The Girls She Left Behind (2 page)

Because she was scared to.

“Okay,” I replied at last, and Cam smiled, satisfied.

Like I said, I couldn't resist.

S
omebody had a cooler full of beer poured into Coke bottles, though the dance had been billed as alcohol-free. Cops cruised the tennis courts' perimeter where, beyond the bushes landscaped along the fence, the sounds of couples giggling together mingled with the smell of marijuana. But from the officers' casual attitudes it was clear they were on the scene only to make sure nobody got hurt.

And at first no one did.

Cam danced like crazy, flinging her arms around and stomping her feet opposite one guy after another, not letting any of them bird-dog her, as she called it whenever some boy tried acting romantic.

I stood by the fence alone, trying to look as if I preferred it that way, that I didn't care. No one wanted to dance with me because even though Cam and I looked very alike, it was obvious to everyone which one of us was the firecracker and which the dud.

Once in a while Cam came over and told me impatiently to get out there, for God's sake—a little fun wouldn't kill me.

But in my own way I was having fun, sort of. I found out about the beer by taking a swig and then another, the stuff going down my parched throat scouringly cold. The night all around me was warm and wonderfully strange, filled with faces I didn't know and vibrant with the loud music.

I was, I told myself wistfully, simply the sort of person who enjoyed watching. After a while Cam seemed to tire of it all, too, returning to me with her mascara smeared, her eyes bright, and her face reddened with heat.

She grabbed the beer out of my hand and chugged it. “Okay. I'm done, let's get out of here.”

She dragged her arm across her sweaty forehead theatrically. “Look at you, though, silly. Did you even dance once?”

By then the scene had gotten rowdy, the band drunk and just goofing around onstage. A fight started at one end of the crowd and a girl wept wretchedly at the other, her friends all crowded around her glaring accusingly at a boy who looked miserable and defensive, unable to get near.

“Sure, I danced,” I lied, but Cam just smirked knowingly at me.

“Right,” she drawled, “sure you did.” She finished my beer and tossed the bottle away carelessly. “Come on, baby, let's get going. It's way past your bedtime.”

We skirted around the thick bushes lining the tennis court fence and made our way toward the parking lot, the shortest route in the direction of home. But when we got near the rows of cars lined up in the lot, Cam stopped suddenly.

“Hey, who's that?” She was eyeing a guy who sat in a gray van at the lot's far end, watching us.

He was cute, kind of, and pretty harmless looking, with wavy blond hair and a sly, knowing smile that he flashed at us while gnawing a fried chicken leg. He seemed sleepy, as if he'd just woken up, and mildly amused by the scene: the park, the summer night with the kids out in it.

But I still didn't like the looks of him. Maybe it was just because he seemed too old—in his thirties at least—to be leering at girls our age. Or maybe it was like the nuns at St. Anselm's always said: that my guardian angel was warning me.

The guy jerked his head lazily, beckoning us over. “Hey.”

I took a cautious step back. Cam, though, had drunk enough beer to make her feisty; apparently my bottle hadn't been her first.

Feistier than usual, even. “Hey, what?” she demanded right back at him, her chin jutting out and her voice sounding snotty. “What do you want?”

Loser,
her tone added clearly as she stalked toward the van. Even on her best behavior, Cam took no nonsense from anyone.

And now she was drunk. Fists bunched, she stomped over to the open driver's-side window and stuck her face belligerently up at the guy, who was still gnawing the chicken leg.

“What're you, a pervert? Some kind of weirdo, sitting here jerking off while all the young girls go by 'cause you can't get one of your own?”

His grin widened sleepily and he put the chicken leg down. “Aw, come on, honey, what's the problem? Don't be that way.” But that only made her madder.

“Don't be that way,”
she mimicked nastily while I watched in growing alarm though I wasn't sure why, my mouth suddenly dry and my heart thudding.

“Cam,” I said. “Cam, we should…”

The bushes growing thickly between the parking lot and the tennis courts blocked the view, and right now everyone was on the other side of them, the lot full of cars but empty, just at that moment, of people.

