Island of Lost Girls

by Jennifer McMahon

  Rhonda took in a breath, relieved to be alone with Peter but a little panicked by it, too.

  She leaned back, her head resting against the edge of the wine cask, her eyes fixed on the stars.

  “So do you remember it? You stole the head of his costume and he chased you all over the dining room.”

  “No,” Peter mumbled solemnly. He reached over to get a cigarette from the pack on the table.

  “We followed the rabbit through the woods looking for eggs full of clues.” Rhonda glanced over at Peter and searched his face for some sign of recognition. There was none. She leaned back against the wall of the tub, closed her eyes, and let the images of that Easter continue to come.

  “Lizzy was last to find her basket,” Rhonda said, “and when she finally came back into the yard, she was riding high up on the rabbit’s shoulders, swinging her basket, playing with his ears.” She opened her eyes and looked over at Peter. “How can you not remember any of that?”

  He shook his head and said only, “It was a long time ago.”

  They were quiet a minute, Peter staring down into his empty bottle, turning it in his hand like a kaleidoscope while he smoked his cigarette. Rhonda studied his face, trying to imagine the way it had looked that Easter so long ago, searching for a trace of the boy she’d run through the woods with, chasing after the elusive rabbit. She thought of Peter’s sister, Lizzy, whom, like Daniel, they hardly mentioned anymore. She remembered Lizzy and Daniel straggling into the yard, the last to return from the woods that Easter. Looking back, Rhonda thought perhaps it had been a sign, an omen, showing that one day they would both be gone, as if they’d walked into the woods for the egg hunt and never come back.

  “I’m sorry I brought it up,” Rhonda said. “It’s just that I’d forgotten all about it until this afternoon. It’s not every day someone sees a huge white rabbit.”

  “Or a kidnapping,” Peter added, leaning over to stub out his cigarette, seeming relieved at the chance to change the subject. He still didn’t look her in the eye. Rhonda slouched, sinking deeper into the tub, her chin resting on top of the steaming water.

  “I feel guilty as hell sitting here drinking beer when that little girl is out there somewhere because I let the rabbit take her,” Rhonda said.

  “What were you supposed to do, Ronnie?” Peter asked.

  “I don’t know. Beep the horn. Get out and yell. Call 911—that’s why I have the frigging cell phone, right? Notice the license plate. Anything. I just sat on my ass. I felt…I don’t know…drugged or something. Hypnotized. Like the bunny put some kind of spell on me. And I was scared, Peter. I mean, it wasn’t until they drove off that I even realized I’d been holding my breath the whole time. My heart was racing.”

  “Of course you were scared,” Peter said.

  “And now I’m just sitting here soaking in this fucking tub when I should be out there doing something.”

  “What is it you want to do?” he asked.

  “Find Ernie.”

  Tock returned, a lit joint in her mouth.

  “We should check out the eleven o’clock news,” Tock said. “I bet they’ll have something about it. Hell, maybe they found her by now. Maybe it was just some kind of prank.”

  “Who would pull a prank like that?” Rhonda asked.

  “I dunno,” Tock said. “Maybe someone got the idea because of that girl in the hole in Virginia. It’s been all over the news for weeks. Maybe it’s just some gung-ho kid and he’ll just drop her off down the highway once he realizes what a totally fucked-up thing he’s done.”

  The Virginia girl, Ella Starkee, was found by a farmer and his border collie. The farmer and the dog had since made the rounds of every morning news show in the country. They posed with Ella for the cover of last week’s People magazine. The little girl was all smiles, rosy-cheeked, hair neatly braided.

  Rhonda found herself wondering what size beetles the little girl had eaten—tiny ones or something more like a June bug. Something substantial.

  “Where were you today, anyway?” Rhonda asked Peter. “Don’t you usually work Mondays?”

  “I took the day off to go hiking,” he said.

  “All of you went?” Rhonda asked.

  Tock passed the joint to Peter, exhaled, and said, “No. He snuck off without us. Suzy and I packed a lunch and drove out to the trailhead to join him, thinking he’d be up at Gunner’s Ridge, but he wasn’t there. So we had a little girls’-day-out picnic of our own.”

  “I hiked a different route,” Peter explained. “Over by Sawyer’s Pond.”

