The Girls She Left Behind (17 page)

“Do you…do you know where?” But to this she gave only a small, negative shake of her shaved head.

A smell came from the kitchen, of frying potatoes needing to be turned. I got up, letting Cam's hand fall. The TV crawl read,
JUDGE OKAYS CAMERAS IN HEARINGS RE ACCUSED'S TRIAL COMPETENCY.

So we would see him again. I hurried back to finish cooking our dinner, my heart thumping wildly at the memories that his face had brought on; for Cam, too, I supposed.

But seeing him had brought on another feeling, also. Stirring the soup, I imagined future evenings when Cam and I would sit together watching the court proceedings on TV, sharing memories that only we two could possibly understand.

Let the other girls be there in person, I thought, in front of the greedy cameras where merely by tuning in, the whole world could gawk at them. We had each other, Cam and I, and despite my fear that she might still turn on me, for now that was enough.

Or it was until I realized the enormity of what she'd told me. That with it I had the means, finally, to cement her loyalty to me permanently. The thought came suddenly as I laid the soupspoons on the dining-room table, lining them up carefully atop the linen napkins and then filling the wineglasses.

Because the two of us punishing the monster together was one thing. But bringing Cam's lost child back to her would be another, wouldn't it?

After all, for creating the ties that bind there is nothing like flesh and blood.

“Y
ou know what I think?”

Lizzie gripped the Blazer's steering wheel as the vehicle bounced along; not many roads led out to the brushland where the gravelike hole had been found, and of those none was paved all the way to the end.

Peg listened stonily as Lizzie went on: “I think
you
think Tara will be in worse trouble somehow if you tell the truth than if you don't.”

No answer from Peg. On either side of the washboard-gravel road, teams of men and women dug firebreaks, swinging at them with pickaxes and shoveling dirt onto hot spots. The air smelled like ashes mixed with exhaust from the constantly howling chain saws, as workers cut brush and whippy saplings and hauled them away before the fires could use them for fuel.

Chevrier had said he'd let the workers up here know to expect her. Now a guy in a yellow vest spotted her and waved her forward.

“Up there?” She stuck her head out the window.

“Yeah! Quarter mile or so!” The guy wore bulky ear protection and an air pack strapped to his back. “Over on the right you'll see a red bandanna tied to a sapling? Turn in there!”

She buzzed the window back up and switched on the Blazer's air-conditioning to clear the smoke from the cab; not cigarettes, this time, but the real deal.

“I've brought you here to show you something,” she told Peg.

The missing teen's mother spoke resentfully. “You've got the wrong idea. I'm telling the truth, I don't see why you think—”

“Hold on.” Lizzie hit the brakes as a girl in an orange slicker stepped onto the dirt road, hands up in a
halt
gesture.

Flames lapped at the road. They'd already eaten right up to the gravel edges, leaving black ash. Two guys beat monotonously at the flickering remnants that kept springing up again.

Peg scowled as the girl in the vest waved them by. “Why are we even out here?” she began again.

Lizzie pulled onto the blackened grass. The red rag fluttered from the trunk of a small tree. “Just get out.”

She led Peg across soft, powdery soil, its burnt structure falling away beneath a solid-looking surface.

Finally she stopped, putting a hand out, and then Peg saw it, too. A hole gaped in the baked earth, and beside it sat a wooden box about six feet long and half as wide.

It looked like a coffin except for the slats that lay around near it. From the nail holes in them, it was pretty clear they'd been nailed crosswise onto the box.

Peg dropped to her knees. “Oh, God…”

From around them rose yells from the fire volunteers trying desperately to keep one another in view in the smoky conditions, or at least within shouting range. A pickup truck moved slowly on the dirt road, barely visible through the haze, the support teams perched in the vehicle's bed handing out water and fresh bandannas to the ground crews.

“Oh,” Peg said helplessly again. The hole was only a few inches deeper than the box itself.

So you put the box in the hole, then the person into the box. Threatening them with a weapon, maybe, to make them get in, Lizzie thought. Then you put the separate boards of the lid on, fastening them with what looked like…yeah, those were roofing nails.

