Little Girl Lost

Chapter 10

Bill Battles called me back in the morning and agreed to meet me at his office. He said he’d have to verify with Mastaduno that it was okay to share information with me, and I told him to be my guest. By the time I arrived, he apparently had, since he greeted me by dropping five pounds of files in my lap. Then he pulled open the blinds to let some light in and offered me a cup of coffee.

It reminded me of what I was missing out on working for Leo. Serner’s offices filled the top three floors of an office building on Madison and Fifty-ninth, and Bill’s office filled one corner of the middle floor. He wasn’t quite their top producer, I guess, or maybe it was just that he wasn’t a corporate officer – one way or another he’d been denied the top floor – but even one of Serner’s second-tier corner offices was light years away from the ground-floor suite Leo and I shared in Chelsea. Bill’s windows looked out over the avenue, and we were high enough up that you could look down on the traffic and not hear a sound. If you stood at the right angle, you could see the spires of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in the distance. In our office, if you stood at the right angle near the window, you could see into the kitchen of an Indian restaurant.

I accepted the coffee, burned my tongue on it, and set it aside. I opened the first file. There was a picture clipped to the inside of the folder showing a pair of college- age girls in Rianon sweatshirts and blue jeans, one with her hip cocked and arms crossed, the other with her arm around the first girl’s waist and her head resting on the first girl’s shoulder. I looked hard at the pair. The one on the left was the subject of the five pounds of reports that followed. The one on the right was Miranda.

Miranda hadn’t changed much by the time this picture was taken. She looked a little thinner, maybe, but the yearbook photo had only been a headshot, and my tenyear- old memories were, as Leo had pointed out, not entirely reliable. She’d given up glasses somewhere along the way, presumably for contacts.

Jocelyn Mastaduno was a tiny bit taller than Miranda, a little heavier. She had shorter hair and, if you could go by their poses in this one photo, a cockier attitude. They looked like sisters. It wasn’t even a matter of resemblance as much as it was something about the way they were standing, the way Miranda held onto Jocelyn’s waist, the look of contentment on her face as she rested on Jocelyn’s shoulder. It had the intimacy of a family photo.

“One of the other girls in her class took that,” Bill said. “Katherine Chin, I think.”

“I talked to her. She’s married, living in Chicago now. Katherine Lewis.”

“Good to know. I’ll get her number from you if we need to do a follow-up.”

I turned the pages, not reading anything in detail but getting a feel for the work Serner had done, who they had talked to. Professors, students, area residents. The one travel agent in town, who said she hadn’t made any arrangements at either girl’s request. Local police. The school newspaper and the local newspaper. Then branching further out: people in neighboring towns, people who’d known the girls before college. It was very thorough. In a way, I was surprised they hadn’t called me. But the investigation had mainly focused on Jocelyn, as was appropriate given that her father was paying the bills.

Jocelyn also seemed to have been the instigator behind whatever the two of them did. Students who knew them had told Serner that Miranda had dropped out of Intro to Psych a week after Jocelyn had, that she had signed up for classes in yoga and modern dance when Jocelyn had, that Jocelyn had been the one behind their request to room together in Heward Hall. It didn’t quite make Miranda out to be a doe-eyed follower and Jocelyn some sort of Svengali, but Jocelyn had tended to dominate in the relationship.

And what sort of relationship had it been? Some of the girls’ peers hadn’t hesitated to speculate. Neither Miranda nor Jocelyn seemed to date much or to date any one boy for long. They preferred spending time together. It wouldn’t have been the first fling between two girls on the Rianon campus, and it’s not surprising that some people drew that conclusion. But as far as Serner could find, there was no evidence one way or the other.

I set the first file aside and started flipping through the second. There was more material here than I could read sitting in Bill’s office, and I asked him whether there was a conference room I could use.

“There is,” he said, “but you don’t have to do that. Those are all copies, except for the photo, which we’ll need to keep here. Sign them out and you can take them back to your office.”

“Leo’ll think you’re coming after me again if he sees your files on my desk.”

“Let him think it,” Bill said. “Maybe he’ll give you a raise.”

I shook my head. “He’s paying me what he can.”

“I hope you realize you’re too good to be wasted in a little two-man operation like that.”

“If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were coming after me again.”

“I’m just saying.”

“Listen,” I said, “I didn’t see anything here about Miranda’s dancing in any of the local strip clubs. I don’t know when she started, but I was assuming it was around the time her mother died, which would have been before she left school. Do you know if anyone mentioned anything along those lines?”

“It’s not a question we asked.”

“Yeah, well, why would you? All I’m saying is, she must have started sometime. Am I going to find anything about it in here?”

“No,” he said. “Believe me, if we’d heard a breath of it, we would have followed up on it.”

It was disappointing, but not a surprise.

“Still, maybe you’ll find something useful in there.” He handed me their form non-disclosure agreement, and I signed it. “God knows we never did.”

We were lying on her bed, in the apartment on Eightyfourth Street, the one that was now home to the Bakers and next door to a youth center instead of a synagogue. Her mother was at work, and would be for two hours still, which was plenty of time to finish our math homework, or would have been if we could keep our hands off each other. She’d just discovered what it did to me when she put her tongue in my ear, and so had I, and both of us liked it more than trigonometry. Her shirt and bra were on the floor, on top of my shirt, which had come off first, and her skirt and my pants were crumpled next to us in the bed. But she still had her panties on and I still wore my Fruit of the Loom briefs, and we both understood it would stay that way throughout, one last concession to the pointless, old-fashioned rules we’d set for ourselves.

It hardly mattered. We couldn’t have enjoyed ourselves more if we’d gone further, and now, thinking back on it, I remembered that afternoon more fondly than any of the encounters I’d had later, first at NYU and then, after graduating, with girls I met through friends or at parties. There had been women since Miranda – but none I’d loved, not even for a night.

We lay in her bed, my fingers tracing the line of her sex through her underwear, and she told me about Rianon College, with its ophthalmology-focused pre-med program, one of the oldest in the country, and its campus, so green and open, so different from anything we’d ever known in New York City. They’d accepted her on an Early Decision basis, she said, which meant that for her the college application process was now over. What about me?

What about me.

Thinking back now, I could remember the bed, I could remember the feel of her body under my hand, I could even remember the quality of the light filtering in through her bedroom window, motes of dust dancing slowly over our heads. But I couldn’t remember my answer. I’d known I’d never leave the city, I’d known that since I was a kid – I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. But I wouldn’t have told her that, not then. Did I join her in spinning a dream of going away to New Mexico, cutting all our ties to our friends and our homes? Did I tell her I’d go with her, that I’d apply, too, maybe for the program in literature, or history, or God only knows what? And if I did, was it a lie, or did I mean it – maybe only for that afternoon, maybe only for that minute, but with all my heart?

She’d gone. I’d stayed. But all through the years that followed, part of me had gone with her, vicariously enjoying the rolling, green campus when I was riding crammed subways past Washington Square, living with her in a clean suburb when my real life took place in a fourth-story walk-up with windows that didn’t close properly and junkies outside on the sidewalk. Leo was my real life. While she was learning to heal people, he was training me to uncover the worst things about them. But late at night, in bed with the door closed and the blinds drawn and my eyes shut, I’d see through her eyes, and because she was someplace better, so was I.

Only now I knew she wasn’t, that she hadn’t been anywhere better. Everything I’d imagined for her – the happiness, the comfortable life – those were the lie. Somehow she’d fallen into my world.