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  “Denis Jimenez,” Denis finally said, reaching out a gloved hand to David.

  David introduced himself, then said, “Your name has a distinct meter to it. A very clean rhyme.”

  “Thank you,” Denis said, looking unsurprised, as if that were the sort of thing he heard all the time.

  “Hi,” I finally said after swallowing. “What’s going on?”

  He waved his notepad at us. “You know, just background information. You never know what information can spark a lead. You want to get a real fleshed-out picture of your subject before you go running off on wild goose chases.”

  I nodded. “Background’s good.”

  “Sure is,” he said. “Tell your folks I’m planning to come sometime next week to give them an update. Not that there’s any big news. This kind of thing works inch by inch.” The hat boxed his face in, framing his features in not the most flattering way. His nose looked wide, all nostril. His stubble was better groomed than usual, only a light sprinkling along his cheeks, but a red rash of razor bumps festered beneath. There was a patch of longer hair he’d missed in the dimple of his chin. Denis was a mess, but his eyes had their usual smolder, and I imagined him arriving at our home several days later. I thought of his voice rising from the kitchen and filtering through the rest of the house. I thought of him knocking on my closed door, asking if he could come in.

  “I started A Sportsman’s Notebook,” I told him now, my words chalky in the cold air.

  He looked at me blankly.

  “Turgenev,” I said. “You know, Hemingway?”

  “Sure, sure,” Denis said, nodding. “You like it?”

  “It’s good,” I said. “There’s a lot of wandering around and describing things, not really a plot. It’s a little disjointed.”

  “Sure,” Denis said. “He’s more oblique than a straight-ahead narrator.”

  “Oblique,” I said. “I like that. He conveys the anonymous days of Russians very well,” I said, cribbing one of the ideas I’d read in the introduction. “It gives the work a real timelessness.” I added, “Paradoxically.” That’s how it’d been discussed in the intro, as a paradox.

  Denis smiled at me, openmouthed. “Smart cookie.”

  I smiled back. I couldn’t help it.

  David Nelson stared hard at me; I could feel it on the side of my face. “So, what, you’re a professional PI and an amateur member of the literati?” he said. His voice bristled, but I wondered if Denis even noticed. For someone who didn’t know David, it could’ve just sounded like the normal croaking of a pubescent boy.

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” Denis said, chuckling. “Reading’s probably just the least damaging of the available distractions.”

  David appeared to be in need of a comeback. Air clouded out of his mouth, but soundlessly. I felt bad for him, in the same low-level guilty way I would for years after high school, whenever I stumbled upon a memory of him. I did not, in the waning months of our friendship, do justice to our history. There was just too much else going on. When he looked at me during that lunch, though, there was something pleading in his eyes, some desperate imperative that I pretended not to see, that I hoped Denis was not picking up on.

  “Listen,” Denis said. “Can you ask your mom to dig out all of the letters from that file cabinet? Not just the nutters. All the correspondence she’s saved, no matter how inconsequential-seeming. I want to take a look at everything she’s got, see if I missed anything.”

  “I can get the letters in order for you.” I tried to sound more dutiful than obsequious, though even I could hear the strain of eager puppy dog in my voice. “Is there any particular order you want?” David made a small, glottal sound, something between a hiccup and a cough, though with more incredulity than either of those.

  “Great,” Denis said. “Any order’s great. I’m sure I can wade through.” He slapped his notebook into his palm, a motion that was coming to seem like his trademark, a punctuation mark of sorts, often directly preceding his exit. “Good to meet you,” he said to David, holding the notebook to his forehead in a quick salute.

  Alone together again, the air crackled around David and me. Cars began making their way back into the lot, a few fishtailing on the slippery pavement, their wheels making dramatic grinding noises. I found myself wishing for a collision, just for the venting relief of such drama. But everyone navigated safely into spaces, without so much as a car door dinging the vehicle parked next to it. We spent the rest of lunch like that, neither of us saying much of anything, both pretending to be occupied by the mundane details; for David, something at his feet and, later, a muffler-heavy car in the street; for me, the slushy trails of boot prints and, finally, the leaden sky overhead.

