Island of Lost Girls

by Jennifer McMahon

  “Goddamnedest thing!” Laura Lee told Warren. “She and Peter were both cut in the same place when the back wall came down. They both needed stitches. They have the exact same scar. Show him, honey. Show the young man your scar!”

  Rhonda pulled her bangs back down protectively, shook her head.

  “You ask Peter to show you his,” Laura Lee said. “It’s the craziest thing. The scars couldn’t be more alike.”

  Warren looked at Rhonda, waiting. Rhonda stared at the television. A huge dam was cracking. She wasn’t big on seventies disaster movies, or any movie made in the seventies, for that matter—they were all so meandering, overloaded with characters. It occurred to her that this might be a topic of conversation with Warren.

  “Laura Lee,” Rhonda said, “can you tell me who else had keys to your car?”

  Laura Lee sighed dramatically.

  “Back to the goddamn car. That’s easy, dear. Only two people: Tock and Peter.”

  Not the answer she’d been hoping for.

  “No one else?” Rhonda asked.

  Laura Lee thought a minute. “I’ve had this car since 1979. Can you believe it? And I bought it used! These things go forever. Of course, I keep it garaged in the winter and I don’t do much driving—where’s an old lady like me going to go? Ha! No, dear. No one else has keys. Except…”

  “Except?”

  “Nothing. It was a hundred years ago. And it doesn’t matter now.” Laura Lee reached for her glass of sangria and stared into it with concern, like there was a tiny drowning man among the ice cubes.

  “What?” asked Rhonda.

  “Daniel. I used to let Daniel borrow my car. He always had a key.”

  She calls his car a submarine and this pleases him. He mimes putting up a periscope, looking around. Lets her have a peek.

  “No sharks,” she tells him.

  He nods to show they are safe. She will always be safe when she is with him.

  He takes her to their secret place. It’s private. Cool and shaded. They won’t be found here.

  Rabbit Island, she calls it.

  He chases her in a friendly game of tag. She’s zigzagging through the trees and stones, laughing.

  He remembers the first Birdie, how they would play hide-and-seek all day. She was so good at hiding. She could find a tiny place and fold her body up, filling the space like a hermit crab. She’d wait so quietly, so patiently to be found.

  The rabbit chases this new girl and he’s laughing too. Quietly laughing because at last, his long-lost Birdie is back. And he’s not going to let any harm come to her this time.

  MAY 23, 1993

  TAKE IT OUT,” he urged her.

  Rhonda laughed.

  “Really. It makes you talk funny. And it makes your lip stick out.”

  She pushed the retainer forward with her tongue, pulled it out with her fingers, holding it like something extra delicate, exotic: a pink beetle with thin, silver legs.

  “That’s better,” he told her.

  They were hidden underground, buried together like secret treasure. The trapdoor on the stage floor was closed over their heads and they sat in the small hole, face-to-face, breathing in the damp smell of earth and roots.

  She studied him in the dim light that came from the cracks in the trapdoor above their heads. They were sitting with their legs crossed under them, facing each other. He was wearing his Peter Pan costume. He smelled like leaves. And she was wearing the white Wendy nightgown, her hair tied back with a ribbon.

  “So you want to know the truth?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she told him.

  “Are you sure you’re ready?”

  She laughed.

  “Then quit laughing. Just relax. I’ll tell you how it is: first, you start with a little kissing. Then the guy feels the girl up. You know, touches her boobs and stuff.”

  Rhonda wrapped her arms around her chest, concealing her painfully obvious lack of boobs.

  “Then he touches her between the legs to see if she’s ready,” he explained.

  “Ready?”

  “You know…ready for him.”

  She nodded, but had no idea what he meant.

  “For his penis,” Peter said.

  “Oh,” Rhonda said matter-of-factly. Her mouth felt suddenly dry. She swallowed hard.

  “He puts it inside her and they move together so that it goes in and out.”

  “Why?” Rhonda asked.

  “Because it feels good, stupid!”

  “Oh,” she said again.

  She couldn’t wait to tell Lizzy all of this. But then, as if reading her mind, Peter put a stop to her plan.

