Girl Who Wasn’t There

by Vincent Zandri

  Tossing the tape to the grass, I check my phone again. No new text messages from Chloe. I nibble at my still swelled bottom lip, taste the dried blood. In all the confusion and violence back at the cabin, it never dawned on me to check the number she’s calling from. But it’s one that I don’t recognize, and why would I? More than likely it’s a phone she stole from her captor or captors. But how did she know my number? It’s possible I’ve told her the cell phone’s number since I’ve been back, or it’s possible she snooped. Nothing unusual for a curious girl her age. What matters now is that she’s in contact with me and I have every intention of locating her.

  “We need a ride, Pen,” I say. “Otherwise it will take us all night to get back to Lake Placid.”

  She looks over each of her shoulders.

  “I don’t think we have much choice but to start walking,” she comments. “At least it’s not winter.”

  “The glass half full girl,” I say. “There’s the Penny I used to know.”

  She smiles. But then she rears back quick.

  “Oh God,” she says. “What the hell was that?”

  A rustling in the brush a few feet ahead of us. What looks like a coy dog, or even a wolf, racing off, something in its mouth.

  “Easy, Pen,” I say, pressing the shotgun stock against my shoulder.

  But the animal is gone now. Something’s not right. Animals like that are nocturnal. They hunt in the darkness, and even if nightfall is coming, it’s still too early for them to be out and about. Unless, that is, there’s game to be had.

  “Stay right there, Pen. Don’t move.”

  “Where are you going, Sid? Let’s just keep moving.”

  “I need to check something.”

  What I don’t tell her is that my gut is speaking to me. My gut and my head. I slowly make my way into the brush. I only make it a few steps when I see the blood. It soaks the ground, smears the thick brush. Fresh blood. A few more steps in I see her. Giselle. A portion of her jaw is gone, as is her left eye and the tip of her nose. Her neck has been bitten through; her carotid artery punctured. She died within a couple of minutes of the wolf’s bite.

  I swallow something bitter and give her entire body a cursory examination. Her left ankle is broken badly, a jagged piece of white bone protruding through the skin. The high heel on her shoe is broken, and the sole of the foot is facing outwards at an unnatural ninety-degree angle.

  “What’s happening, Sid?” Penny begs. “What do you see?”

  “Don’t come in here,” I demand. “Stay where you are.”

  The wolves must have sniffed her out after she broke her ankle, and come after her. I raise up my head, attempt to gaze through the thick brush. Those same wolves are out there. They’re watching us. They move in packs, and it won’t take much for them to come after Penny and me once it’s full dark. They’ll also go after the bodies back at the destroyed cabin, I suspect.

  “So long, Giselle.”

  I turn, head back out onto the logging road.

  “We need to move, Pen,” I say.

  Her face goes tight as a tick.

  “It was Giselle, wasn’t it?” she says. “She’s dead.”

  “Let’s just go,” I say.

  As we move on, I feel the eyes of the wild animals watching our every move.

  We begin our trek along the roadside, secretly hoping that no cops are cruising the area. At least, that’s my hope. But my guess is the cops are combing the place for us. If it weren’t dark out, we’d have no choice but to hike it through the woods, which would take forever. Naturally, after spotting Giselle and her—let’s call it bad luck—the woods would never be an option at this point. In the end, we have only one choice, and that’s to hijack a car. Sure, it’s a crime, but what the hell does it matter at this point?

  A couple more minutes go by until I make out a pair of halogen headlamps cutting through the night sky. Judging by the look of the vehicle’s grill, it’s not one of the police SUVs, but, in fact, a pickup truck.

  “Penny,” I say, handing her the daypack, but hanging onto the shotgun. “Head into the brush. Just step in far enough to hide yourself, until I tell you to come back out.”

  “What are you gonna do?” she asks.

  “I’m gonna rent us a truck.”

