The Longings of Wayward Girls (27 page)

Part Five

E

MOTHER TRIES TO GET ON WITH LIFE
Wintonbury—December 13, 1974

Six months ago, Laura Loomis’s mother took her and a girlfriend for an afternoon of swimming at the Wampanoag club pool. After, she dropped Laura at the friend’s house down the road with the instruction to be home by dinnertime. “I walked her to the door,” the girlfriend said. “I watched her go down the front walk to the road.” Though there were no signs of a struggle, Mrs. Cynthia Loomis, Laura’s mother, knows that Laura wouldn’t get into the car of just anyone. “Sometimes, I still can’t believe this has happened,” she said quietly, sitting at her kitchen table, looking out a window into a snow-covered backyard woods. Laura’s drawings are taped up on the wall. “Laura was a smart girl in school. She was very artistic—she loved to draw.” Mrs. Loomis hopes the FBI, which has been called in to the case, will provide some answers. Life at home will never be the same. “We can’t ever get over it,” she said. “You just find yourself waiting.”

August 30, 2003

B

ea Sidelman pulls the Grand Marquis all the way down the old Filley house’s gravel drive. The rain the day before has left the grass damp and green,

and there are still puddles. sadie has the window down and breathes in the thick air. “It’ll be a hot one,” bea says. They pass a white Audi convertible parked in front of the house. bea glances at sadie and tells her that the car belongs to the sister, beth.

“she’s always tooling up and down the street in it,” bea says.
she pulls up to the barn and stops. she keeps her hands at ten and two on the wheel. “Take care now,” she says, back to her schoolteacher manner. “you were always a smart girl, sadie watkins.”
sadie leans over in the car and puts her arms around bea. she feels her narrow shoulders tense and then relax, and the woman’s arms come up and sadie feels a soft patting on her back.
“Go on home,” bea says, her voice breaking.
she watches while sadie gets out and opens the barn door to reveal her car, and then she waits, the car’s big engine idling, while sadie gets inside and starts the sUV up and pulls out. The smell of the barn—the hay, the oiled tools, the bags of lime—has seeped into her car’s upholstery. she watches bea sidelman disappear down the drive, and when she hears

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her accelerate out onto the road she pulls up alongside beth’s convertible, climbs from the car to stand in the old house’s shadow, thrown now onto the grass. she feels a vague unease. she moves up the slate walkway, around the overgrown rhododendron, to the front door and knocks, the wait interminable. she knocks again but, impatient, tries the door and finds it open. she steps into the hallway, onto the old wide chestnut floorboards, and then moves farther into the house, hesitantly stepping into the open room with the fireplace—
the parlor,
ray called it. Today the room is bright with sunlight. There is a couch pushed against one wall, an old television on a stand. A crystal chandelier throws prisms of light onto the plaster walls. The windows are open, and on the chestnut floors are swaths of wetness, as if they were left open during the storm and the rain was allowed to come in. sadie imagines Francie peering in the window, her eyes eager behind her glasses, her hair hanging lank and dirty to her shoulders, looking like a ghost waiting for ray, much as she stood at the fence in the kindergarten playground, expecting sadie and betty to bring her the candies they’d promised. sadie could see her, defiant, her hands on her hips, her dirty face, her wide eyes and pale skin dotted with insect bites.
Maybe she did keep running
, sadie thinks.
Maybe she’s finally made a life for herself somewhere and is happy.

she turns from the window toward the fireplace and sees that a panel is swung open on invisible hinges to reveal a wood-framed space beside it. The
hidey spot
. Inside, in the shadowy interior, is a dull-colored pile of something she cannot discern and a bit of still-bright fabric. Pink and purple. before she can step closer she hears footsteps, a sharp-heeled clicking down a staircase somewhere.

