Desire Lines Read online

  Kathryn drifts upstairs, her eyes adjusting to the gloomy hall, and goes into her mother’s bedroom. She opens the closet and sifts through the clothes, idly searching for pieces she doesn’t recognize. This skirt is new, this blouse. A moss-green cardigan still has its tag, an orange price sticker revealing its bargain-basement provenance. When she was growing up, her mother bought clothes on clearance or not at all. It was more than the money: Once you had the necessities, her mother believed, anything else was frivolous. You didn’t really need a moss-green cardigan, so if you bought it, it had to be an especially good deal. As a result, Kathryn had a closetful of clothing that was a half-size off, or slightly the wrong color, or made of a fabric that stretched or sagged. When she went to college and was earning her own money working in the dining hall, she began paying full price for small luxuries: black suede boots, a leather jacket, a pair of velvet jeans. Spending the money was a druglike high, but it didn’t last long. After college, with a mountain of bills and three maxed-out credit cards, Kathryn had no choice but to return to her mother’s careful ways.

  Kathryn opens a window in the stuffy room, putting her hand to the screen to gauge how warm it is outside. The day is overcast, with a tarnished edge to the silver sky. The air is cool. She can hear the wind whistling sharply as it moves between the trees. She had forgotten how quickly the weather can change, how cold Maine can get in the summer. Standing there in her shorts and UVA T-shirt, she realizes that she’s covered in goose bumps. She reaches into her mother’s closet, tugs the green cardigan off its hanger, and slips it on, yanking off the tag and slipping it into the patch pocket on the front of the sweater, in case her mother wants to take it back.

  Last night, when she and her mother were sitting down to dinner, Jack had called to see if she wanted to go out to the Sea Dog for a drink. “I can’t tonight,” she said into the phone, turning toward the wall as she used to do in high school to avoid her mother’s inquisitive gaze.

  “So?” her mother said as soon as she hung up.

  “It was Jack.”

  “You could go. Don’t feel you have to stay here because of me.”

  “I don’t, Mom. I’m not in the mood to go out tonight.” Kathryn sat down and spread her napkin on her lap.

  “Maybe you should,” her mother said, cutting squares into the vegetarian lasagna Kathryn had made that afternoon. “It might be good for you.”

  “What is this, peer pressure?”

  “Jack Ledbetter is very nice. And he knows everybody in town. It wouldn’t hurt to be seen with him.” She motioned to Kathryn to hand her her plate.

  “Wouldn’t hurt what?” Kathryn asked. “Who am I supposed to be impressing?”

  “That’s not what I mean. I mean, for your career. Don’t you need to be establishing contacts?”

  Kathryn laughed. “That’s really lame, and you know it. You just want me to go on a date.”

  “He was asking you on a date?”

  She rolled her eyes. “We’re not talking about this.”

  Her mother served herself a piece and propped the spatula in the serving dish. “Well, that’s a little presumptuous, then, don’t you think? Calling you at the last minute?” She took a bite of lasagna. “Umm, good. What is that, chicken?”

  “Eggplant.”

  “I think you did the right thing, playing hard to get.”

  Kathryn poured herself a glass of wine, hesitating at the midway point and then filling it to the top. “Mom, I’m not playing anything,” she said, taking a big swallow. “I just didn’t feel like going out tonight. And it’s not a date. Let’s nip that idea in the bud.”

  Chewing thoughtfully, her mother said, “He’s kind of cute, I think, in a rumpled, underpaid way.”

  “Did I say we’re not talking about this?”

  “Those big green eyes. And that hair—it probably used to be red when he was little, don’t you think? There’s still a little red in it.”

  “Mom,” Kathryn said firmly. “How was your day?”

  Now, looking at herself in the mirror over her mother’s dresser, Kathryn wonders idly if Jack was asking her out. She tries to remember what he was like in high school, why she had never really thought about going out with him then. He was always there, part of the group, his shoulder brushing hers at football games as he passed her a soda or a slice of pizza. He was in the last row of class, laughing with Rachel. He was walking down the hall with cheerleaders, flirting with them at their lockers, dropping them off at class.

