Runaway Girls

by Skylar Finn

  Harbor had paid him to shoot at us that day at the greenhouse. The man had a serious meth habit and took the money, no questions asked.

  It was because of David that Harbor had first seen Brittany Hayes. David was buying from Katy Lipman in the parking lot of a Dairy Queen. He said Harbor came out and told him he had “seen love inside.” He said he noted at the time that the only female in the restaurant was a young girl and felt vaguely disturbed at the notion but otherwise didn’t think much of it. He said he figured that Harbor said he’d “seen love,” not fallen in love, David had reasoned. And anyway, Harbor was a weird guy besides. Maybe he just meant he wanted a daughter of his own.

  I snorted when I got to this line in the interview. People would come up with any amount of insane, inarticulate crap to justify their being passive background bystanders when something heinous was clearly taking place right in front of their faces. If we persecuted bystanders when we persecuted offenders, there’d be no one left in society.

  Harbor had an ordinary, non-descript childhood growing up in an ordinary suburb in southern California. He went to school, made passable grades, nothing spectacular. Didn’t participate in school sports or any school-related function or activity. He didn’t stand out in any way whatsoever. He was basically invisible.

  He enrolled in a local community college after high school graduation, dropped out midway through his first semester, and that’s when the details became spotty and hard to track. People who live off the grid can easily do so in an era where they can find a sublease of a sublease on Craigslist, living in a home whose owner has no record or knowledge that they ever lived there. If they get paid under the table in cash, on paper, they don’t make enough even to warrant paying taxes. They can easily drift from place to place with no one being aware that they exist, which had probably been the case for most of his life beginning in childhood.

  His driver’s license was from California, but I had no doubt in my mind he had lived in at least a dozen states, probably more. He had no record of priors, or any record at all, which was virtually unheard of. Most sociopathic criminals who commit serious felonies started early committing smaller crimes: B&Es, vandalism, petty theft. They start out exhibiting minor signs of social deviance as the problem gradually escalates over the course of a lifetime before blossoming in adulthood. But Donald Harbor had remained invisible. Invisible and undetected.

  The reason it was so easy for Harbor to get away with what he did was that he never used force to get what he wanted. He convinced his victims that it was their idea to follow him. That he wasn’t taking them but liberating them. If he only went after adult women, he probably could have gotten away with it for the rest of his life and gone entirely undetected. It was only the fact that they were young girls who were viewed as incapable of giving consent to an adult man who had raised a red flag in Brittany, Dana, and Crystal’s case.

  The grim reality was that even an especially stalwart DA would have difficulty prosecuting a man who had persuaded a group of women to live in an unlocked basement. Mr. Harbor did nothing wrong; his defense attorney would have said. They were free to leave at any time.

  I suspected this was part of the thrill for him, the fact that they went with him “willingly.” He likely considered himself a man apart, someone above and beyond the ordinary and pedestrian minds around him. One of those freaks who reads Nietzsche and thinks the Superman is about him.

  He wouldn’t have considered himself a kidnapper, but a hero: not unlike the protagonist of the narrative poem after whom he’d christened himself. The Piper is punishing the corrupt adults around him who revealed the corruption when they refused to honor their promise and compensate him for the work he did that saved their town. He doesn’t ransom the children in exchange for the original agreed-upon sum. Instead, he takes them. He doesn’t hurt them. He doesn’t want to punish the children for the sins of their parents. He takes them to a better place, knowing they’ll never even want to return. And that the town will be left to suffer their loss always.

  I thought of Daniel Hayes and April Deakins. Was he attempting to punish the corrupt adults whom he believed didn’t deserve their own children? To lead them away with his words, his musical pipe to a place the adults could never follow him? Knowing that the worst and most final punishment for any parent was to lose their children.

  For a man who fashioned his life after literature, a man of letters as he probably considered himself, even the location would have appealed to him. A small village like Hamelin on a river, near the mountains. He probably always chose a place like this one.

  At this point, it was always hard for me to stop. This was the point where I wanted to get out a map and chart every small town on a river near a mountain. To trace the path of Donald Harbor, past, present, and future. To find him and whatever girls he might have hidden away—the forgotten ones, the neglected ones. The runaways.

  But it was here the file ended. The seam in the mountain sealed itself shut. There was no further information on Donald Harbor, or whoever he might be pretending to be today. It was as if he—and Crystal Deakins—had simply vanished.

