17 & Gone (39 page)

together forever.

It’s Abby Sinclair’s wallet, and I

know this before it comes open because

of what her former camp counselor told

me about the things she took with her the

night she went to meet Luke. And I know

simply because I
know
, in my gut. As if

she reached out from the ether and told

me so herself. I knew it as soon as I had

the thing in my hands.

It’s over soon after I find it.

The fires lured them all here, and with

them comes all the noise.

The shouting. A dog barking. Sirens.

The door being kicked all the way open.

The men bursting in. Hands up. Knees in

snow. The fire truck, the firemen. Lights.

Confusion. The wallet being taken from

me. A girl’s name on my lips. Police on

the way, and then here. My mom. The

feel of my mom’s intact and pounding

heart through her coat. Lights. A blanket

wrapped around me. The tight ties

around my wrists. Questions. Losing

sight of Jamie. The backseat of a police

car. Lights. The sound of fires being put

out. The darkness as the lights go down.

The remembered feel of that wallet, that

old chewed piece of gum. The smell of

kerosene on my clothes, in my hair. The

taste of it on my tongue.

Out the window: the calm, blue sign

that

says LADY-OF-THE-PINES SUMMER

CAMP FOR GIRLS fading away and the

quiet oasis of my mind that shrinks off

with it.

Then pine trees. The pine trees of

Dorsett Road as I’m carried away. The

same stretch of pine trees Abby must

have seen the last night she was here.

—
63
—

THERE
are things I don’t understand,

things I was a part of without even

knowing I was taking part. I guess I was

one girl trying to make sense of them.

And trying to fight them, in a way that

made sense only to me.

“How did you know to go looking in

that shed?”

I’m asked this again and again, the

night of the fires and in the days after. By

firemen. By police. By my doctor, once I

was returned to the hospital. By my own

mom. Never by Jamie, though. He

doesn’t ask me how I knew to stay and

search in there—I guess because he saw

the force that propelled me that night,

couldn’t help but see the living fire of it

in my eyes.

Because that’s the thing: I thought it

was over. I thought finding something

that belonged to her (and the glittery

purple plastic wallet with her school ID

inside did belong to her; police verified

that) meant the worst I could imagine,

and I did imagine. I thought it was too

late. I thought she was dead. I held

something of hers in my hands and then I

held only my hands in my hands, when

they took the wallet for evidence, my

arms wound around my back and zip-

tied there as I waited inside the squad

car to be taken to the station and charged

with arson. I told myself awful things.

Convinced myself she was gone. My

voices told me, or some voiceless part

of me told me, or the synapses in my

head broke open and trotted out a song-

and-dance made up of kicking legs and

flapping lies to tell me. It doesn’t matter

how I thought I knew.

I was wrong.

Turns out Abby Sinclair was still

alive.

Officer Heaney was no police officer

—he’s a man who worked maintaining

the campgrounds, who visited often

during the off-season, who lived nearby.

He’s a man who was working at Lady-

of-the-Pines the summer Abby Sinclair

disappeared. What was found in that

maintenance shed, what I handed over to

police, with my descriptions and

Jamie’s of the man we saw, led to

uncover who he was, and where he

lived, and what—
who
—he’d stolen.

I was told she knew him. All the

Lady-of-the-Pines girls did. So when she

was walking back on foot after

overhearing Luke on the phone with

another girl, after stumbling off her bike

and leaving it behind at Luke’s and

rushing off into the dark to get away

from him, she ran into this man on the

road. I don’t know where on the road; no

one told me so specifically. But I can

imagine it.

Like Isabeth, she got in the car. Even

though, like Shyann, she wanted to run

off and hide forever in the trees, because

her heart was broken. Like Jannah, she

went off with someone she thought she

could trust. And like Hailey, she was

assumed to have run away . . . even

though all this time she was really

missing.

The car pulled over, and the man

leaned out an arm. “Hey, hey, Abby—

Your name’s Abby, right? What are you

doing out there? You okay?”

And she was nervous at first—anyone

hearing a car stop short on a lone road at

night would be—and, besides, she didn’t

want him to turn her in to the counselors.

She’d get kicked out. But his face was

friendly enough, and she’d talked to him

before, that one time the sink got clogged

full of hair and he came to Cabin 3 to fix

it. Not to mention, she’d skinned her

knee when she fell off the bicycle in

Luke’s driveway, before she left the bike

there and took off on foot, and she still

had another mile to walk back to camp

with her knee bleeding.

He said he wouldn’t tell on her. He

said he’d help her sneak back in.

I wish Abby didn’t believe him and

accept the ride that night, but she did.

She did.

Parts of this I tell myself, and parts of

this are unalterably true—news articles

and police officers have told me.

I don’t know what happened to her all

the months she was kept by him, and I

can’t make myself ask. The horror of it

gouges me open.

