The Girls She Left Behind (16 page)

“So when you decide to stop lying to me, give me a call. Otherwise—”

Dylan was near enough now so she could smell his cologne, like vermouth with a twist of lime.

“Otherwise,” Lizzie finished, dropping the cigarette and crushing it decisively with the toe of her boot—

“Otherwise, go fly a kite.”

“W
hat's she doing here?” Dylan asked. Across the parking lot, Peg Wylie hoisted herself up into the Blazer's passenger seat.

“Blowing smoke at me,” Lizzie replied. “And not just from her cigarettes, either.”

The aftertaste of the drag she'd taken was disgusting. “Don't ask me why, though,” she added, “because I still have no idea.”

She angled her head at the motel's main entrance. “Meanwhile there's a room with a lot of fresh blood in it in there, a real horror show. Also—”

She told him about the pill bottles. “I'll bet that's why she flaked out on your interview, too.”

Gazing past Dylan at the distant hillsides, she wondered yet again how she'd gotten herself stuck in a place where there were more trees than people. On the other hand, at least trees didn't look you in the face and lie.

“Peg's still hiding something,” she said. “Like she thinks the truth is even worse than Tara being AWOL, somehow.”

Dylan's eyebrows went up. “And you know this because?”

It had hit her while she was looking at the child in the car: the obvious reason why Peg's most recent story was unlikely to be true.

“Okay, so you saw Tara's missing person flyer, right? The description on it?”

He nodded. “Teenager, brown hair, brown eyes…so what?”

“So Peg says she's on the run from Tara's dad. But he's got a sheet, and I got his description from the New Haven cops earlier. Hair brown, eyes blue…”

“So? What's your point?”

“So Peg's eyes are blue, too,” she said, then watched as he got it and shook his head ruefully.

“Oh, man. High school biology, huh? Two blue-eyed parents, a brown-eyed kid, small chance.”

He grimaced, thinking about it. “So, what, do you think Tara's not really hers, like maybe she stole the kid or something? Maybe that's why she didn't want any publicity about it?”

“I don't know what to think. But somebody needs to go at her again 'cause so far I'm getting zilch.”

She filled Dylan in on Emily Ektari's blood-type mismatch discovery, which meant Jane Crimmins wasn't who she said she was.

“So even though she's got the right ID, she's also lying. And now she's in the wind, on top of it,” Lizzie added.

“Great,” he said, shaking his head in disgust. “That's just what we need. But listen, there's something else. A fire crew was out in the puckerbrush early this morning getting the jump on some embers.”

Finding and dousing any smoldering bits that might blaze up later was a part of the crews' morning routine.

“And they found a freshly dug hole in the ground out there,” he said.

“Like, a hole with someone in it? As in buried in it?”

“Yeah. Looks like it. The thing is, whoever was in the hole isn't in it anymore,” he said.

“G
rave-sized hole, wooden box like a coffin in it,” said Dylan. “Wooden top, couple short nails sticking out of it, lying on the ground by the hole.”

By now it was nine in the morning, the unseasonably warm sun well up in the winter sky. In the parking lot by the motel, the state's white mobile crime-lab van arrived.

“Fire crew's chief says there's a busted-up cell phone in the hole,” Dylan added. “I don't know whose it is, yet, but I'll bet I can guess.”

“Yeah,” Lizzie agreed. “Tara maybe used it once somehow to send that text message to her mom?”

He nodded. “Yup. That's my thought, too. And then it got noticed, and broken. Although it could still be that someone else sent the text,” he added.

“To what, torment Peg? Yeah, I guess that's a possibility.” Either way, Lizzie refused to let herself imagine being buried in a box in an active fire zone.
Vehicles, voices…

But no one to hear you scream.
No rescue.
“And you found out about the cell phone and the rest of it how, exactly?”

Dylan watched the crime-scene tech climb out of the van and start across the parking lot toward them. “Fire crew's team leader called Cody Chevrier. Cody must've figured this'd end up being mine, so he called me.”

