Barbara Arnoff’s mother thought I was insane and, despite her lovely purple hat, was typical for her type: housewife. “Get off my property! You’re a psycho. My daughter is fine.” She went on to offer more uninspired ranting. All I could manage to do was write my phone number on a receipt and slide it in her mail slot after she ran inside to “Call the police.”
That was last night, though, and this morning when her daughter didn’t return home, Mrs. Arnoff finally saw the merit in some of what I had to say. She mentioned the Beachland Ballroom. Barbara had tickets to tonight’s show, and her mother was now willing to trust even a raving mathematician to bring her loved one home. She told me that she didn't think that Barbara had run away, and I didn't think so either. The pattern suggested otherwise. Poor woman. I know how she feels, losing someone, that is.
Before she hung up the phone, Mrs. Arnoff paused for a moment then said, "Mr. Burnkey, I don't know if you are who you say you are, but when it comes to Barbara and her safety, there's no option that I won't try. The girl you want to help find is not just a girl in a database. When she was thirteen years old, for Mother's Day, she wrote me a story. She made a pretty yellow cover and bound it herself. She dressed up that morning, made me breakfast and laid the book on the table. The story was about a mother and daughter who live the cycle of life. They moved from support in early life to friendship in the middle, then later back to support as the mother aged. The daughter became a mother and life's cycle carried on. She was thirteen when she wrote this, Mr. Burnkey. Not a typical girl. Keep that in mind as you look."
I brought my laptop with me from Boston. I sat in my room pulling in the numbers from the glowing screen, seeing the pattern, now like a fickle old friend. If you look at the database of the missing people in America, you see certain consistencies: ages, numbers of parents at home and the like. This data forms a pattern, but not a very interesting one. It points you in no direction other than to remind parents that if you mistreat your teenager, they’ll run away. Common knowledge, I’d hope.
The more interesting pattern, my old friend, runs through that data like your name across a crowded room, somehow clearly. All is chaos until you know what to listen for. Or look for, in this case. The pattern pays no attention to your gender, income or name, this one cares about age, birth date and zip code. Somehow, eighteen year olds across America, seventeen days after their birth date, are disappearing. Being eighteen-year-olds they blend in with the other runaways. The ones who had this in mind. They are, however, different. Disappearing wasn't their idea.
The zip code pattern looks like this:
First Missing Location Zip + (3 x B) = Second Missing Location Zip
Second Missing Location Zip – B = Third Missing Location Zip
Third Missing Location Zip + (3 x B) = Fourth Missing Location Zip
Fourth Missing Location Zip - B = Fifth Missing Location Zip
The pattern: +3B, -B, +3B, -B or +3, -1, +3, -1. B is the constant in the equation. It is 916 and I named it B after Barbara. By plugging in American Zip Codes (a system set up in the 1960s to better route the mail and basically divide the country by the available post offices in an area), I was led to Cleveland. University Heights, specifically.
38622 –B = 37706 : Crowder, MS – Josh Small – age 18 – missing
37706 +3B = 40454* : Mount Vernon, KY – Pamela Glandle – age 18 - missing
40454 –B = 39538* : Diberville, MS – Tony Neil Summers – age 18 – missing
39538 +3B = 42286: Trenton, KY – Felicia Johnson – age 18 – missing
42286 –B = 41370* : Saint Helens, KY – Matthew Warner – age 18 – missing
41370 +3B = 44118: University Heights, OH – Barbara Arnoff – age 18 - missing?
Then I only had to look for the birth dates sub-pattern. The missing people all disappeared on the fifteenth of the month. They all had celebrated their eighteenth birthday seventeen days earlier. Barbara’s eighteenth birthday was April 28. Seventeen days later it was May 15th, and she was gone. Last night.
Look, I am not a complete nut. I know how weird this all sounds, but when you have a hunch that a girl might go missing from her family. That they might never be able to see their daughter, the one that they brought up with dreams of a bright world and chance to cause her own patterns in it … well, she deserves a chance to live. Just like an MIT student named Morton deserved his chance. Some patterns need to be broken.
The Beachland Ballroom looks like it came right out of the 50’s. I mean, if I were alive then, I think that things would have looked like this. I paid my $8 admission and walked into the smoky bar. The band playing on stage was composed of a guitarist and a drummer. The drummer was shouting some nonsense about God and the devil and I realized that this was the first act. Some sort of Jesus revival themed rock experiment. They were mildly amusing.
