The Girls She Left Behind (8 page)

The blond girl looked like a long-term disaster victim, big-eyed, skinny, and pale. In there with the two of them were heaps of old, frayed blankets that might've been beds, and a makeshift clothesline with a few stained, shabby items drying on it. There was a small TV and a hotplate, and in a corner stood an old-fashioned sink—the deep, square kind, with a shower hose shoved onto a faucet.

Under the sink stood a bucket; the toilet, I guessed, which accounted for the stink. Biting my lip to keep from howling, I let myself realize at last that the dark-haired girl in the room was Cam.

Sprawled across the blanket-heap bed she lay naked and motionless, one bare arm flung out as if reaching for something.

I couldn't see her chest moving, and that's when I understood she wasn't alive anymore. He must've brought her in here first, while I was still unconscious.

“Is she…?”
Dead,
I wanted to say, but I couldn't make the word come out of my mouth. I felt nothing, like I was frozen inside, but at the same time I knew feeling nothing was a blessing that wouldn't last.

The girl with the white-blond hair nodded, whispering, “I think so. I think she was already gone when he brought her down here, but I'm afraid to find out for sure.”

She gulped nervously, glancing toward the stairs as if she thought he might be listening. “It wouldn't be the first time.”

“He's brought dead girls down here before?” Now at last I felt a cold, black wave wash over me at the horror of it. That this nightmare was real and I was in it.

And Cam. The blond girl nodded again with quick, tiny bobs of her head, her lips pressed tightly together. She looked toward the stairs again, then went on.

“He…he stashes them here sometimes. Then he takes them away after a while, I don't know where.”

Cam still wasn't moving. Of course she wasn't; he'd hit her so hard, and the labored breaths I'd heard her taking in the back of the van had sounded as if any one of them might be her last. He'd dragged her in here and thrown her down like trash that he meant to dispose of later.

He would take her back out again and bury her, or dump her by the road somewhere. In a ditch, probably, like my mother always said. Which meant things weren't looking so good for me, either, I realized with another rush of fright.

“Do you have a cell phone?” the blond girl asked.

I shook my head. I didn't own one and neither had Cam; back then generally kids didn't, or at least not so much as now. And anyway, calling for help was the last thing I wanted; even as injured and frightened as I was, I already knew I had to escape without anyone finding out that I'd been here.

Even though Cam was dead.
Cam…
my wild, funny cousin, always laughing, brave, and full of mischief…
dead.
I couldn't believe it. Still, I was already sure it was true, and there was nothing I could do about it.
Gone.
The word rang in my head like the solemn tolling of the bell at St. Anselm's whenever there was a funeral.

Gone forever…
But if she were here, Cam would tell me to get a grip, not to be such a baby. She'd say I should look out for myself, wouldn't she?

Of course she would. Even with her body lying motionless only a few feet from me, I could practically hear her. If I meant to obey her, though, I would have to hurry. Because any minute now I was sure that the guy from the van would be back.

And what he would do then I didn't want to imagine. Squinting in the dim glow from the nightlight in the adjoining cell where Cam's body lay, I peered desperately around the cellar, hoping for some tool that I could manage to reach: a crowbar or screwdriver, maybe, the kind of thing that might be lying around down here, and that I could use to get out.

Finally I spied the gleam of metal on the floor. It was a key ring, I realized.
His
key ring. Or was it a trap? Had he dropped it, or had he put it there on purpose to catch me reaching for it? I had no choice but to find out. Behind me, the girl with the blond hair wept softly. Stretched out on my stomach, I slid my hand under the chain link, trying not to hear the sounds from upstairs.

Awful sounds; from what he was doing to the girl he'd dragged out of here, I guessed, and would do to me if I didn't
hurry…

At last my fingers closed on the keys. Somehow in his rush to get upstairs with his prisoner he must have dropped them. Lucky for me, I thought, but now the sharp end of a wire from the bottom of the chain-link enclosure jabbed my arm cruelly, blood running hotly from the gash.

