The first two chapters of In Silent Worlds …

Prologue

Sept 17, 9:36 a.m.

 

The sun blazes in a cloudless azure sky over Charlestown, gleaming on its pastel roofs and rippling on the teal surface of the Mystic River as it flows past the Navy Yard toward the yawning harbor. A late morning crowd moves between the town’s narrow row houses. The dog walkers and the runners. The commuters heading for the Orange Line into downtown. Heads down, headphones on. In the playgrounds kids enjoy the first sunny day in nearly a week. Their laughter echoing off the brick walls of the surrounding schools. Nobody looks toward the sky in anticipation of a celestial event. There was nothing on the news. But a few seconds after 9:36 in the morning, the sky goes dark, pitch black for a fraction of a second. A splinter of time so short that almost nobody notices. Less than one in a thousand. And the ones that do look around in confusion, shake their heads, then go on with their day. It is the same in every city, in every populated area in the world, but in Charlestown the fleeting darkness matters in a way it doesn’t anywhere else.

 

Chapter 1

Sept 17, 8:22 a.m.

 

While Keira gets the coffee machine going, Finn hikes up the window sash, letting in the fragrance of the flowers blooming in the window box, drawing comfort from the freshened air. So far so good. He hasn’t felt like this in weeks, almost normal. He’s fine, he’s going to be fine. It’s all behind him.

His shoulders relax, that tightness in his chest melts away. But soon a breeze sends other smells into the kitchen, car exhaust and something sour, the undertone of sewage and dead fish from the river, and his breathing goes shallow. Damn. He closes his eyes, bracing himself as flashlights arc back and forth through a midnight fog, callouts from the search party echoing around him. Nothing here. Nothing here either.

From behind him, Keira asks if he wants his coffee now. Her voice in the mist. Faraway, disembodied.

“Finn?”

He opens his eyes, but he’s still half there, in the dark with the gasoline fumes and the rot whirling around him, his shirt, cold and damp, clinging to his back. He sucks in enough air to say, “Sure.”

Keira lays a hand on his back, gentle, loving, a touch that pulls him out of the darkness. “You okay?”

He closes the window, manages a few calming breaths. Maybe he shouldn’t have opened it, but that was a rare gust, bad luck, bad timing. Normally you can’t smell the river from the house.

She hands him his cup, eyeing him closely. “Looks like you’re still having these episodes.”

He inhales the heady aroma of the dark roast rising up from his cup, drowning out the other smells still lingering in the kitchen, and smiles for his sister.

“I’m fine. Just some grogginess, that’s all. Haven’t had my coffee yet.”

He doesn’t want her to worry. Keira’s the best sister he could have asked for. They take care of each other, always have. But these past few weeks she’s being extra solicitous, maybe to pay him back for when he took care of her a couple of years ago. But he doesn’t have meningitis like she did, and he really doesn’t like burdening her unnecessarily. The fact that he snapped right out of the episode is a good sign. Not worth her concern.

She moves to the table with a slight limp, a lingering symptom of her illness. She has always told him it could have been way worse if he hadn’t rushed her to the hospital when he did. And now, perhaps feeling it’s her turn to encourage professional help, she says, “Maybe it’s time you finally called Dr. Leung. She’s awesome. I find it helpful to talk to her about my feelings. I think you will too.”

“I’d be happy to talk to her about your feelings.”

Keira lets out her signature singsong laugh.

He takes a seat across from her. She can talk for hours about what she’s going through. The words just flow from her. He wishes he was like his sister, but he’s not built like she is. If anyone presses him for how he’s really feeling, his whole body goes tight, his brain scrambles, words receding out of reach.

“Just call her,” she says, returning to a serious tone. “I think about all the other things you’ve been through in your life. She’d be good for you.”

In the window behind her, sunlight slanting into the canyon of the street reveals the true colors of each home. Lime, plum, rose, lavender. The rich palette of the neighborhood. That is where he should be, outside on the Charlestown roofs, hammering shingles, a good sweat going. Not the line of work he dreamed of as a kid. Back then he only ever thought of doing one thing: being a detective like his dad. But then …

He clutches his coffee mug, tells himself to shake it all off, move forward.

