by Skylar Finn
I glanced out at the river as we drove down the road to the Dairy Bar. It wasn’t usual for it to rain this much this time of year, but if it kept up like this for much longer, the road would soon be underwater.
When we got to the restaurant, the usual battalion of pick-up trucks crowded the parking lot. I glanced through the windows of each one, wondering if any held the Pied Piper. None had Louisiana plates—I checked before we went in, crouching next to each bumper to see. Harper caught my lead and checked the rest. Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, Georgia. No Louisiana. No one in camo, either.
A girl I’d never seen before with long, red hair was behind the counter. Her nametag read MARJORIE. There was a line of men waiting in the available seats against the wall to pick up lunch orders but no one at the register.
“Excuse me, Marjorie?” Harper approached the register and flashed her a thousand-watt smile. I could see her swoon from the door.
“Yes?” she said, batting her eyelashes at him.
“Is Dana working today?”
“No, she switched with me,” Marjorie said. “She wanted off to go to the Oil and Gas Festival?”
“Oil and Gas Festival?” Harper frowned. “Is that a thing?”
“It’s kind of a big deal,” said Marjorie. “I’m going like the second I get out of here.”
“Where’s that at?” he asked.
“The fairgrounds in Sistersville,” she said.
Nottingham. The river, the ferry. The old Wells Inn. The once-majestic boomtown. The site of Daniel Hayes’ doomed project. It seemed inevitable we would have to return there now.
“Do you know who she was going with?”
“Just a few girls from school,” said Marjorie. “Jenny Lundgren and them.” It was apparent that Jenny Lundgren was the kind of teen royalty so well-known that even we were expected to have heard of her.
“Okay, thank you, Marjorie,” said Harper. As we left, the door swung shut behind us, and the bells jingled.
Harper glanced up at the sky. “Think they’ll still go?”
The rain had let up for a moment. The sky was still an overcast gray, the air heavy with water. There was a chill in the air, but not one strong or sharp enough to keep a bored teenage girl with few annual outlets at home on a Friday night.
“I think they will,” I said. I glanced around at all the trucks again. “I’m beginning to think it’s important that we don’t just question Dana Haskell. I think we need to keep an eye on her.”
Dana shouldered her pink JanSport and looked at herself in the mirror one more time. She’d applied her favorite glittery-blue nail polish and even used her curling iron. She wore her favorite jeans and blue T-shirt, along with Brittany’s denim jacket. She was worried it wouldn’t be warm enough if it started raining again, so she layered a hoodie underneath it. That way, she could keep her hair dry, too.
Jenny Lundgren was coming to pick her up. Jenny Lundgren had a car. She didn’t know about her secret meeting with Park Sangsoon. The manager guy said he’d be waiting for her under the Ferris Wheel at eight o’clock. Jenny and her friends wouldn’t care if she needed to meet a guy. They’d probably think she was cool.
Even if he didn’t show up, she told herself, trying to keep at bay the intense feelings of disappointment that formed even considering such a possibility—even if he didn’t show up, she’d still get to hang with Jenny and them. For tonight, at least, she’d be popular. Maybe if she played her cards right, she could keep eating lunch with them every day. Maybe she could even keep eating with them after Brittany and Crystal came back.
She frowned. What if they didn’t come back? She shoved the thought aside. Of course, they would. Either the police or those agent people would find them, and they would come back. Maybe nobody even took them. Maybe they ran away.
And what would they find if they came back? Not meek little Dana, their apathetic sidekick. But the new Dana, who didn’t even need them. They would be sorry then.
“Dana! Your friends are here!”
She felt a happy thrill at the words. Your friends are here. She realized she hadn’t felt like Brittany and Crystal were her friends for a long time. Her feelings of foreboding all but forgotten, she fairly skipped down the stairs, out the front door, and down her driveway into the waiting night.
