The Girls She Left Behind

by Sarah Graves

  And when she opened them again it was morning.

  THREE

  “Over there,” said Emily Ektari. Dressed in a scrub suit, white sneakers, and a white lab jacket, the dark-haired young ER physician pointed to a curtained cubicle in the Aroostook County Medical Center ER’s small but spotless patient-care area.

  The rest of the cubicles, each with its sheeted gurney, shiny metal IV pole, and wall-mounted cardiac monitor, were at the moment unoccupied. In its silence and serene orderliness, the unit was a far cry from the controlled bedlam of a Boston emergency room, Lizzie thought.

  “Quiet,” she remarked into the fluorescent-lit calm.

  Emily looked up from the nursing desk where she was studying a Spanish-language text. “What, you were looking for the Tuesday Night Knife and Gun Club?”

  She was repaying a portion of her school loans by working in underserved areas like northern Maine. But her last post had been in Chicago and her next, she’d just learned, would be in the desert Southwest, where a large immigrant population also had few healthcare options; thus the Spanish textbook.

  “I doubt she’ll wake up anytime soon,” Emily added as Lizzie turned toward the occupied cubicle. “I think maybe she was on some kind of stimulant. The tox screen I sent off to the lab will tell for sure. But for whatever reason, she was so agitated that I had to sedate her.”

  Lizzie grimaced, disappointed. No wonder Dylan hadn’t gotten anything useful out of the woman. “Did she give you any idea what upset her?”

  If she wasn’t just reacting to whatever crap she swallowed, Lizzie thought.

  Emily shook her head. “Dylan said she’d been trying to tell him something when she just all of a sudden got hysterical. That’s all I know. I couldn’t get much out of her, myself.”

  The EKG monitors linked to the bedside units displayed five unlit screens and a bright-emerald one with a jagged up-and-down glowing line marching across it. CRIMMINS, read the inked strip of adhesive tape stuck to the lit screen’s console.

  Lizzie blinked at the name, recognizing it. Oh, come on, she thought. Could it be…because if it is her, then I’ll be damned.

  “And he said the more he tried to coax it out of her,” Emily went on, “the more she lost her shit.”

  The curtains around the patient were partly closed. Inside them on the sheeted gurney, a dark-haired woman lay with a white woven hospital blanket pulled over her shoulders, her chest rising and falling with the slow regularity of sleep.

  “She wouldn’t even let me touch her, other than drawing blood for a tox screen and so on, and starting an IV so I could get some fluids into her. She was pretty dehydrated.”

  The cardiac line went on moving evenly across the bedside monitor. “You really think she was disturbed enough to—”

  “To keep here?” Emily nodded. “Oh, absolutely. She’s classic for a moderate amphetamine overdose, actually, and she had herself all wound up. The shot of Valium I finally gave her took care of that, though.”

  Emily checked the patient’s IV, then made a brief note on the clipboard at the foot of the gurney. “I wasn’t sure at first that it would and it was more than I thought she’d need, but it took hold in the end. Good old Vitamin V. She’ll probably sleep until morning.”

  Lizzie eyed the figure again. Crimmins…The name rang a bell, all right; an alarm bell.

  “Is her first name Jane, by any chance?”

  Emily glanced back, surprised. The printing on the clipboard was too small for Lizzie to have read it from a distance. “How’d you know that?”

  “Just a lucky guess.” Her unease over the missing Tara Wylie suddenly increased. “Name’s familiar from a case that I’d been watching when I was back in Boston.”

  The heart rate on the monitor increased slightly. “Meanwhile I’ve got a teenage girl missing,” she began, meaning to ask Emily to keep an eye out.

  But before she could go on, the heart rate on Jane Crimmins’s monitor shot up, the high beep-beeping shrill in the ER’s silence and the jagged radium-green line on the monitor’s screen zigzagging wildly.

  Huh, Lizzie thought. “Tara Wylie,” she said experimentally. The monitor’s activity revved once more, this time shooting high enough to briefly trigger a jangling alarm.

  Emily scowled at the monitor. “Weird. Guess she’s not quite as asleep as I thought.”

