Vanishing Girls

by Lisa Regan

  The nurse rolled her eyes. “All day long she’s trying to get out of that chair.” With a glance back at June she added, “I’ll have the girls sit this one up in the chair and get her a dinner tray. I can do the admission after I deal with Mrs. Sole.”

  With that, she was gone. Josie glanced down at June. The girl’s eyes blinked rapidly for several seconds. Then they stopped, and she floated back off to wherever it was she had found to hide inside her head.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Josie found excuses to walk past June Spencer’s room two more times after that—retrieving a blanket for Lisette’s lap from her room and then going back again for the butterscotch candies she kept in her nightstand. Each time she passed, she slowed and peered inside. The nursing aides had, as instructed, moved June from her bed to the guest chair next to it. She sat unmoving with her hands on the armrests. Her pale legs—hairy from a year of not having shaved them—peeked out from beneath the hospital gown. Someone had put those awful brown non-skid socks on her feet. Pushed up in front of her was the rolling tray table and dinner: turkey breast with gravy, apple sauce, jello, a tiny can of ginger ale and a hot tea. All of it was untouched, the silverware perfectly lined up beside her plate, which meant no one had tried to feed her. Josie wondered if she would eat. Perhaps, if she was hungry enough? She remembered Ray saying she was healthy. Perhaps the act of eating was an automatic thing for her.

  “Come now,” Lisette called from the cafeteria, and Josie tore herself from June’s doorway to return to the dining room with the candy.

  “There’s nothing more you can do for her right now. Leave her,” she said, as Josie dealt a new hand of kings in the corner. They played in silence, finishing two games before Lisette suggested rummy. “Since you obviously have no plans to go home.” She winked at Josie and started shuffling the cards again as they heard Sherri push her cart past the dining room entrance, heading back in the direction of June’s room. “I’ve got to do this admission,” she called to someone at the nurses’ station.

  Lisette dealt as Josie tried to remember how to play, her ears straining for the click of the door down the hall, hoping that Sherri had the good sense to give the poor girl some privacy.

  “You don’t remember how to play, do you?” Lisette broke in.

  Josie gave her a sheepish smile as Lisette offered her another butterscotch candy and took her through the basics of the game. Slowly it came back to her as they played a few practice hands, before Lisette took the deck and began shuffling it again. “Now we’ll play to win,” she said.

  “Don’t we need a notepad to keep track of the score?”

  Lisette raised a brow. “I don’t suppose you want to take a walk back to my room to get one?”

  “I don’t,” Josie said pointedly.

  “You don’t have some fancy snap on that phone of yours we can use?”

  “You mean app, Grandma.”

  She waved one hand in the air. “Whatever. Or is it whatevs? I heard Mrs. Sole’s great-granddaughter in here the other day and she said, ‘whatevs’. Is that the new thing? Young people are too lazy to even finish saying words?”

  Josie was laughing so hard it took a moment to register the commotion coming from down the hallway. Then a bloodcurdling scream sliced the air, followed by another and another, from more than one person, until it sounded like a pack of hysterical, panicked wolves howling. Josie raced into the hallway and saw a gaggle of nursing aides standing outside June’s room. Their mouths were stretched wide in horror, their faces ashen. One woman stopped screaming just long enough to be sick. Another fell to her knees and covered her eyes as more staff rushed to the door.

  Josie ran for the room, the world revolving in slow motion around her. She was moving toward something terrible, she knew it, a large stone of dread pressing down hard on her center of gravity. Sherri’s cart stood untouched and unattended outside the room, June’s electronic chart aglow on its screen.

  Pushing through the crowd, she made it to the threshold at last. Sherri lay on the floor near the foot of the bed, face up. Her hands lay limp on her chest. She was gone. A pool of blood spread quickly beneath her, her throat in shreds, a tiny geyser of blood still gushing from the torn flesh. Her eyes were huge and glassy, frozen. Not so much in horror or even panic. She simply looked surprised, like someone had jumped out of the closet and startled her. Your face will freeze like that. Josie’s mother’s voice rang in her ears.

