The Girls She Left Behind

by Sarah Graves

  Lizzie couldn’t help thinking about how fast that barn would blaze up if a spark ever reached it. Out beyond the edge of town, the widely spaced wooden houses and mobile homes looked the same: empty, vulnerable. Between them lay dry weeds and dusty loam, the fenced farm fields bounded in the distance by forests, thousands of acres of burnable timber just waiting for the touch of a windblown ember.

  “You know what I’d like?” Jane asked. “A piece of toast.”

  Whoa, thought Lizzie. Weapon or not, this was one strange ranger.

  Jane gazed out at the fields, alive with dust devils whirling across dry soil. “White bread, butter on it. And a cup of tea.”

  Lizzie had planned to take Jane Crimmins to Houlton. An interrogation room in the county courthouse might convince the woman that the search for Tara Wylie was serious, and that she should cooperate if she could.

  Instead Lizzie pulled a U-turn. “I can arrange that.”

  Because after all, why not? She’d once driven a gang-murder witness around the towns out past Boston for seven and a half hours—she’d eaten enough fast food that day to put her off it forever—until the witness found the courage to talk.

  Meanwhile Jane Crimmins was odd and stubborn, but she hadn’t done anything illegal as far as Lizzie could tell, and if someone leaned on her too hard she could shut down and simply refuse to talk to anyone. And that couldn’t be allowed to happen, even if chauffeuring her around was already driving Lizzie a little nuts.

  Jane spoke again. “He’s here, isn’t he? Henry Gemerle? He’s gotten loose somehow, and he’s come—”

  “How do you know that?” But Jane didn’t reply, biting her lower lip as if she’d already said too much.

  Back in town, Jane remained silent as they passed Area 51, the cocktail-holding alien on the bar sign peering through the smoke. A few blocks later, Lizzie turned uphill between the Western Auto store and a daycare center that doubled as a job-training office. On a washboard-rough avenue the Blazer juddered past a mix of bungalows and factory-built split-levels with here and there a double-wide mobile home set on a concrete foundation.

  Crimmins looked impatient. “Almost there,” Lizzie assured her as she slowed for more potholes, then made her final turn. In the rearview mirror, clouds of light dust billowed.

  “Where are we going?” Jane’s face creased in a frown. She didn’t seem worried about the fire. Lizzie was, but since she hadn’t yet gotten an order to evacuate, she’d be sticking around with or without Jane Crimmins’s presence.

  So if they ended up having to head for the hills anytime soon, they’d just do it together, Lizzie decided. “My place,” she said.

  She rolled her shoulders and forced her fingers to relax on the steering wheel. “The bar here in town is loud. And the guys in it can get rowdy or intrusive. You don’t need that.”

  She could just about imagine what Chevrier would say about what she was doing now. This maneuver wasn’t in any interrogation manual, taking a maybe-not-so-well-balanced interview subject to the officer’s home, fixing her a snack…

  But with a person like Jane Crimmins, the only way to get what you wanted was to go slow, lavish her with time and attention until you got close to the information you sought.

  And then you pounced. Lizzie turned into her driveway, parked in front of the garage. Inside, Rascal sniffed the stranger while Jane stood in the pine-paneled living room taking in the ugly brown sofa, cheap red curtains, and mass-produced pottery lamps.

  Lizzie had chosen none of it; the rental had come furnished. She thought of saying so, then decided screw it.

  “Jane? How do you know Gemerle’s gotten loose? And why would he come to Bearkill?”

  Crimmins’s face was pale and drawn in the harsh light coming in through the living-room window. She looked a lot better than she had, though, after a night of sleep and Emily Ektari’s care.

  “She told me he would,” Jane answered at last. “The girl that I was taking care of after they got rescued—”

  “The girl from the cellar? Your cousin Cam Petry?”

  Water in the microwave, tea bag in the water; Lizzie served the tea. “Is that who you mean? Is it why you came to see me last night, to tell me about it?”