And he'd parked, I noticed now, way down at the end, in the one place where the streetlights didn't reach, so the van was in shadow. It was as if he'd stationed himself there deliberately.

Cam thumped her fists hard against the driver's-side door and spun away. “Freak,” she muttered loud enough for him to hear, which was when I really knew we were in trouble, because although his face didn't change at all, his eyes did.

Then he got out, still with that lazy grin, moving toward us slowly but confidently like some big cat that knows it doesn't have to do very much before it leaps.

“Cam, come
on,
” I yelled, starting to run, but I'd gone only a few panicked steps before her muffled scream stopped me in my tracks.

When I turned back, he had the van's rear door open and was muscling her roughly in. “Jane!” she managed to cry.

That's when he hit her. The punch snapped her head sideways, and I saw her face go blank. As she sagged in his grip he finished loading her into the cargo compartment, slammed the door shut, then strolled casually back up to the driver's door and got behind the wheel again.

I tried screaming, I really did. But I was so frozen in fear and disbelief that I couldn't even speak. I stood paralyzed. My mouth moved but no sound came from it as he reversed out of his parking space. He pulled the van up alongside me, then past.

But as he started to drive away, suddenly the spell broke. “No! Stop! Help! Someone…”

A howl of electronic feedback from the guitar amplifiers at the dance drowned my cries, and I knew that in another moment he would be gone. So I did the only thing I could think of: I hurled myself at the van, running straight at the driver's-side door.

I hit the van's door panel hard with my whole body, grabbed the side mirror, and clung on desperately, hooking the fingers of my right hand over the window opening and hauling myself up until my elbow was inside, shouting into his face.

“I saw your license plate, I'll tell the police!”

I hadn't seen it. But it was the only threat that I could think of that might possibly stop him. And it did.

Slowly his head turned toward me. I clung there sobbing and kicking the door panel as hard as I could while the van still crept forward. Finally, with a look of disgust he hit the brake, pushed my elbow out of the window so I dangled from the mirror and fell, then got out and stood over me.

The next thing I knew he had gathered me up in his arms. I was crying so hard I couldn't breathe, kicking weakly and trying to get away from him, but it was no use. He was strong, pinning my arms to my sides, and still no one had come into the parking lot to save me.

To save us. He held me so tightly that I couldn't get enough breath in to scream as he dragged me around the front of the van, yanked the passenger-side door open, shoved me in, and slammed it. Scrabbling for the door handle I found that there was none, only a ragged hole in the panel where it had been removed, and as I leapt for the one on the driver's side I met him getting in.

I shrank back against the door, and I will never in my life forget the look he gave me then, not saying anything, just…looking. Like he was inspecting me to see if I was worth keeping or not, and if I wasn't—

There was an open bottle of kiwi juice in the van console's beverage holder; he grabbed it and shoved it at me. “Drink.”

His eyes were the deep, marine blue of Long Island Sound on a clear day. There was no question of defying him; I took the juice bottle with both trembling hands, unable to look away from him as I lifted it shakily to my lips.

But I must not have done it fast enough for him. “Drink the juice, honey,” he said softly, starting the van rolling slowly forward again. “Or I'll slit your throat open for you and pour it down your gullet.”

I obeyed, trying to control my gasping sobs long enough to swallow. The lukewarm juice had something gritty and bitter in it, like Kool-Aid with some of the powder still undissolved.

He pulled out of the park, looking both ways before hitting the gas. I wiped my arm across my snot-smeared face. “Wh-what do you w-want?”

Like I didn't already know. This was it, the thing that my mother had always warned me about: If you let a strange man get near you—or God forbid one of them should ever get you into his car—then it was all over. He would rape you and murder you and bury you in a shallow grave somewhere, guaranteed.

Or so she'd insisted, shaking a finger at me to drive the message home. And now here was the proof: A heavy metal grille divided the van's passenger compartment from the rear cargo area. I heard Cam taking labored breaths back there, the sound like air slowly bubbling through thick muck. Once in a while she moaned.

