The late drive home from Saint Margaret’s was quiet, most of the boys flattened by the disappointment of high expectations. Terence stared out the window into the night, his blurry reflection—two holes for eyes, a slack, round mouth—the face of a befuddled ghost. I hadn’t seen him dance with anyone, which saddened me. Only Rusty Scarwood claimed to have had a good time, and judging by the lipstick at the corner of his mouth, I suspected he was telling the truth. He held court at the back of the minibus, talking in a low voice as a few boys listened with mingled awe and regret about how he had gotten a girl’s phone number.
I tried to focus on the road, my head filled with Abby Davenport. Seeing her had shaken me, almost more than what Pelham Greer had told me about Fritz. How had she ended up teaching French at Saint Margaret’s? What had her friend Kerry meant about Abby hating music? Was she seeing anybody? I hadn’t noticed a wedding ring, but had I really looked? She walked away from me so quickly. Had she walked away because I brought up painful memories, or because she hated me? Did she know anything about Fritz? And if she did, how was I going to find out? These thoughts played in my head like a feedback loop, amplifying one another without providing an answer. But on that long drive back to Blackburne, I did reach one conclusion: seeing Abby only confirmed my resolve to find out what I could about Fritz.
LATER THAT WEEK, I drove to the sheriff’s office outside of Staunton. It was a whitewashed cinder-block bunker with small windows and glass double doors in a heavy steel frame, all offset by a dusting of red and white flowers and low scrub bushes for landscaping. As I sat in the parking lot behind the wheel of my car and looked at the front doors with the sheriff’s logo on them, I wondered what the hell I was going to say to Sheriff Townsend. I’d called his office the day before, hoping to schedule a phone meeting, but as soon as a receptionist had answered, I had abruptly hung up. My thought at that moment was that I would be more likely to get a response, maybe even some answers, if I spoke with the sheriff in person about Fritz’s case. My experience with agents and editors in New York was that it was harder for someone to bullshit you to your face than over the phone.
Now that I was here, however, I was having second thoughts. Why would he speak to me in the first place? I wasn’t a family member, I had no new information to contribute—Pelham Greer’s info notwithstanding—and he had no obligation to tell me anything about Fritz’s case. I was also suffering from an irrational fear that by going into the sheriff’s office, I would run the risk of getting into some kind of trouble. I had always had a healthy respect for cops, but I had also been slightly afraid of their ability to put people in jail. Once in college, I had been pulled over for suspicion of DUI—the officer told me he thought I’d been weaving. I hadn’t been, but I humbly submitted to the field sobriety tests while three of my classmates sat in the car. When I was done, one of them, Dax Mullen, angrily muttered, “Town and gown, man. He just did that shit ’cause he saw the UVA parking sticker on your car.” He had urged me to go to police headquarters in Charlottesville to file a complaint, but I had declined. When it comes to the police, I am the kind of guy who hopes I never get stuck in a lineup, because I know I would look guilty enough to be mistakenly picked as the drug dealer or the hit-and-run driver or the child molester.
As I sat in the car, squeezing the steering wheel until my knuckles started to ache, two uniformed deputies came out the front door and walked past me to their cruiser. One of them swiveled his head to look at me, as if he were wondering why I was casing the building. That was enough to get me out of the car and headed for the glass doors, my heart thudding furiously.
As luck would have it, Sheriff Townsend was in, and I had to wait no more than ten minutes on a bench in the tiny waiting room before a female deputy waved me back to his office. Townsend was around fifty, with a suggestion of roundness in his features—his face, shoulders, even his hands. He wasn’t fat, exactly; he looked like he knew his way around a buffet, but his handshake was firm, and he sat easily enough in his leather chair behind a massive wooden rampart of a desk.
I started by introducing myself as a Blackburne grad and said that I was interested in the Fritz Davenport case from 2001. His eyebrows lifted slightly at that, but he said nothing, so I explained how I had been Fritz’s roommate and very close to his family and, now that I had returned to Blackburne as a teacher, my interest in Fritz’s disappearance was sharper than it had been in a long time. Sheriff Townsend was sympathetic. “No one wants to lose a friend,” he said. “But to lose a friend like that, just vanishing . . .” He shook his head. “I sympathize, Mr. Glass. How can I help? Please understand,” he added, waving a hand over his desk, as if dispelling an unpleasant truth, “there’s not much to tell.”