  She dragged her gaze to the far side of the room, where June squatted beneath the window, her naked rounded spine facing the door. The non-skid socks on her feet were thick with blood and the hem of the hospital gown swished back and forth in the crimson puddle. From where she stood, Josie could see she clutched a fork in one bloody hand, a small shard of flesh dangling from its tongs. She was doing something with the other hand. Josie couldn’t see what, but her shoulder and elbow worked at a frenzied pace, up and down, back and forth.

  “Call 911,” Josie said quietly to the sobbing women at her back. “And do not come into this room.”

  She took a halting step inside. Then another. Whatever June was doing, it was to the wall beneath the windows, her movement smooth and steady, her crouched body blocking Josie’s view.

  A few feet from Sherri’s head lay a white foam cup at rest on its side. The lid had been removed and was still on the tray table. The water for the hot tea. She must have flung it in Sherri’s face, then gone for the jugular.

  Josie sidestepped the pool of blood edging along the tile floor. Now she was close enough to see that June had written a word on the wall in Sherri’s bright, warm red blood in large streaks using her fingertips. Not a word, actually. A name.

  RAMONA.

  Chapter Twenty

  Josie felt hollow staring down at June as she traced the R in Ramona again and again with a steady, blood-soaked hand. After everything she had been exposed to in her childhood, Josie didn’t think there was much that could shock her, but this—this was difficult to take in.

  Carefully avoiding the widening swath of blood, she circled around Sherri’s body and knelt about four feet away from the girl. June didn’t look at her as she moved on to the first A in Ramona, her palm rubbing the letter into the drywall. Her chin jutted forward—in concentration or determination, Josie couldn’t tell. Maybe both.

  Josie said, “June, it’s me, Detective Quinn.”

  No acknowledgement. It was as if she were the only person there—not just in the room, Josie realized, but in the entire world. Her hand reached back and scooped a fresh gob of Sherri’s blood with which she began stroking the long, straight lines of the letter M.

  Josie inched forward. “June, I’m only here to talk to you. Do you think you could put down the fork?”

  The fork flew across the room, clattering against the wall opposite Josie and falling to the floor. The girl had reacted with such speed and nimble assurance, Josie hardly believed her eyes. She wondered how deeply hidden was the real June?

  Josie swallowed. Her face felt unusually hot. “Thank you,” she said as June swept more blood into the oval shape of the letter O in a rhythmic motion.

  Josie looked at the door. The nursing staff had left the doorway, likely rounding up all the residents and sheltering them in the common area. She didn’t have much time. She scooted forward a bit more and swallowed again. “June, I need to ask you something. Who is Ramona?”

  Nothing. Round and round the O she went. “June,” Josie tried again. “Who is Ramona? I want to help you, but I can’t do that if you don’t tell me what’s happening. Do you know Ramona? Is she in trouble? June, if this Ramona is in trouble, then I need to find her as soon as possible. I can help her. Let me help her. Who is she? Where can I find her?”

  Up and down, up and down her hand went, now working on the letter N.

  “I saw your uncle the other day,” Josie tried. “Your uncle Dirk. Right after his accident. I was there. He said her name. He whispered it to me. He said, ‘Ram
ona.’ If you could just tell me who—”

  The rest of the sentence lodged in Josie’s throat so hard and fast she started coughing. June’s head snapped in her direction and her amber eyes zeroed in on Josie like a predatory bird. They flashed with intelligence and awareness. For that split second, June was there. Really and truly there, in the room with Josie. Then she was gone. She turned back to the wall, and continued.

  Josie recovered herself. “June, please. You can trust me. Please tell me what’s going on. Who is Ramona?”

  The sound of sirens, muffled but getting closer, invaded the room. Disappointment mixed with desperation rounded Josie’s shoulders. The cavalry was arriving. June would be taken into custody, and with her any chance Josie had of discovering who the hell Ramona was and where Josie could find her.

