by Skylar Finn
Runaway Girls
Skylar Finn
Contents
1. Runaway
2. North by Northwest
3. Out-of-Towners
4. The Hayes Household
5. Fair Game
6. To Catch a Predator
7. A Thousand Lightning Rods
8. Not in Nottingham
9. The Secrets Between Them
10. The Worst Kind
11. Fire Starter
12. Prisoner
13. Under Suspicion
14. Penny and the Unicorns
15. The Pied Piper
16. Witness
17. The First Time
18. Hunting Season
19. What the Heart Can’t Take
20. Up In Smoke
21. The End of Winter
22. A Girl Like Dana
23. Plans
24. Lights Out
25. The Brave One
26. Runaway Girl
27. The One That Got Away
About the Author
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1
Runaway
Brittany Hayes was a born troublemaker. That’s what her daddy always said. She had been crossing lines and breaking the rules since she was old enough to walk. She was the kind of child who tried to touch the stove and put jewelry into electrical sockets, just to see what would happen.
The kind of girl who liked to play with fire.
Now that Brittany was a teenager, it was no different. In fact, it was probably even worse. She’d heard her mother lamenting over her on the phone: how Brittany’s terrible twos had gone on for two years, and now her terrible teens would go on for seven. Mrs. Hayes despaired the impossibility of retiring from being a parent.
None of this made Brittany feel bad in the slightest. She felt little remorse over her mother’s exasperation, nor were her feelings hurt that she made her mother want to retire from mothering. If anything, it pleased her. It was quite an accomplishment, she thought, to drive one’s own mother to the brink of early retirement.
Her stepfather, Daniel, let her get away with murder. If her daddy were still around, he’d have taught her a thing or two about respect. But he was a gas and oil man. He traveled all over the country. She rarely saw him unless he was working in town. Right now, he was in Louisiana. Then he’d go to Texas. He said maybe she could come to visit.
Brittany imagined flying in a helicopter and landing on an oil rig in the middle of the ocean, like the pictures she’d seen in her social studies book at school. They were reading about gas and oil before the annual Oil and Gas Fair. Hannah, that weirdo in her sea turtle shirts, complained that they were sanctioning the destruction of their planet. Brittany flicked a rubber band at the back of her head when the teacher wasn’t looking. Nobody claimed her dad was sanctioning destruction and got away with it, as far as Brittany was concerned.
Brittany knew what her dad would say if he knew she was planning on sneaking out. That was why it was a good thing he wasn’t around. Daniel would never say anything, even if he wasn’t totally oblivious and wrapped up in his own little world—which he was. Daniel was obviously a little afraid of Brittany. He knew how easily she could transform his pleasant world into a hellish one if he tried to play the enforcer and make life difficult for her.
Tonight, Brittany was sneaking out. She had it down to a science. Eat dinner like normal, don’t start a fight—for once—then take advantage of her mother and Daniel’s relaxed guard since dinner had gone peacefully. Then she would disappear upstairs for homework and phone time. She never actually did her homework, of course. She paid Peyton Samuel for that. That’s what nerds were for.
Her mother had a lights-out-by-eleven rule, which Brittany typically ignored. She’d turn her light out and then tent her blanket around her phone, staying up and scrolling for hours. It was why she was so late to school every day. Her teachers were equally as exasperated with her as her mother, especially her homeroom teacher. They kept threatening her with detention and in-school suspension for being late, and Brittany kept showing up late, anyway. School was way too early. Teenagers needed more sleep at night then they got. There were studies done about it. She had read them. They were the ones who should change, not her.
On this particular night, Brittany obediently turned out her light at ten minutes after eleven. There was no sense in doing it exactly on time; that might attract suspicion. If there was one thing everyone could count on Brittany for, it was her errant disregard for any and all rules. If she broke character and acted too good, her mother and Daniel would realize something was up for sure.
She waited until she heard the sound of their footsteps coming up the carpeted stairs. Her mother paused by her doorway, hovering, checking for light under the door, or the sound of Brittany talking. When she found nothing but silence and darkness, she moved on to the bedroom. If Brittany was asleep and she opened the door, it would be like rousing a sleeping bear out of hibernation: violent and terrible for everyone involved.
Brittany waited until she heard Daniel come upstairs, then waited some more until she heard him sneak back downstairs half an hour after her mother fell asleep. Who knew what he was up to? Probably watching porn in his office. He did the same thing every night: come upstairs at the same time or shortly after her mother, then he snuck back downstairs to do who knew what after that. Brittany didn’t know, and she didn’t care. The important thing was, his office was at the back of the house in the new addition, and her bedroom was at the front. He would never hear her leave.