  He was funny and charming with her, but never more. Even if he had been interested, Kathryn thinks, his friendship with Rachel would have taken precedence. It was as if he was afraid of hurting Rachel, of betraying her somehow. Kathryn always suspected that was why Jack never had a serious girlfriend in high school. Or maybe it was simply that he didn’t need one; he had enough else going on, and he didn’t want to complicate his life. At any rate, at some point, without ever discussing it, both of them must simply have dismissed the idea that there might be something between them. So they went through the motions of friendship without ever really connecting, without risking revelation, without hope of anything deeper than the occasional dialogue about chemistry class, or arranging rides to the movies, or how the foreboding sky suggested a possible day off from school. More often, their voices joined an ongoing conversation; their personalities melded into the group.

  After getting dressed in jeans and the green cardigan, Kathryn hunts for a notebook and a pen. Her mother has left the car keys for the Saturn on a bulletin board in the kitchen that has always served as a message center, along with a note: “Frank brought the car over this morning. I’m assuming your driver’s license is O.K.! I’m having drinks with Frank tonight (payback!) so don’t expect me home before 7 or so. If something comes up for you, don’t worry about calling—I’ll figure it out. XX MOM.” Kathryn sighs at the bulletin board and lifts the keys off the hook. Looking out the kitchen window, she sees a sporty, bright-yellow car in the driveway with dealer plates.

  The inside of the car smells like a carpet showroom. Everything is beige. In the glove compartment Kathryn finds the registration and the owner’s manual, still sealed in its plastic bag. Except for a ski trip to Utah when she and Paul rented a car, Kathryn can’t remember the last time she drove a new one. The car she and Paul had in Charlottesville, the one he kept, was eight years old when they bought it, with ninety-two thousand miles, a fringe of rust around the bottom, and a strange clunking noise they never bothered to investigate.

  Driving down Main Street, Kathryn feels as if she is vacuum-sealed in a biosphere. She turns on the air conditioner, just to see if it works, and cold air blasts out of the vents. At a stoplight she figures out that the strange black slit in the radio is in fact a CD player, and she discovers three CDs under the dash: Victoria’s Secret’s Classical Music for Lovers, Wayne Newton Live in Concert, and Yanni at the Acropolis. She opts for the radio. By the time she reaches the News building, she doesn’t want to get out. The climate is perfect, she’s just heard two songs by Cheap Trick on the classic-rock station, and she’s found a spillproof cup container at the touch of a button. She could stay in this car all day. She’s tempted to pull out of the parking lot and keep going, all the way down Route 1 to Winterport and beyond, maybe to another state. Hell, why not Mexico? But the next song is REO Speedwagon, and, well, she’s here. She gets out of the car.

  Inside, in the newsroom, a couple of reporters are sitting at their desks sipping coffee and staring groggily at computer terminals. One glances up and nods as she comes in. This pleases her, even though she knows he probably doesn’t recognize her and he’s just being polite. It makes her feel like one of them—a reporter on assignment. She can see Jack at the far end of the room in his glass-walled office, talking on the phone. His feet are up on the edge of his desk and he’s bouncing in his spring-coiled seat, tossing a beanbag in the air.

  As she walks toward him she is suddenly nervous. He’s bus
y, and she isn’t; he’s wearing a tie, and she’s in jeans. He’s been here for hours (she can see the evidence, paper coffee cups lined up on his desk), and she’s just strolling in. This article is probably the least important thing on his agenda—he assigned it to her as a novelty, probably because he felt sorry for her—and it’s the only thing on her mind. Plus, there’s that business of the invitation to go out the night before hanging between them. Does he feel as awkward about it as she does?

  “I can come back,” she stage-whispers at the door to his office, but he gestures emphatically for her to sit down.

  “Yeah. Right. Okay,” he says into the phone, lifting his feet off his desk and sitting up in his chair. When he looks at her, she can see the stubble on his chin and circles under his eyes. “So let me know when you’ve got something down, and we can go from there. Right. Friday. I need it by three. Hasta la vista, baby.” He replaces the receiver and stares at the blinking red lights on the handset. Then he looks up at her. “Hello,” he says.

