by Laura McHugh
Mrs. Darling’s soft face spread into a smile, and her liver-spotted hand reached out to touch my cheek. “Oh, my child, you are an angel.”
Tom beamed at Eli and me, his mouth stretched wide, showing all his teeth.
CHAPTER 3
SARAH, NOW
Gypsy and I had the riverfront trail to ourselves in the early-morning hours before work. I walked with the leash on my wrist, phone in one hand, Mace in the other. Fog hung low over the river as the sun rose through the trees to reveal a network of dew-spangled spiderwebs connecting the branches. The dampness seeped into my clothing and turned my skin clammy. Near the bridge, Gypsy pulled me to the edge of the trail, where the earth had begun to give way in muddy sloughs, sniffing at something I couldn’t see. Down below, the brown water swirled and eddied along the bank, sucking debris into foaming whirlpools.
We were nearly home when I spied a black SUV parked in front of my house. The neighbor’s teenage daughter had an endless stream of friends picking her up at the curb now that they were old enough to drive, but most of them drove beater cars plastered with bumper stickers, music blaring.
As we got closer, I noted details, just in case. Chevy Tahoe, tinted windows, scratch on the right rear bumper. I was considering snapping a picture of the license plate when Gypsy began to growl, and as I turned to see what she was growling at, a man in a black jacket emerged from the walkway between the lilacs. I had rehearsed this scenario in my head a thousand times, determined it wouldn’t play out like it did in my nightmares, yet I stood paralyzed. Gypsy lunged, yanking the slack out of the leash and knocking the Mace and the phone from my hands. I scurried backward, dragging her with me, a scream rising in my throat.
“Sarah?” the man said. “It’s Nick Farrow. I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to startle you. I was just checking to see if you were home.” He held up an ID. “We spoke on the phone?”
I steadied myself, my chest heaving, trying to catch my breath. I told Gypsy to sit. A growl simmered in her throat, but she obeyed. I examined the ID closely enough to be sure it was real, compared the picture to the face in front of me. Over the phone, I’d imagined him grizzled and paunchy like Sheriff Krieger, but Farrow was closer to my age, maybe late twenties, with the athletic bearing of a runner, all long limbs and energy. He had dark hair and greenish eyes and an apologetic half smile that might have been endearing if he hadn’t just popped out of the bushes and scared the crap out of me. He probably used the same expression on girls at bars and had a bit of luck.
He bent down to retrieve my Mace and phone and gave them back to me. “Hey, there,” he said to Gypsy, extending a hand for her to sniff.
“She doesn’t like men.” The words were barely out of my mouth before Gypsy went for his hand, but instead of biting, she tentatively licked him.
Farrow smiled at me, a dimple piercing his cheek. I didn’t smile back. We both knew he hadn’t come to make friends.
“You can’t just show up at my house,” I said. “I haven’t done anything.”
“Of course,” he said. “I apologize. I was in the area, so I thought I’d check in. See if you’d had a chance to consider my request.” He took a square of paper from his pocket, unfolded it, and handed it to me. “This is Abby,” he said.
The girl looked younger than sixteen, small and bird boned, though maybe the picture wasn’t recent. She wore a baggy white polo shirt and long navy skirt, her expression blank, mouth clamped shut, hair forced into a tight bun. The photo was poorly lit and slightly out of focus, not the sort of image parents usually chose to represent a missing child. Handwritten notes at the bottom stated that she had brown hair, brown eyes, no identifying marks.
“I tried to look her up,” I said. “I couldn’t find anything.”
“Not every missing kid makes the news,” he said. “As I’m sure you know. Some cases attract more media attention than others.” He scanned the street, turned back to me. “Do you have time to sit and talk for a minute? We could go to the coffee shop down the block, if you’d be more comfortable.”
“Here’s fine,” I said. “But it has to be quick, I have to get ready for work.”
He followed me through the lilac hedge and we sat on the steps. Gypsy busied herself slurping all the water out of the birdbath.
“I thought of you when I started looking for Abby,” he said. “I remembered seeing you in the paper.”