  Hiding the shotgun by setting it vertically beside my left leg, I step out into the road and wave my free hand over my head like it’s an emergency. The truck must be doing about fifty along the narrow mountain road, which tells me whoever is driving knows the road like the veins on the back of his hand. The lights make contact with my good eye, and for a half second, I’m blinded. Lowering my hand, I shield my eye by using it like a visor.

  The driver hits the brakes, and I can hear the tires leaving burn marks on the pavement. The truck sways across the meridian into the oncoming traffic, but the driver quickly regains control and shifts it back into its rightful lane. When he comes to a stop, he’s already rolling down his window on the 1980s-era Ford F-150 pickup.

  “What hell are you doing, son?” he says. “You trying to get yourself killed?” He says get like git, and killed like killt. A real country boy. The kind of man who refers to fishing as fishin’ and hunting as huntin’.

  I try to work up a smile with my swelled lips.

  “I’m nobody’s son,” I say.

  He’s an older man. Maybe seventy, but chesty in his hunter green t-shirt, his arms thick, not like a weightlifter, but a man who knows the meaning of working with his hands for a living. He’s got a gray goatee and thick gray hair to match. His blue eyes focus in on the shotgun, which I’m not concealing very well.

  “I hope the other guy looks worse,” he says.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your face, son. It might be dark, but I can see the pain on your face plain enough. And that twelve gauge.” He pauses for a beat while the truck idles. “You can tell your wife to come out of the bushes. I’m not gonna say anything. I’m not gonna say anything ’bout you neither. You wanna ride into town, you best hop on up before someone comes along. Someone like the Lake Placid Village PD, if you catch my drift.”

  Turning toward the woods, the wolf pack comes to mind. The sooner she emerges from the bush, the better.

  “Penny,” I say. “Come on, we gotta move.”

  She reveals herself, and together we go around the front of the truck. Opening the door for her, I help her up inside while I follow, closing the door behind me, the shotgun in between my knees. I’m not aiming the gun at the driver necessarily, but then I’m not keeping it away from him either. I’m keeping it at the ready. Just in case.

  Gray Goatee throws the truck back in drive, gives it the gas.

  “I’m Lou,” he says. “Lou Garrity. But my friends call me Gary, for obvious reasons.”

  “Thanks for helping us, Gary,” Penny says.

  He nods, negotiating the winding road as we pass through the mountain gaps, some of which are surrounded by pristine narrow lakes while others support bases of thick pine forest. On my right, the moonlight is lighting up a waterfall that’s mostly dried up this time of year. If I weren’t in search of my daughter and on the run at the same time, I’d be tempted to pitch a tent and stay awhile, for this is truly God’s country.

  “When was the last time you two had a good meal or some sleep?” Gary asks.

  I find myself looking at Penny.

  “I can’t remember,” I say. “We have some pizza in the pack. Old pizza, I guess.”

  “You should eat,” he says.

  “We don’t have time,” I say. “Or the appetite. Who would?”

  He drives for a minute. Then, “I understand what you’re doing.”

  “You do?” Penny jumps.

  “I do,” he affirms. “I had a daughter once. I know what it feels like to lose her.”

  This stranger picks us up off the road and he is suddenly in tune with our most personal details. But then, our faces must be broadcast all over the news by now. M
y face has been broadcast all week long.

  “You know who we are,” I say, like a question.

  “Yup,” he says. “They say you took your own daughter. That you were the one who caused her to go missing. That you probably got mad at her and flipped out, maybe even killed her. But I don’t believe that crap. They keep showing a CCTV clip of you inside the hotel, grabbing your wife, snapping at her. Like it’s supposed to be proof that you’re as volatile as a powder keg. They list the violent crimes you allegedly committed in prison.”

  “My husband has been nothing but good to me since he’s been back,” Penny interjects. “It’s me who’s the criminal.”

  “In prison,” I say, “I defended myself against men who wanted me dead. That’s not a crime. That’s survival. Do you understand me, Gary?”

  “I get it. Here’s what I also get. Men do desperate things during desperate times. I believe you are one of those men.” He turns to me. “The condition of your face is proof enough of that.”

