I
Face in the Dark
BAILEY CALLED IN the early afternoon, which was unlike him. He never called. Aggie thought he might be in trouble again and she asked as much, but that wasn’t why he’d contacted her.
“I found something.” He sounded irritated with her moment of concern, but that could not overshadow his eagerness.
Aggie wished she hadn’t answered the phone as she remembered his latest pursuit. “Wasn’t that the point of the show?” she asked.
“Have you been talking to Alex?”
“He and Margot are camping with the kids. What did you find?”
“Let’s grab a coffee.” Bailey never answered direct questions. “Is Nellie’s still open?”
“You’re in town?”
“I’ll explain over coffee.”
She waited.
He waited.
“No.” She hung up.
It was a hot day. The sea breeze through the open front door was no help as Aggie leaned back in her desk chair and waited for the phone to ring again. It was a Friday afternoon, but the light had a Sunday morning quality, dreamily pressing against the drawn living room curtains and playing at the dusty hem with long, golden fingers. The phone rang. She lifted the receiver to her ear without a greeting on the fourth callback. Bailey was quick.
“Aggie, please. It’s her.”
Aggie frowned. She’d been primed for more whining from a notorious victim, but for the first time in years, the man on the other end of the line sounded like her little brother. Her mischievous, sweet little brother who she had once known as well as herself but had nearly forgotten in the years since their family had been split from the top down like dry firewood under a heavy axe.
The floor fan by the couch ruffled the aisles of papers, finished edits, and printed transcripts stacked around the room. Her righteous annoyance withered to a husk as a feeling she had not expected swept through her like a cold wind: bitter loneliness. Her little brother.
“It’s Joanne,” he said. “I really found her.”
He sounded scared.
***
The eldest Neilson sibling, Joanne, had been a swimmer of Olympic caliber.
She’d been breaking records and resetting them in unimaginable ways since the age of nine. Every race she’d finish a full seven seconds before her competitors, grinning and waving from her perch on the pool edge like a prom queen on a homecoming float. Medical researchers wanted to study her muscle structure, her oxygen intake. Rival coaches insisted she was cheating; there was no way this moon-face, country girl was winning without chemical enhancements. But she always tested clean because she was.
She was simply incredible.
There was a mural of her on the side of the Old Post Office in Lancaster Falls, the word
s HOMETOWN PROUD slashed across a faded scroll painted beneath her beaming face. You could usually find a crusty old “Justice for Joanne” flyer plastered below it, still clutching the wall twenty years on. Because a week after Aggie’s twelfth birthday, two months before the 2000 Summer Olympics, Joanne took Doc, the family golden retriever, on a walk, and never came back.
Doc made it home fine.
The family had heard all the crackpot theories: It was the Russians, the Americans, jealous girls from her own team. They’d heard that she couldn’t take the pressure and ran away, that there was a boy, a girl, aliens. They’d heard she was murdered by a transient, her parents, her siblings, by the mob . . . it got old. Browse any conspiracy theory website or unsolved mystery listicle, and she usually made an appearance.
Often, just like in her racing days, she took the top spot.
Their mother stayed in Lancaster Falls after Joanne disappeared, devout in her conviction that she would come back from her walk one day. Their father couldn’t hack it and found a new job in Halifax that winter. It was supposed to be a trial separation, but a year after Joanne disappeared, he was introducing the three remaining kids to his new girlfriend. They had gotten a divorce without telling any of them. Another thing that just slipped away in the night.
Alex and Bailey were their father’s best men at the wedding that September, along with their uncle Doug. Aggie sat in the audience. Julia had asked her to be one of her bridesmaids, but she hadn’t wanted the attention. At the reception, they were surrounded. There were not many guests, but they all gravitated toward the kids, a ponderous explosion in reverse, questions and sympathetic platitudes spilling from their lips like warm champagne.
“You’re all so brave.”
“Have you heard anything?”
“I just want you to know how sorry we are.”
Alex, Aggie’s older brother—the eldest Neilson child now that Joanne was gone—fielded questions no sixteen-year-old should ever have to handle while sl
lowly guiding his little sister out of the throng. Bailey pushed himself deeper into it. He’d always been dramatic, but this was the first time Aggie had ever thought that might be a bad thing. He’d been Joanne’s favourite, and now it felt like he was abusing that very special honor.
The voices all around grew louder as the DJ spat into his shoddy mic and turned up the music, the questions seeming to take on physical shape: big rough stones squeezing, surrounding, suffocating . . . Aggie was outside before she realised she was crying.
Alex shut the sliding glass door behind them, and the voices and music became muffled, like they were coming from underground.
“You can stay out here, Aggie.”
They were on a tiny patio off the back of the hall, nothing out there except an ice-cream bucket filled with bloated cigarette butts bobbing in scummy brown water. Nowhere to go but down and only if you jumped. Alex checked that there was no one below and tipped the bucket over the edge with his toe. It hit the ground with an unlovely, squelching crash.
“It’s too fast,” she said.
“I know.”
“Don’t tell dad.” Aggie was still sobbing.
Crickets chirped loudly out in the dark. Inside, she could see Bailey in the middle of a circle of men and women, all listening to the eleven-year-old like they had money riding on his every word. ...
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