The pain made my teeth clench and my stomach knot up, but I dragged my hand back in anyway. With the keys at last in my grasp, a torn-up arm was the least of my worries.

“Oh,” whispered the blond girl, glimpsing what I was doing. “Be careful, if he catches you he'll—”

I pulled the keys the rest of the way under the chain link. They were on a metal ring with a spring-loaded clip; he'd taken them off his belt to let us into the house, I remembered, and used one down here to open my cage before shoving me in.

And then to drag the other girl out. “Hurry,” said the blond girl in the next cubicle while the sounds from above, unimaginable to me just hours earlier, went on and on.

“Please,” said the blond girl. “You have to help us. We've been here so long.”

He'd thrown my clothes into the cubicle with me; shuddering at the thought of his hands on them, I yanked them on anyway, as fast as I could. He was busy now but he would return, and when he did my time would be up.

Hurry.
Steadying the heavy padlock as best I could through the chain link, I shoved my hand through a gap in the wire mesh and twisted my hand around to try the first key, jittering it into the lock. But it wouldn't turn, or the next one, either. Or the next. Finally, on the fourth try—

The fourth key turned grudgingly. The lock's hasp snapped open and so did the door, grating against the floor.

“Please,” begged the girl in the next cubicle as, weeping silently, I scrambled across the cellar and up the rough wooden stairs. “Please don't leave me here.”

But I didn't dare go back to help the blond girl get out, so sure was I that in the very next instant he would appear, see what I'd done, and charge down the stairs just as I was creeping up them.

Only he never did, and when I tried turning the doorknob at the top of the stairs I found it unlocked.

He was in a hurry,
said a voice in my head.
Sure of himself and careless with the keys this once…but he won't be careless next time.

He'll never make that mistake again.
So this was my only chance. Renewed fright hit me as I pushed the door open, peeking around it. The sounds from up here had stopped. I tiptoed into the hall. In the darkness, a loose strip of wallpaper brushed my face and I stifled a shriek.

“At least tell someone,” begged the voice from below. “Tell someone we're here.”

Ignoring her, I hurried on. No one was in the rank-smelling kitchen, flyspecked and with piled-high dishes teetering in the sink; no one in the den, dark and musty, full of discarded fast-food containers littered around the TV.

Finally came the sprint to the front door, now padlocked on the inside. I thrust another key in—by some miracle it was the right one—yanked the door open, and hurled myself out of the house. In my frightened rush I nearly tumbled down the concrete-block front steps.

At the gate between the trash-littered front yard and the street there was yet another lock; while I was fumbling with it a roar of outrage came from inside. Flinging the gate wide, I ran sobbing down the uneven sidewalk, glancing back just in time to see him charge out onto the porch with his fists clenched and his piggy little eyes glaring around furiously.

But by now it was very late. There weren't many streetlights in the neighborhood, a down-on-its-luck part of New Haven where public amenities, if they existed at all, were poorly maintained. So he didn't see me.

And that was the last time I looked back. All I could think of was getting away—that I was out and free and he couldn't touch me anymore. Even Cam's poor motionless body meant nothing to me compared with my escape. And as for the other girl, by then I wasn't sure if she was real, or just another part of the awful nightmare I'd been in.

All I knew was that I had to run, to get away and not look back. After I'd done that for as long as I could I began to walk, aching and bleeding, still woozy and terrified that at any minute he might appear in his van from behind me, then grab me and bundle me in.

B
ut he never did. Minutes later on the overpass high above the interstate ramp leading into the city I leaned far out over the guardrails. I thought briefly about jumping, but I didn't. Instead I reared back and threw that filthy key ring of his just as far and hard as I could.

B
y seven o'clock on the Wednesday morning after Tara Wylie's desperate text message showed up on her mother's cell phone, the temperature was sixty-two degrees and the only sign that there had been any sleet at all in northern Maine was the mist steaming in gray billows off the blacktop as Lizzie drove out of Bearkill.

