Tom Wills kept a suitcase under his bed more or less permanently packed and ready for him to travel. He used to argue all the time with Amy about his need to travel for his work. She would say that he had just come back from three weeks out of town. He had to tell her that Charlesburg was a small town and if he stayed within the city limits he would be left with nothing but missing dog cases. He had to phone her every day. He missed that. Now no one cared where he was. He didn't much care himself.
He felt sorry for Mrs. Carstairs. She was genuinely appalled by that video. There was something about her manner that wasn't quite right to Tom. When she mentioned her husband's death she seemed not merely grief-stricken, which was expected, but horrified. Tom turned it over in his mind but could make nothing of it.
Tom's thoughts were drawn back to the viewing of the video. He was reminded of that awful sensation of being overwhelmed and losing control. As he thought about it he felt anxiety gripping his body again. He couldn't get the image of the girl out of his mind, her thin white body bare and defenseless, trembling with pain and terror. How did vice cops who see this sort of material all the time deal with it, he wondered. He had always prided himself on his professional cool, his mental toughness. He had to admit that his heavy drinking of late had taken its toll on him. Perhaps it wasn't only his physical health that was affected. It wasn't that difficult for him to see this objectively. It had no relevance to changing his behavior, though.
He had spent so little time in his apartment in recent weeks he was surprised at how blank the walls looked. When he was on a case and not spending most of his time in hotel rooms he had the habit of pinning up photos and pages of notes on the walls. He thought it might stimulate his thinking. He was a bit obsessive that way. Images of the case would stay in his thoughts whether the pictures were in front of his eyes or not. The walls were bare now. He was not the decorator type. He didn't believe in putting up pictures merely for decoration. Still it was embarrassing and a bit alarming how plain the apartment was, as if all the furniture and the accessories were merely rented and not personal at all. Yet everything had come from the house. Nothing meaningful was attached to those bits of wood and fabric. They had ceased to be connected to Tom's memories.
He remembered once standing over Cindy's cradle when he had arrived back from a case in Miami. Amy was asleep in the next room and he hadn't wanted to disturb her but he felt a need to see his daughter. There she was, wide awake in the moonlight and smiling up at him.
The cradle was gone and the house was sold. There never was much moonlight coming through his apartment window. He missed that neat two-storey house with its dull gray siding. He had always meant to repaint it. Unusual as his job was, that house gave him a bit of middle-class respectability. It gave him a foot in the door of ordinary society.
That night he was dreaming. He was walking down a corridor. It was dimly lit and he couldn't make out any significant details. He knew that he was approaching the room where the girl was. As he came to the door he saw there was an inscription on the door in block letters but he could not read it. He bent forward and peered through the keyhole. He jumped back startled as he saw an eye, blood-shot and staring, looking back at him. He recovered himself before leaning forward again to the keyhole. The face on the other side had pulled back. Tom saw that it was himself in the room. The Tom that was outside the room had a clear view of the room now. The girl was seated in the chair, as in the video, but she was not shackled to it. She was seen from the side so that her face was hidden and she could be identified only by her long black hair. The Tom in the room walked up slowly behind her. Suddenly she reached out a pale hand and grasped him by the wrist. He felt a searing pain. Tom woke up gasping. It took him some minutes to re-orient himself and calm down.
He had difficulty returning to sleep after that. He reached for the bottle of vodka in the drawer of the night stand and was through a third of it before passing out on the bed. He awoke again and it was still the middle of the night and his brain was swimming. He felt an urgent need to retch. He was on his knees over the toilet, shivering. He was covered in a cold sweat as if he had stepped out of the rain. When he put his head back on the pillow and closed his eyes the bed seemed to be tilting like a boat on high seas. He felt his mind slipping into unconsciousness and he was grateful.
There was the girl to be tracked down. Work still motivated him. It was easier to keep moving. He didn't like to think what would happen if the work dried up and he had idle time. Unpromising as this angle was he felt it was necessary to make the effort. He had told Mrs. Carstairs he would pursue it and she expected him to report on his progress. He knew there were upwards of a million missing young people in America at any one time, from babies snatched from their cribs to college students emptying out their bank accounts to drop out of society in pursuit of some elusive paradise.
Tom threw the suitcase into the trunk and drove to Cleveland. In Cleveland there was a resource center for the Department of Child Services, housed in a dreary, antiseptic set of forty-year-old offices. Tom figured this was a clue where child services stood in the priority list of government responsibilities. There was a room open to the public with computers set up on wooden tables and the walls lined with cabinets holding card files. This was a resource mainly for professionals like himself who had dealings with possible missing persons.
Tom imagined he could feel a sense of resignation and hopelessness in these offices. There were too many cases, too many photos, and little chance of finding anyone who did not want to be found, short of hiring a private investigator for each case, and of course there was no budget for that. He wondered how anyone could work in these offices long without be desensitized to the real human stories contained in those file folders.
