And Then She Was Gone

by Noonan, Rosalind

  Dad guided her forward, giving her tense shoulder a little massage. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine,” she snapped, tamping down the ugly little feelings that no one wanted to hear about. “But I’m getting dehydrated. Can I go get a bottle of water while you buy the tickets?”

  “Just hold on. We’re almost there and I’ll go with you.”

  Sierra crossed her arms. He didn’t trust her to go four steps away from him. Really, she should have bought her parents a dog leash for Christmas.

  “You’ll feel better when we’re on the bumper boats. You’re never too old for bumper boats, and it’s a great way to cool down.”

  She rolled her eyes, but stayed by his side. “Yeah, but still, you can’t drink the water by the bumper boats.”

  “We’ll get you water, kiddo.”

  It turned out Dad was right about one thing. She did feel better on the bumper boats.

  This was one of the first times that Dad had let her drive her own boat, and it was fun motoring out on the clear water, steering around the squirting fountain and drifting close to the stone waterfall that smelled of chlorine and hot stone. The boat moved slowly and only after you pressed the pedal down hard, but hey, freedom was freedom.

  Of course, Dad was trying to follow her, but he didn’t have total control. Some man with his little son bumped into Dad’s boat and got him spinning. Dad gave the duo a squirt, but Lauren saw her chance. She drove around the back of the fountain and managed to sneak up on Dad.

  Well, sort of. The element of total surprise is lost in a wide open pool of bumper boats.

  Sierra steered her boat into his—rocked him good—and blasted him with the water gun until he was soaked. He got in a good shot, too, but the cold water felt good in the sun.

  The session ended, and as they docked the boats, she spotted her friends from school waiting their turn in line.

  “Sierra!” Jemma shrieked, pointed, and then they all shrieked.

  “Wait for us!” they called.

  “Do not go anywhere!” Isabelle ordered. “Stay there. We’ll be right off.”

  Sierra smiled from deep inside. It felt good to be wanted.

  “Wow. Somebody’s happy to see you.” Dad was wiping his sunglasses on the tail of his T-shirt.

  “Hold on a second. I have to see what they’re doing next.”

  Sierra jumped over the metal divider to press into the line. “Don’t worry,” she told two annoyed-looking boys, “I’m not cutting.”

  “So, guys?”

  Jemma, Isabelle, and Lindsay turned at once and surrounded her for a hug. She asked them what they were doing next, and they invited her to play miniature golf with them.

  “I’ll ask my Dad,” she said, then ducked out of the line as they got a chance to board their boats.

  Her sneakers felt heavy as she returned to her father’s side. Of course, Dad was not invited to tag along, and Sierra didn’t know how to run that one by him. Sierra knew the answer would be no.

  It was always no. Her parents watched her like a hawk. No alone time. Because bad things happened when you left your daughter alone.

  Dan and Rachel O’Neil couldn’t get over the fact that they had let Lauren out of their sight; they still thought it was their fault. They probably always would. Sierra got that, but she wanted to be alone sometimes. She wanted to do stuff with her friends.

  “So . . . ,” Dad leaned against a post. “I guess Isabelle, Jemma, and Lindsay aren’t too old for the bumper boats.”

  “Guess not.” She folded her arms across her chest and looked toward the bumper boats. She caught a glimpse of Jemma spraying another boat, but then it blurred as tears filled her eyes.

  “Honey, what is it?” Dad straightened and tilted his head. “What’s wrong?”

  “I just want to hang out with my friends.” Her chin wobbled, and she knew she was making a puckered froggy face, but the tears had come out of nowhere, hitting her hard. “We want to play a game of miniature golf and go on the antique cars and play some games in the arcade. And all the other parents dropped their kids off and left. Why can’t you do that, Dad? Why can’t we ever be normal?”

  “Sierra, you know that your mom and I keep an eye on you because we love you.”

  She sniffed, turning away from the bumper boats so her friends wouldn’t see. “Yeah, but you can strangle a person with love like that.”

  Her dad started to answer, but then he stopped and shifted from one foot to another. His eyes were unreadable behind those sunglasses, but she sensed that he was a little hurt. Or maybe he was mad at her for asking for something he couldn’t give.

