The Girls She Left Behind (24 page)

“Drive,” she said.

T
en minutes after leaving the emergency room with Peg Wylie at the wheel, Lizzie looked up. They were already on the outskirts of Bearkill; stunned with fatigue, she'd barely noticed the trip.

Also, she'd been thinking. “That was some good work you did back there,” she said.

Probably the ER team could have revived the stricken man. But you never knew, and anyway, because of Peg they hadn't needed to.

Peg gazed straight ahead. “Thanks. But all I did was slug the guy, you know? Anyone could've done it.”

“Sure. Anyone who knew how. And where to hit him. And had the guts and the upper-body strength to do it.”

All of which, Lizzie recalled, Peg had worked very hard to attain. Unlike some guys, she hadn't just fallen out of bed with the physical chops she needed for emergency response work.

Peg shrugged. They drove in silence a little longer. “Anyway, another thing. I'm sorry,” Lizzie said quietly at last.

Peg pulled the Blazer to the curb in front of Lizzie's office and turned off the key. “Sorry? About what?”

The air here was thick with the stench of burning. The wooden buildings on Main Street no longer looked charmingly old-fashioned but like fuel for a coming inferno.

“For bullying you,” said Lizzie. “Trying to make you tell.”

Peg had driven well, with none of the tentativeness Lizzie might've expected from someone whose own car was the equivalent of a hamster wheel with seats. Which, along with the other traits Peg Wylie had shown, meant that she was a no-bullshit woman, not one who held information back for foolish or selfish reasons.

And
that
meant…“He kept you down there, didn't he? In his basement. Not with the other girls,” Lizzie added, “but before. Alone. Before he had ever kidnapped anyone else.”

She was guessing, but it was the only thing that made sense. Whatever Peg was still hiding, it had to be something she thought Tara mustn't ever know—that, if it were known, wouldn't help find the girl.

Otherwise she'd have revealed it by now. “But then you got pregnant and he let you go, maybe because with a baby you'd be too much trouble to have around?” said Lizzie.

Or just not attractive to him once she was pregnant, maybe. Later he'd probably found other ways of getting rid of women, ones that weren't so likely to get him caught.

The backyard of Gemerle's house, Lizzie still felt sure, would yield human bones when it got excavated.

Peg nodded brokenly. “That's it. And if Tara found out…”

She didn't need to finish. Tara was the product of rape and incest. Her father was a monster who had preyed upon women, trapped and caged them, brutalizing them in secret for years.

Women including Tara's own mother, who was probably his first victim. No child should have to cope with that knowledge. And you could tell a girl like Tara all you wanted that it didn't matter, that although she was the result of pain and shame, she herself was lovely and good.

Making her believe it, though. That might be a problem.

“He kicked me out,” said Peg. “One day after I told him I was pregnant, he just brought me upstairs, dragged me out to the front door, and…bam. It was over.”

“You went home? I mean, back to the rest of your family?”

Peg nodded. “They all just thought I'd run away. Nobody was looking for me, nobody…”

She stopped. “It wasn't even all that unusual. I mean, girls like me end up on the streets all the time. When I showed up home again, even pregnant, no one even made that big a deal about it.”

“And you never knew about the other girls.”

Peg shook her head. “It never occurred to me. I guess it should have—that once I was gone he'd try to find some other, I don't know…outlet. For his urges.”

She turned to Lizzie. “But I just wanted to put it all behind me. So I did.”

And a hell of a job she'd done with the project, too, Lizzie thought. Raising a child alone, keeping it clothed and fed, making a good life for herself and her daughter come hell or high water—against all odds, Peg Wylie had accomplished it, meanwhile taking on one of the hardest volunteer jobs that a civilian could have, as a volunteer firefighter in a little town way the hell out here in the hinterlands.

And she'd made it work. “Okay,” said Lizzie. “I get it. And you were right. Knowing the whole thing wouldn't have helped me.”

It happened. You chased down the wrong lead, it didn't pan out. It went with the territory.

You had to accept it. “But now,” Lizzie went on, “we still have to find Tara.”

