The Girls She Left Behind Page 8

  “Amber Alert’s up.” Beside her in the Blazer’s passenger seat, Aroostook County sheriff Cody Chevrier tipped his close-clipped silvery head as he listened attentively.

  “TV and radio stations’ve all got press releases, they’ll be on the noon news. A flyer with her picture on it is on its way to every cop car in Maine, truck stops got them, hospitals, homeless shelters, and the agencies’ve all got a heads-up,” she recited.

  Quickly she summarized the other events of last night: the appearance in her office of Jane Crimmins, Lizzie’s hospital visit later after Crimmins’s breakdown, and the time with Peg Wylie.

  “That cell phone location’s being worked on, but no luck so far. Can’t say I expect any, either,” she finished. Tracking a cell phone wasn’t the piece of cake the TV crime shows made it out to be.

  “Sounds like you got it all covered,” Chevrier said. “That name, though, Crimmins. Why’s it sound so familiar to me?”

  At his question, her already-solid respect for the rural sheriff went up yet another notch. The kidnapping of three young women followed by their imprisonment in a New Haven basement hadn’t been a local crime, and the name Crimmins didn’t belong to any of the victims.

  In fact, as far as Lizzie was aware it had been mentioned only once, in a human-interest feature that had appeared in New Haven’s alt-weekly newspaper, the Advocate. Yet Chevrier was somehow aware of it.

  “Yeah,” he added, snapping his fingers, “now I remember. She had some link to one of the kidnapping victims in the Henry Gemerle mess, right.” Surprising Lizzie further, Chevrier went on. “That’s it, she was a sort of caretaker afterward for one of the rescued women.”

  “That’s right.” On either side of the road, the dry soil was pockmarked by vanished ice pellets. She put the window down; the air smelled like spring, even if a false one.

  “Case in New Haven,” Chevrier continued, “whole thing started six months ago? Or that’s when it came to light,” he amended.

  “That’s when they found the girls,” she confirmed. “There was an arraignment pretty quick after that. Then nothing more until a couple of weeks ago, when they started showing the hearings on TV.”

  She slowed for the GRAMMY’S RESTAURANT sign, then pulled into a parking lot full of pickup trucks and heavy equipment for cutting firebreaks.

  Chevrier shrugged. “Hey, I stay on top of all the crime stories I can. You’d be surprised how many fugitives think Maine’s a good place to vanish.”

  He glanced around the diner’s parking lot, full of familiar vehicles. “Like nobody here’s gonna notice some strange guy the minute he hits town,” he added sarcastically.

  They parked between a forest service water tanker and an old Ford Fairlane whose rear windows were plastic sheets duct-taped to the outsides of the frames. Into the fuel filler hole, which was missing both its cover flap and filler cap in blatant defiance of DMV regulations, a red grease-rag had been stuffed.

  She switched off the Blazer’s ignition. “Anyway, like you said, the guy’s named Gemerle.” It was pronounced JEM-er-lee. “The monster of Michener Street, the media called him.”

  “So what’s Crimmins doing here?” Chevrier asked as they crossed the parking lot.

  The Fairlane was illegal in too many ways to count, not the least of them being an outdated inspection sticker. But it belonged to a local firefighting volunteer so they let it alone; no doubt Chevrier would have a quiet word with the owner later.

  The night before, she’d calmed Peg Wylie as well as she could and then spent the rest of the hours until morning on her to-do list—the flyers, the Amber Alert and agency notifications—and on refreshing her memories of the New Haven atrocity.

  There was plenty on the Internet about it, including the New Haven Advocate piece revealing that the victim Jane Crimmins had been caring for was a young woman by the name of Cam Petry.

  “I’ll find out more when she wakes up from the sedation she got,” said Lizzie, wondering where Cam Petry was right now.

  Homemade posters for church suppers, raffles, and items for sale—snow tires, woodstoves, a shotgun—filled the bulletin board in the diner’s covered entryway. Also on display was the freshly posted MISSING flyer for Tara Wylie, crisper and more readable than the ones her mother had made, including a head shot from Tara’s yearbook and another of her grinning triumphantly atop a human pyramid of Bearkill High School cheerleaders.