The entire place was cast in red light and divided into three sections: seating to my left, the bar to my right and the stage at the far end. The room couldn’t have been bigger than my apartment in Boston. Boston, where it’s illegal to smoke in bars. I was far from Boston. I asked a group of tattooed young men if they’d heard of Barbara Arnoff, and they replied with “Sorry, dude,” and returned to their bottled beer. I approached the colorful bar, leaned across it and waited. No service just yet, so I turned to a dark haired woman to my left.
“Excuse me.”
“What?”
“Excuse me.”
“Oh, sure,” she turned to face me.
“Do you know a girl named Barbara Arnoff?”
“Who are you? What’s with the old-school glasses?” her makeup-black eyebrows pointed back at me.
“My name is Theo, and I’m afraid she might be missing,” I adjusted my glasses.
The girl was wearing a denim jean jacket and had her hair pulled back in a 1950’s style. Her hand was on her hip and her posture leaned into a commonly used pose from the present day. It said, without speaking, that I needed to prove my case.
“My name is Lacey. But why should I tell you anything?”
“Well, I work for the census bureau in Boston and I have reason to believe that …”
“The census? You came all the way from Boston to count this girl tonight?”
“Well, I have a certain talent for spotting things. And I have reason to believe that Barbara might be in trouble.” Since when did working for the census bureau offer one so little credit? I considered Lacey, thinking I knew her type, predictable, I decided to go slow with her. But before I could start …
“And your census job has led you six-hundred miles for no apparent reason other than to find a girl in a bar and you think that I should give you information regarding one of my friends with nothing more than your unsubstantiated talent?” Now she was really leaning back on that hip and I was becoming intrigued. Maybe I’d misjudged the girl with the pierced nose and make-up like my grandmother once wore.
“My talent, well I can spot the patterns that lead us …”
“Yes, prove it.”
“Well … the truth is … that I look at this place differently than, maybe, you do.”
“Go on, tiger.”
“OK. See the bartender girl? While poring dark beers, she consistently checks on her lipstick, and while poring light beers, she taps at her right hip.”
“Big deal …”
“The last band’s drummer was reliably falling off tempo until his guitarist faced him, at which time he found his beat again. Looking through the doorway to the street outside, you will notice that a red Ford Mustang has been driving around this block every fourteen minutes. I suspect that they are under-cover police. The blonde sitting alone in the both over there is alternating between smoking a light cigarette, a menthol cigarette and checking her cell phone messages, consistently for the past hour. The male bartender checks the cash the register every twenty-minutes, but he secretly moves a twenty dollar bill under the one-dollar pile each time he does so. He will most likely avoid the manager’s forty-minute checks this way and successfully steal $240 tonight. And you, Lacey, are about to …”
The girl raised her right arm to twist some hair around it.
“… play with your hair.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. It’s creepy, I know. My wife always thought so, at least. So what can you tell me about Barbara?”
For all the time spent at the Beachland Ballroom, I had surprisingly nothing to go on as I headed back to my hotel room. No sign of Barbara Arnoff, just my name was on the guest list to Saturday’s Burlesque show. Besides being witty, Lacey was a college graduate and a strip-tease revivalist. At least it had been a good night for unpredictability. Lacey told me that Barbara was also in the strip-tease act, The Pussyfoot Girls, but that she was basically a good girl. They were mostly the sort of girls who dressed in a way that made you think that they were a lot less innocent than they really were. Barbara, if I find her, will look older on the outside than her eighteen years within.
I consulted my laptop with the portable version of the missing person census database that technically I had illegally removed from federal property -- an offense punishable by prison time –- and looked again at the pattern. For lack of finding Barbara, I decided to head to the next city where it predicted a disappearance. The pattern moved on and so, I guess, should I. Maybe getting a jump on the next one would offer more about Barbara.
44118 – B = 43202 : Columbus, OH
I consulted the birth dates for Columbus. There was a hit. Kenneth Wilson, whose birth date wasn’t until later in May will be surprised at the early present that I have for him.
* The last two digits of the zip code indicate the post office. Certain rural areas have less post offices. In these cases, the zip codes were rounded by two to find the closest post office.
next chapter
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