Runaway Girls

by Skylar Finn

  Guns drawn, we made our way around the back. The dead grass was trampled at the far edge off cleared-off space. There was a narrow path beaten down into the brush that led off into the woods. We went toward it, moving as silently as possible.

  There was no telling how long it would take to locate the lab, assuming we were even on the right path—literally. There were hundreds of hollows in the hills and the woods to hide all sorts of unseemly activity. My grandfather and uncle had brewed moonshine in the hills behind the family property in their demon days, when they were young men. Such places were selected precisely to avoid human detection, especially by authority figures. We might be out here all day and never uncover a thing.

  The weather seemed conflicted about what it wanted to be. Was it March that went in like a lion and out like a lamb? The late winter, now early spring sun struggled to break free in the gray, cloudy sky. It didn’t feel particularly cold, but the lightest, almost imperceptible flakes of snow drifted down from the sky over the stark bare limbs.

  The path led deep into the woods. We were surrounded by gray, dead underbrush on either side. There was a stark hush over the forest as if it held its breath and watched us to see what we would uncover.

  We walked for about twenty minutes before I smelled it. Not the cooking of drugs, but the smell of something gone terribly wrong. It was the smell of smoke, and I detected it long before I saw the fire. Harper smelled it, too. We broke into a dead run.

  By the time we reached the silver airstream trailer buried deep within the heart of the forest, it had erupted into flames. It was so far off the path that we might never have found it had it not caught on fire. Daniel Hayes had just stumbled down the front steps, pulling off what looked like an old gas mask he probably found at a rummage sale and coughing ferociously. He bobbed and weaved his way toward us away from the trailer, collapsing onto his knees just as he reached the spot in the clearing where we stood.

  I gripped him by the arm, not to apprehend him but to drag him away as quickly as possible. “It’s going to blow,” I said to Harper.

  He grabbed Hayes by his other arm, even as he struggled against us. “Katy,” he choked. “I have to go back!”

  The combination of the volatile chemicals and his obvious cluelessness was a highly combustible one. Going back for Katy meant all three of us getting blown to smithereens. If she had any sense, she’d gotten out right when Daniel did. If she hadn’t, I didn’t want to leave her, but we had about thirty seconds to get clear of the lab before it blew sky high.

  Hayes was weak from smoke inhalation combined with whatever chemicals he had inhaled while working in a close space with poor ventilation and a dime-store gas mask. He struggled but was weak as a kitten. With the combined force of both myself and Harper, we were able to drag him twenty yards away when a sickening crack echoed through the air.

  There was a dead tree lying on its side and we pulled him down behind it beside us. I tugged my coat up over my head, glancing over the top of the fallen tree as I covered my head with my arms.

  The trailer buckled in half, launched briefly into the air before literally crashing and burning on the frost-bitten ground beneath. Smoke billowed into sky above. The toxic stench of chemicals filled the clearing. Between us on the ground, Daniel Hayes let out a miserable howl. Beneath his jacket, Harper called it in. The last gamble of Daniel Hayes went up in smoke.

  After the firefighters, paramedics, local police, and several agents arrived, Daniel Hayes sat in the back of an ambulance wrapped in a thick gray blanket. He looked shell-shocked. Katy Lipman was nowhere to be found in the surrounding woods. Either she’d taken the opportunity to fake her own death and flee on foot, or she had perished in the explosion. The fire was still being extinguished, and it would be a while before anyone was able to closely peruse the remains to discover if she’d escaped the trailer.

  After he’d gotten oxygen, Harper and I questioned Daniel before they took him away. Once they looked over him at the hospital, he’d be going away for a long time. But that still didn’t settle the question of where his daughter was—the only question that mattered now.

  “Why were you trying to cook on your own?” I said. “You clearly didn’t know what you were doing. Was it for the ransom for Brittany?”

  “It’s not a ransom.” He broke down in tears. He emitted a dry, pathetic sob. “This was supposed to be our last big score. We were going to fly to the Caymans.” He gazed off above my head into the woods, watching as his dreams and all his plans went up in smoke.

  “So this has nothing to do with your daughter?” said Harper skeptically.

  “I don’t know,” he said helplessly. “I thought maybe someone knew what we were doing and took her for drugs—Randall always used to say there are people strung out enough that they’ll ransom somebody for drugs—but I don’t think that was it.”

  “What makes you say that?” I asked.

  “I found something. The morning after she went missing. I didn’t think anything of it. It wasn’t a ransom note or anything like that. I thought Katy left it for me, to be honest.”

  “What was it?” asked Harper.

  He reached into the pocket of his down vest and pulled out his wallet. He pried a thin slip of paper from the billfold and held it out with a shaking hand. I was sure he had long destroyed any forensic evidence we might have gathered from it, but I pulled my gloves from my pocket and slid them on before I took it.

  The paper was odd, like parchment. It was thin and crumpled and yellowed with age, but rather than an artifact from a previous time, it was as if someone had taken typing paper and purposely aged it. It could be done by dripping tea on it and leaving it in the sun to dry. The writing was spikey and similarly old-fashioned as if written with a quill or a fountain pen. It looked like fragments from a poem. The same poem in both the girls’ notebooks.

