THE LOVE OF MISSING WOMEN
chapter one of a work in progress
Mellon sat in his room on the fourth floor of the Shelbourne Hotel. He paused at his work, which consisted of reading a stack of files and making notes of any information he considered incomplete, questionable or obscure, in his laptop. He raised his face and looked across Stephen’s Green.
An autumn midmorning, leaves changing, a few prematurely creased and withering. He’d been in Dublin for four weeks and he was homesick, but he was driven by longings that diluted his sense of missing California. He dreamed at night of unspoiled blue skies and tall palms and the smell of suntan lotion, and sometimes in his sleep he saw a tall girl walking barefoot on a beach. Since she was always moving away from him he never saw her face, but he knew her identity beyond doubt. He always woke from these dreams like a man struggling to escape from an airless bathysphere, giddy and panicked.
He clasped his hands behind his neck and heard the ripple of locked muscles loosening. He couldn’t go back home. Not yet. He gazed at the heap of manila folders. So many reports, so many words - and they’d yielded nothing of value, even though he’d read them a dozen times or more.
What the hell am I really looking for? he wondered. What could he expect to find in a matter of weeks that scores of Garda officers had spent months trying to hunt down? Maybe there was nothing to find, and this whole search doomed. And if that was the heartbreaking truth, then he was wasting a bunch of Tom Donovan’s money as well as depleting his own remaining energy, which was lower now than it had ever been in his life. Donovan was a very wealthy man, sure, but sooner or later he’d realize that even if he threw his whole goddam fortune at his grief, there was no guarantee he’d ever recover what he’d lost.
He opened another folder. Today he was uninspired. The statements inside the folders seemed moribund, as if they’d been written in a language long ago defunct.
It was approximately 4:30 on January 4th when I saw her cross Rathmines Road ...
Mellon pressed his fingertips to the sides of his face. Why had this witness, a man called Frank Wigener, been aware of time in the first place? Had he checked his watch, glanced at a street clock? If so, why hadn’t he been able to give an exact time? Mellon often caught himself wondering about his compulsive need for precision, and how truth became obscured in the crevices of language.
You could go mad obsessing over exact details. Nothing in the world can be reconstructed as fastidiously as you’d like. Stick with simple facts: Frank Wigener, age 47, an unemployed Dublin bricklayer, sees a beautiful tall red-haired girl cross a busy street at around 4.30 on a January day - and then what?
He looked at the typed statement, which had been taken by a Garda officer called Victor Riley. She was the kind of girl you’d notice, you know, about six feet tall and red hair falling down her back. Yes, she was the kind of girl you’d notice all right, Mellon thought. She’d burn an incandescent hole in a clinging sea mist.
He rubbed his eyes. The pain he felt was always the same dull persistent drumming at the back of his head. It was a rhythmic ache of loss, of mystery. Sometimes it made his eyes water. Sometimes he shut his eyes until it receded but he didn’t like the feeling of being suspended in the immense empty dark of his own head.
She had the moves of a dancer, Wigener said. She went inside a sandwich shop, and I didn’t see her come out. I was already walking past the place and I didn’t look back.
Mellon experienced the sharp bloom of familiar grief. I didn’t see her come out. Lindsey was seen, then not-seen. She passed from visibility to invisibility. She crossed a border dividing substance from image. He felt like phoning Tom Donovan and saying, Call it off, I can’t do this any more, Tom. This is too hard, harder than anything I’ve ever had to do in my life.
Tom Donovan would say, You’re the goddam guy in charge, do what you’re paid to do.
Mellon tapped two-fingered on his keyboard: ask Wigener about exact time? - even as he knew it was pointless to ask further questions of the man. He’d met Frank Wigener two weeks ago, a big red-faced fellow with thick unruly eyebrows and an arachnoid tangle of nasal hair. He was friendly, eager to assist in the matter of a missing girl; his manner suggested he had nothing to hide. He was just a guy who’d gazed a few moments at a delightful image crossing a street.
