Read The Night She Disappeared Online
Authors: April Henry
Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Friendship, #Social Issues, #Mysteries & Detective Stories, #Adolescence
“And that man”—he gestures with his chin—“who was he?”
“A customer, but I don’t know his name. Just his face. He locked me in here.” I shudder. “He wanted me to call him master.”
His lips press together for a long second. “And how did he die?”
“Drew shot him when he was pushing a screwdriver into Gabie’s neck.” We both turn and look as the paramedics begin to carry her up the stairs. Her mouth is slack, her eyes closed.
They’ve summoned another ambulance for Drew and me, and the cop says the rest of the questioning will wait until we’ve all been checked out at the hospital. He takes my arm as we go up the stairs. Outside the front lawn is covered with cop cars. There are no nearby houses. No one who could have heard me screaming.
The back doors of one of the two ambulances are open. Inside, I can see them working on Gabie’s still form. She’s being given oxygen, and one of the paramedics is hanging a clear bag of liquid that goes down into a tube that ends in the back of one of her hands.
Then she raises that hand to her face, and something inside of me loosens. She’s alive, then. Gabie’s definitely alive.
I take a deep breath. I can smell grass and dirt and a million other smells I thought I would never smell again. The stars sparkle like diamonds, and I start to cry.
LESS THAN AN HOUR LATER,
three doctors are standing outside my emergency room cubicle, discussing how best to treat my head, when a cop pushes the curtain aside. I’m lying down. I’m still weak even though they’ve given me three packs of soda crackers and a granola bar and have promised to bring me more food. Because I couldn’t stop shivering, they’ve covered me with heated white blankets. Heating blankets is a genius idea.
For a second, the cop just looks at me. He has a strong nose and eyes that don’t miss a trick. Then he smiles, and he no longer looks intimidating. He stretches out his hand. “Kayla, I’m Sergeant Thayer. I’ve been working on your case since the beginning.”
I prop myself up on one elbow and sort of shake his hand. “Thank you,” I say. It’s strange to think of myself as a case.
“I’ll need to talk to you tomorrow,” he says. “There are still some details we need to fill in.”
I nod. I remember the panties that must have belonged to some other girl, but I don’t want to think about her now. Tomorrow will be soon enough.
“There are some people here to see you.” Sergeant Thayer turns and pulls back the curtain, and my parents and brother crowd in as he leaves. I sit all the way up. All three of them manage to put their arms around me. Our faces are hot and wet with tears. We’re all crying and laughing at the same time.
Finally, my mom pulls back and looks at me. For the first time, her eyes take in the bandage over one ear and my newly bald head. The nurse was going to just shave off one side, but I told her that would look even more ridiculous.
“Oh, Kayla,” she breathes, her fingers hovering just above the bandage, “your hair!”
“I think she looks cool,” Kyle says. “Like some kick-ass warrior.” My dad nods, wiping his eyes.
My mom purses her lips. “Kayla’s just lucky that she has a nice-shaped head.”
The comment is so like my mom—always seeing the bright side of any situation—that the four of us start laughing. I haven’t laughed in so long. If Gabie and Drew hadn’t come for me, I might never have laughed again. Thank God I didn’t draw that homemade knife across my wrists.
It’s so wonderful to be surrounded by my family that it takes a few minutes for me to see how bad they actually look. My mom’s face is hollow; my dad’s, unshaven. Kyle has circles under his eyes. I realize that every day I spent in that basement, they spent in their own prison.
But now we’re all free.
The Sixteenth Day
Gabie
EVEN IF YOUR
parents work as surgeons in the very hospital in which you are staying, it turns out that they don’t let you stay there very long. You have to be really sick or even dying. And the three of us are a long way from that. We’ve only spent a day and a half on the med-surg floor, and now we’re going to be discharged. My parents did talk the coordinator into letting Kayla and me room together, and they put Drew in the next room over. After being debriefed by the cops, we’ve spent most of our time filling each other in.
They’ve done everything they can to make sure we get better fast and stay healthy. Kayla, Drew, and I have had tetanus shots and X-rays, and we’ve been prescribed broad-spectrum antibiotics that we’ll each be taking for ten days, just in case. Of course, they couldn’t do anything about the fact that we’re all still covered in bruises and stitches. If you put the three of us together, we would make one great Frankenstein monster.
Kayla’s palm got cut from her homemade knife, but my mom said that it didn’t do any permanent damage to the tendons and nerves, so it shouldn’t affect her softball scholarship. Her head is shaved and stitched, and she jokes that it even looks like a softball. By the time college starts in the fall, she says she might have enough hair that it can pass for a pixie cut.
Drew’s arm took seventeen stitches, and he needed a couple of pints of blood, but he’s okay, too. My parents worked on him, just as they worked on Kayla. They weren’t allowed to work on me, but that didn’t stop them from checking on me a million times as a plastic surgeon stitched the stab wound in my neck. Thanks to Kayla’s intervention, it’s not very deep, and it missed anything important. My parents keep reassuring me that the scar will be no bigger around than a pencil. After everything that happened, it doesn’t seem like that big of a deal.
The guy is dead. It turns out he had a name, and it wasn’t John Robertson like he told Drew when he ordered pizza. It was Ronald Hewett. He worked at home, building architectural models. And one life-sized room in his basement, the perfect place to stash a girl. On his computer, the cops found notes about every woman and girl at Pete’s Pizza, the pros and cons of taking each, and how best to do it. He had picked out a girl—me—and then a night. When Kayla turned up instead of me, he stuck to his plans. I have a feeling that he was the kind of guy who had trouble deviating from plans. Then he wrote about what a disappointment Kayla was. About how I would have been much better. I try not to think about that very much.
