The Girls She Left Behind Read online

  But then through her fright she’d recalled her cell phone and found it in her bag, which her attacker hadn’t noticed. She’d kept it turned off to save battery but now, fumbling the phone out with shaking hands, she managed to poke the gadget’s tiny, glowing keys.

  Her fingers trembled, clumsy and numb feeling. Twice, she accidentally turned the thing back off and had to restart it. But she would get out of this, dammit, she would, so she kept at it.

  Remembering what her mother always said about sticking up for herself—You can’t be a doormat unless you lie down, Tara—she held back her sobs long enough to type her mom’s number and a message—HELP ME.

  There. Gasping with fright, she’d just pressed the SEND button when the van lurched to a halt, slamming her to the floor and knocking the phone from her hands.

  The side door slid open. She wanted to start bawling, but she didn’t. Instead she grabbed the phone up, stuffing it hastily into her pant pocket. She scrambled to her feet and charged the door opening, ducking and aiming her head at her attacker’s midsection.

  Because this is it, this is my last chance—

  “Oof.” The surprised grunt of pain she heard on impact was as satisfying as any stunt in her cheerleading workout. Swerving, she ducked again, rolling to one side and onto her feet on the rough ground, filled with the sharp exhilaration of sudden freedom.

  Run, a small, clear voice in her head advised her coldly. But the voice cut off abruptly when an unseen fist slammed the side of her head and she went down hard, stunned silent.

  A harsh, unidentifiable whisper came from above her. It was the same voice as before. “Do nothing, say nothing.” Helplessly she obeyed, waiting for what would come next.

  Please, I’m only fourteen…“Look at me and I’ll kill you.”

  Hands hauled her up, shoved her forward. She fell again to the dry, stony earth in the darkness, then struggled up once more. She stood there terrified, dizzy and tottering, until a hard kick sent her sprawling for a third time.

  “Had enough? Or do I have to hurt you some more?”

  A hand thrust down at her, gripping a shovel. “Take this.” Shakily, she obeyed, still flat on her stomach.

  “Get up. Put both your hands on the shovel. Don’t be stupid and try anything with it.”

  She hauled herself up by leaning on the tool. It was the only way she could do it. Then she cautiously lifted the thing, ready to fall onto it again if her legs gave out.

  They didn’t. “Good. Now…”

  There was joy in the voice, and that scared her the most. You just wait, though, she thought. Wait until I get my breath back.

  Because even though she was still very scared, she was mad now, too. Who the hell did this person think he was, anyway? And now she had this shovel in her hands, a heavy one, its blade sharp and made to cut swiftly through the earth.

  Or through other things. “Start digging,” the voice ordered, so she did.

  Still thinking, though. Thinking hard about the shovel and about the things—packed earth, dense roots, other things—that it might cut through. Thinking…

  Just you wait.

  —

  Once I saw Cam on TV being led out of the house in New Haven, it all came back to me: The dance at the park. The man grabbing us.

  And what happened next. I don’t know how long it was after I’d drunk the drugged juice that I woke up in the van’s rear cargo area. By then I was hurt and naked, with the greasy taste of the fried chicken he’d been eating smeared on my mouth.

  Cam wasn’t there. The van had stopped. I didn’t know where we were or how long I’d been unconscious, only that it was still dark out.

  The side panel slid open. He leaned in and shoved a bunch of cloth at me. It was a dress, a sort of smocklike thing.

  “Put it on.” He made a hurry-up gesture with his hands.

  I didn’t want to, but I didn’t want him looking at me naked, either. He had my own clothes in his hands, so I did what he said. Then I sat down again as my legs gave way. Through the open side panel I could see that we were on a quiet street in a part of the city where I’d never been, with cracked sidewalks and shot-out streetlights and chain-link fences staggering drunkenly around the tiny, trash-littered front yards.

  “Get out,” he ordered, but I was too frightened to move. Finally, with a curse he yanked me roughly through the van’s side opening, urging me toward a shabby wood-frame house with a sagging front porch and stacked concrete blocks where the front steps used to be.

