by Wendy Walker
On the third night, he does not bring the food. He waits until morning. When he opens the door, the brightest light pours in behind him. It is so bright it blinds me and I can barely make out his face.
He sets the tray down on the floor while I stand against the far wall. He has made me wait because the last time he brought the tray I was waiting for him. The second night, when I heard the floorboards creak. On that night I stood in front of the door. I heard the dead bolt turn, then the change in the shadows as the door opened into the room. In my hands was a blanket.
Heart exploding with rage, hands shaking with apprehension, I was ready to throw the blanket over his head, pull him toward me, then onto the floor. I had pictured the tray flying from his hands, spilling the food. I pictured Alice screaming as I kicked him in the groin. I would leave them both inside that room, lock the door, and run out of the house. I would take his truck if I could find the keys, or run back to the fence where I would make two more cuts in the wire and then crawl through.
Maybe I would have his shotgun with me. Maybe I would blast a hole right through that fence.
But that was not what happened. On the second night, he was ready for me as I stood on the other side of the door with my pathetic weapon. He stood a few feet back. There was no tray in his hands. Only the shotgun.
I was ready with that blanket and he knew it. He knew the blanket was all I had and he knew I would try.
He knows too much.
Or maybe this was tried before, by the woman who used to live here.
He laughed at me. He ordered me to back away. Then he locked the door. And he made me wait all through the next day, and through the next night, wondering if I would get another tray. Wondering if he was now going to let me starve.
The door opens now, after the third night, and I stand against the far wall. I let the light feed my brain which is starving for it. I watch him place the tray on the floor, close the door, turn the lock.
I stumble as I walk toward the tray. My pupils have narrowed from that quick burst of light and now they can’t detect the shadows they have grown used to. I take the tray and sit down. I can feel with my hands the cold sandwich. And something else.
It’s small and metal. I feel glass at the top. A button at the bottom. I click it on and light floods the space.
A small flashlight. A gift I don’t understand.
I do not deserve a gift after the second night.
I don’t stop to think. I leave the flashlight on as I eat the sandwich. I’m thirsty, but there is water in the sink and I decide to eat first because I am sick with hunger.
When I lift the sandwich, I see something beneath a paper towel. An article from a paper he’s printed out. The online paper from my hometown.
Warmth floods my veins as I see the logo, the letters forming the name, the familiar print and advertisers. Grayson’s Flower Shop. Buster’s Bagels. The Law Offices of Walsh, Sandberger, LLC. It’s always the same. Every day. Every time I open the paper. And for the smallest, most insane second, I feel the safety of home.
But then the warmth turns cold as I read the headline.
SEARCH FOR LOCAL WOMAN MISSING UPSTATE CALLED OFF
And colder, still …
Evidence suggests Molly Clarke left of her own accord after abandoning her car.
Tears burn as they pour down my face.
Emotionally unstable after the accidental death of her daughter …
Ran over her own child on her way home from work …
“She never seemed right after that,” says a source close to the family …
I read every word. I read about my abandoned car being out of gas. I read about my phone left behind. I read about my visit to Evan’s school and how he ignored me and everyone saw it and how I cried by the side of the field house.
Did I? Did I cry by the side of the field house?
It takes me several minutes to find the answers. It takes until I see a passage underlined in red ink to know what has occurred.
Clarke’s daughter, Nicole, and husband, John, participated in the search that was called off yesterday afternoon after four days. Investigators would not give specifics, but a source close to the family said that a credit card charge has been made at a nearby hotel, and some clothing and a note have been found inside the room Clarke rented. Investigators did confirm that it is now believed the subject left of her own accord.
What has he done?
He has my purse. He’s found my credit card. He’s forged a note—maybe using the names and numbers I wrote down for him so he could call my family.
Rage returns, bringing back the heat. It does not stop the tears.
Those thoughts I had as I walked down that road, the road with the lies and the false promises, that had seeped into my head and my heart. Thoughts about leaving my family. It’s as though he read them all and then made them come true. He’s done this to me, but I can’t stop the rage from turning right back around. Did I do this to myself?
At the very bottom of the page, I see a picture of John and Nicole. They are walking from a car to a police station. I don’t recognize the building or the street or any of the people around them. I think it must be Hastings.
I run my finger lightly over the page, touching the image of them.
I hear a creak of the floorboards from down the hall and I shine the light under the door. I get up and walk closer, until I can see through the crack beneath it. The light shifts with the creaks and I know he stands there. Waiting. Listening, perhaps.
The cold, musty air heaves in and out of my chest until it explodes in words.
“You’re a monster!” I scream in futility, in anguish, because I know that nothing I can say to him will touch his soul.
But now a voice—
“Shhhh,” it’s the voice of an angel. My sweet Alice. This is how I think of her right now, in this moment, when I realize it is her little feet making the light change beneath the crack in the door.
I press my hand against the wood.
“Alice?’ I say.
She whispers. “Don’t worry,” she says. “Don’t cry.”
“I know.” I sob. “I just want to go home. I want to see my family.”
Alice sighs loud enough for me to hear.
