Before She Disappeared

CHAPTER 10

In the morning, Piper has once again vanished off the bed. Not wanting to repeat yesterday’s mistake, I climb off the end of the mattress, taking as big a step as possible onto the floor. No claws lash out. I move gingerly around the bed to the kitchen area, and notice two things at once: The water bowl needs to be refilled, and there are two disemboweled mice in the middle of the ancient hardwoods. Viv hadn’t been kidding; Piper earns her keep.

“Am I supposed to be impressed?” I call out to my roommate. “And what do I do now? Throw away the corpses? Fashion the ears into a necklace?”

I find a plastic grocery bag in one of the kitchen drawers and reluctantly use it to pick up the remains. That still leaves me with a brownish red smear. Definitely gross. I jump quickly into the shower before my feline roommate can make any more statements.

Ten a.m. I have five hours before I need to report to work, and many investigative paths to pursue. I want to follow up on after-hours cell phones, though it sounds like that might have to wait for a free evening. I also have more questions for the family, now that I’m getting the lay of the land. I wonder if Guerline would let me go through Angelique’s room, till I remember Angelique doesn’t really have a room. But she must still have stuff in the living room, that sort of thing.

Most people don’t realize what a financial luxury privacy is. An individual bedroom, time alone, designated workspace—these things cost money. Angelique got to sleep in a shared family room, while probably doing homework on the kitchen table on a refurbished laptop after her brother had his turn.

Meaning that if she wanted to keep secrets, a diary might not be out of the question. The police had to have gone through her things; her aunt and brother, too. But this is where a fresh pair of eyes doesn’t hurt.

Maybe I could get Guerline to meet me at the apartment on her lunch break? Which would make this morning a good time for the rec center. Even if there aren’t kids around, it would be helpful to meet the staff who work there, some of whom may remember Angelique from the summer before she went missing.

It’s worth a shot.

I lace up my tennis shoes, throw on my olive-colored jacket, and head down the stairs and out the side door.

Where I receive my next surprise of the morning.

Emmanuel Badeau, who’s clearly skipped school, is waiting impatiently for me.

“I have something to show you,” he says without preamble, pushing away from the side of the building. “But you can’t tell my aunt.”

I don’t have time to say yes or no, before he unzips his backpack and removes a battered laptop.

I turn back around, unlock the door, and lead him into Stoney’s bar.

“You do not know my sister,” he starts. “People think because she’s a teenager she must be silly or stupid or impulsive. She’s none of these things.”

“Water?” I ask.

“Coffee,” he orders.

“What are you, thirteen?”

Emmanuel looks up at me blankly. Apparently drinking coffee at thirteen is not shocking in his world. I head to the kitchen to brew up a pot, because I certainly need a cup, giving him time to boot up the laptop. By the time I return, he’s seated at the booth farthest from the front door, frowning over the screen on his laptop. The machine is making a funny whirring noise that doesn’t sound particularly healthy to me. Idly, he lifts up the slender instrument and bangs it down on the table. The grinding noise stops. The battered case, I notice, is covered in stickers. Everything from favorite coffee shops to the Haitian flag to the Red Sox. You can learn a lot about a person from their stickers. So far, I’ve deduced that Emmanuel has the same interests as an average teenager.

“Cream, sugar?” I ask.

The answer turns out to be all of the above. Emmanuel pours enough extras into his mug to turn it into a coffee-flavored milkshake. I take my first sip of shuddering-hot brew, and remind myself it would not taste better with a shot of Baileys. Or Kahlua. Or maybe even that RumChata stuff.

Emmanuel turns the laptop till I can see the screen from my side of the table. It takes me a moment to understand what I’m seeing.

It’s like a virtual bulletin board, filled with photos of his sister, and plastered with what appear to be scanned copies of newspaper articles. There are bubble comments here and there and fierce words scrawled across certain sections in bold.

Big Sister. Caring Daughter. Star Student.

It’s a digital collage. Without asking for permission, I take the laptop and pull it over to me. I study each image, each pull-out quote.

A faded photo of a baby with her face covered in smeared bananas. A photo of a little girl sitting on an old couch next to an infant, patting his head like one would pet a dog. Next photo, Angelique and her toddler brother are holding hands, beaming in front of a homemade swing.