  I began whimpering. I knew that it wouldn’t do any good but I couldn’t help it. “Quiet,” he said, muscling me along.

  I should have screamed anyway and taken my chances. But I was so scared; it was as if my whole body were made of pure fright, vibrating with terror. Plus I was hurting all over and still in shock from what he’d done to me, and dopey from the spiked juice.

  Using a key from a ring on his belt, he unlocked the front gate on the chain-link fence, forcing me through it and up to the house, which was also locked. I kept thinking that someone in one of the neighboring houses would see us and do something. Yell at him to stop or ask me if I was okay or call the police.

  But nobody saw us, or if they did they’ve never admitted it. When he shoved me through the door I tried a final time to rebel, planting my feet and opening my mouth at last to shout something, make someone hear me.

  But nothing would come out except a tiny squeak that made him laugh, like my pain and terror were amusing to him, as if they were what he wanted. He placed his hand on the flat of my back to shove me in, but at his touch my body leapt cringingly forward on its own, nearly falling over the awful threshold.

  Then, with the cold, hopeless awareness of a drowning person going down for the last time, I was just where he wanted me to be: inside, where no one could see or hear me.

  The door swung shut. He kept one hand tight around my wrist while he relocked it from the inside, using another key from the ring he still held. The keys jingled softly as he prodded me along a hallway smelling of rancid grease, down a flight of unpainted steps, and into what looked at first like an ordinary basement.

  A washer and dryer, old tires, and a rumbling furnace were down there. A pool table stood under a dangling lightbulb, a bookcase against one wall was crammed with old magazines, and a heavy orange canvas jacket plus a dusty yellow hard hat and what looked like several small scuba tanks cluttered the rest of the space.

  Except for that stuff—old fire department gear, it looked like—it was the kind of cellar anybody might have. But when I saw it, with that weak yellow lightbulb dangling above it, it hit me all at once that I was never going to see anything else again. Not my home or my parents or anybody else I knew.

  Not ever. Only him with his small gleaming eyes the color of dark water and his lips slick with grease. The scarred, lumpy knuckles of his fingers were grimy, as if he worked on cars for a living, maybe.

  Then I saw the cages. There were two of them over in the far corner of the basement, built up with heavy wood framing against the cinder-block walls. He opened the chain-link cage door of one of them, put his hand on my back again, and shoved me inside.

  “Shh,” my captor said once he’d slammed the door and locked it. I nearly started screaming again then, but he stopped me by putting a greasy finger to his lips.

  “You make a sound, honey, I’ll come back here and slit your throat. I mean it. I have done it before,” he added chillingly.

  As he turned away, chuckling to himself, I felt the contents of my stomach roll over: the dinner I’d had at home, the half of a beer at the park, and the spiked juice he’d made me drink, all of it threatening to come up in a convulsive heave.

  And then it did. Panic clutched me; I thought when I was done he’d be standing over me with his knife out. But he wasn’t. Instead he was focused on someone else, and God help me but I was grateful for it.

  One side of the cell I was in was made of wooden slats as a sort of
divider. From beyond them I heard him fumbling with another lock. The lock’s hasp clicked open; a girl began crying.

  Cam, I thought at first. But it wasn’t her; I knew her voice and it wasn’t. Next came the sounds of a scuffle in there, a dull smack like a mallet hitting a piece of meat.

  “Please,” someone whispered.

  Twice. She whispered it twice. Then something heavy hit the slats I’d pressed my ear against, startling me backward, and she didn’t say it anymore.

  The enclosure’s door scraped shut and a lock rattled angrily, its hasp snapping shut again with another small click. Feet went up the stairs, one pair unsteady, the other a heavy clomp, and the light went out.

  Despair seized me, a feeling like drowning while swirling down a drain faster and faster as the door at the top of the stairs slammed, and then there was silence. I waited in terror for him to come back, but he didn’t.

  “Hello?” The voice came from the other cubicle. “You okay?”

  Peering through a crack between the slats, I saw a primitive room of about ten by ten feet, illuminated only by a small nightlight hanging from an extension cord. Two girls were in there, a dark-haired one and one with that very fine corn-silk hair that was almost white.

