Throwaway Girls

by Andrea Contos

  And I want to tell him if he helped hurt Willa, Madison, the girl by the lake or any like her, I’ll show him no more mercy than he showed them.

  Jake jams his key in the lock but it won’t turn. He yanks it free and tries another.

  When the third doesn’t work, his foot connects with the door hard enough to rattle the frame.

  It takes two more kicks to finish the job, until the frame is splintered and the door limps open.

  Jake shoves his way inside and I sprint from the woods until I can press myself against the side of the cottage.

  My hearing strains for any sign of movement but there’s only the rush of wind. Then the door shifts and I freeze, my hands fisted.

  Twenty seconds pass and there’s no Jake, and I can’t stomach waiting any longer. Because if he is involved, and Madison is in there, he could be killing her right now.

  I creep toward the door until the warmth of the cottage yawns from the gaping frame, carrying the scent of cinnamon and vanilla and, beneath that, something sharper.

  I twist inside, my back flat to the wall. The room is barren, the plank-wood floor interrupted only by an iron stove anchoring the corner.

  Jake can’t be far. And if he comes back, there’s nowhere to hide.

  It’s only six steps to the hallway that leads to a small bathroom on the right, a bedroom beyond that.

  The bed is the first sign this cottage is anything more than a forgotten relic, but it’s empty. Bedding smoothed and flat.

  I don’t want to go in that room. I want to run from this place and scrub the feel of it from my skin.

  I rush through the hallway, past the kitchen and into the bedroom, but I can’t miss the sight of Jake. Can’t unsee him crouched near the kitchen floor, his head in hands.

  I’ve barely cleared the edge of the bed when his heavy footsteps echo through the house. There isn’t enough time to find a decent hiding spot, so I shove myself beneath the bed, which sits so low I barely fit. The slats hang an inch from my heaving chest, and the slow, suffocating creep of claustrophobia crawls over me.

  I squeeze my eyes shut, try not to imagine that this —

  This is exactly what a coffin might feel like.

  The footsteps stop and I can’t see them, but I’d swear they’re only inches away.

  “Caroline?”

  Jake’s voice cuts through the darkness and I force my eyes open because if I’m going to die here, I might as well see it coming.

  But it’s not death that greets me when I do. It’s a small box, wedged between the slats.

  “Caroline?”

  His steps are whisper light. I count them: one, two, then three and four.

  A ringtone pierces the silence and I barely stifle my yelp while Jake mutters, “Jesus,” and then a second later, “Not now, Preston.”

  I want to sigh in relief but I’m too afraid to move, even when Jake’s voice trails toward the hallway.

  “No, she’s not here.

  “No, and I broke my fucking door down, asshole.”

  My shoulder blades press into the floor as I shift right, closer to the wood box. I should wait until Jake’s gone, but I can’t stop my hand from reaching, my fingertips brushing over the grooves of worn wood.

  “What did she say?

  “No, tell me word for fucking word.”

  I flinch at the anger in his voice, at the feeling of being hunted. I let it sink into me, memorize the feel of it, so when the time comes, I’ll remember what it was like for Willa, for Madison, for Becca and Tracy and maybe even the girl by the lake.

  I’ll remember, so I can make all of this right.

  The quiet catches me off guard, and the realization that Jake has stopped talking creeps over me.

  I don’t know if he’s ten feet away or two. I don’t know if I should trust him or fear him.

  The smallest glow of light spills over the floor, and understanding hits so fast my instincts take over before my brain can finish puzzling out why.

  I fumble for the phone in my pocket, jamming the power button just as the first vibration hits.

  There’s a weighted pause, and then Jake’s footsteps echo deeper into the room, every step pushing my heart rate higher.

  A closet door creaks, the light flickering on.

  Hangers rattle and slide on their metal rod.

  And then the door slams shut, and I swear the wood splinters.

  The room goes dark and I wait.

  I wait until the sound of his presence fades, until it’s only silence and the chill of wind rushing through the broken front door.

  I wait until I can’t any longer, and my fingers grip tight to the hard edges of the box. My hand stings with cuts and scrapes from my fall in the woods, and even in the dark, my palm looks smeared with blood.

  I pull and the box slides toward me, grating where it scrapes against the wood slats, but no less stuck.

  My fingers travel over the edges, to the top, when they hit a small ridge, and I follow it until it’s smothered by the weight of the mattress. It’s a stupidly simple design — a flat plank screwed into the lid, the sides extending far enough to rest on the bed slats, holding the box between them.

  I wrench my arm to the side and grasp tight to the bottom, twisting with as much force as I can muster, until the left end of the plank holds by just a corner.

  I wait again, this time for courage.

  Because the longer I lie here, near this place where it all started, the more certain I am I don’t want to know what this box holds.

  I yank it free, so hard the lid pops open and showers me in gold and silver.

  My hand closes around the objects in my palm, and the shapes are unmistakable. The circle of a ring, the sharp point of an earring.

  Next to me, Madison’s ring glints in the moonlight that bleeds beneath the bed.

  Something shifts against my neck, and the second I touch the links and the delicate charm they hold, I know exactly what it is.