“what are you doing?” beth says. she emerges from a doorway, her hands on her hips. “you just walk right in?”
sadie notices beth’s clothes—a flowered dress cinched with a belt, a stone necklace, and sandals with sensible heels. beth looks the part of a schoolteacher, but sadie remembers her as the sad, somewhat pathetic girl of her childhood. Her bobbed hair swishes along her shoulders the same, but sadie notices once again that beth seems much older—the grooves around her mouth deep, her eyes ringed with smudgy makeup, the skin crepelike. she is aged, beyond her years.
sadie is aware of how she looks in her own wrinkled skirt and blouse. “I apologize for just walking in, beth,” she says. “It’s me, sadie watkins?”
beth clenches her jaw. Her eyes flit around the house, as if something has caught her attention—a fly or a bee caught in the room.
“I know who you are,” beth says.
“I came to pick up something of mine,” sadie tells her. “I left it here.”
“Here? I don’t know, I don’t think so,” she says. she stares wide-eyed at sadie, a look that makes her old face seem childlike, guileless.
“It’s upstairs in ray’s room,” sadie says.
beth smiles then, a false smile of the type with which sadie has long been familiar and that in any other circumstance, from another woman, would have put her at ease.
“oh, I haven’t seen anything of yours,” she says, her voice higher pitched, moving into the register of propriety. “And I was just heading out.”
beth means to corral sadie out the door, but sadie brushes past her, down the front hall and up the stairs. behind her she can hear beth’s protests, the angry tapping of her heels. In the bedroom sadie doesn’t look at the bed, its rumpled sheets, the imprint of ray’s head on the pillow. she finds the suitcase, just where she last saw it, and she grabs it by the handle. beth has followed her up and blocks the doorway. she stares at sadie and laughs.
“
That
old thing?” she says. sadie glares at her, and beth’s expression falters. “you might be able to use those things since your mother couldn’t.”
but beth’s voice has lost its conviction. The suitcase is like a charm or a portal to the past.
“At least we know now why you hated her,” sadie says.
beth shrugs, but her eyes fill with something like regret. “she made me hate her.” beth is still the girl she was all of those years ago—she has never moved beyond that time. sadie wonders if any of them have, and then decides she cannot let that happen to her.
“Their little love escapade never happened,” beth said. “My brother had tucked that away in the closet. not a very good hiding spot—” beth stops. she looks as if she’s bitten into something hard and hurt her tooth.
sadie pushes past her out of the room, and beth follows sadie downstairs, close on her heels. They stand in the doorway to the parlor. “speaking of my brother, where is he?” beth asks her.
sadie suspects ray is just waking up at emma and Pietro’s, discovering her gone, and making up an excuse for her. “oh, she has friends in the area,” he might say. And now he is driving up and down the narrow sandy roads in his truck, past the colorful towels on lines, the beach toys stacked under cottages, the smell of eggs and bacon, expecting to come upon her. He’ll run through everything he said, making sure he didn’t slip, making sure he didn’t say something that might have given his love for Clare away, although the night will be a blurry-edged thing he cannot bring into focus. He will drive back to the motel, hoping she will miraculously be there. He said he wasn’t coming back here, and sadie now wonders if he meant that, if she will be forced to endure sightings of him in town, or if he truly has decided he’s shared this house with ghosts long enough.
The heat suffuses her, cottony air filled with the scent of the wet floorboards and plaster. sadie hefts the suitcase from one hand to the other. she remembers the odd bundle in the hidey spot, remembers, suddenly, ray’s phone conversation with beth before they left yesterday—the way his voice rose in fury—and she looks toward the place again, trying to make it out. beth turns to see where she is looking, her face suddenly bright with alarm.
“Get out!” beth shouts. “Just get out!”
sadie is taken aback. she stares at beth, a grown woman who has transformed into a frightened girl, and feels an uneasy sense that this has all happened before. she whirls on her heels and steps out the door onto the front stone steps. beth is right behind her, her hand on the door. In the sunlight sadie sees beth’s dress is soiled. on the heels of her shoes are what seem to be divots of grass, as if she’s been hiking through the meadow in them.
“where’s my brother?” beth asks again.
sadie ignores her and puts the suitcase in the back of the sUV, her chest tight. she remembers ray describing Francie, the shorts with the purple flowers. sadie feels suddenly weak, dizzy in the climbing heat. From across the field of waving grass comes a calling voice. sadie pauses. she imagines it’s Craig, calling her name.
“what have you done with him?” beth says. Her face is pale, shining with perspiration.
sadie looks at her. she needs to get home, she knows that.
but first, she repeats the question she overheard ray asking the night before. “what’s in the hidey spot, beth?”
beth’s hands ball tightly into fists. she wears a beautiful ring, a platinum watch. but beneath her fingernails are slivers of dirt, and on her face is the expression from the night sadie saw her stripped of her clothes in her laundry room.
“He was letting her
go,
” she says, her voice soft, frightened.
And then there are two voices that rise out of the woods. A man and a woman, calling someone. sadie realizes she is the one who is missing, and they are seeking her in the woods.
beth hears it, too. Her eyes become glassy with tears.
“I didn’t mean to do it,” she says, her voice a near whisper.
And then she takes a step back into the house and slams the front door. The morning sun brightens the glass in the upper-story windows. The mica glistens in the trap-rock stones. sadie feels an implausible sense of dread take hold of her. From the woods behind her she hears the voices calling, calling.