  I had to make stealth work of the letters, given my mother’s proclivity for hovering near the kitchen file cabinet. She spent her days at the breakfast table, an arm’s length away, or pacing the small nook with a cigarette in hand, or opening and closing the three drawers as they squealed on their long hinges. The cabinet was her sole, un-contested domain. I did not want her to get wind of what I was doing, to mistake this for a collaborative venture. I could just imagine her fetishistic stroking of each envelope, her fresh recital of words read countless times, her shoulder-to-shoulder, breathy camaraderie.

  I timed things precisely so I could delve inside when she was out of eyeshot and earshot—during her brief trips to the bathroom or while she was taking naps or walking the dogs around the block. This one element of subterfuge quickly tinged the venture with an illicit little thrill. A spy, I hummed to myself as I fingered through the manila folders, listening for the sound of her footsteps. A DEE-tec-tive.

  It was easy to get lost inside the drawers. There were rough markers of an organizational structure, sections labeled History and News and Evidence, though those had been long abandoned. Now fat folder after fat folder was crammed tightly into hanging files, where you’d find a tenth-grade math test (basic algebra, marked liberally with red Xes, a D+ at the top) alongside a recent clipping from the Free Press alongside a silvery certificate from the state swim meet alongside a photocopy of an early police report. Nothing was too inconsequential to keep—there was an old gum wrapper in one folder, a mucky used Band-Aid in another, the adhesive covered in dog hair and dirt, browned blood still spotting the bandage. Where had this once been? His elbow? Chin? And how had she come to find it and store it away?

  The contents of the drawers were compelling and unsettling in the way crazy was compelling and unsettling. They were the shut-in who stacked years of newspapers into towers until his apartment became a narrow, moldering gauntlet. They were the paranoiac who jury-rigged a home security system from crisscrossing strands of dental floss and mousetraps. My first job, then, became one of simply rooting out the letters and secreting small stacks up in my room.

  I’d never read any of them before; they’d struck me as invasive, one more way our life had become boundaryless and up for grabs, the community slithering in daily through our mail slot. I’d felt indignant at the Love stamps and the unnecessary c often added to our name, turning us into The Pasternacks, a family I came to imagine as existing in a parallel universe, their evenings spent around a fireplace, their coffee table littered with Renaissance art books and international newspapers, jazz music playing in the background. Now, though, as I spread the letters across my desk and studied the inky cursive on monogrammed stationery or a typed missive on letterhead or a child’s blocky print, they held new fascination.

  Maybe it was the low-level but constant narration that accompanied the task, narration that would only grow in the coming weeks, capable of enlivening even the most ordinary or solitary of pursuits, characterized simply as What I Will Tell Denis About This (“Denis, seven out of every eight writers seem to be female.” “Den is, did you see that three separate letters came from Georgia?”). Or maybe it was the challenge of the venture, the familiar appeal of trying to master something new: the puzzling together of many rand
om bits of information into a sensible whole. Or maybe it was simply the appeal of having something to do.

  Certainly I had school and homework and Lola and listening to the radio and feeding the dogs and making my lunches and going to Chuck, but all of that, no matter how pointed, had an overarching cast of aimlessness. The letters brought a satisfaction before I’d even started in on the work. How unwittingly desperate I had become for just such a sharpening of my attention, for the distillation of my long, shapeless days into a bite-sized, concrete problem set.

  I read and sorted after school, before bed, in lieu of breakfast, and a categorizing system naturally emerged. There were, most voluminously, the Nice letters. These were the ones devoid of substance, filled instead with snippets about prayer and sympathy and love, the ones most likely to be written on store-bought cards featuring doves or flowers. Most Nice letters were simple and brief, a mention of seeing us on the news, heart going out, etc. A subset of them, though, invoked the shameless sentimentality reserved for grade-school love notes, i’s dotted with hearts, smiley faces attached as addenda to signatures. For all of the Nice letters, I penciled a small N on the back flap of the envelope.