  She turned to Lizzie. “Tell you what, though, when she wakes up for real I’ll let her know that you were here. If she wants to talk to you, I’ll call you, stat.”

  An upped heart rate could’ve meant that the woman on the hospital gurney knew something about Tara Wylie’s disappearance. But it also could have represented a bad dream or a painful gas bubble, Lizzie supposed.

  “All right,” she conceded reluctantly. “Or even if she doesn’t want to talk, call me anyway. Maybe I can persuade her.”

  “Dylan gets better looking every time I see him,” Emily remarked suddenly as they walked back to the nursing station. Lizzie felt her own heart rate rev up.

  “You’re sure you wouldn’t care if I were to start going out with him?” Emily went on.

  They’d had this discussion before. Yes, thought Lizzie. I do care, very much. But:

  “No,” she said. “Seriously, Em, you want to go out with him, it’s fine with me. Be my guest.”

  But Emily must have seen something in her face. “It was much busier in here a little earlier,” she remarked, tactfully changing the subject.

  Now Lizzie noticed the large wheeled trash bins awaiting emptying. Stuffed full of paper gowns, latex gloves pulled inside out, emptied plastic IV bags, and other medical-equipment disposables including plenty of stained gauze, the bins testified to some fairly wild ER activity not long ago.

  “A compound fracture, couple of soft-tissue injuries, some acute dehydrations, and a third-degree burn,” confirmed the ER doc, “from the fire over at Hoverly.”

  Two miles north of Bearkill, Hoverly was a tiny settlement of wood-frame houses, postcard-pretty antique barns, and the neat-as-a-pin workshops of custom furniture manufacturers interspersed with small dairy farms and vegetable gardens. Inhabited by members of a small, strictly old-fashioned religious group, the town mostly took care of its own needs.

  But when several big brush fires had broken out there earlier in the day, horse-drawn wagons and hand-pumped water hadn’t been enough; from her office, Lizzie had heard sirens and dispatches on the scanner, and later seen the ambulances speeding out.

  “It’s bad news out there,” said Emily now. “The way things are going in general around here, it’s only a matter of time before someone gets really badly injured, or even killed.”

  She sat behind the desk. “The weather, the forest fires…I mean, this is my second winter up here and after the last one I never thought I’d be wishing for snow again.”

  Lizzie hadn’t been here the previous winter, but she’d heard the tales: four feet of snow, blizzards well into April, and cold so fierce that even the old-timers around Bearkill were in awe.

  And now this: summer in winter. “It’s strange, all right,” she agreed. “Like things are going haywire, weather-wise.”

  Back in Boston it wasn’t so obvious; in the city, you heard about global warming and somehow you thought it was only a bad deal for polar bears. You didn’t think so much about the fact that what happened to the bears could also happen to you.

  Until it started to. Lizzie’s turn to change the subject: “So listen, Emily. After you got here, how long did it take you to get acclimated? I mean, to feel at home even a little bit?”

  The young MD was from Baltimore, originally; not Boston, but still plenty urban. And she’d worked in other big-city hospitals.

  “You mean like I’m not living on the far side of the moon?” Emily pulled a wry face. “I’ll let you know if and when. No music clubs, no public transportation. I swear right now I’d kill for a pizza with meatballs that hadn’t been poured onto it from a ten-pound bag o
f frozen ones.”

  Her expression turned sympathetic. “Why, you having a bumpy ride?”

  Lizzie sighed. “To put it mildly.” Her own chronic yen was for oysters, washed down with a craft beer from one of the many new artisan breweries flourishing in the Boston metro area. And that wasn’t all she missed:

  Lights and people, car horns and sirens, exhaust fumes and food smells and dust from the construction sites…

  “Mostly I’m just treating it like a question on a cop exam,” she said. “Like, ‘You’re working a new case with a newly assigned partner in an unfamiliar and potentially hostile environment, how do you proceed?’ ”

  Emily laughed. “Right, if the partner is an alien from some other planet and the atmosphere is methane. You know why Bearkill would be a good place to be at the end of the world?”

  As she spoke, a red light over the automatic doors to the unit began blinking urgently.