  We drive for a while in a silence so heavy, I feel like it’s pressing against my sternum. Slowly, I turn my head, peer over my shoulder beyond Penny to Gary. The lights from the dash illuminate his eyes. Big, blue, sad eyes. Eyes that know loss. The loss of a child. The worst kind of loss there is.

  “Your daughter,” I say, filling the quiet. “Did you ever find her?”

  He presses his lips together, nods slowly.

  “Oh, yah,” he says, “we found her all right. When the detectives uncovered her in the village dump two weeks after she’d gone missing, she was mostly decomposed. She’d been stripped of everything but her underclothes. She’d been raped and beaten and left to die on a pile of garbage.” He shoots me a glance. “Yes, we found her all right and it was quite the find. But that was the day I lost my soul.”

  My entire being feels like it’s crashing. The emotions that swim though my veins are a toxic mixture of sadness, desperation, and outright anger. How utterly strange that this man would have picked us up out of the blue. What are the chances that we would have a tragedy like this in common? Or has my situation not yet reached tragedy status? The answer to that one is too crippling to ponder.

  Of course, that’s when the realization punches me in the gut.

  “Gary,” I say, after a beat, “how long did it take for you to find us?”

  He cocks his head over his shoulder.

  “I wasn’t sure I would ever find you,” he answers. “There’s over six million acres of wilderness out there. But then, I sensed you wouldn’t go far, not even after having stolen that Jeep. You’d stay relatively close to Lake Placid because that’s where your daughter went missing. But you still needed to get out of town, now that the police were wrongly fingering you. So where’s the next logical place to go? Into Keene Valley. I knew, or hoped, that if I cruised Highway 73, I’d eventually find you. It was either that or the cops were gonna pick you up. I saw the helo making passes over the forest, heard the explosions. Brought back flashbacks of Nam, let me tell you.”

  Penny puts her hand on my thigh, presses it. It feels good, but I’m still not entirely sure how I should feel about her after what she’s done. I guess it’s a matter of trusting her. Believing she was committing a big wrong in order to do something that was right. Insuring a bright future for our daughter.

  “I need to find my daughter, Gary,” I say. “And I think I know where she is. All I need you to do is drop us off in the village.”

  “In a dark corner, preferably,” Penny adds.

  “We can take it from there,” I add.

  I tell him about Walton, what he’s done. That he’s dead now and that it’s his own fault. Gary doesn’t respond for a long beat or two as we begin the long climb up the mountain road that will take us past the 1980 Olympic ski jump facility, past the airport, past the row of cheap motels and eateries, past the village police HQ, and finally into the village itself. It’s like he’s trying to digest everything I’ve revealed to him and it’s not going down so easy.

  “I’m not about to drop you off,” he says, after a weighted beat. “You won’t last ten minutes in that village without getting caught or shot at by a cop, or at the very least, spotted on the street by someone fixated on their Facebook or Twitter accounts. You’re famous, Mr. O’Keefe. Or infamous, anyhow.”

  “For all the wrong reasons,” I say.

  “Here’s the deal,” Gary goes on as the village begins to take shape. “I intend to take you all the way.”

  “All the way?” I ask. “What’s that mean?”

  “I intend to take you to your daughter.”

  CHAPTER 39

  I DIG WALTON’S driver’s license out of my pocket. Recite the address to Gary.

  “That’s a high-end trailer park outside of town,” he comments. “On the way to Whiteface Mountain.”

  “Isn’t that kind of a contradiction?” Penny says. “A high-end trailer park.”

  “They exist,” Gary says. “All over the Adirondacks. In high-end places like Lake George and Schroon Lake, too. A piece of property in a high-end trailer park can cost three hundred grand. The trailer you put on it is more like a big prefabricated house than a trailer.”

  “What kind of postage stamp you get for three hundred Gs?” I inquire.

