In this issue, the third part of four in Ellen O’Neal’s short story about loss, a haiku from Michelle Parks about hope, a new concern about the little white dog, and a last word.
Carol’s Tale
SHORT STORY — Part 3 of a Four-Part Serial
IN CASE YOU MISSED THEM, READ PART 1 AND PART 2
By Ellen O’Neal
Next morning, I called the police detective in Utah, Clive Barder, told him who I was and asked if he had found anything yet.
“Ease up, Barbara Walters,” he said, “I just got started.”
I laughed. Barder told me it was mostly bad news so far, and I stopped laughing.
“Sorry to hear that,” I said. “No real surprise, I guess.”
“No, but it’s early,” Barder said. “I talked to some of Nebber Dallet’s family and a couple of his old friends. Also a couple kids who knew the daughter back in ’79. Dallet’s pals said they didn’t know where he was and they hadn’t seen him since about 1979. They were uncooperative, wary of me, which I expected, but they seemed straight.
“Same with the family,” he said. “Not too forthcoming, but what they did say seemed right enough. Dallet was no longer in the area, they said. Also, he’s not American but instead a French national who had been living here on an overdue tourist visa. Dallet’s ex-wife said he went back to France, but if we do find him she wants the alimony owed her.”
Barder said he wasn’t wholly persuaded in the ex-wife’s honesty, but most of her story made sense and fit with the other information.
“I guess I don’t trust anyone,” Barder said. “Irregardless, if Dallet took the girl to France, it will get compoundingly harder to track them down. I can file a missing persons report with Interpol, but a three-year-old case won’t get much attention.”
“What about the kids who knew her,” I asked. “Any leads?”
“I found two of her friends, both in high school now. Oh, my, they were forthcoming,” Barder said, chuckling. “Overly forthcoming. Told me everything, and I mean everything about Kelly’s lack of a love life at age 13 and how she got mixed up with Dallet. Did the mother tell you he was 51 years old when all this started?”
“No,” I said. “She told me he was older, but I figured that meant 20s or maybe 30. A creepy 51-year-old guy is just gross.”
“Exactly,” said Barder, “but he’s 54 now. There must be some kind of mathematical ratio to measure age versus level of creepiness. The two junior high friends found it disgusting, too, but they were also fascinated by the sordidness of the whole affair. They haven’t seen or heard from Kelly since ’79 either. The two of them were too far off the deep end of teeny bopper for me to know whether they were being honest or not. I’m too old to read kids anymore. I gave each of them my card, which also made them squeal with fascination.”
He said there were a couple more people he wanted to find, Sandy’s ex-husband, for instance, but so far it was not looking so hopeful.
After he finished, I told him I was planning to write up what I had for the next morning’s paper. “If you do come across anything more today, let me know,” I said. “Thanks for all your help on this.”
“No,” he said, “thank you for taking up the story. If the girl isn’t here in the Salt Lake City area, my investigation won’t get far, but who knows who’ll read your story.”
“Everyone in Port Angeles,” I said.
He laughed this time. “We have our limits, don’t we,” Barder said.
“We do.”
After we hung up, I called the Salt Lake Tribune and asked for the city editor to tell them about my story and to see if they wanted it, too. The city editor, a woman named Teresa Tyler, said she did. I told her about the dairy company angle. She said they had done a feature six months earlier about the start of the milk carton program and then a news story after its first and only success nearly two months ago. A boy on the east side of the city had gone missing and was believed to have been abducted but as it turned out he had wandered away from home and into the nearby wilderness around Mount Olympus. He was found five days later by someone who had, in fact, seen the milk cartons and spotted the kid on a cul de sac in the Holladay suburb. The kid had some mild hypothermia and was hungry as a tack-eater but otherwise fine. The city editor promised to pull both stories from their morgue and send them to me via teletext. I told her our photog would send a laserscan of the photo of Kelly.
I hung up and walked into my editor’s office to update her on the status of the story. Claudette sat at her broad desk, marking up a news brief about a church fellowship dinner and the coming glories of God. Her broad shoulders were rounded from hunching over the desk for so many years. Bobby pins held back her hair, and she bobbed her head in little movements to find the best reading angle for her bifocals. She had a fat red felt-tip pen in one hand and a spindly cigarette in the other.
“Those things will kill you,” I said.
“The pen or the church brief?”
She always said something that made me want to laugh out loud but in such a way that always kept me quiet. I smiled.
“The missing-girl story is going to make a decent news feature,” I told her.
“You know,” Claudette said, “after you told me about meeting the mother yesterday, I had my doubts about the sagacity of pursuing a story, you know, getting the mother’s hopes up, and then we move along to the next news story — the way we do — and leave her to return alone to the emptiness of a lost child, you know? But who knows though? Maybe it will help in some way for her to believe she did what she could.”
“I still needed to call the dairy,” I said. “The newspaper in Salt Lake City is sending a couple of file stories.”
“Salt Lake? Who did you talk to?” Claudette asked.
