The Lost Girls

by Jessica Chiarella

  The girl would have been only four years younger than me. LaBagh Woods isn’t exactly close to Sutcliffe Heights, but it’s still on the North Side, so it should have hit my radar. The only reason I wouldn’t have followed the case would be if it had already been solved.

  “Wait, do they have her killer already?” I ask as a vague framework begins to take shape in my mind. I remember watching the news of the arrest from my dorm room at Northwestern.

  “He was convicted of her murder and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole,” Ava replies.

  “But he was a kid, wasn’t he?” I ask, conjuring an image of the man being marched into the Cook County courthouse in handcuffs.

  “Yes,” Ava replies. “He just had his twenty-fifth birthday.”

  “So there’s no way this case could be connected to Maggie, regardless of where Sarah Ketchum is from,” I say, feeling the shard dissolve in my stomach. The man who killed Sarah Ketchum would have been four years old when Maggie disappeared. Disappointment follows, rather than relief. That’s how it is for me, these swings between terrible excitement and desolation. Never solace. Never a warm, nourishing breath.

  “That’s what the police say as well,” Ava replies.

  “And what do you think?” I ask, because she is so impassive, she watches me with an almost theatrical calm. I can tell that part of her is enjoying this, this slow unveiling of facts, my reactions to each. Like the town gossip, reveling in every bit of shock and horror as she relays her stories to her neighbors.

  “You didn’t google me, did you?” Ava asks.

  “No,” I reply, because what does it matter? “I’ve been a little busy.”

  “Well, I think they have the wrong man,” she replies, matter-of-fact. “I think whoever killed Sarah Ketchum is the same person responsible for your sister’s disappearance. And I think he’s still out there.”

  “That seems like a stretch,” I say, but Ava is already shaking her head.

  “Consider it. Two teenage girls, about the same age, the same physical type. Both of them taken by a man with a car. Both of whom lived, at least for a time, within a square mile of each other. What exactly are the odds of that?”

  “Fourteen years apart?”

  “There could be a dozen explanations for a gap like that,” Ava replies. A gap, I think. A gap in a pattern of behavior. A killer with a pattern of behavior—the holy grail of every citizen sleuth on the true-crime forums I follow. Looking for order in the violent chaos around us. How seductive an idea.

  “Hey.” A voice behind me cuts between us. I turn to find Marco, glaring at me. “Are you ever getting back to work? Or do I need to call someone to cover your shift?”

  “Fuck off, Marco,” I say, but with no real malice. “Five more minutes. And I’ll close by myself.”

  “Next Saturday too,” he says.

  “Fine,” I reply, and with a triumphant grin, Marco goes back to the other end of the bar. Ava takes another sip of her drink.

  “I know it sounds like a stretch,” Ava says. “But if I’m right, it means that an innocent man is spending his life in prison, and that it’s only a matter of time before another girl gets killed.”

  “Did you know her?” I ask. “Sarah Ketchum?”

  “Not really.”

  “Not really? So then why do you know where she spent her summers?”

  Ava toys with the cocktail straw in her drink, drawing it in lazy circles through the fast-melting slivers of ice in her glass.

  “Because,” she says, a sheen in her eyes catching the neon lights above the bar, a wash of green. “Because my baby brother is the one in prison for her murder.”

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  I wake to the alarm on my phone, which I can’t remember setting. It’s Sunday, so by all rights I should be sleeping in. Instead, a bright tone sizzles through the air by my left ear, and I have to stanch the impulse to throw the entire thing across the room to quiet it. This is the main problem with not having an actual alarm clock. There is no snooze button to bang on, only a lit pane of glass. The idea of a button. Not a sufficient place to put my rage at being awake at eight a.m. on a Sunday, when I went to bed after three. After I told Ava that I wasn’t in the business of going out on a limb for men convicted of murdering women. After she left, and I spent the rest of the night alternating between mixing drinks and googling the case. After I closed the bar by myself, which took easily twice the time it would have if Marco had been helping. But now I remember, my presence is required in Sutcliffe Heights, at the quarterly luncheon for the Margaret Reese Foundation, the charity that has become my mother’s sole purpose in life since Maggie’s disappearance.

