The Girls She Left Behind

by Sarah Graves

  The technician grasped the drawer’s handle and pulled, and the drawer slid out soundlessly. Inside, the small, defenseless-looking bundle lay wrapped in a white sheet.

  The smell of bleach rose from the sheet. “Are you ready?” he asked gently, and she nodded again.

  He drew the sheet back, revealing the small, still face with its lavender eyelids, its bluish pinched nostrils and marine-blue lips. A bruise mottled the forehead and one cheek.

  Lizzie dug her nails into her palms, bent closer to be sure. Nausea rose up, but as the room swam tiltingly she felt Dylan’s hand still gripping her arm.

  She stepped back, steadying herself. This child had a broad, flat nose, a dimple in her chin like a vertical knife mark, and curly hair.

  And no tiny birthmark. “It’s not her.”

  The technician glanced up questioningly. “You’re sure?”

  “Quite certain, thank you. This isn’t my niece.”

  Turning away sharply from the body lying before her, she felt nothing but a moment of pride as she realized she’d gotten through it all right. After all the worry over how she might react, what she would do if it turned out—

  But it didn’t. Because it wasn’t Nicki, I came and saw that poor little girl for myself, but it wasn’t her it wasn’t—

  “Lizzie?” said Dylan worriedly when they got back out into the corridor. But she didn’t answer, pulling roughly away from him. She made it all the way down the hall into the ladies’ room and then into the stall before she began to weep.

  —

  “So all that time you spent with Peg wasn’t really a waste after all,” said Dylan a few hours later.

  They were in Area 51’s familiar barroom, decorated with North Woods memorabilia: yellowing photos of beast-drawn carts, a crosscut saw blade as tall as a man, bills of sale for the lumber camp’s provisions—salt, sugar, lard.

  “Yeah, you think?” A small laugh made Lizzie’s chest hurt.

  But it was true. If she hadn’t kept Peg in the loop, then Peg wouldn’t have shown up with a gun.

  And that would’ve been bad. Meanwhile Lizzie’s own weapon had been returned to her; her hand went reflexively to it just to make sure.

  “Hey,” she added, “you never know when persistence will pay off. Although in this case it was just my own personal brand of damn-fool stubbornness, I guess.”

  Chevrier looked up. “Don’t bust your own stones, Lizzie, all right? That’s my job.”

  “Yeah, okay, boss,” she shot back at him. But she was still glad to hear it.

  Leaning back, she looked around at what remained of dinner: burgers for everyone but herself. She’d managed a scrambled egg. Dylan and Chevrier were there, and beside Missy, Trey Washburn was returned from a farm where he’d been moving the animals back in.

  Any thoughts Lizzie might’ve had about Missy and Trey being a couple were banished by the way Trey looked at Lizzie now: like a dessert he’d thought had been snatched away from him but now here it was again, as delicious as ever.

  “Anyway, if you ask me,” said Chevrier, “I think all Jane Crimmins’s I’m-so-unstable act has always been fake, and now it’s just another plank in the cockamamie insanity defense the legal hotshots’re trying to build for her.”

  The attorneys who’d petitioned the court to be allowed to represent Jane Crimmins pro bono, he meant, since the county was not exactly swarming with lawyers who were experienced in murder cases, their request had been granted.

  He drank some beer. “I still want to know how this Gemerle guy picked the spot he did, though. To bury the girl, I mean.”

  Trey Washburn looked up. “Well. I’ve been doing some research about that. What?” he added at Chevrier’s look. “There’s plenty on the Internet, you know, you don’t have to be a cop.”

  Chevrier nodded skeptically. “Okay, Doc, let’s hear it.”

  “Well,” Trey began, “from what I’ve read it seems the only decent thing the guy ever did was volunteer firefighting. Those big fires in Vermont, remember? Gemerle was seventeen that year.”

  Chevrier’s look changed to one of interest as Trey went on: “Gemerle went up there, joined a crew.”

  “No kidding. So he’d have known…”

  Trey looked vindicated. “Yup. Same kind of rural area we’ve got here. And wasn’t that Rusty Harris’s van he stole, from up in Allagash?”