she drives through the center of town, home to her family, quickly, quickly, taking the three hills at whatever speed she can manage safely, and turns into Gladwyn Hollow, her tires sliding on the sandy shoulder, her heart racing with a strange apprehension. The bit of colorful fabric, so like a girl’s item of clothing; beth’s odd admission—these things have made her anxious, physically sick. Her street is quiet like an empty movie set, and she calms, tells herself she has only imagined the calling voices, much as she’s imagined everything that has happened without her here. she pulls into her driveway and enters through the front door. It is a saturday, and she expects to find Craig making breakfast, to smell the waffle batter and the syrup, to discover Max and sylvia in front of the television. but the inside of her house mirrors the street. she walks from the hallway through the living room to the kitchen and breathes in the smells of her family, climbs the carpeted stairs, calling each of their names.

she pauses in each doorway, notices the space of the rooms, as if the people have only just left and she is a visitor to a preserved place, like a museum. In sylvia’s room there is a cup filled with water by the bed, her pink purse slung over the doorknob, her bathing suit tossed on top of the bureau. Max’s room reveals the same sense of silence and disorder—clothing hung on the bedpost, his little train cars pushed into a corner. In sadie’s and Craig’s room the bed is still made from the day before, the spread rumpled as if someone slept on top of it, and abandoned on the rug sadie sees a pair of women’s leather flats, beautiful shoes that are familiar but not hers.

Kate’s, she thinks. she leaves her house and walks up the tarred road. she rings Kate’s doorbell and knocks, calling Kate’s name, until two police cars appear, gliding like strange fish, and pull up in front of her own house down the street. someone calls her name and sadie turns to find Jane rushing through Kate’s side yard toward her, eyes lit with fear. sadie understands that something more has happened, even before Jane grabs her hand.

