The Girls She Left Behind (20 page)

Missy took a deep breath. “And it looks like somebody got killed in there, he said.”

O
utside our building in New Haven I called the reporter who'd showed up earlier, reading the number off the card he'd slipped under the apartment door. It was past midnight and he sounded half asleep, but he perked up when I told him I would talk with him after all.

Only it had to be now, I said. I'd meet him in East Rock Park; if he brought anyone else, though, it would be all off, and Cam was refusing to talk to him at all.

He could get the whole story, every lurid detail, I told him: Cam's victimization at the hands of Henry Gemerle, her rescue, and our lives together afterward.

But he'd have to get it from me. The reporter agreed, the same terrier tenacity I'd heard in his voice earlier drawing him now, and ten minutes later I was waiting by the playground where the swings and jungle gym stood half lit by a single streetlamp.

He showed up on foot and came over to my car, a skinny young guy in a tan knitted hat and black hoodie over a T-shirt, a wispy reddish beard and thick horn-rims completing his hipster look.

I gestured for him to get in, and he did. “Hey,” he said, taking the horn-rims off to wipe them.

“Hey, yourself.” I felt bad about it, but he'd heard Cam's labored breathing and he seemed smart. He might get to thinking about it, later; he might even call the police.

He could do it soon, and I needed a head start. And I'd come this far, hadn't I? Isolating Cam, lying to her and drugging her—or trying—then attacking her and leaving her to die…it wasn't as if I didn't know what I'd already done, and what I'd become.

What, like it or not, I was. So I turned quickly while the reporter was still busy polishing his glasses, and gripping the metal shaft of the barbecue skewer I'd taken from the apartment, I drove the tip of it into his left ear canal as hard as I could.

He stiffened, his arms jerking up and his clenched fists slamming his chest. He'd already begun convulsing as I grabbed his phone out of his pocket, leaned across him to yank the door handle, and pushed him out. When I pulled out of the park his body was visible in the rearview mirror, still moving.

So that was done, his foolishness ended for good. But I still couldn't leave town; not yet. Instead I drove to the medical center, walked through the dim, silent parking garage to the hospital's main entrance, and crossed the echoingly empty lobby.

There was no one at the security desk. The cafeteria was closed, and in the gift shop the Mylar balloons floated eerily, pressing shiny faces against the windows as if trying to escape.

I took the elevator upstairs, entered my office, and logged onto the medical database system as
ADMINISTRATOR
. Locating Cam's file, I changed her status from
DISCHARGED
to
ADMITTED
and listed her condition as
CRITICAL.

That way if anyone went looking for Cam, they'd have an explanation for why no one answered our apartment door. If they looked hard for her, of course, it would be a different story. But this would slow them down. Exiting the database, I left the office and the hospital building as unnoticed as I had arrived.

The drive through the silent city felt surreal, as if the dreams of the sleeping people all around me were in my own head.

At the service area in Branford I saw only the slack-faced servers at the food counters, moving like zombies to the beat of piped-in music under the fluorescent lights. I bought doughnuts and sandwiches, washing another of the Ritalin pills down with a swallow of Big Gulp soda; minutes later the car was gassed up, the tires checked and reservoirs filled, so there was little chance of my becoming disabled by the side of the road.

On the turnpike once more, I glanced a final time in the rearview mirror at the city's late-night glow, sodium yellow on the charcoal sky. After that I drove north, not stopping until I entered the state of Maine.

B
y Thursday evening, a few hours after Henry Gemerle's body turned up in the fire zone, a high-pressure system that had been stalled north of Montreal got a reluctant move on, sliding east. Behind it a line of thunderstorms promised relief for parched, fire-plagued Aroostook County.

But ahead of the storms came lightning, long wriggling lines of blue-white light crackling hotly through the night sky around Bearkill. Next came bright, yellow-white flares shooting up from the tinder-dry evergreens on the ridges around town, their pitchy sap so flammable that it might as well have been gasoline.

“It's happening.” Trey Washburn blew an unhappy breath out. The burly veterinarian stood with Lizzie on the sidewalk in front of her office. From there the sky's orange glow made it clear that in a supreme case of irony, the weather they'd all been hoping for had touched off the major blaze they'd been fearing.