  “We’re way behind the eight-ball on her now,” Lizzie said unhappily, waving at the flyer. Too much time had passed while Peg dithered, trying to pretend that Tara had gone AWOL on her own.

  And why was that? Lizzie wondered again as she followed Chevrier into the diner. At the gingham-covered tables and in the booths, fire crews in green forest service uniforms were fueling up for yet another day of clearing and trenching.

  They crossed to a booth upholstered in blue leatherette and slid in opposite each other. “Anyway, about Tara’s phone. I called the MDEA,” she said. The Maine Drug Enforcement Agency had better electronics expertise than anyone else in the state, which they were using nowadays to hunt down more of those meth labs, mostly. “But they’ve come up empty, too. The phone’s not active now. It could’ve been on just long enough for one call and then turned off again, which makes it a tiny needle in a large electronic haystack.”

  Or whoever had Tara—if someone did—might have caught her using the phone and done something to it, an idea Lizzie preferred not to dwell on as they gave their breakfast orders.

  “Anyway, the Gemerle thing. It was a multiple kidnapping, guy held three girls captive for fifteen years. Kind of like that Cleveland case earlier? Only the Cleveland perp hung himself in jail.”

  “Yeah. Ask me, that guy got off easy.”

  Their coffee arrived. “But the New Haven situation, what’s the recent action on that?”

  “Well, first the court ordered a psych workup.”

  “ ’Cause batshit crazy isn’t a legal term that you can just slap on a guy,” said Chevrier, rolling his eyes long-sufferingly.

  “Correct,” she agreed. “And neither is low-life scumbag, if you’re on the prosecution’s side. So all that took quite a while, because of course both sides had to have their own psychiatrists. But he got judged unfit to stand trial just the other day.

  “So he went back to the forensic hospital in Connecticut. He’s still there and that’s where he’ll stay for the foreseeable future,” she said.

  Hot plates of food came and Chevrier dug into his bacon and eggs. Taking a piece of bacon off his plate, she crunched into it. Then:

  “Listen, has Peg Wylie got any good connections around here? I mean is she related to anyone important, or friends with anyone who’s got any local influence, anything like that?”

  Because connections helped get publicity and when you were looking for someone, every bit of public awareness helped.

  Chevrier shook his head. “Peg’s a single mom, she moved here a little over three years ago and bought that house out there on the Hardscrabble Road. She wanted a better environment for Tara to grow up in, she said. She’s got no important pals that I know of. Lots of friends in the fire department, though.”

  Lizzie tipped her head questioningly. “She tried joining up, but she couldn’t pass the physical,” he explained. “Next thing you know, she’s on the stair machine at the firehouse every day.”

  “And she made it through the next try?” Lizzie asked, but Chevrier shook his head.

  “Nope. Or the one after that, either. But on the fourth try she racked up the best scores anyone around here ever has. You want somebody to run up five flights wearin’ an air pack, drag out some overweight jerk who fell asleep drunk while he was holdin’ a lit cigarette, she’s your man. Woman. Whatever.

  “But remind me about the Crimmins woman again,” he said. “How she got involved with…”

  “Right. The Gemerle thing. After their rescue from Henry Gemerle’s basement this past summer, two
of the victims reunited with their families. But the third one—”

  He nodded sharply. “That’s it. I remember now. It was kind of a feel-good story? Some good-Samaritan-type woman took the third one in, and that was—”

  “Yup,” Lizzie confirmed. “That was her. Jane Crimmins took in Henry Gemerle’s third victim, Cam Petry. Who was her cousin, so I suppose that’s why she did it. And now she’s here, where another girl’s gone missing.”

  “Huh. Well, ain’t that a kick in the head. Hudson’s got good notes, he documented what happened with her last night? ’Cause we don’t need her going around saying that it was his fault the interview went south.”

  “Yeah, he recorded it. Missy’s already typed up a transcript, but there wasn’t much of anything in it. Nothing that looks bad for Dylan, anyway. I’m just hoping my choice last night hasn’t shut Jane’s mouth for the foreseeable future.”