  Now Chevrier got it. “Sure was. Rusty was retired from firefighting per se, but he still had a scanner in the van’s dash.”

  “Right again,” said Trey. “So he’d have heard where the fires were, what he’d find up there, too. Tools, maybe the crates they came in…”

  “Everything he’d need,” Chevrier agreed.

  Listening, Lizzie winced at the misery in her ribs. She’d skipped the pain pills to keep her mind clear for the morgue visit, and afterward had forgotten them.

  When I get home, she promised herself as Chevrier finished his beer and turned to her.

  “You get your applications sent? Better do it soon, Lizzie, if you want to get out of here before winter really settles in.”

  For the Boston PD, he meant. Her old job, catching homicide cases in the metro area; bright lights, big city.

  She frowned at her Coke glass, took another painful breath, and said: “Yeah, well. Change of plan. I’m not going.”

  She looked up. “I’m staying here.” She felt their astonished eyes on her. “I just…”

  Trey Washburn’s face lit up. Missy looked pleased, too, and Dylan worked unsuccessfully to hide a smile of surprised relief.

  Only Chevrier remained expressionless. “How come?”

  Which was the question she’d been asking herself, too. When she’d talked to her old lieutenant again, he’d made it clear that her vacated spot would be available to her once more, no problem.

  Even the high-rise condo overlooking the river, still full of the rugs and furnishings she’d lovingly collected for it, had not yet sold; in a week she could be sleeping in her old bed.

  She closed her eyes, imagining it, then opened them to find Area 51’s enormous clear glass jar of pickled eggs still looming beside the antique cash register on the polished mahogany bar. A rerun of The Andy Griffith Show was on the big-screen TV, the sound turned down low so the scanner on the shelf behind the bar was audible.

  The scanner was always on when she was in here now, just as the bartenders knew she drank single malt when it wasn’t Coke; they kept a fifth of Battlehill under the counter for her. Then there was Rascal, waiting patiently for her out in the Blazer right now.

  But the dog wasn’t the reason, either. “I don’t know, boss. Guess maybe I just don’t want to be a quitter.”

  She got up, the bandage over her ribs pulling annoyingly, and dropped some money on the table.

  “Anyway, I guess if I’m still welcome here I’ll come to work tomorrow, and for the foreseeable future.”

  Nobody replied, but nobody had to. Chevrier’s silent nod of agreement was all she needed. Flipping the collar of her leather jacket up against the chill, she stepped outside where half-frozen rain dripped steadily from the AREA 51 sign.

  The fires on the ridge had come very near to burning Bearkill to the ground; partly melted, the big-eyed alien with the cocktail glass in his hand looked as if he’d been hit by a science-fiction ray gun, his glowing head smooshed sideways by heat.

  But you survived, too, didn’t you, buddy? As she walked down the gleaming wet sidewalk to where the Blazer waited, the doused-campfire scent of drenched embers drifted in the night air. But behind that floated the crisp smell of snow, from the mountains where the ski lifts had at last begun operating.

  “Hey.” The voice came from behind her.

  “Hey, yourself.” It was Dylan, hands in pockets, shoulders under his black topcoat hunched up against the cold. He caught up and walked alongside her.

  “I heard from the New Haven cops. They dug up Gemerle’s yard like you wanted. Found bones in it. An
infant’s. And some others. Adult women, one young girl.”

  So she’d been right. She wondered how many of them would be identified and how many consigned to unmarked graves; even dental records worked only if you had some idea of which dentist to ask.

  “So that’s where Cam Petry’s child got to,” she said.

  Dylan nodded slowly. “Yeah. D’you suppose she ever found out? There at the end, do you think he told her?”

  “That he’d killed the baby?” She gazed down the empty street. “I don’t know. I hope not. Jane might’ve told her, though.”

  She took a deep breath. “But the big question, when it comes to whether or not Jane told the truth in the end, was…”

  “Yeah. Did she love Cam?” Dylan put in. “Or did she hate her?”

  “…was could they forgive each other,” Lizzie finished.

  He nodded, purse-lipped. Then: “I’m glad you’re staying.”

  Behind them Trey Washburn came out of the bar alone, headed for Lizzie, but then saw Dylan and turned away toward his truck. In his puffy down jacket he looked even larger and more bearlike than usual.