  Jane Crimmins looked surprised that Lizzie knew so much. But she recovered quickly. “Sort of. But I only wanted to talk to you. Not a man.”

  “I see. And what did you want to say to me?”

  Silence. Lizzie tried again from another angle. “You do know Henry Gemerle has gotten out, though?”

  Jane hesitated. “Yes. I…like I said, I thought he would do it sooner or later, and then I overheard it at the hospital today, that he really had.”

  Which made some sense, actually. The accident on the Ridge Road, cops and ambulance personnel afterward in the ER…they’d all have known by then about the abandoned car with the corpse in the trunk, and they’d have talked about it.

  Jane could have heard them. Lizzie shifted gears a little. “Well, then, you know why I’m interested. Because now we’ve got a girl missing here, she’s the same age as Gemerle’s victims were, and that’s why we’re so—”

  “Excuse me,” said Crimmins, taking an orange pharmacy bottle from her bag. “Headache.” She popped two small white tablets into her mouth, washing them down with tea.

  She tucked the bottle away again before Lizzie could glimpse the label. “Now, what were you asking me?”

  Lizzie summoned patience. “I was asking about Henry Gemerle. Who’s killed one person already, we think, and maybe taken a girl, and I think your presence here is probably not a coincidence.”

  “No, of course not.”

  Rascal came back into the room and began pacing restlessly.

  Yeah, you and me both, thought Lizzie.

  “All right, that’s it,” she said abruptly. “You came to me, you know. I didn’t go looking for you. Now I want to know why you did, and I want to know everything that you know about Gemerle’s whereabouts and his intentions.”

  She dug her badge wallet from her bag. “All the details, who else might be involved and the reasons behind it,” she added.

  She lay the badge open on the coffee table between them. “Or I will take you into custody right now. You’ll be charged as an accessory in at least one murder, and if anything happens to that missing girl we’re looking for, you’ll answer for that, too.”

  All hollow threats; nothing connected this woman to a crime, and anyway the DA decided who got charged with what, not Lizzie.

  But even though Jane Crimmins probably didn’t know all that, her weird smile didn’t waver.

  “Okay,” she said. “How about this? I’ll tell you what I know if you do the same for me.”

  She paused judiciously, her cup poised halfway to her lips. “Only not if you arrest me, of course.”

  Jesus. There was something so off about this woman. Okay. Deep breath. Start over…

  “Look, Jane, just talk to me, all right? It’ll be easy. I’ll ask questions and you answer them.”

  “Okay,” Jane said again, smiling sweetly. “I’m ready.”

  Probably the smile on the face of a tiger was sweet, too, Lizzie thought. Right up until it wasn’t. And then…chomp.

  “Jane, we need to find Gemerle. Do you know where he is now?”

  Jane’s wide brown eyes gazed innocently at Lizzie. “No, I’m afraid I don’t. But you’re the police around here, aren’t you?”

  That smile again. “So I was hoping that maybe you did.”

  —

  Fifteen years after my cousin and I were kidnapped, I saw Cam on TV being led out of that basement prison and knew what I had to do. With only a few words she could turn me into a monster in the eyes of the world, and she would, too. The Cam I’d known had been fun, but not big on forgiveness.

  To put it mildly. And probably she still wasn’t. Which meant that if I didn’t keep her quiet my life was as good as over.

  But the next morning I went
to my job at the medical center just as usual; I needed a plan, but to make one I required information, and at the hospital I could learn all I had to know.

  So at 7 A.M. I showed my ID at the main security desk and went on through the lobby, past the gift shop with its Mylar balloons and stuffed animals and the cafeteria smelling of coffee, then up six floors in the elevator to a fluorescent-lit office space full of partitioned cubicles, each with a screen and keyboard.

  After I’d graduated from high school, I’d gotten a job there by showing off my one real talent, which was typing. Eighty words a minute, no errors. Lucky for me, because my parents had left me the house but there’d been no money to go with it.