  She glanced at the empty doorway, and when she looked back at June the girl was staring at her again, the lucidity in her light-brown eyes so stark and startling that Josie’s breath caught. Panic welled inside her.

  The girl leaned forward and Josie instinctively flinched, throwing a hand up—but no attack came. Craning her neck, June brought her face within inches of Josie’s, opened her mouth, and stuck her tongue out as far as she could. In the center of it was a small pink ball with a word written on it. Lizard-like, June retracted her tongue before Josie’s brain could properly process the word. Tiny, white letters. Barely readable. Princess.

  “Where did you—where did you get that, June?” Josie asked.

  But the moment was over. The girl retreated back into herself, her eyes as blank and empty as polished stones, her scarlet palm massaging Sherri Gosnell’s blood into the final letter.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Josie sat in a chair next to Noah Fraley’s desk, staring down at her sneakers and waiting to talk with the chief while Noah made awkward attempts at conversation. “Did you know Mrs. Gosnell’s father-in-law is a patient at Rockview?”

  She had tried like hell to stay away from Sherri’s blood, but there it was—a browning crust around her soles. There was no avoiding it. Not in that room. Not after the way June had killed her. “They’re called residents,” she told Noah, absently.

  “What?”

  She was trying to focus on Noah, but kept seeing June’s tongue extended toward her. Princess. What was Isabelle Coleman’s tongue barbell doing in June Spencer’s mouth? Noah stared at her expectantly. She said, “In nursing homes, they’re not called patients. They’re called residents. They live there.”

  Noah’s face flushed. “Oh.”

  She hadn’t meant to embarrass him. Quickly, she said, “I knew that Sherri’s father-in-law is a resident there. I see him there sometimes when I visit my grandmother. Saw him today, actually. He’s the one with the artificial larynx, always accusing Sherri of stealing it. Must be a family joke. Sherri’s husband is—was—the plumber, right?”

  Josie couldn’t remember his first name, but knew he was a Gosnell. She knew this because over a year ago, when their hot water heater burst, Ray had categorically refused to call the man—or any plumber—insisting on installing the new one himself, even though he had no plumbing experience whatsoever. The fight that ensued between Josie and Ray had been a big one. It was almost as though letting another man fix something in his house was a violation. As if letting a plumber install a hot water heater was the equivalent of letting a stranger have a go at your wife. The irony was not lost on Josie.

  “Nick,” Noah supplied. “Nick Gosnell. They told him about an hour ago. He was out on an emergency call. Dusty tracked him down. Poor guy. Can you imagine? I heard they were high school sweethearts.”

  Josie frowned. “That’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”

  She expected more blushing from Noah, perhaps a muttered apology or a palm to his forehead in a gesture of embarrassment. But all he said was, “I guess not.”

  She followed his gaze to where Ray stood, just outside the chief’s door, talking with another officer. Slowly he walked toward her, and she had the strange sensation of being one of those military wives who saw the soldiers in their shiny dress uniforms coming up the driveway, knowing it only meant bad news. When he got closer, she stood up and wiped her sweaty palms on her jeans.

  The phone rang on Noah’s desk and he answered it with a brisk, “Fraley.”

  Ray said, “You okay?”

  No. She felt shaken by what had happened with June. She’d given a brief statement to Ray when he arrived at the nursing home with a small group of other officers, but she hadn’t told him about the tongue piercing.

  “Jo?”

  She said, “Yeah, I’m fine. Where’s June?”

  “Downstairs in holding.”

  Josie kept picturing June being led away from the home by two Denton PD officers, her pale wrists locked in handcuffs behind her back, her eyes looking straight ahead but not seeing anything. She hadn’t put up a fight. It broke Josie’s heart to watch the girl chained up after having spent a year in captivity. She felt sad and horrified by Sherri’s barbaric murder, and her heart went out to the nurse’s family. But she couldn’t get June’s face out of her head.

  “Are you listening to me?” Ray waved a hand in front of her face.

  She focused on him. A five o’clock shadow stubbled his jaw line. They were now standing outside the chief’s office. They’d crossed the room without her even realizing it. “Sorry,” she mumbled.