  So I closed the file and put it in the locked metal filing cabinet in the back corner of my office. It was symbolic, this cabinet. When I closed the drawer and locked it with my key, in my mind, I did the same. I always hoped it would be enough to keep the nightmares at bay, though it rarely ever was. It didn’t have a label, the file. But in my mind, I referred to it as The Ones Who Got Away.

  It would be a nice fairy-tale ending if we always caught the bad guy, justice got served, and everybody went home safely. It would be something I could tie a ribbon around and wrap up with a neat velvet bow. It would keep me from having the nightmares I had at night. But it wasn’t reality.

  Two girls who had gone missing and might have disappeared forever, never to be seen by their families again, were home safe in their beds. It should have been enough. But it wasn’t. Because when I tried to fall asleep at night, I wouldn’t envision Brittany at dance practice or Dana serving soft serve. I would picture Crystal Deakins, disappearing on the river and wonder what became of her.

  Six months later, I received an email.

  Dear Agent St. Clair,

  I don’t know if people do this usually, but I wanted to let you know how I was doing. I will always think of you as the person who saved me from a place where I really and truly thought I might die. I will never forget that, as long as I live. It might be weird, or you might not care, but I wanted to do it anyway.

  My stepdad went to jail, which I expected to feel bad about but don’t. He was never around, anyway, so things are basically the same now as they were before. It’s harder on my mom. It took me a while, but I convinced her she should sell our house so we could move. I told her it was because I had so many bad memories there from being taken, but the truth was, I could tell she had too many bad memories there, too.

  I asked if we could go to California so I could try to become an actor. I expected her to laugh in my face, but she agreed. She said she thought a change would do us good. We came here in the summer, and it’s going pretty good so far. She’ll probably become a dance mom—you know, like the TV show?—but who knows? Maybe she can be happy here, too.

  I’ve never seen her this way: happy. She used to take a lot of pills, but she doesn’t anymore. She started playing tennis with some of the other moms in our apartment complex who brought their kids out here for pilot season. I got an audition for a Disney show, so keep your fingers crossed for me.

  I keep in touch with Dana, but to be honest with you, she doesn’t have that much time for me. Or she doesn’t make that much time for me. She got really popular when we went back to school and started eating lunch with Jenny Lundgren and those girls, and she didn’t really have time for me. I could have eaten with them, but I didn’t feel like being around people just then. Everything they talked about just sounded stupid after everything that happened—shallow or somethin
g. I would listen and zone out. After a while, I started sitting in the courtyard by myself. I wasn’t sad about it or anything. I just realized that if the choice was between eating alone and Jenny Lundgren, I liked to be alone.

  Dana never really fully understood what happened to us. Or someone explained it to her, and she chose not to. I get it, I guess. She was only at the hotel place for a couple of hours and she was unconscious the whole time. She thought she was going there to meet some Korean pop star (???) because I guess that’s what he told her. Dana would be too scared to meet some man from the Internet even if she thought he was our age, so I guess it makes sense, kind of.

  But I thought what we went through would make us close forever, and instead, it ended up being the complete opposite. I guess some people don’t want to remember. I guess they’d rather just forget.

  I will never forget what you did for me, and I hope that you don’t either.

  Yours truly,

  Brittany

  I imagined them happy on a beach. Cynthia sober and Brittany launching a successful acting career. Dana surrounded by friends, no longer the third wheel. Blocking out all her darkest memories so they wouldn’t haunt her. I wished I could do the same. It was a nice image to keep in my head at night when I tried to fall asleep.

  By a strange coincidence, two weeks to the day after I received Brittany’s email, I also got a postcard. It was unsigned, undated, and the only thing on it was a bright-pink lipstick mark, underneath which was written in swirly, cursive letters: SWAK. Sealed with a kiss. The front depicted a sunny beach with blue water and palm trees. The handwriting was familiar. I’d once seen it in the back of a spiral-bound Mead notebook.

  I hoped she was okay. I like to think of her out there somewhere, lying on a pristine beach in the sand, wearing heart-shaped sunglasses. The abuse and neglect she suffered at the hands of the person she was closest to, the one she loved the most, a distant memory. I hoped the man who took her away was long gone from her life and she’d figured out a way to make it on her own.

  These are the fairytales I tell myself to sleep at night. It’s the music of my own piper, carrying me across the river of wakefulness and into the land of dreams, just on the other side of the mountain.

  Thank you so much for taking the time to read my story!

  Writing has always been a passion of mine and it’s incredibly gratifying and rewarding whenever you give me an opportunity to let you escape from your everyday surroundings and entertain the world that is your imagination.

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  Again, thank you so much for letting me into your world. I hope you enjoyed reading this story as much as I did writing it!

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