Page 26 of Last Seen
Where has she seen this name?
She scrambles back to the missing persons notice. Scans it. The narrative is brief. No names are listed. Just a phone number to call if there is information.
It’s too late—too early—to call the number, so she plugs it into the reverse directory and comes up blank. But the area code is 6-1-7—that’s Boston.
It’s not out of the realm of reason that her sister had friends in Boston, especially if she went to Harvard. She probably lived there, maybe after graduating.
She searches “Boston Missing Persons” plus “Catriona,” and there’s a hit. A long-out-of-date WordPress mommy blog has a very serious entry about a friend of a friend’s ex-wife going missing. The friend of a friend is named Tyler.
Halley is going mad trying to put together the pieces. She tries looking him up on Facebook, but there are about forty Tyler Armstrongs. It’s not a unique name. But when she puts in “Harvard” plus “Tyler Armstrong,” she sees an entry. The face is unfamiliar, but the city he’s from is not. Nashville, Tennessee, is listed as his hometown.
Her hometown, too. But her memories of Nashville are so fuzzy, she can barely recall her life there.
She’s going at this wrong. Maybe she needs to put herself back in the setting. Over the years, she hasn’t thought much about her childhood in Nashville. It’s a fun connection—it seems like everyone she’s ever met knows someone who lives in Nashville. But Halley hasn’t been back. Plus, she was so little. Losing her mom and Cat was so traumatic. She remembers the feelings of pain and loss, but nothing detailed.
She closes her eyes and thinks about their house. Goes for sensory details. It was on a quiet tree-lined street in an area called Belle Meade. It was a cottage, white brick, near the golf course, with a grassy backyard and a gray patio. There was a yellow plastic slide. She fudges in a sliding glass door—there was a door from the backyard to the living room, but it could easily have been something else—and enters. Inside ... Her room is pink. Back to the living room. The carpet soft under her bare feet. There is a thick slab of dark wood above the fireplace, and she turns—blackness slams her mind. It’s unrelenting obsidian, like staring at an empty chalkboard. There is nothing else.
Interesting.
Wondering if she should look into some sort of memory regression therapy, she moves her child self outside the cottage.
She can remember a spring day, with forsythia blooming. Halley was in first grade at the church school down the street from their house. Cat, a decade older and infinitely cooler, went to West End School. She had her driver’s license and was newly in charge of dropping off and picking up Halley. She remembers there were arguments about it, but Cat showed up every day, on time. It wasn’t until she picked up her friend, too ... Damn, what was that girl’s name?
She gets up and stretches, her poor brain feeling as strained as if she’d just taken the hardest final of her life.
She runs in place for a few minutes. Pretty girl. Buck teeth. Buck teeth ... They called her Bucktooth ... Tracy, that was her name. She had a bunch of siblings, and she was nice to Halley because her brother was a friend of Cat’s. And his name was ... “Tyler!” she shouts triumphantly. “I will be damned.”
Tracy and Tyler Armstrong grew up on the same street as Halley and Cat.
She gives her left shoulder a little punch, a “Well done, you,” then grabs an old, half-used spiral-bound notebook from the junk drawer. She needs to start keeping track of all this information, and this is how she’s been trained to think. Exploration of the smallest details, from start to finish, documented.
It doesn’t hurt that she has a very good memory, not quite photographic but remarkable enough that she rarely has to write things down. That’s also something she needs to explore, because if her memory is so clear from the time they get to Marchburg on but so vague about the most traumatic event of her life, then something is wrong. It’s almost like it was interfered with, the way she blanks out every time she thinks back to the accident. The murder, now.
She glances at the clock. It’s almost six. The sun is up. Despite the lack of sleep, she feels jazzed and decides to start the coffee and launchherself into the day. She can nap later, after the FedEx comes and she’s visited her dad in the hospital. She has the distinct feeling he might know more than he’s letting on.
Then she needs to call the mystery number on the missing persons report, and Harvard and the Boston police department, and track down Tyler Armstrong.
Leave this to the professionals, Halley,her mind says.
Shut up,she tells it.
Chapter Eleven
Catriona
Brockville Artist Colony
Literature Workshop
2002
I look up to see every person in the critique group staring at me, and not in a good way. I shuffle the typed pages into a neat stack.
“Um, that’s the end of the story.”
The assignment was to write something autobiographical, and admittedly, I’ve gotten a bit carried away, especially imagining the gruesome deaths of my fictional husband and the nanny. But all in all, I thought it was a solid short story—one of my better ones. Though by the rude interruption and the shocked looks, I have clearly unnerved my fellow students.
I fight back a smile. I’m not entirely surprised. I have that effect on people.