“Yeah. You said on the phone that she’s like me. What did you mean by that?”
“Well, on the surface, there are quite a few similarities. She’s from a rural area, like you, a few hours from Wisteria. Similar age at the time of disappearance. She’s homeschooled, family’s deeply religious.”
“You said before that you were sure she was taken, even though you couldn’t rule out the possibility that she ran away. What makes you think so?”
He crossed his arms over his chest. His jacket bunched, and I wondered if he had a gun concealed beneath it.
“Her parents thought she left on her own because they’d been arguing over her behavior. She didn’t want to follow their rules. They said she’d always been a difficult kid. Rebellious. But she’s not equipped to manage on her own. No street smarts. No money. No ID. No phone.”
“And? That’s it? You think nobody runs away unprepared?”
He eyed me carefully. “She has other family out there. People she could have turned to. She hasn’t been in contact with anyone. I think if she took off on her own, she would have gone to someone who could help her.”
“And you really think it could be the same guy, the one who took me?”
“Yes. I think it’s a possibility.”
“Even though it’s been five years?” It was one of the things the sheriff had mentioned in the paper, casting doubt on my story. There would be other abductions. A guy who could do something like this and get away with it, it wouldn’t be his first time or his last. There’d be others and we haven’t seen any indication that there are. My parents hadn’t brought any newspapers into the house, though I’d read some of the articles later, online. Have you ever seen anything like that, where somebody was kidnapped and let go a week later? Sheriff Krieger had said. In thirty-odd years of law enforcement, I can tell you that I haven’t. Doesn’t pass the smell test, does it?
“Sheriff Krieger said…” I stopped myself, not wanting to give voice to his other concerns.
“Sheriff Krieger isn’t what I would call an expert,” he said. A jab at the sheriff. Nice touch. Nick Farrow had clearly mastered the art of Good Cop. “There are plenty of reasons why you wouldn’t see a person committing other crimes for a period of time,” he continued. “The most obvious, they move away, get sick or die, go to prison for something else. It’s possible he might have needed some time to regroup, or he was trying not to do it again. Or, how about this: What if it hasn’t been five years? Maybe there were other disappearances that didn’t get reported, or maybe they were reported but no one noticed a pattern. Maybe he’s still taking girls, but he’s not letting them go.”
Something flickered in my chest, and I tamped it down. Farrow was merely speculating. He had no proof of anything.
“The way you were interrogated…I know it must have been difficult. Your account was—”
“Unbelievable. That’s what they called it.” Over and over, throughout hours of questioning in which my answers were twisted and picked apart. There were accusations and insinuations, a palpable disbelief of my version of events, despite the marks on my body and the ghoulish, unrecognizable reflection I saw in the bathroom mirror at the station. By the end, the thing I wanted most was to get out of there, away from them. It didn’t matter anymore what my story was or whether they believed it.
“That’s not what I was going to say.”
Gypsy flopped down on the ground at my feet, her dripping snout resting on my shoe, her eye
s on Farrow.
“Sarah,” he said. “I believe you. And I believe that you can help me—that you can help Abby. I know this can’t be easy for you, but all I want is to hear your story from you, not filtered through Sheriff Krieger or a tabloid reporter or anyone else. That’s all. What do you think?”
“It’s not that I don’t want to help, but…if you believe me, if you’ve been through the file, you know I don’t have any idea who did this. I never saw his face, never saw where he took me. I was blindfolded and kept in the dark the entire time. That’s the truth. I told the detectives everything, and it didn’t do any good.”
“Their minds were made up from the start. They could have missed crucial details. You might remember something that didn’t seem significant then but could make all the difference now.”
I fidgeted with the piece of paper, a flimsy and inadequate stand-in for a flesh-and-blood girl. My fingernails carved a frame around Abby’s face. She was a phantom made of ink. I could cover her with my palm and she would cease to exist.
“Look, you don’t know me. I know I’m asking a lot when I ask you to trust me. I don’t blame you for not wanting to revisit a horribly traumatic experience. But the person who did this to you might still be out there, preying on other girls. I want to find him and put him away, and I’ll do whatever it takes. Even if I’m wrong and there’s no connection, I promise that I’ll do everything I can to resolve your case, too, whether you decide to help me or not. You didn’t have anyone fighting for you then, but you do now. And I know you’d want the same for Abby, for her to have all the help she can get.”