“City editor. Thompson.”
“I don’t know her name, but I do know the managing editor,” Claudette said. “I don’t mind calling if I can help.”
“Thanks, boss.”
“Don’t call me boss. And that bicycle of yours, that’s the thing that will kill you some day,” she said.
With fingers crossed behind my back, I promised I would give up the bicycle when she gave up the cigarettes.
She thought about that for a split second and said, “I guess we’re both going to die some day. But not today. Get out of here, Carol. Get that story done.”
I called the dairy and got quotes from the employee who had suggested the idea of putting missing children’s pictures on milk cartons. She had heard about the idea from a dairy in the Midwest — Iowa or Illinois — and she hoped it would catch on nationwide. Then there would be no place for abductors to hide.
They were good quotes.
I wrapped up the story and filed it with our city editor, Allister Stetter, a soft-spoken gentle editor who became deranged by 5 p.m. each day because of the mid-afternoon crazy callers asking us to do stories about their dogs who could stand on one leg and parrots that could sing “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.” He had cooled down by the time I finished my story at 6. He asked about art, and I gave him the photo of Kelly Merrick with instructions not to damage or lose it. The Salt Lake paper had also sent an image of one of the milk cartons, which had already been printed, moved into production and crated off to grocery stores. Seemed like mighty fast work for a cow-milking company.
Mr. Stetter asked me what the mother was expecting. I told him that I never promised anything and kept expectations as low as possible.
“Good,” he said. “I remember that case out near Sequim in which the parents never saw their child again. I swore to myself that I wouldn’t raise false hopes again.”
“I think Sandy Merrick wants to feel like she’s doing everything she can, not leaving any rocks unturned. But she’s clear about the likelihoods. Nil,” I said.
NEXT: In the final part of the story, the investigation takes a turn.
Ellen O’Neal is a writer working on a novel about America, and “Carol’s Tale” will probably become part of it.
Haiku
By Michelle Parks
All the birds chatter Sunlight streams through bare branches Spring is almost here
Michelle Parks is a writer and editor in Washington County, Arkansas.
Chronicles of the Little White Dog
By Mark Pennington
Either the little white dog has become virtually deaf by reason of age or she is ignoring us almost all of the time. Either way it's not good news.
“Dogs that go deaf later in life seem to have little trouble adapting to their condition,” Strain said. “Usually, the owners are more upset by it than the dog.”
Of course. They both realize that the dog has even more leverage. More W A T E R. Shut the D O O R. Who is the hero of all these stories?
The Last Word
Ekphrasis | 'ek-frə-səs
This word arrived upon my doorstep at the half-century point in my life. Perhaps I was looking at my feet when it walked by in earlier days. Essentially, an ekphrasis is a literary work — such as a poem — that engages with another work of art — say, a painting or sculpture — as its inspiration. Keats’ “Ode to a Grecian Urn” is an oft cited example.
Although ekphrasis traces back to the Greek ekphrázein, which simply meant a recounting or description, in modern use ekphrasis has taken on the sense that the retelling is often its own work of fine art, expanding upon the original artwork and causing us to think anew about it.
The word ekphrasis was brought back to mind recently by poet Elisa Gabbert, who wrote an interactive essay, “A Poem (and a Painting) About the Suffering That Hides in Plain Sight” for The New York Times. Her essay annotates W.H. Auden’s ekphrastic poem “Musée des Beaux Arts” and is illustrated throughout with highlighted selections from Auden’s poem, which was written in 1938 on the cusp of the outbreak of World War II and driven thematically by the artwork he saw on a visit to the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussells.
Chief among the paintings were three that, at the time, were all attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder: “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” specifically mentioned in the poem, and two more unnamed but to which Auden alluded: “The Massacre of the Innocents” and “The Census at Bethlehem.” All three are amply used to illustrate Auden’s thinking and Gabbert’s essay.
She explains his references, his phrasing, the poem’s ambiguity and its questions of morality. Both Auden and the paintings frame tragedy within the commonplace daily lives led by the masses. Life goes on for nearly everyone with hardly a notice of Icarus’s fall from the heavens.
For a few moments, though, Gabbert pushes us out of our complacency and makes us think hard about catastrophes like war and pestilence and tribulation, but she does so using the comforting language of explanation, helping us stay one step ahead of the brutality. Like Bruegel and Auden, though, she implicates us and leaves the ultimate ekphrasis to be written within our own hearts. How do we interpret all that comes to pass and how do we act upon the world?
Gabbert writes that the poetry within “Musée des Beaux Arts”…
“offers no comforting slogans or rallying cries, no assurance that suffering comes to an end or happens for a reason. It represents a different approach to the poem as a space for moral work, and for moral possibility.”
And now today’s Last Word is added to this little ekphrastic heap as though it were a comment thread on today’s latest game of Wordle. And that is the last word. CEYA
Have an interesting word? Send it to editor.ozarkhollow@gmail.com. Include your name and hometown as well as why the word is of interest to you and what, if anything, you know about the word.
