The Girls She Left Behind (4 page)

The phone console on her desk lit up—
PEG WYLIE,
said the caller ID—just as Dylan came back in, looking for his scarf.

TRANSCRIBED AUDIO OF INTERVIEW W/SUBJECT JANE CRIMMINS, CONDUCTED BY MAINE STATE POLICE DET. DYLAN HUDSON FOR AROOSTOOK COUNTY SHERIFF'S DEP. ELIZABETH SNOW, BEARKILL, MAINE.

T
he rural roads around the northern Maine town of Bearkill all looked the same at night, dark narrow blacktop ribbons with no center line or streetlamps. Huge trees crowded up to the edge of the pavement, stiff and silent.

Making her way in the Blazer along the barely familiar route, Lizzie at last found the place where Peg Wylie and her missing daughter, Tara, lived: a factory-built bungalow on a poured-concrete slab sitting on a bulldozed quarter acre way the hell out in the woods. Lizzie had already been there earlier that afternoon, and it looked even more lonely and remote now than it had in the gray winter daylight.

At the end of the long gravel driveway curving between the trees, a DISH TV antenna perched at one end of the bungalow's red-metal peaked roof and a propane tank hunkered under the bathroom window at the other, both illuminated by a pole-mounted yard light that shone bluish white onto the roughly graded bare earth between the driveway and the house.

The yard lamp lit up the graveled dooryard. A snow shovel propped hopefully against the lamp pole was beginning to rust. Lizzie's boots crunched on the gravel as her shadow lengthened alongside her, then fractured on the pressure-treated porch steps.

“Peg?” The porch light came on, the door opened, and the missing girl's mother appeared, looking haggard.

“Thanks for coming,” Peg said, leading Lizzie in. “Coffee? Or a beer?”

In the kitchen, a small TV with the sound muted flickered from atop the refrigerator. At the center of a round wooden table with two wooden chairs pulled up to it, a gray cat with a notch out of its ear sat on a sheet of newspaper, washing its face.

“No, thanks.” The missing teen's mother was a chunky woman in her early thirties, wearing jeans and a turquoise Bearkill High sweatshirt. Her short bleached-yellow hair was still damp from a recent shower, and her face was taut with worry.

“What's going on?” Lizzie asked, looking around. A heavy canvas jacket hung by the door, flanked by a yellow nylon vest whose back panel was crossed with Scotchlite tape.

A Pathmaker radio stood in a charging base on the counter by the coffeemaker. Lined up under the coatrack were a pair of steel-toed boots, their cap soles heavily scuffed and the yellow cord laces threaded through their metal-grommeted eyelets frayed from use.

“Nothing,” Peg replied dully, though her call twenty minutes ago had sounded frantic.

In a shoe box on the counter in a nest of flannel, a striped kitten slept. Beside the box was a saucer that held an eyedropper and a tin marked
MILK REPLACEMENT—FOR VETERINARY USE ONLY.

Two cats, but the house smelled utterly clean and fresh, Lizzie noted. “Nothing new, anyway,” Peg amended. “I got scared, was all, just so scared, and I didn't have anyone to—”

She pulled out one of the chairs and sank heavily into it. “I'm sorry, I don't mean to be wasting your time.”

Then don't be,
Lizzie thought. If she'd known this was only a social-support visit, she wouldn't have left Dylan Hudson alone to deal with the woman who'd showed up unexpectedly in the office.

She'd have handled it herself.
And if you were really so worried, you'd have pushed for that Amber Alert,
she thought at the woman slumped defeatedly at the kitchen table.

Instead Peg had balked at the measure. It was as if she didn't want any official publicity about Tara being missing, but why would that be?

It didn't add up. Yet there was no sense antagonizing the woman. “It's okay,” she said. “Show me Tara's room once more, why don't you? Who knows, maybe I missed something.”

Not that she really thought so. She'd seen enough missing persons' rooms to know what needed looking at and what didn't; the first time had been enough.

But it had been a pain in the ass to find this place again in the dark. So she might as well make this second trip worthwhile, she thought as Peg led her down a hallway lined with unprimed wallboard, past a bathroom furnished with economy-grade fixtures and unfinished tile.

“You doing this work yourself?” Lizzie asked.

Because it occurred to her suddenly that even way out here in the boondocks, a handyman with the hots for the teenage daughter was a classic perp candidate.