“I have some money,” I tried again tremblingly, even though I didn't. By now we were pulling onto I-95 at the on-ramp before the bridge, headed east.

No one knew where we were. Because of Cam's lie, for a while no one would even know we were missing—not until tomorrow. And by the time anyone figured out what had happened…

Although if my mother was right, no one would ever know for sure.
DISAPPEARED,
the headlines would say.
HAVE YOU SEEN ME?
the
MISSING
posters on light poles and in store windows would read.

But only for a little while. After that, some other kid would vanish and we'd mostly be forgotten, pushed off the charts by a newer runaway teen or snatched toddler.

It happened all the time. “It's a lot of money,” I lied. “If you'd just let us go, I could go home and get it and—”

“Shut up.” His face intent, he stared straight ahead, hitting the gas hard. “Just shut up and do what I say. It'll go easier for you.”

Which I didn't like the sound of one bit. Headlights glared, then broke into wild, multicolored spinning pinwheels. I thought about my chances if I grabbed the steering wheel and yanked it, got us into an accident. But then suddenly I felt sick, too dizzy and sick to do anything.

Anything at all. My ears rang like gongs.
That juice,
I thought woozily. My eyelids slammed shut with a bang that echoed through my brain and my head felt swimmy. And then…

Then I was gone.

F
ifteen years later I still had nightmares about it: long, bloodily insistent shockers that ended with a hand flattening itself to the glass of a dark window, then clawing its way down. Awake, I walked around with a slide show running in my head, girls' faces screaming and pleading. And then, after all that time…

THREE SAVED FROM BASEMENT PRISON,
said the breaking-news crawl on the TV, and
HOMEOWNER QUESTIONED IN WOMEN'S CAPTIVITY.

Both my parents and my grandparents had passed on by then, leaving me their house. Sitting in the same threadbare living-room recliner that I'd been using ever since I had graduated from my high chair, I stared at the TV screen, barely believing. But it was true:

Earlier that day a young woman had managed to get out of a house in a run-down neighborhood—only a few miles from where I now sat—and flag down a squad car. On the TV screen she and another girl were being helped into a police van while my long-ago kidnapper, still slim, even-featured, and yellow-haired just as I recalled him, stood talking with a policeman.

He looked cordial but cautious, as if while he chatted he was trying to come up with some innocent reason for having two girls locked in his basement. Each time he glanced at the policeman you could see he was gauging the cop's response.

The officer didn't smile. Then a third girl came out.
Cam…

Thinner than I remembered but with the same narrow face and large, dark eyes, she cast an unreadable look at the man who had grabbed us, then allowed herself to be guided into the police van with the first two young women.

Cam is alive…

More officers approached. As the van left with Cam and the other two girls, the cops surrounded Henry Gemerle, who'd begun ruining my life fifteen years earlier in that park and had just now finished the job.

Because of course I was happy and relieved that, somehow, my cousin Cam had survived. But now that she had, she could tell people what I'd done, couldn't she? That on that night all those years ago I'd left her behind and never said anything about it.

No one would ever understand my side of it: that I'd been terrified, traumatized, drugged. That I'd been not much more than a child, that I'd thought for sure Cam was already dead when I got out of his house, and that I'd kept silent because I hadn't dared tell anyone what had happened or what he'd done.

That I'd been afraid to. But now if people found out, I'd lose my job, probably, or be forced to leave it on account of the terrible publicity. I'd lose what few acquaintances I had and even my home, since I would never be able to stay where anyone knew me. I might—the awful thought closed my throat in terror—I might even go to jail.

All of which meant that somehow, fifteen years after I'd left my cousin Cam in the hands of a monster and then kept silent about it, I had to fix things so she wouldn't tell on me.

Or so she couldn't.

S
leet needles lanced through the January night, gleaming slantwise in the headlights of the cars making their hesitant way along the street outside. Splattering against the big plate-glass front window of Aroostook County sheriff's deputy Lizzie Snow's storefront office, the wet ice bits made a sound like tiny fists weakly hammering to get in.

