NOS4A2 A Novel

DISAPPEARANCES

1991–1996





Various Locales


THE RUSSIAN GIRL WHOM MAGGIE LEIGH HAD MENTIONED WAS named Marta Gregorski, and in Vic’s neck of the woods her abduction was indeed big news for several weeks. This was partly because Marta was a minor celebrity in the world of chess, mentored by Kasparov and ranked a grandmaster by the age of twelve. Also, though, in those first days after the fall of the USSR, the world was still adjusting to the new Russian freedoms, and there was a feeling that the disappearance of Marta Gregorski and her mother should’ve been the stuff of an international incident, an excuse for another Cold War showdown. It took a while to realize that the former Soviet republic was too busy disintegrating to even take notice. Boris Yeltsin was riding around on tanks, shouting until he was red in the face. Former KGB agents were scrambling to find good-paying jobs with the Russian mafia. It was weeks before anyone thought to denounce the decadent, crime-ridden West, and the denouncing wasn’t very enthusiastic at that.

A clerk working the front desk of the Hilton DoubleTree on the Charles River had seen Marta and her mother exit through the revolving door a little before six on a warm, drizzly evening. The Gregorskis were expected at Harvard for a dinner and were meeting their car. Through the rain-smeared window, the clerk saw Marta and then her mother climb into a black vehicle. She thought the car had running boards because she saw the little Russian girl take a step up before sliding into the back. But it was dark out and the clerk was on the phone with a guest who was pissed he couldn’t open his mini-fridge, and she hadn’t noticed more.

Only one thing was certain: The Gregorski women had not climbed into the right car, the town car that had been rented for them. Their driver, a sixty-two-year-old named Roger Sillman, was parked on the far side of the turnaround, in no condition to pick them up. He was out cold and would remain parked there, sleeping behind the wheel, until he came to at nearly midnight. He felt sick and hungover but assumed he had simply (and uncharacteristically) nodded off and that the girls had caught a cab. He did not begin to wonder if something more had happened until the next morning and did not contact the police until he was unable to reach the Gregorskis at their hotel.

Sillman was interviewed by the FBI ten times in ten weeks, but his story never changed and he was never able to provide any information of value. He said he had been listening to sports radio, with time to kill—he was forty minutes early on his pickup—when a knuckle rapped on his window. Someone squat, in a black coat, standing in the rain. Sillman had rolled down the glass and then—

Nothing. Just: nothing. The night melted away, like a snowflake on the tip of his tongue.

Sillman had daughters of his own—and granddaughters—and it ate him alive to imagine Marta and her mother in the hands of some sick Ted Bundy–Charles Manson f*ck who would screw them till they were both dead. He couldn’t sleep, had bad dreams about the little girl playing chess with her mother’s severed fingers. He strained and strained with all his will to remember something, anything. But only one other detail would come.

“Gingerbread,” he sighed to a pock-scarred federal investigator who was named Peace but looked more like War.

“Gingerbread?”

Sillman looked at his interrogator with hopeless eyes. “I think while I was passed out, I dreamed about my mom’s gingerbread cookies. Maybe the guy who knocked on the glass was eatin’ one.”

“Mm,” said Peace-not-War. “Well. That’s helpful. We’ll put an APB out on the Gingerbread Man. I’m not hopeful it’ll do us much good, though. Word on the street is you can’t catch him.”


IN NOVEMBER 1991, A FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD BOY NAMED RORY McCombers, a freshman at the Gilman School in Baltimore, met a Rolls-Royce in his dorm’s parking lot. He was on his way to the airport, was joining his family in Key West for Thanksgiving break, and believed that the car had been sent for him by his father.

In fact, the driver that Rory’s father had sent for him was passed out in his limo, half a mile away. Hank Tulowitzki had stopped at a Night Owl to gas up and use the bathroom, but he could remember nothing at all after topping off his tank. He woke up at one in the morning in the trunk of his own car, which was parked a few hundred feet down the road from the Night Owl in a public lot. He’d been kicking and screaming for most of five hours before an early-morning jogger heard him and summoned the police.

A Baltimore pedophile later confessed to the crime and described in pornographic detail the way he had molested Rory before strangling him to death. But he claimed not to remember where he had buried the body, and the rest of the evidence didn’t fit; not only did he not have access to a Rolls-Royce, he didn’t have a valid driver’s license. By the time the cops decided the kiddie fiddler was a dead end—just a perv who got off on describing the sexual assault of a minor, someone who confessed to things out of boredom—there were new abductions to work on and the ground on the McCombers investigation was very cold.

Neither Rory’s driver, Tulowitzki, or the Gregorskis’ driver, Sillman, had his blood tested until more than a day after the abductions took place, and any lingering presence of sevoflurane in their bodies went undetected.

