Бентли Литтл - The Disappearance

Gary held out a slim, baseless hope that Joan had wandered away, that in some drugged trance of her own she had ended up sleeping it off in someone else’s camp. But as the light in the sky shifted from bright white to a more subdued yellow and they found themselves covering the same ground they had trod earlier, that already faint hope dimmed and died. Discouraged, he led the other three back to the car.

He had to face the facts.

Joan was gone.

The playa seemed practically deserted, and the orange of the slowly setting sun was intensified by intersecting clouds of dust kicked up by departing vehicles. The three others faced Gary. It was his girlfriend who had disappeared, and he was the de facto leader on this, the one to make the decisions. Beneath the fear and worry, he could see in his friends’ eyes that they were glad they were not the ones to whom this had happened, and while he didn’t blame them for that and would have felt the same if he were in their shoes, part of him resented it.

“So, what do we do?” Reyn asked.

“Don’t you have to wait forty-eight hours or something before you can report someone missing?” Brian sat on the hood of the car, legs crossed. “I know you’re not supposed to get your information from movies, but…” He trailed off.

Gary looked back toward the center of what had been Black Rock City. There’d been a minor police presence here all week, and though he didn’t know where the cops were from or what their ordinary jurisdiction might be, he figured that they were the ones to whom any crime should be reported. “Let’s find the police,” he said.

“You mean one of those rent-a-cops?” Brian asked doubtfully.

“I think they’re real,” Reyn disagreed.

“Whoever they are, I’m pretty sure they’re gone,” Stacy said. “I didn’t see any of them while we were looking around out there.”

Shut up! Gary wanted to scream. Shut up! Joan was missing and all his friends could do was bicker about the legitimacy of Burning Man’s security force. But he knew that wasn’t fair. His friends were only trying to help. It was just that every second of delay, each minute they spent not doing something, was time that Joan remained missing. He grimaced as a spasm of pain shot through his lower back and straightened, pressing a hand against his spine. Every muscle in his body was tense. He had a headache, and his neck felt as though it had been used as a punching bag; it hurt no matter which way he turned.

Without further discussion, Gary took out his cell phone, turned it on and dialed 911. But whatever temporary towers had brought this area service for the past week had been dismantled or were gone, and no matter which direction he faced, he got no signal. “Shit!” he yelled—so loudly that Stacy, standing next to him, jumped. He was angry enough to have thrown down the phone, the way characters do in movies, but he wasn’t stupid, and instead he tried again, with the same result.

He put the phone back into his pocket. His friends were now trying the same thing themselves, although it quickly became obvious that none of their phones was getting a signal, either.

Gary scanned the dusty and nearly empty plain for any sign of police, but Stacy was right: it appeared as though they’d left. He stood there for several seconds, looking at Brian, Reyn and Stacy, and wondering what to do next.

“Did anyone see anything?” Gary asked for the umpteenth time. The other three shook their heads. “Doesn’t it seem suspicious that she disappeared while we were all knocked out?”

Stacy nodded vigorously. “I was thinking that, too. Maybe someone saw us all passed out here, some psycho, and he just… grabbed Joan, kidnapped her.” She shivered. “It could have been any of us.”

“Maybe they were planning to get the rest of us, too, only we started waking up!” Brian jumped off the hood of the car, gesturing excitedly. “That means they might not be that far away! They might not have much of a head start!”

“Hold on a minute,” Reyn said. “Think about this logically. What would be the point? Anyone who kidnapped someone would be committing a crime, a felony.” He glanced at Gary. “No offense, but if someone wanted to rape her, they could’ve just done it right here; they wouldn’t’ve had to drag her off somewhere. Besides, it would take more than one person to pick Joan up and carry her away, and there aren’t bands of white slavers trolling hippie festivals for victims.”

“And yet,” Brian said, “she’s gone.”

“You think she just wandered off?” Stacy asked Reyn.

“What I think is that none of us knows anything.”

They were all talking too much, and this time Gary did shout. “Shut up!” The three immediately closed their mouths, swiveling toward him. Gary took a deep breath. He didn’t know about the others, but his own body still felt strangely heavy, and he was pretty sure he was not yet thinking clearly. His friends might have a higher tolerance level for drugs, but he doubted that they were working at peak mental capacity, either. “We need to get to a place where there’s a signal so we can call the police. Or else go to the nearest town. But someone has to stay here in case Joan comes back.”

“No way,” Stacy said, shaking her head. “Not out here in the middle of nowhere. It’ll be dark before you get back.”

“I’ll hang out,” Brian offered. “I can always find some way to amuse myself.”

“Nothing illegal,” Stacy warned him. “We’ll be returning with cops.”

“No one’s staying here,” Reyn said. He looked over at Gary. “Sorry, but we can’t risk losing anyone else. Joan disappeared while there were still a lot of people around. It would be stupid for us to leave anyone behind now that nearly everyone’s gone.”

“Then the rest of you go,” Gary insisted. “I’ll wait.”

“No, you won’t. You’re her boyfriend. You’re the one who has to file the report. You know more about her than the rest of us; you can answer their questions.”

But Gary wasn’t sure he could answer their questions. There was so much about Joan that he didn’t know. He loved her—he did know that—but they had been going out only a short time, and most of their conversations had naturally revolved around the present and the future rather than the past. There were huge gaps in her history that he couldn’t fill, and the type of knowledge he had about Joan wasn’t really the sort of hard information that the police would require.

Her parents could answer everything, but he realized that he did not know their names, their phone number or even the city in which they lived. He had the impression that they lived far away, in another state, but Joan had never really told him much about them other than the fact that they were very religious.

Could he get that information through the school? Probably not. There were always privacy issues, and for all the university knew, he was some crazed stalker with whom she had just broken up.

Was he supposed to inform the school that she was missing?

He had no idea.

Gary felt overwhelmed. His first impulse was to call his dad and ask what he should do, but his parents lived all the way across the country, in Ohio, and he didn’t want to alarm them. Besides, they couldn’t really help right now. As terrifying as the thought was, as out of his depth as he felt, he was on his own.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”

On the road that led to the highway, and then on the highway itself, Gary sat unmoving in the passenger seat while Reyn drove, his mind spinning, going over everything that had happened, trying to recall whether anyone at Burning Man had been watching them, or looking at them suspiciously, or had paid extra-close attention to Joan. He was still unable to figure out how or when they had been drugged, and the motives for all of it remained a complete and utter mystery.