Crystal’s fingers fumbled over the note. She struggled to carefully pried it apart with her nails without tearing it. Brittany always folded up her notes the same way, like a delicate little origami bird she’d then flattened. Crystal always made fun of her for it, but the sight of it now filled her heart with joy.
crystal it’s brittany
write back if u get this
Crystal thought for a moment, sitting cross-legged on the floor. She pulled back her hair and tied it in a loose knot on her head. This was her going into concentration mode.
She didn’t know where their captor had gone or what he did during the day. She didn’t know if he remained, somewhere above their heads, ready to rush in at any second if he sensed something was awry. Maybe he was watching them somehow on a hidden camera.
She glanced around. Whatever their surroundings were, they were incredibly old. He couldn’t have had a surveillance system in place unless it was more cleverly hidden than she could possibly imagine. The room was pretty sparse aside from the narrow cot and milk crate in the corner, plus the bathroom across from her. She couldn’t hear any sounds above them. Maybe the distant sound of drills once or twice, but she had been sleeping and woke fretfully, unsure if the sounds had been real or something she’d heard in a dream.
She didn’t know how many more times she and Brittany would be able to communicate this way before he either caught on and punished them or did whatever he planned to do, which wasn’t going to be good. She needed to come up with a plan. Now.
We’re getting out of here, she wrote. Beneath this, she began to draw.
He cruised the fairgrounds, scanning the parking lot and all the happy families arriving with their children. The town was small, like most of them, but they poured in from surrounding towns up and down the river, happy to have something to do.
He had fed the girls before he left. Something was charming about the activity, something it reminded him of. When he had guinea pigs in elementary school, perhaps.
He didn’t see Dana yet, but no matter. He’d find her soon enough.
Having grown accustomed to the spacious and half-empty parking lots, the largely empty roads devoid of traffic, and the other benefits of small-town life, I was surprised to see the gathering crowd on the festival fairgrounds when we arrived. I’d forgotten what it felt like to disappear into a crowd.
We’d have our work cut out for us finding Dana, but if she was with “Jenny Lundgren and them,” there were only so many roaming knots of teenage girls to comb through. I felt sure that with the disappearances of Brittany Hayes and Crystal Deakins, a lot of folks were keeping their daughters—and their sons, for that matter—at home where it was safe. Even though I was starting to believe more and more that both girls had been at home when they disappeared—and that they’d once believed they were leaving of their own volition.
The smell of popcorn and hot dogs saturated the air. I closed my eyes. I could almost imagine myself as part of the crowd, here for no other reason than to take in this unique milieu of America life—the rides, the cotton candy, the cheap prizes in games priced ridiculously high. But when I opened my eyes, we were still in the same bleak, grim situation we had been all along: in a race against time to stop a maniac from taking another girl right from underneath our noses.
I wondered briefly how Brown and Manning were faring in Pittsburgh. It would be the one worse place to be than this one: the wrong place at the wrong time to catch the man responsible for these crimes.
Harper and I looked, as usual, starkly out of place with our surroundings, like twin shadows roaming among the living. “Want to get cotton candy?” he deadpanned.
“Yeah, ma
ybe we could go on the Tilt-a-Whirl after,” I said.
“I don’t think they have one,” he said. “I saw one of those swing rides, though.”
“Seen Dana yet?” I asked.
“Not yet,” he said. “But I pulled up some pictures of Jenny Lundgren. And also what appears to be ‘Jenny Lundgren and them.’ None of their socials are private.” He tilted his phone toward me so I could see a picture of the girls we were looking for. They were fairly generic and average-looking—the kind of girls who fold jeans at American Eagle on the weekends to get an employee discount on clothes—but to their peers, they were probably considered an intimidating bunch.
We had been pacing around the fairgrounds for twenty minutes when I caught a glimpse of what looked like Jenny Lundgren’s bobbing blond ponytail. I tapped Harper on the shoulder and nodded. He followed my gesture and fell into step with me. It felt oddly voyeuristic to tail a pack of young girls as if we were now seeing from the point of view of the Pied Piper himself.
