Lost Girls

on the wall beside the bed, the vague corona of sunlight at the edges of tightly drawn curtains--and recognize that it wasn't Ashley who kept her room this way but her father. After she'd gone. Somehow it's obvious that this is where he's spent a number of his subsequent afternoons, picking up the randomly dropped clothes and folding them back into the drawers, washing the sheets and vacuuming the carpet as though in anticipation of an exacting guest. On the walls, the boy TV stars she'd likely grown out of but hadn't got around to taking down, a single framed watercolor of a twirling ballerina on a solid blue background, dancing in space, in sky. The top of the dresser dense with photographs slid into clear plastic sleeves. Postcards--Niagara Falls, Maple Leaf Gardens, the Peterborough Lift Locks--wedged around an oval vanity mirror. All of it as it was before but now pondered over, dusted, and straightened. The kind of room you peek into on guided tours of historic homes, fixed and untouchable on the other side of a red velvet rope.

Move closer to the dresser, my nose probing through the valleys of photos. Ashley glum in her Confirmation dress, taking a vicious whack at a leaping field hockey ball, standing beside her father on a beach of stones the size of dinosaur eggs. None of her mother. I guess her to be the sender of the postcards, although I don't check to see.

Then my fingers find a single loose photograph tilted against the bottom of the mirror, pick it up to hold close before my eyes. Ashley and Krystal standing side by side in white lace dresses with blue ribbons. Standing in front of a leaf-dappled forest, hands held. Their faces not quite grim but kept willfully straight like actresses posing for a period portrait.

It's the only thing I've touched but somehow I can't put it back. Instead I'm sliding it into the inside pocket of my jacket, stepping out of the room and remembering to leave the door open as I'd found it. Leaning into the bathroom to flush the toilet, lowering then raising my fly before returning to the living room and landing on the sofa with a relieved sigh.

''Better?'' Flynn asks, a new cigarette worked into an orange rage.

''Much.''

He holds the pack out to me again and I take two, slip them into my breast pocket. ''For later,'' I say.

''No problem. Here, take a couple more. You never know.''

''Thank you.'' I throw them in with the others. ''I was just wondering, Brian, about how you felt with regard to Ashley's participation in Tripp's after-school group?''

''She was crazy about it. Krystal, too, the both of them. Making up little plays together in Ashley's room there but never letting me see. You know girls. Everything's a big secret.'' Sucks the cigarette in his fingers down to the filter and keeps going so that for a second I'm convinced he's about to swallow what's left. ''Why do you ask?'' he says instead, the butt a dried bean between his lips.

''Just that Mr. McConnell felt that the girls' being in that club was somehow not such a good idea.''

''It wasn't any school club that did them harm, Mr. Crane.''

He waves the air in front of him with the back of his hand.

''Just one more thing,'' I say. ''Why did you decide to call me back? It's one thing to understand what my job is, but it's another to allow me into your home. You must hate me.''

''Oh!'' He laughs once, then coughs. ''There are things in this world I hate, Mr. Crane. Things I'll definitely hate forever. But people? Not really.''

Thinking he's finished, I slide down the couch to collect my coat, but he stands sluggishly and laughs once more before speaking.

''As for why I bothered to call you back, I'm not sure. No, sir, I'm not sure at all.'' He shakes his head, then looks up at me directly, an irregular pulse at the corners of his mouth. ''I suppose it's because, other than the police, and the TV and newspaper people at the beginning, you're the only one who's called.''

I thank him for his time and the cigarettes, leave him standing in the crooked door of his house that is a house only for lack of a better name. Rooted there with arms now lifeless at his sides and on his face the faraway look of the unconsoled.

chapter 18

I can't work. Time I should have spent organizing the mass of Crown evidence has instead been invested in taking longer and longer night walks around town with fallen leaves scuttling behind me on the cracked streets. Staring out the tall window of the honeymoon suite at the locals lurching about or killing time in the cool drizzle that threatens to extinguish their cigarettes. Or, more often than anything else, gazing up at the pictures of Krystal and Ashley, their eyes staring back at me in what I've come to take as some kind of impossible effort toward communication. Trying to say something to the one guy in town who is the least interested in having them say anything at all unless under circumstances of their being alive and well, returning on the Greyhound from touring with whatever band it's important for kids to tour with these days or a failed attempt at finding waitressing jobs on the West Coast.

And there are other concerns. While I know the last thing mild paranoia and bad work habits need is the continued use of a drug known for its side effects of mild paranoia and bad work habits, I can't stop myself from setting new personal records for daily coke intake. I've already gone through more than half the thermos that was supposed to last until Christmas and it's not even Halloween yet. Even though I live on my own in the city and rarely seek the company of others, somehow up here the isolation is more concentrated, as though something imposed from the outside. The alternative relief of rye-and-gingers and barstool companionship in one of the local taverns has been ruled out. The Lord Byron has given me the creeps since my first and only visit, and the couple other places I've walked by at night just seem too sad to be entered.

But it's all worse the longer I go without a line. Step over to the bedside table and cut a couple fat ones. There. No excuses now.

Pull the chair in close, straighten the nearest police report before me and stare down hard at the words. First one, then the other, string them together. Remember reading, Barth? Maybe it would be easier if there weren't such a distracting contrast between the black print and white page. I push the lamp to the far edge of the desk. Darker now, but no clearer, the paragraphs blotching together in the middle, glistening blobs spreading out to steal whole chunks from sentences. Touch one and my finger comes back slick with red grease.

Fucking nosebleed. Dripping out fast over the pages and now on my shirt. All at once I'm pushing the chair back, wiping hands across my lips and smearing them over the back of my pants. It comes with the territory: the exploding vessels, the burned-out septum. But this is an especially bad one. A geyser of thin stickiness spilling liquid copper down the back of my throat.

In the bathroom slapping at the toilet roll, whole yards spinning off onto the floor, scrambling it into a loose ball and pushing it against my face. Wad after wad thrown into the sink and the whole time I'm ignoring the voice in my head--apply pressure--because I'm not exactly sure what it means. But after a time just mopping seems to do the trick, or slows it down, anyway, and I roll up a couple tight cigarillos of paper and cork them in each nostril where they're soon glued in place.

Back to work, Barth, old boy.

But it's still no good. After five minutes I stand again and walk to the window to look out over the empty intersection below. It's late, though not that late, last call at the bars only half an hour ago (an occasion marked by a collection of howls and slurred threats echoing down the street). There's nothing to look at now but the absurd changing of the traffic light, directing movement that doesn't exist. Press my forehead against the cool glass. Exhale. Leave stains.

Then I see something.

A glimpse of movement across the street, two figures stepping into the circle of streetlight. Girls in drab cotton dresses, once white with fancy lace at the seams but now stained ivory, the lace in need of restitching. Around each of their waists a tattered blue ribbon tied in a partly loosened knot. Standing in front of the old Bank of Commerce, a cold-faced limestone vault with Corinthian pillars out front half-dissolved from acid rain. Eyes raised to where I stand at the window. One light haired and the other dark, the light one snug in her dress and the dark one shrunken inside hers.