First Girl Gone: An absolutely addictive crime thriller with a twist (Detective Charlotte Winters Book 1)

by L. T. Vargus

  Charlie fiddled with the corner of her notepad. She hated this. Hated having to turn an old friend away when she was scared and desperate, but she didn’t know what else she could do.

  “That’s what I’m trying to say, I guess. Divorces, marital issues… those are the kind of things we’re equipped to handle,” Charlie said, trying to sound apologetic. “Don’t get me wrong, we’re very good at what we do, but this sounds like something that’d take manpower and hours way beyond our capability.”

  “If it’s an issue of money, I’ll pay. I will pay anything to get my daughter back.” Misty opened her purse and started to pull out her wallet. “Some of it might have to go on credit cards, but—”

  “No, Misty. It’s not about the money.”

  “Then I don’t understand. You’re a private investigator. You find things. So why can’t you try to find my daughter?”

  Eyes closed, Charlie frowned. Misty wasn’t hearing her.

  “I’m trying to tell you that this is something better left to the police. They’ve got the resources to handle a case like this. We don’t.”

  Misty stared at her wordlessly. The silence stretched out long enough that Charlie felt obligated to fill it with something.

  “The police will find your daughter. Everything will be fine, you’ll see.”

  Brow furrowed once more, Misty swung her head from side to side.

  “I can’t believe this. When I walked in the door and saw you sitting behind the desk, I thought it was the answer to all of my prayers. Because if there was one person who would understand, one person who would listen and take me seriously, it would be you.”

  “Misty—”

  “No! How can you tell me everything will be OK after what happened with your sister?”

  The comment hit Charlie like a punch to the gut. Everyone in town had an opinion on the disappearance of Allison Winters, but the one thing they could all agree on was that the Salem Island police had botched the investigation. And it was true, wasn’t it? They’d never found her sister. Never brought her killer to justice. And Charlie’s family had never gotten any closure.

  The lump in Charlie’s throat kept her from speaking, and she wasn’t sure what she’d say anyway, so she kept quiet.

  “How can I trust them to find my Kara after that?” Misty asked. “Besides, they’ve already written her off as a runaway. I saw it on their faces the second I mentioned that she’d run off a time or two in the past. Little sidelong glances at each other like I’m too dumb to know what they’re thinking. They gave up on her right then, I could see. They don’t care that this time is different.”

  With a final sniffle, Misty snapped her purse shut and got to her feet.

  “Well, if you won’t help me, then I guess I should be moving on. Someone out there’ll take my money. But thank you for your time anyhow.”

  Charlie found her voice at last.

  “You said she’s left before, but this time is different,” she said. “Why? What’s different about it?”

  Pausing near the door, Misty squinted at Charlie, like the question might be a trap.

  “Her phone. It goes straight to voicemail. Like it’s turned off or something. If you knew Kara, you’d know that means something is wrong. She never turns her phone off. It’s always glued to her hand.”

  Charlie plucked a pen from the mug on the desk and flipped to a fresh sheet of paper on her notepad.

  “Does this mean you’ll take the case?” Misty asked, and Charlie could hear the hope in her voice.

  “It can’t hurt for me to do some poking around,” Charlie said, ignoring Allie’s tongue clicking in disapproval.

  Misty clutched her chest, and for a moment, Charlie thought she was going to start crying again.

  “Oh, thank the Lord. Thank you, Charlie. And I meant what I said before, I can pay. I’ll pay whatever it takes.”

  “We’ll worry about that later. For now, let’s get some of the basic questions out of the way.” Angling her face back at her notepad, Charlie asked, “The other times she ran away… how long was she gone?”

  “Usually it wasn’t even a full day. She’d stay overnight at a friend’s and be back the next day. Maybe a weekend at the most, but…”

  Misty chewed at her lip. Charlie waited.

  “Well, one time she was gone for four days, but that was because I confiscated her car keys.”

  Charlie waggled the pen between her fingers. Clicked and unclicked the tip.