“Harper, do you notice something?” I asked. The crowd was large enough and loud enough that I didn’t trouble to lower my voice. The girls were all deeply involved in both their conversation and their phones. My eyes scanned the tight clump of glittering nail polish, Vans, and skinny jeans.
“Where’s Dana?” he asked.
Dana set off into the night alone, her eyes wide, her senses overstimulated by the colors and lights and smells all around her. Jenny Lundgren had been deeply impressed when she said she was supposed to meet a boy by the Ferris Wheel and to “come find us after and tell us everything.” She hoped she would have something to tell.
And if he didn’t show? No big deal. She didn’t relish the thought of having to tell Jenny and her friends that the alleged boy she was allegedly meeting had stood her up. But at least she had friends now, she thought defiantly. True friends. Not girls who pretended to be her friends and then left her out of everything all the time.
Dana arrived at the Ferris Wheel and nervously checked the time on her phone. Families with kids waiting in line surrounded the ride. It was one of the rides everyone could go on regardless of height, unlike the more daring rides that most of her classmates favored. If Crystal were here, she would declare it “lame” and want to go on that Viking ship that went practically upside down and scared Dana to death. Only Brittany knew how much Dana loved the Ferris Wheel. Brittany would have gone on it with her, no matter what.
Or would she? Maybe she would have ditched her to go on a Crystal-favored ride, like the one where they raised you up and dropped you from a steep height like a form of torture. Leaving Dana to either go along with them like always or be by herself. Just like always. Then getting to the ride and finding out all three of them couldn’t be next to each other and she had to be next to a stranger.
Dana shook herself of these thoughts. Brittany would have gone with her. The thought caused her heart to twist painfully. She wished that Brittany was here now.
She remembered the last time they’d gone to a fair. It was before Crystal had moved here. Or maybe after, but she had the stomach flu. She couldn’t quite remember now. But she remembered the Ferris Wheel, taking them high into the air. She remembered laughing with Brittany at her side, their fingers coated in powdered sugar from the funnel cake.
What if Brittany didn’t come back? She’d never forgive herself for going to the Oil and Gas Festival with Jenny Lundgren. She felt a sharp pain in her chest like a knife. She barely forgave herself now.
Meeting a K-Pop star when her best friend was missing, what kind of person was she? She should be ashamed. She was ashamed. She would have to pray about this in church on Sunday. Even that wouldn’t make up for things she felt. She felt like—
Dana stopped berating herself and squinted in the darkness. From a distance, a man approached her, his strides purposeful. She couldn’t make out his features, but in his hands, he held a gift-wrapped box.
24
Lights Out
Brittany slid the tray toward her eagerly. The footsteps had thudded heavily toward her door just moments ago as she prayed that he hadn’t intercepted her note and come to kill her. She felt eagerly along the bottom of the tray, and relief flooded her as her fingers passed over the slightly raised area of her note affixed to the bottom.
She didn’t know yet whether it was the same one she’d sent before and Crystal had never seen it or if it was a reply to her own missive. She didn’t have time to check right away. She pried it loose from its makeshift adhesive of gum and removed her food from the tray. She slid it back underneath the door. Then she heard the footsteps recede away down the hallway as they normally did, and she breathed a deep and endless sigh of relief.
Brittany crouched on the floor, her food sitting ignored, as she carefully unfolded the note with her shaking hands. Crystal had written her back. She had found it. And not only had she found it, but Crystal also had a plan.
Brittany studied the diagram, her breath growing rapid, and her eyes widening. This was it. They were getting out.
We threaded our way through the crowd, past a wrench-throwing competition, engine display, pretty baby contest, and horseshoe-pitching contest. A bluegrass band played on a makeshift stage. The lighthearted atmosphere and upbeat vibe of the festival was totally at odds with the tension that we felt beneath it all.