For all they had in common, the disappearance of Marta Gregorski and the kidnapping of Rory McCombers were never connected.

One other thing the two cases had in common: Neither child was seen again.





Haverhill


CHRIS MCQUEEN TOOK OFF THE AUTUMN VIC BEGAN HIGH SCHOOL.

Her freshman year was already off to a rocky start. She was pulling straight C’s, except for art. Her art teacher had put a comment on her quarterly summary, six hastily scrawled words—“Victoria is gifted, needs to concentrate”—and given her a B.

Vic drew her way through every study hall. She tattooed herself in Sharpie, to irritate her mother and impress boys. She had done a book report in comic-strip form, to the amusement of all the other kids who sat in the back of the class with her. Vic was getting an A-plus in entertaining the other burnouts. The Raleigh had been replaced by a Schwinn with silver-and-pink tassels on the handlebars. She didn’t give a f*ck about the Schwinn, never rode it. It embarrassed her.

When Vic walked in, home from an after-school detention, she found her mother on the ottoman in the living room, hunched over, her elbows on her knees, and her head in her hands. She had been crying . . . still was, water leaking from the corners of her bloodshot eyes. She was an ugly old woman when she wept.

“Mom? What happened?”

“Your father called. He isn’t going to come home tonight.”

“Mom?” Vic said, letting her backpack slide off her shoulder and fall to the floor. “What’s that mean? Where’s he going to be?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know where, and I don’t know why.”

Vic stared at her, incredulous. “What do you mean you don’t know why?” Vic asked her. “He isn’t coming home because of you, Mom. Because he can’t stand you. Because all you ever do is bitch at him, stand there and bitch when he’s tired and wants to be left alone.”

“I’ve tried so hard. You don’t know how hard I’ve tried to accommodate him. I can keep beer in the fridge and dinner warm when he gets home late. But I can’t be twenty-four anymore, and that’s what he really doesn’t like about me. That’s how old the last one was, you know.” There was no anger in her voice. She sounded weary, that was all.

“What do you mean, ‘the last one’?”

“The last girl he was sleeping with,” Linda said. “I don’t know who he’s with now, though, or why he’d decide to take off with her. It’s not as if I’ve ever put him in a position where he had to choose between home and the girl on the side. I don’t know why this time is different. She must be some nice little piece.”

When Vic spoke again, her voice was hushed and trembling. “You lie so bad. I hate you. I hate you, and if he’s leaving, I’m going with him.”

“But, Vicki,” said her mother in that strange, drifting tone of exhaustion. “He doesn’t want you with him. He didn’t just leave me, you know. He left us.”

Vic turned and fled, slamming the door shut behind her. She ran into the early-October afternoon. The light came at a low slant through the oaks across the street, gold and green, and how she loved that light. There was no light in the world like you saw in New England in early fall.

She was up and on her embarrassing pink bike, she was riding, crying but hardly aware of it, her breath coming in gasps, she was around the house and under the trees, she was riding downhill, the wind whining in her ears. The ten-speed was no Raleigh Tuff Burner, and she felt every rock and root under its slim tires.

Vic told herself she was going to find him, she would go to him now, he loved her and if she wanted to stay with him, her father would find a place for her, and she would never come home, never have to listen to her mother bitch at her about wearing black jeans, dressing like a boy, hanging with burnouts, she just had to ride down the hill and the bridge would be there.

But it wasn’t. The old dirt road ended at the guardrail overlooking the Merrimack River. Upriver, the water was as black and smooth as smoked glass. Below, it was in torment, shattering against boulders in a white froth. All that remained of the Shorter Way were three stained concrete pylons rising from the water, crumbling at the top to show the rebar.

She rode hard at the guardrail, willing the bridge to appear. But just before she hit the rail, she dumped her bike on purpose, skidded across the dirt in her jeans. She did not wait to see if she had hurt herself but leaped up, gripped the bike in both hands, and flung it over the side. It hit the long slope of the embankment, bounced, and crashed into the shallows, where it got stuck. One wheel protruded from the water, revolving madly.

Bats dived in the gathering dusk.

Vic limped north, following the river, with no clear destination in mind.

Finally, on an embankment by the river, under 495, she dropped into bristly grass, among litter. There was a stitch in her side. Cars whined and hummed above her, producing a vast, shivery harmonic on the massive bridge spanning the Merrimack. She could feel their passage, a steady, curiously soothing vibration in the earth beneath her.

She didn’t mean to go to sleep there, but for a while—twenty minutes or so—Vic dozed, carried into a state of dreamy semiconsciousness by the thunderous roar of motorcycles, blasting past in twos and threes, a whole gang of riders out in the last warm night of the fall, going wherever their wheels took them.