The Girls She Left Behind

by Sarah Graves

  “He’ll come,” I said again. “And when he does, you leave the talking to me.” I knew how to persuade poor Finny.

  Silently she nodded agreement. Even after all she’d been through she was still very pretty with her short dark hair, pale skin, and cameo features. But her big dark eyes, once sparkling with fun, were somber now with the terrible things they’d seen and the worse ones that she’d had done to her.

  “Leave it to you,” she repeated softly. “All right.”

  She wore the smart red wool coat I’d bought for her, with the curly lamb collar and black buttons, stylish new leather boots, and a soft, black cashmere beret; beside her I felt like an ugly stepsister.

  But I didn’t care. Even though I was still afraid of her, the past few weeks had been the happiest of my life, first renting her an apartment in an old but nicely maintained building just off Whitney Avenue, then moving in there with her. The place had big windows, two bedrooms, and a leafy view, and by living there I could take care of her and at the same time keep an eye on her, I thought; not until much later did it occur to me to wonder who, exactly, had been keeping an eye on whom.

  But that was later. At the time, we never talked about that night. She never asked me about it, and I didn’t bring it up. For all I knew she didn’t even remember; she’d had that head injury, after all, the result of the bad beatings he’d given her. Certainly she never asked what it had been like for me, grieving her loss in silence, enduring my own guilt and my mother’s intense vigilance, even more constant and overbearing than before Cam’s disappearance.

  Feeling so sinful and no longer believing in redemption; knowing (I thought) what had happened and not being able to tell—I wanted very badly to talk about it now with the only person who could possibly understand. Still, I couldn’t take a chance, since if Cam did recall, and if she told anyone what I’d done, every finger in the world would be aimed accusingly at me. My quiet, private life, the tiny safe place I’d carved out for myself, would be over. So most of all I had to keep her silent about it, and that was my real purpose that day as we carried our espressos to a table by the window.

  She twisted a sliver of lemon peel between her fingers, the penetrating fragrance floating sharply up from the strong brew. Through the windowpane beside us, the blue light of autumn shone slantwise onto her face.

  “Oh, I love this place,” she said, and then Finny arrived.

  A loose-lipped grin stretched his freckled face when he saw us, his white-lashed eyes crinkling as he brushed back his fiery-red hair with an awkward gesture. In baggy jeans and a frayed sweater with his bony wrists sticking out of the cuffs, he still looked like a middle school kid and was as easy to persuade. Moments after joining us, he had eagerly endorsed my ideas for a documentary film about the notorious Henry Gemerle, the monster of Michener Street, as the press was already calling him.

  To be directed by Finny, of course, and full of the cheesy horror elements he’d always loved. Naturally I had no such plan, but he didn’t know that, and as enthralled as he was by the idea of finally becoming a real filmmaker he’d have done anything I asked; the whole thing took only a few minutes.

  “Wow. Cool,” Finny said, jumping up and in his enthusiasm nearly knocking over the table. “I’ll get started right away.”

  Already mentally getting his gear and a shooting script ready, he didn’t even seem fazed that when the time came, the first thing he’d need to do was break a violent sociopath out of a mental hospital. All he’d said about it was that he could definitely get Gemerle out of his locked ward and off the grounds of Salisbury Forensic whenever I gave the signal.

  It would be easy, he said, as if for an artist like Finny it was just another creative challenge; Cam looked bemused.

  “Interesting guy,” she remarked when he was gone, her arched eyebrows expressing clearly what we both thought: that Finny Brill was a complete buffoon, but a useful one.

  “Yes.” I felt my worry dissolve a little. Working with me on this, she’d have little reason to tell stories about me. I’d be too useful to her—she was turning out to be just as vengeful as I remembered—and afterward she’d be as guilty as I was.

  And maybe…just maybe…once it was all over she would love me a little, too. Forgive me, and love me.

  But even without that, she’d keep her mouth shut. “How do you feel?” I asked.