  “Because you won’t even hear about it until a good ten years after it happens,” Emily answered herself as the doors swung open to admit a gurney with four nurses pushing it.

  Time to go, Lizzie realized. “Listen, Emily, if she wakes up, no matter how late it is…”

  “You bet,” Emily replied, hurrying toward the gurney. “I’ll call you if anything interesting happens.” But the young doctor’s attention was already on her new patient, whose face was covered with a clear plastic oxygen mask and whose chest was even now being exposed for an EKG reading.

  Twenty minutes later, Lizzie was back on her own front step with the long-postponed glass of wine finally in her hand, waiting for Rascal to finish mooching around among the shadows on the lawn. The moon had set, darkening the night to soft black velvet, and the only sound was an owl in a tree nearby, hoo-ing softly as if confiding a secret.

  “Come on, buddy,” she urged, and the massive dog appeared at once from the gloom. She’d tried walking him, but the usually calm canine had startled at every faint sound and tugged persistently at the leash, turning back toward home.

  So she’d given in. Maybe he was picking up on the anxiety she felt over Tara Wylie, or more likely the smell of smoke, still drifting faintly from the Hoverly fires earlier, had spooked him.

  Whatever you say, boss, he seemed to reply now as he followed her inside. There, once the porch light was out and she’d gone around checking windows and doors as was her nightly habit, she debated a refill on her drink and decided against.

  There was, after all, no sense in getting morose, even if she was all alone in a tiny house in the middle of nowhere. Back in the city on a weeknight she’d probably be home by this hour, too, but the windows of her spacious condo overlooking the river there had been a glittering display of moving headlights, brightly lit buildings, and spangled bridges arcing across the sky.

  Here the kitchen window was pitch black.

  She rinsed her glass and set it in the sink, aware of Rascal’s slow, even breathing and glad for his presence as he settled in his dog bed to sleep. On the wall, the black cat-shaped clock that had been here when she moved in ticked through the moments mercilessly, its ceramic tail switching stiffly, wide eyes jerking back and forth.

  Too dark, too quiet, she decided. I should at least put on some music. She moved toward the radio, which at this late hour on a Tuesday night would be playing cool jazz from a French station in Montreal.

  But then she stopped short as the questions that were really bugging her came clear suddenly:

  Why the hell is Jane Crimmins, the mysterious caretaker of one of the victims in New England’s most notorious recent kidnapping case, asleep in a hospital in Bearkill, Maine? Why did she want to talk to me?

  And why’d her heart rate jump when I mentioned Tara Wylie?

  Her cell phone trilled, startling her. “Snow here,” she snapped into it.

  “I’ll be at your office in town in five minutes,” blurted Tara’s mother, Peg Wylie, shakily. “I’m on my way in now, I’m—”

  “Peg? What happened? Have you had some kind of news? Or…did Tara come home?”

  “Just be there,” Peg Wylie half sobbed into the phone, then hung up, leaving Lizzie to wonder if maybe she should’ve had that second drink, after all.

  Peg sure sounded like she’d had a few. That, in fact, might be all that this visit was about, Lizzie thought irritably as she headed out into the night and climbed into the Blazer again.

  But a few minutes later when Peg’s decrepit little Honda sedan roared up to the curb in front of Lizzie’s office and the driver tumbled out, it was easy to see that the problem was more than a few too many Budweisers.

  At the door Lizzie put a steadying hand on Peg’s trembling shoulder, clad in a high school athletic jacket.

  Tara’s jacket. The girl had been—still is, Lizzie corrected herself—a cheerleader. Peg thrust a clenched fist with something in it at Lizzie.

  “Take it. Take it, I can’t even—”

  “Okay, Peg, calm down now.” Lizzie led her inside. “Talk to me. What’s happened?”

  Only a few hours ago, Peg Wylie had worn the anxious but resigned look of a woman whose last nerve was worn to a bleeding nub, but who still believed her missing daughter was probably alive and well.

  She did not look that way now. “Please,” Peg said, weeping. “I really thought she was okay, but…”

  Lizzie took Peg’s hand, peeled the clenched fingers gently open, and plucked a cell phone from it.