  My desk by the window had a nameplate on it—JANE CRIMMINS DEPARTMENT SUPERVISOR, it said—but for my work I didn’t need a name, just ears and hands. All day long I sat at my desk with my earbuds on and my fingers racing while tumors and hemorrhages, seizures and night sweats bypassed my brain and proceeded instead to my hands, and then on through them to my computer keyboard.

  Rumor had it that my job would soon be obsolete on account of voice-recognition software. But for now, the technology wasn’t accurate enough. So medical transcriptionists like me still typed surgical reports, pathology results, and other dictated materials that were produced by the hospital’s clinical staff.

  That included emergency-room intake workups, such as the ones I knew would have been done the night before on the rescued girls. When I reached the office I sorted through the wire basket of new assignments recently sent here by the doctors, coming up with the ones I wanted right away.

  After that I sat down at my desk and turned on my machines, put my earbuds in, and began typing, just as on any other normal workday. Only this time I also began listening instead of merely letting the information flow through me.

  That’s how I learned all their names, where they were from, and every other possible detail about the girls I’d abandoned down in that cellar: their blood types, injuries and illnesses, nutrition statuses, treatment plans…everything.

  There was a lot of it, too: from their medical care, but also from the social services department. As the days went by and more dictation came in, I learned that two of the victims would go home to the families they’d run away from before they vanished.

  The third one, though…Cam had no living family to go to as far as anyone knew, and I could have confirmed that. Aunt Rose had dropped dead suddenly of a stroke in the midst of one of her rages. Cam’s father hadn’t been heard from in years. So far, in fact, they hadn’t even been able to identify her; she’d been uncommunicative, either from a head injury she’d suffered or because she was scared, and I certainly hadn’t stepped in to offer them any information.

  Still, once she was medically stable she couldn’t stay in the hospital forever, so two weeks after her rescue from the monster’s cellar I began typing Cam’s discharge notes. As a last resort, the hospital social workers had set her up with rental vouchers for a place in a New Haven rooming house called the Davenport.

  It was all they could do. Residential placement for healthy adults is extraordinarily difficult; that’s why there are so many living on the streets. But the Davenport was not much better than the sidewalk, and on top of that there’d been a mistake.

  The last building on Skylar Avenue that had not already been torn down for redevelopment, the Davenport stuck up like a rotten brick tooth from the otherwise-empty block. Worse, when I skipped work to arrive there early on the morning after Cam’s first night in the place, I found a bulldozer idling on one side of the ratty old structure and a crane with a wrecking ball dangling from it on the other; by some awful mix-up, the city’s demolition plans and my cousin Cam had arrived at nearly the same moment.

  Inside, the lobby was a dim, rank-smelling cave with peeling green paint, dusty furniture, and broken venetian blinds hanging in windows that needed no covering, they were so caked by decades of grime. Peering around, I found Cam slumped moaning in a chair; no words, just that sound of misery over and over.

  She was not, I had learned, in good emotional shape. Also, the head injury the monster had inflicted—blunt-force injury to the skull—carried with it possible long-term effects.

  “Cam?” I whispered. I hadn’t visited her in the hospital in case the sight of me might trigger something unpleasant, like recognition and possibly even speech. Now she looked up, her eyes widening and the knowledge of who I was clearly present in them.

  But she didn’t scream or begin immediately to accuse me. I held my hand out; she took it and got up shakily.

  “Don’t say anything,” I told her. Outside, the wrecking ball was waiting. “Don’t even look at anyone,” I said, still holding her hand as we stepped out into the sunshine. “Come with me.”

  The workmen had been waiting, wondering what to do. Now I hustled her away from the building just as the crane’s big diesel engine roared. Instants later I winced at the explosive crash of a ton of steel hitting a ton of bricks. But Cam only smiled, her misery-pinched face softening.

  “Like us,” she said as the steel ball hit the building again and the walls began falling.

  “Like us,” she repeated, and I didn’t know what she meant.

  But later I did: bashed, broken, ruined.

  Oh, yes. Later, I understood just fine.

  —

  “Little jerk,” fumed Lizzie a few hours after her interview with Jane Crimmins.