  “I bet the blackflies were god-awful,” Rhonda said.

  “Not too bad,” Peter told her, examining his arms. Rhonda didn’t see a single bite.

  “So you said the Florucci girl is a friend of Suzy’s?” Rhonda asked.

  “Yeah,” Tock said. “They’re in the same class. Suzy went to Ernie’s birthday party back in March. Lives with her mom in a little trailer out on Meckleson Hill Road. Kind of a dump. But Ernie’s a good kid. She’s been out here to play a few times, right, hon?”

  Peter nodded.

  “It could have been Suzy,” Rhonda said.

  Tock shivered and looked away.

  “That little girl could be cut into a hundred pieces right now and I could have done something to stop it,” Rhonda said. “I could have at least remembered the fucking license plate.”

  “You’re too hard on yourself, Ronnie,” Peter said, reaching through the water to take her hand and squeeze it. “You need to let shit go.”

  Like I let Ernie go? Rhonda thought to herself. She looked up into Peter’s watery blue eyes and let her fingers squeeze back. Like you let Daniel and Lizzy go?

  MAY 12, 1993

  LIZZY AND RHONDA danced through the woods, hurrying to the stage. Just a month before, they’d chased the rabbit down the same path, but now the snow was gone and the maple trees that were mixed in with the spruce, hemlock, and white pines were just beginning to leaf out. It had rained the day before but now the sun was out and the woods smelled green and loamy.

  Lizzy was singing “Achy Breaky Heart” and getting the words wrong, which cracked Rhonda up.

  And if you tell my heart, my achy breaky heart,

  I might throw up on this man…

  Lizzy spun in a circle, then put her hands on her hips and kicked her right leg up high. The move was more karate than Rockette.

  They had just come from Lizzy’s, where she’d changed from school clothes into a leotard, leggings, and turquoise leg warmers, then showed Rhonda the metal bar her father had installed at the top of the closet doorway.

  “What’s this for?” Rhonda had asked.

  Lizzy’d jumped up, grabbed the bar, and hung.

  “It’s going to stretch me,” she’d explained. “If I hang for fifteen minutes a day, I’ll get taller. Guaranteed.”

  Rhonda figured about the only thing that was going to get stretched out was Lizzy’s arms, which would leave her looking more like an ape-girl than a Rockette, but Rhonda knew better than to say anything.

  “And look,” Lizzy had said, pulling first one leg, than the other, over the bar and letting go so that she hung upside down in the doorway. Lizzy closed her eyes and hung, focusing, no doubt, on stretching herself taller as her face grew redder and redder.

  “Easy there, Rocket.” Rhonda turned and saw Daniel standing in the doorway to Lizzy’s bedroom. “You don’t want to burst anything.”

  “It’s Rock-ette, Daddy,” Lizzy said, pulling herself up, then jumping down and straightening her leg warmers. “Come on, Ronnie, Peter’s waiting.”

  THEY FOUND PETER sitting cross-legged in the center of the stage, puffing on his homemade corncob pipe; the air sweet with the smell of the cherry-flavored tobacco he swiped from the general store. In the afternoon sun that came down over the tops of the pines into their clearing, lighting up the stage, Peter seemed to glow. He wore faded brown corduroy pants and a green chamois shirt. And a crown made f
rom woven grapevines stuffed with an assortment of leaves. He looked, to Rhonda, like a fairy prince—something you’d come upon while lost in the woods, then you’d blink and he’d be gone. So Rhonda blinked, just to see, but Peter was still there, radiant as ever.

  Lizzy and Rhonda hurried up onto the stage, holding their breath in anticipation: maybe today Peter would tell them about the play.

  He’d been keeping to himself for weeks, locked in his room, spending afternoons at the library and coming out to the stage on warm days after school to write in his notebook. No one was allowed to disturb Peter when he was writing a play. And only when he was finished with the script and all his production notes, would he reveal anything.

  Peter got to his feet, smiling impishly at the girls. He reached out his hand to Rhonda.

  “Come away with me, Wendy,” he said.

