by Skylar Finn
Dana was cleaning up, throwing away paper plates with half-eaten pie crusts on them when we approached her. She smiled when she saw us.
“I hope this helps Brittany and Crystal,” she said. Her voice faltered. “I can’t believe it’s both of them. I keep wondering, what if it’s me next? You know?”
“We wanted to talk to you about that, Dana,” I said. “We’re very concerned about the fact that we believe that both of your friends were talking to the same person before they disappeared. Do you know anything about a boy that Crystal might have been seeing? Maybe someone she thought was a different person from the one Brittany was seeing?”
Her eyes wide, she focused her attention on sorting and organizing the cash in her gray metal lockbox. “I know Brittany was talking to someone. Crystal’s pretty cagey about that stuff.”
“She is? She seemed pretty confident when we met her,” Harper said.
She shifted her big, scared eyes to Harper briefly. “She is,” said Dana. “Just, like—if she talked about somebody, it would be like, what they did, and that was it. Like if she did stuff with one of the jocks under the bleachers or whatever. She wouldn’t like, talk about anybody. The way Brittany could get really fixated on someone and go on and on about them forever.”
I wasn’t surprised that Crystal was the sort of person who would conceal it if she had an emotional connection with someone—out of pride, behind her armor. The face that she presented to the world, rather than her true face and the way she actually felt.
That strongly indicated to me that she had developed something more serious, in her mind, with the Piper—whoever it was—than she normally would have with a boy her age. For her, experimenting with her peers was probably more about asserting her dominance over a situation and her ability to experience physical desire without becoming emotionally attached. Looking at her home life situation, I had no doubt in my mind that Crystal had no intention whatsoever of ending up like her mother.
“Have you ever spoken to this person?” asked Harper.
Now there was no mistaking the look of fear in the young girl’s eyes. “I’m not allowed to talk to boys,” she said immediately as if programmed to do so.
“I know,” I said gently. “And I’m sure you would never go against your parents’ wishes. But did they ever introduce you to him? Did you talk to him on the phone, or on their phones? On your computer?”
“I don’t know who it was.” She shook her head so hard her ponytail flew back and forth on her shoulders. “I have no idea. Do you think it was the person who took Brittany and Crystal?”
“Maybe. Were you studying poetry at school?”
“Poetry?” Her expression was genuinely bewildered.
“Or Watership Down?” asked Harper.
“Watership what?” she asked.
Either she was the greatest child actor of all time, or there was no mention in either one in their current high school curriculum.
“Okay, I think that’s all we have for you today, Dana,” I said. “We really appreciate all your help, as always. And I’m sure Brittany and Crystal’s families appreciate everything you’re doing here so much.”
“Maybe.” Her heart-shaped face clouded over. “Mrs. Hayes, maybe. Crystal’s mom hates me.”
“Why does she hate you?” asked Harper, sounding concerned.
“I don’t know. I can just tell by the way she looks at me.” She looked morose. “She was glaring at me all day.”
“Don’t worry about that,” I said. “You’re doing a really good job.”
“Thank you.” She gave me a brave but wavering smile. I’d never met Brittany, and Crystal was a bit of a pill, but there was something so moving about Dana. Moving, and also engaging. If I were a predator, she would have been my true target. She was also obviously hiding something.
“What did you think of all that?” Harper asked me outside while we shared a cigarette.
“I think it was bullshit,” I said, exhaling my cold breath and a thin stream of smoke in the general direction of the river.
“I think we’re in agreement about that,” he said.
17
The First Time
The first time he saw Brittany Hayes, she was eating with her father at Dairy Queen. The girl picked at her burger but ate all of her fries while her father watched her fondly. He sat at the back of the restaurant and sipped his drink, watching them.
It would have made for a nice picture had he not known that his co-worker was out back, buying drugs from her father’s partner. He did not believe for a moment that the man was unaware of what was going on and knew that he was deeply enmeshed in all of it. It seemed like incredibly bad form to take one’s daughter on a drug deal, but when he followed them up the road, he saw that they were visiting a construction site—presumably the father’s.
After that, he found out everything there was to know about Brittany Hayes. It had been easy. He got her father’s name off the sign at the bottom of the hill of the site: Lipman & Hayes Construction. (His co-worker referred to the woman who supplied his meth simply as “the lady I buy my meth from.”) He learned all about Daniel Hayes and then his daughter.
Stepdaughter, as it turned out. That was something he could work with. The girl probably longed for a father. Any older man who said just the right words in just the right tone could probably be considered a feasible substitute.
Her social media accounts were set to private but had been easy enough to infiltrate. She was the kind of girl who wanted followers, so creating extremely basic accounts and then requesting to follow her had been an easy matter, and she had immediately accepted, probably without even bothering to check and verify who they were from.
Brittany interested him because of the story she told through her photographs and posts. Here was a girl who was conflicted about becoming who other people wanted or expected her to be. She tried so hard to be the person her mother wanted her to be, while simultaneously resenting her for it. She tried hard to impress her peers. But there was another Brittany that existed alongside these false facades that was more genuine—in her pictures of nature and her random musings about the world outside the small world that she knew—that indicated, to him at least, that there was a mind potentially available for liberation: one that had not been entirely corroded by society and warped into something else.