“Some. Tara's been helping with a lot of it, actually, she's good that way. And Pup Williams is working on it when he can, you know him?”

“Yeah.” Pup was a Bearkill man, ninety years old and maybe ninety pounds soaking wet, whose high-quality work and low rates for carpentry were famous all over the county.

Pup was harmless, though. And anyway, in the unlikely event of a struggle Tara could've taken him one-handed.

The girl's small bedroom and Peg's even tinier one faced each other at the end of the hall. In both, the floor was unfinished OSB—oriented strand board was the cheaper version of plywood, Lizzie had learned back when Pup fixed a rotten floorboard at her own rented house. The pastel chenille bedside rugs lay directly on the rough surface.

“It's why I got the house so cheap,” Peg explained. “The guy who built it thought he could save money by doing the finish work himself.” She took a shuddery breath. “But he never got around to it, and now I do what I can, when I can.”

In Tara's room, colorful posters and banners camouflaged the wallboard tape. A twin bed with a pink quilted comforter and a basic bedside table occupied one corner. On the plain pine desk, with a cork-covered bulletin board above and behind it, stood a laptop computer, a lamp, and a stack of schoolbooks. There was a white-painted dresser topped by a pink dresser scarf, and a closet with a hollow-core wooden sliding door.

Lizzie sat on the bed, trying again to absorb some sense of the girl. She'd checked under the mattress and in the drawers and closets on her earlier visit, but turned up no clue to the young teen's whereabouts; if Tara had secrets, she kept them well.

On a small wooden easel in the corner stood a sketch pad and a box of colored pencils. Tara had left a drawing of a crow half finished, a few swift, dark lines that suggested a broad wing, a sharp beak, and two bright eyes glinting greedily.

The lines were bold, without any wasted strokes, as if from inside the girl a vibrant talent had already begun emerging. Maybe it would get a chance to flourish further, Lizzie thought.

But maybe it wouldn't. Something about this whole situation just didn't compute. Cutting school, for instance. It was a small thing. But the girl had never done it before and she was, as her records indicated, a good student.

“I checked her Facebook again,” said Peg, waving at the laptop. “But the only recent activity I can see is from her own friends, trying to locate her.”

“You've asked them in person? And talked to their parents?” Lizzie got up.

Peg nodded discouragedly. “No one's heard from her. So they say, anyway, and they're getting scared, too, so I believe them.”

“And you still can't think of anyone who might've wanted to hurt Tara? Or maybe just to worry you to death, by taking her? An ex of yours, maybe? Someone like that?”

Peg shook her head. “Her father is dead. He died when she was not much more than a baby. And there isn't anyone else. I'm not,” she added wryly, “in the market for any romance.”

Something in the woman's voice made Lizzie turn from the bulletin board with its turquoise-and-gold Bearkill High banner, pair of frilly paper-strip cheerleading pom-poms hung from a push pin, and collection of Justin Bieber fan photographs.

“You're sure? You know for certain her dad is deceased?”

“Sure? Of course I am.” Peg crossed her arms over her chest a little defensively. “He's dead and I'm glad about it, if you want to know the truth.”

That's what I want, all right.
So why, suddenly, did Lizzie have such a strong feeling that she wasn't getting it?

On the dresser stood a snapshot of Tara's boyfriend, Aaron DeWilde. Heavily tattooed and grinning smugly, the kid had a neck like a tree trunk and the overbuilt physique that came from a diet of supplements and protein shakes, plus a lifting routine that was not part of any standard high school phys-ed curriculum.

“Still gone, too?” Lizzie waved at the photo.

Peg sighed. “Yeah, and his folks're still ragging on me about it. I told them Tara's fourteen, Aaron's eighteen, so who do you think was doing the leading in this little adventure they're on? If,” she added uncertainly, “that is what's happening.”

“Uh-huh.” Lizzie picked up a school photo of Tara: long, dark hair, bright brown eyes, and a pretty smile. The girl looked like a thousand others, her face not yet fully formed and her eyes brimming with the youthful certainty that nothing bad could happen to her.
Oh, kiddo, I hope you're right,
Lizzie thought.

But more and more she just didn't think so. The girl always called, but this time she hadn't. She never skipped school, but this time she had. And when people didn't do what they always had done, Lizzie knew, too often it was because they couldn't.

