The Mourning Hours (9 page)

sixteen

E
ven in our bedroom, we weren’t entirely removed from the action. Downstairs, we heard the occasional raised voice, chairs squeaking against the linoleum. Emilie and I sat on the end of her bed, looking out the window. With our faces pressed almost to the glass, we could see the helter-skelter fall of snow, the faint outlines of the oak tree outside our window and the dark outline of Grandpa’s house only a few feet away. I leaned my nose against the window, watching closely, as if maybe, just maybe, out of the darkness would emerge a tall sixteen-year-old girl with red hair, a green coat, leather boots. With each second I felt more and more panic growing inside me. She was dead...she was alive...she was dead...as if I were picking petals off a flower to determine her fate.

No, Stacy was alive. She had to be.

When I pulled back from the window, my nose half-frozen, all I saw were our reflections, pale and ghostly, in the window. Emilie was chewing on the end of her blond braid, staring at nothing. I had sleepy circles under my eyes; it had to be nearly two in the morning at this point, the longest night of my life so far. Emilie’s head snapped up suddenly.

“What?”

She pointed. “Headlights.”

Two more cars were coming down our driveway, slowly, as if this wasn’t an emergency and they had all the time in the world. Even without lights flashing, I knew these were more police officers.

Emilie and I dashed downstairs and stumbled into the kitchen. Grandpa, hearing our footsteps, boomed from the living room, “What now?”

Dad and Johnny were still at the table, Johnny with his arm propping up his head as if his neck just couldn’t do the job anymore. Dad raised his voice when he saw us. “I told you—”

“There are more officers,” I whispered, pointing to the back door.

Emilie looked around. “Where’s the cop that was here?”

“Emilie!” Mom barked from the sink, where she was rinsing out a coffee mug. She jerked her head toward the bathroom. “Shh.”

“What ‘shh’? He knows he’s a cop, doesn’t he?”

The toilet flushed at the same time we heard the footsteps on the back porch stairs. Officer Parks stepped out of the bathroom, drying his hands on his pants. I thought guiltily of the dirty hand towel Aunt Julia had tossed on the floor, after wiping the vomit from my mouth.

Two policemen came in, stamping their feet politely at the threshold. They introduced themselves as Officer Merrill and Officer Weil. Officer Merrill was baby-faced, looking not much older than Johnny, but I recognized the gray-haired, mustachioed Officer Weil instantly. He had come to Watankee Elementary last spring to remind us not to talk to any strangers and to stay away from people who took drugs. I remembered how my classmates and I had snickered at this. In Watankee? What strangers? What drugs?

Johnny rose to his feet. “Have you found her?”

There was a slight shaking of both heads at once.

“Shouldn’t you be out there looking?” There were tears in Johnny’s voice, although not on his face. He was at his breaking point. “Maybe I could go—”

“You’re going to stay put, son,” Officer Parks said.

From the doorway to the living room, Grandpa snorted. “Seems like a funny way to run a search, with everyone just standing around.”

“Papa—” Dad warned.

“Sir, with all due respect,” Officer Parks said, and Grandpa put his palms up in mock surrender.

“We woke up a judge in Manitowoc,” Officer Weil said then, pulling a folded piece of paper from his inside jacket pocket.

“I don’t understand,” Mom said, looking accusingly at Officer Parks. “What’s this?”

“It’s a search warrant,” Officer Parks said, and all of a sudden, it seemed as if I was no longer in the middle of a nightmare, but in the middle of a television drama, like
In the Heat of the Night
or
NYPD Blue.
We have a warrant to search the premises....
Except there was no bad guy here, no criminal, no evidence. Was there? I shook my head, trying to clear it. This couldn’t be happening.

Mom unfolded the piece of paper, glanced at it and passed it to Dad. “I don’t understand,” she repeated, her voice rising. “Do you think she’s here? Do you think we’re hiding Stacy in our house or something?”

Officer Merrill explained, “We’re following the proper procedure for an investigation, ma’am.”

“And you’re investigating
us?
”

Officer Weil was unruffled. “We need to pursue all possible angles, Mrs. Hammarstrom.” There was no trace of the friendly voice he’d used in my classroom, when he’d informed my classmates that police officers were our friends, and we could trust them with anything.

“Clearly you think that we’re hiding something,” Mom continued, but Dad took her by the forearm, which seemed to silence her. He laid the search warrant on the table and nodded slowly.

