by Laura McHugh
CHAPTER 6
SARABETH, THEN
AGE 16
There were footsteps overhead, muddled voices, but Retta and I were alone in the church basement. We had volunteered to stay and clean up after the youth group meeting—or rather, Retta had volunteered us both. She hummed a hymn as she wiped down the folding tables, a soft smile on her face while she worked. She was the embodiment of everything we were taught to be—obedient, pleasing, modest, devout—but she still liked to gossip, unlike most of the other girls, who chatted about things like homemade laundry detergent as though it were actually interesting, even when their mothers weren’t right there, listening. I could say things to Retta that I couldn’t say to anyone else. We kept each other’s secrets.
“Pastor Rick was filled with the spirit tonight, wasn’t he?” Retta said.
“I guess.”
I hadn’t heard anything the pastor said. I’d been too focused on his son, Noah, who’d been seated at the boys’ table because boys and girls weren’t allowed to sit together at youth group. Noah had black hair that gleamed under the fluorescent lights and eyes the faded blue of my favorite jean jacket, the one my mother had given to the Salvation Army. He was built like a bull, blocky and lumbering, but he had a quiet, gentle manner and wore old-fashioned suspenders, which enhanced a vague resemblance to my very first crush, Albert Ingalls from Little House on the Prairie. In my fantasies, Noah was a bookish football player who would take me on dates to Dairy Queen or the skating rink and then make out with me in the parking lot, in a car with the radio playing.
Apart from the fantasies, my relationship with Noah consisted mostly of furtive glances and wistful stares. We would gaze at each other, lips parting, blood rushing to stain our cheeks. We were never completely alone—social interactions between boys and girls were carefully monitored and controlled by the adults at church—but whenever we were allowed to mingle, we would gravitate toward each other. If he saw me gathering hymnals or moving tables, he would come help. One evening, while stacking chairs, his hand had touched mine and lingered. We’d stood there breathless for a long moment, the air crackling between us.
Tonight, he had stared at the table with a vacant expression while his father railed about sin and salvation, and I wondered if he tuned out Pastor Rick like I did, if he was thinking about other things, like sex, or his father suffering a horrible accident that would somehow sever his vocal cords and render him mute. Noah had looked up and caught me watching him. Neither of us looked away. Pink crept up his neck, above his collar, and finally he looked back down at the table, at the greasy bag of popcorn that had made the rounds and come to him last. He hadn’t touched it. There was probably nothing left but hard, unopened kernels in the bottom, what my father called old maids.
“I saw you and Noah,” Retta giggle-whispered.
“What?” I knelt to scoop a piece of smashed popcorn off the concrete floor.
“I saw the way he was looking at you. And he was blushing.”
“He blushes all the time. At everything. He blushed when his dad called on him.”
Pastor Rick had asked what it meant to be an evangelical at Holy Rock and, ignoring the flurry of raised hands, called on his son. We have to spread the word of God, of salvation, to everyone we can, to save as many souls as possible, Noah recited in his soft monotone. Or the burden of their lost souls in Hell rests upon us.
“True,” Retta said. “But I’ve never seen him look at anybody else like that. I think he really likes you.”
I tried not to smile. While Retta would never admit to having a crush on anyone, herself—she wanted to save those feelings for her future husband—she was always eager to talk about courtship and marriage.
“Can you imagine, marrying a preacher’s son?” she squealed. “That would be such a blessing for your family.”
I made a face. Marrying into the Blackburn family was not part of my fantasy. I was fairly certain I would strangle Pastor Rick if I had to spend any more time listening to him than I already did. His wife, Minnie, was even more fanatical than he was, if such a thing was possible. She was sturdy like Noah, but her pale skin, large, unblinking eyes, and puckered mouth made her look like a haunted Victorian doll. She had suffered a series of miscarriages after Noah was born, but she fervently believed that every single thing that happened, good or bad, was God’s will, that all suffering had purpose. She endeavored to make herself worthy through faith and prayer, and she left it in His hands to one day reveal His plan.