  If you could call it that. For Lizzie it had been more like an experiment to learn how pissed off she could get.

  “Turns out she’s no help, but boy, was she ever happy about the attention she was getting while I was taking her seriously.”

  Sipping her wine, she leaned back into the plush upholstered sofa in Trey Washburn’s living room. To judge by the work he did it should have been rugged, but instead the room was an understatedly gorgeous, impossibly comfortable haven of dark, highly polished wood, thick jewel-toned rugs, and gleaming brass lamps.

  In response to his gentle probing she’d spent the early part of the evening telling him about her troubled family history. It was a rough subject, one she usually shied away from: growing up motherless and with an abusive father, then running away from home with her sister, Cecily, and promising to take care of her. After that she’d lost touch and found out too late that Cecily was dead, her body discovered floating in the bay near the quaint fishing village of Eastport, Maine, and her infant mysteriously missing.

  But somehow Trey had made it easy. Maybe it was his quiet interest, not interrupting or commenting until she had finished. Or his sympathy when she expressed her guilt over what had gone down when she wasn’t paying attention, too busy with her own life to notice that Cecily’s was circling the drain.

  Or maybe it was that he was simply a genuinely decent guy. “Thanks for dinner, by the way,” she said. “It was nice of you to let me cash that raincheck. And I’m sorry I’m in a mood.”

  The books on the shelves covering the walls were an eclectic mix of history, veterinary science, and popular fiction, and she happened to know that Trey had read them all. Carrying his glass of the good Cabernet he’d opened to go with the tenderloins he’d grilled, he settled beside her on the sofa.

  “No problem. Cooking your dinner, that’s what I’m here for. Or one thing I’m here for, anyway,” he added mildly, then changed the subject.

  “But this woman you went to so much trouble over today, you mean she was no use to you at all?”

  He bent to smooth the ears of a liver-and-white spaniel, one of the pair he kept. Trey liked being helpful and supportive, she realized; he actually enjoyed being a decent person.

  She’d heard of that. “Not unless you think there’s a revenge plot going on,” she replied. “But for that you’d need at least one of his victims to be planning and carrying it out, wouldn’t you?”

  She closed her eyes and drank a little more wine, trying to let her frustration with Jane Crimmins evap
orate. After all, this wasn’t the first time a supposedly crucial interview had turned out to be a bust.

  “But three of the women Henry Gemerle grabbed and imprisoned all those years ago are down in New Haven where they belong,” she went on, “not up here in Aroostook County conspiring to kill him the way Jane Crimmins claims. I know that because I checked.”

  Trey’s pale eyebrows raised skeptically. “But it’s still what she says is happening?”

  “Yeah, that’s her story, all right. And she’s sticking to it no matter what.” On the hearth rug before a cozily flickering fire in the fireplace, the other spaniel stretched luxuriously in his sleep.

  “Jane says the girl she took care of, Cam Petry, wants to kill Gemerle. But not,” Lizzie said, “until after she tortures him for a while, as payback for the horrific abuse he put her and the others through for all those years.”

  “So it’s Cam that Jane wants to get out in front of. That’s why she was trying to get Gemerle’s location from you, to head Cam off at the pass?”

  Lizzie nodded tiredly. “It’s what she insists, yes.”

  “And you know that’s not true because…”

  “Because I called Cam Petry at the number listed for her in New Haven,” Lizzie replied, “but she didn’t answer. So I tried the hospitals down there—according to Jane, Cam’s been in very shaky health—and sure enough, Yale–New Haven has her.”

  Trey poured more wine as Lizzie continued. “In critical but stable condition, unable to communicate, much less travel, according to the admitting clerk I talked to, who had the records in front of her. And since Cam Petry can’t very well be in two places at once—”

  She took a breath and said, “She’s not here hunting Henry Gemerle or anyone else. So you tell me, why is Jane Crimmins lying about all this?”

  Trey listened thoughtfully but without any immediate reply. That was another good thing about him, that when he listened, he wasn’t just waiting for his turn to talk.