Back in the kitchen the kitten cried pitifully. Peg mixed some formula from the can with a little water and drew it into the eyedropper, then began feeding the hungry infant.

“Tara's rescue,” Peg explained of the kitten lapping eagerly at the dropper. “She found it last week by the side of the road, all alone. Someone dumped the poor thing there, I guess.”

“So now it's your job?” Typical teenager, Lizzie thought, she brings a pet home and then lets her mother take care of it.

But Peg only glanced down fondly at the tiny creature. “Oh, I don't mind. Cute little thing, and Tara…well, she's just a kid, you know?” Her voice broke. “She's just a little kid.”

“Yeah. You're right.” Lizzie glanced around once more. The place was not aggressively spotless, but it was clean, well kept, and orderly. It looked like a place where two ordinary people, a mother and daughter, lived decently and without incident.

Until now. “So Peg, why'd you really call me out here in the dark tonight? On the phone you sounded like you were about to lose it completely,” she added, “but now when I get here—”

She stopped, struck by a pang of sympathy. Peg was all alone out here on the edge of the woods, miles from anyone and worrying herself sick, comforting herself with an orphaned kitten.

Because her own baby was missing.

“You're sure there aren't any of her friends or acquaintances you want to talk to me about?” Lizzie asked.

“Or even yours?” she added. “Someone you work with, someone you might not feel quite right about? Because if there is, I can check people out quietly, you know.”

Sometimes it was a boss at work or maybe someone a parent owed money to, eyeing a young girl in what ended up being way too friendly a fashion.

“And they wouldn't have to know,” Lizzie said. “You realize that, right? I know how to check them out thoroughly without anyone knowing about it.”

But Peg shook her head firmly. “No. Really, I just…”

She paused, chewed her lip. Then: “Honestly, I just panicked. Thinking about the possibilities…you know, if Tara had any idea at all what kind of torture I go through whenever she does this, I don't think she would ever…”

But in that belief Peg was just wrong, of course. Kids didn't have mercy. Back in Boston just before Lizzie had departed for Bearkill, for instance, a thirteen-year-old girl had stage-managed her own kidnapping, emailed a lot of very convincing-looking faked photos of herself in distress, and nearly made off with a ransom of ten thousand dollars in cash, all because a coveted pair of Miley Cyrus concert tickets had not been provided swiftly enough.

But her growing unease over young Tara Wylie's situation, even though she didn't yet know why, said that wasn't the case here.

“Right,” she told Peg. “Tara's a good kid, I get that. About her dad, though…” She let the sentence trail off suggestively.

“I told you before, he's dead, all right?” Peg retorted. But as she said this her shoulders slumped under the sweatshirt. Then:

“Okay, look, the truth is I don't know who Tara's father was. I was really young, it was just the one night, I never saw him again after that and I never wanted to. But…see, that's not what I told Tara.”

Which explained the odd vibe earlier when Peg talked about Tara's father, maybe. Or maybe not.

“Okay,” said Lizzie, still not quite buying it. The story was possible, of course, maybe even likely. This stuff happened to people all the time, and it was at least an understandable reason for Peg's reluctance to discuss it.

But it felt way too much like a fallback, the kind of tale a nervous perp tried putting over on you when the first big lie didn't cut it. Or maybe, Lizzie thought, she was just too used to life in the big city, where everybody was lying and everyone, it seemed, had something to hide.

“Okay,” she repeated, moving toward the door. “Call me again if anything happens, all right? Anything at all, even if you're just scared. Or—” She hesitated, but what the hell. “—if you just need to talk.”

Peg declared that she would, a promise Lizzie wasn't sure she believed. But for now she'd done all she could and it was good to get outside. In the graveled dooryard she breathed in the sharp fragrance of the sleet-slaked pines with a sense of relief.

As she climbed into the Blazer the last of the storm clouds parted, exposing the stars and a slice of moon. But as she drove back to Bearkill in the pine-scented darkness, the white crescent overhead seemed to sharpen unpleasantly into a claw, raking her with new doubt.

Lizzie still wasn't sure why she felt that Tara Wylie was in serious trouble. Maybe she was overreacting. But if the big city had taught her anything, it was that a young girl on her own was the potential star of a world-class creepshow.