Mellon pushed his chair back from the desk and remembered the first time he’d met Lindsey Donovan during a barbecue Tom had given a year ago at his LA house. She was a girl of shimmering beauty on a hazy Cal day, dark green eyes attentive and sympathetic, a graceful girl raised in wealth but untouched by either money or West Coast affectations. She gave the impression of being grounded in the world, easy with herself. She’d shaken Mellon’s hand, her grip unexpectedly firm. A thin silver bracelet, her only adornment, rattled at her wrist. Somebody had introduced him as Tom’s Head of Internal Security, and Lindsey had said something like, You seem far too young. She might have been talking Latvian. He didn’t hear her words. She took the breath out of him immediately. She affected the whole sensory apparatus of Greg Mellon. She stood in bright light and eclipsed everything around her.
He’d been expecting no such fall, no emotional immersion, no shift in the pattern of his life. He lived comfortably, he wasn’t lonely, he hadn’t been looking for love. He had a group of good friends, he socialized regularly, he was in demand for dinner-parties, he attended charity fundraisers. He had his job, his apartment, his privacy. He never imagined that one day he’d see a face across a lawn, and that this sighting would alter his life forever.
Because after Lindsey nothing was the same again.
They conversed easily that day. He couldn’t remember a word she’d said. But he could bring back to mind her animated way of talking, and her laughter, and how she kept touching his arm or the back of his hand. At one point she’d reached out to flick away a fallen leaf or blade of grass from his shoulder, a gesture so unexpectedly intimate he remembered shivering when she touched him. He made an inane remark about a sudden change in the weather, and she stared at him with an expression he’d learn to understand was her knowing look. She saw through him. She affected him, and she knew it. Eventually, with great reluctance, she drifted away from him and moved through the party, the host’s daughter with duties to perform..
He spent most of the afternoon watching her from the distance. She moved from group to group, smiling, talking. She had a knack of putting people at ease; it wasn’t ease that Mellon felt, though. She’d affected him in altogether different way. He was love-struck. He stalked her the rest of the afternoon. He was in the pleasant all-consuming turmoil of love. When he heard her laugh float out toward him, he imagined she was sending him a private signal. And didn’t she spy on him from time to time, over the rim of a glass, say, or when she peered past the face of the person she was talking to at the time?
He felt the first full thrill of a lovers’ conspiracy.
Finally he lost sight of her when she vanished inside a blue and white striped marquee. He was devastated by her absence. He walked around aimlessly. He saw her half an hour later in the company of a couple of men. Their conversation was apparently serious, accompanied by a bunch of hand gestures. She turned her face and saw him across the lawn and she did something simple, yet it fired his heart: she blew him a kiss.
He thought of that blown kiss now as he walked the room of his hotel.
I have to do something, I have to make discoveries, I have to talk every day with Tom Donovan and bring him up to date, even when there’s nothing new to say and I feel ragged and rundown and devoid of ideas. Even when I am too broken to form words, I do it anyway, because Tom Donovan expects me. He expects me to bring Lindsey back, safe and sound.
He buzzed room service and asked for a ham sandwich and a club soda. Inside the bathroom he washed a film of dust from his hands. He avoided his image in the mirror. Lately he’d begun to look pale, his Californian good-health glow fading in the damp Irish climate. The city and the season were diminishing him. And so was the work, and so was the state of his soul.
He had to get away from the demands of the folders.
In the bedroom he scanned a two-page chart tacked to the wall beside the dressing-table. It listed all Lindsey’s verifiable movements on the day of her disappearance; the Gardai had compiled it diligently.
9:00: Irish Language Lessons, 25 Lower Leeson Street. 9:55 Left at end of class. Verified by teacher, Rhiannon McMurtagh. (Refer 80345)
10:21 The Irish Wool Shop: seen by vendor Mary Tinsey. Lindsey bought a white cashmere sweater. She was carrying a bag with a Marks & Spensers logo. She put the sweater in an Irish Wool Shop bag. (Refer 80346)
Small bones, sure, but a part of the skeleton of Lindsey’s movements on the day of January 4. What was in the M&S bag anyway? Mellon pressed his forehead against the wall. Two pages. He hated the realization that Lindsey’s life came down to that. Two pages, a dozen or so sightings.
