Stories: All-New Tales

Stewart O’Nan. LAND OF THE LOST

SHE WAS A CASHIER AT A BILO in Perry whose marriage had long since broken up. Soon after that her two boys moved out of the house, leaving Ollie, her German shepherd, as her sole companion. From the beginning she followed the case in the paper and on TV, absorbing it like a mystery, discussing it with her coworkers and customers-so much so that her manager had to ask her to stop. Early on she visited the Web site and left messages of support in the guest book, from one mother to another, but after James Wade confessed that he’d buried the girl somewhere west of Kingsville, she began keeping a file. At night when she couldn’t sleep she sat up in bed and went over the transcripts and the mother’s map, convincing herself it was possible. She couldn’t believe a feeling so strong could be mistaken.

She didn’t tell anyone what she was doing-she wasn’t stupid. The first time was the hardest because she felt foolish. In the privacy of her garage, while Ollie looked on, she stocked the trunk of her car with a shovel, a spade, a dry-cell flashlight and a pair of work gloves. She opened the door and he leaped into the backseat, capering from window to window, frantic just to be going somewhere.

“All right, calm down,” she said. “It’s not playtime.”

Searching on foot took longer than she thought. They came across nothing more sinister than a rotting seagull, but she wasn’t disappointed. Bushwhacking through the overgrown no-man’s-land behind the commercial strip on Route 302 was an adventure, and looking gave her a sense of accomplishment. They could cross this location off and move on to the next one.

Later she added more serious gear like bolt cutters and a lightweight graphite walking stick recommended by professionals, whose Web sites she treated like the Bible. She religiously documented everything, taking videos of any ground they disturbed, writing up her field notes as soon as they got home.

As fall came on she rearranged her shifts, working nights so she could take advantage of the daylight. In a couple of weeks the ground would be frozen and she’d have to shut down until spring. It was then, when she was feeling rushed, that she discovered a U-Store-It outside Mentor with a stockade fence and a dirt road running through the pines behind it. Across the raw lumber, kids had sprayed their illegible fluorescent-red names.

She walked Ollie along the fence until he stopped, sniffing at a weedy mound. She pulled him away twice, and both times he came back to the same spot. “Good boy,” she said, giving him a treat, and looped his leash around a tree.

She prodded the mound with her walking stick. The dirt was sandy and loose, and she went back to her car for the shovel.

She dug her first hole deep, then shallow ones every three feet. She was out of shape, and had to dip her head and wipe her face on her shoulder. It was cool out, and when she stopped for a drink of water the sweat on her neck made her shiver. By the time she reached the middle of the fence, the sky was starting to get dark. At the four corners of the self-storage, high floodlights popped on, buzzing and drawing bugs, throwing weird shadows. She checked her cell phone-it was almost five. She needed to go home and get ready for work. Rather than leave the site unguarded overnight she decided to call the FBI.

They told her it was too late in the day. They’d send someone out to talk to her tomorrow.

When she complained to her older son, he asked how long she’d been doing this.

The agent they sent asked the same question. He looked over her binders and the picture of the girl on the mantel and the big map tacked up in the kitchen.

“I’m just trying to help,” she said. “If it was one of my kids, I’d want everybody to pitch in.”

“I would too,” the agent said soothingly, as if it was common sense.

The next day they took her out to the site in an unmarked Suburban to watch a backhoe dig a trench along the fence line. Agents in windbreakers and latex gloves sifted the dirt through metal screens, then spread it on tarps for the dogs. A project like this would have taken her weeks, and she was glad she’d called. She imagined the girl’s mother hearing the news. She didn’t care about getting the credit. It was enough to know the girl was finally home.

They found nothing. Just dirt. Worms. It had all been a coincidence. As the agent said, there was graffiti on everything these days.

Meaning she was crazy.

Dropping her off, he thanked her. “I know your heart was in the right place.”

Was it? She could admit that at least part of the reason she was searching for a stranger’s daughter was that no one else needed her. Just Ollie.

She promised her sons to take a break after that. She took down the map and stored the picture in a drawer and watched the last weeks of fall pass.

Honoring her pledge was easier in the winter. She used the time to rethink her strategy and stockpile supplies. Some sites recommended a pitchfork to turn the soil, others a pickax. On paper, again and again, she rearranged her trunk, as if she were traveling cross-country. She enrolled Ollie in an online course for sniffer dogs, practicing with scented rags in the backyard. He didn’t always get them right away, and stood looking at her as if she might give him a hint.

