What Happened to My Sister: A Novel (31 page)

“I’m not flying off the—”

His hand flies up to shush me and he says, “All right, all right now. Let’s say something
is
wrong. What do you expect me to do about it when her own mother ain’t fretting? I’m supposed to call nine-one-one any time that girl decides to forage in some new
place? ’Cause I’d be dialing them three numbers every day in that case. She hunts and gathers—that’s who she is. That mother of hers only opens the door for Jim Beam.
She
ain’t putting food on the table so the girl’s gotta do it. I actually like the kid, it’s true. I don’t want to see harm come to her, or anybody for that matter. I’m a law-abiding citizen and I love my country.”

“What’s loving your country got to do with it?” I try to contain my anger.
Chaplins always take the high road
. “Look, all I’m asking is for their room number, not the key. I think you know by now I’m not here to bother any of your other—ah—guests. I just want to see if she’s up there, let her know we’re down here waiting on her. She’s probably running late and you said yourself their phone’s been cut off, otherwise I’d simply call up there.”

This gives him pause.

“No hotel manager worth his salt would release a room number,” he says. “It’s rule number one of hotel management. But if I were to, say, step away from this ledger here,
this ledger with the room numbers and names in it
, and you were to, say, glance down at it, I guess that’d be out of my control now, wouldn’t it?”

“Oh, Mr. Burdock, I could
kiss
you right now—”

His hand flies up again so I hush.

“So I’m going to step away,” he continues, “check on things in the back. Might take me a couple of minutes. Maybe I’ll see you when I come back, maybe I won’t …”

As he’s talking and without looking down at it, he turns the book upside down so it’s now facing me. Before retreating to the back room he looks at me. “You tell anybody about this, I’ll deny it,” he says.

I silently pantomime locking my lips and throwing away the key.

“One more thing,” Hap Burdock says. “Get that kid outta there, would you?”

And then he’s gone. And I’m worried sicker than I was when I
first came in. My panic sends a shot of adrenaline up my spine—it’s like my blood drank a six-pack of Red Bull. It only takes a second, he’s right, to find “Parker” on the guest registry. Room 217. I bust back out into the afternoon heat, give a fake everything’s-okay wave to Cricket in the car and, once out of her sight line, I rocket up the stairs to the second floor.

At first I knock gently.
Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap
, pause, then
tap-tap
. The universal “friendly” knock.

Nothing happens.

I check to the left and right, and when I’m sure no one can see me I knock again and put my ear up to the door to hear if there’s any sound of movement inside.

Still nothing.

“Carrie? Mrs. Parker?” I call out through a fake smile so I sound breezy and casual. “It’s Honor Ford. Just wondering if anyone’s home.”

I knock again. Harder this time.

“Hello?” I call through the door. “Anybody in there?”

Please God, don’t let me be too late. Now all pretense is gone and I’m banging on the door. To no avail. The shades are drawn so I can’t see in through the window. Please God.

“Carrie? Honey, it’s Mrs. Ford.” I listen again. Nothing.

Now I know what I need to do. I go back downstairs to the car, fasten my seat belt, and pass Cricket my cell phone.

“Call your father,” I tell her, shifting into drive, feeling like the Terminator, ready to kick some ass.

“What happened?” Cricket asks, full of fear. “Where’s Carrie?”

“Just get your father on the line and hand me the phone.”

A half hour later Eddie and I are at home, sitting at the dining room table, Cricket and Mother tucked safely out of earshot in Mom’s bedroom watching TV because I don’t want either of them overhearing the come to Jesus I’m about to have with my husband.

“Christ, Honor, I thought someone was getting murdered, the way you sounded on the phone,” Ed tells me. “What’s going on? What’s all this?”

He tips his chin at the piles of dolls Mother has started making. Given how sparse they are, I suspect it will take more convincing to part with enough Chaplin memorabilia to raise the money we’ll need.

“By the way, I’ve only got an hour,” Eddie adds. “I told the desk sergeant I was taking an early break but I’ve got to get back so—”

“I’ll get right to it,” I say, pushing stray hair behind my ears and taking a deep breath. “Frankly, I don’t know what to do about the Carrie situation. I thought somehow it would resolve itself or something would be revealed that would answer my questions—oh, I don’t know what I thought. I didn’t want to jump to the same conclusion the Dressers jumped to about us.”

