Gristle & Bone Read online

  "So?" Waterman said, looking up from his computer about a minute into the unknown girl's disappearing act.

  "So? You saw it, didn't you?"

  "Right. Pretty nifty fake. Amazing what kids can do in their parents' basements these days."

  "Fake," she said. Hal Waterman was being his usual dismissive self, but Tara wasn't in the mood for it. She stood from the impossibly comfortable chair and twisted his monitor further toward him. "Look at it again, Hal."

  "I'm kind of busy here, Tara." To prove it, he sorted through the mess of paper and sticky notes on the desk, every square inch scrawled on with the small, neat printing of compulsives and serial killers. "Putting together a national newspaper and all that, you know?"

  Tara's hands went her hips before she could stop them.

  "Oh, come on," the boss said, catching the involuntary body language. "Don't give me the indignant act."

  Tara forced them into the tight pockets of her jeans. "Who's indignant? I want the chance to write it, Hal. That's all."

  Waterman gave her a shrewd look. "You've got vacation time coming up."

  She would have thrown her hands up indignantly if they hadn't been squeezed to death between denim and her thighs. "Vacation!"

  "I just don't see a story here, Tara."

  "You don't—"

  Waterman held up a hand, his fingernails large and square, the pads eternally ink-stained. "Remember the time we printed the article about that twerking video where the girl caught fire? Ran that whole companion piece about teenage sexuality run rampant, and whatnot? Every media outlet, every talk show was all over that thing, and it turned out to be another hoax. If it's fake, Tara—and it doesn't take George Lucas to see that it is—then I look like a class-A asshole to the higher-ups for financing your little trip once Jimmy Kimmel steps out of this girl's closet with a mirror and a smoke machine."

  The thought made her grin, despite herself. But this wasn't Pepper's Ghost, and if it was a digital effect, it was the best amateur work she'd seen. "And what if it's not, Hal? Hypothetically, what if it's real?"

  "Nobody would believe it," he said, folding his hands on the desk. "That's the real bitch of it. We could print every story that comes through my office about UFOs and witches and werewolves in the subways—and believe me, I see a lot of them. Stories, not werewolves."

  The focus had gone out of his eyes. He reached into a desk drawer and brought out a bottle of magnesium citrate, popped two pills into his gob and swallowed them with a guzzle from a squat water bottle. Getting one of his "monster headaches," most likely (he never called them migraines), yet another essential component of Tara's visits. "Hell, we could ease our readership into it," he went on, methodically rubbing his temples with his long middle fingers. "Like turning up the hot water on a live frog. One day we're one of the top-rated news rags in North America, and the next, we're the National Enquirer's ugly cousin."

  Tara plopped back into the chair, feeling defeated but not ready to give in. "Even if it is bullshit, Hal, it's a story. Teen depression and suicide are all over the news. It's not just a topic for Law & Order SVU or 90210 anymore. We'd be tapping into the goddamn zeitgeist, Hal. This video's gone viral—half a million hits in under 8 hours—and you can bet it's only gonna get bigger. If we don't get the scoop, we'll look like even bigger assholes writing it up a month after the fact, quoting the Associated Press!"

  Waterman leaned back, allowing his fingers to slip from his temples as he studied the computer screen. The video had ended. Thumbnails for similar clips, as if there was anything remotely similar out there, had filled its box.

  "I'll give you one thing: it does look pretty damn realistic for a high school production. I'm not saying it's real," he added hastily. "Look, even if I were to okay this..." (In Waterman-speak, this meant he'd already made up his mind that he would.) "What makes you think you'd be the one to write it? You're on the music beat, after all. No pun intended."

  Trying not to grit her teeth, she reminded him: "It's my story."

  "You brought it to my desk, sure. That doesn't make it—"

  "I know this girl," she said, and relished the sound of Waterman's coffee-stained teeth clacking as he shut his mouth. "Maybe not her, specifically, but girls like her."

