Girls on Film

by Gregg Olsen

The guy was handsome and he was wearing a uniform. Ginger brushed back her shoulder-length hair and approached him.

  “They’re for Courtney.” He looked over at her.

  “From Mom and Dad?” she said hopefully.

  With all the tubes attached to her and the raised side rails of the hospital bed, Courtney couldn’t really accept the bouquet. Ginger, who wanted to make an impression, reached for them.

  “They’re stunning,” she said.

  The officer nodded and then turned to leave.

  “Thank you, officer—?” Ginger says, angling for his name. She was trying anything that would get her noticed. She was young, pretty, but single. And, she could never, ever admit it, but there was something about that uniform that melted her like a scoop of vanilla gelato on an August blacktop.

  She set the flowers on a tray and handed the card to her sister.

  Courtney teared up, maybe a little because of her parents finally accepting her, but mostly because her hormones had joined forces to take over her body, and everything seemed emotional.

  She opened the card and her face turned ashen. Her eyes wide. Her hand moved to the incubator unit.

  “We need to get the hell out of here,” she whispered, her voice raspy, afraid.

  “What?” said Ginger. “We can’t leave. You just had a baby”

  “We need to go now. Right now. Not five minutes from now”

  Courtney swung her legs over the edge of the bed. She tore out the tubes in her arms and she let out a soft cry. Not because it hurt like hell, but because in that moment Courtney knew that calling attention to herself was akin to a flashing billboard that said.

  Take me. Come and get me. I’m right here.

  She pressed the card into Ginger’s hands and then she put on her maternity jeans and a top.

  “We have to get out of here,” she repeated.

  Ginger tried to stop her. “You can’t,” she said. “You just had a baby. You’ve lost blood. You’re not well enough”

  Courtney stared at her sister. “He can’t have her”

  “Who can’t, Courtney?.

  By then, Courtney had moved to the other side of the room. Her eyes caught those of Ms. Morales, but the woman closed hers without saying anything.

  Ginger was beside herself. Her sister had gone insane and she was confused. She wondered if she should call the doctors or the nurses. Her eyes fell on the call button next to the bed.

  “Don’t,” Courtney pleaded.

  Ginger looked at the little card. It was the kind that came from the florist. This one didn’t come from the florist. A police officer brought it in.

  congratulations to us. bound Forever. she’s mine. alway.

  will be. in time, i’ll come For her.

  AS I SIT HERE, GINGER does what I need her to do. She tell.

  me everything. She tells me how my mom and she were certain that the man who had brought the flowers was connected with my mom’s rapist. Her tormenter. My father. They decided that he’d been connected to law enforcement and that he’d abducted other girls and that my mom’s cleverness had saved her, but then she had me.

  “Once you were here,” Aunt Ginger says, “there was no way she was going to lose you. She was not going to give you to him”

  “She almost gave me away,” I say.

  She shakes her head. “She never even filled out the paperwork. She never was going to let you go. I think she needed to process what had happened to her before she could do what she was meant to do”

  “What was that?” I ask as Aunt Ginger flips off a light and leads me toward the staircase.

  “Love you,” she says. “Protect you. Be your mom.” I know my new aunt is trying to be kind right now, but I’m still so mad at Mom.

  Protect me? She betrayed me. She lied to me.

  I LIE MOTIONLESS. THE MOON leaves a trail of light across the big old bed that commands almost all of the guest room. I know by looking around that it was a girl’s room, but I don’t even know her name. I feel bad about that. I haven’t asked Aunt Ginger anything about her life. About her estranged children. About her husband. I don’t even know if my uncle is dead or alive. It is very late.

  Almost two a.m. I hear Aunt Ginger flush the toilet and go back to bed. Ten more minutes pass and I throw off the covers and slide my feet very quietly to the floor. I am already dressed.

  After talking with my aunt, I spent hours poring over the letters, the news clippings—the breadcrumbs Mom left for me. Now I grab my things, including my shoes, and tiptoe down the hallway. I’ve written a note to both my aunt and my brother. But even though I’ve said everything I need to say, I can’t just leave Hayden without saying goodbye.