  “And you said this time you had a fight? What was that about?”

  “Not really a fight. Just a little argument. You know how teenagers are,” Misty said, fiddling with the zipper pull on her bag. “Kara got into some trouble this past summer, right after her seventeenth birthday. She’d been drinking, and, well… she got into an accident. And then she left the scene. It was kind of a big mess, but thankfully her lawyer was able to get the charges brought way down. I mean, there was talk of sending her to juvenile detention, but the judge agreed to six months of probation and some community service. So she may have dodged a bullet as far as all that, but she’s lost a lot of privileges at home. I mean, she knows how I feel about drunk driving. I won’t tolerate it.”

  “Right,” Charlie said, making a note to look further into this blemish on Kara’s criminal record.

  “Anyway, for Christmas break, a bunch of the seniors were going on a cruise. Miami, Key West, and Cozumel. We told Kara she could go if she got her grades up at the end of last year, which she did. But then she pulled the stunt over the summer, and Chris and I discussed it—that’s my husband—and we decided that we just couldn’t reward that kind of behavior. We have other kids, and we don’t want them getting the idea that we’ll look the other way with this stuff. So we told her she couldn’t go.”

  “And I’m guessing Kara wasn’t too happy about that?”

  Misty let out a sad laugh.

  “I think she thought I was bluffing. It was all paid for, and we’re way past the cancellation window. We told her a month ago it wasn’t happening, but I guess it didn’t hit home until Wednesday.”

  “What happened on Wednesday?”

  “That was the day everyone was getting on the bus for Miami.”

  “And she couldn’t have tried to get on the bus anyway?”

  “I still have the tickets for the bus and the cruise, not to mention she wasn’t going to get far without her passport, which I have locked up. And I called one of the parent chaperones for the trip, just to be sure. No one has seen her.”

  Charlie jotted this down, turned to a fresh page on her notepad, and slid it across the desk to Misty.

  “I want you to write down the names of anyone Kara might have seen or spoken to after she left the house. Friends, boyfriend, co-workers if she has a job.”

  Pen in hand, Misty scribbled down names and phone numbers.

  “I’ll need to come by your house later. Take a look through her things and talk with the rest of your family, if that’s OK.”

  Fresh tears glistened in Misty’s eyes, and she lifted a hand to wipe them away.

  “Of course. Anything you need,” she said, passing the notebook back. “I meant what I said before. I was never scared any of those other times she left. Not once. You know how they say a mother knows these kinds of things? Knows it in her bones? Well, it must be true. It has to be. Because I’m scared, Charlie. I’ve never been so scared.”

  Charlie took down a few more details, and when they finished, both women stood. Misty crossed around the desk and threw her arms around Charlie, gripping her tightly.

  “Thank you, Charlie. You have no idea what this means to me.”

  “Well… you’re welcome,” Charlie said awkwardly.

  Misty seemed to swallow another surge of emotion, and then her eyes went to the photograph of Charlie and her sister again.

  “I always admired Allie. She was such a free spirit.”

  Charlie nodded. People were always saying things like th
at about Allie.

  The glass on the door rattled as Charlie closed it behind Misty. She sank back into the crumbling wooden chair, and one of the slats jabbed into her spine. It was like the damn thing had elbows of its own.

  “So… Misty Dawkins…” Allie said. “She got fat.”

  “Don’t be a dick,” Charlie said.

  “See? That’s why I’m never having kids,” Allie continued. “Seen it a hundred times.”

  “Stop.”

  “You pop out some crotch fruit, and your hips and thighs stay doughy until the end of time.”

  Charlie’s silence only seemed to egg Allie on.

  “Hey, you’re the one who talks to her dead sister instead of having real friends. Perfectly normal, perfectly healthy, right?”

  Charlie closed her eyes, trying not to listen to her sister prattle on.

  For a dead girl, she sure never shut up.