“Amber Alert's up.” Beside her in the Blazer's passenger seat, Aroostook County sheriff Cody Chevrier tipped his close-clipped silvery head as he listened attentively.

“TV and radio stations've all got press releases, they'll be on the noon news. A flyer with her picture on it is on its way to every cop car in Maine, truck stops got them, hospitals, homeless shelters, and the agencies've all got a heads-up,” she recited.

Quickly she summarized the other events of last night: the appearance in her office of Jane Crimmins, Lizzie's hospital visit later after Crimmins's breakdown, and the time with Peg Wylie.

“That cell phone location's being worked on, but no luck so far. Can't say I expect any, either,” she finished. Tracking a cell phone wasn't the piece of cake the TV crime shows made it out to be.

“Sounds like you got it all covered,” Chevrier said. “That name, though, Crimmins. Why's it sound so familiar to me?”

At his question, her already-solid respect for the rural sheriff went up yet another notch. The kidnapping of three young women followed by their imprisonment in a New Haven basement hadn't been a local crime, and the name Crimmins didn't belong to any of the victims.

In fact, as far as Lizzie was aware it had been mentioned only once, in a human-interest feature that had appeared in New Haven's alt-weekly newspaper, the
Advocate.
Yet Chevrier was somehow aware of it.

“Yeah,” he added, snapping his fingers, “now I remember. She had some link to one of the kidnapping victims in the Henry Gemerle mess, right.” Surprising Lizzie further, Chevrier went on. “That's it, she was a sort of caretaker afterward for one of the rescued women.”

“That's right.” On either side of the road, the dry soil was pockmarked by vanished ice pellets. She put the window down; the air smelled like spring, even if a false one.

“Case in New Haven,” Chevrier continued, “whole thing started six months ago? Or that's when it came to light,” he amended.

“That's when they found the girls,” she confirmed. “There was an arraignment pretty quick after that. Then nothing more until a couple of weeks ago, when they started showing the hearings on TV.”

She slowed for the
GRAMMY'S RESTAURANT
sign, then pulled into a parking lot full of pickup trucks and heavy equipment for cutting firebreaks.

Chevrier shrugged. “Hey, I stay on top of all the crime stories I can. You'd be surprised how many fugitives think Maine's a good place to vanish.”

He glanced around the diner's parking lot, full of familiar vehicles. “Like nobody here's gonna notice some strange guy the minute he hits town,” he added sarcastically.

They parked between a forest service water tanker and an old Ford Fairlane whose rear windows were plastic sheets duct-taped to the outsides of the frames. Into the fuel filler hole, which was missing both its cover flap and filler cap in blatant defiance of DMV regulations, a red grease-rag had been stuffed.

She switched off the Blazer's ignition. “Anyway, like you said, the guy's named Gemerle.” It was pronounced
JEM-er-lee.
“The monster of Michener Street, the media called him.”

“So what's Crimmins doing here?” Chevrier asked as they crossed the parking lot.

The Fairlane was illegal in too many ways to count, not the least of them being an outdated inspection sticker. But it belonged to a local firefighting volunteer so they let it alone; no doubt Chevrier would have a quiet word with the owner later.

The night before, she'd calmed Peg Wylie as well as she could and then spent the rest of the hours until morning on her to-do list—the flyers, the Amber Alert and agency notifications—and on refreshing her memories of the New Haven atrocity.

There was plenty on the Internet about it, including the
New Haven Advocate
piece revealing that the victim Jane Crimmins had been caring for was a young woman by the name of Cam Petry.

“I'll find out more when she wakes up from the sedation she got,” said Lizzie, wondering where Cam Petry was right now.

Homemade posters for church suppers, raffles, and items for sale—snow tires, woodstoves, a shotgun—filled the bulletin board in the diner's covered entryway. Also on display was the freshly posted
MISSING
flyer for Tara Wylie, crisper and more readable than the ones her mother had made, including a head shot from Tara's yearbook and another of her grinning triumphantly atop a human pyramid of Bearkill High School cheerleaders.

