The Girls She Left Behind Read online

  —

  Bearkill, Maine’s only bar, Area 51, had a griddle, a deep-fat fryer, and a refrigerator—just enough to meet Maine’s rules about food being available where alcohol was served.

  Still, the burgers were decent, and to Lizzie’s surprise it was already Wednesday noon. “An orderly got him out,” she said, repeating what the forensic hospital’s security guy had told her. A mistake.

  After that conversation it had taken a couple of hours to get the word out to state and local cops, get a photograph of Gemerle, and start distributing more flyers. The rest of the morning had been taken up with paperwork.

  “From what I can understand, the orderly either threatened or bribed another inmate to impersonate Henry Gemerle for just long enough to fool the rest of the staff,” she said now. “Not that it was difficult, I guess. It was after lights-out so the other inmate was just a shape in Gemerle’s bed. And after that it took a while for them to realize they should call me.”

  Trey Washburn’s lips pursed thoughtfully. “So they thought the wrong guy was gone. And the orderly would do this why?”

  Wearing his usual work uniform of Carharrt overalls, boots, and a denim jacket, the burly veterinarian hunched beside Lizzie at Area 51’s long, polished wooden bar.

  “You got me,” she replied. Why did people do any of the damn fool things they did, after all? Like her forgetting her date with Trey last night, for instance.

  Now the smell of the french fryer floated unappetizingly from the bar’s tiny kitchen, and she wasn’t hungry anyway. But at the moment she felt lucky that Trey was still speaking to her, so she’d let him persuade her in here.

  The TV over the bar showed a map of the state thickly dotted with blazing campfire icons.

  “Anyone seen him?” Trey bit into his burger.

  She shook her head. “Seems the orderly got him dressed up in a staff uniform and slipped him past security. Had an ID badge for him, too, they think. Here’s his picture.”

  She slid the eight-by-ten glossy fresh from her office printer down the bar’s polished surface.

  “Yeah, I see the problem.” Trey pushed the photo back. “Guy’s got a normal haircut, regular features. Nothing weird looking.”

  She nodded grimly, chewing. “Uh-huh. Trouble is he’s not just anybody. He’s a dangerous predator who’s already victimized three women that we know of. And he’s got at least one connection who’s right here in Bearkill.”

  There was no concrete reason to think Gemerle was on his way here. But she couldn’t ignore the coincidence of Jane Crimmins, a close associate of one of his victims, arriving just as Tara Wylie, also a former New Haven resident, went missing.

  “You talked to Peg about this yet?” Trey wanted to know.

  The bright-blue eyes that met hers in the mirror behind the bar were smart and kind. She looked away, made shy suddenly by the directness of his gaze; since they’d first met he’d made no secret of how he felt about her.

  “No, I haven’t seen Peg today,” she replied finally. “State cops are with her right now making up for lost time, and after that DHHS wants a crack at her.”

  The child welfare people always got involved when a kid went missing, which when it was a little one actually made sense. But when the missing kid was fourteen and the original theory was that she left on her boyfriend’s motorbike, not so much.

  “The boyfriend’s still gone, too. Aaron DeWilde,” she said.

  “What do you make of that?” He’d finished his burger and when she looked down she found that she’d eaten most of hers, too, plus all the fries.

  “No idea. I’m going to the hospital when we’re done here, to try to find out more.” By now Jane Crimmins’s psych exam should be complete. “And then I’ll head up to Cross Lake where the boyfriend lives, talk to his folks.”

  She wasn’t looking forward to it. “They’ve been watching a few too many cop shows,” she added, having spent time on the phone with them this morning.

  Aaron’s dad in particular seemed fully convinced that there was an FBI lab somewhere that could take a few unrelated bits of physical evidence, punch a set of data into a computer, and come up with the precise current location of a rural Maine kid.

  “Listen,” she added, “I’m so sorry about last night. Leaving you in the lurch like that.”

  “Yeah, well.” He brushed pale hair back from his forehead. “Things happen.” Then he grinned. “Or they happen when you’re sweet on a cop, anyway. Want to try again tonight?”