He was good at this. Passionate, persuasive, sincere. If he’d been running for office, I would have voted for him. I refolded the paper so I wouldn’t have to look at Abby’s face. She was sixteen. Sylvie’s age. “I have to get ready for work.”
He turned to look at me dead-on. “Abby’s been missing for twenty-four days. Sixteen more days than you. She could be running out of time. Or maybe she already has. Either way, I need to find her. All I want is to talk to you. Ask a few questions. Fill in some gaps.”
He didn’t accuse me of being selfish or cowardly, not in so many words. He was more subtle than Sheriff Krieger. He remained calm, his voice steady, his hands perfectly still, but as he held my gaze, his eyes revealed something else. Desperation. How many dead ends had he reached to wind up here with me? What mental contortions had been necessary to convince himself that I possessed a hidden key, that if I would just talk to him, he’d be able to unlock the mystery?
I tried to believe, for a moment, that he was right, that I could help find this missing girl. What would happen if I exhumed Sarabeth, crawled back inside her skin? The interview room at the station in Wisteria flashed into my mind. The fluorescent lights, the orange plastic chairs, the sickening smell of Sheriff Krieger’s wintergreen chewing tobacco. My throat constricted, threatening to choke me. I reminded myself that I was safe, that I was not the one trapped in the dark. I clamped my hands onto the edge of the concrete step, drew in a breath for four counts, held it another four, blew it out.
“I’m sorry, I don’t think I can.”
He tried to keep the disappointment from showing on his face. Or maybe it was anger. “I get it,” he said. “I do.” He handed me a card with his phone number. “But please, at least think about it. Sleep on it. Call me if you change your mind?”
“Sure.” The word wisped out, a ghost on my lips, already threatening to haunt me. I wished I’d said no and been done with it.
The girl’s face loomed in my mind as I showered and dressed. I hoped that she was okay, that Farrow was wrong and she was fine, because there was nothing I could do to help her. I didn’t want to relive my abduction. Just talking to Farrow for a few minutes had stirred everything up, and it felt like a swarm of ants were chittering beneath my skin. I wished that I hadn’t sworn off my anxiety pills, or that I’d at least been smart enough to save an emergency stash for something like this. I wanted to forget about Abby. I didn’t want to think of her chained in that dark hole for twenty-four days. It was hard enough living with Sarabeth’s ghost. I didn’t need Abby Donnelly’s moving into my head with her.
CHAPTER 4
SARABETH, THEN
AGE 14
Thursday became my favorite day, the day I baked for the Darlings. I’d arrive after breakfast, the kitchen smelling of bacon grease, coffee percolating on the stove. Mr. Darling would take a few minutes to chat with me about the calves or the weather before heading back out to the barn, while Mrs. Darling cleaned the cast iron skillet and put away the breakfast dishes. Mrs. Darling would then retire to the sitting room with her Daily Guideposts devotional, turn on the TV, and drift into a late-morning nap until The Young and the Restless came on.
When Tom was done with his chores, he’d sit at the kitchen table with a stack of workbooks he was supposed to complete so he wouldn’t fall behind over the summer like he had the year before. He spent more time talking than working. He confided that he’d failed nearly every subject after his dad died, and he’d had to repeat eighth grade while his friends moved on to high school and left him behind. I could sympathize. I hated thinking of my old friends together, without me, at Wisteria High.
The last Thursday in August, Tom was waiting for me at the kitchen table, his arm buried up to the elbow in a box of Cap’n Crunch. “I’m supposed to tell you sorry, Gramma forgot to let you know they’d be gone.” He extracted a handful of cereal, yellow sugar dust clinging to his skin.
“Gone?”
“They go to Springfield the last Thursday of the month to see Gramma’s cousin in the nursing home. After that, they eat lunch and go to Sam’s Club and the craft store and sometimes Gramma’s arthritis doctor. They won’t be back till suppertime.”