  Chevrier frowned. “So you think you should’ve stayed with her instead of letting Hudson take the interview.”

  “Maybe. It was an option.” Or maybe the real reason she’d proceeded the way she had was in the hope of keeping Dylan in town a little longer. But saying that to Chevrier wouldn’t accomplish anything useful, so she didn’t.

  Driving back to Bearkill they passed small houses on rough bulldozed lots, their neatly stacked woodpiles nearly untouched. So far, this winter had called more for fans than furnaces.

  At Lizzie’s office, Chevrier got out. “So you’ve looked into Gemerle, right? Current whereabouts and so on?”

  “Yeah, he’s still safely in the psych unit.” It had been a pleasant surprise about the job here in Bearkill that her mind and her new boss’s worked so similarly.

  “Although it turns out they actually did have an escape the other night, and that guy’s still in the wind,” she added.

  It had given her pause until the supervisor at the forensic hospital had explained. “Different guy, though. Not Gemerle.”

  Chevrier’s white Blazer, the twin of her own vehicle except for the sheriff’s insignia on his door, sat in the Food King’s lot across the street. But instead of crossing to it he stood watching a stray shopping cart roll slowly across the blacktop.

  “Okay,” he said finally. Then, turning to her: “I don’t want you to make a big deal of this, what I’m about to tell you.”

  “Of what?” The big window at the front of her office showed Missy Brantwell’s blond head bent over an open file folder.

  “Peg Wylie,” said Chevrier. “Remember I said she moved here to get Tara into a more wholesome place?”

  “Yeah. So?” A sharp whiff of smoke tickled Lizzie’s nose; bad news for the forest service.

  “So before here, they lived in New Haven.”

  “Oh. Interesting.” By which she meant Holy shit.

  Chevrier eyed her evenly. “Yeah. Fascinating. So handle that information however you want. Don’t go crazy with it, is all.”

  He started across the street. “And keep me up-to-date, hear? We’ve got no extra manpower, guys’re busy tryin’ to keep the whole state from burning down.”

  The smoke smell was getting stronger. A couple of dark-green vans sped by, each carrying a full crew. A pickup truck followed, tailpipe spewing and its bed loaded with open wooden crates piled high with shovels and pickaxes.

  “I don’t want to hear anybody from the media sayin’ we didn’t try hard enough to find that girl,” Chevrier added as he reached his own vehicle. “So make sure that you do everything, be sure to keep on documenting everything, and don’t forget to cover your ass.”

  Right, she thought as he drove off. But why did she have the feeling that her ass would end up in a sling anyway, whatever she did?

  Inside her office, the scanner was alive with traffic. “Team Four, check in. Guys, gimme a callback here…”

  On the TV that Missy Brantwell had set up on a file cart, the Bangor station’s weather graphic depicted the whole state of Maine shaded in red.

  “…can’t stress enough that you don’t want to be burning anything outdoors,” cautioned the voiceover.

  Still no scanner reply. “Team Four,” dispatch tried again, “come on now, let’s hear from you folks. Gimme a shout right now.”

  The dispatcher’s voice sharpened; the only possible reason a team wouldn’t check in was if they couldn’t. “Team Four…”

  On the TV screen another graphic showed how much of the state similar fires had destroyed in 1947, when two hundred thousand acres burned.

  The scanner spat static. Then: “…Team Four here, sorry about that, we’re all good…”

  Lizzie let out a relieved breath. “Someone’s gonna get killed out there,” Missy groused at her desk, which was covered with notes and paperwork but still so aggressively well organized that it made Lizzie marvel at her own good luck.

  Missy might look fragile, with wide blue eyes and curly blond hair framing an always-amiable expression, but her office-management style was nothing short of military.

  “I don’t care how much training they get,” she said, “none of the Bearkill fire volunteers has ever dealt with anything like this.”

  She plucked a slip of paper from her desk. “Message for you. From some Connecticut guy, he said it’s kind of urgent?”

  Her heart sinking with the weight of an unhappy premonition, Lizzie reached for the phone. Moments later she was connected with the Salisbury Forensic Institute’s chief security officer.