Hewett had no criminal record, but yesterday the cops brought in a cadaver dog. In his yard, Hewett had buried a girl who had been shot in the head. She went missing from Beaverton over six months ago. Everyone thought she was a runaway. I try not to think about her either.
And Cody Renfrew, the guy who shot himself after talking to Elizabeth Lamb, the so-called psychic? The best guess is that he had the bad luck to be in the vicinity the night Kayla disappeared. The meth made him paranoid, and then her being missing pushed him over the edge.
There’s a knock on the partly open door. It’s Drew, his right arm bandaged from elbow to wrist. “Ladies, your carriages await,” he says. He opens the door wider, and I see my dad pushing an empty wheelchair. Behind him are our moms—and they have empty wheelchairs, too. Drew nods at my mom, then sits in the wheelchair she’s pushing. He leans forward to fold down the footrests.
“You’re kidding, right?” I appeal to my dad.
He gives me a wink. “Hospital policy, kiddo.” Ever since I was admitted, my parents have been treating me differently, joking around with me. I’ve even seen them both cry, something I’d never seen before.
Half the nursing staff is hovering in the background, grinning. I have the feeling we’re the most exciting patients they’ve had in a long time. We got so many flowers we asked that they give them to other patients in the hospital. And we’ve had interview requests from every TV show and newspaper. But we just say no. Kayla and Drew and I talked about it the first night and decided we didn’t need to share everything with the world.
My dad pushes the wheelchair to the edge of the bed. “Come on. Kayla’s dad is out by the loading dock, and our car is, too. We need to get out of here before the media figures out what’s going on.”
“I guess you guys are on delivery tonight,” Kayla says.
Of course, my parents and Kayla’s mom have never worked at Pete’s, so it goes right over their heads. But Drew and Kayla and I look at each other. We don’t smile—we don’t have to. We know how much we owe each other, how close we all came to death.
“Then I guess it’s order up!” I say, settling into the wheelchair. “Three mediums with the works.”
Kayla gets in her own chair and makes a fake frowny face at me. “Speak for yourself, missy. I’m a small.”
The Eighty-Eighth Day
Drew
IF YOU HAD
told me that I would ever be waiting to walk up on stage to shake hands with Portland’s chief of police in front of TV cameras and an audience full of even more cops, I would have asked what you had been smoking.
But today I’m one of four people getting a Civilian Medal for Heroism from the city of Portland’s police department. Me. Drew Lyle. Straight-C slacker. Except, I’m not sure I’m really those things anymore. Next month I start taking classes at Portland Community College to become a paramedic. While Gabie goes off to Stanford, probably not to become a doctor. Her parents seem to slowly be coming to terms with that idea. And the times we’ve all eaten dinner together, I think they like the questions I ask about the cases they’ve worked on. Hearing them talk is interesting in a way that none of my biology or health classes ever were.
The audience is clapping now as the police chief, Clayton Yee, hands plaques to the other two civilians getting medals. The two guys had been driving behind a semi that tried to avoid a stalled car. Instead it slid off the highway, overturned, and caught fire. They pulled the trucker from his burning rig. Now Yee and the two men pose for a few photos.
I’m wearing the same clothes I wore to Kayla’s funeral. I find her in the audience and smile at her. She smiles back. Her hair’s growing back, and her face has filled out. I’ve only seen her a few times this summer. She’s never come back to work, except once to say good-bye.
Gabie’s parents are here, sitting up front, looking proud. My mom isn’t here. She’s in rehab. She was given the choice between that and jail, and she chose rehab. Will it work? I don’t know. The court allowed me to become an emancipated minor.
“Now I’d like to introduce you to Andrew Lyle and Gabriella Klug,” Clayton Yee says. Hearing my full first name throws me off a little. Gabie has to poke me to remind me to walk up the stairs.
“Because of their selfless and courageous actions, without regard to their own personal safety, these two young people were able to save the life of their coworker, Kayla Cutler, and quite possibly prevent the deaths of many more young women. If these two young people hadn’t stepped in to save their friend, who knows how many girls would have died in Ronald Hewett’s basement?”
Camera flashes are going off, and a dozen guys are holding microphones out. We’re not quite the sensation we were in the first few days after it happened, but it’s still not unusual for me to see some mention of the story as one of the top news headlines on Web sites. And it still doesn’t feel quite real.
I spot Sergeant Thayer in the audience. His arms are crossed. I have a feeling that if it was up to him, we wouldn’t be getting this award.
Sometimes I still have nightmares about it, about pulling that trigger and how Hewett fell back in a boneless sprawl. Like Flea Market Parade says, sometimes it feels like there’s a criminal in my head. But then I think about Gabie and know I didn’t have any choice.
Yee finishes speaking. The clapping swells, and I look at Gabie and smile. We both bow our heads a little and let the applause wash over us.
Thanks to Lieutenant Cameron Piner of the Guilford County Sheriff’s Office for answering my questions about dive teams. And I wouldn’t have met Lieutenant Piner if it weren’t for Lee Lofland, a veteran police investigator who set up the Writers Police Academy. More thanks go to Robin Burcell, police investigator and author, who pretty much knows everything and is always willing to share it. As always, any mistakes are my own.
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Copyright © 2012 by April Henry
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Henry, April.
The night she disappeared / April Henry.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“Christy Ottaviano Books.”
Summary: Told from various viewpoints; Gabie and Drew set out to prove that their missing co-worker Kayla is not dead, and to find her before she is, while the police search for her body and the man who abducted her.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-4245-4
[1. Missing persons—Fiction. 2. Kidnapping—Fiction. 3. Family problems—Fiction. 4. Oregon—Fiction. 5. Mystery and detective stories.] I. Title.
PZ7.H39356Nig 2012 [Fic]—dc23 2011030876
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The Second Day: Todd and Jeremy