Dennis Lehane: Gone, Baby, Gone

“Only October,” she agreed.

“You’re saying we don’t need this case.”

“Pretty much the size of it.”

I gave up on the pencil and looked out the window for a bit. The wisps of rust had deepened to blood red, and the white sky was gradually darkening into blue. The first yellow lightbulb of the evening clicked on in a third-story apartment across the street. The smell of the air coming through the screen made me think of early adolescence and stickball, long, easy days leaking into long, easy nights.

“You don’t agree?” Angie said after a few moments.

I shrugged.

“Speak now or forever hold your peace,” she said lightly.

I turned and looked at her. The gathering dusk was gold against her window, and it swam in her dark hair. Her honeycomb skin was darker than usual from the long dry summer that had somehow continued to extend well into autumn, and the muscles in her calves and biceps were pronounced after months of daily basketball games at the Ryan playground.

In my previous experience with women, once you’ve been intimate with someone for a while, her beauty is often the first thing you overlook. Intellectually, you know it’s there, but your emotional capacity to be overwhelmed or surprised by it, to the point where it can get you drunk, diminishes. But there are still moments every day when I glance at Angie and feel a gust cleave through my chest cavity from the sweet pain of looking at her.

“What?” Her wide mouth broke into a grin.

“Nothing,” I said softly.

She held my gaze. “I love you, too.”

“Yeah?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Scary, ain’t it?”

“Sometimes, yeah.” She shrugged. “Sometimes, not at all.”

We sat there for a bit, saying nothing, and then Angie’s eyes drifted to her window.

“I’m just not sure we need this…mess right now.”

“This mess being?”

“A missing child. Worse, a completely vanished child.” She closed her eyes and inhaled the warm breeze through her nose. “I like being happy.” She opened her eyes but kept them fixed on the window. Her chin quivered slightly. “You know?”

It had been a year and a half since Angie and I had consummated what friends claimed was a love affair that had been going on for decades. And those eighteen months had also been the most profitable our detective agency had ever experienced.

A little less than two years ago, we’d closed-or maybe just merely survived-the Gerry Glynn case. Boston ’s first known serial killer in thirty years had garnered a lot of attention, as had those of us credited with catching him. The spate of publicity-national news coverage, never-ending rehashes in the tabloids, two true-crime paperbacks with a rumored third on the way-had made Angie and me two of the better-known private investigators in the city.

For five months after Gerry Glynn’s death, we’d refused to take cases, and this seemed only to whet the appetites of prospective clients. After we completed an investigation into the disappearance of a woman named Desiree Stone, we returned to publicly accepting cases again, and for the first few weeks the staircase leading up to the belfry was jammed with people.

Without ever acknowledging it to each other, we refused out-of-hand any cases that smelled of violence or glimpses into the darker caverns of human nature. Both of us, I think, felt we’d earned a break, so we stuck to insurance fraud, corporate malfeasance, simple divorces.

In February, we’d even accepted an elderly woman’s plea that we locate her missing iguana. The hideous beast’s name was Puffy, and he was a seventeen-inch-long iridescent green monstrosity with, as his owner put it, “a negative disposition toward humanity.” We found Puffy in the wilds of suburban Boston as he made a dash across the soggy plains of the fourteenth green at Belmont Hills Country Club, his spiky tail wagging like mad as he lunged for the hint of sunlight he spied on the fairway of the fifteenth. He was cold. He didn’t put up a fight. He did almost get turned into a belt, though, when he relieved himself in the backseat of our company car, but his owner paid for the cleaning and gave us a generous reward for her beloved Puffy’s return.

It had been that kind of year. Not the best for war stories down at the local bar but exceptional for the bank account. And as potentially embarrassing as it was to chase a pampered lizard around a frozen golf course, it beat getting shot at. Beat the hell out of it, actually.

“You think we’ve lost our nerve?” Angie asked me recently.

“Absolutely,” I’d said. And smiled.

“What if she’s dead?” Angie said, as we descended the belfry steps.

“That would be bad,” I said.

“It would be worse than bad, depending on how deep we got into it.”

“You want to tell them no, then.” I opened the door that led out to the rear schoolyard.

She looked at me, her mouth half open, as if afraid to put it into words, hear them hit the air, and know that it made her someone who refused to help a child in need.

“I don’t want to tell them yes quite yet,” she managed, as we reached our car.

I nodded. I knew the feeling.

“Everything about this disappearance smells bad,” Angie said, as we drove down Dorchester Avenue toward Helene and Amanda’s apartment.

“I know.”

“Four-year-olds don’t vanish without help.”

“Definitely not.”

Along the avenue, people were beginning to come out of their homes now that dinner was over. Some placed lawn chairs on their small front porches; others walked up the avenue toward bars or twilight ball games. I could smell sulfur in the air from a recently discharged bottle rocket, and the moist evening hung like an untaken breath in that bruised hue between deep blue and sudden black.

Angie pulled her legs up to her chest and rested her chin on her knees. “Maybe I’ve become a coward, but I don’t mind chasing iguanas across golf courses.”

I looked through the windshield as we turned off Dorchester Avenue onto Savin Hill Avenue.

“Neither do I,” I said.

When a child disappears, the space she’d occupied is immediately filled with dozens of people. And these people-relatives, friends, police officers, reporters from both TV and print-create a lot of energy and noise, a sense of communal intensity, of fierce and shared dedication to a task.

But amid all that noise, nothing is louder than the silence of the missing child. It’s a silence that’s two and a half to three feet tall, and you feel it at your hip and hear it rising up from the floorboards, shouting to you from corners and crevices and the emotionless face of a doll left on the floor by the bed. It’s a silence that’s different from the one left at funerals and wakes. The silence of the dead carries with it a sense of finality; it’s a silence you know you must get used to. But the silence of a missing child is not something you want to get used to; you refuse to accept it, and so it screams at you.

The silence of the dead says, Goodbye.

The silence of the missing says, Find me.

It seemed like half the neighborhood and a quarter of the Boston Police Department were inside Helene McCready’s two-bedroom apartment. The living room stretched through an open portico into the dining room, and these two rooms were the center of most of the activity. The police had set up banks of phones on the floor of the dining room, and all were in use; several people used their personal cell phones as well. A burly man in a PROUD TO BE A DOT RAT T-shirt looked up from a stack of flyers on the coffee table in front of him and said, “Beatrice, Channel Four wants Helene at six tomorrow night.”

A woman put her hand over the receiver of her cell phone. “The producers of Annie in the AM called. They want Helene to go on the show in the morning.”