  Whose it is.

  I’ve memorized every intricate edge and depression, every curve of the iris’s downturned petals.

  I know what it is, because it matches mine.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  I know where Madison is.

  I know where Madison is and I know where Willa died, and now the box that holds proof bounces in Mountain Man’s console as his truck climbs over the back roads that lead to the peninsula with the twisted tree.

  To where he’ll drop me off before he heads, with evidence in hand, to the police.

  They didn’t believe me when I called, when Harper answered even though I dialed Brisbane. Condescension seeped through every word as he told me my claims were crazy, when he insinuated I could find myself criminally responsible for filing a false report.

  But I didn’t make up the five pairs of earrings, four necklaces, and three rings in that box. I didn’t imagine lying on the floor, gathering them all so I wouldn’t leave behind evidence, so I wouldn’t deny whoever owned those pieces of jewelry the right to be avenged.

  And I didn’t pretend to stand in that cabin, clutching that wooden box to my chest, staring at the panel that led to the attic.

  I screamed Madison’s name. I promised I would bring help.

  I shouldn’t have promised. Because there’s no rope or chain to make the stairs descend. No furniture to move so I can reach. No trees to climb or ladders to scale.

  I know she’s there, even though she never screamed back.

  She has to be, because nothing else makes sense.

  I couldn’t see the twisted tree from the ground floor, but Willa’s clues, they led me there, to the place where it all started.

  She wouldn’t have lied. Willa never lied. Not until the day she told me she had to leave but made up the reasons why.

 
I stumbled from the cottage, the broken door slamming open and closed in the wind.

  I didn’t know how much hope I held on to, how much of me still believed Willa was alive, until her necklace touched my skin.

  I didn’t scream. Definitely didn’t cry. I’m nothing but the cold numbness that burrows deeper with every step.

  That numbness led me out the door and into the open sky, and just when I thought I’d gotten something wrong, that Madison’s ring — his souvenir — might be here but she was not, I saw it.

  The attic. The dormer in the back. I couldn’t see the twisted tree from the ground, but the attic would lift you higher, high enough to see over the cliff’s edge.

  From there, Willa could see.

  Madison can see, if she’s still breathing.

  But the police aren’t coming and I haven’t saved her.

  But I’ve given her murderer enough time for Harper to warn him.

  And since I can’t get to her, I’ll bring her murderer to me.

  Mountain Man says this is Thomas Monaghan’s hunting ground. The side of the lake where girls go missing and no one cares. And out here, there’s no one to see even if they did.

  We drive instead of walking this time, past empty lots where houses once stood. Crumbling garages and the battered remnants of gravel driveways.

  I remember them. Tiny one-story homes and laundry lines in the backyard that were visible from my perch in the tree. Mountain Man says they’re all gone now, bought up and torn down.

  My dad was furious when some regulatory issue blocked the sale of a string of them years ago because Higgins Lake is actually a reservoir constructed by the US Army Corps of Engineers and owned by the local power company. Now, I think he’d be relieved.

  Bad juju, he’d call it. Negative karma or something with his chakra.

  I wonder if he’s ever realized how close he was to losing me that day, and if he’ll ever know Willa was the thing that brought me back.

  Mountain Man’s truck lurches to a stop and he doesn’t even put it in park.

  I need to get out of the car. I need to be ready when Aubrey gets here. But my last tie to Willa is in the box that’s smeared with my blood.

  It holds the last thing she wore, when she was still alive.

  A gun appears, lying quietly on Mountain Man’s wide palm, blocking my view of the box.

  This is part of the agreement. I give him the box to take to the police, he gives me the gun. I don’t even know his name and he hasn’t offered it.

  He talks me through the safety, the trigger, the clip.

  If he’s got any qualms about teaching a seventeen-year-old girl how to operate a gun, he doesn’t show it.

  But I don’t need the lesson. While Dad sent me to passive-resistance training to learn how to defuse situations, Mom signed me up for Krav Maga self-defense. And then for shooting lessons.

  I nod along anyway, until my hand sinks beneath the weight of the gun, and then I jump from the car without looking back.

  His headlights bounce away, and then I’m alone in a forest where insects have long since stopped chirping and buzzing, and there’s no rustle of leaves where animals scurry past. No one wants to be in the place where a beautiful girl once lay lifeless on the shore.

  My hand sags with the solid weight of the gun, the ridges of it cutting into my raw flesh. It feels right, this kind of pain. It feels like living.

  I tuck the gun into my back pocket after triple checking the safety like Mountain Man thinks he taught me, and then I text Aubrey before I creep through the fields toward where her car will be soon.

  She’s been waiting down the road at the liquor store because I wouldn’t tell her exactly where to go until I knew Step One was complete. Having her sit in a car near Thomas Monaghan’s playground was not an option.

  Ten minutes later she eases up the road that once served as someone’s driveway. My memory is blurred, but I remember passing an old farmhouse the day my dad sent me to explore while he toured houses with his developer, telling me to come back in an hour. I nodded, even though I had no intention of coming back at all.

  But the wooden fence that trails along the property line — broken, bent and failing in some parts, strong and sturdy in others — tells me this may be the same place.