  Tara felt the old hurts threatening to bubble up, thick in her throat, and it took an extreme force of will not to tear-up in Waterman's office. She wouldn't give him the satisfaction. He'd think it was his fault, and be tempted to offer his sympathy or talk her down, the kneejerk reactions most men had in the presence of a "hysterical" female. Tara bit the insides of her cheeks. The pain seemed to make the itch in her eyes go away.

  Itching. The girl was itching, too, remember?

  Fear crept up her spine, seemingly without origin, prickling the baby-fine hairs on her arms as goose pimples rose beneath them. Her mother would have said someone had just walked over her grave. Fortunately, Tara wasn't the least bit superstitious.

  Aside from believing a girl could vanish into thin air, she sniped.

  Right. Aside from that.

  "This isn't going to be like your POW story, is it?" Waterman said, eyeing her queerly, perhaps sensing the waterworks display that had nearly started here in his inner sanctum.

  "He promised me an exclusive," Tara said, trying not to sound bitter. "How was I supposed to know he'd back out?"

  "Fine." Waterman let out one of his characteristic sighs. The pills he'd taken hadn't yet kicked in; he would be pliable for another twenty minutes, tops, suffering under the weight of his Monster Migraine. "But I want your regular stories on my desk every goddamn morning at six. I'm not filling in for you while you're gone."

  "You won't regret it," she said, not about to press her luck by requesting a hiatus of her music column while she investigated the video. And because it seemed like she was making a deal with the devil, she offered Waterman her hand.

  Somewhat reluctantly, as if Waterman shared the same sentiment, he shook it.

  IN THE TWO days it took to pinpoint the Bamber girl's exact address (a friend in the police department came in handy, as he had many times before), Tara's time spent in front of the bathroom mirror was tense. Coming out of her morning shower, washing her hands after using the toilet, brushing her teeth before bed, she scrutinized every square inch of her body for what she'd started to think of as "missing pixels." Was that mole there before? That dark spot? She found nothing out of the ordinary, of course. Nothing to make her believe she was actually disappearing. If she had, she would have checked herself promptly into the nearest insane asylum, or at the very least place a call to the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, and book an appointment with a trained psychologist at her earliest convenience.

  She'd caught herself staring at her reflection in the rearview as she drove to work the second day, and jerked the wheel out of fright. She found it increasingly difficult to focus on anything, mirror or not—anything but the disappearing girl.

  It took a fair bit of detective work (and a whole lot of mileage) to get her to the door of the house Mackenzie Bamber shared with her mother (widowed) in Pleasant Valley, Ontario. Not difficult work, per se, just drudgery, particularly since Tara didn't especially love that part of the job. She was competent at it—it was something she did almost automatically, like getting ready for work in the morning—but it wasn't her passion. The interviews and writing of the story were what she enjoyed most about reporting; the detective work was just a means to that end. Unfortunately, with her concurrent gig, the music column, interviews were just another thing threatening to sour her on the profession as a whole. So-called "artists" perpetually whining about their celebrity ("it's not about fame, I'm in it for the music"), rhyming off the same old bullshit ("music is my life" and "God gave me talent")... it had started to wear on her after the first few times. She hated to sound like Holden Caulfield, but you didn't have to look hard to find a phony in the music industry.

  This story would be her salvation
. It would pull her out of obscurity, thrust her name and her writing into the spotlight—Tara grew more certain of it with every phone call, with every click of the mouse. Men with the same education, the same experience, and much lesser writing skills had been promoted ahead of her for the last time.

  Finding the girl who'd posted the video had been as windy a route as the roads through the foothills toward Pleasant Valley. The girl went by the internet handle @userbits, a brunette duck-facing in her avatar, with over a dozen short films posted on her YouTube channel, most of them not so much inspired by The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity as pretty obvious rip-offs. But it was good to see kids doing something other than shooting up their schools or getting pregnant. This was the Bamber girl; the girl in the video, who'd not only disappeared in front of the camera but apparently from the earth, was Daria Walker.

  A simple Google search brought up over one hundred hits for the name Mackenzie Bamber. Only eleven were from the same girl. Her LinkedIn profile advertised her as a Video Artist, currently working out of Pleasant Valley, Ontario. Punching above her weight class, Tara thought admiringly. Go girl.