  At my urging she’d worn lipstick, just the tiniest touch; it looked good on her, and after a rough few weeks I thought that against all the doctors’ predictions she might have turned the corner at last. Music came on, Ravel’s “Bolero,” and the stainless-steel coffee machine behind the counter spewed steam, foaming someone’s latte.

  A girl laughed, and a horn honked out in the street. With a happy sigh Cam lifted her cup to her lips. Then:

  “Cam?” She stared fixedly out through the café’s front window but there was nothing there to see, only the constant stream of students and professors hurrying to and from the nearby Yale libraries and dining clubs. The pale stone dormitories with their arched granite entries and leaded-glass windows looked as if they dated from medieval times.

  “Cam?” Her eye twitched, and then one whole side of her face cascaded into a series of grimaces, half her mouth snarling at me while the other half was as still as all that old stone outside.

  Her arm spasmed violently so the espresso in her cup flew upward, the lemon peel falling into her lap. White foam seeped from between her clenched teeth, and her eyes rolled back.

  The barista hurried over. “Everything okay?”

  “I…I think so,” I said. It all went so fast; by now Cam already seemed to be coming around, blinking and trying to get her bearings.

  “What happened?” she murmured, glancing guiltily at me as if she had somehow spoiled our outing on purpose.

  I mopped at the spilled coffee, feeling the stares of other café patrons while trying to reassure Cam that she was fine, that I was with her and everything was all right.

  But of course it wasn’t. The damage the monster’s beatings had done to her brain, as the doctors had already warned her, was getting worse. There was a blood blister in there, as dangerous as a hidden time bomb.

  “I want to go home,” she whispered, and once we got there I made her lie down, of course. But she wouldn’t let me phone her doctor, and against my better judgment I finally gave in, hoping it would be okay.

  Later when she announced that she was taking a shower I had further misgivings, and when I heard the wet thud of her body slamming against the tiled wall I knew I never should have let her go in there alone. And naturally she’d locked the door…

  “Cam!” I pounded on it while the spasms shook her. All I could think of was that her face might be under the water, that while I stood there helplessly she might be drowning.

  Finally I ran for a hammer from our toolbox, the one that we’d laughed over as we stocked it with the kinds of tools we thought two women living on their own should have. With the hammer I bashed on the hollow wooden door until a hole opened in it and I could reach through to the knob inside.

  “OhGodohGod,” someone kept saying, and as I scrambled across the wet tiled floor toward her I knew it was me.

  “Cam.” Her eyes were rolled back again so only the whites showed, her whole body jerking like a fish dying on a hook.

  I cranked the water off and grabbed a towel, covering up the freckles on her arms and legs. I’d only seen her naked once before, back in Gemerle’s basement cell, and I averted my eyes from the sight as much as I could while I hauled her out of the tub, laid her on the tiles with a rolled towel beneath her head, then ran to call for help.

  Even as I dialed 911 I knew she’d hate it, my seeing her like that. Cam was always as clean as a cat and as private about herself, too. But she was beautiful, the curve of her hip sloping gracefully to her thigh, her leg smooth as an artist’s drawing. Even the midline scar on her belly looked perfect to me.

  Afterward, when
the ambulance had raced her off to the hospital where she would remain until the surgeons had their way with her, opening up her skull and removing a piece like somebody lopping off the top of a soft-boiled egg, I recalled that scar again. But the long curved line of her body kept superimposing itself on my real-life vision of her, marred only by my memory of a monster who’d seen it all, too, while he’d done whatever he wanted to her.

  I despised him for it as sincerely and ferociously as anyone could. But mostly I recalled how lovely she was, even though I couldn’t say so while I sat by her hospital bed. I was waiting for her to wake from a complex surgery—clipping the leaky blood vessel, cauterizing the ends, installing a shunt to keep the swelling down, and then repairing her opened skull with a surgical-grade metal alloy patch—that both she and I had feared she wouldn’t survive.

  Later I might have tried telling her, I suppose. But by that time she wasn’t listening. Not to me, not to anyone at all.

  No one but him.