Whoever had been in this box had been let out again, though. She knew from the two sets of human footprints in the ashy soil of what had been pasture, leading away on a trail deeply trodden into the soil by—Lizzie supposed—animals.

Sheep, maybe. Or cows. “Jesus,” Peg whispered faintly. “She was in there? You think Tara was—”

The feds working the kidnapping would arrive soon. Chevrier had already put them in the picture, which was fine with Lizzie. Not having to do crime-scene chores meant she could use the time instead to try again at getting something useful out of Peg.

The truth, for instance. “You're still lying to me, Peg. You know it and I know it. Two blue-eyed parents are very unlikely to have had—”

“Don't lecture me, all right?” Peg retorted. “It was all I could think of on short notice.”

She fumbled in her shirt pocket for a smoke and cursed when she was out, then rummaged angrily until she located a loose cigarette in the bottom of her purse. “Tara still thinks she's my ex's kid, I don't want her to—”

“But what's so bad about that? I've heard worse, and at her age probably Tara has, too.”

Peg only shook her head stubbornly, blowing out smoke. “I don't care, I just don't want her to know.”

Lizzie scanned the makeshift grave impatiently. What Peg was saying didn't make sense. For one thing, sooner or later the girl would figure it out. “That hers?”

It was a cell phone, badly smashed, one large daggerlike shard the only recognizable piece. It had been left here because it was evidence for the crime-scene team to process.

“Yeah,” said Peg shakily. “It used to be mine but she really wanted one, and—”

“Okay.” Lizzie counted to ten, controlling her temper.

Turning, she herded Peg along. The smoke was eye-wateringly thick. “While we drive back to town, I want you to think hard about where Tara might be right now.”

Peg nodded mutely. Lizzie could see that the sight of the hole and the broken phone had shocked the woman, knocked all the magical thinking or whatever it was right out of her head.

But it hadn't yet persuaded her to tell the truth. “And who she might be with,” Lizzie added cruelly.

Her boots raised small clouds of parched dust. “Because I don't know yet how he found her here, but I'm pretty sure Tara's the reason why Henry Gemerle came to Bearkill.”

Hopping into the driver's seat, she slammed the heavy door. The vehicle felt soundproofed suddenly, the whole outside world held off by a couple of tons of steel and glass.

Too bad the feeling couldn't last, she thought as she turned the Blazer around on the gravel, aiming back downhill through the smoke. Not until they bumped back onto the paved road once more did she speak.

“Look, Peg. I told you this once, but I need to be sure you understand that I'm not on Tara's case, officially. It's the state cops and the FBI who—”

“I'm not telling them anything,” Peg cut in flatly.

Lizzie counted to ten. “Peg. You called me, remember?”

On the highway they passed a farmyard where a dozen brown cows walked up a ramp into an enclosed trailer. The drought meant local feed production was way down, and if they couldn't buy feed for the animals the farmers had to sell them.

“You wanted my help,” Lizzie went on, “but I guess now you've decided that confiding in me will only hurt Tara somehow.”

In the farmyard, two small children watched the herd being loaded, waving farewell as the trailer's doors swung shut.

“Still,” Lizzie went on carefully, “I get the feeling you're leaving the door open a crack.”

Silence from Peg. But a
listening
silence. Lizzie took a deep breath. “So here's the deal. If you tell me the truth about what's going on I…I'll keep it to myself.”

It was maybe the worst idea she'd ever had, and for sure it was illegal. But Tara Wylie was still out there somewhere and in danger, if she was even alive.

So never mind the rules, Lizzie thought, or the job. What mattered was the oath she had taken:
to serve and protect.

Nothing else was working for her in Bearkill; not finding Nicki or settling things with Dylan, not even playing straight with Trey, one of the most decent guys she'd ever met. He deserved better from her; everyone did.

“I don't get it,” Peg said.

