“They used to talk about her, didn’t they? At least I have the impression that they spoke often.”
“They did, eventually. Betty and Edgar were not in touch for several years. When she moved to New York, they reconnected. Betty would come up, stay with me for a few days, and pay Edgar and Carolyn a visit. Such a sad case that was, Ginny’s disappearance.”
“I’m told the most popular theory was that Ginny ran off with a boy.”
She was getting used to the taste of the tea and drank more.
“Santiago, yes, I heard that. I never believed it. It didn’t add up. Not when you looked carefully at the timeline.”
“What do you mean?”
Hoffman clasped his hands and leaned forward. “I was working at a newspaper when Ginny vanished. Naturally, I tried covering her story. Santiago Ferreira lived in a rooming house in Temperance Landing. Like most of the young men there, he had trouble finding employment. We were in the middle of the Great Depression and folks were bouncing from gig to gig. He had little money and no car.
“This means that if Santiago and Ginny ran away together, they would have had trouble getting around. Of course, they could have walked to the train station and taken the train, but no one saw two young people walking down the road that day. Nor did anyone remember seeing them on the train. The men who had cars hadn’t given them a lift.”
“I suppose someone outside the rooming house could have given them a ride,” she said, trying to picture the scene. A secret rendezvous, then a swift getaway in a borrowed vehicle. It was unlikely, but she did not feel at liberty to voice more sinister theories.
“Yes. But here’s the problem: How could Santiago be arranging an elopement when he had been missing for five days?”
She shook her head. “I don’t understand. Santiago went missing before Ginny?”
“When I talked to his housemates, they said he hadn’t been seen since December 14. Ginny went missing December 19. Did he go away and come back for Ginny? If so, why didn’t he also pick up his clothes, his money, his correspondence? Those were all back at the rooming house. Besides, he’d landed a full-time job at the Wingrave Manufacturing Company. First couple of days in December he started at the company.
“One of the other men in the rooming house also worked there. He and Santiago walked to the factory and back together. I wanted to talk to more factory employees, maybe find out if Santiago might have left a clue to his whereabouts in his locker, but Mr. Wingrave wouldn’t hear of it. He didn’t want anyone associating his company and personnel with Ginny’s disappearance. Bad press and all that, especially if it turned out the man had done something to her. He phoned my editor, and my editor told me to forget about Ginny and Santiago. I was a copyboy trying to become a journalist. I did as I was told.”
“Did you tell the police about any of this?”
“I spoke to an officer and told him Santiago’s belongings were all back in his room and he hadn’t given any hints he planned to go anywhere. I doubt they investigated it.”
“I would have thought Edgar would have asked them to look into it.”
“He probably asked, but I got the impression Ginny’s family didn’t want people poking too hard at the case. I heard she’d run off with a guy a year or two before. Her father dragged her back all the way from Chicago. They thought she was up to her usual high jinks.”
“I understand that. But didn’t anyone investigate Santiago’s disappearance?”
“The police didn’t care what happened to folks like Santiago; he was just a mill boy, a nobody. They didn’t push too hard with Ginny’s case, and she was a wealthy girl. Do you think they would even bother to open a case file for someone like Santiago?”
It was her turn to grow quiet. He stood up. “I’ll get the boxes.”
The boxes were labeledBettyin black marker and Minerva opened the flaps with careful, reverent fingers. Inside, she found a scrapbook that didn’t contain any photographs or family memorabilia. Instead, newspaper stories had been pasted on each page, along with passages photocopied from old books.Missing since November 1, 1979. Last seen in 1954. Vanished 1960.
“The Black List,” she said. “They tracked missing persons stories and told each other ghost stories.”
“It was their way of coping. Death hurts, yet the wound heals. But when Ginny went missing, it left a void. No scar tissue could be formed.”
“How did it begin? Telling ghost stories, keeping the Black List.”
He refilled his cup of tea and motioned to her. She nodded and he poured more tea into hers, too. “I suppose it began in the summer of ’66. That’s when Betty went to New York. After Irene, her other girlfriends were short-lived affairs, and then, when she did try moving in with someone new, that girlfriend cheated on her. She was feeling lonely, nostalgic. She was finalizing her novel.”
He meantThe Vanishing.It had come out in 1969. The first reprint was three years later, when Gothic romances were all the rage, and it was packaged as one of those books, with a woman running away from a castle on the cover, even though there was no castle anywhere in the novel. The second reprint was from the eighties, during the horror boom.
“She contacted Edgar and they got together, started reminiscing. After that, they made an effort to see each other every year and they played ‘the game.’ That’s what they called their ghost stories.”
She pulled out several black-and-white photos: a young Beatrice Tremblay holding a tennis racket between her hands, Beatrice with Benjamin outside a movie theater, a group of young women by a dock, a handsome man laughing at the camera.
“That’s Edgar, when he was young,” Benjamin said, pointing at the snapshot she was looking at.
The next photo was of Carolyn, in a snappy dress and a chic hat. “Did Carolyn ever play the game?”