  She found the town easily enough, nestled in a valley near Sleeping Giant Provincial Park, on the uppermost shore of Lake Superior, about as picturesque as she might have imagined. Sure beat the shit out of the Sudbury motel where she'd spent the previous night, anyhow. The only amenity there had been a cigarette machine between a pop machine and an ice chest. Tara hadn't seen a functioning cigarette machine since the '80s, and the array of brands was astounding, from du Mauriers to Virginia Slims, an American brand she recalled from flipping through her mother's magazines as a child. She'd stood staring at it, this slot machine whose every push was a jackpot, for almost as long as she'd spent in front of the dirty motel mirror, looking for signs of missing pixels, signs she was disappearing. Eventually she'd chosen the Slims, because its '60s slogan of female empowerment had that ironic edge she enjoyed: You've come a long way, baby.

  I have, she'd thought, as she lighted up. Literally and figuratively.

  Born and raised in the city, Tara had felt the isolation deep in her marrow as she drove through the countryside the following morning, and returning to civilization—such as Pleasant Valley offered—had done little to help. This wasn't quite Deliverance country, but it was as close as Tara Maxwell had ever wanted to get.

  Just passing through town, the casual observer might find it difficult to fathom how the Disappearing Girl's story could have played out here. How could someone feel so utterly ignored in such a small town, one might wonder. With a population of a little over a thousand, it seemed even the most disenfranchised among them would have had very little room to be left alone. But the country was wide, and the town rambled. There were big open spaces between one house and another, even in town, and in those spaces, though the literal distance wasn't much, the psychic distance—the space between one family and another, one person and another—could be galaxies wide. Each household was a solar system, rotating around its own star.

  Tara had an instinct for loneliness. She understood how two people, similar in nearly every respect, could live in the same cramped space and still be so far removed from one another.

  The Bambers' prefab was neat and petite, a mere fifteen feet from its neighbor, yet ten feet further apart than most houses on Tara's block, and the house she rented was in one of Toronto's better neighborhoods.

  The price of privacy here were the transmission towers rising from what must surely be their backyards, monkey bars for the children of giants. The whole block—with its archipelago of potholes, its beater cars and modular homes in various states of disrepair—lay in their shadows. The towers receded into the distance on either side of the block, continuing through the tree line and into the hills beyond, hydro lines like the webbing of gigantic metal spiders. The steady buzz-hum of electricity likely kept newcomers awake at night; over time, they would either get used to it or be driven out of their minds with sleeplessness and the incessant buzzing, like a character out of Poe. Tara guessed she'd fall into the latter group. She couldn't imagine spending the night here, let alone living in these houses.

  The next-door neighbor's dog barked as she stepped out of her cherry-red hatchback, a luxury vehicle in comparison to the pickup and K-Car she parked between, both of which might have seen better days in the mid '90s. Practically foaming at the mouth, the only thing that stopped the dog from making brunch out of Tara was a coil of yellow nylon rope—fraying rope, she couldn't help but notice. The Bamber place had a decent lawn, though it looked like it fresh-laid grass. The dog next door kicked up dirt on what could barely be considered a yard, and had wound toward her from its tree and dish through a maze of rusted car parts and a cinderblock fire pit.

  Tara opened the screen door, knocked on the laminate door behind it, and waited. The dog kept barking, and somewhere along this row of houses, a man shouted, "Shut the fuck up, you shithead dog!"

  She was still grinning when Kenzie opened the door, in cut-off jean shorts and a tight Nirvana Nevermind t-shirt that rose to show off the sparkly costume jewelry hanging from her belly button. The front pockets hung out from under the deliberately frayed stonewashed denim, and so, likely, did the cheeks of her ass. Tara's mother would have smacked her in the head if she'd caught her daughter wearing those. Hell, Tara would have smacked herself.

  Kenzie regarded her with mild surprise.

  She thought I'd be prettier. They always do.

  "Hi, Kenzie," she said, and stuck out a hand. "I'm Tara Maxwell."