Just another fine evening in Bearkill, Maine,
Lizzie thought glumly, peering through the streaming glass as Dylan Hudson's familiar figure came striding into view. Galoshes splashing in the slush, the tall plainclothes detective's shoulders hunched sharply under his topcoat and black-and-white-striped scarf, ice-melt trickling in a shining stream off the brim of his hat.

At the sight of him she let the familiar lurch of feeling go through her, then set it firmly aside. Emotions were one thing but actions were entirely another, she told herself sternly.

“Hi.” He swung in, shedding showers of icy droplets as he crossed the sparsely furnished office. Except for the half dozen
WANTED
posters on the bulletin board and the police scanner on a shelf, the white-painted walls and gray industrial carpet made the place look like an insurance agency's not-very-successful branch office.

Dylan deposited the large white paper shopping bag he carried on her desk. Delicious aromas floated from the bag.

“Hi, yourself.” She should not have let him come, but the miserable night made his driving the ninety miles back to Bangor unwise even for a Maine state cop, and his promise of Thai food delivered to her office had sealed the deal.

“So, anything shakin'?” He pulled out the familiar white cardboard cartons, pushing aside the flotsam on her desk to make two places amid the clutter.

“Couple things.” Last from the bag were a pair of Tsingtaos, the cold brown bottles dripping condensation, and a bottle opener.

“Fire crews're still out,” she added with a glance at the scanner on the shelf above her desk. “But wrapping it up.”

Despite the wintry mix pelting outside now, northern Maine was in the grip of a serious long-term dry spell; a rash of brush fires around Bearkill had made chatter on the police band lively all day. But since the sky had opened up late this afternoon the radio spat only routine local dispatches.

The cash register slip in the shopping bag said the food had come from Bangor. “Dylan, how'd you keep this stuff hot? And the beer so—”

Well, but it was no problem keeping things cold in this kind of weather, was it? On a night like tonight, back in Boston that cop scanner would be hopping with more minor vehicle mishaps than you could shake a tow truck at.

Here in Bearkill, if you slid into a ditch most likely your neighbor pulled you out. “Microwave,” Dylan explained.

He gestured toward the combination convenience store and gas station down the block. It and a dozen other small businesses made up the bulk of downtown Bearkill's commercial activity.

If you could call it activity. Situated in the very rooftop of Maine at the edge of the Great North Woods, Bearkill had once been the thriving center of a booming lumber industry. But the boom had gone bust, and now drab storefront tenants like the Cut-n-Run hair salon, the Paper Chase office and party supply store (
BALLOON BOUQUETS OUR SPECIALTY!
), a tae kwon do studio, and the New to You used-clothing exchange dominated what remained.

“There's a few pretty beat-looking forest service guys and gals in that convenience store right now,” Dylan added, sounding sympathetic.

The combination gas station and snack vendor was called—really, a less appetizing name could not have been found, Lizzie thought—the Go-Mart. “What I heard, they've been out trenching in the fields and forests for nearly twenty-four hours,” he said.

By this time in a normal year, the fire danger in the area would be long over. But it had not been a normal year.

Dylan shook his head ruefully. “Digging firebreaks, that's no-kidding hard labor. Remind me of that the next time you hear me bitching about my job, will you?”

“Um. Yeah.” On the shelf with the scanner was a framed commendation from the Boston PD, where until two months earlier Lizzie had been a member of the elite Homicide/Violent Crimes Investigation Unit. Beside those items, a Lucite stand held a snapshot of a little blond girl.

The little blond girl was the reason that Lizzie was no longer in Boston, and no longer a homicide cop. “They're catching a break now, though,” she added, waving out at the sleet.

She debated telling Dylan about the other thing she'd been working today. If she did, she'd have a much harder time getting rid of him after dinner.

On the other hand, a second opinion might not be such a bad idea. “Listen, I've got a local teenager gone missing.”

