Where I Lost Her

by T. Greenwood

  In the distance I can see a single-wide trailer with plywood windows, and I start to feel sick. What am I doing here? Still, I move forward. The sky rumbles angrily. I step over broken bottles. Trash. This is a wasteland, a dump.

  Suddenly, I trip and feel the familiar cold shock as my foot sinks into a large puddle of water. I gasp. As I pull my foot from the depths, I see a streak of lightning in the distance. It’s like a flash has gone off, and my eyes water, blinking to adjust. It’s not a puddle though. It’s a pool. A plastic kiddie pool.

  I think of the psychic again. So much water. Could this possibly be what she meant? And what the fuck? What is this guy doing with a kiddie pool? I feel sick to my stomach, but I rush forward, a renewed sense of urgency. I get to the boarded-up trailer, but the latch is padlocked.

  This trailer, for some reason, has been liberated of its wheels, and so the bottom is flush with the ground. I wonder why on earth someone would have taken the wheels off of a trailer. But then again, why someone would have a compound of rusted-out trailers in their yard is also a mystery.

  Another crack of thunder, and the entire world shudders. And then, beyond the sound of the rain, I hear an engine. A truck. With a bad muffler. And the light is coming from not one but two sets of headlights. I go behind the trailer, I hold still, hold my breath, try to make myself disappear.

  I hear car doors slamming, and then the sound of voices. Of two men talking. My ears strain, but it is impossible to decipher their voices in the rain.

  I drop to the ground, to my hands and knees. As I start to crawl, I feel a sharp pain. I wince and try not to cry out. I lift my knee up and grope to see what I’ve knelt on. It feels like glass, but it’s just something plastic. I pick it up and peer at it in the dark. I can’t tell what it is though, and I’m too afraid to turn on the penlight, so I shove whatever it is in the pocket of my sweatshirt.

  I peer out around the edge of the building. Sharp’s pickup is parked in the driveway, and there’s another vehicle behind it. The two men’s silhouettes move like beasts in the night, unloading something from the back of the second vehicle. Another truck, filled with landscaping equipment. Garbage bags. In the weak porch light, I can see.

  Massachusetts plates.

  I am low-crawling quickly along the ground like a soldier at boot camp. I have to get the hell out of here.

  The entire world smells of rain and mud. There are leaves all over my body, mud in my eyes, in my hair. If I could burrow into the ground, under the ground, like a gopher, I would. I am moving faster than I would have ever thought possible.

  I don’t stand up though, until I have made it to the road and am sure they haven’t seen me. Only then do I stand upright and run. I run until my lungs are on fire, and I find my car where I left it. I am breathless. My heart feels as though it is beating outside of my body.

  I turn to the lake and it seems like something alive, its surface battered by the rain that continues to fall.

  I’ve left the car unlocked, and so I climb in, aware that I am going to ruin the upholstery with the mud and rain I am wearing like a second skin. I need to get out of here. I don’t want them to see my car with its New York plates, if they haven’t already.

  I reach into my sweatshirt pocket for my keys and my hand touches something plastic. I pull it out, but it’s still too dark to see. I am worried about turning on the overhead light, so I quickly turn the car on and hold it up to the faint glow of the dash.

  It’s a plastic barrette, an orange bunny barrette. The kind Effie used to put in Plum’s hair.

  I am overwhelmed with a sense of déjà vu. Like trying to remember a dream. The barrette. Oh my god . . . it’s the little girl’s barrette.

  Pink tutu, ladybug rain boots. Curly hair. And I remember now this barrette hanging precariously from one of her curls. I recall that fleeting impulse to reach over and snap it shut, the same odd instinct to fix the reporter’s earring, which had lost its back. That familiar urge, that compulsion to take care, to fuss and right and steady and fix: an urge I had felt a thousand times with Zu-Zu, with Plum, with Jake even. A mother’s fingers rubbing away a smudge, smoothing a cowlick, clearing the yellowy wax from an ear. Though more often than not, it has been an impulse to ignore. An electrical current connecting to nothing. A broken synapse.