  A broad smile passed over the girl's face, and she took her hand. "Nice to meet you," the girl said, moving aside to let Tara in. Tidy, with a wooden cross hung on the wall above a threadbare sofa, the air thick with cloying perfume and an unmistakable hint of cigarette smoke. Tara wasn't sure if Kenzie and her mother had cleaned for their guest or if it was always like this, but the lack of dust made her think neatnicks. The only real mess was a single ashtray practically choked with cigarette butts. As she followed Kenzie toward the back of the house, Tara noticed they had all been smoked down to the filter.

  The girl's bedroom was smaller than Tara's dorm room in college. Walls plastered in band posters, grunge and '90s hip-hop and even The Beatles. Nirvana was the most frequent among them, so she rolled the dice. "Nirvana fan, eh? What's your favorite song?"

  "'Scentless Apprentice,'" the girl said with no hesitation, surprising the hell out of Tara, who'd assumed the t-shirt and posters were merely what Kenzie had picked up to have something "vintage," the way kids these days wore shirts of bands whose music they'd never heard. That the girl actually knew something other than Nirvana's '90s anthem of teenage apathy, "Smells Like Teen Spirit," made Tara take an instant liking to her. "That or 'Frances Farmer,'" Kenzie added with a self-conscious shrug.

  "Good tune," Tara agreed.

  Kenzie looked at Tara over her shoulder, suggesting she was equally impressed by her visitor. Then she sat down at her Mac, every bare surface of the desk covered by photos of herself with friends—making faces, throwing up "deuces," giggling hysterically—the kinds of things Tara vaguely remembered doing with her own small group of friends, except for the deuces, which had meant something quite different when she'd been a kid.

  A little beaded friendship bracelet rattled on Kenzie's wrist when she grasped the computer mouse. Did Daria make that? Tara wondered. The thought made her shiver as she sat on the bed behind the girl.

  With a few clicks, a folder opened. Kenzie hovered the cursor over a video file labeled DARIA, and peered back over her shoulder. "Daria sent this to me the day she..." She stopped there, unsure whether to voice the word they were both thinking: disappeared. "...the day she went missing. Cops said it was the last thing she did, far as they could tell."

  "I'm sorry," Tara said, having noticed the many appearances of Daria Walker among the girl's photos. The computer's wallpaper was a shot of Daria alone, a close-up of her face in
near silhouette, with a smile big enough to beat Buddha, the sky blue and wide and open behind her. "I know what it's like to lose a friend."

  The old hurts threatened to bubble up again, but it was the shame that hurt Tara the most. She'd seen the signs and done nothing. Worse than nothing: she'd turned a willful blind eye, and that was the part that pained her most, when she thought back on it. After Christmas break, when the dorm room across the hall had been empty, something vital inside Tara had broken, and every so often—more often, these days—she found herself on the verge of some kind of breakdown, struggling to fight back the tears.

  Kenzie offered a sad little smile and turned back to the screen, where she double-clicked the video.

  "MY NAME IS Daria Walker," the girl said, as Tara had heard so often she'd lost count—over 700,000, counting all the times Daria had said it to somebody else.

  This time was different, watching it over the slumped shoulders of her best friend. Sitting in a bedroom a lot like Daria's had been, it felt somehow more real. Before, she had watched with the somewhat clinical detachment of a spectator. There'd been empathy, sure—but it was ambition, and not empathy, that had driven her to Kenzie Bamber's front door.

  "I'm fourteen years old, and I started cutting when I was twelve," Daria said, swallowing raw emotion. She pulled up the left sleeve of her surf hoodie, revealing over a dozen raised scars, long, straight and pink, each one adjacent to the next, like a prisoner marking off the days of her confinement. Tara liked the comparison and made a mental note to put it, or something more elegant, in her article.

  "I don't know why I started doing it," Daria said, tugging down her sleeve. "I saw my dad's razor in the bathroom and it just sort of... happened. It hurt, like a lot. But it felt good, too. You know when you touch an old TV when it's on, and you get all staticky in your fingers and all up your arm? That's what it was like the first time. It felt electric—not just where I cut, either. Like, all over. Tingly. I've like, taken all kinds of drugs and pills and stuff, and none of it feels as good as the cutting."