  And Rhonda took his hand without hesitation, without any consideration of who Wendy might be or where he wanted her to go. Together, her hand tucked into his, they jumped off the stage and ran around the clearing like crazy birds, cawing and laughing, Peter yelling, “Isn’t it wonderful to fly?” Lizzy sat on the edge of the stage, clapping and laughing with them until finally, exhausted, they came back to the stage and collapsed at Lizzy’s feet. They were both on their backs, and Rhonda’s head was resting on Peter’s chest, going up and down with each breath he took. Lizzy lay down with her head on Rhonda’s belly and her legs over Peter’s, the three of them forming an imperfect triangle.

  “Have you guessed yet?” Peter asked.

  Rhonda’s mind was spinning with possibilities: a play about birds? Greek gods? Fairies maybe?

  “Peter Pan!” Peter said at last. “We’re going to do Peter Pan! It’ll be the best play yet. I’ll play Peter. You, Ronnie, are Wendy. And Lizzy, you are the infamous Captain Hook!”

  THEY HAD DONE other plays, of course—plays Peter had written, and ones they’d made up as they went along. Short, predictable dramas about knights slaying dragons, cowboys killing Indians, cops shooting criminals. Last year, Peter even let the girls talk him into doing a play about a roving band of gypsies. Peter played the gypsy king, Rhonda was the queen, and Lizzy her treacherous sister who was also in love with the king. Lizzy poisoned Rhonda, who got to die a spectacular, three-minute death on stage. Peter, the gypsy king, had Lizzy hung then stabbed himself in the heart with his dagger, cursing the wicked ways of women, damning the gypsy life. This followed the formula of most of their plays: all the important characters died at the end, even the hero. Only in Peter Pan, everyone would live.

  “Everyone but Captain Hook, that is,” Peter explained. “He gets eaten by the crocodile.”

  Peter, as writer, director, and star (not to mention the oldest kid in the neighborhood), made the rules, and, as they got older, the plays got more complicated, as did the rules. But from the beginning, it was a strict rule that the plays were not to be discussed with outsiders. No one was allowed to hear about the play, or see any part of it performed until the opening night, when it was for paying audiences only. Rehearsing a play was like training to be a ninja, Peter said. You cleared your mind of everything else and developed your art in secrecy. You strived for perfection.

  Some children wanted a tree house, a secret fort somewhere, but these kids wanted a stage of their own, and they got their wish. They’d built a stage out in the woods three years ago, in a clearing between Rhonda’s house and Peter and Lizzy’s, right beside Clem’s old, rusted-out Chevy Impala convertible, parked there the year Rhonda was born. Clem and Daniel helped put up the stage, doing all the sawing and heavy lifting, letting the kids pound nails.

  The stage went up like a strange life raft marooned in a clearing surrounded by tall white pines. It was built from two-by-fours and tongue-and-groove boards taken from an old silo that had been torn down a few miles away. The back of the stage was a framed wall from which they hung sheets with scenery painted on (which Rhonda, as resident artist, was always responsible for). There was no curtain. Sets were changed out in the open, for the audience to see. To the left of the stage sat Clem’s old red Impala with its top down, and this was often used as a prop. It had been a cop car, a gypsy wagon, and now, Peter was explaining, it would become a pirate ship complete with mast, sail, and a skull-and-crossbones flag at the top.

  Rhonda opened the sketchbook she’d brought and started to work on designs for the boat as Peter talked, throwing ideas at her. Drawing was the thing Rhonda did best. She could draw better than she could act, and she was by far the best artist in her class, if not the best in the whole school. Writing and directing the plays was Peter’s job, costumes and choreography were Lizzy’s department, but the scenery was up to Rhonda.

  They were just in the planning stages now. They’d spend the next weeks painting scenery, making their costumes, designing the sets. When school let out and the summer kids came to the cottages around the lake, Peter would hold auditions and they would begin rehearsing every day.

  “And this is where our crocodile will lie in wait,” announced Peter, pulling open the trapdoor in the back of the stage floor. It led to a hole the kids had dug underneath. The hole was four feet wide, four feet long, and four feet deep. The trap door above it was designed so that evil wizards could appear and disappear, so that the dead could rise from quiet graves.

  “But who will be the crocodile?” Lizzy asked, nervous about who was going to kill her.