  To see the townsfolk suffer so

  From vermin, was a pity.

  And folks who put me in a passion

  May find me pipe after another fashion.

  If he'd only return the way he went,

  And bring the children behind him.

  And on the Great Church Window painted

  The same, to make the world acquainted

  How their children were stolen away;

  And there it stands to this very day.

  “You didn’t find this odd?”

  “I don’t know,” he said miserably. “I really thought it was Katy. She wanted kids, and I thought it was about that. I didn’t know Brittany was missing yet. I didn’t know until Cynthia called me, hysterical, and by then, I’d forgotten about it. I put it in my wallet so no one else would see it. I asked Katy about it last night, and she had no idea what I was talking about.” His voice broke, thinking of Katy. He buried his face in his hands.

  I’d like to think he was, in that moment, thinking of his daughter, too. But I’d probably be thinking too much of him.

  21

  The End of Winter

  We got quite a bit out of Daniel Hayes before they took him away. They were not experienced drug dealers. They were more like a bumbling duo whose business was failing so badly they tried to make a side hustle for themselves to keep things afloat. When it became apparent how much more money there was in meth than there was in construction in an economically depressed area, they naturally concluded it was more logical to keep pushing until they could afford to bail on their lives here and never return.

  Their operation relied on leaning heavily on someone who did know what they were doing, the less-than-reliable Randall, whose expertise and contacts in the drug world they deferred to. Randall made for a haphazard partner at best, but as long as they kept him in pills, he was compliant.

  There were no prints on the note, which didn’t surprise me. I bagged it and brought it to Brown, who brought new meaning to the expression if looks could kill.

  Brown was not happy with our digression into the woods. We told her Hayes had act
ed suspiciously under questioning, so we followed him. Mostly, she was unhappy that the Hayes meth angle in no way colluded with her Lombardo angle, which raised the possibility she had been leading the team in the wrong direction for days now. Brown didn’t want to acknowledge that. She couldn’t acknowledge that, or it would mean that her instincts and investigation had cost the girls precious time and possibly their lives. Either she had to pull a massive one-eighty and redirect the entire investigation, acknowledging her mistake—or potentially making the one that would, in fact, cost the girls their lives if it were the wrong one—or she could scapegoat us. She chose the latter.

  “All right, listen,” she said. “I’m not happy. I know you think you’re some kind of narcotics hotshot because of that bust a few years ago, St. Clair, but this is not what I asked of you. This is explicitly the opposite. But I can’t pretend this isn’t potentially legitimately related to the kidnappings.” She steepled her hands, deep in thought. “Do you think that the disappearance of both Brittany Hayes and Crystal Deakins is related to the illicit drug activity on the part of both their families?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I do.”

  “I agree,” said Harper. “Beyond a reasonable doubt.”

  “We’re sticking with Lombardo,” she said, “because that’s where my instincts lie. But I can’t take a risk on being mistaken and screwing the pooch on this one. So I want you to keep pursuing this angle and notify me if you see any shred of hard evidence that this is related to those girls. We tracked Lombardo to Pittsburgh. Manning and I are leaving tomorrow, along with six other agents. There will still be four agents here at headquarters. Don’t try anything stupid. Don’t be a hero.”

  The light snow gave way to rain. It rained steadily for the rest of the day. Without something as concrete as a ransom and a drop point, we had little to go on. Just cryptic notes from a madman transcribed by two hypnotized girls and left for an oblivious parental figure who thought the note was left by his mistress.

  Which begged the question, why leave the note for Daniel instead of Cynthia? If it was his objective to mock the parents of the victim, what significance did choosing Daniel over Cynthia have? Was it something particular known only to the kidnapper, or was there something specific about Hayes?

  Harper and I discussed it at the coffee shop, in the back room empty of any other customers besides us. Between us was a printed copy of Robert Browning’s The Pied Piper of Hamelin. Seated next to the non-working fireplace, we clutched steaming hot mugs of coffee and listened to the rain stream down the windows outside. It seemed like the end of winter, but winter could be deceptive.

  “Why does he keep referencing this specific poem?” said Harper. “We can assume he’s referencing himself as the Pied Piper. But why?”

  “In the original poem, the Piper offers to free the town of rats,” I said. “He asks for a thousand guilders in exchange, and the mayor of the town agrees. But when he performs the task and it comes time to collect, the mayor balks. Seeing that all he did was play a little tune, he makes the false assumption that anyone could have done it. A thousand guilders sounds reasonable when your entire town is being decimated by vermin, and irrationally steep once all the vermin are gone. Since they drown in the river, he knows the rats won’t return. So he feels little remorse about reneging on the deal. What will he do? Bring the rats back from the dead? They offer him dinner and to get him drunk along with fifty guilders instead, but the piper isn’t having it. Instead of the rats, this time, he plays for the children. They fall under his spell, and he leads them away, never to be seen again. It’s the origin of the saying about paying the piper. If you don’t, you get your due.”