He had tried in the past. He was never able to find Penny again. He went all the way to South Dakota, but her family had moved and left no forwarding address. He was devastated. He’d looked for her over the years but to no avail. Penny wasn’t the sort of person to put herself out there on the Internet. It was one of the things he had liked about her.
Instead, he realized later on, he had started seeking a sort of Penny incarnate: someone like her, someone with the essence of Penny, that he could find in other people. Someone like him, who marched to the beat of her own drummer, was slightly different, but perpetually at risk of being compromised by everyone around her.
In college freshman year, it had been a girl in his Intro to Psychology class who sat at the back and observed everyone else in a similar way to the one he did. He thought she stood alone in the crowd, but later realized, she had only been determining what group she wanted to join and how she could adapt to it. Within a month, she was pledging a sorority and moved to the front row after getting highlights. It was like watching someone vanish before his very eyes.
He dropped out of college after a semester. It didn’t interest him. He preferred being outdoors, performing hard labor, to being in some overly air-conditioned room, listening to someone self-indulgently drone on endlessly about a myriad of seemingly irrelevant subjects. He got to see the world. Observe people.
Finally, he met a girl like Penny. Not a girl. A young woman, really. She worked at a gas station in Okeechobee. She lived at home and went to community college. Her boyfriend was unemployed and hung around her at work all day, filling her head with lies. Making her feel inadequate.
So she would think that she deserved little more than an empty life with him.
Taking her had been a simple thing. He went in one night, late, when she was finishing up the overnight shift—the boyfriend otherwise occupied. She didn’t know it, but he was seeing another girl. He asked if she wanted a ride home.
She hesitated. She wasn’t foolish. If he were old, unattractive, or otherwise unkempt, it wouldn’t have worked. He said he thought that she was very pretty and wanted to make sure she got home safely. She was so deeply needful of some kind of reinforcement that wasn’t one hundred percent negative. He could feel the gratitude wafting off her in waves.
What did it take to get the rat out of the maze?
Simply picking it up and lifting it out isn’t enough. The rat has been conditioned by the corruption of human intervention playing God over its life to run in circles. It must choose to leave the maze of its own accord.
He realized that the later he found them, the harder it was. The less likely they were to leave. There were children and husbands involved. Sometimes he had to arrange for accidents to take place to rid the otherwise impenetrable obstacle of a domineering fiancé or father. It satisfied him. It was chivalrous, really.
In the case of the girl at the gas station, he’d had to get rid of the boyfriend. He was too controlling, too invasive. He’d never let her get away. He would continue to poison her from inside her own mind, with his whispered falsehoods about her worthlessness and inadequacy. He had simply disappeared one day. No one looked in the swamp where the gators had made short work of him. She thought he ran off with his other girlfriend.
By then, they’d grown close. He spent a lot of time with her. He suggested that they take a trip. She hesitated. What if he came back and she wasn’t there?
It was almost disturbing, her willingness, her desire to compromise her entire life for what was obviously such an undesirable situation. The man was dead, and she would have waited around, wasting the rest of her life, hoping.
He told her there was magic in the world. He told her that the world was a much larger place than she’d allowed herself to realize. He showed her what Penny had shown him all those years ago. After that, she would have believed anything he told her.
That was his favorite part. When they disappeared into the crack in the mountain, and it sealed itself up behind them, never to be seen again.
Brittany was interesting. It wasn’t her friends who influenced her. She found friends just like her: dissatisfied, bored, the victim of their own terrible and inadequate families. It was like a dream come true. He could take not just one but rob an entire town of its youths. Not literally, of course, but closer than he’d come before. They would scratch their heads, wondering, for years about what went wrong.
She was so lonely, so bored, she responded immediately. She was leery of strangers, but he was good looking, and she found the attention flattering, exciting even.
Her best friend was jealous that Brittany was getting all the attention for a change. He watched them at work when he went to their restaurant to eat lunch. Watched them clustered behind the counter, whispering.
He texted Brittany from a booth and watched her reaction even as she huddled over her phone with Crystal. Crystal, giving her loud, asinine advice like an expert. Condescending to mask her own envy. Lying. Crystal was even more inexperienced than Brittany was. He knew a virgin when he saw one.
Crystal was also deeply unhappy. Far more than a girl like Brittany could ever imagine, could ever even begin to contemplate. Crystal lived in a state of absolute squalor and abject despair with her strung-out mom and her strung-out mom’s junkie boyfriend. She kept herself looking presentable, probably by washing her clothes by hand in the sink and putting them on a clothesline out back to dry. Or the shower rod.
She shoplifted makeup from Walmart, always paying for just one thing with the money she stole from her mom’s purse to ease suspicion that she was shoplifting. She smoked pot in the woods with the football jocks. She talked a big game, but she was vulnerable inside.
