Twelve
The Sunday morning in January dawned much as every other in central New York: gray, flat, sunless, cold. Shortly before seven, Robert Williams opened the front door, wincing at the icy chill, grabbed his newspaper off the step, and hastened back inside. He would have preferred to be still abed at this hour on a weekend, but insomnia had plagued him since Sarah's departure, and he'd rather be up, doing something useful, than staring at the ceiling and dwelling on his misery.
He took the paper and his coffee into his home office, whose cozy clutter he preferred to Irene's fabulous but sterile living room. Today's Democrat and Chronicle had come with a supplement, some kind of novelty in thick, fancy paper, which he set aside to examine later. Robert had never been much of a reader, but in the past year, he'd thrown himself into the printed word with an all-absorbing concentration, finding it the easiest way to escape the futility of his anguished thoughts.
An hour later, Irene and the kids were still sleeping, so Robert puttered out to the kitchen to fix breakfast and make more coffee. Even simple activities like this could cause no end of pain, recalling weekend mornings when Sarah had cooked breakfast and shared the newspaper with him. When the food was ready, Robert took his plate and sat at the kitchen table, eating without tasting as he stared out the window into the snowy back yard.
Fifteen months. Almost a year and a half. Two Thanksgivings, two of Sarah's birthdays, two Christmases, two New Years. Robert had been looking and searching and investigating and wracking his brain trying to think where Sarah might possibly have gone. The folders in his office had multiplied, filling an entire cabinet and spilling onto the floor, but every lead had evaporated like mist. He had left no stone unturned, no avenue unexplored. There had been no straw too fragile, too dubious for him to grasp. By now he was familiar with the wretched pattern: the surge of hope, the single-minded drive of investigation, the despair as the possibility petered out, and the final wrenching, exhausting resignation as he was forced to face the reality of hitting another dead end.
Fear gnawed at him, eating into rational thought, causing mind to lurch and body to jerk in odd spasms, as if his nervous wiring were short-circuiting. He was worried, so horribly worried about what had become of his oldest child. Despite the letter she'd left for him, he could not be assured that she was all right, safe from harm. She had departed Oneida University without taking so much as a toothbrush with her. Even more alarmingly, she had not taken with her money or identification or even her house keys: her pocketbook had been found with passport, driver's license, keyring, and wallet all inside it. She'd signed over the title to her car to her best friend, Raelin. Robert and Irene had sorted through Sarah's clothes and belongings, making meticulous lists of everything, and it seemed as though Sarah had not taken with her even a pair of socks.
Nevertheless, the local police and university officials had not treated her disappearance as an abduction. Based on the letters she'd sent and her withdrawal from the university, they determined she'd vanished of her own volition, and nothing Robert said or did could convince them otherwise. At his own expense, he had hired a private investigator, who had followed up every available lead with a computer-like efficiency. Robert even had consulted a handwriting expert, who had determined that Sarah had not written any of her farewell letters under duress. And yet, he worried.
The references Sarah made to eloping with someone she'd met as a teenager drove Robert to distraction: he'd spent endless hours trying to reconstruct Sarah's entire life in an effort to identify who that man might be. Students who'd taken photographs and made videos of the Riley Hall Halloween party, the last time and place anyone had seen Sarah, had put their work at Robert's disposal. There were several electrifying pictures and some good video footage, showing Sarah dancing with a man Robert had never seen before. Much to Robert's frustration, both Sarah and her partner had been wearing masks that concealed the upper half of their faces. The private investigator had calculated that the man in the pictures was most likely between the ages of thirty-five and forty, which meant he'd been at the very youngest in his late twenties when he'd entered Sarah's life.
Robert and the detective had engaged in a long, tedious process of elimination, slogging back through Sarah's school teachers, activity directors, camp counselors, college instructors. Raelin had admitted to him that Sarah had made an oblique reference to someone she'd met at fifteen years old, and Robert had concentrated in particular on the year 1986—no easy feat, given that the family's former house had burned down in 1988. But none of the men from Sarah's past matched the man in the photographs. Robert had enlisted the help of Sarah's Francophone mother: Linda had spent some time in France, tracking down and interviewing everyone Sarah had known during her year abroad. But nothing had panned out.
