Don't Look for Me

by Wendy Walker

  I step outside my prison cell and run with Alice to the kitchen. The key is still in the grate, the grate that now swings open on its hinges.

  In the kitchen, I see the burner coils smoking. I take the pot of soup off the stove. I turn off the heat and go to the sink to get a towel. I wet the towel, then carefully wipe down the burner until the butter comes off, and the heat cools. The smoke stops.

  I let my eyes move around the room, looking for one of Dolly’s eyes. I don’t see one, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there.

  I pull Alice close. “It’s fine now. You’re safe.”

  “Thank you so much!” she says. She is not a good actress, and I file this away with everything else I know about her.

  “How did the butter get on the stove?” I ask her.

  “I was trying to put it on the bread and it just fell off. I didn’t think it would cause any problems. I didn’t know butter could burn like that.” She says this very loud, as though she knows her voice has to carry. I think that maybe there are no cameras in this kitchen after all.

  “Okay,” I say. “It’s okay. How could you know that?”

  I finish cleaning up. I heat the soup, butter the bread, and serve us dinner at the table. Alice glances out the door to the living room.

  “Alice,” I say.

  “Yes?”

  “Can Dolly see in the kitchen?”

  Coy Face comes, and Alice slowly moves her head left to right. No.

  Then her eyes move back to the living room. I follow them and see a monitor on the wall in the corner near the door. It sits at an angle that can see the table, but not the stove. Not the sink.

  And not the cupboard beneath the sink.

  The cupboard which I opened to look for a dish towel, and where I found remnants of some household products. Old sponges. Dish soap. WD-40.

  And a bottle of antifreeze.

  I smile at Alice. I place my hand on her back and gently rub it up and down. Coy Face becomes Happy Face, which has a nice big smile.

  And then I smile too.

  20

  Day fourteen

  Nic walked quickly through the parking lot. The air was cold enough to see her breath. And still enough to hear her steps on the pavement. Watkins was long gone. The woman had vanished as well, between a row of cars, maybe to the back of the building.

  Inside, Nic stopped, leaned against a wall just beneath one of the mounted cameras. She didn’t want to be seen. Not by anyone.

  She pulled out her phone but there was no one to call.

  Her father had lied to her about the handwriting analysis.

  Roger Booth had lied about Daisy Hollander, about being the boyfriend she’d been running away from when she disappeared.

  And Watkins had failed to mention he owned a dark gray truck. Now that she thought about it, so had Officer Reyes. And who else? This was a small town. Watkins must drive that truck when he is off duty. Up and down Hastings Pass. Day after day. Year after year. All of them would have seen it—Booth, Mrs. Urbansky. Reyes. Even Kurt Kent, the bartender.

  And what about Kurt? He’d driven her all the way into those woods to meet Daisy’s sister, knowing about Roger Booth the whole time.

  There was no one she trusted.

  Was that true? Or was she just being paranoid? So what if Watkins drove a gray truck? Edith Moore couldn’t even be sure of the color. It might have been black or brown. And so what if Watkins picked up a prostitute one day, then helped teenagers with scholarships the next? People were complicated. She’d learned that from all those nights spent in bars. She wasn’t a sheltered teenager anymore.

  Still, her life these past five years had left her with just one person she could trust—and that person was now missing.

  What now? She thought about her car just outside. She could leave—drive straight home. Her father would come and collect her things from the inn. She didn’t have to stay here. There was nothing left to do.

  The sea of humanity was all around her, coming from or going to the casino that was just on the other side of the lobby. So many faces—happy, pensive, worried, excited. The energy began to seep inside, feeding the panic that had already taken hold.

  Maybe everyone was lying to her for this very reason. Because she couldn’t handle the facts. The truth. Because she hadn’t been able to navigate her life since Annie died.

  She drew a breath but couldn’t feel it reach her lungs. It felt shallow. Suffocating.

  They weren’t wrong. After that Sunday afternoon when she’d had that first drink, she hadn’t been able to go back. It’s just peer pressure, the school had told her worried parents after she’d been drunk at a dance. This will scare her and she’ll stop. After all, she had so much to lose. Williams College had offered her early acceptance. She was captain of the cross country team. In the running for valedictorian.

  And then, after they’d found vodka in a water bottle she kept in her locker, the counselors had gotten involved. It’s survivor’s guilt, they’d said. That one she’d read just recently in her mother’s emails and it all made perfect sense now. How they made her go to therapy sessions where they talked about how she’d done nothing wrong by continuing to live.

  After the third time when she’d passed out in the school bathroom, drunk off her ass, the month before graduation—her grades on free fall—they’d had no choice but to expel her. The new theory—she was looking for attention. She’d tried to get it by being good but it hadn’t been enough. Now she had to be bad. The horror that had followed was now a powerful, visceral memory. Therapy sessions with both parents, telling her they loved her and how sorry they were that they hadn’t noticed her suffering because they’d been dealing with their own.

  No one listened to her about the hollow spaces that nothing could fill. They didn’t understand how they’d come to be there if not from some affliction out of their textbooks. She wished she’d had a film of it—of Annie running and Nic screaming and then the car and the blood. The dozens of missed calls on her phone from their mother, begging to know if they were all right. Why hadn’t Annie made it to her friend’s house for the playdate?