  “Rhonda,” Peter said just before opening the door so they could both head home for supper, “you can’t tell Lizzy I told you this stuff.”

  “Why not?” Rhonda asked. Peter had never asked her to keep a secret from Lizzy before.

  “Because she’d be weirded out. It has to be our secret. Okay?”

  Rhonda nodded, slipping the retainer back into her mouth, smiling. She and Peter had a secret. A secret that made her feel all tingly and strange, like a walking lightning rod.

  JUNE 7, 2006

  SO ARE YOU gonna tell me about this Daniel guy, or what?” Warren asked. He’d quizzed her about Daniel when they left Laura Lee’s the day before, but she’d put him off, saying she needed time to think. Now here it was the next morning and they were working the phones at Pat’s. He was sucking down a large hot chocolate and Rhonda had a cup of French roast. Warren had shaved around his goatee and his hair was still damp from a shower.

  “Not much to tell. He’s Peter’s father.”

  “So is he the kind of guy who would take a little girl?” He cocked his head to the side, waiting for her answer.

  “No. It’s impossible.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “He disappeared twelve years ago.”

  “Disappeared?”

  “Yeah. One night he was there, with all of us, and the next morning, he was gone. We all thought he’d show up eventually. That he’d gone off on a bender or left town to avoid paying back a gambling debt or something, but no one ever heard from him again.”

  “Spooky.”

  “His daughter Lizzy was my best friend. Peter’s sister. And, um, she disappeared three years later when we were freshmen in high school. Lizzy left for school one morning with just her book bag and was never seen again.”

  “Wait a sec,” Warren said. “Peter’s sister disappeared?”

  Rhonda nodded. “Her dad came back for her.”

  “If it was Daniel, why didn’t he take Peter too?” Warren asked.

  “No one knows,” Rhonda said. She picked up her cup of coffee and drained the last lukewarm sip. “Everyone wondered, but no one knows. The police looked but couldn’t find either of them. Lizzy was one of those faces you see on milk cartons and in Wal-Marts; one of those parental abductions. Her mom pretty much lost her mind after that.”

  Rhonda thought of Aggie’s steady decline: the drinking, the increasingly strange behavior. How she started to play with her hair, pulling out one strand at a time, working at it for hours until she looked like a dog with mange. She got paranoid, accused Clem and Justine of knowing where Daniel was and not telling her. She drank to excess, drove her car into Clem and Justine’s house, and bit the earlobe off a police officer who was sent to investigate a report of a woman dressed in only her underwear trying to steal avocados at Price Chopper.

  Aggie eventually ended up in the state hospital for six months, then went off to her sister’s in Maryland. When her sister got burned out, she had Aggie moved into a sort of residential hotel for the mentally ill.

  “And you’re sure it was Lizzy’s dad who took her?” Warren leaned toward Rhonda. His breath smelled sweet and chocolaty and she let herself wonder, for exactly one second, what it might be like to kiss him.

  Rhonda nodded.

  “Positive. Two weeks after she left, we got a postcard. There w
ere a few more, all saying she was doing fine and telling about adventures she was having with Daniel. The last one was from San Francisco. I was a junior in high school then. The card just said she was taking singing lessons, which was really weird.” Rhonda closed her eyes, tried to remember the sound of Lizzy’s voice and couldn’t. What she remembered instead was her friend’s habit of singing the wrong words on purpose, trying to get a laugh.

  “Weird?”

  “Lizzy gave up speaking after her dad left. Wouldn’t talk to anybody. Three years without a single word. Then she writes that she’s taking singing lessons.” Rhonda laughed weakly, and began peeling the lip off of the now empty paper cup in her hand.

  Warren nodded. “Freaky.”

  “Yeah,” Rhonda agreed. “We were close, then the summer Daniel left, everything just kind of fell apart. Things were never the same.”

  “That must have been really hard. Your best friend just disappearing like that.”

  There it was. The thing she’d longed for from Peter over the years. Just a simple acknowledgment of how hard it was on Rhonda, on all of them. How hard and wrong and terrible the whole mess was. Instead, she heard it from Warren, practically a stranger, but with those two sentences, a thousand times more empathetic than Peter had ever been. It didn’t seem fair. But life wasn’t, was it? She looked down at the photo of Ernie on the MISSING flyer, then went back to working at tearing apart her cup.

