Little Girl Lost

by Addison Moore

  “My child is missing.” The words string out like a morbid poem.

  “I bet she’s okay.” She gives an odd wink, her fingers flicking through the air as if I had uttered something outlandish. “Things always have a way of working out for you. Golden child.” She pokes my arm with her finger. That was the nickname she gave me back in high school. She had half the school believing we were sisters and that I was the favorite of the family. I played along with it at first until the revisionist history turned dark like so many things are prone to do with Heather.

  “I don’t know if she’s okay.” It takes everything in me to keep my voice even. “Do you know if she’s okay?”

  Those dark eyes of hers flit to the corner of the room. “Hell, I don’t know. But what I do know is you are one lucky gal. Did you see that GoFundMe? Holy shee-it! You are one rich woman, Allison Greer.” She gives another quick wink as if it were a tick. “You’ll always be Allison Greer to me.” She sobers quickly as if the fact I had become Mrs. Price was a personal betrayal.

  “Why are you here?” My voice trembles because, honest to God, with Heather, I have never had a clue what makes her twisted mind tick.

  “To help out while we wait for Reagan to come home.” Her eyes grow wild. Heather’s eyes have always had a personality of their own as if they were afraid to be attached to the rest of her and were unsuccessfully trying to plot an escape. “Now tell me that you told the cops all about her real father—because keeping something like that a secret is going to hurt you a helluva lot more than it’s going to help.”

  “He’s dead.” I take a punishing gulp of the scalding coffee and burn layers of nerve endings off my tongue. Finally, I can feel something. I might just scald myself tonight for the hell of it just to feel human again.

  “Dead?” She inches back in her chair as if I had slapped her and I wish to God I would have. The option is still on the table. “What in the hell happened?” Her lips quiver in an exaggerated O. Heather has always made reality feel a bit cartoonish with her overdone theatrics. “That was one hot man. I couldn’t get him out of my head for years. Never seen a man so beautiful. Not even my own husband. Swear to God.” She swipes an X across her chest like a bull’s-eye I’d love to plunge a knife in. “With the exception of James, of course—but you deserve the best, Ally. I’ve always felt that way and you know it.” That last line comes out curt, demanding like a threat, and the room suddenly feels too hot, too unsafe to be in.

  Yes, Heather has always testified to my husband’s hotness. She’s also testified to the comely good looks that Reagan’s biological father, Len, possessed as well. This is true. Never was there a bigger cheerleader in my life than Heather. Never a bigger menace, but never a bigger cheerleader. Len and Heather were worlds apart, but Heather happened to track me down at school the weekend Len and I decided to take off for Hidden Falls. It was a three-day getaway, and as usual Heather had interjected herself in the middle of it. I entered into an alcohol fueled rage and told her exactly how batshit I thought she was and told her to stay the hell out of my life. When I got back, I found my mattress knifed opened and the word cunt scrawled across my mirror in red lipstick. Her signature shade of autumn rust. The exact shade of human plasma she’s sporting now. That’s when I begged Jane to step in, and after that Heather was seemingly history—until she entered my present nightmare, and God knows it wouldn’t be a proper nightmare without Heather Fucking Evans in it.

  “He died at a gas station.” My body heats as if begging to burst into flames. “Freak accident. He was waiting for his car to fill up and some drunk pulled in behind him, pinning him against the fuel tower. There was a fire.”

  “Oh shit!” Her fingers tap over her lips as if mocking his Native American heritage.

  “And that’s what happened.” I fold my hands together as if to exemplify the fact it’s the end of the story. How I wish it were just that—a story.

  “It sounds like he was cursed.”

  I avert my eyes a moment. He was a curiosity more than he was cursed. Every other thing that man did was blessed and beautiful. Len Lewis made the news that night, online and on television, as millions of Americans winced at his painful, unfortunate demise. I had just learned I was expecting, already dating James again. Len and I hadn’t spoken in weeks over some silly argument that I don’t even remember anymore.