I could not let this girl disappear right out from under me. I felt personally responsible for Crystal Deakins and the fact that she had vanished less than a day after we had spoken to her. If we had been able to catch her captor earlier and bring Brittany home, she would still be here, and Dana Haskell’s life wouldn’t be in danger.
No matter how quickly we followed the trail and found the breadcrumbs, it was never quick enough. The only acceptable result would be if we could predict the future and prevent any crime from taking place. I was haunted by the faces of more people lost to the passage of time and our inability to solve a crime instantly than I could count.
Harper touched my sleeve as we emerged through a dense cluster of people waiting in line for the Ferris Wheel, and I glanced up. My eyes landed on Dana Haskell, standing alone off to the side, and relief washed over me. She looked off somewhere into the darkness. We were about twenty yards away as we approached her from behind.
All at once, there was a sound like air rushing into a vacuum, like thunder after a bolt of lightning. I felt a peculiar rushing all around me as if the very air currents were a river that was sucking me downstream. All around us, lights popped and fizzled as the midway lights went out. The music was silenced as the amps blew out. A corridor of darkness spread behind us.
The families clustered around the Ferris Wheel tilted their heads and looked up at the sky. The lights of the Ferris Wheel went out from top to bottom, as if the darkness was something alive that spread and climbed its way down from the sky.
I thought maybe it was the storm, my mind grasping for the closest explanation at hand. But it had stopped raining hours ago. There was no longer a cloud in the sky. It was as if some unseen hand of darkness had emerged from the river and snuffed everything out in its path.
Dana squinted as the man approached her. At first, she had thought it was Park Sangsoon, and her heart had leaped with glee. Then, as the neon lights from the Ferris Wheel washed over his face, she saw it was only his American handler, and her heart fell.
“Hello, Dana,” he said when he reached her. “I’m so sorry, but Park Sangsoon got nervous about the crowd. He felt he would be recognized. He asked me to bring this for you with his most sincere apologies.”
“Oh,” she said, feeling guilty for her selfish reaction. She had no idea what it would be like to be a famous person. She thought that she was the only one who liked K-Pop around here, but for all she knew, a lot of people knew who J-14 was, and maybe they would have swarmed him. That would make anyone uncomfortable. “I understand.”
“He would still like to see you if you wish,” said the man. He had penetra
ting blue eyes, and there was something familiar about him, something she couldn’t quite place. It was his formal way of speaking, almost as if English was a second language to him. But his voice was unaccented, and he looked just like anybody else around here. Maybe a little bit more handsome, but not really because he was old. “He’s staying nearby. I could take you there if you like.” He handed her the box.
Dana glanced down at it. She opened it awkwardly, holding it with one hand and undoing the ribbon and wrapping paper with the other. She was curious about the gift, but also wanted to stall answering the man. She didn’t want to go anywhere with him. How dumb would it be to leave the festival with a strange man at night? She wanted very badly to believe he’d been sent here by Park Sangsoon, but what if he wasn’t? He could be anybody.
Dana lifted the lid and fitted the box neatly inside it, wadding the shining paper up with one hand. Inside was a beautiful silk scarf that matched the silk bomber jacket he’d given her the day before. It was a lovely gift, but it smelled weird. It smelled like chemicals.
Dana frowned, lifting the scarf to her face. What was wrong with it? It reeked. She had never smelled anything like it before. She inhaled deeply.
Dana didn’t see the lights go out. Her eyes were already closed, and she fell toward the earth, directly into the arms of the Pied Piper himself. He caught her neatly. The lights went out. He carried her off into the darkness.
He didn’t usually do this. He liked it when they came willingly. How could it be a crime if it was always their choice? He had to make an exception for Dana. Dana didn’t know about her mom and what she was secretly getting up to when she wasn’t baking cookies for the PTA. Dana thought she was happy. She wasn’t reckless like Crystal or bold like Brittany. Did that mean she didn’t deserve a chance?
