The Girls She Left Behind Read online

  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.”

  “Oh, great.” From what she could tell so far, poverty in Maine boiled down, as it had anywhere she’d ever been, to people just doing what they could to keep a roof over their heads. Like those meth cooks, even; it was a filthy, dangerous, and basically depraved way to make a living, but there weren’t many jobs around here and people had expenses to cover.

  The warmth of Dylan’s touch faded; another pang of longing pierced her before she banished that, too. Dammit, she thought, why am I still so vulnerable to him?

  But when she looked up incautiously into the full force of his crooked smile, she knew why and cursed herself for it. She’d said she would leave him; swore it, in fact, from the moment she’d learned
that he was married.

  Found out from his wife, actually, from whom he was neither separated nor in the process of getting divorced as he’d claimed. Dylan’s wife, Sherry, had surprised them together, bursting in on them one awful night in Lizzie’s apartment, and after that horrid revelation it was of course all over.

  Devastated, she’d sworn off him for good. But then Sherry got sick suddenly, and went downhill fast; she’d died soon after he’d left the Boston PD to join the Maine State Police as a homicide cop.

  “I don’t suppose your little bird got a plate number?”

  Now Lizzie was here in Maine, too, lured to the remote, rural northernmost part of the state by vague stories and an anonymously sent snapshot of a blond child who could be her niece, Nicki. Or not. She knew very well that it might not be.

  Dylan looked wry. “Oh, yeah. Tag number, sure, he got their Social Security numbers, too,” he replied sarcastically.

  Outside the front window the brief storm had passed; the northern Maine night turned spangled and sharp-edged. She stared out into it.

  “No,” Dylan amended more gently when she didn’t answer. “No ID, no real proof of anything at all, really. He said it was just that the kid was the same age as I’d told him we’re looking for, blond and blue-eyed, and she didn’t seem like she belonged with the adults that she was with. Just a feeling he got, he said.”

  She glanced again at the now-silent scanner, wanting to hear for sure that the fire crews could finally stand down tonight even if by tomorrow all the sleet had evaporated, putting them back in tindery conditions once more.

  And she wanted Tara Wylie to be home safe and sound with her mother.

  “Where did he see her?” Lizzie asked, meaning Nicki.

  If it was Nicki.

  “Bangor,” Dylan answered. “I’ve been keeping an eye peeled, I put the word out so the patrol cars and so on know to give me a call if any of ’em notice anything. But with this…look, Lizzie, I only told you about it at all ’cause I promised I’d keep you in the loop.”

  She nodded tiredly, knowing the cold-case drill as well as he did: sifting a lot of chaff in the hope of coming up with even a single grain of anything helpful. It was why she needed Dylan, who had plenty of contacts here in Maine; also, as he’d just proved again, he was the king of schmooze when it came to informants.

  Outside, an old pickup truck loaded with firewood trundled past, followed by an even less-reputable-looking clunker whose fenders appeared to be held together by wide strips of silver duct tape, known locally as North Woods chrome.

  A wave of discouragement hit her. “Maybe I should go back to Boston.”

  There, she’d said it. The photograph of Nicki—if—had popped up out of nowhere months earlier, mailed to Dylan anonymously, without a return address. Seeing it, she hadn’t known at once that in response she would quit the job she had coveted, put her beloved city apartment on the market, upend her whole life. All she’d worked for, all she’d ever wanted…

  Not until she’d done it. Blood calls to blood. But if, as she now feared, the search was hopeless, then it had all been for nothing.

  “What, and leave all this behind?” Dylan’s gesture took in the whole room, its Sheetrock walls and auto-supply-store shelving as blandly generic as if it had come out of a box marked CONTENTS: ONE CRUMMY OFFICE.

  “And what about beautiful downtown Bearkill?” he added with a wave out at the desolate night, the fluorescent overhead lights in the supermarket across the street already snapping off one by one.

  It was only 6 P.M. “You’d miss it,” he said. “The culture, the exciting nightlife, and what about the glittering social scene?”

  Most of the nightlife here consisted of wild animals: deer, moose, even bears. The only sign still lit outside was the one over the door of the corner tavern, Area 51; the glowing panel featured a big-eyed alien hoisting a tilted cocktail glass, its long, slim fingers weirdly articulated and its slit pupils peering expressionlessly.

  “Don’t make fun,” she retorted, her mood changing abruptly at his mocking tone.

  Of the town, she meant, or its plus-or-minus eleven hundred citizens; ones she’d sworn to serve and protect when she became Bearkill’s first resident liaison officer, charged with outreach activities for the Aroostook County Sheriff’s Department. And despite her growing doubts about her decision, for now that oath still held, even if Area 51’s idea of a good hors d’oeuvre was a pickled egg.

  He eyed her, surprised at her tone. “Don’t tell me you’re getting hooked on the place? Gone native already?”

  “Can it,” she snapped back, and was about to say more: that in Boston by this hour she’d be happily tucked into a downtown piano bar, a single-malt whiskey in front of her and a good dinner from some side-street ethnic establishment coming later.