  The look on Evan’s face. The image of their mother holding her dead child. The harrowing sound that left her body that Nic could still hear.

  Guilt. Despair. Self-loathing. There were so many words to describe what lived in those hollow spaces. They laughed in the face of the counselors and their therapy bullshit.

  And now she’d caused their mother’s disappearance with her wretched words. Gone or dead—there was no way around it, no thinking her way out of those scenarios.

  Confusion. Panic—she had to get someplace quiet, alone, before people started to notice.

  She walked along the side of the wall, head down, away from the entrance to the casino. There was a hallway on the other side with restrooms, elevators, conference areas. And a business center.

  A young man passed and she grabbed his sleeve. Her expression seemed to alarm him as she asked if he was staying at the hotel and if he could use his key card to let her in.

  He hesitated, but then swiped the card to open the door. Nic thanked him and he quickly left, looking over his shoulder. Wondering if he’d made a mistake by letting this lunatic into the room. Her breaths were short, her face flushed and wet.

  She sat on the floor in the corner and let it out. She wanted a drink. The thought of going back out into the crowd was the only thing stopping her.

  So she’s dead. So she left us. What now? She could still be found. Nothing had changed since she’d packed a bag and driven to this place. She had to find her mother and bring her home.

  The room had a long table with four desktop computers and a printer. Nic pulled herself up from the floor and sat down in front of a large PC. She turned it on, opened to a search engine.

  She typed them in, one after the other. The names spinning in her mind. Daisy Hollander. Roger Booth. Charles Watkins. Kurt Kent. Results crowded the screen, faces wit
h the same name, but none of them matching in any way that was helpful. She narrowed Daisy’s search to Hastings and got nothing. Then to New York City, and got over thirty faces. She hadn’t asked to see a photo. Many of the women in the search could be her—similar age, description. And yet, probably none of them would be. If she didn’t want to be found, she wouldn’t be blasting her profile on Facebook and Snapchat.

  The focus felt good. Her nerves began to settle, the panic subsiding. She continued.

  Kurt Kent was on the social media sites, and all of them were active but private. Booth and Watkins showed up on people finder ads. Most of those were scams and, anyway, she didn’t need their addresses. She knew where they lived. She needed social media sites, something that might give her a window into their lives.

  Then, a thought about Booth. About his property and the fence with the hole.

  She pulled up a satellite image of the Hastings Inn, zoomed out. It was taken in the summer from the look of the trees—full canopies of green leaves. She couldn’t see the fence behind the inn, but there was something on an adjacent property. A thin line running across a stretch of cleared land before disappearing again in the dense woods.

  She zoomed out and tried to connect the line to other structures—a house or barn or another fence. But it was impossible with all of the breaks into the woods. Still, that line of fence, if it was a fence, bent away from the inn, not toward it.

  Fences usually went in a circle or a square, closing off a parcel of land. It would be odd for the fence to veer off away from the parcel where the inn was located, even if that parcel spanned hundreds of acres. No—this fence did not enclose the parcel of land owned by Booth. It belonged to the parcel that sat behind it just like that person from town had told her father.

  And then she saw something else—another stretch of clearing within that adjacent parcel. She followed it, zoomed in until it was clear—a house.

  A house, and the clearing before it—a driveway.

  She zoomed out again, followed the driveway until it disappeared behind more trees. But, assuming it remained straight, it would end at the next road.

  Like the driveway and the fence, the road weaved through woods. Still, she was able to guess at the path it carved through Hastings. And the point where it intersected another road, which ran along the river. River Road. And that road eventually intersected Hastings Pass.

  Nic held her finger to the screen. She started at the inn, and followed Hastings Pass until it ended at the river. Then she followed it to the left, along River Road, until it met the road with the driveway. Abel Hill Lane. And from there, all the way to the driveway and then to the house—the house that sat on the parcel enclosed by the fence. Farther down Abel Hill Lane was a small cluster of redbrick buildings with flat black rooftops and narrow roads connecting them to one another and to two roads—Abel Hill Lane and River Road. Maybe that had once been the pharmaceutical company that had closed down years before. Or the chemical company before that. Maybe they were the same set of buildings, one company taking over the other.

  Nic searched for addresses on Abel Hill Lane. There were seven in total. She pulled them up one at a time, first on the map and then on satellite imagery. There was a small ranch, number 53. Then a cape, number 67. Then five others—none of them matching the satellite image of the house with the fence. None of them with a long driveway. None of them with enough acreage to be that same property.

  She leaned back in the chair and closed her eyes.

  Everyone was lying about something. And now Edith Moore wanted the reward money. She knew about the purse, the three letters.

  But wait—Nic pictured that morning with Edith Moore and Reyes. In her car, looking across the road to where she said she saw her mother. Rain coming down in sheets. That’s how she’d described it. Maybe she’d seen the color of the purse, but the letters? Could she really have seen the letters from that far away, through the rain, at night? And yet she knew about them.