“We all want things,” she says. “But we get what we get and we don’t get upset.”
She giggles and it makes me cry harder. How can I reach her? How can I make her little fingers move to the dead bolt and turn, turn, turn …
“She’s pretty,” Alice says.
And now comes alarm.
“Who is pretty?” I ask. But I already know.
“Nicole,” she says.
I choke on my own heartbeat. It pounds my throat closed and I can’t speak.
So I listen.
“She has real blond hair and blue eyes and lots of spirit.”
I swallow hard to open my throat. “How do you know?” I ask. The picture was black-and-white. And it gave no description of my daughter.
“He told me. He knows her from when she came to look for you.”
“Oh,” I say. My voice is shaky. I try to infuse it with casual surprise. “When was that?”
“Ummmm…” Alice says, and I can picture her face scrunched up as she thinks. “I don’t know but she just went home. They’re all done looking for you.”
And now I am relieved. I do not want my daughter to be here, to be in this town where he can see her. It’s as though in some bizarre twist of irony, my prayer has been answered, the prayer that they just let me go.
Even so, the panic is acute. My hand taps furiously against my leg to contain the energy that has nowhere to go. It wants to make my fists pound on the door. It wants to make my voice cry out for help.
None of these things are useful.
“Okay,” I say then, hand tapping, hard, stinging my leg. “Do you know what that means?”
“What?” she asks me.
I choke on the words I have
to say. But I know I have to say them.
“It means that I can stay now. It means that I can come out of this room and be your mommy because they’re all done looking for me.”
She is quiet. She doesn’t believe me.
“But you just said you wanted to go home.”
Clever girl. How I hate you right now.
No, I will not. I will not hate a child. A child who is also a victim. I pull it back and turn it around.
“I know … but you are right. We can’t always have everything we want. I want to be home, but I also want to be your mommy. I can’t have both, and that’s okay. I can just be your mommy now for as long as you want. Home will always be there waiting.”
Tears, tears, tears as I choke on these words. On the hatred that keeps knocking.
“Oh,” she says now. She has perked right up. “Well, you should have wanted to stay this whole time. Because you killed your daughter and she was nine. And I’m nine! And I need someone to teach me, and you’re a teacher! You should have seen that this was your second chance.”
A piece of the puzzle falls into place.
“Who told you that?”
“It doesn’t matter anymore.”
A long breath. I swallow tears. “Why is that?” I ask. “Why doesn’t it matter?”
“Because he likes her. He likes the way she looks and the way she acts. She’s more like my first mommy.”
The next word comes out through trembling lips. “Who?”
My lips tremble because, again, they know the answer before she says it.
She says it anyway.
“Your daughter. Nicole. And he wants her to come back.”
14
Day fourteen
Roger Booth was not at the inn when Nic returned from the woods. A laminated sign was posted on the reception desk saying that management is off site for the evening. He left a phone number in case of emergencies. Where the hell would Roger Booth be for an entire evening?
Nic’s mind was still on the thoughts, the words, that had been set free on her run, but also the fence and the small hole someone had tried to cut in it. She had questions that needed answers. She needed Roger Booth.
In the parking lot, she saw a car, then Kurt Kent in the driver’s seat. She’d forgotten about their meeting, and ran now, outside to catch him before he drove off.
“Did you find out anything? About the truck?” he asked when she jumped into the passenger seat.
“Not yet,” Nic answered.
“Yeah. Things move slow around here. Which is strange since there’s not a lot to do. Inertia, I suppose.”
He took a left out of the parking lot, heading toward the river.
“Inertia?”
“Yeah. Physics, you know. An object in motion.”
“No—I know what it means. I just…”
“Figured I wouldn’t?” He sounded insulted, like he knew she was making assumptions about him just because he was stuck in this town. And because he felt above all of it—this town and Nic’s assumptions.
“I’m the high school dropout,” she said, hoping to diffuse him.
He looked at her, then back at the road. It seemed to work.
“Yeah. Okay.”
They drove in silence, past the police station, town hall, the auto body shop. They got to the end of Hastings Pass, where the road met the river, and made another right.
“Did you know there’s a fence behind the inn?” Nic asked. “It’s about a mile and a half into the property, and about eight feet tall. Barbed wire coils. Barbs in all of the wires, actually.”
“Did you ask Booth? Maybe it’s his fence.”
“He said he didn’t know. But why would the Booth family need a fence? You can get to the property from either side of the buildings, and through the back doors. Not exactly a steel trap.”
Kurt shrugged. “Animals, maybe. Bears, but also wolves and deer. The deer can jump seven feet. The wolves hunt the deer. I don’t know.”
“There’s something else about it,” Nic said. “There was a spot where it looked like someone was cutting through the wire. It looked precise, not an animal, but a person. Maybe with wire cutters. Like someone was trying to make a hole to crawl through.”
Kurt appeared more surprised now. “That’s weird,” he said. “Kids, maybe—from a house next door? Looking for a cut-through to town? How old were the breaks in the wire?”
“I couldn’t tell. There was some rust, but not a lot. Nothing had grown over it, like weeds, or fallen branches. I don’t have anything to compare it to, but I don’t think it started before the summer.”