  Or without promising I will be back for him.

  Hayden’s sleeping nearly at the foot of the bed when I enter his room. His arm dangles to the floor and he looks like a gangly baby lost in slumber. His dyed hair suits him, I think. I lean over his body and he stirs awake.

  “Rylee?” he says drowsily, his brow knitted like one of those doilies downstairs. “I wanna sleep now. What’s the matter?.

  God, I love him.

  “I’m going to find Mom”

  “I’ll come, too,” he says, with the kind of conviction used by a girl telling another she looks cute in the worst outfit in the world.

  “No. You can’t,” I say. “I promise I’ll be back”

  My brother opens, then closes his eyes and I do something that I haven’t done in a long, long time. I kiss Hayden on the forehead. “Love you,” I say.

  “I’ll take care of him,” a voice behind me says in a whisper.

  I turn around and find my aunt in the doorway. She’s wearing a pretty grape-colored robe and she’s holding a bag and a set of car keys.

  “You drive, don’t you?” she asks.

  “Of course I do,” I say.

  Chapter Nine

  Cash: $234.50 (Aunt Ginger gave me ten twenties).

  Food: A box of granola bars too.

  Shelter: Ford Focus.

  Weapons: Gun, scissors, ice pick.

  Plan: Try not to get picked up by the police. Find Mom. Then kill Dad.

  THE FORD FOCUS IS A CAR for losers, but I’m hoping that luck is on my side. It’s a mega hope. The truth is that I’m not a seasoned driver. Far, far from it. I’ve never passed my test. I did get behind the wheel a few times to move a car into the driveway, and Caleb liked Grand Theft Auto and to sync up better with him, I played that game about a zillion times. Alone. Without him. Just to be close to him. When I remember that right now, I think maybe I am a loser after all. Maybe the Ford Focus my aunt is letting me use is an appropriate car.

  The car is a conspicuous red. Aunt Ginger has—or rather had—a plastic potato hanging from the rear-view mirror. On the front of the plastic potato is the tag-line Idaho’s Spuds Number One in the World. All I could think about when I pitched the thing into the backseat was that it must be really rough being from a state in which your marquee item is a lowly brown tuber.

  Right now I want French fries. I don’t know why.

  In that instant, I catch myself in the mirror. It startles me a little how much I look like my mother. With the dye job, the heavier, mom-ish make-up, and the not-so-bad-if-I-say-somyself haircut, I really could pass for her. That’s a good thing. If I get pulled over I have her driver’s license.

  I am Candace.

  As I drive west on the Interstate, I munch on a granola bar and think about where I’m going and what I need to do. At first, it’s scary driving so fast and my hands hold the steering wheel with a deathly grip. My knuckles literally hurt. But as I keep going, I grow more confident, but I’m also tired. It is early morning and I pull over and sleep a little at a rest stop next to a minivan with steamed up windows. A little girl opens her eyes and I nod at her. I wonder for a second if she’s on the run too. I’d been that little girl in the past, sleeping in our car, waiting. I don’t remember exactly where that was or how old I was. H
er age? Five.

  I remember my mom talking to a woman at the rest area and how she’d offered us money because she saw something in us that I didn’t understand.

  Homelessness.

  Like that minivan and that little girl.

  The vehicle is loaded to the gills with stuff. I look closer and recognize that they aren’t camping. They aren’t moving. They are living there. It’s just the man behind the wheel and the little girl. Where is her mother.

  A trail from the van leads to the restroom.

  I call the girl Selma for some reason. She’s pretty. She has dark hair and dark eyes. I catch her eyes again. Selma moves her finger through the condensation on the window that she stares out from. A circle. Two dots. Finally, an arch.

  A sad face.

  She’ll be better off than I am.

  I can’t help her.

  I don’t even know if she needs help, though deep down I sense that she does. The swarthy man looks from the driver’s side and gives me a scowl and I turn away, slipping down deeper in my seat. I check the door locks. Down.