  “I said I checked out the acrylic nail. It belongs to one of the searchers.”

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “The chief wants to see you. Don’t wind him up, okay?”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  From across his desk, Chief Wayland Harris eyed Josie like he’d caught her shoplifting. In fact, the look he gave her over the top of his reading glasses was worse than the one he had given her when he asked her to turn in her gun and badge and put her on paid suspension. Then he had looked at her with disappointment, but today it was almost as if she were someone else—a stranger dragged into his office for questioning. She didn’t get it. Back then, she’d done something wrong. She knew that. She’d never say it out loud because she loved her job too much to jeopardize it, but she knew it was true. This time, she had merely been a bystander. She’d even disarmed June Spencer. Sort of.

  “Quinn,” he said. The fact that didn’t call her by her rank bothered her, but she kept her composure. “Why is it that every time there is a catastrophe in this town, you’re right in the middle of it? Did I not make myself clear when I told you to stay home? Do you not understand the meaning of a suspension?”

  “Sir,” Josie said. “I was just visiting my grandmother.”

  “And you were just getting gas when that SUV crashed into the Stop and Go, is that right?”

  “It is. Wrong place, wrong time—or the right place at the right time, depending on how you look at it.”

  He hunched forward, leaning his elbows on his desk. He was a large man. Some of the officers had nicknamed him Grizzly, or Grizz for short, because of his large, barrel-shaped frame. That, and the hair protruding from his bulbous nose. “The way I look at it is that I suspended you three weeks ago and yet you’ve shown up at every major crime in this city since then. Are you trying to get fired?”

  Her face flushed. Not from embarrassment, but from frustration. “Sir, I promise you, none of this was on purpose.”

  His ice-blue eyes flicked toward the door quickly, then back to her. “Why did you go into that room tonight?”

  “What?”

  “Why did you go into the room with June Spencer tonight? That girl could have killed you. You weren’t armed. You’re not a cop right now. What she did to Sherri Gosnell…” He shook his head. “Let me ask you this: are you trying to get killed?”

  “No, I just—”

  “I told you to keep your head down, Quinn. You’re like a damn feral cat. Into every damn thing.”

  “Chief,” she said, “I think June Spencer was with Isabelle C
oleman.”

  “What?”

  Her words tumbled over one another as she told him about the strange encounter with June. “I saw a Facebook photo of Isabelle Coleman with that same tongue barbell. It was taken a few months before she was abducted.”

  As she spoke, he stared at her, his expression carefully blank. It was his specialty. Good or bad, his face was unreadable. When she finished, he let out a lengthy sigh. “Quinn, I hate to break it to you, but nowadays all these teenage girls have piercings. Hell, my oldest got one last year. I wanted to kill her.”

  “But sir, June Spencer would not have a barbell that said Princess,” Josie said. “Hers would say Bitch or it would have a skull on it, or something. Listen to me, I don’t think that June was with Drummond for the last year. I think she was being held by the same person who took Isabelle Coleman. I think she saw Coleman sometime in the last week, and they swapped. It’s a message, don’t you see?”

  The wiry hairs of the chief’s left eyebrow lifted skeptically. “Quinn, do you hear yourself? Sending messages with tongue piercings?”

  “It’s too big a coincidence. Please, look at Coleman’s Facebook page. You’ll see.” Josie kept going. “What if Isabelle Coleman and June Spencer saw one another? Did you finish the search of Drummond’s property?”

  “There’s nothing there. We took the whole place apart and dug up his entire yard—four feet down. You could drop a pool in there now. There’s nothing. No sign of Coleman.”

  “So, she wasn’t with Drummond. They were both being held somewhere else and then they got separated. What if June saw Coleman after she was abducted, but before she ended up with Drummond? Have you checked Drummond’s known associates?”

  “Drummond didn’t have any known associates. He doesn’t even have any friends. I tried calling his only known relative, an uncle in Colorado. The guy told me Drummond doesn’t deserve a funeral. City’s paying for it.”