"The full story? Tonight is the most I've ever heard."
"I really don't like to talk about it."
"You don't have to now if you don't want to."
"I want to," Diana said. "I need to."
Jason shrugged. "I have a fridge full of beer."
Diana felt half of a smile form on her face. She took a deep breath.
"My dad left the family when I was twelve and Rachel was nine. Just up and left one day. Packed his shit and told Mom he was moving to Colorado. I think he still lives there, but we stopped hearing from him after a while. He was supposed to get remarried."
"So more than one person in your family has disappeared, I guess."
Diana nodded. "Right. Anyway, after he flew the coop, my mother went into a deep spiral. She's never really come out of it. That's why she's in the hospital."
"Alzheimer's, right?"
"Yeah." Fifty-fifty chance. "But when she went to ground after my dad left, she didn't leave Rachel and me much choice. We had to raise ourselves, you know? There would be weeks at a time when my mom wouldn't even come out of the bedroom. We wouldn't even see her. She didn't bathe. She didn't get dressed. She barely ate. She just..."
"Disappeared?"
Diana nodded again.
"It must have been shitty."
"We did what we had to. We didn't have any choice."
"Weren't there any relatives you could have called?"
"Not many. And I felt sorry for my mother. I wanted to protect her. I kept thinking that if I kept things going at home, she would eventually come around and be okay."
Someone started singing out in the street, and soon they were joined by two more voices, ridiculously out of tune and loud.
"Somebody's having fun," Diana said.
"I ought to go run them in," Jason said. "Disturbing the peace and general obnoxiousness." He scratched his jaw. "Go ahead."
"My mom. She never came around. And, for all intents and purposes, I started running the household. I shopped. I paid the bills."
"You paid the bills?"
"I filled out the checks and got my mom to sign them. She could be convinced to write her name. But I did all of that stuff. And I took care of Rachel. I made sure she got to school, and I made sure she ate on time. I helped her with her homework. And all of that was fine for a while. We were young, just kids. We couldn't get into too much trouble, so we made it work."
"I sense a 'but' coming," Jason said.
"A big one. The kind that makes all the difference." Diana paused a moment. She felt something swelling in her chest, something that made it difficult to speak. She took a long drink of her beer.
"Are you okay?" Jason said. "We don't have to go on—"
"I'm fine," she said. "I'm fine. I just haven't talked about this in..."
Never.
She cleared her throat. "Rachel was a pretty girl. A beautiful girl. Much prettier than me, and much prettier than just about any girl in our school or in our town. But it wasn't just her looks that made her special. She had a quality, a sense of life and a vitality about her. An energy just radiated out of her, at least when she was really young, and people responded to it. Especially men.
"It was obvious from a very early age that she was going to be popular with the boys. They started calling her and coming to the house right around the time Dad left, before Rachel was even old enough...before she had even reached puberty. And these weren't boys her age. These were boys who were older, fourteen or fifteen years old."
"Sounds like a recipe for trouble."
"It was. I was young, too, of course. It took me a while to figure out what was really going on, and what these boys really wanted. By the time I did, Rachel had already been raped."
"Oh, God," Jason said, his face turning white. "How old was she?"
"Eleven."
"Oh..." Jason took a long drink of his beer. "I don't know what to say."
"Rachel went to a party. There were older kids there, kids from the high school. She ended up in a room with one of the older boys. He was from one of the rich families in town. Brian Barone. His dad was a vice-president at the ball bearing factory. A whole family of assholes if you ask me. Anyway, Rachel ended up in a room with this kid. Locked in a room with this kid. I found all this out months later, but people who were at the party told me that they heard Rachel calling out, saying, 'No, no, no.' But nobody did anything about it. They let it go. I guess they thought boys will be boys and all of that."
"How did you find this out?"
"People at school started talking about it. I overheard them in the locker room after gym class one day. I heard them saying that Rachel had already lost her virginity. I confronted them. I called them liars. I even punched one of the girls in the face. Sally Bingham. I made her cry. She told the vice-principal, and they gave me a three-day suspension. That didn't matter since I didn't really have parents paying attention to whether I was going to school or not. But I did talk to Rachel about it. I told her the story I'd heard at school, and she broke down and admitted everything to me. She was at the party, and she was in the room with Brian Barone. She said no, but he kept going..."
Diana paused, felt the emotion swelling within her.
"It's okay," Jason said.
Diana stood up. "I have to go to the bathroom."
She took her time, washing her hands thoroughly and splashing cold water over her face. A new, open beer waited for her at the table when she came back.
"I got the feeling you might want that," Jason said.
"I do."
They both drank, and a brief silence hung over the table.