And that in a nutshell was Aroostook County sheriff Cody Chevrier, who felt no need to visit a crime scene just for ego-boosting purposes, or God forbid to create a photo op.
Your job, you do it,
was his motto, though if you needed any backup he was there in a heartbeat.

“Cody got me up to speed on what the fire guys found and I was on my way up to that scene when you called,” Dylan said. “The county's so strapped for personnel right now with the fires going on, he doesn't have anyone else to send.”

Which was why there weren't volunteers out searching for Tara Wylie. The battle against the brush fires was a holding action and every available man or woman who wasn't tied down somewhere else was busy battling to keep it that way.

The crime-lab technician strode toward them. She was in her late twenties, Lizzie estimated, tanned and athletic looking with bright, smart eyes and wavy auburn hair tied up in a scarf.

“Hi,” said Lizzie, not sticking out a hand because the tech was already all gloved up. Besides, she didn't feel like it.

“Hi,” said the tech with the barest glance at Lizzie. “See you inside,” she told Dylan with a brilliantly white smile.

Lizzie watched the technician return to the motel. “Isn't it amazing what diet and exercise can do for a person?”

“Yeah,” said Dylan, still watching, too. She was about to ask if he wanted a can of Alpo to go with his houndlike tendencies, but Peg interrupted.

“What's going on?” she demanded, squinting suspiciously from Lizzie to Dylan and back again.

“I'll tell you later,” said Lizzie, and Dylan shot her a look of gratitude, having no wish to explain to Peg now about the hole in the ground where a broken cell phone had been located.

“You've got this other thing?” Lizzie added to him, meaning the bloody motel room.

“Yeah.” His grim nod confirmed her own earlier assessment that this was his case. There'd been too much blood in that room to believe otherwise, and she could see from his face that he was already making his mental to-do list.

Then he caught her expression. “Something wrong?”

The crime-scene tech had already entered the motel but her image felt burnt on Lizzie's retinas; that and the way Dylan had watched the young woman's lithe figure as she'd departed.

Lizzie shook her head irritably. “I gave the motel manager more grief than he deserved in there, that's all.”

Dylan's eyebrows raised. “You could apologize.”

She turned. “I don't feel that bad about it,” she said, and stalked away from him.

But by the time she reached the Blazer with Peg Wylie already in the passenger seat, she'd cooled off enough to think straight again. Today wasn't about Dylan, or about Nicki, either.

It was about Peg's missing daughter, Tara, and Peg was still lying about something. Which was why, on Lizzie's own to-do list, changing that fact had just become job one.

O
n a cold December morning in New Haven two weeks after her brain surgery, I brought a still-recuperating Cam home from the hospital. The cab let us out in front of our building. I'd bought a car by then, a nearly new Lexus, with some of the money I'd gotten from selling my parents' house. But I didn't want to watch out for traffic or pay attention to street signs that day; I wanted to focus on her.

Gripping my arm, she made her halting way up the front walk; inside, she stood gazing around as if to make sure she was really there at last. She went into the kitchen where everything gleamed, to the living and dining rooms bright with fresh flowers in readiness for her, and at last to her own room with its familiar braided rag rug, low wooden bed, and white chenille spread.

I'd thought about new curtains but when I saw her I was glad I'd kept the old lace tie-backs, merely washing and ironing them to pristine whiteness. Only when she was satisfied that everything was as she'd left it did she let me take her coat and carefully lift her soft knitted cap from her head.

The staples from surgery had been removed and prickles of new hair had begun sprouting on her bluish-white scalp. She would need help with bathing, I'd been told, and there was a whole long list of other things she wasn't yet allowed to do alone, too.

“This is an elaborate care plan,” the nurse had said, “which must be followed strictly. Are you certain you can handle it?”

But in fact the only hard part was hiding my happiness. It would be like when Cam first got freed, I thought. When she could barely do anything on her own and had turned to me for everything.

And it was that way, too, for a month while I nursed and cosseted her. Dainty sandwiches, nourishing broths…nothing was too good for her. Even the plan to punish Henry Gemerle was put on hold, waiting for her recovery. But then:

“Oh, my
God
!” In the kitchen I was making a mushroom stew with cream and shallots; dropping the spoon, I rushed in to find her already halfway out of her chair, her lap robe fallen to the floor.