“Looks like I'm going to have a long night,” Trey continued. Not everyone in the area had moved their livestock yet, and plenty of animals still needed coaxing into trailers.

“Me, too.” Another bright flare sprang up on the horizon as here in town more cars and pickup trucks zipped by, heading for the volunteer fire crews' staging area.

“You okay?” Missy called, driving up in her yellow Jeep.

In the backseat, Rascal drooled happily, his hound-dog head hanging out the open car window; of course Missy had thought of going over to Lizzie's for the dog.

“Heading to my gran's,” she called. Trey's big red pickup truck had already departed. “Unless you need me?”

“Nope. You go, I'll hang out here,” Lizzie replied. “Stay safe with your family.”

A whiff of burning creosote stung her nose as Cody Chevrier pulled over, his face grim. “Everything under control?”

She stepped up to his vehicle. “So far. I'll keep the office open as long as I can. Unless there's something else you need?”

Chevrier shook his close-clipped, silvery head. “You're doing it. Give yourself time to get out ahead of any flames, you hear?”

The fire was visible between the rooftops, moving inexorably closer. Chevrier eyed the blaze uneasily while from his dashboard a stream of urgent dispatch transmissions crackled.

“Things get dicey, you hit the road,” he said. “This here's for an experienced crew, Lizzie.”

On his radio the dispatcher's tone changed suddenly. “Fire One, choppers report you have flame approaching your position on your west, over.”

Fire One was the on-air name for the all-volunteer Bearkill Fire & Rescue. “Fire One, do you copy?”

Still nothing. “Answer back, Fire One.” Chevrier pulled away abruptly, the Blazer's cherry beacon swirling.

Experienced,
she thought, watching him go. Which she wasn't, and it made her feel even more out of her element here than usual.

But as she turned back to her office she spotted Peg Wylie leaving Area 51, under the glowing sign of the big-eyed alien with the tilted cocktail glass.

Peg looked as if she'd been tilting a few cocktails herself, wobbling unsteadily toward her old Honda. So instead of going in, Lizzie fired up the Blazer and drove alongside Peg.

“Hop in,” she called, and Peg obeyed; booze fumes filled the passenger compartment.

“Take me out there,” the inebriated woman demanded thickly.

“You lied.” Aiming the Blazer out of town, Lizzie gripped the wheel so hard her fingers ached.

“I was about to commit a crime for you, you know that?” she went on as she swerved hard onto the old Station Road just past the Bearkill town limits sign, bumping on the broken pavement.

“Tara's not the result of any one-night stand. She's not your ex-husband's kid, either. And Gemerle didn't give her to you.

“She's yours and Gemerle's, isn't she? You didn't want an Amber Alert because you were afraid that the Gemerle connection might surface.”

Peg rubbed her eyes with balled fists; she could do that now because the contact lenses weren't in. When she gazed imploringly at Lizzie, it was with eyes that were a deep, rich brown.

“What I still don't understand,” Lizzie finished, “is why.”

In the past couple of hours Peg had cried too much, and drunk too much, to keep the lenses in. She'd taken them out in Area 51's tiny restroom, Lizzie guessed, because they hurt and because she'd figured no one would see her anymore tonight.

But about that, as about so many things recently, Peg Wylie had been wrong. Another pang of anxiety for Tara stabbed Lizzie.

“No,” Peg protested again. “It was only that Tara's run away before. And she's always come home, so I just didn't think—”

Lizzie shook her head exasperatedly. “Yeah, right. Stick with that stupid story, Peg. Because, you know, it's worked so well for you, so far.”

Ahead in the murk the skeleton of an old gas station hulked by the crumbling roadside, saplings thrusting up through what had been the service area. A maple tree grew in the mechanic's bay and the antique gas pumps were all shotgunned to scrap.

Lizzie pulled onto the disintegrating tarmac. The gnawing urgency she felt, that Tara was still out there and in danger—
but alive, she could still be alive
—kept ratcheting upward.

