Carthage. Joyce Carol Oates

LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICERS with photographs of Cressida.

      Spreading a half-dozen photos across a table.

      Startling to see their daughter gazing up at them.

      Wariness in Cressida’s eyes, thin-lashed dark eyes gleaming with irony and the faintest tincture of resentment as if she’d known that strangers would be staring at her, memorizing her face, without her permission.

      In none of the photos was Cressida smiling. Not since childhood had Cressida been recorded smiling.

      Arlette had wanted to explain—Our daughter was not an unhappy person. But she refused to smile when she was photographed. Not even in her high school yearbook is she pictured smiling. And this is because . . .

      But Arlette could not utter these words. Her throat closed, she could not.

      . . . she’d said, you know that one of the pictures will be for the obituary. So you can’t ever smile. You’d be a fool to smile at your own funeral.

      IN THE LATE MORNING of Sunday, July 10, 2005, the search for the missing girl in the Nautauga Preserve began and continued until searchers were obliged to leave the park, at dusk; it was continued the next morning, until dusk; and the next morning, until dusk.

      The search differed considerably from more routine searches in the vast Preserve for lost hikers, campers, mountain climbers, numbering quite a few in the course of an average summer: for it was believed that this missing girl might have been assaulted—raped, killed?—by a man.

      The search was complicated by the possibility that the missing girl had been dumped into the Nautauga River, and her body carried far downstream.

      Yet, morale was high. Especially among those volunteer searchers who knew Cressida Mayfield and the (younger, female) park rangers who were determined to find the girl, missing in their own territory.

      It had been eleven years since anyone had been lost in the Preserve and had not been found alive; in that case, involving a young boy believed to have run away from home, in the winter, the boy’s body wasn’t found until the following spring.

      In the course of the search a miscellany of castaway items was found—rotted and desiccated articles of clothing including underwear (both men’s and women’s); single gloves, mittens; single shoes, hiking boots, and belts; mangled hats; plastic bottles, cans, and Styrofoam; maps of the Preserve, hiking books, bird books, children’s toys, a single headless doll terrifying to the volunteer searcher who discovered it believing it to be, for a moment, a headless human infant.

      Also, scattered bones determined to be the bones of animals or birds.

      Here and there, a dead, rotting animal carcass like the partially devoured doe discovered by Zeno Mayfield, that seemed to have caused the father of the missing girl to collapse in a paroxysm of exhaustion and despair.

      God if I could trade my life for hers. If that were possible . . .

      SO MANY VEHICLES parked in the Mayfields’ driveway, and along Cumberland Avenue, if the missing girl had arrived home she’d have thought it was a festive occasion.

      Muttering out of the side of her mouth, a droll remark her mother could almost hear—What’s the big deal? Juliet’s getting engaged—again?

      Bright TV camera lights in the living room as Arlette and Zeno Mayfield of Cumberland Avenue, Carthage, parents of the missing girl, were being interviewed by local TV personality Evvie Estes for WCTG-TV 6 P.M. news.

      Arlette hadn’t been able to speak. Zeno had done all the talking.

      Of course, Zeno Mayfield was very good at talking.

      His voice had quavered only slightly. His eyes pouched in tiredness were damp and seemed to have no clear focus.

      But he’d showered, and shaved, and put on clean pressed clothes, and his thick-tufted hair had been brushed properly. He knew to speak to the TV audience by way of the TV interviewer and he knew not to be nettled or discomfited by certain of the woman’s questions.

      Arlette gripped in her right fist a wadded tissue. Her tongue had gone numb. Her eyes were fixed to the rapacious eyes of the heavily made-up Evvie Estes. Her terror was, her nose would begin to run, her eyes would leak tears, unsparingly illuminated in the bright TV lights.

      Our daughter. Our Cressida. If anyone has any information leading to . . .

      Then, there came the surprise of the ten-thousand-dollar reward.

      Not one of the law enforcement officers who’d been interviewing the Mayfields had known this was coming. Judging by her confusion on camera, Arlette had not known this was coming. Zeno spoke in an impassioned voice of a ten-thousand-dollar reward for information leading to the recovery of—the return of—our daughter Cressida.

      SURPRISING NEWS—A REWARD.

      Not a great idea.

      Many more calls will come in.

      Many more calls will come in.

      FOR INSTANCE, from “witnesses” who’d sighted the missing girl, they were sure: in and near and not-so-near the Nautauga Preserve.

      As far north as Massena, New York. As far south as Binghamton.

      In a 7-Eleven. Hitchhiking. In the passenger seat of a van headed south on I-80.

      Wearing a baseball cap pulled low on her forehead.

      Wearing sunglasses.

      Coming out of the Onondaga CineMax on Route 33, with a bearded man—the movie was The War of the Worlds with Tom Cruise.

      As far north as Massena, New York. As far south as Binghamton.

      Dozens of calls. In time, hundreds.

      Most valuable were calls from “witnesses” claiming to have been at the Roebuck Inn on the night of Saturday, July 9.

      Guys who knew Corporal Kincaid by sight. Women who’d seen a girl they suspected to be, or believed to be, or knew to be Cressida Mayfield, at the inn: in the crowded taproom, on the deck overlooking the lake, in the women’s room “sick to her stomach”—“splashing water on her face.”

      One of the bartenders, who knew Kincaid and his friends Halifax, Weisbeck, Stumpf—“The girl came in from somewhere. Like she was alone, and kind of scared-looking. In jeans, a black T-shirt, and some kind of top, or sweater. Not the kind of girl who turns up at the Roebuck on Saturday night. Maybe she was with Kincaid, or just ran into him. I think they left together. Or—all of them left together. It was a pretty loud scene, with the band on the deck. But definitely, it wasn’t any bikers she was with—this girl ‘Cressida.’ Hey—if other people call about Kincaid, and it turns out it’s him, like if the girl is hurt—do we split the ten thousand dollars? What’s the deal?”

      And there was an ex-girlfriend of Rod Halifax, named Natalie Cantor, claiming to have been a “friend” of Juliet Mayfield’s in high school, who called Zeno Mayfield’s office phone to tell him in an incensed, just perceptibly slurred voice that whatever happened to his daughter, Rod and his buddies would know—“Once, the bastard got me drunk, slipped some drug into a drink, he’d been wanting to break up with me and was acting really nasty trying to pimp me to his disgusting buddies—Jimmy Weisbeck, that asshole Stumpf—out in his pickup. Right out in the parking lot, the son of a bitch. They’re all mean drunks. I don’t know Kincaid, but I know Juliet. I know your daughter, she’s an angel. I’m not joking, she’s an angel. Juliet Mayfield is an angel. I don’t know the other one—‘Cress’da.’ I never saw ‘Cress’da.’ Anything you want to know about that poor girl, Rod Halifax will know. I wasn’t the first girl he got tired of, and treated like shit. It was not ‘consensual’—it was God-damn fucking rape. And I was sick afterward, I mean—infected. So, ask him. Arrest him, and ask him. Anything that’s happened to that poor girl, like if they raped her, and strangled her, and dumped her body in the lake—you can be sure Rod Halifax