“Yeah, I don't, either.” Because what she'd decided was wrong and yet at the moment, it felt like the only possible thing. So she would hear whatever Peg said, act on it as best she could, and figure out on her own when or whether to confide in anyone else.

So maybe I'll tell. And maybe,
she thought, feeling suddenly much better about everything—

Maybe I won't.

P
atient confidentiality doesn't only mean not talking about what you know. It also means not trying to find out things that are none of your business.

That's why what I did next was against the rules: I had no job-related reason for retrieving the records of cesarean births that occurred in New Haven hospitals during the relevant years. But I did it anyway, since for the sort of plan I was devising now I couldn't rely just on Cam's word.

Once I'd gotten the birth records I wanted, I narrowed my search to brown-eyed mothers like Cam. I could also have sorted them by zip code, ethnicity, or a dozen or more other delimiters used mostly by public health researchers. But all I really wanted was my cousin Cam's medical history, and finding that, too, was surprisingly easy.

I simply searched for it, and the information came scrolling up on the computer screen in front of me. From it I learned the child's birth year, a scant nine months after we'd both been abducted, and that when she went into labor he'd brought her to the ER, signing his own name as the supposed husband of the patient and father of the child. He must have threatened her to keep her silent, I guessed, and afterward he took her and the new baby back to the Michener Street address, in a run-down part of town I'd studiously avoided all that time.

She never kept any follow-up appointments, and I could find no vaccination records for the infant. Fifteen years later at my desk in the medical records office, I gazed out the high window overlooking New Haven. From it I could see all the way across the Yale campus and in the other direction across Long Island Sound.

Out there, somewhere…
The baby was a healthy girl: She'd gone home with Cam and the monster, but she hadn't been there—she'd have been fourteen by then—when Cam and the other women were rescued.

So what had happened? Cam didn't seem to know—pressing her for theories had resulted only in stubborn silence, at any rate—but there were two other women who might. That was why, on the Monday morning after I learned that Cam's baby had definitely been born, I took a bus downtown to the courthouse.

Gemerle's competency proceedings were about to begin their second day of hearings, and his other two victims would be there; I'd seen them on TV, sitting with the victim advocates.

Of course I was terrified to approach them. All I wanted, as I stepped off the bus in front of the courthouse building, was to jump right back on it again and go home, to be there with Cam.

But the girls might know something about Cam's lost child, so I didn't.

“H
e's my cousin,” Peg whispered to Lizzie. “Henry Gemerle's mother and mine were sisters.”

By now it was late morning. Smoke drifted lazily from the fire zone they'd just been in, hazing the blue sky over where they sat parked outside Lizzie's office.

“That's good, that's a good start,” Lizzie said. “Now, do you want my help with any of this? Because that's what I'm offering to you here. All you need to do is take it.”

Sniffling, Peg yanked a wad of tissues from her purse. “I swear when I get that kid back I will never let her out of my sight again.”

Lizzie ignored this. “So the cousin thing, though. You want to expand a little on that?”

Peg nodded brokenly. “Like I said, our mothers were sisters. Both dead now. We lived only a few blocks from each other in East Haven.”

“I see.”
Take it slow,
Lizzie reminded herself.
Circle around a little.
“So did Tara ever meet any of your family members?”

Peg laughed bitterly. “No, none of them. And she won't if I have anything to do with it.”

She turned to face Lizzie. “They all thought Henry was a good guy because he was working steady. I'm the only one who thought he was weird. He gave me the creeps. I kept away as much as I could.”

“Uh-huh. The rest of the family still saw him, though? At his place, or yours?”

But Peg wasn't listening. “I mean of the whole bunch, there's not a one who wasn't short a few marbles, if you know what I mean. To them, Henry was just fine. But then…”

Missy came to the office window and spotted Lizzie, nodding as if the sight of her was expected. Which reminded Lizzie: She'd promised to be here by noon to cover the phones for an hour.

“…then I started hearing about this baby Henry had somehow gotten hold of,” Peg said.

Lizzie waved at Missy to say she'd be coming in shortly, as they'd agreed.