She summarized what they knew: “We think Gemerle grabbed her Tuesday night and buried her in that box up in the fire zone to punish you, because you testified against him.”

Peg bit her lip. “Okay. What else?”

“I think Jane Crimmins was here looking for him, wanting to get revenge, maybe, for that girl she took care of, Cam Petry. And when she found him she turned the tables on him, killed Gemerle in the motel and then dumped him in the fire zone. That would've been last night.”

If it was Jane Crimmins. Emily Ektari's results still said otherwise. But maybe there'd been a mistake.

Peg caught on fast. “And when she took his body up there, she found Tara? She was the one who dug Tara up and moved her, maybe, sometime last night? So maybe she's still alive?”

Lizzie paused. There was such a thing as too much hope. “I don't know. I don't understand that part yet. But we know Crimmins burned her hands pretty badly doing something recently, and the fires were all over the place up there, so—”

Peg nodded slowly. “So it could be that's what happened. But even if it was, where's Tara now?”

“I don't know that, either.” Not far from the original burial site, maybe; moving Tara any great distance, against her will and with people around fighting the fires, would've been problematic.

So the girl really could still be there. Whether she was dead or alive, though, was another question. Through the front window of her office, Lizzie could see Missy Brantwell with her blond head bent over a map as she talked on the phone.

Missy should've been with her family, somewhere safe. But probably she'd come back for some small thing she'd forgotten and gotten caught up in helping someone.

Behind her Trey Washburn stood with Missy's toddler in his arms; together, they looked like a family. Lizzie swallowed a pang of envy, turning from the pretty interior scene to the smoke drifting like fog under the streetlights, yellowish in the gloom.

“I'm sorry about all this,” she said. “All that's happened.”

The lights in the office went off and the trio inside came out into the street, heads down, squinting in the smoke. With the little boy now clasped in her arms, Missy followed Trey through the murk to his truck and he helped them in; then his headlights flared in the acrid gloom and they were gone.

Peg rested her hands on the Blazer's steering wheel, her face desolate. “I never should have gone to court. If I'd just kept my fool mouth shut, he never would have—”

“Yeah, maybe.”
Don't poke a stick at it
was a fine rule for dealing with psychopaths, in Lizzie's experience. But there were exceptions.

This one, for instance. “I knew if I didn't, though,” Peg went on, “it would be just a matter of time until it was some other woman's daughters. He'd be after them the same way he went after those new girls, once he was done with me.”

She sighed heavily. “But I never thought helping someone else would mean sacrificing my own child.”

“No. Of course you didn't. But…listen, do you want to tell me the rest of it? I mean,” Lizzie said, feeling inadequate, “just so you can. Tell it, I mean, to someone. Anyone at all.”

Secrets like Peg's were like acid; they ate through you. If you kept them, they ate right through your soul.

Besides, Lizzie still did need to know all of it, just in case. She might have the luxury of kindness without any ulterior motives, someday.

But not now. Peg spoke softly. “He drugged me, like I told you, and when I woke up I was at his house, in the cellar. I was thirteen, I was naked, and he'd already….”

Lizzie waited, saying nothing. “It went on for two years,” Peg said when she could speak again.

“And you didn't tell because your family depended on him.”

Peg nodded. “Yes. And because he said he'd kill me if I did.” Her next breath came out in a sob.

“Besides, I was so ashamed. I thought it was my fault, what he'd done to me. He
said
so. He told me I
made
him do it. Lizzie, if he's had Tara all this time, what if he—”

Peg got control of herself again. “Anyway. Finally he just…kept me. A couple of weeks, then it was a month. He kept promising I could go home. But it never happened until I said I thought there was going to be a baby. And then suddenly I was free.”

She took a shaky breath. “So like I said, I went home. Just another knocked-up girl in the neighborhood.”

An old pickup truck rattled by in the smoky gloom, its bed loaded with hastily gathered belongings, mattresses and toys.

“So,” said Lizzie, “when Tara disappeared you figured it couldn't be him. He was confined, and he wasn't supposed to know you'd testified against him. That's why you thought it was okay to wait, let her come home on her own like she'd done before?”