  —

  “Inmates at the Salisbury Institute aren’t supposed to have computer privileges,” said Dylan, leaning back in one of the ugly plaid chairs in Lizzie’s living room. “So how’d he even know what Tara Wylie looks like?”

  By now it was early Thursday morning and they’d been going over the case for hours, the half-empty doughnut box and the remaining bottle of warm Coke shoved aside on the coffee table.

  “They’re not supposed to have escape privileges, either,” she retorted. But somehow Gemerle had managed that, too.

  They’d reviewed all the facts: that Tara and Peg Wylie were from New Haven, just like Jane Crimmins, Henry Gemerle, and the hospital orderly, Finny Brill.

  What connected them all, though, was still a blank. “They’re all linked somehow. We just don’t know what the link is yet,” she said. By lamplight the room was almost cozy, she noticed, the dark wood paneling and deep-red draperies giving it a denlike feeling.

  “Yeah, you’re probably right,” said Dylan. “Hey, this is just like the old days, though, isn’t it?” He pulled his iPad from his soft leather briefcase, twiddling with the icons on the screen.

  Back in the city they’d had brainstorming sessions like this often. “I’ve missed those times,” he said.

  She missed them, too, and she especially missed what came after, the night paling to dawn through the windows of her bedroom overlooking the Charles, his arm flung out across the pillow with the day’s first gray light brightening behind it.

  Remembering, she took a doughnut and bit into it, then had to wash it down with a gulp of lukewarm soda to get it past the lump in her throat. The swirly red script on the Coke bottle’s label blurred suddenly through her tears.

  She cleared her throat. “What’re you doing?”

  He shrugged. On his iPad’s screen the familiar Facebook page layout had appeared. “Probably nothing. But I dropped in on Aaron DeWilde’s folks earlier tonight. Any particular reason no one’s been hunting very hard for him?”

  Damn, she thought; Peg Wylie’s games and then Jane Crimmins’s antics yesterday had knocked Lizzie’s own planned visit to the DeWildes off her to-do list, and then with the fires going on, too, she’d forgotten about the missing boy’s family.

  “Well, for one thing, he’s got no violent history with Tara or anyone else, nothing to suggest he’d harm her,” she replied. “And he’s an adult, at least legally. Although the DeWildes have been pestering Peg Wylie,” she added, “accusing Tara of leading their innocent little boy astray.”

  Dylan made a face that echoed her own opinion. First of all, the DeWilde boy’s age made a charge of statutory rape possible, a fact his parents didn’t seem to have thought of. And anyway, no kid was as blameless as the DeWildes made theirs out to be.

  “But they haven’t even filed a missing persons report on him yet,” she finished.

  Which was actually kind of odd, now that she thought about it. “Why, did they say something that made you think they really don’t want cops looking too hard at him?”

  “Not in so many words. They’re too far into denial for that.” Dylan did something on the iPad, cursed, and backtracked. “They just kept saying how the Wylie girl was a bad influence on him, that whatever he might be into—not that he is, but if he were—it’s all her fault.”

  He went on navigating his way around the screen. “Kid’s no angel, though, I’ll bet, and if he ends up in a jackpot his folks wanted me to know she must have put him there. Okay, here’s his Facebook page.”

  Just as in the photo in Tara’s room, in this one Aaron was a big, good-looking kid, but here he held a shotgun. Correctly, too: muzzle up, open action, finger well away from the trigger.

  In other words, for a Bearkill kid he looked perfectly normal. But: “Huh. No recent activity.”

  She scanned the screen. A dozen messages showed, all of the hey, bro, where r u? variety. But there were no answers, not for the past two days. “Is part of it set to private?”

  Dylan shook his head. “Nope. Looks like everything’s here. Kid’s got no secrets, supposedly. Or if he has, he’s smart enough not to put them online.”

  He scrolled up and down once more, then closed the Facebook icon and snapped the iPad’s cover shut. “His folks both said he’s usually on here every few hours or so. But now…”

  He got his phone out and punched in a call. “Yeah, Bruno, you know the kid we’re thinking that the missing Bearkill girl went off with, that Aaron DeWilde?”