Just weeks earlier she'd been hired to be the eyes and ears of the Aroostook County Sheriff's Department here in Bearkill. And why an ex–Boston homicide cop had turned out to be exactly the right person for the job was a whole other story.

But it was not the one preoccupying her now. “Fourteen-year-old—you know the type, she thinks she's twenty.”

Northern Maine, with thousands of square miles of forests, mountains, and farm fields sparsely dotted by tiny, struggling towns much like Bearkill, was so different from Boston that it might as well have been on some other planet. But teenagers were the same just about everywhere, she was coming to realize.

“I'm hitting a wall on it,” she admitted.

Dylan was a murder cop, too. So he knew all about missing girls; the found ones, and the ones who never got found.

Especially them.

Lean and sharp-featured, with pale skin, dark, hooded eyes, and dark, wavy hair that she happened to know curled into tight, Botticelli-angel-type ringlets when he was in the shower…

Stop that,
she told herself firmly.
Stop it this minute.

He popped the tops off both beer bottles. “Yeah, well, why don't you fill me in on the case while you eat. Dig in.”

She didn't have to be invited twice. One of the first things a cop learned as a rookie was to eat whatever, whenever; regular mealtimes were for civilians.

“Any reason you think she isn't just a runaway?” he asked, shoveling shrimp in red curry onto hot noodles.

“Yeah, there is. Couple of them, actually.” She chewed, swallowed, drank beer. A stickler for the rules would've said no drinking, her being on the job and all. But then a stickler probably wouldn't have been stuck in a sleet storm way out here at the ass end of the earth.

Hell, if she'd been a fourteen-year-old girl in this nowhere little berg, she'd have probably done a runner herself.

At the same time another thought niggled persistently at her, something she was forgetting. But it remained elusive.

“Tara's taken off several times before and she's always come back,” Lizzie said. “Everyone goes nuts looking for her for a few days, then she waltzes in like nothing happened. Even though her mother's frantic, she thinks that's probably how it'll all end up this time, too. But…”

She let her voice trail off, trying to put into words what a bad hit she got off the situation. Some things looked worrisome at first but ended up fine; others stank from the get-go.

Like this thing now. Dylan eyed the dark front window, still hissing with sleet. “Yeah. But,” he repeated. “How long?”

“No one's seen her since yesterday morning. It was a school holiday,” Lizzie replied reluctantly.

It was now Tuesday night. “She's never skipped a whole day of school before,” Lizzie added.

Dylan's eyebrows went up and down once in reply.
Bad sign,
they signaled.

But she knew that, too. “I mean, I guess she could be just a runaway. Which is what most everyone around here is assuming.”

Everyone but me.
A shred of broccoli clung distractingly to his lower lip.

“And like I say, the girl's done it before. Maybe decided to push it a little further this time. But the other difference is that the earlier times she's always phoned home to let her mom know she's okay.”

Lizzie ate a shrimp. “Not right away, maybe, but she's always done it. This time, though, not a peep. And none of her friends knows where she is, either.”

The friends had been the usual gaggle of teen girls, diffuse and dreamy with the occasional speculative glance at Lizzie's weapon. Overall it had been like talking to a basket of kittens.

“You believe them?” asked Dylan. “And is there a boyfriend?”

Standard questions. The broccoli shred was gone. “Yeah, and he's missing, too, along with his motorcycle. So duh, right?”

The boy was an eighteen-year-old local kid with nothing on his record but a couple of misdemeanors; one was a pot bust but even that was only for possession, and the rest were just for underage drinking. So no real red flags had gone up from Aaron DeWilde, who was no Boy Scout but merely the kind of sullen, doe-eyed misfit that girls like Tara had been finding the sensitive side of since time began.

“No Amber Alert,” added Lizzie. Tara Wylie had already been the subject of two of these; each time the girl had showed up on her own, demanding to know what all the fuss was about.

“Not yet, anyway. Mom's put up a few homemade posters in case someone around here saw something but that's all. Hey, not my decision,” she added at his look of surprise. “Maybe if I knew the girl better, I'd feel better about that, too.”