“We're way behind the eight-ball on her now,” Lizzie said unhappily, waving at the flyer. Too much time had passed while Peg dithered, trying to pretend that Tara had gone AWOL on her own.

And why was that? Lizzie wondered again as she followed Chevrier into the diner. At the gingham-covered tables and in the booths, fire crews in green forest service uniforms were fueling up for yet another day of clearing and trenching.

They crossed to a booth upholstered in blue leatherette and slid in opposite each other. “Anyway, about Tara's phone. I called the MDEA,” she said. The Maine Drug Enforcement Agency had better electronics expertise than anyone else in the state, which they were using nowadays to hunt down more of those meth labs, mostly. “But they've come up empty, too. The phone's not active now. It could've been on just long enough for one call and then turned off again, which makes it a tiny needle in a large electronic haystack.”

Or whoever had Tara—if someone did—might have caught her using the phone and done something to it, an idea Lizzie preferred not to dwell on as they gave their breakfast orders.

“Anyway, the Gemerle thing. It was a multiple kidnapping, guy held three girls captive for fifteen years. Kind of like that Cleveland case earlier? Only the Cleveland perp hung himself in jail.”

“Yeah. Ask me, that guy got off easy.”

Their coffee arrived. “But the New Haven situation, what's the recent action on that?”

“Well, first the court ordered a psych workup.”

“ 'Cause
batshit crazy
isn't a legal term that you can just slap on a guy,” said Chevrier, rolling his eyes long-sufferingly.

“Correct,” she agreed. “And neither is
low-life scumbag,
if you're on the prosecution's side. So all that took quite a while, because of course both sides had to have their own psychiatrists. But he got judged unfit to stand trial just the other day.

“So he went back to the forensic hospital in Connecticut. He's still there and that's where he'll stay for the foreseeable future,” she said.

Hot plates of food came and Chevrier dug into his bacon and eggs. Taking a piece of bacon off his plate, she crunched into it. Then:

“Listen, has Peg Wylie got any good connections around here? I mean is she related to anyone important, or friends with anyone who's got any local influence, anything like that?”

Because connections helped get publicity and when you were looking for someone, every bit of public awareness helped.

Chevrier shook his head. “Peg's a single mom, she moved here a little over three years ago and bought that house out there on the Hardscrabble Road. She wanted a better environment for Tara to grow up in, she said. She's got no important pals that I know of. Lots of friends in the fire department, though.”

Lizzie tipped her head questioningly. “She tried joining up, but she couldn't pass the physical,” he explained. “Next thing you know, she's on the stair machine at the firehouse every day.”

“And she made it through the next try?” Lizzie asked, but Chevrier shook his head.

“Nope. Or the one after that, either. But on the fourth try she racked up the best scores anyone around here ever has. You want somebody to run up five flights wearin' an air pack, drag out some overweight jerk who fell asleep drunk while he was holdin' a lit cigarette, she's your man. Woman. Whatever.

“But remind me about the Crimmins woman again,” he said. “How she got involved with…”

“Right. The Gemerle thing. After their rescue from Henry Gemerle's basement this past summer, two of the victims reunited with their families. But the third one—”

He nodded sharply. “That's it. I remember now. It was kind of a feel-good story? Some good-Samaritan-type woman took the third one in, and that was—”

“Yup,” Lizzie confirmed. “That was her. Jane Crimmins took in Henry Gemerle's third victim, Cam Petry. Who was her cousin, so I suppose that's why she did it. And now she's here, where another girl's gone missing.”

“Huh. Well, ain't that a kick in the head. Hudson's got good notes, he documented what happened with her last night? 'Cause we don't need her going around saying that it was his fault the interview went south.”

“Yeah, he recorded it. Missy's already typed up a transcript, but there wasn't much of anything in it. Nothing that looks bad for Dylan, anyway. I'm just hoping my choice last night hasn't shut Jane's mouth for the foreseeable future.”