  Chapter Two

  With Misty Dawkins gone and the office empty once more, a cold feeling settled over Charlie—that bone-deep chill that belonged to the deepest, darkest parts of winter. Even as she worked—setting up interviews with Kara Dawkins’ friends and family and running basic background checks—her mind lingered on Allie’s disappearance all those years ago. Creeping gray memories flashed through her mind.

  She saw Allie as a cackling toddler, cookies crammed into her sticky little fists. She’d pushed a dining room chair into the kitchen to commandeer the sweets in the highest cupboard for her and Charlie. So long ago now.

  Next, she saw Allie as a teenager, perpetually smirking, her hair chopped short and dyed pitch-black for that one year—the year she hated everything, as Allie herself later described it.

  Allie would have been sixteen that year. Only two years before she’d disappeared, and yet she’d changed so much in such a short time after, changed and changed again. Every year seemed so much longer at that age, the personality shifts coming hard and fast every three months or so.

  And then, jumping to the time after Allie had vanished, Charlie saw the empty bed where Allie was supposed to be, her sister’s half of the room taking on a hushed reverence during the time she was missing. A quiet place, somber, it felt more like being in church than a bedroom, felt terribly empty without her.

  They searched for nearly three weeks, and during that time, everyone kept holding on to the hope that she was still alive. That’s what they kept saying, anyway. “She’s out there somewhere.”

  Until her sister’s foot washed up on one of the public beaches. No one pretended she was alive after that.

  Charlie saw the funeral, all the people draped in black. Uncomfortable. Muted. Her mother sobbing the whole way through. The visitations. The service. The wake. Rituals stripped of meaning, reduced to a blur of strangely formal images in her memory.

  Each of these memories conjured ancient feelings, awakened them, brought them back fully fleshed out, just as intricate and potent as they were back then. The level of detail in each one bewildered Charlie. Together they overwhelmed her.

  Charlie moved to the coffee machine in the corner of her office, the too-hot burner there slowly cooking decent coffee down into a thick gloop. She poured herself a cup. Drank. The coffee still tasted good enough for now—only faintly burned—but the scalding liquid couldn’t touch the cold feeling that had settled over her. Maybe nothing could.

  The investigation into Allie’s disappearance had focused heavily on a local hermit, Leroy Gibbs, who did odd jobs around town, but the evidence was circumstantial, and despite a media frenzy upon his arrest, the charges were eventually dropped due to a lack of evidence. The crime was never solved, the wound never closed. And while the town moved on and mostly forgot as the years crept by, the Winters family never recovered.

  The grief killed Charlie’s father rapidly, taking him out by way of a stroke just two years later at forty-nine. It drove her mother to madness, a series of mental breakdowns that shuffled her in and out of the hospital and on and off various medications.

  It was during Allie’s funeral that her voice first made an appearance. Charlie couldn’t stop staring at the closed casket.

  “You think it’s in there?”

  Charlie’s gaze swept to the right, to where she’d heard the voice. There was nothing there but a table with an antique-looking lamp and a vase of tulips.

  “The foot, I mean,” Allie’s voice clarified. “My foot. Can they embalm just a foot? Do they put makeup on it? I hope they gave it some polish at least. Nice pop of color.”

  Charlie blinked, certain she was going crazy but feeling completely calm about it.

  The voice never left after that. Her sister was her constant companion now, sarcastically commenting on everything that happened.

  Whether Allie’s presence was psychological or supernatural, Charlie couldn’t say, but she was in no hurry to fix the problem. Even if Allie only existed in her imagination, she didn’t want to lose her again.

  Charlie went to take another sip of coffee but found her mug empty. She moved to the kitchenette in the room beyond the office. Rinsed her mug. The warm water felt good on the tips of her fingers.

  She still couldn’t believe she was back here on Salem Island, working in the office her uncle Frank had set up decades ago: A1 Investigations. He’d worked the standard private investigator jobs for all those years—cheating spouses, background checks, a touch of surveillance now and again. With him out of commission due to cancer and her stepping in, it was as though she’d inherited the family business by default—the prodigal niece returning to fulfill her destiny—even if Frank was still hanging in there for now, going through chemo treatments, looking quite hairless at the moment.