"You know," Jason said, "I don't see any of this as your fault. You were a kid, too. You couldn't control her. Adults can't even control kids all the time."
"But there was something I could control," Diana said.
"What's that?"
"My reaction to what Rachel told me."
Jason cocked his head, a look of caution on his face. "What was your reaction?"
Diana stared at the tabletop, letting her eyes fade out of focus. She didn't intend it, but she realized she was shaking her head slightly back and forth.
"Diana?"
"I called her a whore."
Jason made a quick intake of breath, almost inaudible. He didn't say anything.
"I read her the Riot Act. I told her that Mom was sick, and the family was coming apart, and the last thing any of us needed was for her to go running the family name even further down by sleeping around town at parties where everybody would hear about it."
Diana spoke the words quickly, and once they were out, a silence again fell over the table. Diana felt as though she had been exposed, as though something ugly she had previously been able to keep buried deep within her had now been brought out and laid on the table for everyone to see. She wished the lights would go out so Jason couldn't see her.
"Her behavior didn't get any better after that. It got worse. She became wilder and wilder, sleeping around with a lot of different guys, drinking and partying. On the night she disappeared she went to a party. Apparently, she'd been sleeping with an older guy, a nineteen-year-old. Rachel didn't know he had a girlfriend. The girlfriend showed up at the party and went after Rachel. Physically. She punched Rachel in the stomach, doubled her over, and made her cry. People broke it up, but Rachel left the party crying. A different guy gave her a ride home. He dropped her off at the end of our street. He said she was fine when he left, quiet but fine. The police cleared him of any wrongdoing."
"Do you think he's involved?"
"I doubt it. I saw Rachel in the house after that. I was still awake, and I heard her come in. I went out into the hallway outside our bedrooms, and I saw her. She'd been crying. Her makeup was a mess, smeared all over her face. She looked like she'd been through the wringer." Diana paused. She took a deep breath. "I just shook my head at her. I didn't ask how she was doing, or what had happened. I just shook my head at her and went into my
room and closed the door. About fifteen minutes later, I heard the front door open again. I looked out my bedroom window and saw Rachel walking up the road in the glow of the streetlights, going away from our house. That was it. That's the last time anybody saw her that we know of."
Diana waited for Jason to say something. Anything. He didn't speak right away. He sat there nodding, tapping his fingernail against the glass of the beer bottle.
"What are you thinking?" Diana said.
Jason took a moment to answer, then he said, "I think you want to help this Kay Todd woman because you feel guilty about everything that's happened to your family. You see this as your second chance."
"It's not a second chance," Diana said. "There is no second chance. That's gone."
"Then it's another chance to do something right. Any way you look at it, it's atonement. Something like this is never just a simple act."
"It's always tied to the past, to something that went before."
"Such is our fate," Jason said.
"I went to see my mom tonight. At the hospital. Driving back, I stopped and took a little walk in the woods, just like in the old days."
"Find anything?"
"I found myself alone in the middle of the woods. Searching. And I think I'm going to keep finding myself there from time to time unless I do something about this. Unless I try to put it to bed by helping Kay Todd. You never know. It might tie the knot somehow."
"Do you really think you're going to find anything?" Jason said. "The trail's awfully cold."
"I don't think I have any choice. But I really won't know until I look."
"You never know what you're going to find," Jason said. "You might not like it."
"I don't like what I know now, so how much worse can it get?"
"That might not be a question you want to ask. What are you going to do next?"
"Start talking to people around town. See what I can find."
"If you need my help..."
"I know," Diana said. "I know."
It was late, and the thought of going home to her empty apartment made Diana feel a little sick. She didn't know if she could bring herself to ask...
"You want to stay here tonight?" Jason said.
She smiled. "Yeah, that would be nice."
* * *
Diana slept better than she had in a while, certainly better than the night she had spent in the chair in her mother's hospital room. And she didn't dream, at least not the kinds of dreams that had come to her during that night at her mother's side, the kinds that were populated by Rachel and Kay Todd. Maybe it had been being with Jason, falling into his arms, stripping each other's clothes, losing herself in someone else for a brief period of time.
Diana slept deeply enough that she didn't hear Jason's phone ring just before six, and she didn't hear him showering and dressing. She didn't know anything was wrong or unusual until he placed his hand on her shoulder and whispered her name, bringing her awake.
"Hey."
"What is it?" Diana asked. "You're dressed already."
"They called me in, but you can stay here. Go back to sleep."
"What's wrong?" Diana asked. She could tell that he knew something that he didn't want to tell her. She thought of Dan. Something might have happened to Dan, but she didn't want to say it. "What is it?"
