Pretty Little Killers (15 page)

Vanished

When Skylar clocked out
of Wendy's at the Glenmark Centre on July 5, 2012, she had every intention of returning to work the next day. Her shift ended at 10:00
P.M
. and the drive across Morgantown to Star City took only ten minutes. When Skylar walked through the front door of her home, she found Mary and Dave sitting in front of the television, watching
CSI
.

After greeting her parents, Skylar headed to the kitchen for some of Mary's homemade sweet tea. She loved the stuff and drank it by the gallon.

“Honey, are you hungry?” Mary asked from her recliner. The Neese apartment is open and airy so from her vantage point Mary could see Skylar standing in the small kitchen-dining area. Even before Skylar answered, Mary knew what her daughter's dinner had consisted of: one of those little berry ice cream desserts Wendy's sold. She just loved those.

“No, Mom, I ate at work.”

Skylar crossed the wood-laminate floor and came into the carpeted living room. There, she perched on the arm of the recliner and hugged Mary. “Love you, Mommy,” Skylar said, kissing her mother on the cheek.

Then she jumped up, leaned over the couch, and kissed Dave in the same fashion. “Love you, Daddy,” she said. “I'm really tired. I'm going to bed.”

“Do you work tomorrow?” Mary asked.

“Yeah.”

“Do you want me to wash your uniform?”

“Yes, it smells like French fries,” Skylar said, wrinkling her nose. Because she hated the smell of grease on her uniform, she always made a beeline for the shower. Not a minute later, Skylar tossed her dirty clothes out the door for Mary to throw into the washing machine. It was the same mother-daughter routine every night after Skylar finished work.

Mary waited for the wash cycle to end, then loaded Skylar's uniform into the dryer. After switching it on, she said goodnight to Dave and went to bed. She didn't know it, but Skylar's slender arm peeking around the bathroom door as she tossed out her uniform was the last glimpse Mary Neese would ever have of her daughter.

Dave was more fortunate; while he was dozing on the couch, he received one last “Love you, Daddy,” when Skylar reappeared from the bathroom, wrapped in a large bath towel. She got a drink from the kitchen, went into her bedroom, and locked her door like every other American teenager who has a secret.

Dave Neese received no response when he knocked on his daughter's bedroom door the next afternoon. “Hey, honey, get up. I want you to take me back to work so you can have my car.”

Nothing.

He knocked again. “Sky?”

Again, no answer. Usually, she was up—bam—as soon as she heard the car was available. Dave knew he shouldn't be letting Skylar drive by herself; with just a learner's permit, the teen was supposed to have a licensed adult in the car. However, he also knew she'd drive just enough to take him to work and then go to her own job. She'd
come straight home after her shift. That was their agreement. The Neeses saved on gas and Dave always checked the odometer to make sure she was sticking to the arrangement.

After getting no reply, Dave went to the hall closet and grabbed a coat hanger—the door locks in the apartment easily popped open. But when he peered inside Skylar's bedroom, she wasn't there. Her unmade bed looked like it had been slept in, so Dave first assumed she must have gone shopping with a friend. Then he remembered her door had been locked from the inside. He called his wife at work.

“Mary, did Skylar tell you where she was going?” Dave's voice rose as he spoke. He paced the small kitchen, feeling his worry build.

“Just calm down.” Mary knew how close to the surface Dave's emotions ran. “Don't flip out. She probably went shopping with one of her friends or something. She never misses work.”

“That's what I thought, but her door was locked.”

“She probably just accidentally hit the button closing the door in a hurry. You know how she does.”

“Okay, maybe. But I'm going to look for her.”

Dave rushed back to Walmart, a few minutes away, and told a supervisor he had to take the rest of the day off. “Listen,” he said, “I can't find Skylar. I don't know where she's at, but I gotta find my kid.”

He decided to check at home once more to see if she'd returned while he was gone. Skylar was largely a responsible teenager, and although she might forget to let her parents know where she was going, she would usually remember at some point to check in. But she was also fearless and willful, and that concerned Dave.

Skylar still wasn't at the apartment when he returned. Dave walked through the kitchen and out onto the small balcony for a smoke. He wanted to think, to plan his next steps. That was when he noticed a small black bench sitting at the base of the back wall of the apartment complex, just around the corner from Skylar's first-floor room.

Dave flipped his cigarette into the round ceramic bowl he and Mary kept for cigarette butts and went back through the apartment,
out and around to Skylar's window. The screen was leaning against the wall, her window open a finger's breadth. That was the moment he knew:
Oh, my God. She snuck out
.

nine

On the Verge

On that Friday afternoon
when Dave came home to find Skylar gone, the Neeses discovered Skylar hadn't learned her lesson about sneaking out, like they had thought after her joyride with Floyd and friends.