  “So the children, in this instance, are Brittany and Crystal,” said Harper. “And the parents who didn’t pay are Daniel Hayes and April Deakins.”

  “In theory, yes. But paid for what? I don’t know that the vermin, in this instance, are so literal. This is someone who considers themselves more intelligent than any authority or higher power and probably has all his life. Smarter than his parents and teachers, smarter than God. Someone who has likely resented society and flouted its conventions, living on the fringe of it all his life. Someone who might think that a man like Daniel Hayes, a woman like Crystal Deakins, don’t deserve to have such beautiful children, only to neglect them. In the poem, the piper isn’t taking the children away simply to punish the townspeople. The parents. If that had been the case, it would have been much more difficult to lure them away to some mountain where they’d be cold and starve.

  “He seduces them,” said Harper. “He promises them a better life. A fantasy world filled with everything they’ve ever wanted.”

  “He convinces them that they’d be better off with him than they ever would with their parents,” I said.

  “And that’s how he got to them,” said Harper.

  “But who? Is it someone who knew the girls already? What was the connection between them?”

  “Each other? Their friendship? Their home life?”

  “Maybe all of these things,” I said. “Such a mind would have very specific criteria for who he took. He wouldn’t take anyone happy because they wouldn’t want to leave. He had to find girls who would be seduced by the idea of a better life.”

  “But the piper’s intention is also to punish,” said Harper. “So there must be a correlation with Hayes and Deakins. What was it about the parents that warranted punishing?”

  “They neglected their daughters for infidelity and narcotics,” I said. “But he would have to have some way of knowing that, of finding that out and targeting them.”

  “Do you think he was a customer?”

  “Someone this methodical is probably not simultaneously abusing hard drugs,” I said. “He’d get sloppy, careless. For him, the execution of his crime is the high.” My gaze wandered around the room as I spoke and stopped at the far window in the next room. It overlooked the front porch of the old house the shop was in, a wraparound porch overlooking the street. My view had been impeded the first time we came because there had been someone sitting there. A man in a camouflage hat. He’d been reading the newspaper—or pretending to—and then quickly looked away when I glanced at him.

  A man in a camo hat.

  I’d thought at the time it was merely our appearances. We were clearly out-of-towners, and likely to attract attention from the lifetime residents of the town. But there was something familiar about the memory of the man that only occurred to me now, triggered by being back in the spot where I’d first seen him: his build and what he wore.

  “Hang on a sec,” I said to Harper, jumping up from the table. I went through the former living room and parlor into the front of the shop opposite the front door. The barista boredly flicked through a magazine as she leaned against the counter.

  “Excuse me,” I said, and she glanced up curiously at the sound of my voice. “Do you get a lot of regulars here?”

  “Yeah, we got regulars,” she said, setting the magazine down on the counter. “It’s mostly regulars. Recently, there’s been a lot of gas and oil folks, too.”

  “Do you remember a man dressed in camo? Comes in here to read the paper?”

  She shook her head. “The only person who reads the paper on the regular here is a lawyer, not a hunter. Somebody like that, probably not a regular. Might be one of the gas and oil guys.”

  “Do you remember any of them specifically?”

  “Not really. They all kind of tend to blur together after a while. They might come in every day for a week or two while they’re working on the job, and then we never see them again.”

  I thought of the truck out front with the Louisiana plates. The call for the man named Pete in the pub who’d ordered a pizza. He wouldn’t use his real name.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Sure,” she said. “You find those missing girls yet?”

  “Not yet,” I said, hating myself for it even as I said the words.

  �
�Well, let me know if I can do anything to help.” She smiled.

  “Of course. Thank you.”

  Back at the table, I slid into the seat across from Harper. “It would appeal to him, the nature of such a job,” I said. “Remaining transient. Never having to settle permanently in one area or answer to anyone.”

  “It would also be an exceptionally easy way,” said Harper, “to commit a crime—and then vanish without a trace.”

  Brittany Hayes sat in the front of Dairy Queen, waiting for her stepfather to finish paying for their food. She twirled her hair around her finger and gazed out the window. Just another small town in a series of small towns. She wondered what it was like outside of them. She wondered how to get away.

  She knew she could leave for college, of course. That was what most people did. Hopefully, she wouldn’t end up one of the ones who came back after. No, she would never do that. It wasn’t like she was going to inherit Daniel’s business or something. He knew she had no interest in that, that it would never happen. If she were more like a son to him, maybe. But she was a girl, and he didn’t seem to expect much of her on the basis of that. No one did, she thought bitterly.

  She hated it here. She didn’t know if she could even wait for college. She thought she might shrivel up and quietly die if she did. Maybe there was some way to get away before then. But how? Maybe she could act. She could move away to L.A. with her mom and audition for a TV show. She could get legally emancipated. She’d read about kids doing that.

  But how could she become an actress here? There wasn’t even a community theater. No one cared if you did the school play. She’d have to go to New York or L.A., and her mother would never go for that.