by Laura McHugh
“When I found her adoptive parents, they didn’t want me to see her. It took a while for me to figure out she wasn’t there. They hadn’t reported her missing. When I finally got them to talk to me, they said they figured she’d run away, but I didn’t believe it. I was sure something had happened to her.”
“Why didn’t you just tell me?”
“Would you have talked to me if I showed up at your house, some random guy asking for your help to find his long-lost sister? I needed you to trust me, believe me. The badge, the case—that gave me the credibility I needed. After we met, I wanted to tell you, but you were skittish. You didn’t want to get involved as it was. I really did think your case had some connection to Abby. I believed it. I needed to. Because you were let go. I wanted Abby to come back, too. I wanted to believe that I could find her alive.” He looked down at the pavement, at the weeds growing through the cracks.
“Maybe you will.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I hope so. I meant what I said about helping with your case, too. But they have nothing to do with each other. There’s no need for you to be involved. This was a dead end.”
“How can you be so sure? What about the new leads? Leon? Everett Linley? I talked to Retta, and she said Eva Winters babysat Leon’s kids.”
“Everett got drunk and crashed his truck into a Piggly Wiggly store, striking and injuring a cashier. Nothing close to kidnapping. Suffered a brain injury in the accident, which he’s still recovering from. We don’t have any evidence that Leon did anything to anyone. No charges were ever filed against him. I’ll track down the Winters girl, make sure she’s where they say she is, see if she’s okay. If she’s not…if there’s any evidence of a crime, it’ll be investigated. But right now any similarities between your case and Abby’s are purely coincidental. The church, the homeschooling—how many families around here have that in common? Too many to count. Destiny had that, too, and it didn’t mean anything. I’m right back where I started, and I’m wondering if maybe instead of chasing leads I should be searching Abby’s parents’ house, digging up their backyard.”
I wanted to comfort him somehow, but I didn’t know what to say. Maybe he was right.
He shoved his hands in his pockets and looked me in the eye. “What you did…what you went through to help me…I don’t think I really appreciated how hard that was for you. I’m so sorry about all of this, the position I put you in, the pressure. Misleading you. It wasn’t fair and it wasn’t right. And I understand if you’re angry. If you never want to see my face again. But if you ever need me—if you need anything, or nothing—just call me, and I’m there.”
He watched me get back in my car, and I gripped the steering wheel until I could no longer feel my hands. I sat there and cried after Farrow pulled away. I was angry that he’d manipulated me, that he hadn’t felt like he could tell me the truth from the beginning, but I understood why he’d done it. If my sister were missing—if it was Sylvie—I would do anything. I didn’t regret getting involved. On our trip to Lone Ridge, I’d begun to think that maybe I could actually do something to help other girls like me. I had felt, however briefly, that I wasn’t powerless. But Destiny was dead and maybe Abby was, too, and I was busy making crafts and baking cupcakes for my sister’s wedding, a wedding I had naïvely thought I might be able to stop.
I’d been wrong about so many things, including Sylvie. She didn’t want me to rescue her. She was going to marry Noah Blackburn, and I couldn’t convince her otherwise. She wasn’t like me. She was content with the choices she’d made. There was nothing she wanted to change. I’d been given a second chance at life, something Destiny would never have, and I spent it in fear, afraid to let people know me, holding myself back from the things I truly wanted. I was barely even living.
CHAPTER 26
SARABETH, THEN
AGE 18
I came to in a moving vehicle, a tarp covering me. I’d been hog-tied, my wrists and ankles bound together so I could barely move. Everything swirled when I tried to turn my head, and a wave of nausea rolled over me. I smelled blood. I could feel it beginning to dry on my face, down my chest. My slip was cold and wet, my hands sticky. I wasn’t dead but maybe he thought I was, and he was going to dump my body. That might be the only option I had left, to lie still, pretend to be lifeless.