Peg nodded again. “Uh-huh. And later even if he did have her, you knowing all this wouldn't have done anything to find her.”

She took a hitching breath. “If she was alive, it would only shame her. If…if she survived.”

Lizzie hesitated. Finally: “You're right, it wouldn't have,” she repeated. Hell, it wasn't even helping anything now.

Because sometimes the truth set you free. But other times it just hurt. “Well, the good news is that he probably had her but he doesn't anymore. The bad news—”

The bad news was that it looked as if Jane Crimmins did have Tara, or at least that Jane might know where the girl was now.

Lizzie explained this. “And unfortunately,” she added, “it's starting to look as if, in her own way, Jane Crimmins might be almost as bad as Henry Gemerle ever was.”

“I
don't get it,” said Dylan half an hour later in Lizzie's office. “You're saying you want to go up to the fire zone again tonight? Like, now?”

“Right,” said Lizzie. Minutes after Missy Brantwell switched the lights out and departed, Lizzie had gone in, turned all the lights back on again, and summoned Dylan Hudson and Cody Chevrier to meet her there.

“I don't know,” said Chevrier, passing a hand back over his brush-cut silvery hair. “Pretty wild up there. There's hot spots sparking up all over the place.”

It was long past midnight, well into the small hours of Friday morning, and the blaze raging in the hills beyond town had crept perilously near; helicopters whap-whapped overhead and tanker trucks rumbled in the distance, trying to get more water to the firefighters still battling to hold off the flames.

“I think Jane might've killed Gemerle in the motel and hauled his body there,” she said as the siren atop the firehouse went off again. “And if I'm right there's a chance we might find Tara alive there, too, near where she was buried.”

“Because?” Dylan asked. They'd been partners long enough back in Boston to respect each other's wild theories. But what Lizzie was suggesting now meant walking into a firestorm, and even Dylan Hudson wasn't that ballsy.

Not, anyway, without persuasion. “The only reason Jane would have dumped Gemerle there at all is if he told her about the spot,” Lizzie said. “About Tara being there, I mean, before Jane killed Gemerle. Otherwise, why would Jane even think of it?”

Lizzie sucked in a breath. “So what I'm saying is that maybe Jane found Tara and moved her somewhere else.”

Chevrier made a skeptical face. “So she didn't save her? Didn't bring her home, just stuck her in a different spot?”

“Yeah, I don't get that yet, either,” Lizzie admitted. “The why of it all.”

Which was a problem, a big one, when it came to getting these guys on board. But Dylan had been thinking.

“The important thing,” he told Chevrier, “is that maybe Tara Wylie really is somehow still alive. Out there,” he added, “alone, just hoping and praying that somebody cares enough to try one more time.”

Lizzie glanced gratefully at him as the sirens sounded again. “Before it really is too late,” Dylan finished.

Chevrier's lips pursed doubtfully, but the rest of his face said he was coming around to Lizzie's way of thinking, even if it was against his better judgment. “Peg's back home?”

Lizzie nodded. “I took her there, dropped her off, and told her she needed to stay put in case I need to call her. Or in case Tara shows up.”

Cruel, but they couldn't have Peg Wylie getting in the way.

“The last thing we need is her going off half-cocked so that she ends up having to get rescued herself,” Lizzie added.

What they needed, actually, was a miracle. But as a pair of boxy white ambulances screamed by outside, their cherry beacons stabbing the night, Lizzie knew they weren't going to get one.

And Chevrier still didn't look completely convinced. “Look,” she said, “if it's bad we won't stay. But we can say we tried.”

He sighed heavily. “I don't know, Lizzie. If you ask me, the whole idea's just flat-out nuts.”

And that did it. “Fine,” she snapped. Calling these guys had been a mistake, and wasting any more time trying to convince them was a worse one.

“I'm going. Don't like it, you can fire me when I get back.”

“Lizzie,” Dylan began, but she put a hand up at him.

“Just don't, okay? I appreciate what you've done so far. Stay here if you're staying, is all. Or get your stuff together.”