  “I tried calling her back but it wouldn’t even ring, there’s something wrong, please…”

  “Okay. This is your phone, right?” Lizzie asked. Peg nodded numbly as Lizzie turned the phone so the text message displayed on the small screen was visible.

  “Okay,” she murmured again. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t okay at all.

  The time-and-date stamp on the cell phone’s text message read TUESDAY, 9:24 P.M., just half an hour ago. Below that, the message itself consisted of two words, all caps, no punctuation. Centered on the black screen the white letters stood out stark as a scream:

  HELP ME

  —

  We didn’t want to wake you, the note lying in Tara’s lap had said, in the dome house of the hippies way out in the woods where she’d fallen asleep.

  Outside, bright daylight meant it was at least midmorning on Tuesday. She’d jumped up and looked around dazedly, but no one was there, not even the cat. The music had stopped and the dome house, so busy and friendly the night before, shimmered with silence. Panic rushed through her as she realized what had happened. Then she saw the kitchen clock and realized it was nearly noon, even later than she’d feared.

  Stay as long as you like, the note said. Which meant they’d gone without her. She’d already missed half a day of school, and she hadn’t called home. Fumbling in her bag, she’d found her phone, but no bars showed in the display screen. There were dead areas for cell reception in Maine, and this must be one of them.

  She’d hurried through the kitchen, where the sink was piled with dishes. By daylight the dome house’s interior looked shabby and careless, the chair coverings threadbare and the floor, made of rough, unvarnished planks, unswept. She’d stopped to fill the animals’ water bowls from the hand pump on her way out.

  The outhouse was disgusting. She’d crouched quickly among the trees, then jogged down the long dirt driveway to the road. How could they just leave her like that, without a word?

  But when a car finally pulled over and picked her up, she’d decided not to worry about it; she would explain when she got home, she’d told herself, which she would very soon because the car was full of more college boys. They were going to help fight the wildfires in Aroostook County, they said.

  Tara had thought they looked too soft for it, in their early twenties but already with pouches of fat beneath their chins and the poochy beginnings of beer guts. Of course she hadn’t said so, though; they were just boys, after all, goofy and clueless as if fighting wildfires was some kind of an adventure.
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  And they’d taken her right to Bearkill, or almost. But that’s when her next mistake had happened, a big one, and very fast.

  So fast, she’d never even had time to scream. One half mile, she thought bitterly now, reliving her errors and mocking herself for them as she trudged on through the smoke-reeking night. They offered to take me all the way but like an idiot I said no.

  Her mother always said if you do something, own it. Don’t try to hide it or weasel out of the responsibility later. But she’d also said don’t hitchhike. Said it like she meant it, with a look in her eye that had told Tara it truly wasn’t negotiable.

  So she’d chickened out. She didn’t want her mother to know that she’d been hitchhiking, so she told the boys she’d walk the rest of the way home, even though winter’s early nightfall had already arrived.

  And it hadn’t been bad at first; nice night, and her own driveway wasn’t far off. But then the van came up fast from behind her, its headlights casting her wavering shadow onto the blacktop ahead.

  She’d never seen the driver, hadn’t bothered to look around until the van slowed, alerting her too late. Practically in the same instant a pair of rough hands had grabbed her, slapping tape onto her mouth and heaving her into the van’s cargo area.

  She’d never had time to scream, and the van had taken off fast, lurching forward abruptly while she was still scrabbling for an inside door handle. But there wasn’t one, and that’s when she had realized: She might not know who’d grabbed her, but she knew what this was, all right.

  She ought to; she’d been warned often enough. She’d been kidnapped by a maniac, a rapist or worse. That’s what her mother always said would happen if she hitchhiked, and now it had.

  The van sped down the road while she screamed as loud as she could through the tape, hammering with her fists on the heavy metal grating between the passenger and cargo areas. Dark cloth draped over the grate kept the driver hidden, but whoever it was could hear her.

  She’d made sure of that, even after the van jolted off the paved road, the lurch throwing her to the metal floor. Kicking, pounding, howling through the sodden tape over her mouth…