“What’s the Carrie situation? The Dressers? Honor, get to the point for God’s sake.”

“Okay, okay! Jeez. Here it is. Carrie is clearly neglected. You can see that too, right? I mean, I know you’ve only been with her for a few minutes and it was emotional and all but surely you could see that she’s neglected at the very least. She’s malnourished, her clothes are far too small for her, she turns up with bruises and strange marks. And now she’s missing.”

“What do you mean she’s missing?” he demands, leaning forward and putting his elbows on the table. I see the fierce protective streak that has made my husband such a damn fine police officer.

“Well, I went over to the Loveless to pick her up and after waiting awhile in the car I ended up going up to their room—”

“It’s just her and her mother, right?” he interrupts.

“Yes, and I
still
have never met her mother,” I say, “which is another thing. Wouldn’t you want to meet the person your child is spending nearly every waking minute with? How could this
mother let her nine-year-old daughter go off with strangers every day? For all she knows, we’re child molesters!”

“What happened when you went up to their room? I take it no one was there.”

“No one was there,” I say, nodding.

“So how do you know she’s missing and not just out with her mother, running errands or something?” he asks.

“Ed, I’m telling you, something’s wrong,” I say. “I’m looking you in the eye and telling you I can just feel it. Maybe it’s a mother’s intuition, maybe it’s some cosmic sign, I really don’t know. But this is me and I’m asking you, I’m begging you, to help me get to the bottom of this.”

“Baby, you know we can’t file a missing person report unless someone’s been gone for—”

“Don’t even finish the sentence. I know. But this is
me
talking to
you
. This isn’t some nervous Nellie stranger who doesn’t know diddly about what goes on out there in the world. It’s
me
and I’m telling you I’ve got a really bad feeling about this.”

We lock eyes for just a moment, but it’s long enough for me to know he still loves me. He still loves me!
Focus, Honor. Focus
.

“What about Cricket?” he asks, looking down at whatever random pile is sitting in front of him. “I assume you’ve asked her where she thinks Carrie might be.”

“She was with me, waiting in the car when I went up to the room at the Loveless,” I say, “and she looked worried sick—panicked almost—when I said Carrie wasn’t there, so I just tried to calm her down and then I called you.”

“Let’s get her in here,” Ed says, standing up to call for her. “Cricket? Come on down here!”

“They’re in Mother’s room with the TV on, so let me go get her,” I say.

When I come back Eddie looks up from reading one of the foreclosure documents.

“This is unbelievable,” he says, shaking his head and looking back down.

“I just had a very illuminating talk with Mom about it this morning,” I say, with a hint of sarcasm. Illuminating it was not.

Eddie’s head jerks up.

“So I take it she told you,” he says, missing the sarcasm.

Instead of displaying my confusion, I just sigh, fall into the dining room chair I’d been sitting in, and wait for Eddie to elaborate.

“Honor, I swear I didn’t know, and by the way, she came to me,” he says. “I don’t want you to think it was the other way around. She came to me.”

It’s the oldest trick in the book: pretend you know what someone’s talking about until you
do
know what someone’s talking about.

“She came to you,” I say, careful to clear my voice of accusation.

“Not long before we … before we split up,” he says, “your mother came to me and said she had a sizable nest egg and wanted to help ease the pressure on us. I guess she thought our problems were all money-related, what with the medical bills and all. I didn’t want to take her up on it—I downright refused her the first time she brought it up. I figured you’d hate me even more if you thought I was taking handouts from your mother. But then she said you wouldn’t have to know. It could just be between the two of us, your mom and me, until—oh, I don’t know, until I could somehow get my head back above water financially.”

So she hadn’t sent the money to Hunter after all. That’s why she didn’t want me blaming him. She didn’t want me telling him about the foreclosure because it truly wasn’t his fault. Oh my God. The medical bills bankrupted my mother. Oh my God.

“How long did y’all think you’d be able to keep this from me?” I ask. “Don’t even answer that—I know the answer: forever. You
thought you’d be able to keep this secret from me forever. You made it this far so I guess you thought you were almost home free. You’ve always played it close to the vest, Edsil, so this shouldn’t come as any real surprise.”