“Oh,” I said, trying not to sound disappointed. “I guess I should go.”
“What?” he said. “Why?”
I was thinking that my parents wouldn’t want me hanging around with a boy all day, unsupervised, even if it was Tom Darling, but that obviously hadn’t occurred to him, and maybe it hadn’t occurred to Mr. and Mrs. Darling either.
“Did your grandma say anything? Did she still want me to work today?”
“Yeah. She asked if you could do half the oatmeal cookies with raisins, half without.”
“Sure, whatever you want.” I opened the cabinet to get out the flour and sugar.
“I already finished my chores,” Tom said, grinning. His teeth were too big for his mouth, his lips barely able to close over them. “I can help you with the baking, and then we’ll get done quicker and have time to do other stuff before they get back.”
I leaned against the counter. “What do you mean? What other stuff?”
“I dunno. Whatever you want. Watch TV? Play videogames? I’ve got a computer up in my room.”
I tried not to react, hoping my face didn’t reveal just how badly I wanted to get on the internet. Maybe he was testing me, trying to get me into trouble. “My parents have rules about that kind of thing,” I said carefully.
“I know,” he said. “I won’t tell.”
“What makes you think I want to do those things?”
“Why wouldn’t you?” he said.
I stared at him, all teeth and gawky limbs. There were cereal crumbs at the corners of his mouth. He was looking at me funny not because I was dressed like a pioneer, but because I had suggested that I didn’t want to watch TV. Somehow, he’d seen right through the pretend me and glimpsed the real me underneath. I started laughing, and his grin widened until he was laughing, too.
We turned the TV up in the den so we could hear the morning talk shows and Tom mixed cookie dough while I made the bread. The first batch of cookies burned while we were upstairs watching YouTube videos and didn’t hear the timer go off. I panicked at the veil of smoke in the kitchen, imagin
ing what my mother would say if she found out I’d been careless enough to set fire to the Darlings’ oven.
“No big deal,” Tom said, fanning at the smoke with a dish towel. “We’ll just make more. But we should get rid of the evidence.” He scraped the burnt cookies into a bag and we took them out to the barn. Mr. Darling’s workbench sat in one corner, and an assortment of old livestock tools hung from a pegboard on the wall above it. He’d explained to Eli and me what they were used for one day. There was a pair of long-handled castration pliers, a poultry hook, a metal syringe with a pistol grip for administering vaccinations, an ear tagger that resembled a hole punch, but with a sharp spike on one side to pierce through flesh. Tom picked through oversized shears and rusted clamps until he found what he was looking for: a slingshot.
“My dad’s,” he said. “He used to hunt squirrels with it. Tried to teach me, but I’m no good at moving targets. We’d go down and launch rocks at the pond, see who could get one out the farthest. He could shoot all the way across if he wanted, never even hit the water. But he’d let me beat him sometimes.”
“So…we’re gonna slingshot the cookies into the pond?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I mean, we could just throw ’em away but I thought this’d be more fun. We can take the Gator. Just don’t tell Grampa I got it out when he wasn’t here.”
“Anything that happens on Secret Thursday stays between us,” I said.
“The first rule of Secret Thursday is you don’t talk about Secret Thursday.”
“Okay.”
“It’s from a movie,” he said. “Never mind. Let’s shake on it.”
He squeezed my hand tight, and I instinctively looked around to make sure no one was in the shadows of the barn to see. Mama said that secrets were like bruises in an apple, hidden beneath the skin, brown worm tracks tunneling down to the core and rotting you from within. What’s done in darkness, she warned, shall come to light, and she’d done her best to prove it. She had ferreted out and disposed of the Maybelline lip gloss I’d stashed in my mattress, the E. E. Cummings poem I’d torn from a school library book and folded into my Bible, an old valentine from Jack tucked into the back of my underwear drawer. Each loss left me emptier and stoked flames of resentment toward my mother. Secrets were the only contraband I had left, and that made them all the more exciting. On the scale of secrets, this one was small, but it hummed with electric warmth, burning bright in the hidden hollows of my heart.