I looked from Dad to Mom and Johnny and back; it was unthinkable that this was happening, that officers were standing in our house, about to look through our belongings.

Johnny said, “This is a waste of time. We should all be out there!”

“We have a full team of people out there looking, and more members of the community have joined in the search,” Officer Parks said. “In the meantime, we need to let these officers do their jobs.”

Mom shook her arm free from Dad’s grasp. “I just can’t believe this. We’ve been completely cooperative. And yet you think that...”

“Let’s have everyone head into the living room,” Officer Weil said firmly.

Aunt Julia came forward, taking Grandpa by the arm. “Maybe I’ll walk you home. Nothing you can do here right now anyway.”

Grandpa huffed a bit but let himself be led to the door. “You call me with any news,” he said over his shoulder.

“Your room upstairs?” Officer Merrill asked abruptly, and Johnny said, “Yeah.”

“We’ll start there, then,” Officer Weil said. “We’ll just ask you to stay down here with Officer Parks for a few minutes.”

In the living room, we sat stiffly side by side on the furniture we’d had for my entire life, but which now felt unfamiliar and strange. Upstairs, the men traipsed from room to room. Officer Parks sat in the recliner we always reserved for Grandpa, awkward as an uninvited guest.

“So, tell me,” Dad blurted abruptly. “This is Bill Lemke’s idea, isn’t it?”

Officer Parks furrowed his eyebrows. “What’s Bill Lemke’s idea?”

Dad let out a short puff of air through his nose and said nothing.

Overhead, feet crossed the hall. I imagined the officers entering our bedrooms, recording the details of our lives: the unmade beds, Mom’s negligee hanging from a hook next to her closet, Johnny’s heaps of dirty clothes. I tried to think like Nancy Drew; what kind of clues were they hoping to find—diamond earrings or an envelope full of money or a signed confession? I wondered if they were searching Stacy’s bedroom, too, finding her perfectly made bed, her bare walls, the picture of the boy with his face etched out, someone who wasn’t Johnny at all.

The back door opened, and we all flinched, startled. Aunt Julia called, “It’s just me. Should I make more coffee?”

Mom looked to Officer Parks, who said, “That would be fine.”

“Please,” Mom answered her weakly.

We listened to Aunt Julia clattering around in our kitchen, rinsing the pot, filling it with water, setting mugs on the counter with a delicate clink. Meanwhile, we sat stiffly, prisoners in our own living room.

Outside, somewhere, was Stacy and a whole troop of men looking for her. I couldn’t wrap my mind around it, Stacy fumbling, snow-blind. Upstairs, men we barely knew were sorting through our possessions, trying to determine Johnny’s involvement. I remembered how those police dramas on TV always said, “Innocent until proven guilty”—and that’s where Johnny was, then, dangling in limbo between those two worlds. I tried to read his face, so I could decide for myself. But his face was blank, his mouth slack, his eyes boring into the carpet, into nothing.

Mom cleared her throat. “What happens next?”

Officer Parks looked up from his notes. “That depends on what they find upstairs, and how the search is going outside. But I’m guessing that within the hour a detective will be here with some more questions.”

“What else is there to ask? Haven’t you heard everything already?”

“It’s sometimes surprising what turns up in an interview. Things you wouldn’t even guess would be important turn out to be crucial.” Officer Parks said this calmly, his eyes shifting from face to face. I almost choked when he looked at me. I knew what might be crucial: the fight between Johnny and Stacy five days ago. But his eyes settled firmly on Johnny. “If you have anything new to add, anything that would help the guys out in the field... Right now, time is of the essence.”

“She just started walking,” Johnny said. “I mean, she was mad at me—”

“Why was she mad at you?”

We all stared at Johnny, who looked terribly nervous.

“Because I’d crashed the truck, and it was so cold, and I guess she thought...”

Officer Parks tapped his pen impatiently.

Johnny swallowed, and the next part came out in a whisper. “I think maybe she thought I would follow her.”

I could see Stacy then, looking over her shoulder, stamping her pretty leather boots in annoyance. A few more steps, a glance back into the night. Was she still there, expecting Johnny to rescue her? I thought of the men in the search party, tramping through snowdrifted fields. The way it was coming down, the snow would blur their vision, make every figure Stacy’s, every movement that of a wandering teenage girl. The wind would make them unable to call to each other, unable to hear Stacy’s voice.