  “Well, I guess he’s off the suspect list, isn’t he?” Her eyes stay wide and round, her face freckled and pale as a grouper’s. Heather always did remind me a little of a fish. I asked my dad about it once, if he saw it too, and he simply said grouper. It’s not a coincidence I can’t stand fish.

  “Yes, he is. And so that’s the end of it. Please do not mention him again. Not to me—not to the media for God’s sake. Let’s respect the dead.”

  “What about his family?” She leans in hard with a child-like curiosity etched in her face as if this were a bedtime story I’m weaving in her honor. “I bet one of them found out and they’re just raving mad! I bet they took her to the reservation or something. They don’t think the rest of us are good enough to raise their kind.”

  “No.” I’m quick to refute her runaway thoughts. “He had no family. Both of Len’s parents were dead. He never made mention of any siblings. I doubt anyone outside that circle would care enough to do this.” My mind tries to wrestle down the possibilities, but a part of me knows that delving into any of Heather’s theories is only an exercise in madness.

  She leans in further, closing the distance between us with a ferocity. Her hard gaze penetrates me, unyielding and unwelcome.

  “People are insane.” Her fingernails graze over the top of my hand and I retract it. “People want what they believe is theirs, and sometimes there’s not a person on the planet who has the power to stop them.” Her voice is hypnotically slow, those gray eyes of hers gloss over as if she were stoned.

  “Are you threatening me?” I’m so damn tired of being in the passenger’s seat. If Heather Evans thinks I have an ounce left in me to put up with her brand of psychotic bullshit, she has another thing coming. As far as I know, I am in a waking nightmare that for the life of me I can’t rouse myself from, and last time I checked it’s not a homicide to slaughter someone within your dreams. That is exactly what I used to fantasize about back in high school. Some girls dreamed of their wedding day, a white picket fence, two point five children, and I dreamed of hacking Heather to bits with the rusty butcher knife my father kept in the shed. My sister beat me to it—wrong person, though.

  “Take it how you want to, Ally.” Her eyes spear their deadness into mine. “I’m not leaving until we find your little girl. And the only way we’re going to find her is if you tell the truth—just like you had me tell the truth that day. Remember?” Her voice pitches, candy coated with insanity.

  “Yes.” I swallow hard. “I remember.”

  * * *

  By Friday, I’m worn thin with text messages from my least favorite nuisance. I’ve relegated Heather to a hotel room and happily confined she’s been ever since. For now, the electronic communication and just breathing the same air, as she puts it, is enough to satisfy her. She claims to understand that my husband and I need some time to ourselves. But I know her too well. I have a ticking time bomb sitting at the edge of town just waiting to blow up in my face.

  McCafferty shows up again, and like some over animated character in a silent movie, she asks us to follow her down to the woods at the end of the street as a coven of reporters lurk in the distance. It’s the first icy day we’ve had here and the fog rolls out in billows down the street like batting unfurling off the bolt. Tomorrow night is Halloween, a treasured and well-loved holiday to Reagan, and it sickens me that she’s not here to bask in the glory. It sickens me she’s not here to begin with.

  “What are we doing?” I pant, trying to keep up with her brisk pace.

  James picks up my hand and gives a warm squeeze. “Is there new evidence?”

  New ev
idence is an oxymoron at the moment, considering there hasn’t been any evidence at all.

  “Just something I thought the two of you might be interested in.”

  We set foot into the woods as our feet crunch over the brittle pine needles that have shed to create a mattress over the soil.

  “Before this land was a development, there used to be farmhouses here.” She gives a hard sniff as if pausing to take in the fresh pine scent. It smells like rot and death to me, and I pray to God that has nothing to do with Reagan.

  James scoffs. “If you say the words Indian burial ground—”

  My stomach lurches when he says the words Indian burial ground—more to the point, Indian.

  “Not that.” She walks deeper into the woods before turning to face us. “There was once a house here.”

