Jeremy Finley - The Darkest Time of Night

Dr. Richards then added quickly, “I’ll pay you to do this on the side.”

I tried to not let on that at that very moment, I was ensnared. The student loans Tom would rack up by graduation seemed insurmountable.

“I won’t do anything that’s illegal, and I won’t keep quiet if I even think you’re doing something that harms someone.”

“There’s nothing harmful about anything we’re doing. Honestly, most people would laugh if you told them what we do.”

“And what is it, exactly, that you do?”

“Start organizing all those papers by date. You’ll find the reference to a date on every other page. I’ll pay you a $1.50 an hour.”

I started doing the math in my head. It didn’t even meet minimum wage standards for 1969, but it wouldn’t be bad extra money. “I still don’t know what this is about. Why are these people disappearing? Who is taking them?”

Dr. Richards stared hard at me, and then pointed up with one finger. I looked up at the ceiling covered in maps of the stars.

Like all children of the fifties, I’d seen the movies featuring the campy music, the flighty women, and cardboard-cutout heroes who fought against invaders from other worlds. When I had read over the documents from Dr. Richards’s office, I tried not to think about those films. Because the people who documented the missing were real, and they were afraid. The letters, the bizarre phone calls, all came from very serious people.

I only told Tom that I was doing additional freelance copy editing work for a professor. It meant I would be staying later at the office. He certainly didn’t object to the extra cash flow.

So I combed through the papers, leaving the neatly organized stacks in boxes outside the professor’s office each evening. When I arrived the next day, the boxes would be gone.

One night, with the campus silent with snow, I had set a box outside Dr. Richards’s door, surprised to see the light still on. I knocked. He looked up and motioned me in.

“You’ve been getting the checks in your mailbox?”

“Yes, thank you.”

“No, thank you. It’s unacceptable, the conditions of those files.”

“Do they really think…?”

He put down his pen and rubbed his eyes. “Think what?”

“That… aliens… took their loved ones?”

“You’ve read it all. What do you think?”

“I know they’re afraid. They’re really afraid. And I know they’re desperate to believe in something that explains what happened. But if you read the newspapers, you know that terrible things sometimes happen: drugs, alcohol, mental illness. I wonder if you’re feeding them false hope.”

Dr. Richards jutted out his jaw. “It’s a fair criticism. Something I’ve wondered myself. But it’s the commonality that keeps me up at night.”

“Commonality?”

He leaned his chin on his right hand. “How can someone in Malvern, Arkansas, describe the same kind of being that someone in a remote village outside Kenya, Africa, says they saw as well? It’s all the same, with some small variation. Look here.”

He handed me two pieces of paper. “You know this family. The Gobels.”

“How can you forget? It’s terrible.”

“Farm family. Outskirts of Cape Girardeau, Missouri. Wake up one morning to find their two-year-old daughter gone. Massive search, police, FBI, everything. No one finds anything. The mother, Sarah, is so distraught, she hires a hypnotist to force her to remember everything about that night. And when she’s put under—what does Sarah see?”

“It’s not what she sees. It’s what she feels. Something probing her body. Large eyes. Wide forehead, gray skin. Then bright lights…” I paused, finding the words on the page, “… and her daughter going into them.”

“The Semitacalous, from the Zakynthos Island in Greece.” Dr. Richards slid me another folder. “You know their story too: Elderly couple. Go to bed one night. Anna wakes up the next morning, her husband, Georgios, is gone. But she doesn’t need a hypnotist—she remembers everything. The probing, the wide head, the irregular eyes. The bright lights and her husband rising into them.”

He placed the folders on top of each other. “The Gobels’ daughter went missing on August 20, on the same night Georgios Semitacalou disappeared. Neither has ever been seen since.”

He looked down, his pen scratching across the paper before him as if I had never interrupted him. “Now you tell me what to tell these families.”

I looked out his small window. “I… hate it for them. How long can they keep looking? How long do you tell them to keep hoping?”

“Forever.”

“Why? How can you even encourage them?”

“Because sometimes they come back,” he said, continuing to write.

At first, I found the laminated cards that Dr. Richards gave to me to pass along to the families of the missing quaint and sweet. I had praised him for being compassionate enough to come up with the poem written on the front. His response had been an academic frown.

“It wasn’t my idea. I honestly don’t know why we hand them out. We started doing it about five years ago. I suppose it’s supposed to be comforting, but I think it’s a bit much. We’re all instructed to do it, so it’s become our calling card. Every family gets one.”

I often sent them by mail, always with a handwritten note. I reread the poem each time I placed one in an envelope.

PRAYER FOR THE MISSING

You are not gone, as long as I remember.

You are not away, as long as I weep.

You have not vanished, as long as I can picture your face.

You are with me.

You are in the rain.

You are in my tears.

You are where the water falls.

Being an English major, I wasn’t overly impressed with the poem, but it was a nice sentiment. And knowing Dr. Richards was atheist, handing out anything that resembled a prayer was a real stretch for him.

He told me to send one to Barbara Rush when she insisted on meeting with him.

“Her family is against our involvement,” he said.

“She wants your help,” I replied, flipping through her brother’s case file.

Barbara was only eighteen, four years younger than me. Her twin brother, Don, had gone missing in a snowstorm in St. Joseph, Michigan, a small tourist town on a dramatic arch of Lake Michigan. Her parents had fallen apart after his disappearance, leaving the girl to search for her brother on her own. That led her to a missing-persons support groups, and ultimately to one of Dr. Richards’s colleagues who attended such meetings to seek out questionable disappearances. When he heard her story, he encouraged her to call to the University of Illinois’s astronomy department.

She had asked for Dr. Richards, and I took the call.

Don had casually smoked marijuana, Barbara explained, so the St. Joseph police thought he got stoned and wandered into the storm. Probably got too close to the lake, they surmised. His body will wash up soon with the ice balls, she heard one whisper to the other.

But she insisted that her brother—despite being a lifelong Michigander—hated the cold. Even high, he would have never gone out. And when she had awoken that night and found light streaming through her bedroom, she’d assumed a car was shining its headlights into her room—maybe one of Don’s friends from the bowling alley had come to pick him up for a quick nip at the bar. She had parted the curtains and saw Don standing on the street, in the snow, looking up. Then the lights were gone, and so was Don.

“I told my parents,” Barbara had said. “They thought I was sleepwalking. But I don’t sleepwalk. Never have.”