  My eyes water at the assault from Aubrey’s headlights until she kills them, and she yelps when I knock on her window.

  The window slips down and she hisses, “You almost gave me a heart attack,” but her expression softens the longer she looks at me.

  I hold out my hand. “Give me your keys.”

  She practically stumbles out of the car and hands them over without protest, which is how I know exactly how terrible I look right now.

  Minutes later I’ve tucked her car into the camouflage of overgrown shrubs and marked the spot with a branch shoved into the dirt.

  I hand her back her keys, and mine. “Look for the stick if you need a marker. Your car is facing out so you won’t even have to reverse. If something goes wrong and you need a different escape, my car is down the road. Right hand side. Look for the big pile of boulders and go right about five feet. And listen, you’ll know when the time is, but you can’t stick around, okay? You could get hurt.”

  I don’t look at her. I can’t. Aubrey is amazing with makeup, and I don’t want to see how accurately she followed my instructions.

  But she’s looking at me, and I read everything in her voice when she whispers my name.

  I shake my head. “It’s better if you don’t know. C’mon.”

  I call Jake on the way back to the tree and ask him to meet me there. I have no idea how long it will take him to get here, or what he may have been doing while I set this all up. And I can’t let myself consider I may have figured this out too late. I pretend I don’t notice the way he’s trying to ask me if I’ve been to his cabin. If I know about his cabin.

  If he’d just say he was there, if he’d just be honest, I wouldn’t have to do this.

  I wouldn’t have to be the person who forces him to face the thing he fears most.

  But he doesn’t. He makes me describe the area three times, the tension in his voice ratcheting higher the longer we talk until he finally resorts to pleading. I don’t understand. That’s what he says more than anything. I don’t expect him to.

  I don’t want him to.

  If he understands why this place, why now, why I won’t just get in my car and go somewhere safe, then he knows all of it. He knows about the box beneath the bed and the attic where girls die. He knows exactly who his dad is, and everything I thought I knew about Jake Monaghan is wrong.

  We reach the little clearing and Aubrey’s silence is a living thing, and then she says, “Okay.” It’s more to herself than me. She’s given up on trying to get me to explain. “Where do you want me?”

  I fixate on the trodden grass, right where I found a discarded girl two years ago. “You’ll just need to lie there and …”

  “Pretend to be dead.”

  I nod because I can’t do anything else, and her clothes rustle as she lowers herself to the hardened ground.

  “Caroline, I need you to tell me if this looks right. If I did a good job with the makeup. I tried to do the bruising like you said, but I’m Brown so they don’t look the same, you know?” She pauses. “Caroline?”

  She’s full of shit. Aubrey doesn’t stop in the middle of a production to ask the audience if her performance looks right. And she knows damn well her makeup looks fantastic. She’s just forcing me to see her.

  My stomach heaves the second I do, the vision of her knocking into me so hard my body folds onto itself.

  I know she’s alive. That she’s breathing and touching me and the girl with the bruised neck and sunken eyes is just an act. But it’s not an act for Willa, and it’s her body I see superi
mposed on Aubrey’s when I close my eyes.

  Then she’s off the ground, tucking my hair behind my ear, her fingers frigid against my skin. “Talk to me. Tell me what’s going on. Please, Caroline.” Her voice breaks and it’s the one thing that can snap me back into focus.

  I shoot up straight and do my best family picture day smile. “I’m okay. Don’t cry, all right? It’ll streak your makeup.”

  I’m not making her feel better. She’s breathing so hard her shoulders show it, and her lips are pulled into a tight line, but she takes her spot on the ground anyway, and within moments she’s still.

  Jake’s Rover rockets up the path, his headlights morphing from a faint flicker to a piercing glare that cuts through the overgrowth. In this silence, I can hear for miles.

  I told him to come up the drive that ends far closer to the peninsula. For Step Three to work, his car needs to be visible.

  I wait, settling the weight of the gun in my battered palm. The engine dies and a door slams, and then he’s running.

  He calls my name and I yell back, and then he rounds the corner and skids to a stop on the slippery grass. He’s nothing but a shadow, hands in fists and shoulders bunched tight. Twigs snap beneath his feet as he steps forward, so slowly I’m not sure he’ll ever get here.

  He’s close enough I can see his face against the pitch-colored sky, the way his gaze jumps from me to the lake behind me.

  He swallows. “What is this, Caroline?”

  He follows my outstretched hand to Aubrey’s body and his face transforms from concern to abject horror — eyes so wide the whites of them glow in the darkness and his mouth twists into a muttered string of, “Oh fuck. Oh Jesus. Fuck!”

  He runs toward Aubrey, his knees hitting the ground before he slides the rest of the way. He cradles her head, his large hands gentle and excruciatingly careful as he lowers his cheek to her mouth. His fingers fly to her throat, pressing softly, and his brows draw down. “She has a pulse!”

  He laces his fingers and positions them just right on Aubrey’s chest and I scream his name but he’s not listening. He’s too focused on trying to save a girl who isn’t dying. He’s too rattled to remember you don’t do compressions on someone with a pulse.