Then the most recent photos. Angelique sitting at the table in the apartment, head over her schoolwork. Angelique on the sofa, holding up an exasperated hand, as if to ward off the photographer. Angelique curled up asleep on the sofa, colorful quilt pulled up to her neck, an anatomy book splayed beneath her chin, where it must’ve fallen when she dozed off.

Angelique smiling that same shy smile from her missing poster. But also Angelique laughing, Angelique working. Fifteen-year-old Angelique, growing up in front of my eyes.

Then, I start scanning the words, and I understand everything.

“It was you,” I murmur, looking up at Emmanuel. “You’re the one who keeps posting online, visiting the message boards. You—your posts—you’re the one who brought me here.”

“I didn’t mean you.” He scowls darkly.

“Tell me about this.” I push the laptop back to him. “How did you do this? Why?”

He takes a moment, clearly gathering his thoughts. “That Friday, when my sister didn’t come home, when my mamant called Officer O’Shaughnessy . . . I could see they didn’t take the situation seriously. She will come home, they said. Maybe she had to run an errand or made plans with friends. Don’t worry, don’t worry, don’t worry. These things happen with teenagers. But these things don’t happen with my sister. Not with LiLi.”

His personal nickname for his big sister, from when he was little and couldn’t pronounce Angelique. I had read about it online. A detail provided by Emmanuel, I realize now, in order to humanize his sister. Make her real not just for sympathizers, but to any predator who might be holding her.

“Officer O’Shaughnessy promised he would ask around. He even called a detective, to make my aunt happy, and more officers arrived to question our neighbors. But I could tell they didn’t believe anything was wrong. That they thought at any moment, the door would open and my sister appear.”

“They interviewed your neighbors?”

“Up and down the block. The ones who would answer the door.”

“Knock-and-talks,” I murmur, the beginning of any search.

“I conducted my own knock-and-talks.” Emmanuel feels out the sound of the official words. “Except I reached out to LiLi’s friends. When they said they didn’t know where she could be, I knew she was in trouble. And I knew the police would not be able to help us. But I can’t knock on every door. I can’t make adults talk to me or force the police to listen. So I made this. To keep my sister alive. To let the world know who she is, so that maybe if someone sees her, they will call us. Or”—his shoulders square—“if someone has her, they will see she is a daughter, sister, niece. She is kind and smart. And that person will let her come home again.”

“What about Officer O’Shaughnessy? I thought your aunt liked him.”

“She likes that he speaks Kreyòl. That he drinks soursop and brings over his mother’s homemade meat patties. He’s familiar, but he’s not the same. He’s an American whose family came from Haiti. My aunt, my sister, myself, we are Haitians who now live in America. He has never felt the ground shake beneath his feet. He doesn’t understand that it can happen again.”

The way Emmanuel says this, I realize he’s not talking strictly about the earthquake that flattened Port-au-Prince ten years earlier. He’s speaking of their life even now, filled with an uncertain future.

“Are you happy here?” I ask. “Do you—did Angelique—want to stay?”

“We want to be Americans. Very much. LiLi talks of nothing else.”

“I’ve heard of the complications of your visa status. That it’s already run out once, and may still be revoked. Was Angelique scared that she would have to return to Haiti? Does she even remember your home island?”

“You do not understand my sister,” Emmanuel repeats.

“I would like to,” I tell him honestly. “I would like to, very much.”

Emmanuel sighs. He leans forward, gets that look on his face people reserve for speaking to idiots. “I do not remember Haiti. I was three when we left. Even my own mother, I know her face from photos, her voice from the phone. The rest, it’s been too long now.”

I nod.

“What I do remember is the dark. Waking up to a noise that scared me. I didn’t know what, I was only a little boy. But I woke up and I knew, without seeing, that something very bad was happening. Then I heard my mother, crying, pleading. ‘No,’ she was saying over and over again. Then I heard a terrible sound again. Smacking. Like flesh hitting flesh.”

I’m not sure what to say.

“I couldn’t get up. I peed the bed in terror. Then, LiLi took my hand in the dark. She told me it was just the TV, even though we both knew it wasn’t. She sang me a song, one of our favorites, and after a while I sang with her.”

“She would’ve been what, six at the time?”