I couldn’t imagine the purpose of such divine cruelty, allowing her to conceive over and over but never bear a child, especially as the wife of a pastor in a church full of children, but her strength and steadfastness were admired by the entire congregation. If Holy Rock allowed for saints or idols, they would have erected a statue of Minnie Blackburn.
“It doesn’t matter if we like each other. Pastor Rick would never approve.” I’d earned a permanent spot on the pastor’s bad list soon after our arrival at Holy Rock. The youth group was charged with cleaning up the graveyard at the edge of the woods behind the church. Mama hadn’t yet sewn proper dresses for me, so I was wearing someone else’s castoff. It was too big and made of heavy wool, better suited for winter. I got hot pulling weeds and scrubbing stones, so I snuck away to dip my feet in the creek. I slipped on the rocks and drenched my dress and decided to take it off to dry. I lay in the sun in the tank top and shorts I’d been wearing in place of a slip, the dress draped over a branch, while the other kids finished their work. When I opened my eyes, Pastor Rick was casting a shadow over me, the rest of the youth group behind him. Most of the boys either tried to avoid looking at me or zeroed in on the bits of exposed flesh like they’d never seen arms and legs before. I knew I was in trouble, but the look on the pastor’s face sent me into a fit of nervous laughter. It was the first time I really noticed Noah. He was the only one looking me in the eye, his face pink, trying not to laugh. I felt an instant kinship with him, the two of us sharing a joke no one else found funny.
There were other incidents at church, early on—singing inappropriate radio songs to the children when I helped out in the preschool room, shouting a curse word when I stubbed my toe on a pew, failing to complete my Sunday school lessons. I was never intentionally bad, but my normal behavior didn’t come close to meeting the Blackburns’ standards.
“You’ve changed,” Retta said. “Grown up.” It wasn’t so much that I’d changed, but that I’d learned how to behave to best avoid punishment. I had enough scars across the back of my thighs from my father’s belt. “And you should give the pastor some credit,” Retta continued. “He’s kind. Understanding. Forgiving.”
Retta idolized Pastor Rick. He had guided her through the darkest time of her life, something that no one else knew about aside from Retta’s family and me. She had whispered her story one afternoon while we played dolls, as she laid them together in the shoebox bed in their wedding clothes.
Retta had older half brothers, her father’s sons from his late first wife. When she was little, one of the brothers, Leon, would come into her room at night and wake her up to play. She had liked the attention at first, the shared secret. But she didn’t like some of the games or the way he made her play them. She started to have a stomachache every day and would burst into tears over little things. Her mother heard a noise one night and went to check on her and caught Leon slipping out of Retta’s room. The next morning at breakfast, there were two empty seats at the table. Retta’s mother explained that her father and stepbrother had left for a weekend prayer retreat, and breakfast continued as usual.
Very little was said in the family about what had happened. Leon confessed his sins and was forgiven. He married soon after and moved to his wife’s family farm outside of town, but the families still sat together at church like normal and gathered every Sunday night for supper.
Retta’s parents
never spoke of the incident again, and when Retta grew sullen, they sent her to Pastor Rick for counseling. He prayed with her, but no matter how much she prayed, she couldn’t get rid of the unpleasant thoughts, so Pastor Rick tried various other therapies. When she was hesitant to say things aloud, he urged her to act them out or write them down. She wrote her secrets on scraps of paper and stuffed them in a canning jar under her bed, but they kept her awake at night, and she feared her mother would find them. Pastor Rick had suggested she burn them, but she thought it best to keep them contained, hidden away where they couldn’t be found, so she buried the jar in her backyard just outside the fence where the sweet autumn clematis grew. One jar, and then another, until she had emptied herself out and her secret garden was sown.
