48 Clues into the Disappearance of My Sister

by Joyce Carol Oates

Genres: Private Investigators; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

From the towering imagination of Joyce Carol Oates, literary icon and author of BLONDE, now a major motion picture. When a beautiful woman mysteriously vanishes, her sister must tally up the clues to discover her fate.
Marguerite has disappeared from her small town in Upstate New York. But was foul play involved? Did she merely get away for fun? Or did she finally make the decision to leave behind her claustrophobic life of limited opportunities?
Her younger sister Gigi wonders if the flimsy silk Dior dress, so casually abandoned on the floor, is a clue to Marguerite's having seemingly vanished. The police examine the footprints made by her Ferragamo boots leaving the house, ending abruptly, and puzzle over how that can help lead to her.
Gigi, not so pretty as her sister, slowly reveals her hatred for the perfect, much-loved, Marguerite. Bit by bit, like ripping the petals off a flower blossom, revelations about both women are uncovered. Subtly, but with the unbearable suspense at which Joyce Carol Oates excels, the fate of the missing beauty slowly comes to light In this suspenseful story about the complex relationship between two sisters.
'An exquisite novel of suspense... This elegant, captivating tale is un-put-downable.' PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

Release date: March 14, 2023

Publisher: Mysterious Press

Print pages: 301

Sample

1

Silky White Fabric, Bodiless. Pool of silk, in languid-liquidy folds on the floor where (the viewer/voyeur avidly assumes) she’d shrugged her naked body out of the shift, let it fall slithering like a snake, but a sheerly white, purely white, camellia-white silky snake falling past her hips, her thighs and to the carpeted floor in a hiss.

Though bodiless, boneless, smelling faintly, fragrantly of a (female) body.

Is that a clue? The flimsy white silk Dior “slip dress” belonging to my sister M. discovered on the floor of her bedroom.

Subsequent to her disappearance on April 11, 1991.

Or: is the article of clothing of little significance, purely chance, irrelevant and accidental, not a clue?

(In a later time in history, certainly in the 21st century, M.’s silky white slip dress would have been examined for DNA; particularly the scummy clue called semen. But in 1991 in small-town upstate Aurora-on-Cayuga, New York forensic science was little known, and so the chic silk Dior with the spaghetti straps, neatly hung on a hanger in M.’s closet, by me, the protective younger sister, has awaited M.’s return all these years undefiled.)

(Though yes, possibly the silk dress on the floor of M.’s bedroom was a “clue”—if we’d known if the dress had been purchased by M. herself during her three-year sojourn in New York City or if it was gift from a lover and, if so, which lover.)

(Also, a clue in that it had been dropped in haste, or negligently, by M. who was ordinarily so fastidious she would never have allowed an article of clothing to fall to the floor and not retrieve it immediately, hanging it in a closet, or folding and putting it neatly into a drawer. For Marguerite Fulmer was cool, calm, control. A self-styled sculptor: one who shapes, but is not shaped.)

(Letting clothes fall onto the floor of her room, accumulating over days, weeks, refusing to allow the housekeeper into her room was more characteristic of M.’s “difficult” younger sister G. but since G. had not ever gone missing from Aurora-on-Cayuga no one gave a damn about the condition of G.’s room, or took the time, in twenty-two years, to search it.)

Silky white fabric, bodiless. Shimmering, slithering down the woman’s hips, the ivory-pale (naked) body, exposing that body with a shhhing sound like a snake’s hiss. Staring you do not wish to stare, it is demeaning to stare, too much pride and self-respect to stare, indeed you do not stare and yet (helplessly) you observe the flimsy slip dress fall to the floor, a pool at the woman’s ivory-pale (naked) feet.

2

Double Mirror. The means by which I saw my sister on the morning of the day she was to “disappear” from our lives.

That is, the means by which I happened to see M.’s reflection in a mirror for (in fact) I did not see Marguerite herself, only her reflection.

(It is imprecise, if common, to say that the [reflected] image is the person; but, in this instance, the reflection of M. was but a reflection of the [unknowable, inscrutable] M., in fact

the reflection of a reflection.)

Mornings begin early at our house. In winter, before dawn we are likely to be awake if not fully dressed.

But then, it was April. Yet a chill wintry dawn like a celestial eye slowly—grudgingly—opening to fill the leaden sky.

Passing by M.’s room on my way downstairs, surprised that her door eased open as if by a draft, for usually M.’s door was shut firmly against unwanted intrusions and cheery morning greetings, I could not resist glancing inside, and so happened to see, in the vertical mirror attached to the inside of my sister’s closet door, which was also partially open, about six feet away, the reflection of M. on the farther side of the room, facing her bureau mirror; so that, wholly unpremeditatedly, in the suddenness of the moment, my eyes took in, without accessing, scarcely registering, my sister’s wraithlike face in the bureau mirror reflected in the mirror on the closet door—that is, an image double mirrored.