“Getting back to work.” He nods toward the window, the roofs. “That’s my best therapy.”

Keira stares into the hand-painted mug his wife Lill gave her the year they met in art college. “What if you have another incident?”

“I won’t.”

She watches him for a long moment, unconvinced.

He wills himself not to blink or flinch in any way. It was the closest call he ever had, but he’s still here, and he’s a pro, knows it’s better to not think about it, to get right back up there, or it gets into your head, what could have happened.

“That was a freak accident,” he says. “Once in a lifetime. Won’t have anything like that again. I promise.”

Keira picks at the chip on her coffee mug with one of her rainbow-colored fingernails. “I don’t want to worry about you getting distracted while you’re up there. You’re on leave. Just use it. Stay home till you’re fully back to normal. Plus, you have this rare opportunity to spend more time with Evie. You’ve always wanted that. This is your chance. You have a special connection with her. And who knows, it might make the difference for her now. And for you too.”

Through the kitchen doorway, five-year-old Evie, the only child he and Lill had, kneels at the living-room coffee table, drawing. Her long, chestnut brown hair drapes onto the paper, shrouding her face. In her own world. A few weeks without a word. His heart sinks. Inside her body is a perfectly functioning voice box. A set of vocal cords that produce the most beautiful sound he has ever heard. A sweet, high, vibrant voice that conveys a brilliant mind, an intelligence several years above her age. But the lever that works those cords is held back, stopped by that very same mind. A sensitive mind that has been traumatized by the tragic loss of her mother, a mind that has decided that sometimes it is easier, or safer, to stay quiet than to speak. He and Keira have tried everything, taken her to all the professionals, followed all their advice, created a home full of love and safety, but she has continued to go in and out of quiet periods. Her doctors have told them Evie’s profound giftedness makes her a special case and that, given she suffered a major trauma during a critical developmental stage, they just need to keep doing what they’re doing and hope she grows out of her selective mutism. But Finn doesn’t like relying on hope. Keira’s right. If he has a chance of making a difference now, he needs to take it.

“I’ll stay,” he says.

“And Dr. Leung?”

He is still looking at his daughter. Throughout his life he has had bouts of anxiety, panic attacks, whatever you want to call them, like he’s been having since the night by the river, but he has done his best to keep his baggage to himself, especially around Evie, and he has never had an episode in her presence. She brings something out in him that nobody else does, a calm. But maybe she picks things up from him, maybe he is holding her back. He swallows, sick that this could be true.

“I’ll call her this afternoon, after I take Evie to the playground. It’s a beautiful morning—we’ll have some fun together. That should help both of us.”

Keira bows her head. “Thank you. You two are the most important people to me.”

His lip quirks. “Where does Marcus rank?”

Keira started going out with Finn’s boss a year ago. They worried it might bother Finn, but he was happy to be the catalyst that brought them together. Big hearts made for each other.

“Distant third,” she says. “Don’t tell him.”

They share a brief laugh.

“Kiki…”

She looks up at him.

“Everything’s going to be okay.”

“I hope so.”

“Finn promises,” he says. An inside joke, alluding to when they were kids and she convinced him little brothers had to speak in the third person.

Keira laughs again. The worry that was etched on her face earlier has dissolved, for now at least.

*

Finn crouches beside his daughter as she lifts her head to the large, colorful painting on the wall above the couch. One of Lill’s pieces. A centerfold she created for her children’s book about Otrokia, a utopian planet bristling with double helix slides, carousels with rocket ships and spacecraft. A futuristic amusement park as intricate as a Bosch. The book, all her artwork for it, his wife’s opus. A legacy that perfectly encapsulates her optimism and her playfulness, the free spirit he fell hard for.