  I try not to dwell on the woman my mother was before Maggie went missing. How graceful and warm she once was. How unprepared she’d been to learn that the world contained more than what she’d seen of it. That it was not a place of order and decorum. Or, that its order was that of a meat grinder, eating everything it was given and spitting out a bloody, crumbling mess. I was lucky to learn that lesson early. My mother had further to fall; the damage was arguably greater.

  She grew up in Lake Forest, Illinois, where the oldest of the old Chicago money have their estates. When she married, she and my father—a physics professor at Northwestern—received her trust fund and bought our family home in Sutcliffe Heights. Our house was modest for the area—a mere $3.5 million, four-bedroom affair. Farther north on Lake Michigan’s shore, our neighbors boasted estates that went for double or triple that. Maggie and I grew up assuming we were middle class, especially compared to our grandparents. As if anyone but a wealthy few in the entire state of Illinois lives just a short walk from a neighborhood beach. The third coast was ours, ours alone, because there was so little of it and our lives were so terribly charmed.

  Still, Sutcliffe Heights’s proximity to Chicago made all the difference when it came to the response to Maggie’s disappearance. Everyone knew that merely a fifteen-minute ride on the Union Pacific Metra line could have deposited Maggie within the city limits. Half an hour and she could have gone all the way to Ogilvie station, in the living, breathing heart of the city, with its arterial Amtrak lines, which could have taken her anywhere. If she ran. If she’d chosen to disappear.

  That was what the detectives from the Sutcliffe Heights PD thought, when they interviewed us in our living room the night Maggie disappeared. Already, they were more interested in Maggie’s behavior—the chance that she was simply a runaway—than in the man I’d seen. Perhaps it wasn’t a kidnapping at all; perhaps they could all just go home.

  In that way, at least, the media was an ally. There was nothing more sordid or tantalizing than a rich white girl snatched from the woods near her family’s home, so that was the narrative they ran with. There were already news vans outside our house, spotlights frosting our front windows, when the police interviewed us that night. Looking back, I know that none of it was luck. I know that the police and the media took Maggie’s disappearance seriously because of who we were and where we were from and what she looked like. But still, it is difficult not to feel fortunate, after seeing two decades’ worth of women disappear without even a ripple through the city’s consciousness, that there was any response at all. Even if all the police wanted was to label her a runaway and move on with their lives.

  “Does she have any friends in the city?” one of the detectives asked, writing in a narrow notepad. My mother shook her head. “Anyone that you may not know about? Did she ever take the train into the city by herself?”

  “She’s sixteen. She isn’t allowed to take the train without one of us,” my mother said, motioning to my father with a cigarette dangling between two of her fingers. I’d never seen my mother smoke inside the house before. It was unprecedented behavior, and it scared me, to the point where I considered narcing on my sister. About the times when sh
e’d put on enough makeup to look eighteen, pulled on a Northwestern sweatshirt over her party clothes, and joined her friends in a lip-glossed pack for the quick Metra ride into the city. Admitting that she’d broken the most fundamental rule of our childhood—to never breach the borders of Sutcliffe Heights—seemed like the most complete betrayal I could imagine. But then, there was the man in the car. My sister letting go of my hand. Telling me to run.

  “She does,” I said, interrupting the adults in their conversation. “She goes into the city all the time.”

  I still remember the feeling as the words slipped from my mouth, even all these years later. The feeling that I was ruining Maggie, somehow, in the eyes of my parents. And they were so angry at her that they were even angrier at me, because she was gone and I was the one left who could be punished for her recklessness. It was the first taste I got—my mother shouting at me in front of those detectives, ash dropping from her cigarette onto our white carpet—of what life would really be with Maggie gone. It was the first glimpse I had of the woman my mother would become.