Brittany rolled out of her canopied bed and reached beneath it for her glitter backpack. She drew it out slowly, so her keychains wouldn’t jingle. In it, she packed: a change of clothes, her favorite lip gloss, hydro flask, scrunchie, body spray, and a bottle of apple vodka she’d stolen from Daniel’s liquor cabinet. He had gotten it for some barbeque an eon ago and never drank it. Daniel was more of a bourbon type of guy.
She pulled on an oversized black hoodie. She had never changed for bed and still wore the same skinny jeans she had worn to school. She slipped her feet into sneakers and shouldered her backpack. She didn’t bother bunching up the blankets to make it look like she was still in bed. That was strictly amateur hour. She knew her mom wouldn’t come in until she overslept through all three of her alarms and was well on her way to being late for school again.
She went over to the large bay window that overlooked the front lawn. She nudged it open and carefully made her way across the gently sloping roof after sliding the window shut behind her. When she reached the edge, she turned, lowering herself onto her hands and knees, and crawled backward down the sturdy wooden trellis. In the spring, her mother’s purple morning glories would snake their way up the wood. But for now, it was bare.
She reached the bottom in no time flat. She dropped from the trellis, bent, and rolled a short way across the dewy lawn. It was a little extraneous, but it made things more fun. She felt like a spy. There, at the end of the driveway by the mailbox, a pair of headlights waited. Beckoning. She sprinted across the damp lawn toward her freedom and the waiting night ahead.
2
North by Northwest
The wheels of the train rolled under my feet as the engine rumbled. I sat with my laptop open on the tray table in front of me and gazed out of the window. I watched the scenery flash by as we went through Yemassee, South Carolina. It was a place that brought to mind tobacco fields and the old South. There was something pastoral and beautiful about it—peaceful.
I tr
ied to internalize it as much as I could. I knew what lay ahead, and there would be nothing peaceful or beautiful about any of it.
I had been called in to assist in a kidnapping case and would be working with a CARD team deployed to find a missing girl. CARD was the Child Abduction Rapid Deployment team of the FBI, and profilers from the Behavioral Analysis Unit assisted them in cases.
The girl was fifteen and had gone missing from her West Virginia home two days before. Because of her family’s proximity to the Ohio River and a tip from a neighbor who claimed to have seen her entering a car with Ohio state tags, the assumption was she’d crossed state lines. The parents had money and were awaiting a ransom call, though the kidnapper had yet to make any demands.
What I hoped more than anything was that Brittany Hayes was still alive. What I believed, based on what I had learned about the human condition in my time as a profiler, decreed that she almost certainly was not. In my experience, hope was a four-letter word. I already assumed the worst: that I was headed to investigate not a kidnapping, but a murder.
It wasn’t always like this for me: I’d once been a bright-eyed, passionate young psychology student. My fate had changed forever in the fall of my senior year of college. I’d fallen under the spell of a charismatic and intelligent professor who saw potential in my work for profiling and encouraged me to study forensics and apply to the FBI Academy. In many ways, to this day, I was haunted: both by him and my decision to do exactly that.
I couldn’t imagine another life for myself now. However, I sometimes wondered if there was some happier version of myself in an alternate timeline somewhere—someone who had instead gone on to open a private practice, get married, have a kid or two, and maybe a golden retriever. But I would never know.
Instead, I drifted through my life like a ghost. I was not entirely unlike the ghosts of the murder investigations, which haunted me. I remained unmoored and unattached. I liked it this way. I had always been solitary, stoic in my habits and manner.
I sometimes wondered what it would be like to live a sort of sitcom-style of life that I observed in the episodic content I watched on the road. I vaguely realized that no one actually had that life, but the endless cycle of PTA meetings and bake sales looked oddly utopian to me, compared to my own life.
I put in my earbuds and settled my head back against the seat, reclining it as far as it would go. Business-class was relatively empty and peaceful. I could have gotten a room, but I knew I wouldn’t sleep. The Auto Train ran from Sanford, Florida, into Lorton, Virginia. It would deposit me hours from my destination and save me the trouble of having to rent a car.
I was a terrible flyer, a nervous wreck for days before a flight and a basket case on the plane. I never drove north if I could help it. I wanted to have the peace of liminal space afforded by sitting back and watching the scenery pass me by, disengaged and little more than a voyeur. It helped me to prepare mentally for what lie ahead. I especially liked the Auto Train because it went through Quantico. I could glimpse my old stomping grounds through the window and reminisce about my humble beginnings.
How I got from here to there.
In all too short a time, I could hear the conductor call out the stop for Lorton. I stretched and gathered my things from the overhead rack. I had only an overnight bag and my laptop case. My suitcase was packed neatly away in the trunk of my car. I waited in line with the other passengers after we disembarked and watched the cars roll down the ramp for us to claim them.
It was late winter, not quite yet spring. The bare brown branches rose into the slate-gray sky. It was something of a novelty, coming from the lush subtropical climate of Florida, where the flowers and trees bloomed year-round. It was a nightmare for allergy sufferers, but otherwise pleasant. Especially when the rest of the country was suffering its various forms of winter.
