Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Joel and the others moved on, assuming Violet would be waiting at the bus. But at 3:35 P.M., when Mike Higgis took roll,

“Where’s the rest?” I asked.

“That’s all I took.”

“All the articles were about disappearances like this?”

“Pretty odd, huh?”

I only shrugged. I couldn’t remember if my oath of secrecy extended exclusively over the Blueblood Histories or the entire night’s conversation with Hannah, and so all I said was: “I think Hannah’s always been interested in the subject. Disappearances.”

“Oh, yeah?”

I feigned a yawn and handed him the page. “I wouldn’t worry about it.”

He shrugged, obviously disappointed by my reaction, and folded the paper.

I prayed — for my continued sanity — that would be the end of it. Unfortunately, for the next forty-five minutes, as we wandered the Whitestone rooms, the dust-iced tables, the never-sat-in chairs, no matter what I said to pacify him, he wouldn’t stop blathering about the articles (poor Violet, wonder what happened, why would Hannah have those papers, why should she care). I assumed he was simply vamping, doing Liz in The Last Time I Saw Paris, until his little face caught the light of a constellation — Hercules the Giant — flickering in the kitchen ceiling and I saw his expression: it wasn’t affected, but genuinely concerned (surprisingly weighty, too, a seriousness usually associated only with unabridged dictionaries and old gorillas).

Soon we drifted back into the Purple Room, and Nigel, removing his glasses, instantly fell asleep in front of the fireplace, clutching the mink possessively like he was afraid it’d tiptoe out before he woke. I returned to the leather couch. A marmalade smear of morning was spreading through the sky, visible beyond the trees through the glass-pane doors. I wasn’t tired. No, thanks to Nigel (now snoring), my mind was circling like a dog after its tail. What was the reason for Hannah’s addiction to disappearances — Life Stories brutally cut off so they remained beginnings and middles, never an end? (“A Life Story without a decent ending is sadly no story at all,” Dad said.) Hannah couldn’t be a Missing Person herself, but perhaps her brother or sister had been one, or one of the girls in the photographs Nigel and I had glimpsed in her room, or else the lost love she refused to confirm the existence of — Valerio. A connection between these Missing Persons and her life, however distant or gauzy, had to exist: “People only very, very rarely develop fixations wholly unrelated to their private histories,” wrote Josephson Wilheljen, MD, in Wider Than the Sky (1989).

There was, too, the supremely itchy feeling I’d seen her somewhere before, when she had a similar eggshell haircut — a feeling so persistent, the next day, sunny and freezing, when Leulah dropped me off at home, I found myself weeding through some of the contemporary biographies in Dad’s library, Fuzzy Man: The Life and Times of Andy Warhol (Benson 1990), Margaret Thatcher: The Woman, The Myth (Scott 1999), Mikhail Gorbachev: The Lost Prince of Moscow (Vadivarich, 1999), flipping to the centers and inspecting the photographs. It was a pointless exercise, I knew, but frankly, the feeling, though relentless, was also sort of vague; I couldn’t vouch that it was authentic, that I wasn’t simply mixing Hannah up with one of the Lost Boys in a production of Peter Pan Dad and I caught at the University of Kentucky at Walnut Ridge. At one point, I actually thought I’d found her — my heart swooped when I saw a black-and-white picture of what had to be Hannah Schneider reclining on a beach in a chic vintage bathing suit and headlight sunglasses — until I read the caption: “St. Tropez, Summer of 1955, Gene Tierney.” (I’d stupidly picked up Fugitives from a Chain Gang [De Winter, 1979], an old biography of Darryl Zanuck.)

My next foray into Private Investigation led me down into Dad’s study where I searched for “Schneider” and “Missing Person” on the Internet, a survey that belched up nearly five thousand pages. “Valerio” and “Missing Person” yielded 103.

“Are you down there?” Dad called into the stairwell.

“Doing research,” I shouted.

“Have you eaten lunch?”

“No.”

“Well, get your skates on — we just received twelve coupons in the mail for Lone Steer Steakhouse — ten percent off All-You-Can-Eat Spare Ribs, Buffalo Wings, Molten Onions and something they call, rather disturbingly, a Volcanic Bacon-Bit Potato.”

Quickly, I scanned a few pages, seeing nothing remotely interesting or relevant — court documents detailing motions of Judge Howie Valerio of Shelburn County, records of Loggias Valerio born in 1789, Massachusetts — and switched off Dad’s laptop.

“Sweet?”

“I’m coming,” I called.

I hadn’t had time to conduct any more recon work on Hannah or Missing Persons by the time Jade picked me up that Sunday, and when we arrived at Hannah’s house, I thought to myself — more than a little relieved — perhaps I’d never have to again; Hannah, with renewed exhilaration, was dashing around the house in bare feet and a black housedress, smiling, engaged in six things at once and speaking in chic sentences that snubbed punctuation: “Blue did you meet Ono — is that the timer going off — oh Christ the asparagus.” (Ono was a tiny green shaving of bird missing an eye who apparently hadn’t taken to Lennon at all; she was putting as much birdcage between herself and him as she could.) Hannah also had taken the trouble to make the haircut look marginally more stylish, urging some of the edgier, meaner parts to lie down, chill out off to the side of her forehead. Everything was fine — perfect really — as the seven of us sat in the dining room eating our steaks, asparagus and corn on the cob (even Charles was smiling and when he told one of his stories he actually told it to all of us, not Hannah exclusively) — but then she opened her mouth.

“March twenty-sixth,” she said. “The beginning of Spring Break. It’s our big weekend. So mark your calendars.”

“Big weekend for what?” asked Charles.

“Our camping trip.”

“Who said anything about a camping trip?” asked Jade.

“I did.”

“Where?” asked Leulah.

“The Great Smokies. It’s less than an hour’s drive.”

I almost choked on my steak. Nigel and I locked eyes across the table.

“You know,” continued Hannah brightly, “campfires and ghost stories and gorgeous vistas, fresh air—”

“Ramen noodles,” muttered Jade.

“We don’t have to eat ramen noodles. We can eat anything we like.”

“ Still sounds wretched.”

“Don’t be like that.”

“My generation doesn’t do wilderness. We’d rather go to a mall.”

“Well, maybe you should aspire to something beyond your generation.”

“Is it safe?” Nigel interjected, as offhandedly as he could.

“Of course.” Hannah smiled. “So long as you’re not stupid. But I’ve been up there a million times. I know the trails. I just went actually.”

“With who?” asked Charles.

She smiled at him. “Myself.”

We stared at her. It was, after all, January.

“When?” Milton asked.

“Over vacation.”

“You weren’t freezin’?”

“Forget about freezing,” said Jade. “Weren’t you bored? There’s nothing to do up there.”

“No, I wasn’t bored. ”

“And what about the bears?” Jade went on. “Even worse, the bugs. I’m so not an insect person. They love me though. Every bug is obsessed with me. They stalk me. They’re crazed fans.”