by Laura McHugh
Ronnie seemed to have figured out that I wasn’t going to tell on him, that he could say anything he pleased and I would stand there and take it. From what I’d seen so far, though, he was mostly talk, and if I could tune out Pastor Rick’s sermons and my mother’s constant lecturing, I could surely manage to ignore him. I told myself he wouldn’t go so far as to lay a hand on me, though I remembered Tom saying Ronnie would be gone soon, repeating it over and over to convince himself, but that hadn’t made it true. There was no telling what Ronnie might do.
CHAPTER 11
SARAH, NOW
It was late when we left the Jewells’ farm and headed back to our cabins for the night. There were no other cars on the road. As we began our descent into the river valley, the headlights reflected a dark stain, the blacktop gleaming with fresh blood. It must have been a deer, or something of similar size. There was no sign of a body. Maybe the animal had managed to hobble away, or someone had taken it to salvage the meat.
The gas station was closed when we arrived, all the lights out. We drove down the hill and parked on the rocky shore. Farrow reached into the paper bag and handed me a toothbrush and a key attached to a chunk of antler. He watched as I stepped onto my cabin’s tiny porch and unlocked the door, making sure I got safely inside. I flicked the light on and waved good night before locking the door behind me.
I kept my hand on the knob as I surveyed the low-ceilinged room, which contained nothing but a bed and a nightstand, no unnecessary comforts or frills. It smelled of mildew and decay, the lingering dampness of a flood. The walls, floor, and ceiling were all a mottled brown, perfect for hiding insects and stains. The overhead light didn’t quite reach into the corners. I took out my phone to shine the flashlight behind the bed. The space glittered with an impressive network of spiderwebs. The bedding was the color of dried blood, dusty to the touch, and I wondered when it had last been washed, how long it had been since someone stayed here in the off-season.
There were three windows, one by the front door, one above the bed, and one directly across from it. Each had a makeshift curtain that was too short to reach the sill, leaving a gap for someone to see in, though I told myself there was no one outside for miles, no one but Farrow. All the other cabins were empty.
I stepped into the tiny bathroom and slung back the shower curtain, revealing a large, leggy spider near the drain. I leaned down and got close enough to make out the telltale fiddle on its head: a brown recluse. Our house on the farm with its gaps and drafts had harbored all manner of spiders and crawling things, including scorpions and the occasional snake, but recluses made me especially nervous. My brother Luke had been bitten in bed, the venom inducing fever and infection, rotting a hole the size of a silver dollar in his leg. I climbed into the tub to smash the spider, but when I lifted my foot, it jumped onto my shoe. I kicked and screamed until it disappeared into the folds of the shower curtain. Moments later, Farrow was pounding at my door and I hurried to open it.
“You okay? Thought I heard something.”
“Yeah,” I said, still breathless. “It was just…a spider. How did you even hear me?”
“Uh, you were pretty loud. And I was sitting right outside. Didn’t feel like going in quite yet.” He gestured toward a pair of Adirondack chairs overlooking the river. “I’ve got some warm Gatorade if you’d like to join me.”
“Sure,” I said, grateful for an excuse to get out of the cabin. “No Gatorade. But I’ll hang out for a minute.” I pulled the door shut behind me and Farrow and I sat side by side in the darkness, listening to the water flow over the rocks. Across the river, the woods formed a black abyss beneath the stars.
I liked being outside at night. Sometimes at home I’d sit on the porch when I couldn’t sleep. It was true that certain kinds of darkness made me uneasy. I didn’t like the way a windowless room or a blindfold closed in on you. But there was a difference between the dark of confinement and the dark of night. The night sky felt open, expansive, full of promise. It was never completely void of light, though it might come awfully close in a place like this.
“I hope she’s okay,” I said.
“Me too.” He leaned back in the chair, looking up at the sky. “I wish we’d made more progress today. The window’s so small, and the longer someone’s missing…”
“We got here as quick as we could.”
“No. We came as soon as we heard. But we were already behind. She’s been gone since Wednesday night.” He picked at the splintered wood on the armrest and then turned toward me, his face ashen in the moonlight. “Your parents never contacted the police. Something I was thinking about…your father said they assumed you’d taken off on your own, and they saw no reason to get the law involved. They preferred to keep private matters private. Why did they think you’d left?”
The chill in the air grew sharper as a breeze swept through the river valley, and a light fog drifted up from the water. “It was no secret I wanted to get out of there. I wanted to go to college and they wanted to force me to marry a man I barely knew. They didn’t like me pushing back. I got into some trouble, right before. Said some things. I guess it made sense to them that I’d leave.”
“Have you talked to them about it, now that some time has passed?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t hear from them much. They don’t have a phone, or email. My mother and I exchange letters sometimes, but we don’t talk about any of that.”
“Do you miss them?”
A moth flitted along my bare arm, and I brushed it away. “I’m not sure how that’s relevant to the case.”
“It’s not,” he said, his voice soft. “I just wondered.”
“Yeah. I miss my little sister. Sylvie. We were really close, and I feel like I abandoned her. I worry sometimes that she’s forgotten me, or my mother’s turned her against me. I got a letter—” I stopped myself. I hadn’t told anyone, hadn’t had anyone to tell.