“It’s sylvia,” she says. “Craig woke up this morning and she was gone.”
sadie stares at Jane, the realization settling, her body going cold. still, she can’t believe it. “what are you saying?” she says, expecting that when Jane repeats the words she’ll discover they mean something else. but Jane’s face tells her all she needs to know. The voices weren’t calling her, they were calling sylvia. “This is my fault,” sadie says.
Jane doesn’t ask her to explain, she just takes her in her arms. “It will be okay. Kate and Craig are looking around the pond. Max is with Maura.”
sadie looks down the street toward the police cars, and Jane waves her hand. “let Maura talk to them.”
They head up the path through the woods, the way trampled and cleared by the women’s and children’s passage throughout the summer. Pale light filters down through the trees, although the path keeps its shadows. Jane tells her she was waiting for her. “Kate called me last night. we wracked our brains trying to figure out where you’d gone. we called the hospitals, the police. Craig found your cell. They told him he had to wait until this morning, and now this.”
sadie is mute with fear, but Jane doesn’t really expect her to answer.
“I told Craig you’d just gone off for a bit, to get away. Maybe an old friend, I said. I told him not to worry. Kate was with him at the house.”
At this, Jane glances at sadie, to see how much she is taking in.
“I can’t believe she’d come this way at night,” Jane adds. They are moving quickly, and she is talking too much and out of breath. “but Max told Craig this is where she was headed.”
sadie says sylvia has never been afraid of the woods, that she tells Max stories about fairies and elves that live there, and Jane glances back at her again, and then takes her hand, and they continue on this way, like two girls.
They reach the clearing, and the pond is soft and still, the late-summer insects hovering over the surface. They walk the perimeter and see nothing. sadie listens, but the calling voices have stopped. she remembers the day she and betty sought Francie and came upon the pond. she thinks that finally it has come, that this is the payment she will make for Francie’s disappearance—not her mother’s death after all, but this: one child. It is possible that sylvia is somewhere below, tangled up in a tree branch, captured beneath the surface, but Jane tells her she isn’t there, her face as fierce as bea sidelman’s. sadie hesitates by the pond, watching its calm surface, thinking about how deceptive it is. she looks at Jane, her face a question.
“she’s too smart,” Jane insists.
sadie doesn’t say anything about Francie bingham or about how smart she was. They forge on through the pine woods, taking the path sadie knows, the one she and sylvia and Anne took the day of the daisy crowns.
laura loomis’s mother, Francie’s mother—both waited back at the house while the neighbors searched, tranquilized to calm their frayed nerves, their terror building as hours, then days passed and their children remained unaccounted for. sadie couldn’t have imagined it then, but she experiences it now, her chest heavy with panic. she calls out Craig’s name. sadie knows her daughter, quiet and imaginative, and tries to think like her now, a child who once created a bed for a plastic dinosaur out of an old sucrets tin, a house for a small dime-store doll out of an apple crate. Her drawings, pages of fairy-tale characters, all depict events in a long-running story. sylvia would walk through these woods having imagined conversations with nymphs and sprites and elves. she and Jane haven’t walked far when she sees something glittering on the path, and she bends down and picks up a sequined star. she scans the path and sees another, then another, and as her eyes adjust to seeing them she realizes there are hundreds of stars scattered among the pine needles like constellations. she stops and smiles.
“like Hansel and Gretel,” she says. she points, and Jane sees them too, and she lets out a laugh, her loud hoot she uses when one of the children surprises her.
“It’s from her arts and crafts kit,” sadie says.
she yells Craig’s name again, and this time there is an answering call: “we’ve got her! she’s here! she’s fine!”
Her knees tremble with relief. Jane exhales and finally releases sadie’s hand. They see Craig farther along the path, his dress shirt bright like a signal flag. He approaches with sylvia in his arms. she sees sadie and struggles to be let down. Kate is with him. sadie sees they are all wearing the same clothing they wore the day before, and she is filled with guilt and regret. she has no idea what went on while she was gone. sylvia runs into sadie’s waiting arms. Her body is all bony limbs. Her little fingers are cold, her eyes dark. she seems to be fine, shivering a bit in her T-shirt and shorts, her hair knotted, her arms scratched, but otherwise unharmed. Craig approaches sadie and nods once, his face stiff with restrained emotion. when she whispers his name he makes a noise that is either a sigh or a groan, she can’t tell which. He wraps his arms around sadie and sylvia both.