“…said it was his girlfriend's baby,” Peg went on, “even though nobody could remember Henry ever having a girlfriend.”

Missy turned away from the window and went back to her desk. “Peg? Let's go inside, okay?” Lizzie interrupted reluctantly.

Once a subject started talking, you didn't stop them if you could help it. But as it turned out Lizzie might as well have tried damming Niagara Falls.

“He really wanted to get rid of it,” Peg continued as they went in. “The baby, I mean. A baby girl. And I wanted one. My mom came home talking about it and I said I'd take it. And I did.”

“Really.” Inside, Lizzie sat at her own desk with Peg in the chair across from her. “Nobody thought that was unusual at all? No one from any health department or anything?”

Peg made a face. “Please. The last thing we wanted was to get family services involved, nosy social workers or whatever.”

She dug in her purse for a cigarette, found none. “We knew girls who'd had their kids taken away by the welfare people. So, no. No social workers, anyone like that.”

It still sounded odd, though. “What about your mother, didn't she have something to say about it?” Because if Peg was thirty or so now—younger than Lizzie had first thought, just aged by worry—that would've made her, what, fifteen?

“Yeah, well,” Peg replied with a shrug. “My mom didn't have too much input into my decisions. She had a big pill habit to take care of.”

“Sorry. That must've been rough. But…come on, Peg, even you didn't think it was strange? A weird cousin with a girlfriend no one ever saw, and then a baby?”

Peg sighed. “Maybe if I'd thought about it I would've. But I was just a kid myself. I had this fantasy of being some kind of a storybook heroine, saving a baby from the kind of life I had.”

She shook her head ruefully. “I had no idea how hard it would be. Or that…”

Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Or that he'd come back.”

Now they were getting to it. “But you were afraid he would?”

Peg nodded, her eyes downcast. “A few months later I saw him downtown. He looked…I don't know. Wrong, somehow. Like he was plotting something. He didn't see me or Tara, though, and I was glad. He scared me.”

She looked up. “That's when I decided that I didn't want him around her ever again.”

She broke off suddenly, her desolate gaze looking past Lizzie out into the winter day. “I should be out with the fire crews, you know. I'm a volunteer myself, I should be there with my crew.”

Lizzie recalled the boots and hard hat in Peg's kitchen, the radio on the counter. “I think under the circumstances they'd cut you some slack.”

She leaned back in her chair, trying to make sense of what Peg had said. The likeliest explanation for what they'd found on the ridge was that Gemerle had moved Tara. Maybe he'd worried that her cries for help might be heard by the fire volunteers.

Which if it was true meant at least that she was alive, or had been when he did it. But why he was keeping her that way—why he was doing any of this at all—Lizzie still had no idea.

Turning, she was about to say so, to offer at least as much reassurance as she could. Instead, a stray gleam of sunlight from the office's big front window hit Peg's eyes at an angle, revealing the faint line of something curved on the left one, a pale iridescent blue against the white part of Peg's eye, just the narrowest edge. But it was enough, and from it suddenly Lizzie knew two things:

Just as she'd thought, Peg Wylie had indeed been lying about everything, all along.

And she was lying now.

I
t had been dark in that cellar of his, and it was years ago. So going into the courtroom that day, I felt sure that neither of the girls I'd left down there would recognize me.

The metal detector and security screening held no terrors for me, either. The guards in their navy-blue uniforms seemed to sense this, already looking past me as I approached. Once cleared to go in, I moved along with dozens of others down the linoleum-tiled corridor to the door where a clerk was handing out paper tickets with numbers on them.

The hall was jam-packed; it seemed half the world wanted an in-person look at the awful criminal they'd seen on TV, and I had a moment of panic when I thought I might not get admitted. But in the end I was issued one of the last passes being given out that morning, and with it I made my way into the rear of the chamber.

The room was warm, smelling of dusty radiators, damp coats, and the pungent hair pomade of one of the courtroom clerks. As the judge entered we all stood, then sat and waited some more while up front the attorneys put their heads together and argued over some procedural business.