  But just as good, as genuine and well intentioned as ever. She would have to have a talk soon with Trey, to explain…what?

  Even she didn’t know. “As far as staying goes, I’ve still got some unfinished business here,” she told Dylan.

  Meaning Nicki; it was going to take more than a few weeks or months to find a little girl who’d been missing for years, if she was here at all.

  If she was even alive. Dylan poked the curb with the toe of his shoe, then spoke quietly.

  “I miss you, Lizzie. I know you don’t want to hear it, but I do. And I could be wrong but I think you feel the same.”

  He looked up at her. “I know you do, in fact.”

  “What about your new girlfriend?”

  Trey got into his truck, the interior light showing his kind, honest face for an instant before he slammed the heavy door. Then after a few seconds the light went out.

  “That’s not going to work.” Dylan shook his head ruefully. “I was kidding myself. No sense kidding her, too.”

  He waited until Trey pulled a U-turn and drove off, then went on: “I’m going back to Bangor tonight. Or I could…”

  He stopped, started again. “Or I could come home with you. If you want.”

  She was tempted. But that way lay disaster.

  He spread his hands in appeal. “It’s never going to work with anyone else, Lizzie. I know that now. I’m in it for the long haul with you, pretty much whether I like it or not.”

  That made her smile. “How flattering.”

  His answering grin, darkly handsome as ever, nearly trashed her resolve. “Yeah. Well. Anyway, see you around.”

  Turning, he strode through the icy rain to his car and got in. As he pulled away from the curb, the light in the AREA 51 sign went out, leaving her in darkness.

  She got into the Blazer, where Rascal’s slobbery kisses didn’t substitute for the ones she could have had. But it would be too ungrateful to let the dog know that, so she smoothed his long satiny ears, praising him in a way that would have been excessive if he hadn’t been such a noble beast.

  The Blazer started with a roar. She snapped the headlights on and set the wipers to sweeping smearily across the windshield. By now the rain was an icy torrent, sheeting down the glass.

  At home, a fast trip around the cold, dark yard satisfied Rascal; once inside, she fixed herself a toddy of whiskey and hot lemonade, passing up the pain pills yet again, and took her mug with her to bed.

  Flannel pajamas, clean cotton socks, and the patchwork quilt that Missy Brantwell’s mother had made for her all conspired with the soft lamplight in her pine-paneled bedroom to make her feel, if not much less lonely, then at least warm and safe.

  Hey, it ain’t Boston. And I still hate knotty pine. But it’ll do. She pulled the quilt up snugly and settled against the pillows with Rascal sprawled by her side.

  It’ll do just fine for now. She’d opened her book, a history of the French people in Maine’s St. John Valley, and had taken the first soothing swallow of her hot drink when the high-low signal tone from the scanner unit on the kitchen counter alerted her.

  “All units…” Springing out of bed, she was dressed, had her boots on, and was tightening her duty belt when she realized:

  No pain. Not much, anyway. Certainly not more than she could handle. “Rascal, you hold down the fort here for me, okay?”

  The dog looked up wisely, then slowly lowered himself, his huge paws crossed in an attitude of patience. Lizzie grabbed her badge, keys, and duty weapon, not bothering to turn on the outside light; she knew her own front walk by heart.

  Outside, she breathed in the ice-washed night air. Alive, she thought, savoring it.

  Something cold kissed her cheek. It was snow, swirling down unseen like a blessing in disguise.

  This book is for George and Penny

  BY SARAH GRAVES

  The Dead Cat Bounce

  Triple Witch

  Wicked Fix

  Repair to Her Grave

  Wreck the Halls

  Unhinged

  Mallets Aforethought

  Tool & Die

  Nail Biter

  Trap Door

  The Book of Old Houses

  A Face at the Window

  Crawlspace

  Knockdown

  Dead Level

  A Bat in the Belfry

  Winter at the Door

  The Girls She Left Behind

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  SARAH GRAVES lives with her husband in Eastport, Maine, one remote rural road away from the Allagash wilderness territory and the Great North Woods.

  sarahgraves.net

  Facebook.com/​SarahGraves2011

  @SarahGraves2011

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