she apologizes, over and over. she tells him she’s been with old Mrs. sidelman.
“she knew my mother,” sadie says. she glances at Kate over his shoulder—this story is for her, too, but Kate is looking away, not wanting to witness their reunion. bea has planned to call later in the afternoon to apologize for keeping her overnight. but none of this is necessary now.
“oh, sadie,” Craig says. “It doesn’t matter.”
behind the exhaustion in his voice, she hears the place where she fits, her old life waiting and comfortable like a leather glove. His breath smells of bourbon. His face is drawn and lined, his eyes wet. sylvia tells her in her little high-pitched voice that she was looking for her at the castle house, and sadie reassures her that she will make the waffles for breakfast, and that she will wash Max’s pillowcase that smells like his tears. They emerge from the woods at the pond to see that women and children from other neighborhoods have just arrived with their folding chairs, their blankets and towels, their striped umbrellas. They rub sunscreen on their children’s shoulders. behind them three police officers appear from the path. It is the children who spot them first. The women all glance up, their faces marked with astonishment. They sit in a circle and stare at the officers, whose shoes flatten the drying grass, whose buckles and badges flicker in the sunlight. Heads pivot and pivot back, their faces poised for what might happen next. They suspect heart attack, stroke, car accident. All of it a loss they steel themselves against, none of it seeming to fit here at the pond, with the brook’s gurgling and the wind in the leaves.
Craig approaches the officers and reaches out a hand to each. sadie hears him explain that all is well, and they form a small circle.
“I’m just glad we have a happy outcome,” an officer says. He’s older, gray haired. He wipes his brow. “we’ve searched up here before, all of this Filley land. Days of looking, you know?”
The younger officer beside him nods. “I was a kid then, but I remember the last one. she was in my class at school— funny little thing. so sad for the family.”
“still live in town. The mother died recently.”
“saw that in the paper. brave lady.”
“The other family moved away right after—the loomises.”
sadie holds sylvia and listens to the police officers talking, the occasional static buzz coming from their radios. Jane is beside her, an arm flung protectively over her shoulder, as if she hasn’t forgotten that sadie, too, was lost.
Craig steps up to the pond and looks down into it. His reflection wavers on the surface.
“
This
is where you’ve been bringing the children?”
sadie suddenly sees the trampled-down grass, the pond’s dull reflection, the scattered toys and paper cups. The women instinctively cover their stretched-out suits, their bug-bitten legs, smooth down their unruly hair with its neglected roots.
“you know there might be fertilizer runoff here,” he says to no one in particular. “Contaminants.” He suggests they collect a sample and send it to the ePA for analysis.
The officers nod in agreement. “There’s a perfectly good pool in town,” one of them says, his voice bouncing off the ring of pines. The women stare back at him as if they’ve been reprimanded. They glance to Kate, who moves among them, smiling, offering her calm expression. They’ve never seen her at the pond before, and as is often the case when seeing people you know in unexpected places, they don’t all recognize her. “was that Kate?” someone asks sadie.
Their unusual entourage makes its way to the path and down into Kate’s backyard. Kate remains quiet. she gives sadie a look that sadie cannot decipher and slips her hand around her wrist, a soft, firm grip.
“everything has worked out,” she says, as if she can hardly believe it.
The heat is rising in waves from the asphalt. entire families, alerted by the police officers’ cars, have gathered with Maura and Max on sadie’s front lawn. A pack of children on bikes pedal past from another neighborhood, emissaries sent to see what’s happening here. Craig and sadie and sylvia approach, and Maura rushes toward them to scoop sylvia up in her arms. Max buries his face in sadie’s lap. sadie thinks the group of them there, poised on the green grass, must look like a tableau. she glances up the street and sees Kate at the end of her walkway turn to head into her house. she has forgotten to mention her shoes.
sadie imagines Kate descending into her Christmas basement. she’ll throw the switch and all the houses will flame into life, the people inside them placed just so lit up on display, each scene so carefully manipulated: the wife carrying the turkey to the table; the father heading up the caroling party; the little girl on the rug by the fire, coloring; the boy on the couch wearing a cowboy hat, watching television, his legs jutting out, just reaching the end of the cushion. but sadie imagines that when Kate goes down today, she will discover that the mothers and fathers and children in her village will have shifted position, moved into other rooms, other houses, stepped out into their snowy yards to stand together without her intervention.