  I remember the overwhelming feeling of tenderness toward the girl though, exacerbated by that barrette come loose in her curls, this barrette.

  But I didn’t tell anyone. I completely failed to mention the orange plastic barrette that clung by its sharp teeth to one curly lock. I didn’t tell Sergeant Strickland, the reporter, even Effie, who made up the flyers with my description. It was the one detail I forgot.

  As I drive back to the camp, the realization of everything I have just seen and heard, of what I just found, collects and accumulates like a gathering storm. Lincoln Sharp, the man with the truck. The dog at Lisa’s, her lies. The barrette. The barrette. So much hinges on this little piece of orange plastic, but I fucked it up.

  I pound my palms against the steering wheel until they feel bruised and tender to the touch. What am I supposed to do now? How can I still save her?

  Oddly, my first thought is to tell Jake. Though that impulse, like the other, is based on habit. On a body’s involuntary reflex. But that current too has been broken. Failed. Shorted out. It connects to nothing anymore.

  Effie. I need to talk to Effie.

  I am filthy, covered in mud and leaves. I check my reflection in the rearview mirror. I am unrecognizable: a monster that has crawled from the murky depths of somewhere. It is 4:45 A.M.; no one is awake. Only the faintest bit of light suggests that morning will come. I make my way to the guest cottage. I am exhausted, but I can’t climb into those clean sheets in these clothes, so I strip them off and fall asleep nude on top of the coverlet.

  I wake when the sun begins to burn my cheek. I can barely roll over, my back aches from crawling along the ground last night. I need to get into the shower before Plum wakes up. I put on my robe and knock quietly at the door to camp. Effie gets up early; I know she will be in the kitchen making coffee.

  When she sees me, her mouth opens into a startled O.

  I don’t know how to explain anything that happened last night without sounding like a lunatic, and so I simply hold out my hand. I have been clutching it in my fist the whole night, even as I slept. When I open my palm, the skin is red and pocked from the sharp plastic tines.

  “What is that?” she asks.

  My throat is thick, and I shake my head. Tears coming so quickly now, there is nothing I can do to stop them.

  “It’s hers,” I say. “It was in her hair. It must have fallen out.”

  Effie picks it up, takes it from my palm, and studies it like a foreign object, an artifact from another time and place.

  “You didn’t mention it,” she says, her eyes seeking something in mine. “You didn’t say anything about a barrette.”

  “I forgot,” I say, choking on the words. On my failure. I don’t know how to explain that moment, that my hand longed to reach and touch her tangled hair, to snap it shut.

  And now I worry that she too won’t believe me. That maybe I am crazy. If I had really seen this barrette, why did I fail to catalog it with all the other details? How could I have forgotten when I remembered everything else?

  No.

  I saw her. She’s real. This is the proof of her existence, not of my insanity.

  A sob escapes from my throat, and Effie pulls me close.

  “Where?” she says. “Where did you go?”

  I shake my head.

  “Where did you find it?” she asks again, this time in the same tone of voice I have heard her use with the girls when they aren’t being forthcoming. “Tess, you have to tell me where you found it.”

  “At Sharp’s,” I say.

  I feel her entire body tense. “You went to his house? In the middle of the night? What if he had a gun?”

  I r
ealize then how truly insane this sounds. I don’t know how to explain that it was the rain, the storm that propelled me out of my bed and into my car. That I couldn’t stand the thought of her outside alone as the sky made its assault on the earth. I don’t know how to justify this odd trespassing. The only thing I have to offer is this little orange barrette.

  I take a hot shower, watch the night swirl down the drain in muddy rivulets. I pluck out leaves that accumulate in the rubber drain catch and toss them in the trash. It takes three shampoos and rinses before the water from my hair runs clear.