Evie was only two when Lill passed; too young to remember, people said. But he knows different. Knows that in the months afterward, the first time Evie went mute, she was thinking of her mom nonstop, burning memories into her brain. Memories that she recounts with photographic detail when she speaks. Memories that might now be a comfort to her as she stares at her mother’s painting, but also a pathway to that tragic loss.

Evie moves her pencil delicately across her drawing, a colorful and carefully rendered garden full of kids and figures that look like little robots, a creation inspired by her mother’s artwork. Finn finds himself drawn into the world she has created, trying to interpret the expressions on the faces of her characters, a sense of awe rising in him that at five she has this talent. A talent that exceeds even her mother’s, according to the teachers at Evie’s art camp, who have never seen a child draw like this, and the art critic who featured Evie and her work in the Boston Herald. A Charlestown prodigy. Someone to watch.

As sunlight streams in from the living room window, speckling the peach fuzz on her little arms, a tinge of familiar panic blooms inside him. The fear that Lill was the one who was meant to nurture their daughter, that even with his sister’s help, he won’t be enough for Evie. That he won’t ever be able to coax her out of her mutism. That he will fail her and she won’t live her destiny.

He takes a breath, does his best to put on a chipper tone. “Let’s go to the playground, Bubs. The sun is out today.”

Evie keeps drawing.

“I’ll push you on the swing, as high as you want to go. You can touch the leaves on the big tree.”

She stops drawing, remains still for a long moment, considering the offer, before picking up a blank sheet of paper from a pile on the floor next to her. She draws a simple shape, a square. Points to it. In her nonverbal phases, she communicates in pictographs. She can write as well as an eight or nine-year-old, but chooses to stick with pictures, as if writing words is the equivalent to speaking them, a loophole in her mutism she doesn’t want to take. A square can mean many things: toast, a book, a pool. Context is key to understanding.

He knows what she means now.

“Sure, we can go to the sandbox. Play that game you like.”

Perhaps as a reward for his correct guess or the excitement of going outside, maybe a bit of both, Evie smiles, a beautiful miniature replica of Lill’s, and it is like a flame has been lit inside him, lifting his mood, giving him the hope that he can keep the promise he made to Keira.

*

Evie, kneeling between his legs, runs a stick through the sand. The river left him alone on the walk to the playground, no unwelcome gusts. And here, by the sandbox, the sun is out, the air calm, carrying only the scents of sunscreen and cedar trees, the chatter of kids. When Evie taps his knee, Finn studies the figure she has just made in the sand. “Star,” he says.

She gives him a thumbs up, erases the drawing, starts another one. They’ve had the sandbox to themselves and have been going like this for five minutes. She’s drawn a spider, a bunny, an apple, a flower. All in silence. No hint that a word might be coming. Maybe a change of scenery would help, something else she loves.

“Bubs.”

She cocks her head, tilting an ear to him.

“How about we play here for a little while longer then go get some ice cream at our favorite place?”

She lays the stick on the sand and tucks the back of her head into his chest, her sign that she wants him to hold her. He wraps his arms around her and she runs the tip of her finger down one of the protruding veins that twist along his forearm, something she has loved to do ever since she was a baby. When her finger reaches his wrist, she unfurls his hand, tracing the network of callouses that scar his palm, as if trying to connect all the dots. Her touch, soft as a feather, spreads a tendril of warmth throughout his body. A peace settles within him, a feeling that only Evie evokes. A feeling he hadn’t felt for so long before her birth … since a time before memories.

He kisses the top of her head, the warm, sweet scent of her scalp holding a trace of Lill. He breathes deep. She is so much like her mother, her hair, her eyes and smile, her talent, and so many little gestures, the way she pulls on her ear while reading, stares off into space when brushing her hair. He wants to tell her all this, but he worries it would drive her deeper into herself. Maybe when she is cured, he can let her know all the wonderful traits she inherited from Lill. Which makes him wonder what she got from him. He has never been able to figure that out. But maybe her mutism is just an extreme version of his own reluctance to talk. A pang of guilt strikes him, but before that takes deeper hold, a prickle on the back of his neck pulls his attention away, to a woman about twenty yards from him, standing next to the swings.