The last entry on the list was 21.05: Picked up taxi in Christchurch and driven to O’Connell Street. Exited taxi at the General Post Office. Verified by driver, Jerry Dooley. (Refer 80353) Where the hell did she go after nine o’clock at night on O’Connell Street? and what had she been doing in Christchurch earlier?
He opened the door for the waiter. He gave the kid a generous tip, then carried his sandwich and drink to the bed. He lay propped against pillows and bit a chunk from the sandwich.
She went inside a sandwich shop.
There was a very tiny mystery here.
Betty Shea, the owner of the shop, had been interviewed by officer Victor Riley and had no recollection of seeing Lindsey that afternoon or any other. If Lindsey had entered the shop, then she’d left unnoticed. A tall beauty, a dramatic flash of color on a drab Dublin wintry afternoon - and Betty Shea didn’t remember her? Or had Wigener been mistaken in his testimony? Maybe Lindsey hadn’t gone into the sandwich shop at all.
A midget of a mystery, a scab to be picked.
Mellon couldn’t leave these minuscule perplexities alone. They’d become habit. He opened the drawer of the bedside table and took out a brown envelope. He held it upside-down and shook it. Photographs of Lindsey slid out on the bed. He’d studied them so many times he knew them as well as any family snapshot his mother kept in her sturdy big-hinged photo albums at home in La Jolla, unfamiliar people from small Midwestern settlements and farms: I come from dour yeoman stock, Mellon sometimes thought, and felt strange about his roots, as if he’d been a foundling, or adopted.
He picked up a picture of Lindsey inside the grounds of Trinity in the summer of last year, her long hair tied back in a white ribbon. He couldn’t look for long. She seemed appallingly real, appallingly inaccessible. He passed to another shot, which showed her playfully holding a limp triangle of pizza in a Temple Bar street, and making a mess of getting it into her mouth. Strands of melted cheese webbed between her fingers. He thought he could hear her laugh faraway. There was a Polaroid photo with her flat-mate Charlotte Kyle, taken outside a crowded pub called The Barge on a sunny night a year ago. She was gazing directly into the camera.
Lindsey wasn’t just the boss’s daughter; she was Mellon’s first and only love. And because she’d vanished before he’d even begun to explore the depths of this endlessly expanding sensation, she remained a thicket of unfulfilled possibilities, a sad conundrum made all the more baffling because he couldn’t figure out an ultimate resolution.
He pushed his sandwich away. He drank the club soda.
He had two choices ahead of him. Either he’d work more hours on the files, his head bent and his shoulders stooped. Or he’d go out and walk the busy streets of the city, clear his head and maybe buy something from a gift shop, Waterford crystal or some piece of allegedly sacred stone mounted on varnished wood. Something his mother might like. Look what Greg brought me back from Ireland.
But it was really a present for Lindsey he wanted to buy – and what was the point of that if she never came back to receive it? Something simple in one of those Irish designs she loved, something he kept in a velvet box for her return, and maybe he’d open it every year on the anniversary of her disappearance, and as the years wheeled past he’d become pinned to a ritual that was less meaningful each time he performed it. Her face would eventually slide from memory, and so would her voice and her scent and the feel of her – and he’d become a brokendown old man with no claimant, neither dead nor alive, to his feelings. Even her name would dwindle to a whisper, a hush he woke with inside his head.
He was holding the photograph so tightly he threatened to tear it. He slackened his grip and looked one more time at the picture of Lindsey and Charlotte outside The Barge. Two happy girls. Lindsey’s hair was longer than it had been in California. She was shielding her eyes from the sun, her hand pressed at an angle to her forehead. The shadow of the photographer lay across the images like a birthmark.
Had Charlotte ever identified this person who’d taken the picture?
He opened the pages of Charlotte’s file. Victor Riley, once again, had been the interviewing officer. Mellon flicked through the report, but there was no reference to this particular photograph. Had Riley been tired at the time of asking, and overlooked the identity of the photographer? Maybe there was another, simpler, explanation; the photograph had never reached Riley’s desk, and so he knew nothing about it.
Too many questions, and every one like a small nail driven into Mellon. This investigation, he thought, had become a kind of crucifixion. I want a happy ending.
No: what I really want is a resurrection. I want Lindsey reborn to me.
contents©2006 Campbell Armstrong
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