Tom went to the manager's office and introduced himself. "My name is Tom Wills. I'm a licensed private investigator in this state. I'll keep the story short and simple. I have a wealthy client who picked up a girl hitchhiking last week. The girl seemed anxious, frightened. She might have been sick. After she got out of the car my client started worrying out her. She thought she could have done more for the girl. She hired me to see if I could find her or contact her family."
"Do you mind if we check your number?" Tom pushed his private investigator license card across the table.
Tom had always known he had a talent for skating over the truth without ever touching it. His job was one in which his talent could be put to regular use. He used to hide bottles of liquor around the house. Amy would always ask him if he had alcohol in the house. Tom couldn't understand why she had to ask the question when she always knew the answer. She would give him the most scathing looks. Perhaps she needed to have the moral upper hand. Perhaps she held out the hope that one day he would say no and all the spots would be empty. At some point he realized that she found the bottles but didn't bother to remove them.
As Tom went through one photo after another of missing teenagers he was steeling himself for the eventuality of meeting the friends and family of the missing girl. The thought receded from his mind with the hours. The problem was he could not narrow the time frame—he couldn't tell when the video was shot. The fact that it was on VHS was curious in itself but this wasn't evidence of much. It could have been shot in another format and copied. Mr. Carstairs might have been more comfortable with the older format. Neither did he have a clue where the video was shot, although it made sense to start by assuming it was local or in the region. The pictures of dark haired girls all began swimming and blurring in his head. Still there was no match for the girl on the video. With each file he clicked through there was a deepening in his vague sense of loss, a feeling he was only half conscious of.
Tom imagined that around the globe there must be an audience of thousands for videos like his. He thought of lonely men spending hours in the dark in front of their computer screens searching for material like this. They formed networks of contacts. Modern communication technology, Tom noted with disgust, allowed otherwise isolated individuals to support and encourage one another in their repugnant habits.
He took a break for lunch and found himself in the bar across the street. Once Tom had a drink in his hand the memory of all his bad bouts with alcohol disappeared, however recent they were. He limited himself to a second whisky and stepped back onto the street. He felt pleased with himself for stopping at two. When he was on a case he could go days without heavy drinking. He squinted even though it was another overcast day. He wondered when his eyes had become so sensitive to light. He reached into his jacket pocket for a pair of dark glasses.
He only stayed another hour at the resource center. An intuition told him that the girl was either not in these files or her file was too old and distant to be easily found.
He returned to his motel room, stopping at a store to buy liquor. He picked two bottles of vodka and one of rum. He would have bought more but he didn't know how long he would be in town or if he would need to travel. The advantage of vodka, Tom knew, was that if he was sipping it during the day it wouldn't be as easy to detect on his breath. He didn't fool himself, though, into thinking that he escaped detection. People often seemed to have an uncanny ability to recognize him as a drinker, as if a red capital letter 'D' had been stamped on his forehead.
Tom sat up late in the motel bed watching the video over and over again on his laptop. He had had the video digitized and saved to his laptop. The video lab technician he often consulted could have done it for him but Tom felt this video was too sensitive a matter to trust to a lab so he rented the equipment himself. A glass of liquor in his hand, he looked at the video image by image, thinking that there might be a detail that he had overlooked which could furnish a clue. He could not get the idea out of his mind that if only he watched it one more time he could find the key to his investigation.
Tom found himself putting off sleeping. He had to admit that the nightmare of the previous night still disturbed him. He got in the car and drove nowhere in particular. He liked the quiet streets at night. Either a crowd, in which he could immerse himself, or empty streets were tolerable. Driving at night suited his image of the private eye. It wasn't safe for him to drive and he knew it. He had once woken up in a field, barbed wire wrapped around the car and the windshield broken, with no memory of how he got there. He kept slow tonight and stayed within the city limits.
Tom passed along a street on which prostitutes were working. He knew it was highly unlikely that he would see the girl in the video working the streets but he couldn't help looking at their faces. There was a light mist and the gaudy neon signs of the stripper bars had a soft glow to them. Tom thought of all those endless faces he saw in the files and he imagined them populating an endless row of bars and dark street corners, lining up to draw the attention of a slow parade of passing cars.
Tom realized that if he was going to drive around randomly in the city he had better look at a road map so he wouldn't get lost in an unfamiliar neighborhood. As he reached across to the glove compartment he saw the white gown of the silent passenger in his car. He knew he must have yelled out in surprise. He nearly swerved the car off the road. A girl had appeared in the dark next to him. Tom pulled over and hit the brakes. He took a breath and forced himself to turn to look over at the passenger side. He had time to see the girl's pale face turning towards him with a relaxed, expectant gaze, as if she knew him well. For a moment she seemed convincingly real. Then the seat was empty again.