  Peter shrugged. “Don’t know yet. But that crocodile’s out there somewhere, I can feel it!”

  JUNE 6, 2006

  THE HOLE ELLA Starkee was left in was nine feet deep, and the floor, said the article in People magazine, was roughly the size of a wooden shipping pallet. The kidnapper, whom Ella came to call The Magic Man, covered the top of the hole with boards and leaves. He came to visit every day. The article didn’t say what he did during these visits, only that he used a ladder—fashioned from saplings lashed together—to get down into the hole to see her. Each day, he brought her one butterscotch candy, golden as sunlight, with crinkly cellophane wrappers that she saved and sucked on long after the candy was gone.

  PAT’S MINI MART had transformed into the Find Ernie headquarters. Pat and Jim had cleared the shelves in the back aisle of Ho Hos and Smartfood, and moved the shelving units into storage. They were replaced with a long row of folding tables, piled high with flyers, envelopes, and legal pads. Extension cords and phone wires snaked out from behind the deli’s meat case, powering the laptop computer and two cordless phones. Those who stood too close to the work area for long, Pat roped in—“Surely, you have five minutes to stuff envelopes?” or “How about manning one of the phones for ten minutes, while Alison here takes a break?”

  Pat’s nephew, Warren, who had just finished his freshman year of college down in Philadelphia, had driven all night to get there to help out. His job was to collect all the phoned-in tips, jotted on the legal pads, into a database on the laptop. Karen Boisvert, who worked for IBM, had set up a Find Ernie Web site, complete with all the latest news and a form to submit possible sightings and leads. Peter had been there, working right beside them, until Crowley pulled him into Pat’s office for questioning.

  Rhonda was sitting next to Warren and his laptop, answering phones. Warren wore a Penn State baseball cap and a hemp necklace with brown and black beads. His eyes were bloodshot from not having slept the night before, and he seemed to have a strange, boyish addiction to hot chocolate with mini marshmallows (he was on his fifth cup since Rhonda had been there).

  So far, it was mostly dead ends and crackpots calling: a woman who had a dream that Ernie was in a well, a man over in Chelsea who said he believed there were rabbits living among us, wearing people suits. Rhonda drummed her fingers on the table, got up, and paced. Surely there must be more she could do. She had shown up at Pat’s first thing in the morning, as soon as Peter called to tell her about the gathering of volunteers, and she’d been sure then that today they’d find Ernie.
/>
  Pat had seemed overjoyed to see Rhonda: she caught Rhonda up in a tight embrace and said, “How awful for you to have seen such a thing. You must be a wreck! But don’t worry, we’ll find her. You mark my words! I bet she’ll show up this very morning!”

  Pat led a small group through the streets of Pike’s Crossing, then into the woods bordering the state forest. They were gone most of the morning and came back for lunch and went out again, to continue combing the woods with Pat cheering them on, saying she was sure they were going to find Ernie that very day.

  Rhonda had believed Pat, had even let herself fantasize that it would be her who took the important call; she who put together the string of clues that would lead the cops to Ernie. But now, here it was, a little after three p.m.—twenty-four hours since Ernie’s kidnapping. And the most productive thing Rhonda had done was to keep the coffee pot full.

  “Fuck,” she mumbled to herself, then started organizing papers and pens—busy work. Useless. Little Ernie Florucci’s face stared up at her from the flyers strewn across the table. MISSING, said the bold red letters at the top of the page. Underneath was a snapshot of Ernestine taken just the week before. She was wearing a flowered sundress and sitting in the dull yellow grass of her front yard, a plastic kiddie pool in the background. She had dark brown, straight hair done up in pigtails. Her small nose was dotted with freckles and she had a slight gap between her two front teeth. She was smiling up into the camera, squinting a little, like the sun was in her eyes. Or like she couldn’t make out something she was looking at in the distance.

  “I’m sorry,” Rhonda whispered to the little Ernie as she put the flyers in a neat pile, then sat back down in her chair, willing the phone to ring.

  “What’d you say?” Warren asked, looking up from his computer. His eyes were a deep, rich, chocolaty brown. A little sad and totally sincere, like the eyes of a basset hound. Rhonda imagined the string of girls Warren must have back in Pennsylvania.