When she notices Finn looking at her, she turns her gaze from him, from Evie. Everyone else in the playground is someone he at least half recognizes from the neighborhood. But this woman, tall and thin, long dark hair pulled back in a ponytail, is new to him, a stranger. She wears a blue jacket, out of place in the summer heat, and doesn’t appear to be watching a child.

He’s wondering who she is when a little boy leaps into the sandbox and picks up Evie’s stick, the tool she communicates with, her voice now.

Evie freezes.

“That’s my daughter’s stick.” Finn holds out his hand.

The kid pulls the stick away.

“Can you please give it back to her?”

The boy hides the stick behind his back.

Finn picks up an abandoned plastic shovel and bucket. “Let’s trade.”

The kid chews on a dirty finger then drops the stick, grabs the bucket and the shovel. Finn hands the stick back to Evie, who hugs it to her chest, while the boy feverishly builds a sandcastle.

The boy’s mother, a familiar redhead, takes a few pictures of her son’s creation—more formless mound of sand than anything resembling a fortress—with her cellphone. Behind them, Finn feels the woman in the blue jacket looking their way again, but before his thoughts can turn to her, the boy totters across the sand to Evie, asks her what her name is.

When she doesn’t answer, he stomps his foot, repeats his question.

Finn wraps his arms around Evie again. Tiny vibrations from her body pulse against his skin. Her name takes shape in his mouth, but he doesn’t utter it. She won’t say anything, not to this boy, not under this pressure, but he knows that rescuing her only teaches her she doesn’t need to speak.

“Are you a dum-dum?” the boy says.

Finn whispers in his daughter’s ear. “I wouldn’t listen to anyone who’s proud of that sandcastle.”

She squeezes his hand. The boy grimaces at Evie. It’s time to leave. But before Finn can move, he catches fragments of a hushed conversation between the two mothers nearby.

Charlotte, the girl. Poor girl.

Lucia, her mother. Poor mother.

Committed suicide this morning.

A neighbor in the projects found her.

Finn draws air into lungs as inflexible as steel. He is back there, in Lucia’s doorway, the day after they arrested Charlotte’s uncle, Lucia’s brother-in-law, for kidnapping and murder. A casserole Keira made in his hands. Before he stepped inside, she asked him, from the small dining table, where she sat in a foldout plastic chair, “What did she look like? I know you were in the group that found her. Tell me.” His hands shook, the casserole heavy, about to fall. “Were her eyes open? Were they closed?” He tried not to think about what he saw. Didn’t answer her, wasn’t sure she really wanted to know, and he couldn’t bring himself to tell her anyway. Lips tightening, she nodded a few times. A subtle, silent gesture that spoke volumes. Without Charlotte, her only child, she couldn’t go on.

“Are you okay?” A distant voice, from another world.

Hot. It’s hot. He’s sweating. His shirt is soaked through. Then his foot is slipping, a shingle coming loose, a toe board snapping. Around his waist, the harness he never clipped in. Marcus reaches for him, but he pushes him away. Seconds later, a jolt deep in his gut as his body slides down the slope of the gable, his shoe catching on the gutter, tearing it away from the roofline. He careens over the edge, plunging through the air.

Before he smashes into the ground, a voice, the woman’s voice again, asking him if he’s okay. Louder this time.

The sidewalk turns to sand. He looks up at the woman. The redhead.

“I’m fine,” he says, embarrassed.

He has had an episode in public, but worse than that, in front of Evie. He snaps his gaze to where Evie sat, but the stick lies silent next to hollows where her knees were dug in. His stomach twists. He scans the playground. Lots of children, but no sign of his. Then, a flutter of long brown hair near the corner of the school building. Relief floods him. But she’s about to turn the corner, disappear from view. If the gate is open, she could get to the street.

He’s out of the sandbox, running, calling after her.

Evie’s right hand, fingers curled, swings backward before vanishing along with the rest of her body into the void beyond the corner.