  Something spicy from the Szechuan place, she thought, or a plate of piroshki, the rich steamed pastry full of cabbage and egg. Instead, a pedestrian scuttled unexpectedly by outside the office window, glancing briefly in at them before hurrying on.

  Pale-skinned and hollow-eyed, the woman wore a puffy winter jacket in shiny black and a red scarf tied under her chin. Black slacks that looked dressier than the jacket-and-babushka combo, heeled leather boots. Like Lizzie’s. Or, not exactly like.

  “Dylan, I have not even a little bit ‘gone native,’ as you so pleasantly put it.” She glanced down at her own sleek Manolos: black, stack-heeled lace-ups she’d paid a small fortune for back in the city.

  “Yes, I can see that,” Dylan replied admiringly, taking in the rest of her usual work outfit: slim black jeans, a white silk shirt, and a leather belt, brass-buckled.

  She ignored his comment, regarding it as merely the standard Dylan Hudson brand of shameless flattery. If you let him, he could oil you up one side and down the other.

  Her black leather jacket, tailored to fit her perfectly and as soft as chamois, hung next to Dylan’s coat. Pulling it on, she looked around the office a final time.

  “Grab that trash bag, will you?” She didn’t want the office smelling like a take-out joint when her administrative assistant, Missy Brantwell, opened up in the morning.

  He complied obediently, heading out the rear exit with the tied-shut black plastic sack. Now if she could just extricate herself efficiently from the parting dance they’d soon be doing out on the sidewalk—since it seemed that he had no suggestions to make on the missing teenager situation—she’d be home free.

  Speaking of which, there was a large black-and-tan hound dog waiting for her there, one who needed food and a good long walk every evening, whatever the weather. And Dylan was not at all a fan of pitch-dark jaunts through half-frozen road slop.

  Good, she thought as he came back in without the trash bag, she’d use Rascal as an excuse. But as she opened her mouth to tell him that the rest of her evening would be devoted to dog care, a pickup truck pulled up outside, a shiny red Ram 1500 with a heavy chain winch in the back and a magnetic sign on the door panel:

  GREAT NORTH WOODS ANIMAL CARE, TREY WASHBURN, DVM. No cute puppy or kitten illustrations adorned the sign. Trey was not that kind of veterinarian. His specialty was the kind of creature that could kill you by stepping on you: a longhorn steer, for instance, or a six-hundred-pound pig.

  Dylan spied the truck. “Well, well, if it isn’t our friend Farmer John.”

  He did not sound friendly at all. But Lizzie hardly noticed, being fully occupied suddenly by the mental equivalent of a punch in the stomach. Now she knew what she’d forgotten.

  Dylan eyed her acutely. “You’ve got a date with him, haven’t you?”

  “Yes, Dylan. I do. Or I did, anyway.” A dinner date, one that had completely slipped her mind.

  Jumping down from the cab of his truck, the burly vet came in all smiles. But he stopped short when he saw Dylan.

  “Hi.” Tall and broad-shouldered, wearing a fleece-lined denim jacket, tan Carharrt overalls, and leather work boots, the big man gla
nced from Lizzie to Dylan and back.

  “Smells good in here.” The Thai food. With his thinning blond hair plastered back by the melting sleet and his round, pink face set in a determinedly amiable expression, Lizzie almost couldn’t see the hurt in his blue eyes.

  Almost. “Trey, I’m so sorry, I just got very involved here earlier, and—”

  Yeah, I can see that, his face said. “Hey, no problem. I just stopped by to say that I’m going to be a while anyway. Got some cows at a ranch up the road not doing so well on a diet of trucked-in chow now that their pasture’s dried out. So I promised the folks I’d come up after hours and take a look.”

  If Dylan hadn’t been there, Trey would have asked her to ride along, Lizzie knew, and she’d probably have accepted. Now, though, his gaze met hers communicatively: What the hell are you still doing with this joker, anyway?

  It was a good question, one that she’d also been known to ask herself. And she didn’t have a decent answer for either one of them.

  “Nice seeing you again,” Dylan said stiffly as Trey turned to go.

  Damn, she thought again as his sturdy frame bulked in the truck’s dashboard glow. But she didn’t know what she could have done differently about this and anyway it was too late, she knew, as Trey pulled away with his truck’s big tires spewing slush.

  Outside, Dylan walked with her to her vehicle, him clomping in his old-fashioned black rubber galoshes while she picked her way cautiously, not wanting to wreck her boots. The night’s sleet-washed air tasted good, cleansed for the moment of the stench of burning, not like Boston, where the air was full of exhaust fumes year-round.

  “Trey is not,” she said firmly, “a farmer.”

  Dylan shrugged. “Hey, he works with farm animals. Goes home with manure on his boots. No difference.”

  She beeped open the Blazer’s doors, having not yet gotten out of the Boston habit of locking everything she couldn’t nail shut. People around here left their cars running, keys hanging in the ignition, even, when they went into the store.

  “He’s been a good friend. I don’t,” she added, glancing back at her office once more, “let him bad-mouth you, either.”