Irene thought Sarah had been lying. She thought the claim of a teenage crush was a ruse to throw Robert off the scent, and she suspected Sarah's beau was someone she'd met far more recently, perhaps at Oneida, perhaps in Europe, perhaps during a summer vacation. The private detective theorized that Sarah might be living in another country, under another name, which was why she'd left her license and passport behind; Sarah's beau must have enough money to pay for a complete change in identity. With Sarah's fluency in both French and German, she could be living anywhere: Europe, Quebec, North Africa. Robert only didn't understand why. Why the need for such secrecy? He could only conclude—and the detective agreed with him—that the man must have some kind of criminal background, or there must be another reason why Sarah believed her parents would not approve of the relationship.
Irene's patience had worn thin after several months with no word from her stepdaughter. The July after Sarah vanished, Irene had given birth to her second child with Robert, a girl they'd named Meredith. Irene understood Robert's worry, but still she made it clear she believed he was expending too much time, money, and energy trying to locate someone who had no interest in being found. Robert made every effort not to neglect his two younger children, but his love for them could not diminish his concern for Sarah.
Again and again, Robert's mind went to Sarah's last week at home, the week between her junior year abroad and her senior year of college. She'd seemed fine during that visit—travel-weary, distracted, fretting about her post-graduation plans like any other student, but nothing that had struck Robert as out of the ordinary. Irene speculated that Sarah might have been pregnant, but even so, why would that make her drop out of college? Surely she must have realized Robert would have supported both her and her child. Why had she simply left? Couldn't she have waited at least until she'd graduated from Oneida? The baby might not have been due until May or June; even if it had been born sooner, Sarah could easily have taken off a semester or even a year and finished her degree at a later time. Why such a dramatic break with her life, her education, everyone she knew, everything she'd worked for?
Sarah's dormitory-mates in Riley Hall had been baffled and shocked by her disappearance, and they'd helped Robert as much as possible, not only with photos and video footage, but with their own recollections. Robert felt as though he'd interviewed every kid in the dorm, and none of them said they'd noticed anything out of the ordinary in Sarah's behavior the night of the party. One of the kids even said how social and gregarious Sarah had been, circulating around the common rooms and talking with everyone. She'd been observed, by dozens of students, dancing up until midnight, when "Danse Macabre" had begun playing. Everyone Robert spoke to said they'd only seen Sarah's mysterious partner during that one number. Residents of Riley Hall were supposed to sign in guests, but Sarah had not signed in anyone. Nobody had seen the strange man enter the dorm, and nobody saw him leave, with or without Sarah. Nobody had seen either one of them after "Danse Macabre" ended. The next day, the masks Sarah and her partner had been wearing at the party were found on the rooftop of the dorm's central tower; the couple therefore must have gone upstairs at some point, but nobody could remember seeing them do so. Everyone agreed this was mystifying: the dorm had been crawling with students all night, but nobody had seen Sarah's partner anywhere but on the dance floor, and only for the seven minutes of the Saint-Saëns.
Robert had spoken at length several times with Raelin Bourke, Sarah's best friend. Her story never varied. Like everyone else, she'd seen Sarah during the party—they'd hung out together, danced together. Raelin had seen Sarah dancing with her beau during "Danse Macabre," at one point passing close enough so that she'd brushed into Sarah's vast skirt. In the excited aftermath that followed the number, traditionally played at midnight at Riley's Halloween party, Raelin had lost track of her friend. The party didn't wind down until nearly three AM, at which time Raelin had gone to bed with her boyfriend, Danny Foster, in his room. It wasn't until the next morning that she'd returned to her own room and found the letter Sarah had left for her.