There was something strangely beautiful about the frozen stillness of it. I thought about it as I drove. If I lived here year-round, I would surely be miserable, but right now, there was something so quiet and removed about it. It was as if I had entered a different world.
It was a lengthy drive, a little over five hours, and I made a game of seeing if I could make it without stopping. It was unlikely, given my intense addiction to coffee—and any form of caffeine, for that matter. I made it to Little Washington before I stopped to get gas and visit the rest stop. I marveled at the people walking their dogs, benevolent and oblivious to the evils perpetuated in the world. It often felt as though I watched them through a two-way mirror as if we inhabited separate worlds.
I got some garbage from the vending machines—sugary, salty snacks and a questionable coffee-like substance—before getting back into my car. The sugar and the caffeine would keep me awake for the remainder of the drive.
My mother grew up here, born and raised. She escaped at eighteen and never went back—until she had kids. I guess my grandparents forgave her when she had her first and only child, me. I was doted on and adored whenever I entered this strange world with no palm trees.
I always felt as if I were traveling back in time, coming up here. My mother was born in my current destination: New Martinsville, West Virginia, where Brittany Hayes had disappeared. She grew up across the bridge, on the Ohio side of the river, in a small town called Hannibal that was little more than a census-designated area on the map. You could stop for directions twenty minutes up the river from it on the West Virginia side and they wouldn’t know where you meant. The town consisted of a gas station, a church, a post office, and a dam. New Martinsville was a booming metropolis by comparison.
Even driving from Lorton required a meandering route that took me north, then west, then south through Maryland and Pennsylvania. It was borderline inaccessible. By the time I reached Moundsville, I was desperate for more coffee. The highway gave way to narrower roads surrounded by tall, bare brown trees and steep granite face. There was no Starbucks between here and Wheeling, so I stopped at Gumby’s Cigarette World. The store also sold alcohol. I was staying at the New Martinsville Inn, and it wasn’t the kind of place that had its own bar.
I passed the towering smokestacks of the natrium plant, wrinkling my nose at the smell. Once a flourishing coal-mining region, it was still a place where nearly all of the economy was industrial to this day. It was strange making my way here gradually before the next unusually prolific hurricane season that was surely around the bend down south as if I’d reached the source of the problem. But telling folks here that the industries were bad for the climate was telling them they should starve in order to maybe, possibly preserve future generations decades down the line. There was a reason the area went red during an election.
There was old snow on the ground when I turned into the parking lot, gray and black, bunched up in the corners. I checked in and got a room in the back with a view of the dam. I got ice from the machine in the hall around the corner of my room and made a small drink with the flat little bottle of rum I had procured from Gumby’s along with an illicit, contraband pack of Marlboro Milds. While I had (technically) quit smoking quite a while ago, the brutality of a kidnapping and likely child murder case wasn’t one that left room for a clean life with no vices. I had to take what reassurances I could get, where I could get them.
Spring wouldn’t be here for another month, at least. It was still cold enough to see my breath as I sat on the bench out back behind the hotel. My breath, or maybe just the smoke. I’d taken the little plastic cup from my room out back with me and when I heard a voice in the near darkness right next to me. I jumped so badly I nearly threw the cup across the parking lot.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.” It was a normal, average-sounding voice attached to a normal, average-looking man. Neither his politeness nor his appearance was in any way reassuring to me.
I’d seen some of the most innocuous individuals commit countless heinous crimes over the years, so I knew better by than to be lulled into a false sense of security.
He c
ame out of the shadows of the building, and it was then that I saw his navy FBI jacket. I breathed a sigh of relief. Granted, he could have been a crazed imposter who got it online, but I found it unlikely, under the circumstances.
“You’re FBI?” I asked, glancing at his jacket.
“Special Agent John Harper,” he said, extending his hand. “BAU-3.” Unit Three specialized in crimes against children. “You must be Agent St. Clair.”
“I see my reputation precedes me,” I said dryly, taking his hand.
He had a warm, firm handshake that I could feel even through my gloved hand. My father always told me I could tell everything I needed to know about a man based on his handshake. I thought it was a bit of a quaint axiom from a previous time, but I was willing to concede this particular point in Agent Harper’s favor.
“Are you kidding me?” he said. “Everybody knows about the Black Widow Killer.”
“How I failed to apprehend her even after she murdered several people I knew and loved?” I asked, finishing my drink. I tossed the empty cup into a nearby trashcan.
“Failed?” He looked at me, eyebrows raised. “I thought she died in a fire when you tracked her down.”
“They never found conclusive evidence of that,” I said with a shrug. “I mean, I’d like to believe that. But I’d like to believe a lot of things.”
“You think she’s still out there somewhere?” he asked.