  The visit to Aunt Ginger plays in my head like the DVR when my mom pushes past all the commercials. I think of the papers from the safe deposit box and what they mean. One now makes sense—the card from the hospital—it wasn’t someone wishing happiness for a new mother, but someone making a claim on her.

  And on me.

  A birth certificate confounds me. There is no name. Or at least, if there was one it has been carefully removed. I can understand why she didn’t want his name on the document that announced my existence on this planet, but why no name in the space provided for one.

  I start driving and by the outskirts of Spokane I even turn on the radio. I can’t find anything good to listen to, so I push the button for the CD. Aunt Ginger, it seems, is a country and western fan and, outside of Taylor Swift, I’m not so much into that scene. The song is about drinking and riding in a truck and it is catchy enough to keep it on. I don’t love it. Yet I’m alone and the man’s voice seems a little bit like company.

  I figure that the best course is to start at the beginning. I need to know more about what happened to Megan, Leanne, Shannon, and my mom, to try to make a plan to find my bio dad. Since Mom is missing and the three girls are dead, that doesn’t leave me with tons of options.

  When I finally make it over the mountain pass to North Bend, Washington, I stop at a Starbucks drive-through because I need some coffee—and I’ve never driven through any drive-through and I want to see if my wobbly driving skills have improved since Idaho. I don’t clip the order window, but I come close. I order a sandwich and a latte and I realize that I can never do that again. When you don’t have a home, and you don’t have any source of income, eight dollars is too much for anything as frivolous as coffee and a sandwich. I ask the girl with mocha-colored hair and eyes, a requirement for working there, I guess, where the library is located.

  “Turn right out of the lot. Take the next left. Go to the light. Then take another left and you’re right there”

  Right. Left. Light. Left. And was that last “right” a direction or an affirmation that I’d be at the library.

  I pull over in the parking lot and inhale the sandwich. I barely chew it. I didn’t realize I was so hungry. Or nervous. Or that turkey and pesto is a bad combination. If I’m scarfing it down because I’m nervous, well, I’m nervous about that too. I don’t want to end up being an emotional eater like Marilee at school. The girl eats three lunches every day and pukes most of it up. I’ve been in the bathroom when she’s done the puking part and it is probably the ugliest sound in the world.

  Scratch that. Second ugliest. The ugliest sound in the world was the one made when I pulled the hunting knife from my dad’s chest.

  The library is either new or recently remodeled. Bright colored carpet tiles mark the children’s reading space; more muted colors indicate adult areas. I stop at the periodical section and skim through the morning papers to see if there’s an update on what happened in Port Orchard. But there isn’t. I don’t know what to make of that. Dad was killed. Mom, Hayden and I are missing. Surely that deserves some more follow up. Maybe later. As far as the Seattle paper goes, Port Orchard is the other side of the moon anyway. I go to an area with a bunch of computers and a sign saying cool teen scene—obviously named by some adult who didn’t understand that calling something “cool” makes it completely so not.

  As I drop my purse to the floor and position myself in front of a computer, I am promptly told by some kid that I’m too old to be there.

  “This is for teens,” he says, pointing up at the sign on the wall. He smells like he went swimming in body spray. “Not adults”

  I stare hard at him. I know my mom’s hair and style make me look older, but come on, there’s no way I look like an adult. I’m fifteen. Or sixteen. Somewhere around there, anyway.

  “How would you like me to punch you in the gut? I’ll do it so fast and so quietly no one will hear. And if you say anything, I’ll say you groped my tits”

  His hooded lids snap open. “You’re kidding?.

  I stare harder. I don’t say the words, but one begins with an F; the other with an O.

  He backs off and leaves. A trail of Axe follows him like snail slime.

  I’m not sure where that little bit of rage came from, but I suspect my bio father’s side of the family. My knuckles are white. I’m stressed out about what I’ll find when I cross the mountains. I know my mom and creep of a father are here somewhere. All his victims are. Alex Rader, if that’s his name, wouldn’t stray far from the best moments of his insufferable, twisted life.