All this, vertiginously recalled (now) twenty-two years later as one might recall a dream of utter mystery that, in the intervening years, has not lightened in mystery but deepened.

(Possibly, in the periphery of my eye I “saw” the Dior dress on the floor. But such “seeing” was not conscious at the time and if it seems conscious in retrospect, that is the mind playing its mischievous and perverse tricks upon itself.)

(No, I did not see the flimsy white dress sliding down my sister’s naked body to lie like a shimmering pool of white at her feet. I am sure that I did not see this though it seems that I remember it vividly.)

What I do remember clearly: my (beautiful) (doomed) sister standing with her back to me on the farther side of the room as she was brushing her long straight silvery-blond hair, reflected in the vertical mirror upon which my eyes fixed in a sort of startled fascination even as the thought came to me No, this is forbidden!—gazing with dread upon my sister as if I were, not an adult woman in her mid-twenties, a woman with a definite, one might say indelibly formed personality, but a pubescent child; for years in awe of the (aloof, elegant) sister six years older than I.

Peering through a doorway into the interior of another’s life: the apprehension that we will glimpse the other, the sister, in a state of unwanted intimacy, nakedness.

Was M. naked, standing before the bureau mirror reflected in the closet mirror? The pale straight back, perfectly shaped waist, hips, thighs, legs.

Shadowy vertebrae, slender wrists, ankles.

(Of course) in reporting this (fleeting/involuntary) glance into M.’s room to detectives I would say nothing about what M. was wearing. If one of them had thought to ask me—(no one ever did)—I would have said with a frown Oh I don’t know, a bathrobe, I suppose, what would you think?

Nothing annoys me so much as pests poking their noses into my private life.

My father’s private life, and mine. Keep your damned distance!

No doubt by this time M. had showered in her antiquated, barely serviceable shower and taken time to shampoo her long showy hair as (I had reason to think) she did several times a week out of vanity, pride in herself and her beauty, which was the sort of “classic” beauty that pretends to be unaware of itself.

In contrast to me, the younger sister G., with a legitimate reason to wish to be unaware of her appearance, who often didn’t trouble to wash her hair for weeks.

M., brandishing a gilt-backed brush that had once belonged to our mother, brushing her hair in long languorous strokes causing hairs to crackle with static electricity.

Yes, I’d noticed that. A frisson of static electricity that caused the hairs on my arms to rise in sympathy.

Strange how M. was oblivious of me. Oblivious of what was rushing at her from the future on wide-spread dark-feathered wings.

Almost, I wanted to call to her: “Hi there! Hel-lo.”

Almost, I might have warned her: “Marguerite! Take care!”

If I’d called to her would M. have peered at me in the mirror(s), or would M. have turned a startled face to me?

I will never know. For I

dared not speak.

To this day the phenomenon of the double mirror remains a mystery: of little consequence, purely accidental in the exigency of the moment, and yet essential. For, though the fleetingly aligned mirrors were necessary in order that, for the final time, I would see my sister, the double mirror was the only means by which I could have seen her, since the door to her room would have blocked my view of her in front of the bureau, under ordinary circumstances.

By chance then, a draft of cold air in the second-floor corridor must have blown the door open, which was not uncommon in our old drafty house.

(A nuisance that I’d learned to prevent by securing my door when I was inside my room: pushing a heavy stack of books against the door at the bottom.)

M.’s “room”—(as it was called)—wasn’t a singular room but three adjoining rooms running the length of the eastern side of the house and overlooking, at a distance of about one hundred feet, the choppy waves of Cayuga Lake, the largest of the “scenic” Finger Lakes.

My own room, which was a single room, was on the other side of the corridor, adjacent but not (of course) connected with the master bedroom, a large suite of rooms taking up the remainder of the second floor.

(Father’s room, this was. Which I never, or rarely, entered. Then, only if invited. Once the master bedroom had been beautifully furnished by our mother and may have become, in intervening years, somewhat shabby or careworn, inhabited just by Father, and then reluctantly for Father preferred to spend much of his time at his office in downtown Aurora or in his home office here in the house, on the first floor, rear.)

Making my way along the corridor scarcely hesitating at M.’s (part-opened) door as if this were, not a cataclysmic day in the life of our family, perhaps even (in retrospect) a defining day, but a totally ordinary day, headed for the front staircase with its hardwood banister and wide steps covered in a worn maroon plush carpeting, so unlike the narrower, thinly carpeted back stairs of the massive old seven-bedroom, five-bathroom English Tudor on Cayuga Avenue; making my way like a sleepwalker under the spell (as I could not have known, yet) of the double mirror that would haunt me for decades. Not sinister, but rather neutral, as a pane of glass is neutral, regardless of what we are forced to see through it, M.’s mirrors, precisely because they were so accidentally aligned, and so fleetingly, may have suggested, to me, a premonitory aura of the unreal, the unsubstantiated, even the phantasmagoric, imposed upon what was but an ordinary domestic scene: a resident of the house passing by the doorway of an older sister on her way downstairs to breakfast at about 7:20 A.M. at the outset of what should have been just one in a sequence of mostly unremarked, ordinary days in April 1991.