“What is it, what's wrong?” I put my arm around her to guide her down again. She was not supposed to get up unaided without her walker, which I'd left out in the hall because it took up so much room in the apartment.

And besides, she had me. She gestured at the TV. “He…”

I followed her anguished gaze to the screen, where a courtroom news story was being reported. Then I saw the prisoner in his bright-orange jumpsuit being led in between two bailiffs.

It was Gemerle. Cam turned accusingly. “You didn't tell me.”

I hadn't prepared her for this new torture, that he might suddenly appear right there in our own living room.

“I didn't know,” I whispered, and truly I hadn't. For weeks all I'd thought of was Cam's surgery and her recovery…it was as if nothing else in the world existed.

For me, nothing else had. True, there had been calls on the answering machine from the district attorney's office, asking if Cam would testify; at the very hearing, I realized, that we were watching on TV right now.

But she couldn't, of course, and not only because she was so ill. After all, who knew what a clever attorney might manage to coax or trick her into saying?

Fortunately, her surgery had given me a perfect excuse to tell them that she wasn't able to talk on the phone, that she was much too ill to appear in court, and that she would be that way for the foreseeable future.

And her doctors had backed me up on this. Still, to make absolutely sure she'd keep silent when I wasn't around, I'd been sedating her with Valium tablets when I went to work. Orders for prescriptions, I'd found, could be put into the medical database like anything else, then filled at the hospital pharmacy.

But now Cam was wide awake, staring at the TV as Henry Gemerle shuffled to the defendant's table, his wrists manacled and his ankles in chains. Seeing him I turned, expecting to find her hatred of him mirroring my own. Instead, though, her face was full of sorrow and yearning. After a moment of utter confusion I believed I knew why.

It had been in the news that there'd been infant things in that cellar—tiny clothes and other items moldering in a storage cabinet. But no infant anywhere.

“Cam,” I said gently, sitting beside her. “Where is…?”

That old midline abdominal scar I'd seen explained her look of sorrow now, I thought.

…your baby?
I was about to finish. But before I could do so, Cam shook her head impatiently to silence me.

“There they are,” she whispered as the camera panned over the courtroom spectators, and then I saw them, two young women in the front row. They were flanked on either side by a pair of guardlike older ladies in dark business suits, the kind of outfits that frilly blouses are meant to soften but don't.

“Victim advocates,” Cam said contemptuously of the women. She'd never spoken to another social worker after the Davenport fiasco. The crawl at the bottom of the TV screen read,
EXPERTS SAY ACCUSED UNFIT, JUDGE TO RULE ON ABILITY TO ASSIST DEFENSE.

“The girls look all right,” I said. Cam shrugged, waiting only for the moment when the camera found Gemerle again, his lips curved in a smirk I recalled too well. No shame troubled his face, only a kind of puzzled curiosity, as if he didn't understand what everybody was so upset about. Those deep-blue eyes of his glinted with the same cruel glee I'd witnessed at his house that night.

Seeing him, I knew suddenly that the experts were wrong; Henry Gemerle was no more unfit to stand trial than I was. At the thought that he might fool them an awful drowning feeling went through me, like I was falling down a dark well.

Still gazing at the TV, Cam reached over and put her hand on mine. She'd never done such a thing before.

“He looks just the same,” she said, not removing her hand.

“Yes,” I replied faintly, still fearing that before we could team up to punish him she would tell, that with a word she would ruin my life. Seeing him would remind her, I thought, of what had happened to her.

And why. That it was my fault. “Yes,” I repeated, dry-mouthed with fear suddenly. “Older. But the same.”

The yellow hair, thick swatches of blond eyebrows, and once-slim build now gone a little to flab since he'd been imprisoned were all the same as I recalled.

“Cam, is the baby still alive?”

She looked startled. I was, too; I hadn't known I would say it. But she nodded in the affirmative. “Oh, yes.”