  A chill runs up my spine because already I don’t like where this is going.

  “Turn of the twentieth century these were all dairy farms.” She frowns at the development sitting behind us, a testament to modern day architecture, greedy contractors, and overbuilding. “But the main house of the Wilder farm stood right here.” Wilder farm? She knows something. Why else would she drag their corpses into our lives? “Rumor has it, the builder knew the history of these grounds and refused to build on it.”

  James leans in. “What history?” His eyes grow large, bulging like twin blue eggs.

  “The story goes the Wilders were feuding with local Indians.”

  “Knew it.” His features set in, a staunch refusing to believe whatever else might stream from her mouth. “There’s always an Indian in the story.”

  A dull laugh rattles and dies in my chest. Little does he know there has been an Indian in our story for six short years.

  “What happened?” I take a timid step forward, suddenly the ground feels sacred. I’m half-afraid if I comb back the kindling beneath my feet I’ll find the past right there staring back at me in some mirrored world—Reagan locked on the other side, irretrievable.

  McCafferty’s nostrils flare. “Tempers heated over who the land belonged to. One night there was a fire in the Wilder home. Both parents were burned alive, but when relatives came, they couldn’t find any of their five young children.”

  My heart ratchets up slowly at first, then with the speed and finality of a roller coaster shooting straight to hell.

  “What became of them?” I whisper as if they were here lurking somewhere, and I didn’t want to wake them. God knows I don’t want to wake a single ghost from anyone’s past, let alone my own.

  She shakes her head, that ultra-tight bun has pulled her eyes back, made her look ten years younger than she is, I’m sure. “Not one of them was ever seen again. The farm became this thing, this folklore, about a dozen urban legends spawned from the very soil you’re standing on. Nobody dared build over it. Some claimed the ground was cursed by those Indians.”

  “They took the kids.” James shrugs it off. “Why is that so hard for anybody to believe? It’s the only logical explanation. Or hell, they could have banded together and headed out West. Everyone was doing it. There were no phones, no Google search, no dim-witted police department to help them out. If you wanted to disappear, it was the perfect time to do it.”

  McCafferty sheds that signature mocking smile. “That might have been true, but two of the five were blind, one was lame, and the other two were infants.”

  “But the Indians still could have taken them, right?” My heart gives a steady knock over my chest and I rub my neck as if pleading with my body to keep from malfunctioning.

  “The Indian tribe was raided by the government. They searched high and low for those kids. They swore they didn’t have them. The dim-witted police even went as far as digging up the reservation, looking for bones. Sent in hounds—the whole nine yards.” She steps between James and me while inspecting the ground as if she might come across a skull, a hand spiking up from the soil in need of assistance. “Want to know what the Indians said happened?”

  James and I exchange a brief glance, each too weary to admit we don’t.

  “They said the ground swallowed them up as a punishment for the sins of their parents. To the tribe, at the time, it was a mercy killing on behalf of the earth. By swallowing the children, they were now one with the soil. They were a part of this deity, this rock they worshipped. It had all somehow come full circle.”

  “Sounds like bullshit.” James wipes the sleep from his eyes. That look on his face doesn’t even crest disgust. He’s simply dismissed everything she’s just said to us.

  McCafferty gives a shrug of the shoulders. “Just thought I’d let you know before some reporter started to spout things off. Your father was the one who mentioned the gap in the woods. I told him I’d look into it.”

  His eyes round out a moment before he goes right back to dismissing all thoughts of earth swallowing anyone whole. It figures that his father would have landed us on this morbid topic to begin with. Morbidity in and of itself has plagued the Price family for years. James and I are going through hell, but his parents beat us to it.