  She knew, or someone had told her—someone else who knew about her mother’s purse.

  And what did that have to do with Abel Hill Lane?

  Her father said they’d stopped searching when they reached that fence.

  Maybe she should just get a drink. Maybe get a few. Calm her nerves. Settle her mind.

  But she couldn’t stop.

  She typed in Hastings and then history.

  And then she started to read.

  21

  Day fourteen

  There is antifreeze in the cupboard. But this is not all that I assess in the kitchen with Alice. Alice and her Happy Face.

  I assess many, many things. Thoughts and emotions, but mostly instincts which, as before in the woods, require the closest scrutiny.

  Alice has unlocked the grate. She has set me free and it is a gift I cannot squander.

  I could run for the front door, to my tools in the woods. But it’s dark and cold and I don’t know where Mick is. He could be outside in his truck, watching the camera feeds. He could be five minutes away. Ten minutes away. Days of work would be undone.

  I could take this child hostage. Put a knife to her neck right in front of the camera. It is not beneath me. It is not out of my capabilities, and I don’t allow myself to think about the implications. It’s nothing personal, Alice.

  There are other things, worse things. But nothing gets me the time I need to get through that fence.

  I go back to what I have found here—to the antifreeze in the cupboard. I know about this from my other life when I was a science teacher. When I was a good mother. When John and I were still in love. Before we had a child that died. A child I killed.

  Before life started to close its hands around my throat.

  We finish eating and I clean the dishes and put a kettle of water on the stove.

  “We should go to bed,” Alice says.

  “Yes,” I agree. “You go ahead. I am going to make a cup of tea to bring with me.”

  Alice leaves and I take a teacup from a cupboard. I bring the cup to the cupboard under the sink and pour in the antifreeze. Dolly cannot see the sink.

  We go to our bedrooms. She gets ready for bed. I get ready for bed. I change in the bathroom with the door open. I take my time, though I fear it is futile.

  Alice comes now to lock the grate. I don’t resist. But then she changes her mind.

  “Can I sleep with you tonight?” she asks.

  Of course you can, sweetheart.

  We close the grate but do not lock it. The key remains in the hole.

  “What about your tea?” she asks. Nothing gets past her.

  Alice snuggles up beside me.

  “I would rather sleep now,” I whisper.

  The heat from her body, her breath, her heart beating—none of it bothers me tonight. None of it pulls from my gut the feeling of my lost child, my precious, precocious Annie. None of it stirs the longing, or the guilt, or the redemption that has begun to appear.

  Tonight, Alice and I are one. I absorb her into me while I lay awake, making assessments. Contemplating my instincts.

  The grate is still open, and with it, my options.

  It is a different kind of prison now that I know Dolly is watching me. Before I knew about Dolly I felt the freedom to release my face. To have my own Angry Face or Coy Face or Sad Face. There was freedom to pound my fists into the pillows, to cry, to hold myself and rock myself to a place of calm, like a mother holding her child.

  That freedom is now gone, and the open grate does nothing to mitigate this other type of insidious confinement. I have done things in the line of the camera that should be the cause of humiliation. He has seen me naked, changing into the clothes that he slides through the panel. He has seen me naked and unaware and still, this has not kept him here with us. He still longs for more. I think about my old friends and our battle to hold on to youth. But being a size four can’t make you twenty-five. Age is about maturity and knowledge and it seeps out in the way we move
and carry ourselves. Here is the proof. I have skinny legs and blond hair and this man has seen all of me. Still, he longs for something more. Something he lost. And knowing this has caused me to reassess. I decide to move on and think about my instincts. Make a new plan.

  Alice is also slow to drift off and she rambles now. I want to make all kinds of faces but I hold my expression steady. Pleasant. For Dolly to see.

  Alice talks about her first mommy, so I chase away my thoughts to concentrate on hers. I wonder if she is beginning to feel things for me that she felt for her. It’s been too long since she’s had anyone to have these feelings for.

  “She smelled good,” Alice says, pressing her nose into the nape of my neck, insinuating that I do not smell good. Maybe I do smell bad to her by comparison, but I am stuck with the cheap body wash that Mick slid through the panel.

  “She used to sing to me,” Alice says now. Her voice is soft, dreamlike. I decide not to sing to her because that might upset her, although I used to sing to my babies when they still slept in my arms. I could see my voice reach deep inside them, settle their nerves. Mine was the voice they heard as I carried them inside me. It is primal, the way the body reacts to the voice of the mother.

  I think that maybe I will sing to myself one day so she can overhear it, and that maybe she will come to me and ask me to sing. Yes, I think. I will lure her into asking me to sing to her like her first mommy. Maybe I can get close enough. Maybe it will reach her, even just a little.

  There are other things she says, and I make a note of all of them.

  But my thoughts keep drifting back to the antifreeze under the sink in my bathroom, poured into the teacup which I carried back to my room.

  Antifreeze contains ethylene glycol, which breaks down in the body by forming sharp crystals. Those crystals shred human tissue, especially the kidneys. I taught some of this to my students when I introduced basic chemistry. Of course, I did not share the rest of it.