Farrow nudged gently. “And?”
“My mother said Sylvie’s getting married. I don’t know if it’s something she wants, or if they’re forcing it on her, like they tried to with me. I feel like it’s all my fault, that it wouldn’t have happened if I’d been there looking out for her, protecting her.”
“You can’t blame yourself for leaving,” he said. “And it might not have been any different if you were still there. But I get it. I have a little sister. Or I did. Half sister.”
“Had? What happened to her?”
“Our family split up when we were kids. Lost touch.”
“Oh. Bad divorce?”
“No.”
I waited for him to continue, but he didn’t. “No? That’s it? You’ve been quizzing me about my family all day, and I’ve told you everything. You can’t tell me one thing about yours?”
“Okay,” he said. “You’re right. That’s fair. We lost touch because we got taken away and put in foster care. Neither of our dads was around. Our mom worked nights at a convenience store and paid a woman in our building to sleep over while she was gone. One night the sitter didn’t show, and we were fine, so then Mom figured we didn’t need anybody watching us. We were just sleeping, anyway. Save a few bucks, and we didn’t have any to spare. Someone reported her and family services got involved. Mom couldn’t keep it together after that. She wanted to get us back, but she lost her job, got evicted, moved in with her boyfriend, who was running a meth house. She wound up in prison. DFS didn’t want to separate us, but in the end, my sister and I got adopted by different families.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “So you haven’t seen her since then?”
“No. Her adoptive family moved around a lot. We used to do birthday cards, phone calls, but that stopped after a while. I wanted to reconnect, apologize. When I tracked down her parents, they weren’t open to a reunion. She’s still a minor, so there wasn’t much I could do.”
�
�What did you want to apologize for?”
“I was the reason our family split up,” he said. “I was talking to a kid at school, bragging, how I had the place to myself at night. Like I was partying or something while my mom was at work. A teacher heard me, asked some questions. I was twelve years old, scared of every noise, worried my baby sister’d wake up and start crying and I wouldn’t know what to do. Teachers are mandatory reporters. So.”
“You were a kid. It wasn’t your fault. Sounds like it was a bad situation to begin with.”
“I know. But I wonder how things might’ve turned out if I could have just held it together. She never did wake up crying. Not once.”
“Well, you can tell her all that when you see her. I bet she won’t hold it against you. Maybe her new life is really great.”
“Yeah.” Farrow stretched his shoulders, ticked his head side to side to crack his neck. “I’m gonna get to bed. The dogs’ll be at the farm first thing in the morning.” He pulled himself out of the chair. “You staying up for a bit, or…?”
“I don’t think I can sleep in there,” I said.
“Oh. We can switch cabins if you want. Or I can come kill the spider.”
“I’m not scared of spiders.” I didn’t know how to explain that it wasn’t the cabin, or the bugs, or anything he could fix. It was this place, so much like home, that made me uneasy—the isolation, the yawning emptiness waiting to swallow me up. I wanted to go back to St. Agnes, to my little house tucked in among all the other houses, the city lighting up the horizon.
He was silent for a moment, and I could feel him watching me. He dug his keys out of his pocket and handed them over. “You can sleep in the truck if you’d like. Lock yourself in. I’ve done it before. It’s not that comfortable, but there’s room to stretch out in the back.”
“Thanks.”
“Call if you need me,” he said. “Or hit the horn. I’m a light sleeper, and I’ll only be ten feet away.”
I found a jacket of Farrow’s to use as a pillow and lay across the bench seat, watching the stars, listening to the urgent whisper of the river. The jacket smelled like him, the faint scent of fresh-cut grass lingering from his soap or cologne. I performed my nighttime rituals, checking and rechecking the windows and locks, counting slow, deep breaths, reminding myself that I was safe, for the moment at least. The light in Farrow’s cabin was still burning as I drifted toward sleep, though he hadn’t gone inside. I could just make out his dark silhouette on the shore, keeping watch.
CHAPTER 12
SARABETH, THEN
AGE 17
Ronnie had ruined Secret Thursdays, but I had found something new to look forward to at the Darlings’ house. I’d finished my homeschooling, and my parents wouldn’t let me enroll in community college since they’d decided I should get married instead, but I’d convinced Mama to allow me to take an online class. The compromise was that she got to choose the course. She claimed it was an introduction to nursing, one of the few careers she deemed acceptable for me, but it was offered through an educational group I’d never heard of, not a real school, and by the second class, I realized it was a thinly veiled attempt to train women in unlicensed midwifery. I didn’t care. I had no interest in nursing, no desire to usher babies into the world with the accompanying blood and screams. All I cared about was the time it gave me away from home.
Tom had agreed to let me use his laptop, and Mrs. Darling had cleared off a tiny desk in her sewing room for me. She tucked a bouquet of sweet peas in an old perfume bottle and placed it on the windowsill where it would catch the light. The room smelled like fabric softener, the name-brand kind my grandma used to get, with the teddy bear on the box. I could sit down and shut the door and everyone would leave me alone for one blessed hour. I could feel my shoulders loosening on the walk to their house.