“The thing is,” Officer Parks said, resettling his bulk in Grandpa’s recliner, “it always looks better if you tell everything you know, right off the bat.”

Mom abandoned the diligent chewing of her thumbnail, leaving a ragged edge exposed. “Looks better to who?”

“There’s nothing else,” Johnny insisted, ignoring Mom. “Stacy left the car, she was walking. She’s out there somewhere.”

Heavy footsteps came down the stairs, and we all swiveled to see Officer Weil in the doorway. Officer Merrill followed him, carrying a small white garbage bag in one hand.

“What’s that?” Mom demanded.

“We’ve identified a few things that may be important to the investigation,” Officer Weil explained. “We have some correspondence here that looks like it’s come from the victim.”

“Our letters?” Johnny asked, his face reddening.

Mom groaned, leaning her head against her palm. It seemed like a lifetime ago that she had confronted Johnny with Stacy’s desperate note.
It’s like you’re the best drug in the world and I need you in me all the time, pulsing through my veins.... If I can’t see you every day, I’ll kill myself.

“What else do you have in there?” Dad demanded, and Officer Merrill held up a small white plastic bag.

Johnny jumped up. “You can’t just take that, can you?”

“What is it?” Mom asked.

Officer Merrill exchanged a glance with Officer Parks, who nodded, and Officer Merrill gently lifted up a rectangular pink-and-white box between his gloved fingers.

“What the—” Dad began at the same time Mom said, “Johnny, how could you be so—” And Johnny, who had looked for a second as if he might charge the officer, sank back onto the couch.

“A pregnancy test,” Officer Weil clarified. “Just the box, looks like the contents have been removed.”

We were all holding our breath then, the meaning of the empty pregnancy kit clear to all of us. Aunt Julia, standing behind the officers in the doorway to our kitchen, leaned heavily against the door frame.

Johnny stuttered helplessly, “I just don’t see...that doesn’t have anything to do with...”

“The search warrant explains all of that for you,” Officer Parks said crisply. “Also, I’ll need to ask you to change your clothes, Johnny. We need to take what you’re wearing now, as well as the coat you were wearing earlier.”

It had seemed insignificant in the face of everything else, but took on a new importance now. The blood on Johnny’s sleeve. Johnny’s blood—or Stacy’s? Or some of both? My mind spun so hard I felt sick to my stomach, dizzy like the time I’d inched onto a ledge off the hayloft to reach a kitten who had wandered too far. The height hadn’t bothered me at all until I’d looked down. That’s what it felt like now, as if we were all standing on a ledge, a gulf opening underneath us.

Dad and Mom looked at each other in wordless conversation. “Go on, Johnny,” Dad said, and Johnny stood. In the kitchen he stripped out of his sweatshirt, T-shirt, jeans and socks, until he was down to his boxers. The further he stripped down, the younger he looked to me—in the beginning a man, at the end a boy.

“All right, Johnny,” Officer Merrill said and placed Johnny’s clothes carefully in a white garbage bag with his gloved hands.

“Are you finished, then?” Mom asked, her voice tight.

Officer Weil nodded. “For now. The truck has already been towed to the station, so this should about cover it. We appreciate your cooperation.”

Under her breath, Mom muttered, “We haven’t had much of a choice.”

Dad put a hand on her arm. “Go on upstairs, Johnny. Get some clothes on.”

And yet Johnny stood there for a minute, pale and skinny, his collar bones prominent, as if they might break through his skin with any movement. Although I knew his strength, had seen him hoist bags of feed and wrestle a pig to the ground, he didn’t look like much of an athlete standing in front of us. He didn’t look like someone who could execute a pin in a matter of seconds, or even take on a teenage girl.

At that moment, he really didn’t look like much of anything.

seventeen

A
unt Julia had removed our stained tablecloth and set coffee mugs and napkins directly on the scuffed wood surface. She poured Johnny a cup when he came downstairs, fully dressed again, but he didn’t take it. Instead, he headed back to the living room. “I could make some hot chocolate for the girls,” Aunt Julia suggested.

“They’re going back upstairs,” Mom said firmly. She ran a hand over my hair. “Change into fresh clothes and get some sleep. We’ll wake you when we know something.”

Emilie nudged me, and I followed her upstairs, my feet heavy as a zombie’s. I caught a glimpse of the clock at the top of the stairwell: nearly four in the morning.

Downstairs, Mom hissed, “Of course everything was normal. What are you saying?”