Seconds later, he charges past the corner, and when he does, everything goes suddenly dark, like an eclipse. It lasts for only an instant. Before he can begin to wonder what happened, he absorbs the view ahead—a flagstone path cutting between the façade of the school and a hedge running alongside a wrought-iron fence.

The path lies empty.

 

Chapter 2

 

Finn races down the path. To his left, a flat wall of bricks, a line of windows six feet from the ground. No doorways, no niches, no place for a child to hide. He scans the hedges to his right. If she hid in the greenery, he’d see her. Yellow shirt, blue shorts, bright colors against the green. Impossible to miss. But he sees nothing. And behind the hedge, the fence rises too high for a child to climb.

He sprints to the iron gate at the end of the path, the only way out. It’s padlocked, doesn’t budge.

He spins around. Where in the hell could she be? Could someone have taken her? Could they have climbed the fence with her, or taken her through the gate and locked it? But she was only out of his sight for a few seconds, less. There’s no way anyone could have taken her in that time. No way. His brain pulses with blood, confusion. He runs back along the path, pulling at the hedgerow, in case he somehow missed her.

Back at the corner of the school building, doubt creeps in. Maybe she snuck past him, returned to the playground. She must have. It’s the only possibility. He quickly scans the play area. Yells her name. Loud enough for parents and kids to look his way.

He tells the crowd his daughter has gone missing, describes her, asks if anyone has seen her, his tone laced with rising terror.

Heads swivel, shoulders shrug, a series of Nos.

He yells his daughter’s name again. But he knows one thing: she will not answer. Wherever she is, she is silent, wordless.

The playground has many possible hiding places: the climbing structure, the wooden platform, the tube slide, a tunnel, a garbage bin. He inspects them all. She is nowhere.

Cedar trees run along the fence that surrounds the playground on three sides—two short sides and a long one that runs parallel to the school building. Maybe she’s behind one of them. After asking the parents to check the cedars, they fan out toward the fence, their kids helping, eager to be heroes. But it isn’t long before worried faces stare back at him. Heads shaking.

His stomach lurches. Where is she? How could he have let her disappear? He needs to find her, now, right now. She has to be nearby. Nobody took her, he’s telling himself this, willing it to be true. Needing it to be true. He flings open the gate of the playground, scrambles down the steps to the sidewalk, checks up and down the street.

Hand shaking, he pulls his cellphone out of his pocket, presses the emergency call button.

“My daughter is missing.” He says it fast, knowing every second counts.

The emergency operator, a kind voice, asks for his name.

“Finn. Finn Vey.” His gaze sweeps across his surroundings, still hunting for a flash of yellow and blue, of long brown hair, but the sidewalk soon turns to cold, wet cement. He is no longer on the street beside the playground. He is standing in an industrial section on the other side of the Mystic River, past midnight in a drizzle of cold rain, staring at what the circle of his flashlight has just landed on behind an electrical equipment shed. A tiny, bone-white hand.

“Mr. Vey. Finn.” A voice in his ear. The phone. “Your daughter’s name?”

“Charlotte,” he says faintly.

“And Charlotte’s date of birth?”

Charlotte? Is that what he said? “Evie. Her name is Evie.”

“I’m sorry, is her name Charlotte or Evie?”

“Evie. Evie Vey. I don’t know where she is. Please, send the police now.”

“I will. But I’m going to need more information. Take a deep breath, and just answer everything as clearly as you can so we can find your daughter.” After a quick pause, she continues. “Evie’s date of birth.”

“August 16. She just turned five.”

He rattles off answers to the next series of questions. Height, weight, hair color, all the details she asks for—it sickens him to reduce his daughter to this, to physical descriptions, measurements. As if that is all she is. “Any medical conditions?”

“She doesn’t speak.”

“As in mute?”

“Selective mute. She can speak. She just doesn’t sometimes. She’s not speaking now.”

“Okay.” The operator asks for details about when she went missing, from where, how long she was out of his sight.

He tells her everything before she finally says the police are on their way, advising him to stay where he is.

“I need to keep looking for her. Maybe she went home.”