Jason looked down. He ran his hand over his head. "Okay. You'll find out soon enough. A girl, a student at Fields, went out for a bike ride yesterday. She hasn't come back. That's all I know, but I'll call you if I can."
"No. Wait. Tell me more."
"There is no more. She's probably just hurt or lost. It'll be okay."
But he didn't sound convinced. And Diana didn't believe him.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
When Jason was gone, Diana climbed out of bed and turned the radio on. She tuned in during a Wall Street Report, an economics professor from Fields droning on and on about petroleum futures and interest rates, and Diana felt sorry for anyone who had to sit through one of his lectures on a Monday morning. So while he kept talking, she took out the folder of articles from Kay Todd and starting paging through them, hoping something would jump out at her and make some sort of sense.
The articles were brittle and yellowing at the edges. Pieces of the old newspaper crumbled away when she picked them up. They confirmed the basic facts that Kay had already given Diana and added little more. The consensus of the police and the media seemed to be that Margie Todd—dissatisfied with her life and unhappy with living in New Cambridge—ran away.
"It doesn't make sense, though," Diana said out loud.
Runaways made some sort of plans. They prepared in advance. They at least took their identification with them and whatever money they could put their hands on. Margie Todd hadn't done any of these things. Sure, she'd had a fight with her mother and dropped out of school. But that was nothing unusual. It didn't add up.
The voice on the radio changed and announced a special report. Diana put the articles down and turned the volume up.
"Union Township and New Cambridge Police continue to search for Fields University freshman Jacqueline Foley who disappeared yesterday evening while on a bike ride."
"Ms. Foley, who is nineteen years old, was supposed to return before an eight o'clock meeting at her sorority house, Alpha Iota Mu, and when she didn't arrive, the police were called. Ms. Foley's parents have arrived in New Cambridge from their home in Columbus and have already established a $50,000 reward for any information that leads to the safe return of their daughter, who was believed to be riding her bike in the area west of town near County Road 600. In other news..."
Diana sat on Jason's couch, absorbing the information. The girl had already been gone overnight, not a good sign. She knew enough of these sorority girls from her time around the campus and the town, and she knew how seriously they took their commitments to their houses. Jacqueline Foley was a freshman, which meant she was newly pledged. No way she'd risk the wrath of her sisters by missing a meeting in September. Jason mentioned the possibility of being lost or hurt, and that seemed likely. There were a lot of lonely county roads around New Cambridge, many of them unmarked. It would be easy to get lost or misjudge a turn.
Or be taken.
For the first time since she'd given up her job on the police force, Diana wished she had it back. She could be in the center of things there and know, at the very least, as much as her fellow officers knew. The information wouldn't necessarily come to her directly. The higher-ups and the detectives liked to hoard their information, then dole it out on an as-needed basis in situations that only worked to their advantage. But in a small department, things leaked out, and Diana knew that eventually Jason would have information to pass on to her. She'd just have to be patient and wait for it.
Diana gathered the articles from the coffee table and started to carefully place them back in the folder, hoping that no more fell apart in her hands. Kay hadn't said so, but Diana imagined that the articles were sacred to the old woman, perhaps one of the few physical connections she still had to her missing daughter. Diana made it to the last of the articles, the bottom of the pile, when one caught her eye that she hadn't noticed before. She checked the date. March of 1985, one year after Margie Todd disappeared. The headline read, Still No Sign of Missing Fields' Student.
Diana scanned it quickly and saw nothing new, just a rehashing of the facts and a quote from Kay saying that she still held out hope her daughter would come home safely. But at the end of the article, the reporter included a quote from Officer Dan Berding, described as "the first officer on the scene the night Margaret Todd disappeared." And in the article, Dan said, "It looked to me like somebody took her. From the looks of things, there's no way this girl ran away."
What a difference twenty-five years makes, Diana thought.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Diana went home and showered. She brought a radio with her into the bathroom and turned the volume up high, hoping to catch any of the n
ews about the disappearance. But there was nothing new to report. The newscaster repeated the same facts over and over again, little more than what she had heard from Jason upon awakening earlier that morning.
While she toweled off and pulled clean clothes out of her closet and drawers, she thought about calling Jason on his cell phone, even going so far as to take her own phone out and scroll down to his number. But she couldn't bring herself to press her thumb down and call. He was busy, completely wrapped up in searching the county for any sign of the Foley girl, and he didn't need an overly curious friend—and occasional one-night stand—calling him on the job.
Once she was dressed, Diana considered the long day stretching out before her. It might be hours before she heard from Jason, and it might be days—or even never—before there was any significant news about the Foley girl. She didn't want to sit around and wait. She had waited long enough.
She took out the phone book and looked up an address, then headed out to start her day.
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