“I’m only asking. I don’t know what to think.” Aunt Julia’s voice was defensive.

“Don’t you do it, Julia. Don’t you look at me that way,” Mom said.

Aunt Julia must have stepped away from her, because a moment later the only sound was the splash of water in the kitchen sink.

Emilie flopped onto her bed, her face toward the wall. I slipped out of my dirty pajamas and into sweatpants and a T-shirt and lay on my bed, too, although it didn’t seem as if this would be a night to get any sleep. I wondered if we would ever sleep again if Stacy Lemke didn’t make it home.

My mind kept snagging on the officer’s words—the
victim.
Stacy was a victim, just like girls in after-school specials, like the kids in grainy black-and-white images on the backs of milk cartons. I was too keyed up to sleep, and my own bed felt strange, different from the place where I’d slept my entire life. I fluffed my pillow and straightened my quilt, trying to figure out what was different. Maybe I’d been a different person before—just last night— when I’d changed into my pajamas and cuddled up with a book. I’d only been a child then. Or maybe it was the thought of the officers raiding our house, rummaging in our closets, in our laundry hampers and drawers. As if Stacy were hiding in here...a pocket-size Stacy Lemke, fitting into the old shoebox under my bed...not missing at all.

I woke, not realizing I’d been sleeping, to voices downstairs.

“I think the detective is here,” Emilie told me. She was sitting up now, leaning against the wall. “That means they’re going to question Johnny again.”

Again? I rubbed my eyes and looked at her. It seemed very important, suddenly, that I ask the question. “Do you think Johnny hurt her?”

Emilie glared at me. “How the hell should I know?”

Downstairs, I peeked into the living room. Dad and Johnny sat side by side on the couch. Dad looked exhausted; Johnny looked pitiful. With the months of weight loss and the stress of the past few hours, his skin was sallow, stretched tight across his cheekbones. His pulse seemed to thump from his Adam’s apple.

The detective loomed over them, as solid and powerful as a linebacker. He had a green folder clutched in one hand. “I’m Detective Halliday,” he announced. “I know you’ve already talked to Officer Parks, but, unfortunately, I have more questions.”

Mom and Aunt Julia carried in two wingback chairs, salvaged from an estate sale a few years back but never refinished according to Mom’s original plan. Detective Halliday settled into one chair, and Officer Parks took the other. Lined up across from each other that way, it was two against two, but somehow Dad and Johnny seemed woefully outnumbered.

Aunt Julia excused herself and came back to the kitchen. We stood in the doorway as she ran a bony hand back and forth over my head.

“We’ve already told the officers everything we know,” Dad protested, his hand resting on Johnny’s leg. “We’ve been talking for hours.”

“If I could just go out there—” Johnny said, his voice almost a whimper. He pounded his left fist against his thigh. His right hand, bandaged and useless, lay at his side.

Detective Halliday opened the green folder. It already contained papers, handwritten responses on typed forms. “Let’s get through these questions first.” His voice was quiet, but with an edge. “We’ll start from the beginning.”

Johnny breathed hard through his nose. “I already told Officer Parks, we were driving home—”

“No,” Detective Halliday interrupted. “Let’s start with Saturday morning.”

Johnny leaned back a few inches. I saw him struggling to understand the question. Saturday morning? What did that have to do with anything?

I thought about Saturday morning. It was only yesterday, but it felt like a million years ago. I’d been at the kitchen table reading the comics when Johnny had come in from milking the cows. “Colder than a witch’s tit out there,” he’d said, once he was sure Mom wasn’t in earshot. It had been too cold for a run, but I’d heard him later in the garage, jumping rope for minutes at a time, stopping to catch his breath, and starting up again. That’s where he’d been when Mom had sent me outside for a can of orange juice from the extra freezer. I’d heard his breathy count: “One seventy-five...one seventy-six...”

Yesterday morning he had been my brother. Now, things had happened so fast that I couldn’t be sure who he was.

Mom walked past into the kitchen, giving me a look,
the
look, the one that told me I was too young to be part of an adult conversation, even if it was the most important conversation of my life. We left Johnny to mumble his answers for Detective Halliday and assembled around the kitchen table. Aunt Julia pulled me onto her lap, and I breathed in her musky cigarette smell.

“I hope Stacy’s okay,” I whispered to no one in particular. Aunt Julia hugged me a little more tightly.