  Then there were the Crazy ones. These all existed in the same swirling universe as Melissa Anne’s. They contained detailed theories (one promised that all the clues to Danny’s whereabouts could be found in the movie Seven and implored us to pay careful attention to GLUTTONY and VANITY and Kevin SPACEY) or a garbled list of nonsense (one repeated Hercules and life-force, nineteen and twenty-three times respectively, in a single paragraph). After wading through so much illegible scrawl and garbled syntax, I came to almost admire the plainspoken, straightforward awfulness of Melissa Anne’s work. She was, at least, good at what she did. I did to the Crazies what I did to the Nices: marked a C on the envelope flap.

  Wrong letters were the simplest to discern. I saw Daniel at an I-90 rest stop outside of Minnesota on July 29th. This, four days before he disappeared. Or another: As I have already told the police, I treated a boy who resembled your son on September 6th at St. Mary’s Emergency Room in Saginaw. He had a broken arm. He reported a peanut allergy and had a large port-wine stain spanning his left shoulder. No allergy, no stain. All, marked with a W.

  As I completed each small pile of Nice, Crazy, and Wrong, I made new reconnaissance trips to the cabinet, refiling the completed letters and grabbing new ones from fresh folders.

  There was a final category that I didn’t return to the cabinet, stashing them instead in the top drawer of my desk. These were the Viables. Viables sounded more right than wrong, offered no good reason to be dismissed. These were the shopkeeper who thought Danny purchased a winter coat in Sault St. Marie, the cabdriver who allegedly gave him a ride through Akron, the social worker who swore she admitted him to a homeless shelter in Flint for two nights in October. The Viables were the most threadbare of all the letters, the most heavily scented with my mother’s cigarette smoke, most pulpy from her repeated handling. She too had recognized these were different. These were the letters of her familiar tableau: hunched at the table, cigarette in hand, pages spread before her.

  Yet.

  For all her scrutiny and obsession, she had done nothing more than file them haphazardly away. She had never begun to make even the most rudimentary sense of them. A growing incredulity rose in me as I amassed Viables (there were nearly two hundred of them, out of over seven hundred letters total) and began matching them to each other. Three claimed to have seen a rusting brown sedan near Larkgrove Elementary the night Danny disappeared. Two contained reports of Danny hitching a ride along I-94, one near Chicago in late summer, another outside Minneapolis later in the fall.

  How could my mother, I wondered, not have thought to seek out similarities? To group like themes? To look for the most basic of clues? For all her months of notes and index cards and manila folders, she was a terrible detective, simply the worst, rendered wholly ineffective by—what? Sentiment? Stupidity? I spent long stints of What I Will Tell Denis About This imagining how we would laugh at her rank amateurishness, her incompetence that bordered on negligence.

  On my fifth day with the letters, I got out of bed to work on them. The middle of the night, I discovered, was the ideal time for such work, my parents well asleep, my mind naturally teeming. Soon I was matching the pair of sightings from across the border in Canada: a prep cook in Windsor who’d recognized Danny as a brief diner regular from mid-to late October, and a lady who insisted he passed through neighboring Essex in December. Three letters came from Indiana, a zigzag through the state from Valparaiso to Muncie to Terre Haute. Two letters placed him respectively driving over the Mackinac Bridge to the U.P. and spending November in subzero Marquette.

  It was well past four when I finally finished. In all, nearly sixty Viables had been matched with at least one other. Letter after letter sat stacked along my desk in piles according to their relation to each other, an intricate cross-hatching. I imagined how I would sweep my hand in the air, telling Denis, Look. At. This.

  I was buzzing with the adrenaline of a job well done. And with sleeplessness too. My eyes were starting to blur. Danny here, Danny there, Danny everywhere, I thought singsongily, almost as an afterthought. The task had been so much about figuring it out and getting it right; it hadn’t been particularly (or at all) heart-wrenching. Now, as my brain began to loosen itself from the hours of hyperfocus, he swam in. I pictured him in Canada, on interstates, in rusty brown sedans. In the moments before sleep, I felt all-powerful, as if I had, just by the act of reading of him, repopulated the world with possible Dannys, sprinkling the map with an army of my brothers who might at that very second be sticking his thumb into an Indiana roadway or sleeping soundly in a faraway neighborhood or maybe even, I thought with a jittery nervousness, marching determinedly toward home.