When pressed about anything Sarah might have revealed prior to Halloween, Raelin would only admit that Sarah had told her about a teenage crush, someone who had "messed with her head" when she was fifteen, and that the experience had "stayed with her forever." Sarah had told her friend that "nothing happened," which Robert took to mean something sexual. He knew from interviewing one of Sarah's boyfriends that she'd ended her virginity the summer between high school and college, which confirmed Sarah's claim that she'd not slept with the man she'd met at fifteen. But Sarah had never revealed to Raelin the identity of her crush, and that was the only reference Sarah had made to it during the entire three years of the girls' friendship.
Robert could not help suspecting that Raelin knew more and was withholding something from him. He had pressed and pressed, but Raelin would only repeat what she'd already told him. Robert learned it was Raelin who had found Sarah's Halloween costume, that astonishing white ball gown, in a secondhand shop in downtown Oneida. Robert had questioned the shop's owner, who could only tell him that someone had left the dress anonymously on the front step of her shop in early October. And Sarah had signed over the title to her car to Raelin. But if there had been any collusion between the two girls, Raelin would not reveal it. Seven months after Halloween, Raelin and Danny had graduated with the rest of their class, and Robert had lost touch with them. Four months from now, another class of Oneida students would graduate, and most of the kids whom Sarah had known in college would be scattered, gone to the next phase of their lives. Robert grieved bitterly that his daughter was not among them.
Two weeks after Sarah's disappearance, her class photos had arrived in the mail, like a dispatch from the Great Beyond. Sarah's departure from her former life had been planned in such detail that she'd even filled out a forwarding order with the Post Office. Those first few months had been full agonizing pit traps: mail arriving at the house for Sarah, phone calls from old friends unaware she'd vanished. These things, each a memento mori, ripped open the wound and left it to bleed anew.
But the class pictures in themselves provided another clue. Comparing those pictures to the photos taken the night of the Halloween party, it was evident Sarah had undergone some drastic physical change. Her senior photos showed a young woman whose face still bore the roundness of girlhood. The Halloween pictures, taken scant weeks later, showed a leaner, more angular face, a chin with a new point. But the eyebrows were the most startling thing: arching up at the outer corners, giving Sarah's whole face a sinister aspect. One of the Riley students had run into Sarah Halloween morning and asked to take her picture; Sarah had claimed the eyebrows were part of her makeup for the party, but if so, she'd done a spectacular job. In the picture, a close-up of her head and shoulders, those eyebrows could not have looked more real. Even Linda, a stage actress, told Robert she could not see how the makeup effect had been achieved.
When Robert had gone back to Oneida—one of his many fruitless trips to the college—and shown the photos to Raelin, she'd just shrugged and said Sarah had lost some weight. Robert was not convinced: weight loss could not account for such a radical alteration of physical appearance. He asked Raelin whether Sarah had been using drugs. Raelin had laughed at the very thought, and all the available evidence bore this out: Sarah's class grades had been stellar prior to her withdrawal—a week before she vanished, she'd aced a German literature midterm, work which her professor described as among the best she'd ever seen.
The other possibility that worried Robert was that Sarah had been drawn into some bizarre cult. When asked about her Halloween costume, Sarah had told her friends she was the Goblin Queen. Irene reminded Robert about Sarah's adolescent obsession with "that ridiculous play"—a copy of which they'd found among Sarah's college possessions. Irene had sharpened Robert's hazy recollections: Sarah, even as a teenager, had enjoyed dressing up in a fairy-princess costume and performing scenes from a play called The Labyrinth, often in the town park. Robert had done some research—one of those tantalizing straws—and had learned that the play had been based on an obscure figure from Germanic mythology: Jareth, the King of the Goblins. Linda had given Sarah her copy of the play; later, she'd also given Sarah a board game called The Labyrinth, as well as a figure of the Goblin King, both of which Sarah had kept on her bedroom desk, and both of which had burned with the rest of the old house.