The vehicle slowed and vibrated as it rolled onto gravel, and then it came to a stop. I tried to keep my breathing quiet, shallow, and when the door opened I stopped breathing altogether. I stayed limp, but as he dragged me out, my hip caught jagged metal and my skin tore. A sound escaped my mouth and he paused and I feared it was the end.
He laid me down on my side, weeds and gravel scraping my bare skin, and crouched over me, his hair brushing against my face as he leaned close. I didn’t flinch. I imagined him watching my chest, listening for my breath. I repeated one word over and over in my head. It wasn’t a prayer. I was begging. Please please please please please.
He got up. I heard his shoes crunching and a door slammed and he was peeling away and then he was gone.
My body shuddered in relief. I gulped cool air. When my breathing slowed, I listened, and heard traffic nearby. The rumble of semis. I had to be close to a highway.
I struggled against my restraints but couldn’t work them loose, so I painfully contorted myself until I could claw at my blindfold with my fingernails. The duct tape had been tightly wrapped around and around, melded to my hair and skin, but I managed to peel it up enough to see the sky. It was nighttime. There was pink light on the horizon, though I didn’t know whether it was east or west, if the sun was rising or setting.
I couldn’t see much through the weeds, so I listened to the traffic to figure out which way to go. I needed to get to the road where I could be found. I couldn’t get up, but I could scoot and roll, and that’s what I did until I saw headlights.
I dragged myself onto the shoulder of the highway, hoping someone would notice me. Cars passed by and I wondered what I must look like in the dark. Wreckage from an accident. A wounded animal.
Finally, as the pink light began to turn yellow and spread up into the sky, a car sped by and then screeched onto the shoulder twenty yards down the road and began to back up. A woman got out and ran toward me. She had silver hair and wore an old-fashioned brooch on her jacket like my grandma used to do. She gaped at me, horrified, shrugged off her jacket, and draped it over me. She waited with me for the ambulance and held my hand. It was covered in blood. Mine. Hopefully his.
A Missouri state highway patrolman in a big hat asked me questions while the paramedics examined me.
“What’s your name?”
“Sarabeth Shepherd.” My voice creaked like an old screen door.
“And where are you from?”
“Wisteria. I was kidnapped.”
“When was that? Last night?”
“September twenty-fifth.”
The patrolman exchanged glances with one of the paramedics. “You’re sure about that?”
“Yes. It was almost my birthday.”
“That was over a week ago.”
“A week?”
“Was that Wisteria, you said? Arkansas?”
“Yes.” It wasn’t often that anyone disappeared from Wisteria. I figured law enforcement would be on the lookout.
“Huh,” he said. “There’s nobody been reported missing from Wisteria. Or anywhere else around those parts.”
His words floated through my head like bits of dust, slowly drifting down and finally settling. It didn’t make sense. Maybe it was a mistake. Maybe he’d missed it somehow, being across the state line in Missouri. I wanted to tell him that my family was looking for me, that they’d miss me if I’d been gone for an entire week. But now I wasn’t sure that was true. From the look on his face, I wasn’t sure he’d believe me anyway.
CHAPTER 27
SARAH, NOW
Friday morning I was still reeling. I’d barely slept, thinking about Destiny and what her mother had done to her. I’d begun to believe Farrow’s theory that she and Abby and I were linked, that finding Destiny would lead us to Abby and uncover the truth of what had happened to me. I hadn’t wanted to dig into my own past until Farrow had convinced me that it might help someone else. But we never had a chance to save Destiny, and we were no closer to finding Abby than we had been at the beginning.
The more I thought about it, though, the less I was convinced that Farrow had been wrong about everything. Maybe the person who’d taken me hadn’t hurt anyone else, but what if he had? What if he was targeting girls like me? Like Retta. And Eva Winters. Girls hidden away in the hills and hollers, the only record of their existence a name scrawled inside the cover of a family Bible. Girls who wouldn’t tell or wouldn’t be believed. I couldn’t shake Leon from my head, but Retta, who knew him best, was no longer speaking to me.