  Dylan got up, his long stride carrying him to one end of the living room and back. “Right, that’s the one. Listen, I know he’s already on our interview list but can we maybe—”

  Dylan was about to ask his colleague to move the search for the kid nearer to the front burner. But as he listened again Dylan’s face changed.

  “Really. Yeah. Motorcycle still with him, you say. And money still in his pocket.”

  These things ruled out robbery. And if you couldn’t ask the victim about them, it meant nothing good had happened to him.

  Dylan put his phone away. “Patrol cops just now found Aaron DeWilde’s body. Mall security phoned it in, it was lying behind a dumpster around the back of the Sears store in Bangor.”

  He was pulling on his coat. “ID’s not a hundred percent yet. They’ll want his folks to do a visual identification in Bangor tomorrow, before the body gets sent to Augusta. But it’s him, the description fits.”

  He paused at the door. “Do me a favor and call them, let them know I’m coming? I need to notify them in person.”

  “Sure.” She didn’t envy him his errand, telling a teenage boy’s parents his body had been found. “Good luck,” she added.

  He laughed without humor. “Thanks. But I’m pretty sure that train has left the station for tonight.”

  Or it had for the DeWilde family anyway. She watched from the doorway as Dylan went away down the front walk and his car backed out of the driveway, pulling off down the silent street. Then at a sound from behind her she turned to find Rascal in the act of gobbling a doughnut, the box overturned and his grin white-ringed with powdered sugar.

  Not until much later, after she’d called the DeWildes, straightened the living room, showered, and made her way at last to bed, did her eyes snap open suddenly in the darkness.

  A soft, faintly musical note had just sounded from somewhere outside the house. Or…had it been from inside?

  Probably not. Rascal lay sprawled at the foot of her bed, and he always sprang up if she so much as dropped a tissue. So maybe the alarm was from her own raw nerve endings still twitching with the urgency of so many unanswered questions.

  But whatever it was, there’d be no more sleep tonight. In the kitchen she snapped on the coffeemaker, let the dog out, then blearily spied her own open laptop’s screen saver looping and relooping on the kitchen table.

  Then she recalled the soft ping! of her email program. The new-mail alert sound was what had yanked her awake.

  New info, plea
se call, read the email’s header. It was from Peg Wylie; Lizzie grimaced tiredly at it.

  Peg had already sent alarm flares up too many times. Besides, letting people think you were at their beck and call day or night was how you got a life with nothing in it but work, a situation she’d known only too well back in Boston.

  It was just past 4 A.M. The dog ducked back in through his door. “What d’you say, Rascal? Should I at least get dressed first, and maybe eat some breakfast?”

  At the word eat, he made a beeline for the kitchen, and by the time she’d fed him and herself and put on clothes and done her hair and her makeup, it was nearly five. She gave herself a last look—black jeans, white silk shirt, leather belt, and boots, a lower-heeled pair this time in deference to the early hour and her uneasy sense of how this day might go. She checked her bag for her badge and duty weapon on her way out.

  The sky was still dark, the smoke-tinged air silent and the temperature strangely mild, like spring instead of midwinter. In the Blazer she swiped her phone’s screen to the mail function and found Peg’s message again just as another came in, this time from an unfamiliar sender. Call me. Urgent.

  Sure, Lizzie thought tiredly, everyone’s messages were always urgent when they wanted something. But then it hit her who EEKTARIMD was: Emily Ektari. And if Emily said it was urgent, then—

  Pulling over, Lizzie punched in the number Emily’s message supplied. “Hey. You’re up early.”

  Emily laughed without humor. “Yeah. Listen, remember I drew blood on Jane Crimmins yesterday? I got her blood type.”

  Lizzie hit SPEAKER, then pulled back onto the pavement. “No, I don’t think I did know that.”

  She needed to check on Jane soon, too, she reminded herself, in the motel room. “But how come you drew blood on her at all?”

  “Long story,” said Emily. “I’d have drawn a tox screen on her anyway, as agitated as she was. Which, by the way, I was right about. She had stimulants on board. Not an overdose per se, but plenty.”