Emmanuel nods. His gaze is far away, his young face grim. “Later, the earth started to shake and pictures fell off the wall and my sister was there again, grabbing my hand, pulling me outside into the open yard. ‘Stay,’ she ordered me. Then she disappeared into the house. I wanted to follow. I was so scared. People were screaming. I thought I would die. I thought we would all die, and there was nothing I could do.”

“You were three,” I remind him gently.

“When I saw my sister again, she was holding my mother’s hand. I don’t think my mother found my sister. I think LiLi went back for her. I think LiLi brought her out of our home, right before it collapsed.”

Six-year-old Angelique. It’s possible, I suppose, but I also wonder how much of this memory is clouded by a baby brother who idolizes his big sister.

“We had a father,” Emmanuel tells me. “I’ve never seen pictures of him. LiLi, my aunt, my mother, they never speak of him. I remember his voice. I remember his fists. And I remember LiLi did not lead him out of our house.”

This catches me off guard. I sit back, trying to understand what Emmanuel clearly believes. That six-year-old Angelique not only saved him and their mother during the earthquake, but she—deliberately?—left their abusive father behind.

“People say LiLi is shy. She’s not shy,” Emmanuel tells me fiercely. “She’s focused. She has her friends, but they’re foolish girls with foolish dreams. LiLi has a mission. Not just to save herself, but to save both of us.”

“She had a plan to protect you two against deportation?”

“She started taking classes online.” Emmanuel gestured to the laptop. “Two extra courses a semester. She said she could not count on her visa lasting three more years till graduation. But she could work harder to graduate earlier, so she could get into the college and have a student visa. Then she would be safe.”

“What about you and your aunt?”

“My aunt has a green card. She’s been here a long time. But she said if LiLi and I go, then she will return to Haiti as well. We have been together too long for her to want to be apart. We are hers, the children of her sister’s body and her heart.”

I imagine that sounds even more beautiful in Kreyòl. “So if Angelique had a student visa . . .”

“Then she and my aunt would be safe. Maybe then, they could petition for just me, or buy some time. LiLi told me not to worry. She always told me not to worry.”

“You don’t think she simply took off to avoid deportation?”

“Never.”

I point my chin at the laptop. “Did you and she share that?”

“Yes.”

“The police must’ve examined it.”

“They took it, kept it for months till Officer O’Shaughnessy asked for it back. He knew I needed it for my schoolwork.”

“They find anything?”

“No. But I knew they wouldn’t.”

I regard Emmanuel seriously. “Because you had the laptop for at least a full weekend before the police became serious about their efforts, and in that time . . . ?”

“I didn’t remove anything. There was nothing to remove.” Emmanuel touches the keyboard lightly. “My sister loves math and science. She would read codebreaking books and do endless number puzzles to wind down. She will become a doctor. None of us doubt her. But this is my superpower.” His fingers dance across the keyboard. “By midnight Friday, when LiLi still hadn’t come home, this is where I first started looking. I tore apart every gigabyte of data on the hard drive. Nothing. By the time the police requested it on Monday, what did I care? As usual, they were too late.”

“But your sister is very smart. And aren’t there a ton of apps designed solely to help teenagers avoid their parents’ spying eyes?”

Emmanuel merely shrugs. “LiLi might keep secrets from our aunt, but she wouldn’t keep secrets from me.”

“What about her phone?”

“We don’t have it. It was in her backpack, or I would’ve checked it, too.”

“You ever see a different cell phone around the house? Maybe something old-school, like a beat-up flip phone . . .” I let my voice drift off.

“An after-hours phone. Many kids have them.”

“Then you all know about them, including Angelique?”

“Yes.” Emmanuel hesitated. “Once, I noticed what I thought might be a phone, tucked underneath Angel’s school papers. But then it was gone, and I never saw it again.”

“When was this?”

“Over a year ago. September maybe, last year.”

“Two months before Angelique went missing?”

He nods.

“What about the rec center?”

“What about it?”

“I understand Angelique spent the summer before school started there.”

“They have a day program for teens.” Emmanuel nods. “We both attended.”

“With your friends from school?”

“Our friends from the neighborhood. Most of our classmates live too far away.”

“So, lots of new kids?”

“Yes.”