I was able to distract myself for a while by helping Luke and Paul in the fields, harvesting pumpkins and gourds and cornstalks to use as decorations for Sylvie’s reception. I was surprised to find myself actually enjoying it. I’d never thought I’d miss farmwork, but I liked the smell of the earth, being outdoors, testing my strength. It felt different, too, now that no one was standing over me. I was here by choice.
For a long time, when I thought of home, everything snarled together in one ugly knot, but now that I was here, it was easier to tease apart the tangled threads. I had never hated the farm, the sweeping beauty of the land. What I had hated was the loss of myself, the act I was forced to put on, the suffocating dresses and submissive smile. I had loved sitting alone in the sunlight, watching the cloud shadows move over the distant hills, listening to the wind sift through the trees. Those were the things that had grounded me. In the field, I could breathe deeply without counting my breaths.
The sky grew overcast, the air humid and stagnant. The boys worked quietly. There was no conversation, no joking around, and I wondered if they were like that all the time, or only because I was here. When we had what we needed, we hauled everything back to the house and got washed up for supper. I wasn’t hungry and didn’t feel like sitting through another big family meal listening to everyone talk around me, so I decided to skip out and go into town to buy Sylvie a wedding present. I left a note in case anyone noticed my chair was empty.
* * *
—
It was after five when I got to town, so the stoplights had switched to flashing red. I’d forgotten about it being Friday night, and the main strip was clogged with teenagers cruising in a loop between Dairy Queen at one end and the Farm & Home at the other.
As I passed the storefronts, most already dark, I realized my options would be extremely limited. Not that I even knew what I was looking for. I had no idea what Sylvie wanted or needed for her little cabin and hadn’t been thoughtful enough to ask. I’d been too busy hoping that the wedding wouldn’t happen. I made the loop twice before turning on Third Street and heading toward our old house.
I’d worried that it wouldn’t look the same, but the changes were subtle. It looked nicer than when we lived there. The dingy white siding had been painted yellow, the unwieldy evergreen shrubs lining the front ripped out and replaced with a bed of smooth river rocks. There was a basketball goal in the driveway and a big green “W” painted on the concrete to let everyone know that a Wisteria High Wildcat lived there. The light was on in my bedroom window upstairs. I kept driving, creeping past Jack’s house. The crabapple tree was still there, a pink trike sitting in the grass beneath it. I stopped when I came to Mulberry Drive. If I followed it to the edge of town, I’d be at Retta’s parents’ house. I sat at the intersection, no cars coming or going in either direction, trying to decide what to do.
After a minute or two, I turned back toward Main and pulled into the Price Chopper parking lot. There was a fall display out front, with potted mums and bales of hay and garden tools. I grabbed a crimson mum and a hand shovel and went inside to find a card. The selection was limited, so I picked a random congratulations card, not realizing until I got in the checkout line that the message was more suited to a graduation or promotion than a wedding. Congratulations! All your hard work has paid off! It would be more fitting for Mama, who’d probably worked harder than anyone to marry her daughter to the pastor’s son.
As the clerk scanned my items, I looked up and saw a familiar figure walking by. It was Jack. His hair was thinning, though he still wore it long in front and swept to the side like he had back in school. The name tag on his polo shirt read assistant manager. He nodded curtly in my direction as he passed, his mouth pressed into a flat, closemouthed smile, the sort of polite acknowledgment a manager might give any customer in his store. I couldn’t tell if he was pretending not to know who I was or truly didn’t recognize me. On my way out, I was tempted to do something spiteful, arrange the produce in vulgar anatomical vignettes, the way Everett and his other friends used to do at the farm stand in an attempt to get a reaction from me. I settled for bumping into a tower of oranges and hearing them thump to the floor, one after another, hoping Jack would have to pick them up. There wasn’t time for anything else. I had something more important to do.
I had to be sure about Leon. I couldn’t let it go. If Retta wouldn’t talk to me, I would dig up her secrets myself, pull them out of the earth where they’d been festering and expose them to the light.