  But this wasn’t Charlie’s destiny. She wasn’t supposed to be here, didn’t belong here at all.

  With what had happened to Allie and her parents, Charlie had taken her first opportunity to flee Salem Island. She’d planned to get far from here and managed to accomplish it pretty well, making it the full 2,395 miles from the east coast of Michigan to the Pacific Ocean.

  She’d worked the last eight years as an investigator for a law firm in Seattle. There she did real investigative work—nothing like the menial cases Uncle Frank worked around Salem Island. Corporate fraud, pollution cover-ups, political espionage, hacked elections, embezzled charity money, all the sordid trappings one would expect in a world as corrupt as this one.

  Approaching these through the civil side rather than through criminal law, her law firm never really achieved justice so much as they made some small group of the crooks pay. They couldn’t stop these crimes. They couldn’t even slow them down, but they could sock each bully in the nose a couple times, bloody them up, and make them pay a few million in punitive damages. Justice? Not really. Vengeance? Yes. That blurred line between vengeance and justice made sense to Charlie, fit the way she saw the world. It made it something like her dream job to be part of it.

  But eventually things in Seattle went bad. Things always went bad in time, didn’t they?

  And now she was back on Salem Island, back where her family had come apart at the seams, their insides pulled out and put on public display. Maybe you could never really get away from something like Allie’s disappearance. Maybe it followed you.

  Even now, years later, Charlie suffered recurring nightmares of finding Allie’s body, kneeling down on a patch of bare earth in the woods, fingers scraping at the rich black soil. Sometimes it was Allie’s face that emerged, eyes closed as though she were only sleeping, peaceful if a little colorless. But usually it was her sister’s bones that emerged, white and stark against the dark of the dirt. Some part of her believed, way down deep, that justice would still be served for her sister in this small way, that she could find her way to Allie’s remains, someway, somehow.

  Alas, reality offered no such satisfaction. No body found. No resolution.

  In real life, justice was lopsided. Halfhearted. Usually unattainable. Even in the best-case sc
enario, it occurred in shades of gray. Maybe the real thing couldn’t exist in a world like this one.

  Still, she couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like, to get that closure in Allie’s case, to dig up her bones. She wanted it so deeply, but could it offer any satisfaction after all this time?

  The body could be found, perhaps—the what finally known definitively, but even then the why would still linger. No explanation. No meaning ascribed. Wasn’t that what every family of a victim truly sought? The why. The reasoning. Some sense of meaning they could hang their emotions on.

  So many times over the years, Charlie had driven past Leroy Gibbs’ place—a ramshackle farmhouse near the water’s edge. She repeated the ritual every time she was back for the holidays, dredging all those memories up to the surface again, and again, and again. Here was the main suspect—a quiet type, bearded, with fierce eyes—never fully cleared so much as deemed not guilty due to a lack of real information. Here was the house, the place where perhaps her sister had met her end. Could the woods nearby be her resting place, even now?

  She didn’t know. Couldn’t know.

  And the not knowing became a second wound to go with the one Allie’s absence made, one that festered, one that rotted from the middle out. Like one of those spider bites that went necrotic and ate the flesh away, Charlie thought. The not knowing ate at the meat of you, stripped you down to the bone.

  The grief hurt. The loss ached. But the not knowing? The not knowing killed you.

  Charlie ripped her hand out from under the hot water pouring out of the faucet, realizing only after she’d scalded herself that she’d zoned out into ghostly memories once again, letting the water run over her fingertips, the heat growing and growing until the hurt shook her awake.

  She spritzed cold water on her reddened fingers to stop the burn from getting worse, then shook her hand. The pain held for a moment and receded.

  Back out in the main office, she adjusted her clothing as though that might help refocus her on the task of the day: the Kara Dawkins case. She needed to pull herself together. Do her job. A girl was missing, after all. Misty Dawkins’ crying face flashed in her memory to remind her of that grave reality.