“Yeah,” Kurt said. “Hard to tell without knowing what kind of wire it is. If it’s been treated with something. Rust repellent. I don’t know much about fences.”
Nic looked out the window as he drove. The road was narrowing, cutting a path between tall trees whose canopy erased part of the sky.
“You know your way around here.”
“Hard not to after a lifetime.”
“Fair enough.”
They made a turn onto Pond Road. Another onto Jeliff. Nic made a point of looking for the signs, some of which were just paint on rough cuts of wood nailed onto a tree. Pavement turned to gravel and then dirt. Another turn onto a road with no name, then a mile or so farther into the woods. The road ended in front of a small house.
The structure was no more than a thousand square feet. One story. Flat metal roof.
“Someone lives here?” Nic asked. There was no car. No electrical wires. An old clothing line ran between two trees. A sheet and some women’s clothing hung to dry, though the frost was coming in the mornings now.
Kurt turned off the ignition.
“Veronica Hollander. I told you, we’re on state-owned land. Her father cleared the road, built the house. They lived here—all ten of them. Let me go first,” he said. “She doesn’t get a lot of visitors.”
Nic waited in the car. Kurt approached, carrying a brown paper bag. He knocked on the door. It opened a crack. He said a few words, then he turned and waved for Nic to join him.
A woman stood in the doorway as Nic followed Kurt inside. She was large and unkempt, wearing pajama bottoms and a short-sleeve shirt that curved around her loose breasts. Long, curly blond hair, and skin that did not appear to have seen the sun in quite some time.
She stared at Nic for a long moment, her face confused at first, then moving over her head to toe.
“I’m Nicole Clarke.” Nic extended her hand.
The woman blinked, shook her head quickly like a dog shaking off water.
“Veronica,” she said. “People call me V.”
Nic smiled. “People call me Nic.”
They sat at a small round table in the corner by a window. The window looked out at woods, barely five feet from the house. There was no grass, no garden. Just the small clearing for the four-room structure.
Four rooms. That was all. The bathroom and the living area—sofa, kitchen. Two bedrooms on either side of a short hallway.
Nic turned down her offer to make tea. There was hardly space for it. The table was covered with piles of clothing. A sewing machine sat nearby. V made a cup for herself. She had quite a collection of tins which sat on a small shelf above the stove.
“So you do tailoring?” Nic asked.
V nodded. “I do anything people need. Fix clothes. Make clothes. Take ’em in. Let ’em out. I sew draperies and slipcovers. Cushions. Whatever.”
She sat down with her teacup and the brown paper bag Kurt had brought. Inside was a bottle of apricot brandy, which she opened, pouring a shot into the cup. The smell of the brandy rose with the steam and filled the room.
“Must be quite a shock,” V said. “Seeing a place like this.”
Nic didn’t know how to respond. Did she mean her place or Hastings?
Kurt intervened. “Nic’s mother is that woman who disappeared during the storm.”
V’s eyes widened. “Oh!” she said
, leaning back in her chair. “Chief came by and asked me about that. I was scared to death here. Thought a tree was sure to take this place down. I didn’t see a soul that night. Stayed huddled beneath the bed. No one did one thing to protect me. Can you imagine that? The government can’t be bothered with folks like us.”
V went on then, about the government and Medicaid and how her parents had to live in one of those places that makes old people wish they were dead, and makes them die faster to get them “off the dole.” Her mother was trying to outsmart them by suddenly taking an interest in her health after eighty-seven years. V said this part with admiration.
Nic went with it. “Your family sounds strong-willed.”
Now V shrugged, less sure. Less admiring. “I don’t know about that. My parents had their views. I think they liked having a hard life, liked the fight of it. But the rest of us, we got a little beat down by always fighting for things. My mother used to lock the refrigerator and the pantry. Padlocks. No money, no food, kids piled four in a room, boys and girls. One bathroom. If you really had to go, sometimes you just went outside. Middle of winter, pissing in the snow.”
She took a long breath, ready to tell more of her story. Kurt cut her off.
“She wants to know about Daisy,” he said.
V was surprised now. “Daisy? Why on earth do you want to know about her?”
“Because she also disappeared from Hastings,” Nic said. “Ten years ago.”
A loud, boisterous laugh filled the small space wall to wall. “Who told you that?”
V stared now, out the window into the woods. Thinking, maybe, about her sister.
“I did,” Kurt said.
V set her elbows on the table and leaned closer to Nic. She looked her in the eye, hard and without blinking, for a long moment.
“Daisy wasn’t like the rest of us. Plain folk. Making do. I know where all the others are. Some married. Some got kids. Others like me, just working to pay bills. We like living alone after how we grew up. But Daisy, she was a shining star. Smarter than the rest of us. Resourceful. Always fighting to get out. Get more. She used to use a stick to poke through the crack in the cupboard where the chains couldn’t quite pull them together right. She put sticky tape on the end and figured out how to drag boxes of crackers close to that crack. She’d pull out a few. Eat them all herself. Then she’d slide the box back. And she didn’t care when it was time for punishment.”