I drove past Retta’s parents’ house at the northern edge of town and parked behind the abandoned general store that had been slowly rotting into the ground since we were kids. I crept through the dark field that backed the house, carrying the hand shovel I’d bought at Price Chopper. When I got close enough that someone might have spied me from a rear window, I dropped to my knees and crawled through the weeds.
I knew approximately where Retta had buried the jars, just outside the fence at the edge of the backyard, behind her mother’s flower garden. Heady clouds of sweet autumn clematis climbed the wire fence, their white blossoms glowing in the moonlight and shielding me from view. I leaned all my weight on the shovel, trying to push the blade into the earth, but the hard-packed clay would accept nothing more than the tip. Somewhere down the road, a dog barked, and another one, closer, barked back. I moved along the fencerow seeking looser soil, finally finding it near the fence post.
I crouched and dug, prying out thick hunks of pasture grass by the roots to get it out of the way, my hands blistering where they gripped the shovel. It didn’t take long to hit something, though the first thing I dug up was a jagged stone. When I pulled it out, I felt something else in the void, something smoother. I carefully worked it loose and brought it into the moonlight. An old-fashioned canning jar, caked with dirt. When I shook it, it made a faint sound like fluttering moths.
I kept going, unearthing more rocks, focused on my work. A low growl came from behind, the sound like the first throat-clearing pull on Daddy’s chain saw, the motor gurgling and dying out. I slowly turned around. It was an enormous German shepherd mix that could have passed for a wolf in the dark. One of his ears was shredded, like he’d been in a fight. The dog snarled. I held still, my arms at my sides, and spoke softly. “It’s okay. Good boy. Go on home.” He started barking, and the more I shushed him, the louder he barked. I tucked the cold, filthy jar in the crook of my arm, held the shovel in front of me, and edged away from the dog, into the field, until I was far enough away to run.
When I got to the car, I found a half-empty bottle of water under the seat and used wet napkins to wipe down the jar. Metal ground against glass as I struggled to unscrew the corroded lid, the blisters on my hands tearing open. Finally I gave up and smashed the jar with a rock, collecting the paper slips inside. Moisture had gotten in, and some of the messages were too stained and degraded to read. I felt guilty sorting through Retta’s secrets, loo
king for Leon’s name, and I felt worse the more I read. She described dark feelings that couldn’t be prayed away. She confessed to holding hate in her heart for her brother, and for herself. She was filled with a deep well of shame. It was heartbreaking.
Then I came to one that mentioned Pastor Rick. He was the one who had counseled her, helped her heal. On the scrap of paper, she’d written that she wasn’t sure at first that what he was doing would help. But she trusted him. When she wouldn’t tell him something that Leon had done, he asked her to show him, but she was scared to. He said only a holy man can make you pure again. One day I’ll have to lie with my husband and if I’m not pure, he’ll know. Pastor Rick didn’t touch her. He asked her to describe the things that had happened to her, and how they made her feel. Once, he had her close her eyes and lie naked on the floor.
I tried to call Retta on the way home. The first two times it rang and rang, and the third time someone picked up and the line immediately went dead.
* * *
—
I lay in bed thinking about Pastor Rick. I looked over at Sylvie, her eyelids fluttering and her hair spilling over her pillow down to the floor, and I remembered how the pastor had sat on her bed when he came to see me. How he had stroked the yellow blanket and told me that I could talk to him, that he was a very good listener. I fell asleep at some point, and when I woke, sunlight filtered in through the curtains and dappled Sylvie’s neatly made bed. There were noises downstairs, cabinets slamming, pans jangling. It was the day before her wedding, and she was already down in the kitchen with Mama, preparing the food for the reception.
I got myself ready and went down to help, dreading what would likely be a full day of cooking and cleaning. They put me to work grinding the meat for ham salad sandwiches, a punishing chore for my blistered hands. I fed chunks of ham into the grinder and turned the crank, watching the meat ooze out of the little holes at the other end like pink worms, and then stirred it together with homemade relish and mayonnaise.
