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Chapter One
Where Are You Going,
Where Have You Been?
"George?" Lois Larkin called out to her fourth-grade class. Her voice was muffled, and she held the attendance book close to her nose. It was a sunny Tuesday morning in September, and the clock tower had not yet chimed nine A.M.
"Uh huh," George answered. He was chewing on a red Crayola.
Lois raised her wet eyes from the book. "George, don't eat that. It'll make you thick." Then she took a deep breath, just like she'd learned in speech therapy, and corrected herself: "Sick."
George pulled the crayon out of his mouth. Its entire top half was missing, and his teeth were coated in red wax. Lois shook her head. George Sanford: not the brightest of God's children.
Lois Larkin was twenty-nine years old, and had been teaching fourth grade since she'd moved back to Corpus Christi seven years ago. Her figure was slender but curvy—what the barflies at the Dew Drop Inn called "slammin'." When the boys and even the girls in her class daydreamed out the window, they were usually fantasizing about the feel of her long, black hair, and the scent of her NILLA Wafer-flavored breath.
Kids loved Lois. Parents loved her. Drunks hooted happily at her. Even animals flocked to her. Lois was lovely save for one flaw. The space between her two front teeth was so wide she could cram a pencil through the gap. She'd submitted to six years of braces through middle and high school to close it, but nary a month after the metal cage in her mouth was clipped, her teeth migrated to their nascent terra firma, and the gap returned. When she was excited she lisped, and spit sprayed through the fissure, landing like an indifferent plague on the faces of friends and foes alike. Today, for example, the open page of her attendance book was damp.
"Jameth Walker?" Lois asked.
"Here," James called.
"No kicking, James. Feet thraight ahead . . . straight ahead."
"Yeth, Mith Loith," James sang. His smug grin spread from ear to ear. Lois's first instinct was to crack the boy on the head with her soft book, but instead she continued.
"Caroline?"
"Here, Miss Lois!" Caroline waved both hands in the air and squirmed in her chair like she had to take a piss. It occurred to Lois that maybe she didn't like kids so much.
Lois blotted her eyes with a snot-covered tissue. Took a deep breath. Said the words slowly. "Boys and girls, I have thomething called an allergy. Do you know what that is? Ith when you sneeze a lot and your eyes get all watery. For some people, like Johnnie, dogs make them sneeze. For me, ith mold and ragweed. I'm not crying. Do you understand?"
They nodded. Caroline raised her hand and moaned: "Oh! Oh!"
"Yeth, Caroline."
"I have an allergy to penicillin. That's an antibiotic, for, like, if you get AIDS."
Lois nodded. "That's very serious, Caroline, and good to know. Now, ith Kerry here today?"
"Yes."
"Alex Fullbright? . . . Michael Fullbright?"
The list went on.
In fact, Lois was lying. She wasn't suffering from allergies. She was crying. But today was the big class trip, and though she'd wanted to stay home, there hadn't been time to call in a substitute. So here she was, lisping her way through attendance and praying that some snot-nose like James Walker didn't raise his hand and finally point out the obvious—she wasn't wearing her engagement ring.
In hindsight, what happened wasn't surprising. A part of her had always known that Ronnie and Noreen were no good. When they used to tell her about some heartbreakingly stupid decision they'd made, like spending their paychecks on lottery tickets instead of rent, the evidence had been as plain as the gap between her teeth; these people were useless. But then she'd forget, because Ronnie's house was a sty that smelled like stale milk, and who else would remember to open the windows so he didn't get a headache? Because sure, Noreen was mean as Joan Crawford on diet pills, but deep down, she had a huge heart, right? You just had to look with a magnifying glass. Besides, Lois wasn't perfect, either. She lisped, collected bugs, and snacked on raw hamburger meat when she was premenstrual, for Christ's sake.
Besides, it wasn't their fault her life turned out so crappy. She should never have moved back to Corpus Christi after college. At the University of New Hampshire, she'd been happy. Unlike in high school, where she'd felt like a big-boned giant, college men had asked her on dates. She found friends who shared her love for the Science and Nature category of the Genus edition of Trivial Pursuit. She stopped covering her mouth when she talked, because it turned out that so long as she apologized, people were okay with an occasional ocean spray.
But during the winter of her senior year, her father had been driving down the road that connected Corpus Christi to Bedford. His Nissan hatchback skidded on black ice and flipped once before it landed in the woods. The dashboard crumbled, shattering both his legs. It happened late at night, and his frozen body wasn't found until the morning. No one could explain why he'd left a warm bed and his slumbering wife, Jodi Larkin. He had no secret girlfriend, and he didn't smoke or drink. He'd still been belted into the driver's side of the car when the snowplow driver found him. Even with a set of broken legs, most people would have crawled out the open passenger door and searched for help, but not Russell Larkin. They found his cell phone in his pocket, reception clear as a bell, but he never made a single call. Probably, it wasn't a suicide. He'd just wanted to go out for a drive, feel the night air, and look at the stars. Yes, she'd reassured herself; it probably wasn't a suicide.
The Missing. Copyright © by Sarah Langan. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
Excerpted from The Missing by Sarah Langan
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