“They’ll be there in just a moment. They’ll need your help. And a picture of your daughter.”

After Finn hangs up, he rings Keira. It goes to voicemail. He tries again—same.

A few parents from the playground stand on the steps by the entrance gate. Anxious faces. He asks if one of them can wait for the police while he runs home to see if his daughter is there. A woman in tan shorts and flip flops steps forward, introducing herself.

Finn pulls up his photo album, looking for a photo of Evie to send to the woman, something she can show the police. He swipes through his recent photos, usually a string of Evie pics punctuated by the occasional shot of something else. But there are no photos of her—not the one of her blowing out her rainbow-colored birthday candles, not the one of her holding a ladybug in her hand, not the one of her curled up on Keira’s lap. He flips frantically back and forth through his album. Photos for work, of frayed shingles, bent pipe flanges. Where are the pictures of Evie? There are dozens of them. Hundreds probably. He can’t take enough of them. Is worried he’ll look back one day and wish he took more. No way he deleted them. He checks his deleted items anyway, doesn’t find them there.

A cold shudder tears through him.

“My phone…there’s a problem.” He describes Evie to the woman, tells her to pass the details on to the police, and then he’s off running down the sidewalk, retracing the route home. He’ll find her there, or on the way there. Nobody took her, he tells himself again. He refuses to let that fear take hold. She got out of the playground, wanted to go home to draw. It’s that simple. No reason to panic. In a matter of minutes, maybe even mere seconds, he’ll be holding Evie again.

As he rounds the corner onto Russel Street, he pulls out his phone, swipes for Marcus’s number. His call goes straight to voicemail. Breathing hard, he leaves a message, tells his friend what has happened, asks him to go to the Palmer Carston playground and help the police. Right away, as soon as he possibly can.

Racing home, his eyes probe the long, narrow street, leaping from one pedestrian to the next, searching for a hint of Evie. A five-minute walk home, a two-minute run. A slight curve of the street hides his house. Maybe she’s there, just around the bend. She knows the way. They’ve walked this route, hand-in-hand, hundreds of times.

Legs burning, on the brink of giving out, he sees Charlotte’s face in the cold glow of the flashlight. Her pale cheekbone, and lying next to it, a stuffed bunny. Just like one Evie has, but smeared with dirt.

Through the blue front door of his house, the shock of airconditioned air wicks sweat from his body. He yells for Evie, for Keira. Nobody answers. A stillness hangs in the entranceway. Something is off. In the living room, the coffee table lies clear, Evie’s artwork gone, no colored pencils. Her bunny no longer on the floor where she left it. Only a couple of postcards adorn the chrome doors of the fridge, none of Evie’s drawings.

Keira rarely tidies…

He calls out again, his feet thundering up the steps. After rounding the landing, he flies into Evie’s bedroom, except there is no bed, no dresser, no bookcase crammed with toys and children’s books. No walls with the jungle animals Lill painted. In their place, blank cream walls, a desk, a computer monitor, a bookcase with paperbacks, a windowsill with a couple of fuzzy cacti.

He’s in the wrong house.

He’s down the stairs and out the door in seconds. The lamppost and the telephone pole stand on the sidewalk, fixtures that have always faced his front door. He turns back, stares at the door he just came out of. The blue door he opened with his key. The number fixed to the lintel.

It is his door, his house.

He races back inside, up the stairs, lungs heaving, checks Evie’s bedroom again. It is still an office. His mouth goes suddenly dry. He runs down the hall to Keira’s studio, pushes open the door.

Keira, her back to the door, stands in front of an easel, headphones on, hips swaying to music only she can hear. Finn calls her name but gets no answer. He grabs her shoulder. She startles, swivels around. Upon seeing Finn, she gasps with relief, yanks out her headphones. “Jesus, you scared the crap out of me.”

“Did Evie come home?”

“What?”

“She went missing at the playground. Is she here?”

“Who?”

“Evie,” he all but screams.

Keira squints in confusion, her face twisting. “What are you talking about? Who’s Evie?”