  “It was hard. And the hardest part has always been not knowing what happened to Lizzy. We never heard from her again. She and Daniel just snuck off and made this whole other life somewhere and none of us ever knew why.”

  Warren nodded. “Two lost girls,” he said.

  “What?” Rhonda’s cup was in shreds. She scooped the torn pieces into a pile.

  “Lizzy and Ernie,” he said.

  Rhonda let out a breath of air through her teeth. “The two have nothing to do with each other, Warren.”

  Warren began picking up the torn pieces of Rhonda’s cup, studying them like they were evidence. “I’m just saying that I think things happen for a reason, it’s just that we don’t always know what the reason is.” He gnawed his lower lip, then continued. “I don’t think it was a mistake or just shit luck that you were here in the parking lot at the Mini Mart when Ernie was taken. You were meant to see it, meant to get involved.”

  “I don’t buy it,” Rhonda said, scooting her chair back, away from him. “Life is all about shit luck and random chaos. That’s how the universe was created. It’s why we’re all here.”

  “YOU SHOULDN’T BE here,” Trudy hissed at Rhonda.

  It was lunchtime and Katy and her mom showed up with a cooler full of sandwiches for the crew at Pat’s, with Trudy Florucci in tow.

  “Aunt Trudy, she’s here because she wants to help,” Katy said.

  “Make her leave,” Trudy said to Pat, who had stepped in to intervene.

  “Trudy, she’s…” Pat started to say.

  “I made the sandwiches. It’s the one thing I’ve been able to do to help since Ernie was taken. It took every ounce of energy I had. And I’ll be damned if that little twat is going to sit on her fat ass eating my sandwiches thinking she’s some kind of fucking hero when it’s her fault Ernie is gone!”

  Pat nodded at Rhonda, who stood up on shaky legs. Pat put an arm around her, guiding her toward the back of the store. “Go hide out in my office till she’s gone,” Pat whispered. “We need you here.”

  Rhonda did as she was told, taking a seat behind Pat’s massive desk. In the corner, a small TV was tuned to CNN. On the wall beside her was a clipboard with the employee schedule on it. Pat’s desk was cluttered with magazines, newspapers, printouts and MISSING flyers with little Ernie peering up, smiling. In the middle of the chaos was a large granite rectangle, similar to a grave marker, the words PAT HEBERT, STATION OWNER AND MANAGER engraved on one side. Beside it was a framed photo of three little girls, one of whom was most definitely Pat at ten or eleven. It was odd to see that Pat had been young once, but somehow comforting to see that, from appearances anyway, not much had changed. Pat looked serious, the oldest girl of the group, the girl who was obviously in charge. The middle girl had a complacent, bucktoothed smile. The littlest one, the girl on the end, had her hair done up in ribbons and looked a little mischievous, like the minute the photo taker turned away, she’d pull the ribbons out.

  In front of the photo in its heavy metal frame was the issue of People with Ella Starkee, the farmer, and his border collie on the cover. Rhonda flipped it open, scanned the article, which she’d already read several times.

  Ella’s kidnapper met up with her on her way home from school. He asked if she wanted to see a magic trick. She shrugged. He pulled a coin from his ear and gave it to her. As she palmed the shiny quarter, he grabbed her wrist and pulled her into his car.

  “Coast is clear!”

  Rhonda jumped. Warren popped his head through the doorway, his smile sweet and slightly apologetic, like Trudy’s behavior was somehow his fault. “Katy’s still here, but her mom and aunt are gone. Come on out and grab a sandwich.”

  Back at the volunteer table, Katy pushed a tuna on wheat toward Rhonda, who refused it, though she was starving.

  “My aunt Trudy’s not herself,” Katy told Rhonda. “She just wants someone to blame, you know? And I’m sure that when she gets her head back on straight, she’ll see it wasn’t your fault about Ernie. I mean, I can see that clear as day, you know? What were you supposed to do? The guy grabbed her and was gone.”