  Denis came over early the next week, Kimberly in tow. I was on the phone with Lola when they arrived. “Is that the Menace?” Lola said when she heard all the noise in the background, everyone saying hello to everyone, finding chairs around the table. My mom had prepared an hors d’oeuvre plate of sorts, unwrapping cheese slices and opening a jar of green olives with pimientos.

  Lola said, “I don’t have anything against Mexicans, but that guy is slimy. I’m not saying that to be prejudiced.”

  I told her I had to go. Denis was already sticking his hand into the olive jar, popping three in his mouth at once. Kimberly held up her hand as my mom held the plate in front of her. The cheese slices varied between white and yellow, though they were uniformly shiny and limp, except for a stray beagle hair sticking to a yellow one. “No thanks,” she said smilingly. She was sitting up very straight.

  “Tip says Jerold Terry thinks you’re nice,” Lola said quickly, as if she’d been saving this for the end as a way to keep me a bit longer. Jerold Terry was a sophomore wrestler. We’d sat next to each other at a basketball game the week before. He’d breathed heavily out of his mouth and made a cawing noise any time Franklin made a basket. I couldn’t remember saying anything to him.

  “So?” I said, trying to sound nonchalant.

  “He’s cute,” she said unconvincingly. We both knew Jerold Terry wasn’t cute. He had a receding chin and a huge gap between his front teeth. His braces looked as if they were shredding the insides of his mouth. Though no Franklin boy, aside from David Nelson, had ever thought anything of me. There was, despite myself, something stirring about this news. Denis and Kimberly already had their notepads in front of them, pens poised and ready, moving, as usual, in unspoken synchronicity.

  “I gotta go,” I repeated.

  “Later, dater,” Lola said—one of her many catchphrases meant to impart familiarity between us, though it often had the opposite effect.

  I hovered just beyond the table—nobody offered me a seat—and listened as Denis summarized for my parents all the information he’d gathered so far: talks with the police and the neighbors near the basketball court and the m
en who’d been playing on the next court over, the friends and teachers and coaches at school. Anticipation thrummed through me, as if I were made of taut violin strings instead of muscle and tendon, and they were being soundlessly plucked and plucked. Denis covered familiar ground—Danny was a loyal, charismatic figure at school, well liked but also with well-known aggressive tendencies. He’d been benched from practice twice for getting too rough during scrimmages.

  “That’s what he was supposed to be doing during scrimmages,” my dad said. “It’s a rough game.”

  Denis nodded and didn’t protest. He seemed to be growing inured to the defensive twang that accompanied nearly anything my father said to him.

  My mother drummed her fingers on the tabletop. “What’s this got to do with where he is?”

  “You can’t build a house without a solid foundation,” Denis said.

  My parents looked unimpressed by the metaphor. Denis talked about how there’d been no eyewitness reports of any sort of abduction, though there were a few reports of an unfamiliar brown sedan in Larkgrove that night.

  “Rusty,” I said. Denis turned to me, as if just realizing I was in the room. “A rusty brown sedan,” I repeated, louder than I would’ve liked. My mother turned in her seat to get a look at me, squinting, her cigarette smoke ribboning thinly in my direction.

  Denis nodded. “No plates, not even a partial. The police tried to follow up, but nothing panned out. We’re staying on it, though.” He talked of Danny sightings as far away as Florida, as near as western Michigan.

  “Do you know about the one in Quebec?” I said. “That might count as farther than Florida.”

  My mother’s squint deepened. My father blinked slowly at me, both of them looking like they were trying to remember where they knew me from. I imagined these to be something like the looks they’d had when I spoke my first sentence (I began talking in sentences, the story goes, having skipped single words entirely, leapfrogging from gah and oooh and eek to Mommy, close the door), though hopefully, back then, without the vague suspicion that seemed to color their faces now.