Lost Girls

chapter 10

The Murdoch Public Library is located across the street from the courthouse in what used to be the manse of St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church, a dour, cracked-plaster affair that epitomizes the town's no-nonsense Protestant aesthetic. Who knows where the minister lives today (perhaps tucked away in the basement and dusted off once a week to deliver a sermon to his diminishing, blue-rinsed congregation), but what used to be the dining room, sitting room, and even the kitchen of his residence are now clotted with book stacks, a couple of study carrels next to the windows, and, in the place where the stove and sink used to be, a bearded man with alarmingly dark eyes seated behind a wooden desk shuffling index cards. When I approach I note first that he and I are the only ones in the place, and second that he's not seated at all but standing, and is a man who, given the benefit of the doubt, may be estimated to reach the height of four foot six.

''Can I help you?'' he asks in a voice deeper than would seem possible for a man his size, plush and tranquilizing as a late-night dj's.

''Hope so. I understand that you have a newspaper here in town. A weekly?''

''The Murdoch Phoenix.''

''Indeed. I was wondering if there's back copies of it on microfilm, or if you have it on-line?''

''Neither, I'm afraid. But we do keep a pile of them in the Periodicals section. It's the pantry to your left.''

A glance in that direction reveals a room the size of a walk-in closet off the kitchen with a foldaway table, battered oak chair, and, on the shelves around them, yellowing editions of the local paper.

''I see. Well, would you mind if . . . ?''

''Not at all.'' He gestures a babyish hand at the chair. ''Can I ask if you're conducting any particular type of research?''

He has stepped out from behind the desk now and placed his hands on his hips in a let's-get-down-to-business pose. Something in the bemused crinkle at the corners of his mouth communicates intelligence, and the directness with which he meets my eyes leads me to suspect he's not snooping, that his interests are wholly professional.

''What I'm interested in, to be precise, are news stories having to do with the lost girls.''

With this he remains perfectly still for a nearly uncomfortable length of time. Then, briefly, a smile appears and recedes into the fur of his beard.

''Then you'd be Bartholomew Crane,'' he says. ''I'm Doug Pittle. We ran a story on you in the last issue.''

'' 'We'?''

'' 'I,' actually. Aside from being head librarian, I'm also publisher, sales director, and editor in chief of The Murdoch Phoenix. I hope you don't mind the publicity, but it's nothing too terribly inflammatory, I assure you. In fact, I think you'll find that the Phoenix--that is, I--have taken a more balanced view of the case than even the Toronto papers and considerably more than the television news, needless to say.''

''A profile? Where did you get my bio? As far as I'm aware, I'm not yet listed in the Who's Who.''

''I'm a researcher, Mr. Crane. It's amazing the things you can find if you look in the right places.'' As he speaks he guides me to the pantry and pushes the door half-closed to provide a level of privacy as well as a flow of oxygen into the tiny room. ''If you need any help, I'll be here until we close at six.''

''How did you--''

''It's a small town,'' he says flatly, and retreats back to his desk.

Before I get started I wonder at how Doug Pittle so smoothly resisted a prolonged exchange and at the same time left me with the impression that further conversation would come later. No doubt he had himself a long experience of living among the damaged goods that constitute the better part of Murdoch's population, and he knew that, in time, another like himself would have to eventually seek refuge in the one place where they could be surrounded by the calming presence of books.

So it is that I find my nose stuck in the crimpled pages of the May seventeenth issue of The Murdoch Phoenix, when the girls were first reported missing. The initial story ran as a front-page blurb noting that two local students had not been seen since the previous Thursday (the Phoenix was published every Tuesday) and that, the girls being close friends, it was suspected by police that they'd most likely ''run off for the weekend.'' The next issue featured two pictures of the girls, the same yearbook portraits published in every paper in the country. Smiling, floral Sunday-best dresses, side by side, blanketing the top half of the front page. One light haired and dimple chinned, the other dark and freckled, blue eyed both.

The story below told of how the police were now of a radically different opinion from that of the week before, how search teams were being arranged throughout the area, how armed forces helicopters were brought in to run aerial patterns over a hundred-square-mile grid, and how two senior Ontario Province Police homicide detectives had been assigned to the case to ''explore potential foul-play scenarios.'' In the weeks that followed, stories chronicling the frustrated search appeared on every front page, and never failed to include a vague quote from the detective in charge (''Every avenue of investigation is being pursued,'' ''All of the department's resources have been made available,'' and, later, ''It's true that we are now treating the case as a homicide, although of course we remain hopeful''). Then, during a heat wave in the week following Labor Day that registered the highest temperatures the town had experienced since 1937, Thomas Tripp was arrested and charged with two counts of firstdegree murder. The police weren't releasing anything to the press that wasn't already known: the girls were last seen after school that Thursday getting into the back of Tripp's car, both wearing white summer dresses, and that authorities were now ''marshaling the full extent of the evidence for the Crown.'' At the bottom of the page a small photo of the accused inset at the lower left-hand corner, a face carrying the bewildered look of those who have suddenly found themselves in serious trouble.