  The bar’s TV switched to a live shot of racing flames just as a siren howled outside. Beyond Area 51’s front window the haze had thickened noticeably again just since they’d come in here.

  “What?” She dragged her mind back from the sudden mental picture of a girl dead in a ditch, surrounded by fire. Then:

  “Sorry,” she said. “I can’t tonight. I need another raincheck. With plenty of rain to go with it, if possible.”

  Trey was the kind of guy who could spend all day wrestling large farm animals into swallowing medicine and holding still for shots, then go home and do miracles with kitchen implements she had only seen used in fancy restaurants: copper whisking bowls and long-handled sauté skillets.

  And on top of that, he understood the unpredictable hours of cop work. His own didn’t follow a set-in-stone schedule, either.

  “Just until this is over,” she added. Trey nodded agreeably. Really, it was too bad that agreeable wasn’t all she wanted.

  Really too bad. Out on the sidewalk she watched Trey’s pickup truck pull away. The wood-frame buildings of downtown cast bluish shadows as the winter sun, already more than halfway through its short winter arc, fell behind the high hills to the west.

  In the office Missy Brantwell looked up. “Peg Wylie stopped in with more pictures.”

  They spread across Lizzie’s desk: Tara riding a bike, flying along no-hands with her arms spread wide and her eyes as bright as stars. Carving a pumpkin, up to her elbows in it.

  “So d’you think she’s okay?” asked Missy.

  “I don’t know.” Lizzie sank into her chair. Once upon a time the only predators you had to worry about were the ones who could physically get to the kids. But with computers, an entirely new category of slimeballs was on the rise.

  In Boston a few weeks before Lizzie’s last day there, a girl of twelve had been found boarding a flight to Brazil. It turned out that a registered sex offender posing as a sixteen-year-old from Rio de Janeiro had bought her the ticket.

  “State cops took Tara’s laptop this morning,” Missy added. “Maybe they’ll still get something off that.”

  But Lizzie didn’t think so. An online predator could have deleted his or her Facebook profile by now. If Tara hadn’t already cried wolf a few times, the investigation might’ve begun in time to catch something like that. But Tara had used up all her get-looked-for-right-away cards by running off twice before.

  “Uh-oh,” said Missy suddenly. Following her assistant’s gaze, Lizzie watched a fragment of flaming ash spiral down outside.

  “Get your stuff,” Missy snapped. Grabbing her purse, she slammed her desk shut and locked it. Lizzie snatched her own bag, too, and all the Tara photos, plus her personal weapon.

  Because the early part of a case always felt like wading through molasses, and if you came upon something as you slogged forward, who knew what it might be? Two firearms—her duty weapon and her personal piece—could end up being laughably too many…or not enough.

  Outside, Missy locked the door as more ash floated down.

  “Jeffrey at daycare?” He was Missy’s little boy. Lizzie slid her work gun into her duty belt and snapped the safety strap, put her personal weapon into her bag.

  “Yeah. I’m going to the daycare to check on him. Probably this is nothing,” Missy said, “but…”

  But no one else thought so. Up and down the street people were shutting up shop and heading for their cars or standing on the sidewalk, gazing unhappily in
to the blue sky.

  Blue except for the ash falling out of it. Another flaming fragment swirled to the sidewalk; Lizzie scuffed it out with her boot as a sick orange glow flared in the west.

  “A ridgeline flamed up. They’ll do that,” diagnosed Missy. “Sulk and smolder out there in the puckerbrush, and then—”

  “There’s a plan, though, right? I mean, if a fire does get going here in town?”

  Missy grimaced. “An evacuation plan, yeah. Anything starts burning here, this whole place is gonna go up like a bonfire,” she finished, getting into her car.

  As Missy drove off, Lizzie’s cell phone trilled. “Hey, it’s me, Dylan.”

  She turned her back on the western horizon, where the sight of a line of evergreen trees behaving like turpentine-soaked torches unnerved her more than she liked admitting, even to herself.

  “Where are you?” A helicopter whap-whapped overhead, laden with firefighting chemicals, the heavy beat of its rotors blocking out Dylan’s voice for a moment.