  From whom she learned that there had been a mistake.

  FIVE

  Aching and bleeding, still so scared out of my mind that I could barely recall who I was—Jane Crimmins, I kept reciting to myself idiotically, my name is Jane Crimmins—I made my broken way home late that night after my narrow escape.

  We lived—my parents, my mom’s parents, and I—in an old blue-collar neighborhood of New Haven, street after shabbily-neat tree-lined street full of small brick houses built years earlier for factory workers with lunch pails and union cards, breadwinners supporting whole families on a single paycheck.

  Although by the time I lived there, that era was long gone. Under the weakly glowing, infrequent streetlights junk cars stood on blocks, torn blue tarps stretched across roofs, and cast-iron railings bled rust onto cracked-concrete front steps.

  As I crept guiltily along the dark, silent street I kept waiting for one of the neighbors to call out to me. Old Mrs. Watterston, maybe, whose swollen legs kept her up most nights. Or Finny Brill, a boy from my class whose bad skin and worse breath made him a pariah around school.

  Finny stayed up late, too, watching old horror films whose cheesy plots he would recite the next day, trying to convince everyone that he’d made them up himself. He was a braggart, sure he would one day be a famous film director, and always trying and failing to be in on the doings of the more popular kids.

  His bedroom window flickered with blue TV light as I snuck under it, feeling like a criminal. Any instant I expected to hear his voice, full of triumph as he caught me doing something that I shouldn’t be; Finny was so pathetic, he actually thought he could make friends that way. As if him spying on you was just the same as you telling him your secrets.

  If Finny saw me I was dead. But he didn’t, and no one did call out. I slunk up to our house, identical to the rest on the street except for the old Chris-Craft motorboat hulking amid the weeds at the rear of our yard, perched atop a rotting trailer whose long-flat tires were peeling away in thick gray strips. The back door was open; I slipped inside.

  The house smelled like cat box and the Hamburger Helper we’d had for dinner. Going upstairs I held my breath, not from the odor but so I wouldn’t sob out loud. Cam…But there was nothing I could do for her, and now I heard her voice again telling me what would happen to me if anyone learned what that man had done to me.

  “Examine you,” she’d said. “Instruments.” It was as if she’d been cautioning me about what more could be inflicted on me and how I could avoid it: by
keeping my mouth shut. And now that she was dead she was somehow even more of an authority than before, so I decided to stay silent.

  In the upstairs hall I heard my parents and grandparents, early-to-bedders all, snoring behind closed doors. Not until I glimpsed myself in the bathroom mirror did the fear I’d been holding back hit me so hard again that it nearly swamped me.

  My clothes were bloody and torn, nails broken and filthy, and the palms of my hands were scraped raw from scrabbling away from him. Or trying to; bruised, reddened finger marks around my ankle showed where he’d caught me. But my eyes were the same: wide, dark brown, seemingly as untroubled as before. My mouth, a thin pink line just like always, gave me hope as well.

  Because it needed not to have happened, this nightmare more terrifying than any of Finny Brill’s productions. It needed to be taken back, rewound like a horror film.

  Not for Cam, of course. She was murdered, beyond my help. But for me, it had to be made so it wasn’t real, and I had a bad feeling that this time, praying wouldn’t do the trick.

  Or any time, actually, from now on. Thinking this, I took a hot shower, then filled the bathtub and lay up to my chin in it for a long time, letting the hot water penetrate every sore fold and crevice. My father’s Gillette razor blades were in the medicine cabinet, I knew, in a small flat dispenser, and it seemed clear to me that if I thought at all it would have to be about them.

  So I didn’t. Instead I soaked thoroughly, then soaped and soaped again, scrubbing until my skin pruned and the water began cooling. Shivering with misery I dried with a clean towel; then, in my own bed at last, I was asleep almost at once, falling into it with a final sob as if hurling myself off a cliff into the soft black nothingness.

  Cam, I thought as the darkness closed around me. Gone. And then, Her mom’s going to be so mad.

  And after that I didn’t think at all anymore.