  Rhonda nodded. Gone. Hopping off into the sunset, hand in paw.

  “So this is what I’ve been able to figure out: the rabbit had been visiting Ernie for at least three weeks. The last time we know he saw her for sure was this past Thursday: Ernie told her mom she missed the bus and the rabbit brought her home. She drew pictures of him hiding in the bushes by the playground at school and talking to her through her bedroom window. But most of the pictures looked like this,” Katy said, slipping a page surreptitiously out of a school binder that said GIRLS RULE in sparkly letters on the cover—a bright crayoned drawing labeled RABBIT ISLAND in crude letters.

  “Shouldn’t the police have this?” Warren whispered.

  Katy shrugged. “Ernie made so many drawings of the same scene. Crowley got all of them. I figured I should save one, just in case we never get the others back, you know? They’re evidence now. And it didn’t seem right to give every last one away. It seemed like, I dunno, bad luck or something. Like I was giving away every last piece of her.”

  How pleasant it looked, Rhonda thought, like a scene from a brochure showing a tropical island getaway. She studied the palm trees, the multicolored rabbits lounging on neat rows of rocks in the sun, the pale clouds shaped like hopping bunnies. The island was surrounded on all sides by dark, shark-infested water. A small black fence circled the island, and to get in, you walked through a swinging gate guarded on either side by giant bunnies. Pulled up in the water next to the gate was a small brown submarine.

  “That’s obviously the Volkswagen,” Warren said, pointing to the sub. “Look at the shape. She’s just added a periscope and propeller to it.”

  “But how could the rabbit have used Laura Lee’s car again and again?” Rhonda asked. “I mean, I can see taking it once and her not noticing, but he must have used it several times. That seems pretty chancy.”

  “Not if it was someone Laura Lee knew,” Katy said. “Someone she trusted. Someone who had his own set of keys.”

  Rhonda shook her head, looked back at the picture.

  She saw Ernie and Peter Rabbit in the center of the island, Ernie smiling, holding the rabbit’s paw. Rabbit Island. Rhonda imagined Ernie there right now, happy and warm in the sun. Maybe Rabbit Island was the place everyone who disappeared went to. Maybe, Rhonda thought in spite of herself, Lizzy and Daniel were there too. Perhaps, thought Rhonda as she touched the missing child’s drawing, Rabbit Island was a place populated by all w
ho were lost. She shook her head. Be logical, she told herself. Look at the evidence.

  “So if the sub is the car, then Rabbit Island is probably an actual place, too,” she said.

  “A zoo maybe?” Warren guessed.

  “Looks more like a park to me,” Katy said.

  Rhonda nodded. “Chances are it’s not all that far away. When the rabbit took her for these rides, they couldn’t have been gone long. He always got her back home before Trudy noticed she’d been missing.”

  “With all this water,” Warren said, “it might be some place by the lake.”

  “Could be,” said Rhonda. “The lake doesn’t have any islands but there are plenty of small beaches and rocky outcroppings.”

  “There’s another thing—something only the police know,” Katy said as she looked up from the drawing. “For some reason or other, the rabbit had this weird name he called her.”

  “Weird name?” Rhonda asked.

  “He called her Birdie,” Katy said. “I heard my aunt tell my mom. Crowley found a card from Peter Rabbit tucked under Ernie’s mattress. It was addressed to Birdie.”

  “Jesus,” Rhonda said.

  “Bizarre,” Warren said, sucking in his lower lip and biting down.

  “But you didn’t hear the Birdie thing from me,” Katy said, sliding the drawing back into the folder and sticking the folder in her backpack. “And if anyone sees I’ve got this, it’ll go straight to Crowley. If my aunt catches me talking to you, she’ll have a conniption. Maybe I’ll see you guys later. If I can’t come back this afternoon, I’ll make it tomorrow.”

  “Take it easy,” said Warren, smiling. “And thanks for lunch!”

  “No problem,” Katy said, practically glowing as she smiled back at him.

  “So what do you think?” Warren asked as they watched Katy hop on her bike outside.

  “I think someone’s got a crush on you,” Rhonda said.

  Warren’s face flushed. “I mean about the drawing and this weird bird name,” he said.