On the day of my first exam, which I hadn’t bothered to study for, Tom met me at the door before I could knock, his face flushed. “You can’t use my computer today,” he said.
“Why not?”
He looked over his shoulder, into the house, and then turned back to me. “Gramma took it away,” he whispered. “I think she found…porn on it, or something, and I know it was Ronnie, but she probably thinks it was me.”
My stomach knotted. I knew I should feel bad for Tom, but I was more worried for myself, that Mrs. Darling might have found out I’d been messing around on the internet and would tell my parents. “Are you sure it was porn?” I said.
“No, but definitely something bad. What else could it be?”
“She has to know it was him,” I said. “Maybe she just took it for evidence, and she’s going to confront him with it and make him leave.”
“I wish,” he said. “I know you were supposed to do your class stuff, but since you can’t, I think you should probably leave.”
“If I go back home now, my mother’ll ask what’s going on.”
“I don’t know, tell her we’re sick or something. Or the internet’s down.”
“Tommy!” Mrs. Darling called out from somewhere inside the house.
“Sorry,” he said, leaving me alone on the porch as the door swung shut.
I walked up the road to the farm stand, not knowing where else to go. I didn’t want to go home. I wanted to sneak up to the Darlings’ window and eavesdrop, find out what was happening. My mother had made a big deal about trusting me online, and I’d tried to be careful, knowing she had likely enlisted Mrs. Darling to keep an eye on me. Tom had shown me how to erase the browser history. I’d turn on the class lecture and let it play while I shopped for earrings and jeans and makeup that I couldn’t buy or wear, logged in to Tom’s Instagram to look up my old school friends, and googled things my parents wouldn’t want me to google. The last time I’d been on the computer, I’d started out searching for the nearest bus station and ended up on a site for women who’d escaped arranged marriages. Many of them had been raised in polygamist sects. To get out, they’d had to take risks, trust strangers, leave everything behind, start their lives over with nothing.
I’d been so absorbed in their stories that I kept reading long after my class finished and was startled when Mrs. Darling knocked on the door to check on me. Now I couldn’t remember whether I’d gone back and deleted my history. Mrs. Darling was always kind and generous toward me, but she wouldn’t want to betray my parents’ trust. If she saw what I’d been looking at, there was a good chance that she would call and tell them. Maybe she already had. Acid burned my throat. Mama might never let me out of the house again.
I was too preoccupied to notice that a vehicle had pulled up until I heard a door shut. It was Jack. I waited for his friends to pile out of the Jeep, but he was alone. He’d never come alone before.
“Hey,” he said, sheepish. He pushed his sun-streaked hair out of his face and then stuffed his hands into the pockets of his cargo shorts. He somehow managed to look like a surfer despite being landlocked in the Bible Belt.
“Hi.”
“Here by yourself?”
“Yeah,” I said. “We’re not really open today. I was out for a walk.”
“Oh,” he said. “I didn’t come to buy anything.”
“I know,” I said. “You never do.”
“Right.” He smiled, closemouthed. He’d smiled like that since his front teeth came in crooked in grade school, and the habit stuck even though he’d had braces since then. “I just wanted to apologize,” he said. “For the other day. My friends are jerks sometimes.” I assumed he was referring to the bare ass hanging out the window of his Jeep when he drove by the week before, one of them mooning me, though I wondered why he was apologizing now, out of all the times his friends had made crude jokes and gestures and he hadn’t said a word.
“It’s fine,” I said. “I’m used to it.”
He tilted his head. “If you’re not working
…wanna go for a ride?”
Heat spread across my chest. I had imagined something like this, played out a dozen different ways—Jack and I cruising downtown on a Saturday night, or going for ice cream at the Dairy Queen, or playing basketball in his driveway like we did when we were kids—though I’d given up hope that it would ever happen. My parents wouldn’t allow me to go for a ride with a boy from town, even if it was Jack, who had once been my closest friend. I knew I should say no, but I didn’t care anymore. What could they do that would make my life worse than it already was? They were planning to marry me off, and if they found out I was searching for ways to escape, they might lock me in the house until the wedding. I might as well take a ride with Jack while I had the chance.
“Sure,” I said. “I’ve got an hour or so before I have to get home.”
“Oh.” He faltered for a moment, caught off guard, but quickly recovered, his mouth again stretching into a tight-lipped smile. “All right. Let’s go.”
We sped away from Wisteria, going too fast, riding the center line on the curves. Jack tapped on his phone, one hand on the wheel as he texted, the wind from the open windows whipping our hair. He hadn’t looked at me once since we started to drive, hadn’t spoken a word. I tried to enjoy the fleeting rush of freedom, to forget what might await me at home, but the harder I tried to relax, the tenser I grew. We were miles from town when he cut off the main road, the Jeep bouncing over deep ruts, following a faint path through the woods and finally stopping in a glen filled with cottonwood trees. I’d thought, somehow, that we’d keep driving in silence, away from town and then back. It hadn’t occurred to me that we would stop.
“It’s so pretty,” I said, the words coming out stilted. “Where are we?”