“Honor, please,” Ed says, his eyes pleading with me. “You think I wanted to be in this position? You think I wanted your mother to put her life on the line like that? I didn’t know! She said she had a lot in savings and I promised her I’d pay her back …”

I should control my temper. I know I should. But I don’t. Sue me.

“This is exactly the type of thing that tore us apart,”
I spit the words at him like a snake. “You don’t let me in, Ed. You’ve never let me in. You’re so goddamn stoic and proud and private.
I’m your wife! I’m
the one you should have come to with the money problems! Not my mother.
Me
. Your
wife
. Every time you opened the mail or sat down to pay the bills, every single
fucking
time I’d ask you how we were holding up you’d say
fine, just fine
, until it was too late!”

“Honor …”

He can’t stop me now. No one can.

“And every time her name came up,
every single fucking time her name came up
, a cloud would come over your face and you’d leave the room,” I yell. The tears are cracking my voice. “Or if you couldn’t physically leave the room, mentally you would just shut down. Locking me out entirely. Going back to work when you didn’t need to because you couldn’t stand to grieve with me!”

“I went back to work because we’d been accused of
child abuse
, Honor, remember? I went back to work because the longer I stayed away, the guiltier we looked! I went back to work to try to hold on to my job, Honor, Jesus!”

There are tears in Ed’s eyes now too.

“You could have shown some emotion when she died,” I hiss, not ready to accept his rationale, sensible though it is. “Would it
have killed you to have squeezed out a tear or two when she died? You didn’t cry! You didn’t cry once. Until … until …”

“Until Carrie.”

We’re both startled by Cricket’s sudden appearance. I’d been so overwhelmed with anger and hurt and sadness I’d completely forgotten about Cricket. Again.

“Why can’t you guys just let the past be the past?” Cricket cries at us. “Why can’t you
move on
? You think Caroline would be happy to know you split up after she died? You think she’d feel good about knowing her death
caused
you to break up? Huh? Because that’s what happened. Caroline died and
I’m
not reason enough to try to stick it out.”

When Eddie and I start protesting, Cricket shushes us. Shames us, really.

“Look. You both love each other, right?
Right?
” She looks hard at both of us, like a headmistress doling out detentions.

Then Eddie looks me in the eye and answers her, “Yes, honey. Yes, your mother and I love each other.”

“Mom?”

I don’t need to look at her to know she’s turned her burning gaze to me. I look into Eddie’s eyes and goddamn it all. Goddamn it all to hell.

“Mom?”
she presses me.

“Fine! You win!” I holler at both of them. “I love your father, okay? I love him but he drives me crazy and if he thinks …”

The rest of my words are muffled because he has leapt out of his seat to come around and gather me into his arms, laughing at my pride in not wanting my anger to dissipate, kissing the top of my head, murmuring my name, knowing that now we can fix this. It’ll take a lot of work but now we can fix
us
.

“So, Dad? Did you find Carrie yet?” Cricket, the inveterate subject changer, brings Eddie and me back down to earth.

“Oh my God, Carrie,” I say, fixing my hair and straightening my blouse after our movie moment.

Ed is similarly discombobulated, but his rearranging has to do with his trousers and that’s all I’ll say.

He clears his throat and sits down in the chair next to mine.

“Cricket, did Carrie ever mention any favorite hiding places? Anything she liked to keep secret?”

Now it’s Cricket who’s squirming, which I must say is surprising. I assumed she would answer no, otherwise why wouldn’t she have brought it up earlier? But her silence is telling. I know my daughter well enough to know she’s holding something back.

“It’s okay, honey, you can tell us,” I say.

“You’ve
got
to tell us if you want to find Carrie,” Ed says.

Cricket looks frightened but doesn’t say a word. Which just proves she knows something.

“Cricket, it’s not breaking a promise if it’s a matter of life and death,” Ed tells her. “Now, I know you want to be a good friend to little Caroline by keeping secret whatever she’s asked you to keep secret, but a
real
friend would know that any little detail will help find her, so whatever it is, you need to tell us.”