  The blond girl looked like a long-term disaster victim, big-eyed, skinny, and pale. In there with the two of them were heaps of old, frayed blankets that might’ve been beds, and a makeshift clothesline with a few stained, shabby items drying on it. There was a small TV and a hotplate, and in a corner stood an old-fashioned sink—the deep, square kind, with a shower hose shoved onto a faucet.

  Under the sink stood a bucket; the toilet, I guessed, which accounted for the stink. Biting my lip to keep from howling, I let myself realize at last that the dark-haired girl in the room was Cam.

  Sprawled across the blanket-heap bed she lay naked and motionless, one bare arm flung out as if reaching for something.

  I couldn’t see her chest moving, and that’s when I understood she wasn’t alive anymore. He must’ve brought her in here first, while I was still unconscious.

  “Is she…?” Dead, I wanted to say, but I couldn’t make the word come out of my mouth. I felt nothing, like I was frozen inside, but at the same time I knew feeling nothing was a blessing that wouldn’t last.

  The girl with the white-blond hair nodded, whispering, “I think so. I think she was already gone when he brought her down here, but I’m afraid to find out for sure.”

  She gulped nervously, glancing toward the stairs as if she thought he might be listening. “It wouldn’t be the first time.”

  “He’s brought dead girls down here before?” Now at last I felt a cold, black wave wash over me at the horror of it. That this nightmare was real and I was in it.

  And Cam. The blond girl nodded again with quick, tiny bobs of her head, her lips pressed tightly together. She looked toward the stairs again, then went on.

  “He…he stashes them here sometimes. Then he takes them away after a while, I don’t know where.”

  Cam still wasn’t moving. Of course she wasn’t; he’d hit her so hard, and the labored breaths I’d heard her taking in the back of the van had sounded as if any one of them might be her last. He’d dragged her in here and thrown her down like trash that he meant to dispose of later.

  He would take her back out again and bury her, or dump her by the road somewhere. In a ditch, probably, like my mother always said. Which meant things weren’t looking so good for me, either, I realized with another rush of fright.

  “Do you have a cell phone?” the blond girl asked.

  I shook my head. I didn’t own one and neither had Cam; back then generally kids didn’t, or at least not so much as now. And anyway, calling for help was the last thing I wanted; even as injured and frightened as I was, I already knew I had to escape without anyone finding out that I’d been here.

  Even though Cam was dead. Cam…my wild, funny cousin, always laughing, brave, and full of mischief…dead. I couldn’t believe it. Still, I was already sure it was true, and there was nothing I could do about it. Gone. The word rang in my head like the solemn tolling of the bell at St. Anselm’s whenever there was a funeral.

  Gone forever…But if she were here, Cam would tell me to get a grip, not to be such a baby. She’d say I should look out for myself, wouldn’t she?

  Of course she would. Even with her body lying motionless only a few feet from me, I could practically hear her. If I meant to obey her, though, I would have to hurry. Because any minute now I was sure that the guy from the van would be back.

  And what he would do then I didn’t want to imagine. Squinting in the dim glow from the nightlight in the adjoining cell where Cam’s body lay, I peered desperately around the cellar, hoping for some tool that I could manage to reach: a crowbar or screwdriver, maybe, the kind of thing that might be lying around down here, and that I could use to get out.

  Finally I spied the gleam of metal on the floor. It was a key ring, I realized. His key ring. Or was it a trap? Had he dropped it, or had he put it there on purpose to catch me reaching for it? I had no choice but to find out. Behind me, the girl with the blond hair wept softly. Stretched out on my stomach, I slid my hand under the chain link, trying not to hear the sounds from upstairs.

  Awful sounds; from what he was doing to the girl he’d dragged out of here, I guessed, and would do to me if I didn’t hurry…

  At last my fingers closed on the keys. Somehow in his rush to get upstairs with his prisoner he must have dropped them. Lucky for me, I thought, but now the sharp end of a wire from the bottom of the chain-link enclosure jabbed my arm cruelly, blood running hotly from the gash.