She said she no longer thought about the bad things that had happened. But I did, sometimes. I’d see Leon at church and imagine the secrets buried in the earth like seeds, waiting to sprout and grow toward the light. I wondered what dark flowers would bloom on the twisted vines.
Retta and I were almost done cleaning when we heard footsteps coming down the stairs. Noah appeared, and Retta made big eyes at me.
“Hello, Noah,” she said. “Can we help you with something?”
“I just need to take a few chairs upstairs,” he said.
“I’ll help,” Retta said. “We were just finishing up.” She gave my arm a quick squeeze, grabbed a folding chair from the closet, and hurried up the stairs.
Noah and I stood staring at each other. We were alone, though not for long. I inched toward him, closing the distance between us, not sure what to say. I wanted to ask him a thousand things, to hear the words that waited on his tongue, unspoken, every time our eyes met across a room. I wanted to know if he thought of me the same way that I thought about him.
“You looked…distracted, earlier,” I said. “What were you thinking about?”
“The salvation game,” he said.
“Oh,” I said, deflated. He’d been paying attention to the lesson after all. Pastor Rick made us play the salvation game each summer at Bible camp. One person was “it” and had to chase the rest of us through the field behind the church, tagging kids to “save” them, and the saved would in turn try to tag others. Anyone who got tagged would go to Heaven, while those who made it across the field were condemned to Hell. It was a dumb game, but we were supposed to take it seriously, a real-life battle for souls. My little sister, Sylvie, wept and prayed for those she failed to save.
“Remember last time? When we were the only two left.”
“Yes,” I said. I remembered. Noah and I had been sprinting toward the woods, racing, my long skirt gathered in my hands to keep me from tripping. I’d glanced over my shoulder at Sylvie, who was trailing behind us, and Noah had slowed down to let her catch him.
“I was thinking,” he said. “What if we just kept running?”
“Sarabeth! Time to go!” Mama called from above, her voice sharp as an axe. Noah gave me a mournful smile and grabbed the chairs he’d come for. As we climbed the stairs under my mother’s watchful eye, I imagined us running for the woods, not stopping, never looking back.
CHAPTER 7
SARAH, NOW
I had forgotten how steep the hills were, how the top of each one looked like the end of the road because you couldn’t see the drop on the other side. I clung to the armrest, my stomach lurching as we plunged down into gullies and barreled around hairpin curves. The homesteads we passed were scattered far from any neighbors, decrepit trailers and motor homes, sagging shacks with the roofs caved in, timeworn outhouses clinging to the edges of ravines, skeletonized cars rusting beneath shrouds of dead vines. Even the houses that appeared uninhabitable showed evidence of life: mums planted in a broken toilet in the front yard, laundry hanging out to dry. We saw a few signs for towns that no longer existed, what Daddy would call a wide spot in the road. Cell service evaporated and we pulled over at the edge of a dry creek bed to check the paper map.
“We must be right about here.” Farrow’s finger hovered over an expanse of green. “We’ve crossed into the Irish Wilderness but haven’t hit the Eleven Point River.” He steered the Tahoe back onto the pavement and we rode in silence for a few more miles. “I think this is it,” he said finally, flicking the blinker as we approached an unmarked dirt road. The only clue that anyone might live at the end of it was a mangled mailbox lying in the ditch.
A tunnel of trees closed around us, blocking out the sun and momentarily rendering us blind. The SUV lurched uphill over rocks and potholes, brush scraping against the doors. Two miles on we emerged back into the sunlight at a hilltop farm consisting of a ragtag collection of weathered buildings with rusted tin roofs, a dilapidated camper, and a graveyard of tires and tractor parts. A bonfire burned in a stony field hemmed by barbed wire.
We parked next to a police cruiser. The view through the windshield was extraordinary—the earth falling away beyond the fence into a wooded ravine, endless hills fading into the distance like receding waves. The expansive vista somehow made me feel claustrophobic, like the sky was closing in on me. It looked so much like home.