Robert had contacted his ex-wife, and Linda told him she'd picked up the game and the figure at a toy shop in Bonn; bless her heart, she'd gone to Germany to see if there was anything to be learned. But the shop was closed, its owner retired, the remaining stock sold off. Still, Robert sensed some kind of connection. Irene, who had seen the Goblin King figure in Sarah's bedroom many times, swore the man at the party had been dressed exactly the same. So if there had indeed been contact with this man when Sarah was fifteen, had The Labyrinth provided some pretext? Was this a stranger who had joined Sarah in her amateur theatrics? But Rosebriar Hollow was a small town, the Williamses were well-known, and anyone who had seen Sarah cavorting with a strange man would have immediately alerted Robert and Irene.
Such a scenario seemed incredibly unlikely, but Irene reminded Robert of one notable incident: during the summer of 1986, when Sarah was fifteen, she had abruptly redecorated her room and given away many of her childhood toys; perhaps most significantly, Sarah had put into storage both The Labyrinth board game and the figure of the Goblin King. She'd even started dressing differently. By the time she'd begun her sophomore year of high school that fall, she'd seemed like a different kid. And Irene could trace this transformation to one night in particular, the night she and Robert had gone out for their anniversary, leaving Sarah to babysit Toby. Sarah had been late getting back to the house that evening—she'd arrived in her medieval fantasy dress, soaked to the skin—and had thrown a screaming adolescent temper tantrum. Robert and Irene had almost missed their dinner reservation. But they'd arrived home at midnight to find all well, Sarah calm, Toby sound asleep in his crib. It was the next morning, Irene insisted, that Sarah had announced her plans to redecorate her room.
"Don't you remember?" Irene pressed. "We never had any trouble with her after that. It was like she grew up overnight."
And now, Robert wondered: what had delayed Sarah getting home that summer evening? Clearly, she'd been out play-acting. Had the strange man been there? Had he, God forbid, come to the house later, when Sarah had been home alone, baby-sitting? The images this conjured in Robert's mind were unsettling and horrible. But still, common sense prevailed: Sarah had been fine—more than fine. Indeed, whatever had happened that night seemed to have caused some epiphany. As Irene said, it was like Sarah had matured in a day and rarely, if ever, looked back. So why would she, at almost 22 years old, run off with a man dressed as a character from one of her childhood games?
There were too many pieces, and nothing quite fit together, no matter how hard Robert tried.
Irene had provided all the love and support and sympathy a man could want; she and Sarah had never been close, but Irene took her role as stepmother seriously, and she did worry about Sarah's safety. Recently, though, she'd begun to take a more cynical view of the whole affair. It was clear to her, she said, that Sarah had planned her disappearance down to the last detail; moreover, she'd departed in a way that was sure to cause her family the maximum amount of stress and anxiety. She was, Irene declared, "punishing us."
Robert's burden of guilt added to his gloom. Irene had been planning to have her parents move into the house for the summers: they would live most of the year in North Carolina, but come back to upstate New York during the hottest months. They had put their house in Rochester on the market, and Irene had furnished an in-laws' apartment over the garage for their use. She and Robert had said nothing about this to Sarah, but Sarah discovered it by accident when she'd gone up to air out the apartment. Right before she'd left for Oneida, she'd confronted Robert. He'd tried to reassure her, but Sarah's consternation had been palpable: Irene's parents strongly disliked her, and Sarah had felt she would no longer be welcome in the house. And that had been their last conversation, save a handful of phone calls and email messages. Maybe this hadn't been the sole reason for Sarah's departure, but almost certainly it had been a contributing factor—she'd alluded to as much in her letter to him.
The horrible irony was that after all the uproar, Irene's parents had not moved in after all. They'd sold their house in Rochester at a good profit, and rather than come back to New York during the summers, they'd bought a time-share condominium in Bar Harbor with another couple. The apartment over the garage was fully furnished but unoccupied, save its use for occasional overnight guests.