  “Can’t we try it, just this once?” she suggested. “You can go and do errands and I’ll be fine. And I won’t say anything to Mom. She’ll never know!”

  “This is not about sneaking behind your mother’s back. If we give it a try, I’m going to fill her in on it.”

  Sierra squinted at him. “So . . . I can do it? You’ll leave me here and come back later?”

  He scrunched up his lips, then sighed. “Sure. Why not.”

  “Thanks, Dad.” She hugged him, seeing a glimmer of hope.

  Maybe things could change.

  Chapter 4

  Through the checkered latticework of a rose trellis at the edge of the amusement park garden, he watched the four girls. Laughing and shrieking, exclaiming “I love you!” as they flung themselves into each other’s arms.

  Four girls, soon to be teenagers. Man, he was slipping into a strange land without a road map.

  Dan O’Neil stepped around the trellis as Sierra moved out of his line of vision, behind the spike of a windmill. A moment later, he relaxed as she came back into view, plucking a purple ball from the cup and doing a little victory dance on the putting green. The sun brought out red highlights in her warm brown hair. Caramel hair, just like her mother. Every day Sierra was looking more and more like Rach. A good thing, though sometimes it made him yearn for Lauren, who had inherited the O’Neil blond hair and pale skin.

  Dodging the hot sun, he sank into the shadows to wait. At first he had worried that the two guys playing ahead of the girls could be a problem, but then they were with girlfriends. Should be nothing to worry about.

  Should be.

  He had promised her he would leave, but that was a lie; these girls needed someone to watch over them. Besides that, Rachel would never let him live it down if he let their daughter loose on her own at Boondoggy’s. Therapy had gotten Rachel and him beyond the blame stage for losing Lauren, but the murky waters of guilt never completely receded.

  But this was normal, he told himself. Just a normal dad, watching over his twelve-year-old daughter. Okay, a normal dad with a touch of OCD, but he imagined that other fathers did this—guys like Larry and Hal. Guys whose daughters hadn’t disappeared from the face of the earth. They didn’t see ghosts of their daughters whenever a windowless van cruised through the neighborhood. Their teeth didn’t grit at the sight of a grown man talking to a child. They didn’t see the dark underbelly of danger that accompanied life in suburbia.

  As Dan straightened out one of the slats of the latticework that had worked loose, he thought of his wife at the graduation ceremony, clinging to what might have been. Sometimes, he worried that his family was spinning out of control, that they were planets circling a sun that had burned out, and it would be a thousand years until they realized it was all over.

  Lauren was that missing sun. When he dug deep, he believed she was still alive somewhere, though he didn’t hold out the hope that he would ever be able to see her again. He didn’t believe he would ever be giving her long blond hair a playful tug, calling her “movie star,” serving her up a s’more from the fire pit out back. That was the fairy-tale ending. But then, when he fell to the lowest of lows, Rachel would rally and make his favorite sherry chicken. Or he would get distracted by a movie, and she would snuggle up beside him on the couch and put her head on his shoulder, the way she used to whe
n they were teenagers. And for a few fleeting moments he felt right again. Until reality pinched him, reminding that something was missing.

  Lauren.

  He thought of those first wretched days, of lines of volunteers, side by side, crossing fields. Stirring weeds and poking bushes. Canvassing door-to-door and begging people to answer and take a minute—just one minute—to look at Lauren’s photo. Thank God for the guys from the firehouse, who knew how to handle all sorts of people. They had gotten the word out, and within twenty-four hours they’d had firefighters from all over the state of Oregon helping in the search.

  A good thing . . . because when they’d activated the beacon on Lauren’s cell phone, they’d learned it was coming from the Tillamook State Forest, a vast tract of land between Portland and the coast. Finding a person there would be like finding a needle in a haystack.

  But they had combed the lush, green woods that swept over the northern Coastal Range. Tuna and Sully had worked with the state rangers, leading search parties from dawn till dusk. They had found Lauren’s cell phone just twenty yards from the side of the highway, as if someone had stopped along the road to cast it off while driving west.