  When I come out of the shower, Effie has made breakfast and hands me a cup of coffee. I sit down in the kitchen nook, and she sits across from me. Plum is still asleep. She will likely sleep another hour or two before she stumbles down the stairs, bleary-eyed and hungry.

  And over coffee and thick slabs of hot coffee cake, I tell Effie everything that happened. But this time I am careful not to forget a single detail. The trailer, the child’s swimming pool. Sharp, the truck with the Massachusetts plates. I even tell her about what the psychic had said: Water, sharp. I struggle to remember the other things she said, that I dismissed. She said she saw red, felt there was something underground?

  “We have to tell the police,” she says. “They can’t ignore this.”

  “I was trespassing,” I say. I think of the hardware store signs, the neon orange missives nailed to Sharp’s trees. BEWARE OF DOG. NO TRESPASSING. “If they find out I did this, the police will have everything they need to make a case against me.”

  “But you have evidence,” she says. “You have proof now. If not that he has her, that she’s been on his property.” She gestures to the barrette, which sits on the table between us.

  “But they don’t know about the barrette,” I say. “I never told them. I forgot.”

  “What about DNA?” she asks. There must be something on there. Her hair?

  “But according to them, there’s no missing child,” I argue. “Nothing to compare the DNA to. She does not exist.”

  Effie sighs, crosses her arms, and holds her shoulders. “I think you should tell Ryan. There’s got to be some sort of—what do you call it? Like client confidentiality?”

  “Attorney-client privilege,” I offer. I have been here before. I know about secrets between lawyers and their clients. “But won’t he drop me? Normal people don’t do things like this.”

  Effie smiles and reaches across the table for my hand. “You’re not normal people.”

  And I know she doesn’t mean it as an insult. That she may be the only person in the world who, despite everything, still believes me.

  “Okay,” I say. “I’ll call him later.”

  “Good,” she says.

  “But I have another call to make first.”

  Mary McCreary, psychic detective, pulls into the driveway in her beat-up red Mustang just past eleven. All signs of last night’s storm are gone. The sky is blue again, though spotted with clouds. Plum and Effie are making tie-dye T-shirts in the yard. Their creations hang from the long line stretched between trees: electric and bright. It’s not even noon, but I’m drinking a beer, trying to stave off the anxiety, which gnaws at me like a small but determined chipmunk.

  I wonder, as she gets out of the car and waddles into the yard toward me, if I have made a terrible mistake. This could be total hocus-pocus. I worry I am just reaching for anything to help me support my building case.

  I stand up and walk to her, hand outstretched.

  “Hello, hello again,” she says. I notice this time that she has tiny teeth and childlike hands.

  “Can I get you a beer?” I ask.

  She nods. “Yes, please.”

  I don’t tell her where I found the barrette. I don’t want to influence her at all. I don’t want to feed her the information; instead I’m hoping that she’ll come up with it on her own. Proving, somehow, that this isn’t all just wishful thinking but rather that she is able to somehow read these clues better than I can.

  We sit together at the kitchen nook.

  I put the barrette in her palm, and she eyes me suspiciously. I also don’t tell her to whom it belongs, though I have a feeling this is obvious, or else I wouldn’t have asked her to come all this way.

  She curls her small fingers over the barrette; it disappears inside her fist. She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath.

  I hold my own breath and wait.

  For several moments there is nothing but the rattling sound in her chest.

  And then her fingers uncurl and she drops the barrette as though it has burned her. I half expect for the pink flesh of her palms to bear the branding of the little bunny.

  “What?” I say. “What is it?”

  “Sharp,” she says.

  “I know, I know,” I say, impatient for something she hasn’t already offered. For something new. “Lincoln Sharp. What else?”

  She shakes her head. “No, teeth. Sharp teeth.”

  I study the barrette, those innocuous plastic tines. Tears sting my eyes. This was stupid. Maybe I have lost my mind.

  “It’s scary, scary. With sharp teeth,” she says, her voice childlike. “She’s afraid of the scary black dog.”