On the kitchen counter, the baby monitor crackled to life with the sound of energetic fussing. Meredith was awake and had discovered either that her stomach was empty or her diaper full, or both. Robert hastened up the stairs to see if Irene needed any help.
(ii)
He spent the day in resolute activity: minding Meredith so that Irene could eat breakfast and get her shower, helping Irene take down the last of their holiday decorations and pack them away into storage bins for another year. After lunch, he got Toby bundled up and drove him into Rosebriar Hollow, where the creek was frozen and kids were skating. Toby was a small blond terror on his hockey skates, tearing up and down the ice, causing Robert to laugh out loud, something he did so rarely that he'd almost forgotten the physical sensation; laughter now felt to him like trying to speak a foreign language.
A few other parents approached him with their usual mixture of sympathy and discreet inquiries. Any word from Sarah? Was he still employing that detective? Were there any new leads? Was the detective making any headway? Everyone had at least one suggestion to offer: had Robert tried this, or looked into that? Or explored some other possibility? There was that person who might know something; had Robert spoken with him, or her? Robert would nod, yes, those all were things that had occurred to him, or to Irene, or to Linda, or to the detective. But thank you for the suggestion. Then his neighbor or friend or client would nod and smile, drifting over to say hello to some other acquaintance, and Robert would be left alone to brood.
People mostly had been kind, for which he was grateful. If people blamed him—or Irene, or Linda—for the loss of his daughter, finding some fault with her upbringing, they kept those thoughts to themselves. To his face, anyway, nobody blamed Sarah herself; she'd been a good, steady, intelligent kid, so none of them could say: oh, that slut, that crazy, irresponsible girl; what else could be expected of a kid like that? Still, Robert derived some amusement from people's struggle to find words of socially acceptable condolence. What did you say to someone whose child had vanished under such improbable circumstances? Sarah's disappearance lacked the finality of death—as awful as it was, at least society provided structure for the expressions of sympathy. People whose children had been abducted required a different kind of support. But when a young adult vanished without a trace, and willfully severed all ties with her life, what then?
Robert stayed at the creek-side, oblivious to the cold and his own discomfort, until at last Toby grew tired and hungry enough to want to go home. Robert and Irene had done their best to shelter Toby from the worst of their suspicions about what had happened to Sarah, and now Robert realized with a spasm of pain and regret that Toby seemed to have lost all curiosity about his older sister. He hadn't mentioned her name for weeks, not even asking Robert and Irene if Sarah would come home for Christmas.
(iii)
After dinner, Robert cleaned the kitchen so that Irene could get Meredith bathed and settled for the night. He helped Toby with his bath and read bedtime stories to him until it was time for lights-out. Irene had vanished into her craft room; Robert could hear the quiet, rhythmic thrum of her sewing machine. He wandered back down to his office, determined to tidy up the place: the materials related to Sarah were threatening to overwhelm his work files, and Robert was concerned about losing important paperwork. He forced himself into motion and made decent headway before his emotional energy ebbed away. He gathered up the neglected Sunday paper, planning to finish reading it into the living room before it was time for sleep.
His gaze fell on the supplement, and he picked it up, curious at the texture of the unusual paper: it had a thick, heavy quality, like something that might have been used in another century, more like fabric than paper. Robert turned over the slim packet, finding no identifying marks; oddly enough, the paper had been sealed with neat stitches of thread.
He used the tip of his scissors to cut one of the stitches and gently tugged out the thread. Setting the packet on the desktop, he unfolded the wrapping. Inside was more of the same paper, rolled into a scroll and tied with string. Robert cut the string and unrolled the paper, almost crying out in shock, his astonishment leavened with a simultaneous surge of fury at himself for ignoring this item all day.