  So the search had moved down Highway Six to the raging Pacific and the small beach towns that were just coming awake that June. Volunteers headed south to Netarts and Oceanside and north to Bay City and Garibaldi, all the way through the crowded city of Seaside and up to the Washington border at Astoria.

  Lauren . . . Lauren. Find Lauren.

  It was the mantra that kept him on the edge of nausea most of the time. The search that began six years ago was still going on, every day, every minute that Dan was awake.

  It was the focus of his morning run that took him through the streets and hills and woods and fields of Mirror Lake. It had him peering into the backseats of cars in store parking lots. It had him watching neighbors’ garages and playhouses. It sent his dad out on the boat every morning to eyeball the shoreline of Mirror Lake.

  It kept the guys at the firehouse busy slapping stamps and labels on postcards with an aged sketch of Lauren and the headline: MISSING: LAUREN O’NEILL, SEVENTEEN YEARS OLD. It had been Sully’s idea to send postcards to every filling station in Oregon and Washington. As Sully had pointed out, anyone who wanted to move around was going to need gas. Good men, Sully and Tuna. They had proven to be good friends, just when Dan needed them, and, like Dan and Rachel, they had refused to give up.

  There was no telling when you might find your daughter coming out of Walmart or searching the dairy cases for the cheapest milk. You had to be ready, watching, on alert. As his father always said: “You never know.”

  Chapter 5

  When Paula Winkler got the call from the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office, she was sipping café au lait from a huge mug and wondering if she should rethink her painting of the three red hens.

  She backed away from the easel, paused in a stream of lemony sunshine that shot through the skylight of her garage studio, and tucked a long strand of silver hair behind one ear. Too much red?

  She could easily make one a dark shade of orange, leaning toward burnt umber. Or maybe a zesty shade of tangerine.

  “Such a problem to have,” she said aloud to no one. Since George had passed and her kids had flown the coop, Paula was on her own now. She had come to embrace the change with this second career—art. Ten years ago, at the age of forty-eight, Paula had cracked open the dozens of paint buckets George had stored in the garage and, mixing and tinting, she had begun to paint on scraps of plywood.

  She’d had a modicum of success selling her work, but mostly it was her therapy and her path to joy. With budget cuts and tons of red tape binding a social worker’s every move, working for the Department of Human Services did not put a gal on the fast track to fulfillment.

  But painting did.

  Some days it was about the feeling she wanted her topic to express. Some days, like today, it was all about the color.

  “A happy apple red is one thing,” she said as she stalked the canvas. “But fire engine red? A five-alarm fire?” She shook her head. It needed some adjustment.

  That was when the phone rang and the desk officer at the sheriff’s office asked her to report in for an urgent matter.

  “To the sheriff’s office?” Paula blinked. Usually when she was on call, she responded directly to the scene of an emergency: a home where children needed to be taken into custody, a crime scene where youth needed to be safely apprehended.

  “This is a special case,” the desk officer explained. “The sheriff and a police chief would like you to ride along with them. How soon can you get here?”

  “I’ll be there in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”

  Paula was the queen of the quick response. Her home in West Green was centrally located in the county, she knew her way around, and when you lived alone there was no child care to arrange or meals to tuck in the oven. Within fifteen minutes, she was standing in the lobby of the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office, shaking hands with Hank Todd, the Mirror Lake police chief, Jacob Darius, the county sheriff, and Pete Wolinsky, a patrol officer she had worked with before.

  Paula had never worked directly with high-ranking officers before, and certainly not on a Saturday. Her radar was blinking like the town square on Christmas Eve.

  “Thanks for getting here so fast.” Pete closed his black notebook. “Guarantee, you’re gonna like this one.”

  Hank nodded toward the parking lot. “If you don’t mind, we’ll brief you on the way there. You want to ride with me?”

  “Sounds good.”

  “We’ve got a unit out at the farm right now,” Jake advised as she pushed back her sleeves to buckle into the department Jeep. “They’re waiting on us to go in.” He explained that a large local discount store had been held up by a man with a stun gun that morning. “A stun gun at Costco.” Paula slid her sunglasses on against the afternoon sun. “Was he planning to stun every customer and employee he passed on his way out? Can you imagine the mob there on a Saturday morning?”

