It’s a Mystery: “Loyalty is a distorting mirror”
/How Quickly She Disappears
By Raymond Fleischmann
Berkley, 2020
The novel opens in July, 1941. The setting is a remote village in Alaska, Tanacross. Elisabeth Pfautz has been living in Tanacross, a village with a population of eighty-five people about two hundred miles southeast of Fairbanks, for three years. She feels trapped in a loveless marriage with her husband, John, who teaches for the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). She still dreams often of her identical twin sister, Jacqueline, who disappeared without a trace 20 years earlier from their hometown in Pennsylvania. Constantly haunted by the memory of her sister, she is buoyed up only by her precocious daughter Margaret who, at eleven years old, acts and reads well beyond her age:
Since moving to Alaska, Elisabeth and John had educated her themselves, at home, and Margaret took everything they taught her with a speed and retention that was sometimes shocking. She eschewed Nancy Drew for H.G. Wells, traded toys for books of logic problems.
Margaret is eagerly awaiting the weekly arrival of the small plane that delivers supplies, hoping it has a science book she ordered. But the plane that lands isn’t the usual one. It’s piloted by a German named Alfred Seidel who is substituting for the regular pilot on leave to attend a family affair.
Immediately, Elisabeth senses there is something strangely unsettling about him. But since he’s badly in need of sleep she knows she’s obliged to put him up in their guest room often used for Government Officials. Elisabeth’s misgivings aside, he is neither rude nor unfriendly. Plus, he presents the package with the book to Margaret with a flourish as though he intuits its importance. It is, therefore, completely shocking when the next day Seidel kills Elisabeth’s close friend, Athabaskan Mack Sanford. He bludgeoned him with a hook wrench. Now he’s been apprehended by some locals and tied up in a meat cache waiting for the law and asking to speak to Elisabeth.
It turns out, Seidel knows exactly what happened to Jacqueline, or so he says when she visits him in the cache. However, he plays her, revealing only that Jacqueline is alive:
“Then tell me where she is,” Elisabeth said.
“It’s not that simple. I told you that today is going to be the first step toward the truth. It’s nothing more than that. It’s only the start.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I won’t tell you anything more than what I’ve said already. It means I can’t tell you everything I know, not in one sitting.”
…Alfred held firmly to his word: He didn’t tell Elisabeth anything else that day, no matter her insistence.
And then he is carted off to jail in Fairbanks. By the time September rolls around, she has spent almost every waking moment feverishly searching for details about Alfred Seidel’s past. As she grows more and more frantic for any connection between Seidel and her sister, she encounters dead ends, one after another. When she finally gets to see him in prison, he tells her that he will tell her where her sister is if she fulfills three requests. Of course, since nothing with this man is straightforward, it’s a tactic that leads to a protracted cat and mouse exchange.
There is a dual timeline presented in alternating chapters. One timeline follows her at age eleven and shows us the lead-up to Jacqueline’s disappearance and the immediate aftermath. The depiction of the relationship between the twins is fascinating and feels right on the mark. The other unfolds from Elisabeth’s perspective in the present. We watch apprehensively as her obsession with Seidel takes her on a downward spiral with almost deadly consequences.
How Quickly She Disappears moves at a pulse-pounding pace to a heart-stopping climax. This is an elegant, beautifully realized thriller written with style and grace.
—Irma Heldman is a veteran publishing executive and book reviewer with a penchant for mysteries. One of her favorite gigs was her magazine column “On the Docket” under the pseudonym O. L. Bailey.