Farrow reached into the backseat and offered me a black baseball cap with a highway patrol logo.
“You didn’t tell anyone you were bringing me, did you? Is that supposed to be a disguise?”
“It’s not a disguise,” he said. “It would be a crime to impersonate an officer of the law, and I would never ask you to do that. It’s just a hat to keep the sun out of your eyes. Up to you if you want it.”
I put it on and checked the mirror. No one was going to recognize me. No one would be thinking about Sarabeth Shepherd. Everyone would be focused on finding Destiny Jewell. That was the reason I’d come. For Destiny, and Abby.
“All good?” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Just follow my lead. I’ll handle most of the talking. All you have to do is look, listen, observe. Pay attention to your gut. You get a feeling about something, even if it doesn’t seem important, let me know.”
We got out and I trailed behind him as he approached the nearest man with a badge, the one who seemed to be in charge. I’d worried about being out of place, drawing attention, but there were plenty of other people milling around. A few were clearly law enforcement, but most were in plainclothes. Volunteers, maybe. Neighbors and friends who’d come to help. The community turning out to do what they could.
Farrow introduced himself to the deputy, who launched into an update of the situation, ignoring me. He gestured toward the house, where a woman stood in the shade, smoking a cigarette. The mother. She was rail thin, her long straw-colored hair parted in the middle and tucked tightly behind her ears. She wore torn jeans and a long-sleeved shirt despite the heat and could have passed as a teenager herself. Her hands were in constant motion, one fidgeting with the cigarette and flicking ash, the other pulling her hair behind her ears over and over. I worried that she’d mix up her hands, run the cigarette through her wispy hair, and light herself on fire. Farrow started toward her and I followed.
“Ms. Jewell?” Nick said. “I’m Nick Farrow, highway patrol.”
“Trina,” she said, blowing smoke out of the side of her mouth. Up close, she appeared weathered, like the Barbie doll Retta and I had accidentally left outside over the winter. Her skin was prematurely creased and splotched, her fingers knobbed with calluses, her hair fraying at the ends.
“Trina. I know you’ve already answered a lot of questions this morning, but I just want to go over a few things. Would that be all right?”
She nodded and kept nodding, her head cranking up and down as though she couldn’t stop it once it got started.
“Want to sit down?” Farrow asked, gesturing to a pair of ratty lawn chairs.
“No-I’m-fine,” she said. It all came out as one word.
“Okay. Can you tell
me when you last saw Destiny?”
She flicked her cigarette with her thumb to knock off the ash, not noticing that it had burned down to the filter and gone out. “Wednesday night. The three of us ate supper together. Roasted hot dogs and let Destiny do some marshmallows.” Trina shook her head, a sad smile crimping her lips together. “She liked ’em burnt, you know, let ’em catch fire and then blow ’em out. After that, she went out to the trailer to do her homework and Vance and me sat out here having a smoke till he had to leave for work. I guess it would’ve been about eight when I went in. I don’t know exactly. It was dark, anyways, and the light was on in the trailer. That’s the last I can be sure.”
“Vance. He’s your…?”
“Boyfriend. Yessir.”
“He live here with you?”
“Nah. Not, like, official. He lives with his mom in town, but he stays over here some when he’s not working nights.”
“Okay,” Farrow said. “So you went inside. Did you hear anything in the night, get woken up at all?”
“No.” Her head nicked to the side, like a horse shaking off flies. “Took an Ambien. Slept like the dead.”
“What time does Destiny normally go to bed?”
She shrugged. “She stays up sometimes, reading, listening to music. I don’t rightly know. Hard to tell with her out in the trailer.”
We all turned to look at it. It was more of a camper than a trailer, the kind you’d pull behind a truck on a family vacation, though it didn’t look like it had been on any family vacations in a long time, if ever. It appeared to have settled into the red earth like a weary animal, never to heave up out of the dirt again.
“So she sleeps out there.”
