Disappearing Acts

Meat sat in front of the telephone. He was trying not to call Herculeah. He began doodling on the telephone pad.

He remembered that when he was three he would write like this, big loopy letters, and when he had a page full he would run to his dad. “Another story?” his dad would say. “Want me to read it to you?”

Meat’s happiest memories of his dad were sitting on his lap, listening to the funny stories Meat had written.

“Hey, this is about a Flapdoodle. I didn’t know you knew what a Flapdoodle was!”

Meat was surprised to find that in the middle of this pleasant memory, he had dialed Herculeah’s phone number. Well, he had tried.

On the third ring a recorded voice came on. These recorded voices were always so cheerful, Meat thought, making callers who weren’t cheerful feel even worse. Mrs. Jones said, “This is Mim Jones. I can’t take your call right now, but you can leave a message at the beep, and I’ll get back to you.”

At the beep, Meat cleared his throat and said, “Herculeah, I’m going back to Broadview to look for Marcie Mullet. If you don’t want to come with me, fine! I’ll go alone. Good-bye.”

He hung up the phone, proud that he had resisted the urge to revert to childishly adding fourteen or fifteen pleases.

He took a deep breath. Now that he had announced his intention, he had to carry it out. He had to go to Broadview.

Meat put on his jacket and went out onto the front porch. He took more time than necessary zipping his jacket up. He kept his eyes on the upstairs window of Herculeah’s bedroom. He knew that was where she was and maybe if she saw him ...

To give her plenty of time, he took out the blue wallet and opened it. He stared at Marcie Mullet’s ID picture on her driver’s license. The picture didn’t actually look like the girl on the bathroom floor. Her hair had been straighter and longer, but sometimes girls changed things like that.

The statistics didn’t quite fit, either—five feet seven inches tall, 185 pounds. The girl on the bathroom floor had seemed taller than that, thinner too. Of course he wasn’t an expert on girls’ sizes.

He checked the rest of the wallet, though he knew the contents—no folding money, three quarters, two dimes.

But wait. What was this? There was a folded piece of paper behind the driver’s license.

He glanced again at Herculeah’s bedroom window. He wanted to run across the street, beat on the door.

“I found a note—a note. You have to see this!” he wanted to read it aloud, giving it the menacing quality he felt it deserved.

But he had been left standing at Herculeah’s front door enough times today. He went down the steps and at the corner turned toward Broadview.

Herculeah watched from her mother’s office window as he put on his jacket and went through the blue wallet.

She watched intently as he discovered the piece of paper, watched as he unfolded it. The look on his face made her want to run across the street and read the message for herself. But she couldn’t face Meat, not yet.

When Meat was out of sight, Herculeah picked up the phone and dialed a number of her own.

“Yes, he’s out that way. He says he’ll stop by on his way back to the station.”

She hung up the phone and waited, walking back and forth in front of the window until she saw her father’s car. She burst through the front door and was on the sidewalk before her father had opened the door.

“Two things really,” she said as they went up the steps. “One is sort of, well, police business.”

“Just listen, Dad, please. Don’t give me the finding-dead-bodies lecture. Meat went into the bathroom of Funny Bonz. Funny Bonz is a comedy club in the basement of the old hotel. There was a body on the floor—it sort of fell out of the toilet stall. Well, then the man who runs the club, Mike Howard—”

“Mike Howard ... Mike Howard,” her father said as if he were turning through a mental Rolodex.

“Yes, Mike Howard. And this is really suspicious. Mike Howard goes to check and he is gone a long time—much longer than it would take him to check. And then he comes back and says there was no body—that it was probably some sort of April Fools’ joke.”

“Maybe it was. And it’s not unusual for people to do drugs in public rest rooms.”

“I guess, but I was wondering if a body fitting this description had turned up. The corpse was a girl with brown hair, maybe dyed. Her name could be Marcie Mullet.”

“He could have gone over to Marcie Mullet’s house—it’s on Broadview—thirteen twenty-nine.”

There was a silence. Then her father said, “So what else is bothering you?”

“Dad, this is one of the worst things that has ever happened to me in my life.”

“I’m serious this time. I bought a camera in Hidden Treasures yesterday. I don’t know why I bought it except that I was drawn to it.”

“Oh, Dad. But even as I was buying it, something was bothering me about the other objects for sale on the table. Like I’d seen them before.”

“But I couldn’t think where. Anyway, whoever had owned the camera had taken nineteen exposures. I finished the roll and got it developed.” She paused to swallow. “Well, there were five pictures of Meat and Mom that I took and nineteen others.”

“Herculeah, don’t make me keep saying, ‘So.’ Just tell me what’s upset you about these pictures.”

“Yes, Meat and his dad. Well, seven of them are of Meat and his father doing normal things—like standing in front of the house and sitting on the front steps. There’s one of them in the park, and one Meat must have taken of his dad because his head’s cut off. Those were normal, everyday pictures like any father and son would take.

“And then I remembered where I’d seen all those other things at Hidden Treasures before. One time I was over at Meat’s and he went into his mother’s room. He’d bought some pecan rolls from the Lion’s Club and they’d disappeared, and Meat suspected she’d hidden them in her closet.

“So I stood outside the door as a lookout to warn Meat if his mom came home. Finally, I got curious about what was taking him so long and I went in there and he had a whole box of stuff—and now I remember that most of what was in that box was on the same table with the camera. Meat’s mom must have cleaned out her closet and taken all the stuff to Hidden Treasures.” She looked at her dad.

“And then, wouldn’t you know it, Mrs. Mac came in and caught us. Meat blurted out that he was looking for his pecan rolls, he knew she’d hidden them, and she said that she’d found the empty wrappers when she was making up his bed that morning, that he must have eaten them in his sleep.”

She handed him the seven pictures, and he shuffled through them, glancing at each one for only a moment. He looked up at her. “I take it there’s more.”

“Yes, the rest are of his father dressed for—” She made a face. “For, I guess you’d say, work.”