  “…Augusta,” Dylan replied. “Listen, that Crimmins woman? The one from last night…have you seen her yet today? And is she by any chance talking about an escaped inmate? Because I just got a call from…”

  He named the security guy at the Salisbury Forensic Institute, the one she’d spoken to, also. “You talked to him about a perp named…how do you pronounce it, again?”

  “Gemerle,” she said. “Why, what’s—”

  A Jeep with a cherry beacon on the dashboard roared by, and then a couple of pickup trucks. A windowed van full of a dozen or so dogs came after that; Lizzie recognized Bearkill’s volunteer animal shelter staffer behind the wheel.

  “Hey, Dylan, just tell me, okay? I got a few things going on here, and—”

  “…spotted him…” His voice came intermittently through the buzz and howl of a bad connection. “Car…stolen…turnpike.”

  “What, the Connecticut turnpike?” Another loud sputtering of static made her curse.

  But then the phone cleared up suddenly. “No. Lizzie, there was a LoJack in the orderly’s car. He hadn’t disabled it and once they found out the runner was Gemerle, they got a court order and tracked the vehicle all the way to Maine. Took them a while, but they finally picked it up. They found it abandoned at the rest area in Houlton a little while ago.”

  Houlton was sixty miles from here. An ambulance screamed by. Behind the big plate-glass front window of her office, the phone console started blinking. “Dylan, I’ve got to—”

  “Wait, you need to hear this. There was a gun safe in the abandoned car. Empty. I think Gemerle’s gotten a weapon. And—”

  And? she wondered a little wildly as the phone console in the office went on signaling.

  She turned her back on it, pressing the cell phone to her ear. A missing girl, a rapidly worsening fire emergency, and an escaped human predator who was probably here in Maine; what more could there be?

  But when the punch line finally came, it was a killer:

  “—and when the trooper popped the abandoned car’s trunk, he found a body inside.”

  —

  “Where is she?” Cam’s mother—my aunt Rose—lived only a few blocks from my house in New Haven.

  She grabbed my shoulders and shook me, then flung me back down into my chair. “You tell me where Cam is, you—”

  Two days had passed since the terrible events of that night: Cam murdered, me brutally assaulted, and then my escape. I’d kept quiet about it all, each passing hour with no one yelling at me or forcing me into a frightening medical examination confirming me in this decision, and now my mother and I were at Cam’s house.

  “You’d better tell me where she is, you little…” Aunt Rose was scared and being scared made her furious.

  Everything did. “I—I don’t know where she is.” Not technically a lie.

  I stared at Aunt Rose, so frightened I could barely form words. But at the same time my mind kept working; so far all I’d had to do was keep my mouth shut, but now might be different.

  “Isn’t she home yet?” The panic had begun the night before, when after twenty-four hours still no one could find her. It wasn’t the first time that Cam had taken off from home, usually after a quarrel with Aunt Rose over some stunt Cam had pulled.

  But it was the first time she hadn’t come back. Aunt Rose glared darkly at me, her meaty arms folded across her chest.

  “No, she’s not home, you little liar. You’re worse than she is, that fake look on your face. Do you see her here? Do you?”

  I don’t know why she hated me. Not that I was perfect; there had been minor things. Small fires, a choking incident at school.

  Little things like that. Now she loomed over me menacingly, demanding an answer until my mother stopped her.

  “Rose. Don’t scare her, now, you know how she is.”

  We were in my aunt’s living room surrounded by her treasured collection of hand-painted Hummel figurines, sweet little plump-cheeked ceramic children doing sweet little activities: tootling on musical instruments, having confidential conversations with bluebirds, and so on.

  I wanted to grab one of those stupid figurines and hurl it through a window, but instead I sat meekly on the cheap woven throw Aunt Rose had draped over the chair. The living room was spotless; not one bit of dust marred an end table or a coffee table, the air reeked of Pledge and Comet cleanser, and we’d had to take our shoes off before being allowed to walk on the white wall-to-wall carpet, her pride and joy.

  You know how she is. I shot a dark look at her but she didn’t see it, luckily for me; from now on, I reminded myself, I would have to be more careful.