  “No one’s saying he’s smart or clever. Just desperate. He said he’s been out of cash for a while, since his taxidermy business went bust. The perp is Kevin Hawkins. Says his aunt owns Green Spring Farm and he lives in a cabin on the back acres.”

  Paula had always shivered a little when she’d passed those signs advertising TAXIDERMIST on that farm road. It seemed so old country, so Norman Bates. “And you want me along to check on the aunt . . . the one who owns Green Spring Farm?”

  Chief Todd shook his head. “It’s not Vera Hawkins we’re worried about. It’s this sister Hawkins mentioned. He calls her Sissy, and he said he’s worried about her getting along if he’s incarcerated. Asked us to check on her.”

  “That seems considerate of him,” Paula said.

  “Except our records show that he’s an only child. No siblings. No adult arrest record, but three sealed convictions when he was a minor for rape and attempted sexual assault.”

  “He’s a sex offender?” That caught Paula’s attention. “I don’t remember any registered sex offenders in the Green Spring Farm area.”

  “That’s because there’s a loophole,” the sheriff explained. “A childhood conviction doesn’t stick. Even three childhood convictions. When Hawkins committed his crimes, the judge let him face trial as a minor on all three counts. Law says he doesn’t have to register as a sex offender.”

  “That and the fact that he’s not even living at a legal address. He keeps talking about a cabin behind the farm. You can’t reach it by car, but it’s a short hike down a trail.” Hank shook his head. “That’s not like any residence I know of in Mirror Lake.”

  Mirror Lake was not a place where people lived off the grid. She propped her sunglasses on her head to get an unfiltered look at Hank. She had known him for thirty-some years, since she’d started working for social services, and the man had excellent instincts. “What are we talking about here, Hank?”
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br />   He gave a shrug of those burly shoulders that held up the burdens of half of Mirror Lake. “Hawkins says he’s lived in the cabin five or six years. If he’s not completely deluded or lying, I’m thinking that puts us back around the summer that Lauren O’Neil disappeared.”

  Paula’s interest shot up—way up. It seemed that everyone in the state of Oregon had participated in the search for the O’Neil girl. Paula and her son had volunteered more than once, helping the recovery teams search local farms and parks. “And you think that this fake sister—Sis—you think she might be Lauren? Right here in Mirror Lake?”

  “Thinking . . . and hoping.”

  “Oh, Hank, I hope you’re right,” she said as the Jeep circled fast on a roundabout. “I hope you’re right.”

  Chapter 6

  Sis dropped the hoe and swiped her sweaty hair back with one wrist. Too hot. She hobbled back to the shed to wrap her hair into a coil. Using two chopsticks from a Chinese takeout place, she secured it at the back of her head, off her neck. Her wispy yellow hair was already lightening from the sun, turning pale as a wheat field. She used to hate her hair. She used to think people thought blondes were stupid. But she had come to love it—a glittery, golden part of herself that Kevin could not control.

  That first year he had made her dye her hair, and she hated slopping the smelly stuff on. It stung her scalp and left brown patches on her skin.

  “Why do you make me use this?” she had protested.

  “ ’Cause we can’t have you matching the girl on TV.”

  Not that anyone ever saw her in the beginning. When they’d made the two-hour trip from the beach to his aunt’s farm, she had been handcuffed in the back of his van. Those first few months, he wouldn’t let her go out in public at all. Later, when he knew she wouldn’t bolt, she’d been disguised by hair dye and glasses and these grandma dresses for the weekend and summer days at fairs and festivals and the Saturday market in Portland. Kevin would plunk her down at an easel with a sign that said: PORTRAITS FOR PENNIES: STARVING ARTIST PORTRAITS FOR SALE. Of course, the penny thing was sort of a lie, since Kevin wanted two thousand pennies for a simple pencil-sketch portrait. Still, people went for it. Anyone who asked was told she was his sister, but mostly he had kept her a secret. Sometimes it made her mad because she wasn’t supposed to talk to anyone, but Kevin would put Mac on his hip and go around and visit with the other vendors like old friends. But at least she got to talk a little with the people she painted. Folks visiting from Chicago or California. Grandparents and young couples and families like the one Sis used to have.