  Creeps like him always love to bask in the memory of what they’ve done. I’ve watched enough TV to know that.

  I log on to the computer with a keyboard that looks like someone jammed a cookie into it and start searching. I read more and more about Shannon, Megan, and Leanne. There are no articles about my mom. Not a single one. After talking to Aunt Ginger, I know why.

  No one believed her. Her own parents didn’t. There was no one to stand up for her to say they were worried she was missing. Even her own sister. I wonder why she didn’t. She seemed to love her.

  I search for Alex Rader, but that’s an epic fail. There are several of the unfortunately named men in the country, but none locally. I don’t allow myself to think that the man I’m looking for would simply move away and start over. I’m thinking that Alex Rader wasn’t a real name. Maybe he changed his name all the time.

  Just like we did.

  I scan for more clippings about Shannon Blume’s case. She was last seen two blocks from her home in Burien, Washington. I see the same article that Mom had clipped and put in the safe deposit box. There are others too. I take in the information faster than I did that expensive Starbucks sandwich. I also hit the copy feature and I hear the whirring of the laser printer behind me.

  There’s a picture of Shannon. A school photo, I think. She looks somewhat blankly at the camera. Her hair is blond, long and parted in the middle. All the girls were blond. Her photo is shown in what appears to be a wooden frame, held by her mother. Her father has his arm around her. Their eyes are not blank at all. Mr. and Mrs. Blume’s eyes telegraph their fear. Fear that would be well founded.

  Ten days later another article appears.

  transient Finds body oF missing burien tee.

  A subsequent report indicates that the girl had been boun.

  and gagged. The reporter uses the word “violated”.

  Raped too, I think, but the paper doesn’t say so.

  And finally, as I speed-read and print, I see the end of Shannon’s story. The transient was arrested and convicted of her murder.

  There are three articles about the trial. I skim these too. The jury was convinced, but Mom wasn’t. I reach for the fake Chanel purse and pull out the envelope with the clipping. Mom has underlined a sentence.

  Blume had recently had a heart tattooed on her shoulder, alt
hough her mother had no knowledge of it.

  My mother thought that was significant and I need to know why.

  I search for the Blumes’ address and find through online tax records that they haven’t moved.

  The smelly body-spray kid glowers at me from across the room, trying to get me to leave. I glance over at the computer next to me—the one he’d been using. Two under-dressed women and what appears to be a German Shepherd are doing something on the screen that I don’t even want to process. Along with being degrading and humiliating, it is completely at odds with the stated purpose of the “Cool Teen Scene”.

  exPlore your world. it’s a big, beautiFul Place.

  I look at him and mouth the word: “Perv!.

  I don’t even wait for his reaction. I have too much to do. Next I look up information about victim number two. She’s another pretty blonde. And she’s sixteen at the time of her disappearance. Megan Moriarty was on the cheerleading squad at Kentridge High School in a suburb further south of Seattle. I look at her and make a judgement. I don’t think I would have liked her. I know that it’s wrong. But for some reason I never like the girls on the cheerleading squad. They are so over-the-top in their self-indulgence that if you weren’t a mirror they’d never look at you. At least they never looked at me. Caleb Hunter said I was way prettier than the six girls that considered South Kitsap their personal turf and the rest of us either servants (band members, coaches) or adoring fans (the suck-ups that make up most of the class). Outsiders like me hated them, but we were also kind of mesmerized by them too. Every second of the day the gang of six demonstrated their power. They were interchangeable—slender, larger on top, and teeth as white as ascending wedding doves. They could snare a boy with just a look.

  I think of Caleb just now. I had told myself that I’d never see him again. When I did that, I just assumed that I could will him out of my memory. We’d done that as a family before, when we made the switch. We just packed up whatever we had that we needed and left everything else and everyone else behind. We didn’t disappear in the night. We couldn’t do that. That, Mom said, would arouse suspicion. Instead, we told neighbors and casual friends—because that’s all we ever had—that a family emergency had occurred and we had to leave. We promised to call and write, but we never did. Not even once.