“Did you make new friends?”

“Yes.”

“And Angelique?”

A shrug. “No one she mentioned. She had Marjolie, of course. They walked over together each day.”

“What about a young man?’

Emmanuel flops back in the booth. “Now you sound like the stupid police.”

“Sorry.”

“My sister did not meet some boy. She would not leave me or my aunt or her dreams of medicine for some boy.”

There is so much disdain in his voice, I wonder if Emmanuel is protesting too much. But what he says next catches me off guard.

“‘I think that God’s got a sick sense of humor and when I die, I expect to find him laughing,’” he suddenly quotes.

It takes me a moment. “Wait, isn’t that Depeche Mode? But what do my high school memories have to do with anything?”

“Eighties music is very popular,” Emmanuel states seriously.

“I still don’t get it.”

Emmanuel looks around, as if expecting the sudden appearance of eavesdroppers, then whispers quietly, “LiLi doesn’t believe in love. She doesn’t believe in God either. ‘No one will save us, ti fre.’ She told me that all the time. When I woke up with nightmares, when I first cried with homesickness: ‘No one will save us, ti fre, but it is okay, for we will save ourselves.’ That’s what my sister believes in. Her strength, her determination, her plan. She was not waiting for our aunt to magically secure our visas, or for some lawyers to sue on our behalf. LiLi believes in LiLi. We will be okay, because she will work hard enough to make it so.” A pause. “You cannot tell my aunt this. It would break her heart.”

I nod slowly, leaning back in silence. The sister he describes, a girl who at the tender age of six supposedly had the fortitude to save her own mother and brother, who was still actively in pursuit of a better future for them all . . .

I think I would’ve liked that girl very much. And I don’t want to believe she could’ve been derailed by something as fickle as male attention. Then again, fifteen is that age. And maybe the girl who didn’t get to act like a normal six-year-old wanted for one moment to be foolish and giddy. I couldn’t blame her for that.

“Are you continuing to update this site?” I ask Emmanuel.

“Yes. The police . . . They were too slow to start. And now, all this time without any progress . . . We do not see or hear from them so much anymore. Even at school . . . It’s a new year. The other kids, teachers, they move on. It’s not their home that is empty.”

“You’re hoping this might gather national interest. Maybe get your sister’s case on a major news program, re-ignite the investigation.”

“I send letters and e-mails every week. They don’t answer. But my sister . . .” His voice breaks slightly. “She’s worth it. The whole world should know her. The whole world should be looking. Why . . . Why aren’t they looking?”

Then he can’t talk. Emmanuel looks down at the table, blinking rapidly. I reach across, lightly fold my fingers over his hand. He doesn’t pull away, but we both know it’s not my comfort he wants.

“I’m not GMA,” I say. “Or 48 Hours or any of those national shows.”

“No,” he states bitterly. Nothing like a teen to give it to you straight.

“But I can promise you,” I continue, “that I do care, and I am looking, and I won’t leave till your sister comes home.”

“She’s not your family.”

“I choose her anyway. According to you, she’s worth it. That’s good enough for me.”

He glances up, his eyes damp with tears. “She did not run away.”

“I believe you.”

“She did not leave us for some boy.”

“Okay.”

“But something has changed.”

“Clearly.”

“No, I mean recently. The past few weeks. Before, when she first disappeared, I monitored the internet for signs of activity all the time. But . . . It’s been a while.”

I nod.

“I’d stopped paying attention. But then you came, and you asked questions and last night . . .”

“What happened last night, Emmanuel?”

“I logged into one of her classes,” Emmanuel murmurs. “I just wanted to picture her leaning over the computer, tapping away. I wanted to feel close to her again. But I couldn’t.”

“You couldn’t log in, or you couldn’t . . . feel any hint of your sister?”

“The course was closed.”

“Like you said, it’s been eleven months.”

“No, not suspended or canceled. Closed. As in the work completed, so the class is no more. Sometime in the past month, my sister logged in. She submitted the homework. She passed the test.”

Emmanuel stares at me. “Last week, my missing sister . . . I don’t understand . . . I can’t explain . . . but of all things, LiLi completed her online class. She’s out there, somewhere, still doing her schoolwork. But not coming home to us. Why? Of all things . . . Why?”