Chevrier frowned. “So you think you should've stayed with her instead of letting Hudson take the interview.”

“Maybe. It was an option.” Or maybe the real reason she'd proceeded the way she had was in the hope of keeping Dylan in town a little longer. But saying that to Chevrier wouldn't accomplish anything useful, so she didn't.

Driving back to Bearkill they passed small houses on rough bulldozed lots, their neatly stacked woodpiles nearly untouched. So far, this winter had called more for fans than furnaces.

At Lizzie's office, Chevrier got out. “So you've looked into Gemerle, right? Current whereabouts and so on?”

“Yeah, he's still safely in the psych unit.” It had been a pleasant surprise about the job here in Bearkill that her mind and her new boss's worked so similarly.

“Although it turns out they actually did have an escape the other night, and that guy's still in the wind,” she added.

It had given her pause until the supervisor at the forensic hospital had explained. “Different guy, though. Not Gemerle.”

Chevrier's white Blazer, the twin of her own vehicle except for the sheriff's insignia on his door, sat in the Food King's lot across the street. But instead of crossing to it he stood watching a stray shopping cart roll slowly across the blacktop.

“Okay,” he said finally. Then, turning to her: “I don't want you to make a big deal of this, what I'm about to tell you.”

“Of what?” The big window at the front of her office showed Missy Brantwell's blond head bent over an open file folder.

“Peg Wylie,” said Chevrier. “Remember I said she moved here to get Tara into a more wholesome place?”

“Yeah. So?” A sharp whiff of smoke tickled Lizzie's nose; bad news for the forest service.

“So before here, they lived in New Haven.”

“Oh. Interesting.” By which she meant
Holy shit.

Chevrier eyed her evenly. “Yeah. Fascinating. So handle that information however you want. Don't go crazy with it, is all.”

He started across the street. “And keep me up-to-date, hear? We've got no extra manpower, guys're busy tryin' to keep the whole state from burning down.”

The smoke smell was getting stronger. A couple of dark-green vans sped by, each carrying a full crew. A pickup truck followed, tailpipe spewing and its bed loaded with open wooden crates piled high with shovels and pickaxes.

“I don't want to hear anybody from the media sayin' we didn't try hard enough to find that girl,” Chevrier added as he reached his own vehicle. “So make sure that you do everything, be sure to keep on documenting everything, and don't forget to cover your ass.”

Right, she thought as he drove off. But why did she have the feeling that her ass would end up in a sling anyway, whatever she did?

Inside her office, the scanner was alive with traffic. “Team Four, check in. Guys, gimme a callback here…”

On the TV that Missy Brantwell had set up on a file cart, the Bangor station's weather graphic depicted the whole state of Maine shaded in red.

“…can't stress enough that you don't want to be burning anything outdoors,” cautioned the voiceover.

Still no scanner reply. “Team Four,” dispatch tried again, “come on now, let's hear from you folks. Gimme a shout right now.”

The dispatcher's voice sharpened; the only possible reason a team wouldn't check in was if they couldn't. “Team Four…”

On the TV screen another graphic showed how much of the state similar fires had destroyed in 1947, when two hundred thousand acres burned.

The scanner spat static. Then: “…Team Four here, sorry about that, we're all good…”

Lizzie let out a relieved breath. “Someone's gonna get killed out there,” Missy groused at her desk, which was covered with notes and paperwork but still so aggressively well organized that it made Lizzie marvel at her own good luck.

Missy might look fragile, with wide blue eyes and curly blond hair framing an always-amiable expression, but her office-management style was nothing short of military.

“I don't care how much training they get,” she said, “none of the Bearkill fire volunteers has ever dealt with anything like this.”

She plucked a slip of paper from her desk. “Message for you. From some Connecticut guy, he said it's kind of urgent?”

Her heart sinking with the weight of an unhappy premonition, Lizzie reached for the phone. Moments later she was connected with the Salisbury Forensic Institute's chief security officer.