“Is there anything to tell?”
He smiled briefly, creases appearing and then disappearing in his round face. “Well, we never found him, obviously. And not for lack of trying. Local and state police in Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Maryland, Pennsylvania, D.C.—all involved. Of course, we helped spearhead the initial search efforts. No evidence of foul play. No physical evidence of any kind, really. In this type of situation, it’s the lack of physical evidence of a person that’s the problem.” He gave another brief, sympathetic smile, and then his face smoothed over, becoming professional again. “No eyewitnesses actually saw him leave campus. There was no ransom note, no letter home from Fritz saying he was fine, no nothing.”
I looked at Sheriff Townsend’s desk. Aside from two neatly stacked-and-squared wire in- and out-boxes, a phone, and a blotter, the desk was immaculate. “I’m sorry, Sheriff, but . . . have you been reviewing this case recently?” I asked.
He looked at me, his smooth face fractionally more serious. “Why do you ask?”
“Well, you seem to remember quite a lot about it. You don’t have the file in front of you, and it was nine years ago . . .”
Townsend’s features relaxed, and he gave me a rueful smile. I was beginning to realize that Sheriff Townsend had several smiles in his repertoire. “Not the kind of case you forget,” he said, almost apologetically. “I was a deputy at the time, running our criminal investigations division. We were the guys on point for this case.”
“Do you have any idea what could have happened to him?”
Townsend exhaled and leaned back in his swivel chair, the leather creaking beneath him. “You’ve got eight hundred thousand people reported missing each year in the United States,” he said. “More than half of them are eighteen or younger. Most are runaways, and lots of them come back within three days. Some are kidnapped, usually in some sort of parental custody issue. Some are victims of violent crime. But some just go right off the radar. You never find them. Never. It’s horrible for the families. They just want to know.” He sighed. “I can’t imagine how hard it was for the Davenports to do what they did.”
“What do you mean?”
He glanced at me. “That’s the other reason I remember the case pretty well,” he said softly. “They had him declared legally dead, just last year. Got a copy of the death certificate for our files.”
I stared at him. “What . . . How did they do that?”
“Law says someone can be declared legally dead if he’s been missing for seven years with no sign. The Davenports held on for eight, but they finally went to a judge and got him to declare his death in absentia. It’s terrible, but a family can go through that kind of thing for only so long. It’s a way to come to terms, awful as it sounds.”
I’m sure Townsend said something else, but it didn’t register as I just sat there, staring blankly at him. The Davenports had declared Fritz legally dead. The news was like a heavy door swung shut with a boom that sent dust flying. No wonder Abby had reacted oddly when I’d shown up at the dance at Saint Margaret’s.
Walking down the hall with Townsend toward the front door, the sheriff apologizing again for not having more to tell me, I gazed blankly at the flyers pinned to bulletin boards on the walls. A Most Wanted poster for a suspected bank robber. Public service announcements about seat belt use. A picture of a child—a little girl, age seven—missing since last month. And then I found myself in front of what looked like an invitation to an office party. It was in honor of Deputy Lester Briggs, who was retiring.
“Something wrong, Mr. Glass?” Sheriff Townsend asked.
“I . . . no.” Briggs was the deputy who had come to my room with Sam Hodges the night Fritz had disappeared. The flyer for his retirement party was dated more than a month ago. “I just saw this flyer here and remembered that Deputy Briggs was one of the first officers out at Blackburne after Fritz disappeared.”
Sheriff Townsend kept his face neutral, although I thought I saw his eyes tighten just a bit. “He was a good officer,” he said. “Retired just last month.”
I nodded. “I’d like to thank him, for everything he did with Fritz’s case and all,” I said. “Does he live around here?”
He pondered this. “I believe he said he was moving to Florida,” he said. “Wanted to go fishing and live near a beach.” He held out his hand and we shook. “Good luck, Mr. Glass,” he said. He watched me through the glass doors as I walked to my car, his expression obscured by the sunlight glaring off the glass, transforming him into a shadowy apparition in the doorway.