He had a very flashy car, an old muscle car he restored because he liked working with his hands. He passed her walking on the side of the road one day, earbuds in, expression distant. He knew she was walking to the gas station that sold cigarettes to underaged girls. It was run by an older man who would tease them and give them a hard time but give them whatever they asked for if they played along.
He parked on the side. He waited. When he saw her coming closer, he got out of the car and leaned against the door, smoking a cigarette. He wore a tight white T-shirt and blue jeans. It was so easy to discern the fantasies of a young girl.
He felt, rather than saw, her staring at she approached: his car, his cigarette, his windswept hair. The pop song about unrequited love playing in her ears; the soundtrack to the movie she believed she was living in that moment. He looked up and gazed at her briefly, with his pensive, penetrating stare. He figured she would like that.
“You want one?” he asked, raising an eyebrow. He held out the pack like food to a wild animal. Getting her to come closer. He knew she would. He knew her bold act well.
“Sure,” she said immediately.
She came right up to him and brushed her hand against his when he lit the cigarette for her, his hand cupped around the flame. He smiled at her. She smiled back.
It was always easier, with the younger ones.
Brittany scanned the room. She needed a way to communicate with Crystal. She examined every crack and every crevice, every nook and cranny. From the floorboards to the walls, she found no vents or ventilation shafts, nor anything else she would conveniently find in a movie at just the right moment to allow her to escape and find her friend. She sat down heavily on the army cot, defeated.
Something occurred to her just then. It struck her the way inspiration is said to strike, like lightning. Except the lighting was in her brain.
She thought of the man she’d once thought was Peter and the way he seemed to control light, like even electricity operated at his behest. She shook off the thought. It was too much to process. If it was real, who knew what else he could do? Maybe he could strike them dead with a snap of his fingers.
She pushed the thought aside. It was just a coincidence, the thing with the lights. He knew the timing of the street lamps; he had planned it that way. Wasn’t he the one who had determined what time they should meet?
He convinced her he was magic, a wizard and a magician. Someone with a strange power all his own, the likes of which she’d never known. Someone who could take her far away to a better place than the one she’d always known.
But it wasn’t true. It was just a spell that he cast over foolish, young girls who didn’t listen to their teachers and parents about never talking to strangers. Girls like her, she thought, hating herself.
But there was no point in that now. Didn’t she hate herself enough in the course of her day-to-day existence? The one she had once resented and now fantasized about: when she fought with her mom, ate dinner with her family, procrastinated doing her homework. What she wouldn’t give to be doing that right now.
But maybe she could. If she could just be smart enough to get away…
Three times a day, he slid a tray through the slot and then boarded it back up again. The same tray. She didn’t eat off the tray; her food was on a paper plate. She lifted it off and pushed the tray back through the slot. Maybe he thought she would smash it and use the shards to escape or hurt herself.
Would he use a different tray for Crystal? Maybe. But probably not. Why would he?
She didn’t have any of her things—her phone, her wallet, her makeup: compact, eyeshadow palette, lip gloss—everything that had been her in bag when she left with him. When she’d woken up, her bag was nowhere to be found.
But he hadn’t touched her. He hadn’t gone through pockets on her clothes, and even if he had, he probably wouldn’t have found the secret inside pocket in her denim jacket where she h
id clandestine things like weed, cigarettes, a lighter.
He wouldn’t have taken notice of the receipt she had from the gas station where she and Crystal bought their cigarettes. The receipt and the little golf pencil to sign for credit card purchases because the gas station and its owner were old and still made you sign for things. The pencil Brittany had taken aimlessly, without thinking, because she liked to take things. Not shoplift, the way Crystal did. It made her sweat and break out into hives, imagining inevitably getting caught and what her mother would say when she was.
But small things, things left unattended: pens, matchbooks, lighters. Her lighter had been Crystal’s mother’s boyfriend Randall’s, and she’d taken it the first time she ever went over to Crystal’s. It had a naked woman on the side of it, and the sight never failed to thrill her and make her feel like a very different person than the one she was. Now it filled her with a dull and inarticulate horror.
She took out the receipt and flattened it against the old stone floor. In tiny letters, she wrote crystal it’s brittany. Beyond this, she felt stumped. She needed a plan. But she had none. Finally, she wrote, write back if u get this.
Establishing communication with her friend would be the first step. Then they could come up with something together. Crystal was smart. She’d have an idea. She always did.
Brittany scrounged around for something to adhere the receipt to the bottom of the tray. He would hold it by the sides and wouldn’t notice the flat piece of paper stuck flat to the middle. There was no reason for him to turn the tray over with food on it.
She realized that Crystal might not have something to write with and breathed in deep. She felt overwhelmed, frustrated, and angry all at once. She needed to come up with a plan now, in case this was her only chance to communicate with Crystal.
There was a noise at the door. The plywood pulled back, scraping over the floor. She glanced up quickly as a startled deer. The tray slid through the slat: two identical plates of mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, and chicken nuggets. One for her and one for Crystal.
