Evan Hunter - The Moment She Was Gone

But after what happened in Sicily, I wonder if Annie accepted my mother’s threat of arrest only because the FBI had already entered the landscape of her mind.

“The New Year’s Eve Incident,” as the family later referred to it, took place in December of 1983, a bit more than three months after our seventeenth birthday. By then, I was going steady with a girl named Rosemary Quinn who was sixteen and a junior at Ambrose. Annie, being mean, said Rosemary probably still wore white cotton panties. She also said she probably didn’t know how to kiss, a misapprehension I didn’t bother to correct. I was taking Rosemary to a party on West Seventy-ninth Street that night. A twenty-one-year-old boy who was a senior at Dartmouth picked up Annie at nine o’clock and took her to a party in Greenwich Village. My mother, at the age of forty-one, had begun dating a bald lawyer Who was fifty-four years old and who lived in a white clapboard house overlooking a pond. She went to a party at his house in Larchmont, New York.

My mother and I were both home by four A.M.

Annie still wasn’t home by the time the sun came up.

Neither of us was particularly alarmed.

I made scrambled eggs (which were a bit runny, my mother kindly informed me) and she and I sat in the kitchen drinking coffee and eating and watching the sun come up over Manhattan. She told me Douglas Feingold was really a very nice man, but that she couldn’t see herself getting sexually involved with him (thank you for sharing that, Mom) and then she went into her “My Son the Doctor” routine (although Aaron was in Business Administration and not Pre-Med), kvelling about how well he was doing at Princeton where he would be starting his last semester next year (and incidentally meeting the future Mrs. Gulliver, young Gussie Manners serving up burgers at Ye Olde Mickey D’s). As I say, this was 1983 — well, 1984 already — and the cotton was high, and neither of us even thought to wonder about where the hell Annie might be until it occurred to me that it was almost nine A.M. on the first day of the new year, and no sign of her, and she hadn’t even called to say good morning and happy new year.

I asked my mother if she knew where Annie had been headed for with the twenty-one-year-old Dartmouth senior, and she said Annie had left a number...

“Which I’ve always insisted on,” she said.

... and she went fishing in the drawer under the wall telephone and found a slip of paper with the name Josh Levine scribbled on it, and a telephone number under that.

“Is this the Dartmouth guy’s name?” I asked. “Or the name of the guy where the party was?”

“The Dartmouth guy is a Wasp named Freddie Cole,” my mother said with some contempt, since she had always considered my father a Wasp even though he was a Catholic.

“Do you think Annie would be angry if we called her?”

“To wish her a happy new year?” my mother said.

“Well, to see if she’s okay.”

“Why wouldn’t she be okay?”

“I don’t know. It’s already nine, five after nine, in fact,” I said, looking at my watch again.

“Call her,” my mother said. “She’ll be happy to hear from us.”

I dialed the number on the scrap of paper. The phone rang once, twice, three times...

“Hello?”

A girl’s voice. At first I thought it was...

“Annie?”

“No, this is Irene.”

“Irene, hi, this is Andy Gulliver. Is my sister still there?”

“Who’s your sister?”

“Annie. She came there with... uh... Freddie Cole? Is he there?”

“Just a sec,” Irene said.

I waited.

My mother looked at me.

I shrugged.

“Hello?”

A man’s voice.

“Who’s this?” I asked.

“Freddie Cole.”

“Hi, Freddie, this is Annie’s brother. Could I speak to her, please?” There was a silence on the line.

“Freddie?”

“Yes?”

“Could I speak to my sister, please?”

“She’s resting,” Freddie said.

“Well... uh... could you get her, please? I’d like to talk to her.”

“Okay,” Freddie said.

He put the phone down, I heard it clattering on the table top or the counter or whatever. I heard voices, laughter, more voices. My mother looked at me again.

“He’s getting her,” I said.

“Where is she?”

“Resting.”

“What do you mean? You mean sleeping?”

“He said resting.”

“Who did?”

“Freddie.”

We kept waiting. I looked at my watch. It was ten minutes past nine. “Freddie?” I said into the phone, hoping he would hear my voice and pick up the receiver again. No one picked up. “Freddie!” I shouted into the phone. Nothing. No one. I whistled into the phone. I whistled louder. I could still hear voices and laughter in the background.

“Where is she?” my mother asked.

“I don’t know, Mom.”

She was already wearing a look I would come to know only too well in later years. A tight little mouth, a frown creasing her brow, puzzlement and suspicion in the green eyes, helplessness beginning to border on panic.

“Hello?”

“Annie?” I said.

Her voice sounded frail, distant, trancelike.

“Annie? Is that you?”

“Andy?”

“Yes, honey, what’s the matter?”

“Did Sven call yet?” she asked, and a chill went up my spine.

“What is it?” my mother asked.

“Annie,” I said, “where are you?”

In a voice that was lilting, almost sing-song, she said, “I don’t know, where am I? Has Sven called yet?”

“Annie, put Freddie on the line, okay?”

“Freddie?”

“The boy who took you to the party.”

“Freddie?”

“Freddie Cole. Please get him, Annie. And stay near the phone. Don’t go away, all right?”

“How can I get Freddie if I don’t leave the phone?” she asked, and began giggling.

“Just go get him, okay? Hurry, Annie!”

“Oh, okay,” she said in the same sing-song voice, and I heard the phone clattering down again.

“Andrew, what is it?” my mother said.

“I don’t know.”

“You were speaking to her, what do you mean you don’t...?”

“I’m trying to find out, Mom.”

“Where is she now?”

“She went to get him.”

“Let me talk to him.”

“He’s not here yet, Mom.”

“Well, where is he? Why’d you let her get off the phone? What the hell is...?”

“Hello?”

“Freddie?”

“Yes.”

“What’s wrong with my sister?”

“Nothing. Why? What’s wrong with her?”

“Is she drunk?”

“How do I know what she is?”

“Look, you son of a bitch...”

“Hey! Hey! Don’t you go...”

“Where are you? Where’s that party you’re at?”

“What is it?” my mother said.

“Just don’t go calling...”

“Give me the address there.”

“I don’t know the fucking address.”

“Get it! And fast!”

“What is it?” my mother said again.

In the taxi, I repeated every word of the conversation I’d had with Annie on the phone, and my mother kept saying over and over again, “It’s dope, they doped her.” I didn’t know if it was dope or not. I was seventeen and I had never so much as smoked a joint. I’m now thirty-six, and I admit to having smoked marijuana since, but only several times in my life, and then only because I didn’t want to seem like a spoil sport. When you’re in college, and everybody around you is smoking, you don’t want the girls to think you’re a wuss.

This was New Year’s Day, and there wasn’t any traffic at all in the streets. In fact, I think we were lucky even to find a cab. We made it down to Tenth Street in something like twelve minutes. The cabbie let us out in front of a brownstone in a row of similar buildings. I tipped him three dollars on an eight-dollar ride, and he wished us a happy new year and drove off. My mother looked suddenly old and frail. This was the second time I’d seen her look that way. The first was when Annie sold the band equipment and went flying off to Europe. In later years, this look would become commonplace. I realize now that Annie’s frequent disappearances made all of us look old before our time.