  “Hello.”

  “You look rested.”

  “You look like you had a rough night.” She smiles.

  “Yeah, it’s probably just as well you didn’t go with us. Somebody’s intern had the crazy idea to do tequila shots.” He rubs his head. “I’m getting too old for that stuff.”

  “Oh,” she says, “it was an office thing.” She’s surprised to find she feels a pang of disappointment.

  “Yeah, I thought you might want to meet some of the others. They’re a good bunch.”

  As always, Kathryn is struck by Jack’s casual generosity, his impulse to bring people together. He was like that in high school, organizing Friday-night video evenings and arranging rides to parties. He had more friends than anyone she knew. But she remembers Rachel snapping at him once, in front of a large group, “I needed to talk to you. I didn’t want this to be a huge thing with everybody else,” and all of them standing there uncomfortably while Jack tried to explain that he didn’t realize, he didn’t understand, he thought it would be fun with more people, and he thought she’d think so, too. Looking at his bloodshot eyes across the desk, Kathryn promises herself that she won’t make any more assumptions about his motives. “I’m sorry about begging off,” she says. “Next time, okay?”

  “Okay. And no interns, I promise.” He hits the desk with both palms to signal a change in the conversation. “So what about the Jennifer story? Are you on board?”

  Kathryn shifts in her chair and glances down at her blank notebook. She hasn’t followed any of the half-dozen paths Jack suggested, from contacting the police department to reading old clippings to interviewing family and friends. She isn’t sure where to start, and she’s also somehow afraid of being seen as taking advantage of their misery. After all, she knows Jennifer’s family, knows the pain they’ve been through and how raw it still is. It was an ordeal for them to have to talk to the police and the press as much as they did at the time; they certainly won’t want to rehash the whole thing now. “Well, I’ve done some asking around,” Kathryn says, “and it’s the funniest thing. Nobody seems to know where she is.”

  “Really,” says Jack.

  “That’s right.”

  “You’re quite a sleuth.”

  “It’s still speculation at this point,” she says. “I’ll let you know when I can get something more solid. In the meantime, I need you to point me in a couple of directions.”

  “At the same time?”

  “Yes, I need a good spin on this story.”

  They both grimace at the lame wordplay, and he puts his face in his hands. “I can’t keep up with you. I can’t keep up with me. I need a cup of coffee.”

  THE LIBRARY AT the News is staffed by a heavy woman with a nimbus of salt-and-pepper hair wearing a batik-print skirt and a loose purple tunic.

  “Joanne, Kathryn is doing a special assignment for us and needs to get into the archives,” Jack tells her. “Can you set her up?”

  Joanne nods, giving Kathryn a once-over. “What does she need?” she asks Jack.

  “It’s a missing-persons case,” Kathryn says. “The girl’s name was—is—Jennifer Pelletier. She disappeared in June of 1986.”

  “Oh, sure, I remember it. Unsolved, right?”

  “Right.”

  “You got a lead?”

  “Well—” Kathryn starts.

  “She’s covering some different angles,” Jack says.

  Joanne gives Kathryn a skeptical look. “I thought they worked that case up and down and sideways. Hard to see what different angles you could find after all this time.”

  Jack glances at the big clock above her head. “Hey, I’ve got a meeting in a couple of minutes,” he says. “I appreciate your help on this, Joanne.” To Kathryn he says, “Let me know if there’s anything I can do.” He lightly squeezes her arm and then lifts his hand in a wave. “Talk to you soon.”

  Kathryn looks after him as he leaves. She’s slightly stunned by the smoothness of his departure, the friendly squeeze and empty promise of it. The squeeze conveys both empathy and distance; it lets her know that Jack has brought her as far as he is going to, and she’ll have to go the distance alone. Though it seems like an intimate gesture, there is nothing personal about it.

  “So what are we after?” Joanne demands.

  “I need to see any story related to this case, and maybe even before. Is it possible to find unrelated pieces that might have mentioned her name?”