At last all the rustling and murmuring went silent. In the upstairs gallery the news cameras stood like three-legged aliens, each aimed at the bench where the judge glanced once more at the bailiff, then looked out over the spectators.

His gaze lingered a moment on me, I don't know why, and the sudden notice, so much the opposite of what I'd been expecting, brought my heart up into my throat. And then, before I'd even had a chance to recover,
he
came in.

Henry Gemerle, the monster of Michener Street…At the sight of him my whole body went rigid with fright, my gut rolling over as if getting ready to turn itself inside out. Then I caught sight of the girls. They sat nearer the rear of the courtroom today and the cameras were all aimed at Gemerle, so I felt safe.

Getting up, I moved toward the girls. Neither of them looked anything like I remembered from the brief glimpse I'd had of them, which renewed my confidence that they wouldn't know me, either. Reaching the bench where they sat—the victim advocates weren't present today—I slid in beside them and whispered:

“Hello. You don't know me, but I'm taking care of Cam.”

Slowly the young woman nearest me turned her head.

“Cam Petry?” I said. “You remember her, don't you? And I want to ask you about—”

She just stared. It was Nancy Shields; I'd learned her name back when they were all first let out of the cellar.

“—about Cam's baby,” I said. But then before I could go on I felt Henry Gemerle's eyes on me, his lip curled in obvious fury at the sight of the one who got away.

Me. Hastily I turned away from Nancy Shields and scrambled backward.

But it was already too late. Gemerle's clear interest in me and my frightened reaction made people wonder about me. Many of the observers in the courtroom turned curiously, a low murmur spreading around me. Even the judge glanced up, and everyone stared: the lawyers and court employees, onlookers on benches, and psychiatrists in suits, all slicked up and ready to give their expert testimony about Henry Gemerle.

No,
I thought desperately,
this isn't what I wanted.

Gazing around wildly I searched for a rescuer, someone to save me. But there was no one, only a chunky blond woman wearing a blue sweatshirt staring down at me from the gallery, looking as if she might have wanted to help. But she couldn't.

So I did the only thing I could do. I ran.

B
y the time I got home that Monday noon, Cam was throwing things into a duffel bag any which way.

Luckily only Gemerle had recognized me; I'd given only a single interview right after Cam and I moved in together.

A feel-good human-interest story, the pesky writer from New Haven's alt weekly newspaper the
Advocate
had said it would be, a heart-warmer about cousins reuniting after a tragedy. I'd been reluctant; the flurry of interest surrounding the girls hadn't yet died down, and the last thing I wanted was any publicity.

But if we were boring enough—I refused photos, and didn't let the reporter come to our apartment—the rest might leave us alone, I'd figured, and in fact that was what happened. I'd played dumb and Cam had been legitimately stupefied, both from shock at her experiences and from the pills I'd already begun feeding her.

But what had happened in the courtroom was still bad enough. Cam had despised the idea of my talking to the alt-weekly reporter. Being stared at and questioned was torture for her, even in the hospital when it was only for her benefit. Now I'd risked drawing attention to her again.

Or at least I thought that was the reason for her anger. “Cam,” I begged once I got into the apartment. “Please listen.”

But she didn't look at me, just kept throwing things into her bag.

“Cam, I never meant to—”

She whirled on me. “ ‘I never meant to,' ” she mimicked cruelly. “I didn't know, oh, I'm so innocent, please feel sorry for me.”

She threw the duffel into the hall. “Funny thing about you. You never mean any harm, but somehow you always do it anyway.”

She'd swept her dresser top clean of her hairbrush, a tray of pill bottles, and an envelope containing her medical history.

But she'd left a picture frame with a snapshot of the two of us.

“I just wanted…” I began. The snapshot was like a window into a happy world; here in this one, Cam's energy frightened me.

“Right,
you
just wanted,” she snapped back at me. “Can I ask you something, though?”

She turned to face me. “Have you ever thought for a minute about what
I
might want? I mean, how exactly did you think this thing you did today was going to turn out?”