The woman in the photos they perused, she had Lucinda’s fall of wavy auburn hair. College age or thereabouts. The woman smiling beside him at the rail of a cruise ship, her eyes and mouth were the adult version of the eyes and mouth of the second grader smiling beside a much younger Foster in other photos.
Yes, his child, yes, Lucinda, yes, she was dead. This other Lucinda, so beautiful and still alive on her social media page, she was a coping mechanism. Why bother explaining? His reasons would never sink in.
Another member of the group held up a video clip of this full-grown Lucinda and Foster, her father, in the basket of a hot-air balloon. Far below them acres of grapevines flowed in parallel straight lines across a landscape of low hills. This member asked, “Gaslighting us, maybe?”
Another corrected. “‘Trolling’ the young people call it nowadays.”
The group leader continued to press. “If… If she’s really been missing over seven years, you need to finally file with the medical examiner for a Presumption of Death Order.”
How could Foster make them see? It wasn’t how it looked. He flexed his hand, balling his fingers into a fist and then spreading them wide. Letting the pain from the airport bite mark distract him.
Robb shushed the group. “Friend,” he asked. “Is your child dead or alive?”
Foster began the story he always told. “We’d gone to my office. Lucinda stepped into an elevator—”
Robb interrupted. “Then you need to hold a funeral.” He meant an empty-casket ceremony, a memorial service where all her false friends and distant social media followers could pay their last respects to a coffin filled with her old dolls and stuffed animals and clothes. Pallbearers would carry this to an open grave. In short: a hollow ritual.
As the harangue continued, his phone buzzed. A text appeared on the screen. From Lucinda.
This Lucinda, alive and beautiful and so addictive, she asked: Up for next week?
The girl on the bed stirred. She blinked slowly, and her lips curved into a loopy, dopey smile. Her bare arms and legs twisted, stretching against the rope that held her wrists and ankles tied to the posts of the rented brass bed. Her movements crinkled the clear-plastic sheeting that protected the mattress. It had taken Mitzi longer than she’d expected to assemble the bed, an antique delivered from a properties warehouse. She’d hardly had time to position the monitor and move the mic booms into roughly the right locations before the Rohypnol had started to wear off.
She lowered a Shure Vocal SM57 until it almost touched the girl’s lips. Next to it, an old-school ribbon mic waited, like something left over from Orson Welles’s radio days. Reaching in from other directions were can mics. A shotgun mic dangled down. Each connected to its own preamp. She waited for the girl to speak, watching for the needles to jump on each of the VU meters in this, her palace of analog.
The needles twitched as the girl spoke. “Oh, it’s you.” She gave Mitzi a slow-motion, underwater wink. Lifting her chin, she looked down at her exposed breasts, her complete nakedness.
Mitzi nudged a mic closer. “You fell asleep during our talk.”
The girl sighed with relief. “I was afraid this was a rape.”
In response to a monitor, Mitzi withdrew a mic a smidgen. She said, “I need to check my levels. Can you tell me what you had for breakfast?”
Still woozy from the sedative, the girl lifted her face toward the Shure. So close she looked at it cross-eyed, she began, “Pancakes. Potatoes. French toast.” Clearly playing along, inventing things, she continued, “Scrambled eggs, oatmeal, bacon…”
A waitress reeling off breakfast specials.
The popping p’s and b’s pegged the analog needles into the red. Oversaturating the recording, making it warm. But clipping the digital, turning it into useless static. Mitzi pulled the Shure back a little more. She brushed a strand of pale hair off the girl’s forehead, and doing so gently pressed the girl’s head back down into the plastic-covered pillow.
Without resisting, the girl continued, “Orange juice, grapefruit juice, oatmeal…” Her eyes drifted shut as if she might once more fall asleep. Her restaurant uniform lay draped across the chair near the wall. Her stomach growled, making the needles jump. “Sorry,” the girl mumbled. “All this food talk makes me hungry.”
Mitzi wondered if she needed to readjust for room tone. She said, “Not to worry. You won’t be hungry much longer.”
She went to the chair where the girl’s things sat and opened the purse. Removed a billfold. Sought out a driver’s license and studied it. “Shania?” She stepped back to the bedside, repeating louder, “Shania, honey?” She spied, in the billfold, the three one-hundred-dollar bills she’d offered as bait. Mitzi retrieved the bills, folded them, and slipped them into a pocket of her jeans.
The girl’s eyes opened. Her brow furrowed as her focus darted from one mic to the next as if she’d forgotten them.
Mitzi pressed on. “Do you know what the Wilhelm scream is, dear?” The girl’s eyes found her own.
The girl shook her head. The driver’s license had been issued in Utah. Jack Mormon because there’d been no special underwear to find when Mitzi had cut away the waitress uniform.
“You’ve heard it,” Mitzi prompted, “the Wilhelm scream.” It was a man’s scream first recorded in 1951 for a film titled Distant Drums. In one scene, soldiers wade through an alligator-infested swamp, hence the scream’s formal title, Man, Getting Bit by Alligator, and He Screamed. Since it was created, the Wilhelm scream has been used in more than four hundred features, as well as countless television projects and video games.
“The classic screams have such elegant names,” Mitzi continued. “Like paintings.” The second most famous scream, for example, is titled Man, Gut-Wrenching Scream and Fall into Distance. “Like a masterpiece of art.” This scream’s more common name is “the Howie