Which leaves the matter ambiguous: was the double mirror the means by which I “saw” into a profound and inexplicable mystery, or was the double mirror the profound and inexplicable mystery itself?

3

Missing Person. It would be claimed that M. “stepped off the face of the earth”—“vanished into thin air”—“disappeared without a trace.”

Was this true? Is it?

For no one is truly missing. Everyone is somewhere though we may not know where

Even the dead—their remains. Somewhere.

It is well known in Aurora how Father is still hopeful. And I, the younger sister, the less beautiful, less talented sister will express “hope” if queried.

“Yes! Every hour of every day I grind my teeth in dismay, despair, resentment, fury. My sister is not ‘missing’— my sister is somewhere.”

And, I have been known to say, earnestly: “In hiding, maybe. Or in disguise. Just to spite us. To spite me.”

After a moment adding: “Even if Marguerite is no longer living still she has got to be somewhere.”

If only the slender bones. Swath of pale silvery-blond hair that fell seductively past her shoulders.

The remains of the pearly-perfect teeth, maybe. That final grimace out of hard-packed black earth looking like triumph.

4

Early Spring. In upstate New York spring is slow to emerge out of winter as a steaming breath out of a cavernous mouth.

Exactly when M. left the house is not known. I did not see her leave nor did Father (as we would report to detectives). Our housekeeper Lena did not see her. Presumably after 7:20 A.M. But probably no later than 8 A.M. For it was M.’s routine to walk/hike to the college and it was rare that she arrived there, if she was going there at all, after 9 A.M.

A thinly overcast morning. Thursday: the very epitome of a nothing-day.

Dripping icicles from the eaves of our house, ice-toothed sludge underfoot, northern sides of yews serrated with frost slow to melt. Is this what M. noticed, or was M. thinking of something very different?

Was M. thinking guiltily of something very different?

Aurora-on-Cayuga is built on a half-dozen hills overlooking a lake and so it is always at the whim of the “lake effect”—rapidly shifting weather, piercing sun through clouds, a possibility of spitting rain.

This seems to be definite: M. was wearing her ankle-high mahogany-dark Ferragamo leather boots with a low but distinctive heel. Her footprints led through the tall yews behind our house in the direction of the narrow asphalt road that within a half mile bifurcated the steeply hilly “historic” campus of Aurora College for Women, founded 1878: a cluster of austere old red-brick buildings with grim weatherworn facades, South Hall, Minor Hall, Wells Hall, Fulmer Hall adjoining the newly built Cayuga Arts School where M. was “junior artist-in-residence” and taught a class in sculpting.

M.’s boot prints, leading from the rear door of our house through the trampled grass of our back lawn stretching for an acre then passing out of our property and into the no-man’s-land of winter-damaged deciduous trees and underbrush that belonged to Cayuga County, soon lost amid myriad footprints and animal tracks on the path winding through the woods to Drumlin Road.

If we’d known. If we’d realized she would never return. Photographing the Ferragamo prints. Determining if the prints continued on the farther side of Drumlin Road or if by that time they had vanished, which could only mean that someone (unknown) had stopped for M. on the road, forced her into his vehicle or (perhaps) M. had climbed into the vehicle of her own volition calling softly to the driver, “Here I am.”

5

Last Seen. How many times asked: when did you see your sister last? And what did you say to each other?

And very carefully I would explain that I’d last seen my sister at about 7:20 A.M. on the morning of her “disappearance” but we had not exchanged words.

I had seen her; she had not seen me.

And the fools would persist asking when had I spoken with my sister last, and what had she said. And I would make every effort to remember, and to answer sincerely.

Saying Marguerite did not say anything to me to indicate that she was unhappy or anxious or worried. Not saying We did not have that kind of relationship! We were not sisters who confided in each other, especially Marguerite did not confide in me about her lovers. You are very naive to assume so.

Nor did I tell them that to be precise I’d seen, not my sister, but the reflection of my sister in the double mirror.

And not M.’s face, not clearly. For M.’s face was framed in the bureau mirror, a blurred oval as if partially erased. Scarcely recognizable, if I hadn’t known it was her. The beauty, and the blemishes in the beauty.

For mirrors double distances and make of the familiar, strangeness.

6

Revenge. There is a famous/notorious work of art, a drawing by Willem de Kooning “erased” by Robert Rauschenberg in 1953. You could say that the lesser artist revenges him elf upon the greater artist by erasing his work. ...