  From now on, a lot of things would be different. “She came to the knitting group,” I said. “She wanted me to go with her.”

  Careful, starting immediately. Someone could have seen us together at the dance.

  “Go where?” Aunt Rose demanded. She was a stout, broad-shouldered woman with crimson gin-blossoms on her cheeks. Today she wore a housedress with an apron around her middle, rolled-down stockings, and canvas sneakers with the seams split to ease her bunions.

  My mother was small and timid, neatly dressed in slacks and a white blouse and with her hair freshly permed. Seeing them side by side, it was hard to believe they had once looked alike.

  “The park,” I answered Aunt Rose. “We just wanted to—”

  “So you lied?” From the look on my mother’s face you’d have thought I’d just told her we’d been working as prostitutes.

  She got up, shaking her head. “Oh, Jane. You lied? I’m so disappointed in you.”

  Wow, big surprise, you’re disappointed, I wanted to retort, shocked at all these new, harsh reactions I was having but unable to stop them.

  Not even wanting to stop them, and why should I? I wondered suddenly. Nothing I did was ever good enough, nothing ever quite right. I could go to confession every day, every hour, and still some small, insignificant sin would manage to smudge the golden perfection of my immortal soul.

  Which all at once I did not believe in, either. One minute I’d had faith and the next, presto, all of it was gone. But at that realization there wasn’t the sense of release I’d expected, that I imagined whenever I heard about other people’s disbelief. All I felt was sad and ashamed.

  So ashamed…now that the first numb shock of what he’d done to me had worn off slightly, if I could’ve managed it I’d have crawled right out of my skin, thrown it away because he’d touched it. Being dead made Cam the lucky one of us, it seemed to me.

  Dead meant not having to remember. “I tried stopping her,” I offered. “But she was going to go, whether I went along with her or not. So I thought it would be better if the two of us…”

  I was nervous, and talking too much. Luckily, a knock at the door interrupted me. Moments later Aunt Rose led two men in dark suits into the room. Now you’ll tell, her malevolent scowl said. After trying all Cam’s friends and anyone else she could think of, she’d final
ly given up and called the police.

  Once they’d been introduced, they began to ask me a lot of questions, politely and gently. I gave truthful answers until they started asking about the two of us leaving the dance.

  No one had been in the parking lot; no one had seen that part. Or so I hoped. But either way, it was a risk I would have to take. I couldn’t give them anything to latch on to, to make them think I might be lying about something or leaving something out.

  “We walked home together until we got to Evergreen Street,” I said. “Then we split up. I went straight home, came inside, and went to bed. I thought she was going home, too.”

  I glanced at my mother, who was biting her lips to keep from crying and fingering her rosary anxiously, turning the beads over and over in her small, neatly kept hands. Then I looked at my aunt, whose broad, coarse face was frankly murderous.

  “Liar,” she muttered. “You’re a terrible little—”

  “I’m not lying,” I cried. “Cam went left, I went right. How was I supposed to know she’d—”

  “What, Jane? How were you supposed to know she would what?” one of the detectives asked kindly. Not suspiciously.

  Sucker, I thought at him. I’d dangled a shred of bait out in front of him and he’d taken it. “That she wouldn’t go home. That she’d go somewhere else,” I whispered. “Without me.”

  Because that had to be my story, didn’t it? Whatever they asked about what happened to Cam, I didn’t know about it because I hadn’t been there.

  Aunt Rose made a sound of disgust. “That child,” she spat venomously at me, “is a sneak, and she’s just lying her face off. And if you can’t get it out of her, I know how to—”

  As she spoke she was taking off the plastic belt that she wore around her ample middle, curling it like a whip. “Rose!” my mother breathed frightenedly.

  Together the detectives got to their feet, rising in one smooth, decisive motion to block my aunt’s attack. “It’s okay, we’ll handle this,” one of them said.

  Aunt Rose stepped back grudgingly, her expression thwarted and her eyes telegraphing that if she had her way, I’d be getting the belt and more. But then a question from one of the detectives changed her tune.