Having read through every story from the beginning to the present (''Tripp Hires Prestigious Toronto Firm for Defense''), I bring the entire pile out of the pantry and stand it on a table next to the library's lone photocopier. After an hour of holding my head over the machine's blinding flashes I amass an inky heap as thick as a nineteenth-century Russian novel.

When I'm finished Pittle stands, moving around to lean against the shelf that holds the magazines--Time, PopularMechanics, Maclean's --all neatly labeled and untouched.

''Can I help you with anything else?''

''Maybe you can. Do you have anything in the way of a local atlas or history? Something that might provide a kind of general overview of the town?''

''You're a historian as well, then?''

''Not at all. I just like to know what I'm dealing with.''

''You mean where you're dealing with,'' he laughs, dark as coffee. ''I know just the thing.''

He slides around the corner into the stacks and in a few seconds returns with a large, apparently untitled hardcover book.

''A History of Northern Ontario Towns,'' he announces. ''Compiled by Murdoch's own late Alistair Dundurn, honored World War II veteran, amateur historian, and, in his later years, well-known eccentric who walked the town's streets talking in a language known only to himself. I remember him, although he died just a couple of years after I arrived. Found him frozen solid in the middle of a snowdrift beside the doors of Our Lady of Perpetual Help after the big blizzard of eighty-four. Everyone thought it was a funny thing, his choosing to impersonate an ice cube outside of a Catholic church, being a die-hard Presbyterian all his life.''

''Sounds interesting,'' I say, meaning not the book but the way its author died.

''Some of it is,'' Pittle says, meaning the book.

He holds it out to me and it instantly shrinks in the transfer from his hands to mine.

''It's got a good chapter on Murdoch in there,'' he says critically. ''Histories both official and unofficial.''

''My thanks. I guess I should haul all this stuff out of your way now, though. What do I owe you?''

''Well, I don't imagine you've counted all those copies, and I'm certainly not about to, so why don't we just call it even. And as for the book loan, consider yourself an honorary member of the Murdoch Public Library. Or perhaps more a visiting scholar.''

''That's quite a designation.''

''It comes with one condition.''

''Yes?''

''When it's all over--the trial, I mean--you agree to give me an exclusive interview. A few remarks for Phoenix readers.''

''Agreed,'' I say, and, sticking the heavy wad of paper and book into my leather document bag, walk out the library's front door and back down Ontario Street through a bitter autumn rain that, although varying in its intensity, has been falling since the day I arrived.

Back in the honeymoon suite I take out the copied articles and arrange them chronologically on the bed. Then, without an idea in my head, I take the rest of the afternoon to tape them all in this order to the wall next to the desk, the dresser, the window frames, and then, standing on a chair, in a series of lines beneath the wood moldings of the ceiling around the entire perimeter of the room. When I'm finished I consider the fruits of my work and marvel at its pointlessness, at the way I've voluntarily made an ugly room even uglier. Put together like this, the smudged print of text blends together so that only the yearbook photographs and banner headlines (''No Sign in Search for Local Girls,'' ''Our Little Sweet One: A Father Talks,'' ''Lost Girls' Teacher in Custody'') stand out. It's as though the walls themselves now disclose a tale of their own. A story told largely without words, and the few that could be seen acting only to provide different titles to rename the same recurring image. Although the girls' smiles are unchanging, their intimations are subtly enhanced as I walk around the room, transformed from something innocent to ironic to tragic to, by the end, a mocking ambivalence.

I wasn't aware of their names until now.

Of course I'd seen them typed out on police reports and witness statements and in every news story I'd read about them but, my mind on other things, they failed to register as names.

Krystal McConnell.

Ashley Flynn.

Names of the times. Borrowed from soap-opera characters of prominence fifteen years ago who have since been replaced by spiffy new models: the social-climbing Brittany now an unscrupulous Burke, the generous Pamela a refitted, urbanized Parker. But when Krystal McConnell and Ashley Flynn were named deep in the heart of the eighties, the thing was cuteness. Pink cotton perfumed with designer fragrances. A belief in the transformative powers of positive thinking, spring water, German-made automobiles, and avocado. Brand names in banners beneath made-up family crests, galloping polo ponies and green reptiles embroidered over every heart. And everyone named according to a particular version of the pedigree fantasy. Ashley: transplanted Southern privilege, a destiny lying in sorority mixers and a marriage of health-club memberships, state-of-the-art appliances, and night courses in nouvelle cuisine. Krystal: light refracted through the grooves and crests of fancy cut glass, a fragility tempered with the Eastern European heartiness of an imported K.

I look again at the grainy pictures on the wall. Pointillistic dots in varying degrees of light and dark that blur up close but magically assemble into faces as I pull away. Ashley and Krystal were their names. And that, at the moment they obligingly smiled at the corny joke told by the school yearbook photographer, was what they looked like.