  Now, six months after our latest screaming match, it seems almost silly that I’m still required to attend events for the foundation. Especially since the impetus of the argument—the podcast’s popularity, my separation from Eric—has only magnified in the ensuing months. And because my mother responded by cutting me off from the family trust, since threats of grounding, sending me to my room, and military school were no longer viable options for a twenty-nine-year-old.

  But still, even with no family money to lose, even with no careful détente with my mother to sustain, I’m not allowed to miss a family photo op. That would be the truly unforgivable offense, and I’m not quite prepared to torch what little remaining goodwill I have with the little family I have left. No matter how tempting a few more hours of sleep would be.

  When I glance at the screen of my phone, there’s a voicemail from a blocked number. A voicemail left at precisely three thirty a.m. The same time as the others.

  I know, even before I listen to it, what it will be. A thick sort of silence. Menacing. The message is thirty seconds long. I delete it without listening to it.

  I take a shower, trying to warm myself after the chilling effect of the voicemail, and then search through the family-approved side of my closet for something to wear. I sold most of my old clothes—all Reformation and Everlane and Anthropologie, the necessary wardrobe for the young wife of an investment banker from Kenilworth—to cover the security deposit on my apartment and the attorney’s fees from my divorce. It was an outlay of cash that I had to fight Eric to keep him from paying himself, as there was no way I would allow him to pay for the divorce that I’d caused. Still, had he known I was paying with my own money and not my family’s, he never would have made the concession.

  I finally settle on slouchy tweed trousers, a sleeveless silk blouse, and ankle boots, though I’m not at all confident that this isn’t the same outfit I wore to last quarter’s luncheon as well. There’s just something about the fact that both Maggie and I are wearing dresses in every photograph hanging in my mother’s house that makes me desperate to wear pants.

  I catch the Metra at Ravenswood, and the experience is as disorienting as ever, like retracing the steps of my adolescence, which was always moving in the opposite direction. Pulled into the city, not slipping away from it.

  It’s not a long journey, after all. Sutcliffe Heights is the first truly wealthy suburb north of Chicago. Of course there is Evanston, with its university and its beautiful old mansions, but Evanston is the sort of place where you still have to be careful when you walk alone at night. It’s still a place where you can get a studio apartment for under a thousand bucks a month, where concrete underpasses are tagged with graffiti, where the people who live on your block could be any race, any creed, any religion. And it has not one but—horror of all horrors—seven L stops. Sutcliffe Heights is blessedly safe from all that diversity—a word as bad as a curse there, unless of course you are extolling the virtues of diversity of thought, which has become a popular sentiment among Chicago’s country-club intelligentsia. Sutcliffe Heights is fenced in by money, beyond the reach of the CTA, made up of expensive houses separated by woods, lined up on the lakeshore. The only place the children of Sutcliffe Heights hear Arabic spoken is in the classrooms of their private school, where it is offered alongside Latin and Mandarin and French. It’s a cesspool of wealth and privilege, and Maggie understood that at a much younger age than I did. It was why she loved Chicago the way she did.

  She wasn’t the only kid from Sutcliffe Heights who took the occasional joyride downtown. We were all latchkey kids, even though none of our mothers worked. My mother was never home, always had a charity event to plan, or a luncheon with friends, or a spa appointment. It was the nineties, after all, before it became a cardinal sin to leave your kids unattended during summer vacation. It wasn’t only that the world felt bigger back then—before the internet and cell phones and social media shrank everything to a mere moment’s availability. It felt looser. Before a text message could pin you down, hold meaning no matter if you chose to acknowledge or ignore it. Back when a ringing phone could be missed, and you would never, ever know who was calling. We told time by the sun, during those summers. If we forgot our wristwatches, sundown was dinnertime. As long as we showed up when the table was set, no one ever asked where we’d been.