Thinking about the bruises she used to sometimes see on Skylar's thighs, Mary realized she had missed some clues. At the time, she and Dave believed Skylar when she said she got them at work. Looking back, Mary said, “We fell for it. She really got them from sliding down the windowsill.”

That terrible July 6 day was when her parents realized Skylar hadn't learned a thing. Just the opposite. In fact, as the Neeses would discover from one friend of hers, then another, in that first month after she disappeared, Skylar snuck out a lot.

When she recalled Skylar's lies, a shadow passed over Mary's heart, no doubt brought on by thoughts of what she and Dave should have done differently. Should have seen. All the red flags they'd missed.

Looking back, Mary couldn't help but criticize herself for not keeping a closer eye on Skylar. She was confronting the difficult realization almost all parents eventually face: children who have been open and truthful in the past can, as teenagers, become deceptive
and intensely wrapped up in their own worlds. They have extremely private lives and keep secrets from their parents. Skylar's disappearance brought many of her secrets into the open.

After Mary and Dave learned over the next month that their missing daughter had been sneaking out frequently, Floyd Pancoast, the boy Star City police had caught joyriding with Skylar, came forward. He knew some of Skylar's secrets. “He was one of the suspects in the beginning,” Mary said. “We pretty much harassed him. Dave and I went to him in person, and he told us, ‘I loved Skylar. I miss her so bad.'”

Mary heard Pancoast was big into marijuana, which is why she asked him directly, “How could you guys drive around every night, getting high, and Skylar's getting up and going to school every day and has a 4.0 average?”

Pancoast told her, “We didn't get high every night. We'd just drive around. She listened to me.”

Through the police investigation, the Neeses learned Skylar and Floyd were no more than good friends. He didn't have anything to do with her disappearance. “So I had to apologize to him,” Mary said. “He still feels terrible about losing Skylar.”

A compassionate woman, Mary's expressive eyes often reflect her own sadness as well as the sorrow she sees in others. She and Dave must have realized they were wrong when they saw the raw emotion on Floyd Pancoast's face. Afterward, they offered him comfort, as they did repeatedly with various teens who had been touched by Skylar's disappearance.

Almost immediately after people learned Skylar was missing, the rumor mill began churning out stories. One of the most persistent involved a boy. No one seems to know who this boy was, but every variation suggested he was instrumental in her disappearance. Pancoast was one of many such “boys” the police questioned:
Were you romantically connected to Skylar? Did you do drugs with her? Did you see her the night of July 5 or the early morning hours of July 6
?

Mary insisted Skylar and Pancoast were not romantically involved, and just “buddies.” In truth Pancoast, who sported a buzz cut and
tattoos, wasn't Skylar's type. Mary couldn't say exactly what her daughter's type was, though, because Skylar never had a boyfriend.

Everyone believed Skylar was focused on getting a good education so she could go to college. For the time being, she was not interested in romance. Occasionally, she giggled with her girlfriends over one cute guy or another or took part in drunk-girl kissing games, but she wasn't serious about dating or sex the way many teens are. Perhaps Skylar was on the verge of such stirrings.

The afternoon after she and Rachel killed Skylar, Shelia was headed back toward Blacksville. She probably wondered if Rachel was going to ruin everything. She had to be more careful. How could she have lost her phone? Rachel claimed she had looked everywhere and couldn't find it.

“It must have fallen out when . . . you know,” she'd informed Shelia a couple of hours earlier. Shelia told her to shut up—not over the phone—but at least Rachel hadn't texted it. Their plan had been very clear: all communication about anything suspicious must be in person or on FaceTime. The police could get everything else—phone calls, tweets, texts—
everything
. FaceTime, an app that let the two girls place a video call, was the only safe way. On FaceTime, once a conversation was over it was gone forever.

As she drove toward the spot where they'd gone the night before, Shelia might have thought about what happened, glorying in the crime they had gotten away with.

Or maybe not. Shelia was proud of her ability to block out unwanted thoughts and emotions, and she was very, very good at it. She tweeted as much, quite often.

When she arrived, Shelia pulled over and got out. She tried sending a text to Rachel's phone and then listened carefully. She didn't hear anything. Again, she texted Rachel's cell. Shelia probably would have kept her eyes turned away from the newly gathered pile of leaves and branches. The search took several long minutes, as she
sent text after text—until finally she heard Rachel's ringtone. There it was, a little ways off in the grass. Shelia slipped it in her pocket and headed back to her car.

No doubt Shelia saw the large dark stains in the road, but she was so elated over finding Rachel's phone she likely didn't give them a single thought.

ten