  “We don’t have a search database going back that far. But I’d bet her mother has a scrapbook. You could ask her.”

  Kathryn tries to remember if Jennifer or her mother had kept such a thing. Neither of them seemed the type.

  “We do have all the articles on the disappearance, of course,” Joanne continues. “I’ll need to track down the microfiche. What’s the date on that?”

  “June thirteenth, 1986,” Kathryn says automatically. “A Friday.” The date is as fixed in her brain as her own birthday.

  “Is that the date that it happened, or the date the first article appeared?”

  “Friday the thirteenth, huh? The date it happened. I guess the first article would have appeared on Monday, the … sixteenth.”

  When Joanne goes off to find the articles, Kathryn sits at a table and begins to compile a list of people to talk to: Jennifer’s mother, her brother, Will. Rachel, Brian, Jack. The detective who worked on the case, the reporter who covered it. Abby Elson, a friend of Jennifer’s none of the rest of them knew very well. Chip Sanborn? Kathryn writes his name and then crosses it off the list. She wonders which teachers might have anything to say. Miss Hallowell was Jennifer’s English teacher, but she’d moved to Portland a few years after they graduated. Like Jennifer, she had once, as a Bangor High student, starred in the school play, and she saw this as a special bond between them. Miss Hallowell had been distraught at the news of Jennifer’s disappearance; she joined the search parties, organized a phone hotline, and cried a lot in public. Kathryn puts her name down with a question mark. Mr. Richardson, the flamboyant drama teacher who smoked cigarettes with his students behind the school, had featured Jennifer in several of his productions; he might have something to say. And then there was Mr. Hunter, the social-studies teacher who also ran the orienteering club. Kathryn and Jennifer had been in his class senior year, and Jennifer did orienteering. Mr. Hunter was young and charismatic, one of the few teachers at the school who was adept at jumping over the great divide between teenagers and adults.

  “Well, here’s what we got,” Joanne says, handing Kathryn a manila folder. “You can use one of those projectors over there.” She motions toward a row of old-fashioned-looking light boxes with darkened screens. “I’ll be here if you need anything else.” She turns around and busies herself at her desk.

  “Thank you,” Kathryn says.

  Joanne nods. “Those stories have been picked over by everybody and his brother, but who knows, maybe you’ll find something nobody else could.” She s
hrugs doubtfully.

  Kathryn puts her bag on the first table she comes to and switches on the machine. Opening her folder, she sees that the four sheets of film are labeled neatly in chronological order, beginning with the Monday after Jennifer’s disappearance, June 16. She takes the top sheet and puts it on the light table, moving the magnifying glass above it until the first article is projected onto the screen. BANGOR HONOR STUDENT MISSING, the headline announces. It’s by a staff reporter named John Bourne. “After graduating with honors from Bangor High School on Friday afternoon, Jennifer Ann Pelletier and her family celebrated over dinner at Pilot’s Grill. Then, like many new graduates, she met up with her friends for what her twin brother, William, 18, says was a ‘casual, relaxed get-together’ down by the Kenduskeag. Around 11:30 P.M., according to witnesses, she said she was tired and wanted to walk home,” Kathryn reads. The article continues:

  No one has seen or heard from her since.

  The Bangor Police Department is taking the disappearance seriously, and is asking the public’s help in locating Pelletier. According to Detective Ed Gaffney, she is 5 feet 5 inches in height, and weighs 117 pounds. She has shoulder-length blond hair and blue eyes. The night she disappeared she was wearing Levi jeans, a white cotton shirt, a black cotton sweater, a black and silver belt, black shoes, and silver earrings and bracelets.

  Pelletier exhibited no unusual signs of behavior or mood in the weeks before her disappearance, according to friends and family members. “She was excited about graduating, and kind of sad about it, too, like all of us,” her brother said. “But she was her normal self.”

  Described as a popular, well-liked student, Pelletier was active in drama and sports in high school, with a leading role in the school play, “Grease,” this spring. She lettered in cross-country last fall. She was also a member of the National Honor Society and the orienteering club, and she volunteered regularly at Westgate Manor, a local nursing home.