From the doorway, Emilie said, “She’s not okay, you idiot.” Her hair was mussed on one side from sleep, her face wrinkled from being pressed against a pillow.

“Emilie!” Mom snapped.

“She’s not okay,” Emilie repeated quietly.

I stared at her. “What do you mean? How do you know?”

“Are you kidding me?” she scoffed. “She’s been out in the cold for hours now. It’s got to be ten degrees out there. Think about it.”

“That’s enough, Emilie,” Mom hissed, but of course Emilie was right. I tried to picture Stacy in her appliquéd jeans and her Ships sweatshirt, or maybe her red sweater with a row of white hearts across the chest. She would have been wearing her new boots, a Christmas gift from her parents. Emilie and I had both idolized those boots: soft brown leather, with laces that went all the way up her shin bones. Not boots for walking in the snow. Her winter coat was Kelly-green with big toggle clasps, which she topped with a knitted hat with dangling pom-poms. For some reason I couldn’t imagine her whole face at once: strands of red hair, green-gray eyes, the crease of skin on her cheek when she smiled. Already I had lost a clear vision of her; already I was seeing her in pieces.

Stacy’s boots would be ruined by now, soaked through, her toes freezing inside. Her face would be rubbed raw from the cold, snowflakes sticking to her eyelashes. The cold would have seeped inside her coat, through her jeans, down her sweater.

I imagined her coming up the steps to our back door, her fingers and toes brittle with frostbite, snapping off like autumn branches. I’d read about the Titanic, how the people who went into the water froze to death before they could be scooped out. I felt a sob rise in my throat and tried to disguise it with a cough.

Emilie glared at me.

Mom said, “We’ve just got to pray for her. We’ve just got to pray that God keeps her safe.”

Emilie folded her arms across her chest. “Might be too late for that.”

Mom hissed across the table, “Now you listen to me—”

But just then a police radio sputtered to life in the living room, and our phone rang. Mom lunged for it, picking up on the second ring.

She’s alive! She’s safe!
Emilie was wrong, the detectives were wrong, I was wrong for thinking what I had thought. Stacy was alive and everything would be okay.

“Oh, my God.” Mom’s face was flushed. “It’s Uncle Paul. Says he just heard on the scanner...”

The men filled the doorway, led by Detective Halliday.

“What’s going on?” Emilie demanded.

“We’ve got a report of someone matching Stacy’s description at a gas station up north, near Highway 10,” Officer Parks said. “We’re heading up to check it out.”

Johnny, eager, reached for his coat.

“Can we go, too?” I asked, squirming in Aunt Julia’s lap.

“No, baby. They’ve got a whole team out there,” Dad said, and I could tell from his voice that he was hopeful, too. He and Mom exchanged a long look, and then the men headed out the door. I wrestled free of Aunt Julia’s grasp and watched from the window as Officer Parks opened the back door of his patrol car and Johnny and Dad piled in. Their faces were lit for a moment until the light inside the car faded, and they vanished into the dark. A knot of fear stuck in my throat, thinking of Dad and Johnny behind the protective screen, riding along like a pair of criminals. The patrol car did a quick turn in the driveway before heading off into the night. The digital clock on the microwave read 4:37. Was it possible that this was still the same, long night?

“Highway 10? That’s a long way to walk,” Emilie said from the door. She had pulled one of Dad’s hooded sweatshirts over her pajamas, its sleeves flopping beyond her fingertips. With the hood cinched tight, only a small oval of her face showed—the inside corners of her eyes, her nose, the sad set of her lips. “How would she even get there?”

“Shush,” Mom said, but the house was already quiet, absent the police officers. “We’re going to wait and see.” We shushed obediently and listened to the silence, which wasn’t really silent at all. We were breathing, the coffee was percolating, the wind was smacking snow against the windows. Stacy was missing, and now Dad and Johnny were gone, too.

I took a deep, ragged breath. “They’re coming back, aren’t they? Dad and Johnny, I mean?”

Mom was chewing on her thumbnail again, worrying the ragged edge. “Of course,” she said. “Of course they’re coming back.”

I waited for them on the couch, tucking a crocheted afghan around my body. How long would it take to get there, up to the juncture with Highway 10? Was Emilie right, or would Stacy be waiting for them, as if she’d been there all along? I heard the grandfather clock chime five before I fell asleep. It was almost morning, then. It would be morning by the time I woke up. And in the morning, everything had to be better.