But the mother of the year here, just went on lying about it. Lizzie turned in the driver's seat.

“Give me a break, Peg, okay? She's your child and his. And you wanted to make sure no one would suspect that.”

She forced down a surge of fury. “Because he threatened you, and Tara, too, and you're still scared of him. But now what you feared is happening, because you gave a statement about him in New Haven.”

Peg shook her head in silence as Lizzie went on: “But what I don't get is, why would you do that?”

More silence from Peg. “He's dead, you know. Gemerle is. We found his body up in the fire zone. We think he was killed last night. From the condition of his body we think it was almost certainly his blood in the motel room, not Tara's. We'll know for sure when lab results come back.”

At the news Peg looked up wonderingly in relief, but not for long. “Then where is she?”

She was sobering up fast. “Why hasn't she come home yet if he hasn't…if he hasn't hurt her?”

“I don't know. But I think maybe he had her and now that he's dead he can't say where he put her.” Cruel, but Peg's dawning look of simple fright in response gave Lizzie a way in at last.

“So you've got to tell me the whole thing, Peg. All of it, or we'll have no chance of finding her.

“Everything you remember or that you even suspect,” she went on. “Then maybe we can still get Tara out of this.”

Peg finally spoke:

“No. She's dead, isn't she.” A flat, despairing statement, not a question. “He killed her, hid her body.”

“We don't know that. Look, why are you fighting me on this? Just tell me—”

“And you won't tell anyone else? Before, you promised that you wouldn't tell—”

Lizzie shook her head. She'd had a chance to think some more about the deal she'd offered. “No. I should never have said that.”

Peg slumped in defeat.

“What difference does it make?” She seemed to be asking it of herself. “Without Tara, I don't care about anything, anyway.”

She straightened, steeling herself. “Okay. Like I said, we were cousins, Henry and me. And he drugged me. He put something in a wine cooler, and then…”

A terrible little laugh escaped her. “And then he raped me.” She forced the word out.

“And you got pregnant.”

Peg nodded. “Yes. But I was too afraid to tell anyone how I got that way. He told me if I ever said what happened…”

She turned miserably. “See, he'd give us money. Our family, we were penniless. I can't even express it, how poor. But Henry had dropped out of school and he was working steady. He even had his own place, a foreclosed house he'd bought near his mom's.”

Peg sucked in a shaky breath. “He said if I told anyone, he wouldn't help us out anymore.”

Lizzie watched a raccoon waddle into the gas station ruins. “Did you know about the girls? In his cellar, did you know about them?”

Peg shook her head emphatically. “No! Of course not, I…he was always after me. Then all of a sudden he quit bothering me. I didn't care why, I was just glad. I didn't know it was because he had someone else to torture. I only found out about all that stuff when everyone else did, last summer when he got caught.”

Lizzie thought about this. Something was still not quite right about it, but what? “Okay. And you didn't want Tara to know who her dad was. That's why you changed your eye color, right?”

Peg looked taken aback. “What? Oh, no, it wasn't like that at all, it didn't have anything to do with that. It was about me.”

Her face grew thoughtful. “I'm not even sure how to say this. But see, even after I got away from him, every time I looked in the mirror I saw the girl he'd made a victim out of.”

She shook her head again, remembering. “I changed my hair, cut it, colored it, dressed different ways, wore makeup or not. But still there she was every time in the mirror, his…
thing.
His filthy toy. Only then one day I tried on the blue contact lenses.”

“But why didn't you tell me about them?”

Peg blew a breath out. “I don't know. I guess I just didn't believe it mattered. Or I didn't want to believe it.”

Lizzie started the Blazer again and put it in gear. “So there was never any husband, either?”

“No. Mitch was a friend. I never even dated him. Like I told you, I just said it because I didn't know what else to say.”

The Blazer bumped down the ruined road. “Okay. That's good, Peg. That's helpful. But here's the problem I've still got.”

Overhead, thunder rumbled ominously. “See, I get that you didn't want Gemerle to stop helping your family. And you didn't want Tara to know her father was a monster, either, even if your eye-color change wasn't part of that.”