  McCafferty starts heading back toward the street. Her footsteps carefully lift the ground fog making her feet disappear and the very sight of her has an ethereal flair. “The Indians believe in just punishments, that whole circle of life thing. You take our land; you will become our land. I guess you can say they take their curses pretty seriously.” We watch as the mist swallows her, but it’s not good enough. A part of me wishes the ground had yawned open its greedy mouth and ate McCafferty for breakfast. How dare she align her thoughts with Heather Evans of all people. Dear God, what the hell is happening? “For what it’s worth, my sister is a realtor. You know what she always says? The people don’t pick the neighborhood, the neighborhood picks the people.” Her lips pull tight. Idiot. “If I get any new leads, I’ll get in touch.”

  Her words resonate in my mind long after she’s no longer visible. They take their curses pretty seriously.

  Heather thought Len was cursed and I all but laughed. It’s not true. There is no bullshit curse. This is just another mind game the universe is trying to take me down with.

  Len wasn’t cursed and neither is Reagan. But that doesn’t stop me from dropping to my knees and clawing at the soft piles of dry brush. A fresh bite of soil hits my nostrils as my fingers feverishly comb through years of debris. James tries to pick me up again, but I scratch and claw at the earth as if I were rabid. She’s here. Something’s here. It’s that smell. It’s making me mad.

  Where in the hell is my baby?

  I hit soil and grind a fistful in my hand before pitching it to the sky.

  The soil rains all of its fury right back over the two of us as if to say there is nobody to blame but you.

  “Come here,” James says tenderly as he lands his arms around me. His phone jumps out of his pocket and lands face up before me like an offering.

  A text is there to greet us. Hannigan again. It has a ring to it.

  Coming out to visit soon. Time to show you my stomach.

  My heart thumps all the way into my skull. Why do I get the feeling Hannigan isn’t some fifty-year-old beer-bellied man from the city?

  6

  James

  Shit. Shit. Shit.

  I could blame my father or McCafferty on the fact she dragged us out for that ridiculous history lesson from the annals of Friday the 13th, but really, I should place the blame where it truly belongs—square on my shoulders.

  I told Allison, rather conveniently, that Hannigan, this man from work, my old work when I still was viably employable, was threatening to come out to help with the search. He meant to say he can’t wait to show me what he can stomach. I had told him no in an earlier, verbal conversation—that not even I could stomach what was happening.

  The deception flowed from me like oil. How quickly my mouth had become a hot sewer of deceit.

  You see, once you tell a lie you need to cover it with another lie, and that lie quickly b
lossoms into a tangled web of deceit the size of the damn universe. It’s like a game of telephone gone bad. You’re so far away from the truth, you almost want to laugh or in my case claw your eyes out at the very same time.

  Hailey Oden is having somebody’s baby. For now, she wants me to believe it’s mine. It very well could be, and that alone scares me almost as much as having Reagan out there in this world, God only knows where. And speaking of which, since God does know where and isn’t opposed to keeping it a secret, one of the local morning shows has offered to hear our story, and they’ve tossed in a psychic just to sweeten the deal. Both Allison and I outright refused. The last thing we want this circus to turn into is, well, a bigger circus. But both Rich and McCafferty said it would be a good idea to try to regain the trust of the public once again. As of right now, my wife and I are the two most hated people on the planet. The Western world has pegged us for the crime, hung us by our ankles in the very public square of the comments’ section in just about every online article, and don’t get me started on the fact we have been the brunt of tasteless late night television jokes as well. Nothing is sacred anymore. It’s open season on the Price family, no matter how big our loss.

  At five forty-five Halloween morning, Allison and I march ourselves down to KWTV for hair and makeup. We have another shot to make things right with the imbeciles who have chosen to judge us, and this is our shining moment. Sons of bitches, bastards. I wish I could kill them all. A visual of that brain-stained dining room fills my mind like a screen saver that refuses to dissipate. I’d love to take them all on one by one. God knows I have the pent-up rage to do it. My blood boils like a lava current through me. All I see is red.

  An employee from the studio meets us at the gate and escorts us to the makeup lounge, an over lit room with a few stray women all waiting to greet us, but it’s the tall brunette with knife sharp teeth that sends a chill up my spine.