“Cell phone?” Dylan scraped a slice of mushroom from one of the cartons and ate it.

She shook her head. “She's got one, but it's a hand-me-down, just a cheap little burner.” No GPS tracking software in it. “And either it's turned off or the battery's dead.”

Outside, the sleet stopped suddenly as if a switch had been thrown. “Damn,” Lizzie said.

Since her arrival here in Bearkill, the weather had featured a single blizzard that met all her expectations for a take-no-prisoners northern Maine winter event. But the snow had melted swiftly, leaving the rural terrain looking oddly like the “after” pictures on a global-warming-alert website: cracked soil, spring-fed ponds dried to muck-holes, withered winter wheat.

Tonight's sleet, in fact, was only the second measurable precipitation since Labor Day, all moisture instantly inhaled by the fiery breath of a summer that, but for the one brief wintry interlude, just wouldn't quit. And the weather now, while impressive to look at, was giving little relief to the desperately parched earth.

“All the fire teams'll be right back out there tomorrow,” predicted Dylan, eyeing the streaming front window skeptically.

Chewing, she nodded agreement. The danger had been critical for weeks, everyone in the county on high alert for the smell of smoke; in the grand scheme of things tonight meant nothing.

“What's that sticking out of your shirt?” A corner of some thinly woven silvery material peeked from above his loosened tie.

Dylan rolled his eyes. “New vest. Testing it out for a little while. I guess the brass in Augusta decided I wasn't bulletproof enough.”

“Yeah, well, I don't blame them. You must be killing them in workers' comp alone, not to mention their safety stats.”

She touched her napkin to her lips, then wadded it. “You've been nailed three times, right? Or four? It's a wonder you don't have lead poisoning by now.”

He nodded, grimacing. Dylan liked to pretend it was no big deal, getting shot. But she noticed he wasn't complaining about the new vest.

“It's been comfy enough so far. Not heavy or bulky, and they tell me it's chock-full of bullet-stopping space-age polymers,” he said. “For what that's worth.” Then:

“Little bird called me today,” he remarked.

She swallowed. So that's why he was here. “About…?”

But she knew.
Nicki.
She looked up again at the blond child in the framed photo. Nine years old, eight years missing…

If she was still alive she was Lizzie's only surviving kin, the daughter of Lizzie's murdered sister, Cecily, whose body had been found nearly a decade earlier on the Maine coast.

Oh, Sissy, I'm so sorry…
After Sissy's death there'd been a murder investigation with all the right bells and whistles. But no culprit, or any possible motives, had ever been found, and her baby wasn't found, either. And now there were rumors that a little girl very like what Nicki would've grown up into had been spotted here in Aroostook County.

More than rumors, actually. It was why Lizzie was here. She looked away from the photo.

“Yeah,” said Dylan. “Guy I talked to says it might be Nicki, anyway. But don't get your hopes up,” he added unnecessarily.

The food was gone. She gathered the cartons and napkins and the plastic cutlery together to stuff into the trash. Later she would haul the bag to the dumpster behind the building. It was a far cry from what she'd gotten used to in the Boston PD where, to a decorated homicide cop like herself, handling the trash meant snapping a set of cuffs onto it.

In Bearkill, in fact, everything was a far cry from Boston. But she'd been here only a few weeks, she reminded herself. She couldn't very well give up on looking for Nicki when she'd barely settled in.

“So what else did your guy say?” she asked when Dylan came back from rinsing the beer bottles in the washroom.

Recycling bottles and cans was huge around here, not so much for the environment as for the nickels, northern Maine not being a high-income territory unless you were a lumber company manager or farm-equipment distributor.

Or a methamphetamine cook. Just in the time she'd been here the MDEA had busted a trio of operations, small teams making the lethally attractive drug in mobile homes or at remote, unlikely-to-be-stumbled-upon campsites.

“Says he saw a kid.” Dylan put a hand companionably on her arm as he passed, let it rest there for a more-than-companionable moment. “With a couple. Transient. Living out of a car, he said.”