  Maggie started babysitting me when she was ten years old, and by the time she was sixteen, she was my tour guide into the vast urban sprawl of Chicago. I was her willing apprentice, in all things. She taught me the art of slipping away, and I made myself in her image. Six months before she disappeared, she led me onto the Metra and into one of its tepid bathrooms, sliding the door shut behind us and locking it. We waited five minutes in half-giggling silence until we reached the Davis stop, and then Maggie led me back out—unseen by the conductors—into the concrete and weather-beaten brick of Evanston, where she bought us L passes and took me downtown on the Purple Line.

  We walked all the way to Navy Pier, where Maggie bought an ice cream for me and a pair of seashell earrings for herself, in the clot of vendors and tourists packed onto the long stretch of the pier. She smoked a cigarette as we watched seagulls circling, diving down to pick discarded French fries off the rocks. It was the most potent feeling of freedom I’d ever experienced in my short life. I looked at my sister and knew there was nowhere we couldn’t go. I would follow her anywhere. That day is still my high-water mark, the measure against which I compare any happiness that may wash into my life. I do not expect that measure to ever be met.

  Now, it takes no time at all for the low brick buildings of Rogers Park and Evanston to give way to the greenery of the North Shore. As if there is a line drawn between the two, where the concrete stops and the forest begins. And then the automated voice announces Sutcliffe Heights, and the train’s double doors open to the breezy sunshine of the northern suburbs. I step off the train, and there is Wilson with the Mercedes, waiting to drive me home, despite the fact that I haven’t called ahead to announce which train I’d be taking. He opens the door for me before I even reach the car.

  “How long have you been waiting here?” I ask, slipping into the cool leather interior. The front seat, because Wilson knows I won’t sit in the back, no matter how much he gently insists.

  “Not long,” he replies, an impassive, knowing smile on his face. Deep lines around his mouth, at the corners of his eyes. His nose spotted with the filaments of broken blood vessels. Somehow, I always remember his looking this old, this weathered.

  “Hours?” I ask.

  “Not hours,” he says before he shuts me in, rounds the front of the car, and gets into the driver’s seat.

  “Liar,” I reply, holding up the book sitting in the center console of the car. David Copperfield, its dog-eared page nearly halfway through the paperback.

  “I started it
a few days ago,” he says as we pull out into the sparse Sunday traffic.

  “Sure you did.”

  “Would you have preferred it if she left you to walk?”

  “It’s a ten-minute walk to the house. I think I could have managed.”

  “So you wouldn’t have been angry at her for that too?” he asks.

  I scowl at him in response.

  “You know, Carla and I listened to your podcast,” he says. “We thought it was very well done.”

  “I’ll make sure not to rat you out to Mom,” I reply, though it’s surprisingly good to hear praise coming from Wilson. He and his wife have been employed by our family since Maggie and I were kids. Carla was our cook, our sometimes-nanny, our housekeeper. Wilson drives and takes care of the grounds and takes care of Carla. So it’s good to know that someone else who knew Maggie—someone else who loved her, and who felt her loss acutely—approves of my work.

  “Don’t be silly,” he replies. “I told her the very same thing.”

  “You told my mom you listened to my podcast?” I ask.

  “And that I thought it was very well done.”

  “You’re braver than I am.”

  “She’s the one who asked me to listen,” he says, and the sentiment is almost funny, it’s so jarring. I turn in my seat so I’m facing him.

  “My mother told you to listen? My mother. Samantha Reese. Blond, about five foot eight, posture like she’s having an affair with her chiropractor?”

  “The very same,” Wilson replies. “She asked me to listen, and to let her know if there was anything on it potentially compromising about the family.”

  “Ah, I see,” I say. “I guess she doesn’t have time in her schedule for things like that. Protecting the family honor from her traitorous daughter.”

  “You’re too hard on her,” Wilson says. It’s a familiar refrain, as if he’s waiting for me to finally reach the age where I forget all the ways in which my mother made my childhood difficult. “She was afraid it would be too upsetting for her, to listen herself,” he continues.