I was not supposed to leave Mrs. Audrain’s house until much later, and she had promised to have me driven back to campus after the party concluded. But the cryptic call immediately had me putting on my coat and making a feeble excuse. Before Mrs.Audrain could protest, I ran out the front door and down the steps into the chilly December night.
Without a car I’d have to walk back, and in the snow; what might have been a leisurely stroll would surely become a much slower and more cumbersome task. But I could not think what else to do. There were no taxis in town. Forty minutes. It would take me forty minutes to walk back to our dorm.
Luckily, it had stopped snowing. I stuffed my hands in my pockets and hurried down the road. It was an easy path to Stoneridge from Mrs. Audrain’s house—the street that took you to the college was the main artery of the town. It swept by the libraryand the park with its gazebo, rounded the central cemetery, and then curved by the ocean. I had walked this route many times.
However, the snow on the ground and the night altered the town and certain landmarks vanished. Predictably, I found myself suddenly walking down Neptune Street rather than following Pickman Road. I was walking in the wrong direction.
I turned around, changed course, but I was growing cold. My breath was a plume of smoke. Only once did a car traverse the street I was following, and it didn’t stop when I waved at it, hoping I might hitch a ride.
I tried to walk faster, pushed myself until I was running, and by the time I reached the front of Joyce House beads of sweat rolled down my neck. I stormed inside and almost lost my footing on the staircase.
When I reached our room, the door was wide open.
Ginny wasn’t there.
Her winter coat hung from a hook, her scarf and gloves were on the shelf where she normally left them, and her boots were tucked under it. Her knitting basket lay on the floor, overturned, but otherwise nothing looked amiss. She couldn’t have stepped outside without her winter clothes. She had to be inside the dorm.
I rushed down the hallway, hoping I’d find her in Carolyn’s room or with another of the girls. Carolyn’s door was closed and she didn’t seem to be in. I bumped into Bertha Trumbull and asked about Ginny. Bertha hadn’t seen her.
I ran downstairs and found the house phone. The receiver was off the hook. I carefully put it back in place. Dread pooled in my stomach. I felt that time was running out.
I stepped outside, walked around the house, and found a trail of footprints leading away from the dorm, away from the college grounds. It had stopped snowing a scant hour before, which meant the prints were freshly made.
I followed their trail. The light of the moon reflected on the snow was so bright the land around me seemed to glow, and I had no trouble seeing where I was going.
Abruptly, the footprints became a confused jumble and the trailended by the bend of a road, under a tree. On the snow there was a single smudge, like a red flower poking through the bone-chilling whiteness. It was a drop of blood.
The sight of it terrified me.
“Ginny!” I screamed at the night, but there came no answer.
My hands felt frozen stiff and the sweat that had trickled down my neck was growing cold. I stumbled down toward the road clumsily, not knowing where I was headed.
Then I stopped.
I had the sensation that there was something nearby, something dangerous and cunning and sharp. I saw nothing, heard nothing, yet my heart beat quickly and my dread was bubbling up, becoming panic.
“Ginny!” I cried out.
I stepped back, retreated toward the tree, my hand pressed hard against its trunk. The bark bit into my fingers.
It was starting to snow again, and as I squinted into the dark, I felt a deep alarm. It spread down my nape, my back, down to the very soles of my feet, making my eyes water and my teeth chatter violently.
Once, when Irene and I went camping in Arizona, we accidentally stumbled onto the nest of a rattlesnake. When I saw that reptile, my reaction was swift and immediate; I jumped back, driven not by reason but by blind fear. It was, perhaps, an instinctive reaction to encountering such an animal.
I can compare that moment in the snow to my encounter with the snake. It was as if the dark held a primeval terror, and upon encountering it my only possible reaction was the limbic response of flight. I ran away, stumbling madly through the snow, unseeing.
I did not stop running until I reached our dorm, and it was only after I flung the front door open, clutched a cup of hot tea, and spoke in anxious murmurs to our house mother that the feeling that something hungry and dangerous lurked outside began to fade away.
—
From the outset, theinvestigation into Ginny’s disappearance was botched; the twin forces of propriety and prejudiceseemed determined to stifle any leads. The incompetent police officers who appeared at our doorstep were dismissive of the case. They said Ginny was probably out late, at a party, and would surface later. Edgar’s desperate pleas for help finally moved them to ask a few questions and gather statements during the subsequent days.
Yet scant progress was made. Soon, the theory that Ginny had run off with Santiago had taken root and they seemed to lose interest in the case, if they’d ever had any. Ginny’s family back West, made aware of the rumors of a secret love affair, seemed glad to let the issue drop.
I learned, after talking to Ginny’s father, that she had eloped with a boy two years before—Terry, who’d stolen a car—that they had been brought back home after a couple of days and the whole matter hushed up. This seemed to seal the case in most people’s minds. Edgar loudly declared that he didn’t believe Ginny had run away on him.
People pitied him. They said that he was naïve.