“Do you want to pass or not?” she asked. “Or am I just wasting my time?”

She kept an eye on the Web site, and cruised the chat groups for news. She was afraid one day the page would come up and say she’d been found, but month after month, nothing changed. It had been two and a half years. Besides the family, she might be the only person looking for her.

In March the ground thawed and she tacked up the map. She’d turned her older boy’s room into a command center, emptying his desk and filling the drawers with her notebooks. On a brand-new corkboard she posted her schedule. Four days a week she’d search, weather permitting. She’d been too impatient in the fall, letting her emotions get the best of her. She’d actually expected to find the girl her first time out, as if she were psychic. She needed to be calm and methodical. If she was going to succeed, it would be because she knew how to work.

Ollie just liked riding in the car and going for walks. He had his certificate, but the death scent made him sneeze. The smells that interested him came from other dogs, and he immediately covered them with his own, lifting his leg and making her wait. As spring turned to summer the only thing he’d discovered was a bee’s nest, provoking a swarm and earning him a bump on the nose. He would have stayed and tried to fight them if she hadn’t dragged him away.

She made the mistake of telling her younger son, who told her older son, who called and said he thought they agreed she was going to stop.

“I don’t see why you’re so upset,” she said.

“I’m worried about you. Do you understand why?”

“No.”

“That’s why,” he said.

After that, every time he called, he made a point of asking how the search was going.

She refused to lie.

“The same,” she said.

“What does that mean?”

It meant she was ranging farther and farther west, devoting whole weeks to a single exit off the interstate, tromping the buggy jungles behind truck stops and fireworks outlets, breaking ground by every stockade fence she came across, graffitied or not. Her knees creaked, her arms ached, and then at work she had to lean over the conveyor and lift a gallon of milk into someone’s cart, and she thought maybe he was right. She was too old to be doing this.

There was always the possibility James Wade had been lying. As her map filled with pins, she tried not to let it bother her.

In August, jumping a drainage ditch, she twisted her ankle and missed three weeks, ruining her schedule and giving her son a new excuse to badger her. To catch up she went out five days a week, but felt like she was rushing, cutting corners. The weather was mild, Indian summer lingering deep into October. If it held up (and the Weather Channel said there was a chance), she’d have a shot at finishing.

One bright afternoon she was outside Fairport Harbor, behind a Ryder truck center, when Ollie stopped and lay down in a shallow trough filled with pine duff. He rested his head on his paws and flattened his ears back as if he were being punished. It wasn’t anything she’d taught him.

“Come on, get up.” She whistled and clapped, and still he didn’t budge. She had to coax him away with a treat and tie him to a tree, and even then he hunkered down, cowering.

The Ryder place wasn’t a self-storage, and the fence, though heavily tagged, was chain link with green plastic slats, but she went to get the video camera anyway.

The trough was tub shaped, around five feet long, and sunk a few inches below the ground around it. She brushed away the leaves and pine needles and laid the pitchfork beside it for scale, narrating as she panned along the fence. “November third, 2008, 1:27 P.M.”

When she’d gotten enough coverage, she set down the camera and took up the pitchfork. She dug into the very center of the trough, jabbing the prongs through the crust, pushing it deeper with her foot, pulling back on the handle so the ground cracked and broke around the tines. She stuck it in again, levering open a hole.

Behind her Ollie whined.

“Shush,” she said.

The third time she dug down and yanked back, the pitchfork snagged on a swath of fabric.

It was discolored with mud and stank of mildew, but was unmistakably a piece of green nylon, a wisp of white batting poking from a hole.

She set aside the pitchfork, tossed away her gloves and tugged at the piece, pulling another couple inches through the dirt. It was the shell of a sleeping bag, she could see the thick seam of the zipper. With a finger she wiped at the crumbling mud, revealing rusty teeth.

Thank God, she thought. What would Brian say now?

As long as she’d waited for this moment, she didn’t want to see what was inside. The thing to do was stop and call someone, but after last year, she couldn’t. She knelt beside the hole, digging it free with her bare hands. This time she would make sure. Then everyone would know she wasn’t crazy.