How easy it was for the man to get

away with taking her and keeping her—

because everyone so quickly believed

she ran away. It was never questioned,

not by anyone who knew her, not by

friends or family, not by the girls she

spent her summer with, not by the boy

she kissed under the stars.

It was questioned by no one—until

me.

At some point, and I don’t know if it’s

the night of, or a different day, someone

approaches to tell me something

important. One police officer remembers

me from when I visited the station asking

about Abby Sinclair and her bike. He

comes over when they’re processing me

for setting the fires, and he takes one of

my hands, even though it’s got ink from

the fingerprinting on it, and he tells me

some things.

Thanks

to

me

convincing

her

grandparents, Abby’s file was reopened.

He says that my visit to New Jersey, not

to mention the letter I sent Abby’s

grandparents—creepy

as

it

was,

upsetting them as much as it did—did

have them looking into it, but it was my

finding the wallet that broke open the

case. My poking around, my insisting no

one give up looking, that’s what did this,

he says. He was telling me I helped save

a missing girl.

I don’t see her myself, but I think of

her. I am always thinking of her.

She’s Abby Sinclair, 17, of Orange

Terrace, New Jersey. Abby with the

cubic zirconia in her nose. Abby who’s

afraid of clowns. Abby who can’t

whistle. Abby who chews her nails, just

the ones on her thumbs. Abby who can

tap-dance. Abby who doesn’t mind when

it rains. Or maybe she does mind. Maybe

she isn’t like any of those things, since I

made that all up.

But she is Abby Sinclair, for sure. She

was reported missing September 2 and

her case was officially closed on

January 29.

She’s 17 still, and she’s alive.

So how did I know? The truth is that I

only hoped. That’s what I did. There

was no disembodied voice whispering

the truth of what happened to Abby

Sinclair into my waiting and willing ear.

And if there had been, if ghosts walked

and communicated with me, if lost girls

really did reach out to me across the

smoky abyss—I wonder, wouldn’t I

have known the truth so much faster? I

could have saved her two months ago.

I could have helped end this before

the fires even got set.

Which is what I keep going back to:

the fires. It’s all I dream of now, since

the house is gone. This time it’s not

wishful and imaginary, it’s a memory of

something I did with my own two hands.

Besides, I know it now for what it

was: a girl’s attempt to call for help. A

need to be listened to. To be
heard
.

I know what she was saying—what I

was saying, even if I had trouble

articulating it in words then:

Don’t give up.

Don’t give up on her, or any of them.

Keep looking.
Always
keep looking.

No girl—no missing girl, no runaway

—deserves to be given up on, just like I

wouldn’t want anyone to give up on me.

The blaze was red and ferocious in

the snowed-out night. Before the fire

truck came to douse it and darken it, it

was brilliant, it was blinding. It was

unforgettable. No one could ignore it. I

bet it woke people in their beds at night,

so they stood at their windows

wondering. I bet people could see that

fire from miles and miles away.

THREE MONTHS LATER

IT’S
my first week back home. The

insurance company decided my stay at

the hospital was over, even if the

doctors hadn’t, and I was signed out and

left in my mom’s care as of Monday.

There are things outside our small house

that look different now, and I’m

spending my time noticing. There are

colors that are brighter, and patches of

sky that seem lower, and there’s a tree

on the lawn that I don’t remember seeing

here before.

Since I’ve been gone, spring has come

to Pinecliff, and our cat, Billie, has lost

some weight and is shedding tufts that

drift through the rooms. In the quiet, it

seems as if the house has been capsized

and I’ve woken underwater, seaweed

and minnows slowly circling me. I know

it’s only Billie shedding, but I let my

imagination idle as I watch a bit of hair

float by. There are other things I notice:

how my bedroom looks smaller than I

remembered, the bed taller. Things like

that. But I’ll get used to them.

Another one of my letters got turned in

to police, the postmark tracked down

and pointed to me, which is how my

mom discovered I’d written to more than

Abby’s grandparents. I’d been writing

other girls’ families, too, when I could

find them, telling them what their

missing daughters and sisters and nieces

would have wanted them to know. The

things the girls told me in my dreams,

when they let me coast through their

memories, a visiting observer who never

tampered with their lives but who paid

attention, who remembered. I’d write to

a girl’s mom, saying she meant to visit

her in prison, even one time. I’d write to

a girl’s boyfriend, saying she still loved

him and she didn’t ditch him at the gas

station and she did want to go to Mexico

with him, if only she could. My mom

wanted to know how many of these

letters I’d sent, whose mailing addresses

I’d found and what stories I told them,

even if I had the addresses and the

names wrong, even if my letters never

reached who I intended.

When I confessed, I could see from

her face how serious she thought this

was.

“These are real girls,” she told me

carefully. “Those girls you found online,

they
are
real. With real lives. And real

people at home wondering what