The first piece of paper was a pen-and-ink sketch. Robert would recognize Sarah's work as surely as he would have recognized her voice, and he dropped into his chair, shaking so badly he could barely keep his hold on the paper. The picture was a charming rendition of a baby, about Meredith's age, a plump, round-faced child with a startling expression and an impudent shock of black hair. She had those peculiar upturned eyebrows; the resemblance to Sarah could not be mistaken. This, then, was her child, and whatever mysterious transformation Sarah had undergone, the condition had been passed along to the infant girl.
The second page was a letter, addressed to him. Sarah's strong, assured handwriting had not changed. Tiny spots of ink here and there suggested she'd written the letter with an old-fashioned fountain pen, but otherwise it was her hand, full of its idiosyncratic spikes and swirly loops, the product of her lifelong fascination with calligraphy. Robert made a mad, frantic scrabble for his reading glasses.
Words jumped off the page in a blur, and he had to force himself to still his hands, to read the letter through from beginning to end, frustrated that there wasn't more, but feeling for the first time in fifteen months something akin to relief.
Dear Dad, the letter began, as if Sarah were writing home from abroad or sending him an email from Oneida, I'm sorry for disappearing on you. I know you're worried sick about me, and I know it's pointless to tell you to not to worry, but I'm going to ask you anyway. Please don't worry about me. Whatever you're doing to try to find me (and I know you are), please stop. You won't find me. I'm sorry to have done this to you. I wanted to at least write to you and let you know I'm okay.
I'm actually more than okay; I'm happier than I've ever been in my life. I have a baby now—she's six months old, and her name is Elisabeth. We call her Lizzie. She's beautiful. I know you're wondering: so, yes, I was pregnant when I left Oneida. But that's not the reason I left, at least not the whole reason. I went away to marry the only man I could ever love, the only man I could ever be happy with. Unfortunately, marrying him has meant giving up everything else, but if I had to do it over again, I'd make the same decision in a heartbeat.
I'm sorry this is strange; the circumstances are bizarre to say the least. Please believe that I'm loved, I'm safe, I'm happy. I didn't vanish to hurt you or because I hate you (or Irene) or because I had some kind of breakdown. I haven't been kidnapped or forced into doing anything. I hope that one day I can see you in person and explain—as soon as I'm able to, I will, but it's going to take time.
Please give my love to Irene and hug Toby for me. I see you have a baby girl now—
Good God! Robert thought. She knew about Meredith! How? How had she found out? Clearly she must still have some contact, some ability to get news from home, which suggested she wasn't being kept against her will—maybe she was living nearby, if not in the United States, than perhaps in Canada.
—she looks like a little cutie! Irene must be thrilled. I'm so happy for you, Dad. I know one kid can't replace another, but she'll be someone for you to love, someone who can love you in return, if you let her. Please don't neglect her because you're worrying about me.
I'll write again some other time, but I can't promise when. I'm sorry there's no way for you to write back to me—maybe one day there'll be a way for us to communicate, but I haven't figured it out yet. Be patient, and when you least expect it, there'll be a letter from me on your doorstep.
I know you're afraid for me, and I know I'm asking you to take a lot on faith, but one day, hopefully, I'll be able to explain everything.
I love you so much. You'll always be the Best Dad Ever.
—Sarah
Robert read and re-read the letter. Her words—and they were unquestionably hers, her writing style came through as clearly as her penmanship—allayed some fears, but only raised others. He sat in the chair, studying the sketch of his granddaughter. At last, he could feel himself smiling. He debated telling Irene about the letter, but for some reason he didn't think she'd take it well. He could anticipate all her reactions: anger, disbelief, incredulity, fear, shock, worry. Robert didn't want to add any fuel to the fire of resentment Irene had always borne against Sarah. No, they'd all had too much strife—why add more, when there was no easy remedy? This would be Robert's secret. He tucked the letter and the sketch into a folder, which he stashed in the back of a cabinet drawer full of identical folders. Irene never came in the office, so hiding the letter in plain sight seemed the wisest strategy.
Robert clicked off his desk lamp and, whistling, went to the kitchen to fix himself an evening snack.
To be continued…
8