  My heart stops like a cork in my throat.

  The dog.

  “Where did she go?” I ask, and Mary seems disoriented. A sleepwalker suddenly lurching into consciousness. “Mary, where is she now?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Please, tell me where she is, where she ran? You said she saw a dog? When? Before or after I saw her?” I am so desperate for answers I almost forget who I am asking. She’s a quack. I don’t believe in any of this bullshit.

  But still, she didn’t know about the dog. She didn’t know about Sharp either.

  “You said something about something being underground. Do you mean a grave? Please? You said there was red . . . is that blood?”

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “It doesn’t work like that. They’re just flashes. Just little bits and pieces that come. They’re not in any sort of order.”

  “But what am I supposed to do now?” I ask. “What does it mean?”

  “I don’t know,” she says.

  When Mary leaves, I follow her red convertible around the lake toward town, but as I near Hudson’s I realize that my tank is almost empty. And so I pull into the dirt lot, and she disappears down the road. She has a dentist appointment this afternoon back in Burlington. This was all she could offer today.

  Before I get out of the car to fill the tank, I check my phone. There are no missed calls, but there is a text from Jake. CMB. His shorthand, his adolescent text speak, irritates me. He’s forty-five years old. What’s he so busy doing he can’t spell out call me back? I still haven’t spoken to him since he and Devin left on Sunday morning. I know I need to tell him about the police, but that is a conversation I’d rather not have. The longer I wait to return his call, the longer I can prolong the inevitable. And so instead of texting him back, I toss my phone in my purse. Out of sight, out of mind.

  But that’s not true; I am distracted. And so it takes a few minutes before I realize the gas pump isn’t turning on. I already entered my PIN. I selected the grade. I lean over and fiddle with the handle; it’s secure in the gas tank opening.

  I grab my purse and head into the store.

  When I get inside, I see it’s the same boy who was working the night that I found the girl. He’s Billy Moffett’s son, Effie told me. And he does look a little bit like a younger version of Billy, the one we knew all those years ago. He’s sitting behind the counter, picking at his cuticles with a pen cap.

  “Excuse me,” I say. “I can’t get the gas to turn on.”

  He looks up. “Oh, hi.”

  “Hi. The gas isn’t coming on.”

  “Did you fiddle with the nozzle?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you select the grade?”

  “Yes. I did everything. It’s just not turning on.”<
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  He ducks behind the counter, I guess to whatever machine controls the tanks.

  “Go try it again. If it don’t work this time, just pull up to the next pump,” he says.

  “Thanks,” I say.

  “Wait,” he says, a flash of recognition on his face. He points his finger at me, bobbing it up and down. “You’re that lady who found the little girl.”

  I sigh and nod.

  “There’s still a few folks showing up to search,” he says. “Even though the cops said it was a hoax.”

  “Really?” I look toward the doorway to the back room. But it’s dark back there. No signs of life.

  “Yeah. Yesterday they came about noon. Maybe five or six of ’em that are still looking.”

  Something about this warms my heart, though I know it has nothing to do with me, and everything to do with the possibility that there is a child out there alone in the woods.

  I’m sure the police have already spoken to him, but he seems friendly, and so I say, “Hey, I don’t know if you remember that night I came in. You were working, I think. I bought a bottle of wine?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “You know, some people were saying you were drunk. That you were hallucinating or something.” His skin colors red and he stares down at his bloody cuticles.

  I smile to assure him I’ve heard this all before, that it doesn’t bother me.

  “Well,” I say. “There was another guy in here. A guy filling up his white pickup truck. He had painter’s overalls on? A big black dog in his truck. Flatlander,” I add, trying to ally myself with him. “Massachusetts plates?”

  “Yeah, I know him,” he says.

  I am taken aback. I know him. Not I remember him.

  “Yeah? Does he own a camp on Gormlaith or something?”

  “Maybe,” he says, shrugging. “Comes up pretty much every weekend. Sometimes during the week too.”