  “That’s the point,” Gary goes on. “You don’t get a postage stamp. You get an acre or more. It will usually be surrounded by trees and vegetation, very private. I’ve been inside Walton’s trailer park community before. It’s got maybe one hundred fifty one-acre parcels that are nice and secluded, with plenty of trees and privacy fences. But in the center of all that is a private town with its own general store, its own post office, a coffeehouse, a nondenominational church, a fire department, you name it.”

  “Sounds like Walton never had to leave the place if he didn’t want,” I comment. “Everything he needed was right at his beck and call.”

  Penny squeezes my leg again. I can’t help but wonder if this place is familiar to her. But then, my insides are telling me that not only has she never been anywhere near Walton’s home, she never had much contact with the man before yesterday when Giselle sent us to his village PD office. My guess is she was kept separate from the major players in this charade, kept in the dark as to their true plans. No wonder she was so shocked and hurt over Chloe’s disappearance. Her tears and her despair were all too real.

  “Sort of like the perfect place to keep someone against their will,” she adds. “Secluded, but then you never have to go very far to keep them alive.”

  Pulling my cell phone from my pocket, I check the texts again. Nothing new. It dawns on me that I haven’t tried the number in a while. I press SEND, and the last incoming number automatically dials for me. An automated message comes on. “The number you’ve reached is temporarily disconnected or out of service. Please check the number and try again.”

  I close the phone, glance at Penny.

  “Nothing,” I say.

  Her body is pressed up against mine. I feel her shivering.

  “This is all my fault,” she says.

  “Listen, Pen,” I say. “We’re going to get Chloe back. Right now. And then this will all be behind us.”

  “There’s all those dead bodies back there at the cabin. The police are searching for us. They’re going to lock us up forever, Doc.”

  “Not if we go to the police with the truth,” I say. “Surrender ourselves at the first opportunity. But not until we get Chloe back.”

  “He’s right, ma’am,” Gary says. “All you got to do is tell the truth. I don’t always trust in the system, but sounds to me like you’re gonna have no choice in the matter.”

  “So what are you saying?” Penny begs.

  “I’m saying the law is the law, and no matter what side of right you are on, you are always gonna lose.”

  We drive on in the darkness. In the moonlit distance, Whiteface Mountain looms large. In the winter, it would be veined with white ski trails running top t
o bottom. Soon we come to a piece of road running perpendicular to Route 73. There’s a large sign made of logs and rough wood planks that bears the name “Adirondack Acres.” Gary slows the truck, flicks on his directional.

  “Now’s as good a time as any,” he says. “The Lake Placid cops will be swarming on this place within the half hour to be sure.”

  “Let’s go,” I say.

  “I want my daughter back,” Penny says.

  “So do I,” Gary says. “So … do … I.”

  The road into Adirondack Acres is long and winding, flanked on both sides with tall, thick pine trees, making the night even darker since the tree cover blocks most of the full moon’s glow. Gary takes it slow. Could be he wants to avoid any unwanted attention by anyone who might be watching, even if the only living things out here are deer, coy dogs, snakes, moose, and wolves.

  After about a mile, we come upon a road that forces us to either turn right or left. Gary goes left and proceeds past a trailer that’s set back on a flat piece of ground. It’s a double-wide by the looks of it, with a porch built onto the front facade. He continues, passing three more trailers, until he comes to another property accessed by a stone and gravel driveway that, at present, is blocked by a chain-link fence gate that is secured with a padlock and chain.

  “This is it,” Gary says, a little under his breath. “Chief Walton’s property.”

  “Looks like we’ll have to climb the fence,” I point out.

  Gary opens his door.

  “No, we won’t,” he says.

  Slipping out, he reaches into the metal toolbox setup in the pickup’s cargo bay.

  “What’s he doing?” Penny asks.

  “He’s grabbing some bolt cutters,” I answer. “Big ones.”

  Gary comes around the front of the vehicle, goes to the gate, his body awash in the bright white halogen headlamp light. Opening up the cutters, he places the blades on one of the chain links, then quickly and forcefully pulls the handles together. The chain link snaps in two. Grabbing hold of the chain, he pulls it out of the tubular aluminum gate posts, and swings open the gates.