  The pain made my teeth clench and my stomach knot up, but I dragged my hand back in anyway. With the keys at last in my grasp, a torn-up arm was the least of my worries.

  “Oh,” whispered the blond girl, glimpsing what I was doing. “Be careful, if he catches you he’ll—”

  I pulled the keys the rest of the way under the chain link. They were on a metal ring with a spring-loaded clip; he’d taken them off his belt to let us into the house, I remembered, and used one down here to open my cage before shoving me in.

  And then to drag the other girl out. “Hurry,” said the blond girl in the next cubicle while the sounds from above, unimaginable to me just hours earlier, went on and on.

  “Please,” said the blond girl. “You have to help us. We’ve been here so long.”

  He’d thrown my clothes into the cubicle with me; shuddering at the thought of his hands on them, I yanked them on anyway, as fast as I could. He was busy now but he would return, and when he did my time would be up.

  Hurry. Steadying the heavy padlock as best I could through the chain link, I shoved my hand through a gap in the wire mesh and twisted my hand around to try the first key, jittering it into the lock. But it wouldn’t turn, or the next one, either. Or the next. Finally, on the fourth try—

  The fourth key turned grudgingly. The lock’s hasp snapped open and so did the door, grating against the floor.

  “Please,” begged the girl in the next cubicle as, weeping silently, I scrambled across the cellar and up the rough wooden stairs. “Please don’t leave me here.”

  But I didn’t dare go back to help the blond girl get out, so sure was I that in the very next instant he would appear, see what I’d done, and charge down the stairs just as I was creeping up them.

  Only he never did, and when I tried turning the doorknob at the top of the stairs I found it unlocked.

  He was in a hurry, said a voice in my head. Sure of himself and careless with the keys this once…but he won’t be careless next time.

  He’ll never make that mistake again. So this was my only chance. Renewed fright hit me as I pushed the door open, peeking around it. The sounds from up here had stopped. I tiptoed into the hall. In the darkness, a loose strip of wallpaper brushed my face and I stifled a shriek.

  “At least tell someone,” begged the voice from belo
w. “Tell someone we’re here.”

  Ignoring her, I hurried on. No one was in the rank-smelling kitchen, flyspecked and with piled-high dishes teetering in the sink; no one in the den, dark and musty, full of discarded fast-food containers littered around the TV.

  Finally came the sprint to the front door, now padlocked on the inside. I thrust another key in—by some miracle it was the right one—yanked the door open, and hurled myself out of the house. In my frightened rush I nearly tumbled down the concrete-block front steps.

  At the gate between the trash-littered front yard and the street there was yet another lock; while I was fumbling with it a roar of outrage came from inside. Flinging the gate wide, I ran sobbing down the uneven sidewalk, glancing back just in time to see him charge out onto the porch with his fists clenched and his piggy little eyes glaring around furiously.

  But by now it was very late. There weren’t many streetlights in the neighborhood, a down-on-its-luck part of New Haven where public amenities, if they existed at all, were poorly maintained. So he didn’t see me.

  And that was the last time I looked back. All I could think of was getting away—that I was out and free and he couldn’t touch me anymore. Even Cam’s poor motionless body meant nothing to me compared with my escape. And as for the other girl, by then I wasn’t sure if she was real, or just another part of the awful nightmare I’d been in.

  All I knew was that I had to run, to get away and not look back. After I’d done that for as long as I could I began to walk, aching and bleeding, still woozy and terrified that at any minute he might appear in his van from behind me, then grab me and bundle me in.

  —

  But he never did. Minutes later on the overpass high above the interstate ramp leading into the city I leaned far out over the guardrails. I thought briefly about jumping, but I didn’t. Instead I reared back and threw that filthy key ring of his just as far and hard as I could.

  FOUR

  By seven o’clock on the Wednesday morning after Tara Wylie’s desperate text message showed up on her mother’s cell phone, the temperature was sixty-two degrees and the only sign that there had been any sleet at all in northern Maine was the mist steaming in gray billows off the blacktop as Lizzie drove out of Bearkill.