A normal life. Rachel flashed to the very routine days in the classroom. Yes, some days were punctuated by a foul comment or a fistfight, but generally there was a predictable curriculum to follow. Each year began with rusty grammar skills and kids on the brink of growing up. Baby faces and guys who needed to shave, all mixed in the same class. The patterns of their progress, both academically and physically, were fairly predictable. Normal.
Rachel tried to imagine the new normal for their family, but the screen was eerily blank.
Hank Todd ran the show, giving the announcement the dignity it deserved. The cameras panned to photos of Lauren, the ones that had been used in the past on the MISSING flyers.
“I’m glad they gave Hank the show,” Dan commented. “He’s good people.”
Sierra frowned up at the screen as if she didn’t believe a word of that, and then went back to her texting frenzy.
The only time Lauren reacted was when an FBI sketch of the compound behind Green Spring Farm flashed on the screen. A mixture of fear and embarrassment flickered in her eyes as the FBI representative described the living conditions.
Rachel had to look away. It burned inside her, the irony, the feeling of ineptitude that her daughter had lived so close to them. Less than two miles away, at the farm where Sierra had taken riding lessons and attended a birthday party. So close, and yet, undetected.
Lauren’s eyes remained fixed to the television as a photograph showed the garden and two structures in the compound.
“Is that where you lived?” Sierra asked in disbelief.
Lauren nodded.
“Was it awful?”
The question everyone was dying to ask.
Lauren fiddled with the tab of the zipper on her new hoodie. “It wasn’t always bad.”
Denial snapped in the air.
Rachel tasted bitterness on the back of her tongue. She had an utterly insane urge to argue with Lauren, to tell her that a monster had stolen six valuable years of her life. That she deserved so much better. That she had a family who had searched and cried and bled for her.
Dan must have caught the wildness in her eyes, because he caught her with a look that warned her to stop.
Taking a calming, deep yoga breath, Rachel tried to give up being fifty shades of crazy and focus on the other three people in this room. Her little family, reunited once again.
But she never expected this feeling of alienation. She and Dan were marooned on a desert island. This was not the way she had imagined her girls to be in their teen years. She longed for the little girls who listened to instructions, laughed at her jokes, and let her braid their hair with butterflies and bows. But those little girls were gone, and their mother needed to grow up, too.
It was time to learn the new Lauren.
Chapter 19
Sis rubbed the smooth sleeves of her new hoodie as she peered at the shiny eye of the video camera. Paula had warned her about it, telling her not to be intimidated, and she found she didn’t mind it so much. It made her feel like a TV star, like the girls on Full House. Much as she loved the show, she knew it wasn’t real, and sometimes she thought about how those actresses had spent so much time with their TV families playing out scenes in front of cameras like this.
Of course, they had happy things to say and she didn’t. But she wanted to get the memories out. Paula said it would help with her rehabilitation, and after talking the older woman’s ear off last night, she was beginning to believe it was true.
“That’s a long list,” Lauren said, frowning at Paula’s pile of papers. “How many questions do you have?”
“As many as it takes to get your story, honey. But don’t worry. We don’t have to stick to the list. We can just talk, you and me.”
The lady working the video camera, CeeCee or DeeDee or something with two letters, had really short dark hair and a scarf that seemed to be squeezing its way out of her shirt. She had helped Sis prop her cast up on a stool, and then set out juice and water and cookies—animal crackers, like the ones they gave you in nursery school. She told Sis that she usually did these interviews, but today she was helping Paula. Sis wished the woman would leave and go back to nursery school with her animal crackers, but she settled in off to the side of the tripod with a creamy, distant smile.
“If it’s not too hard for you, I’d like to start with the very first day,” Paula prompted. “You told me you were walking home from school when you saw the van parked at the curb.”
“I can talk about that. I’ve gone over it a million times in my head. Most of the time wishing that I could have done something differently. Just one thing might have created a chain reaction and changed everything.”
If she had walked faster or slower. If she hadn’t stopped to watch the hummingbird. If she had just stopped complaining and stayed in the after-school program with Sierra and the babies.
“We all second-guess ourselves,” Paula said, “but we can’t change the past. And it’s not your fault you were kidnapped. So you stopped to watch a hummingbird? They are marvelous creatures, aren’t they? Where did you see it?”
“On the Millers’ porch. They were our neighbors, two doors down.” Sis told Paula everything, moment by moment, as catalogued in her memory under the-day-my-sweet-life-ended. The amazing pattern of violets in the Millers’ lawn that needed to be sketched. The man who seemed to be delivering a package. His piercing blue eyes. And then the stun gun. She even mentioned peeing her pants, and Paula told her that happened to a lot of people when they were subjected to that sort of electric shock. That made her feel better.
Paula wanted to hear everything, but today they were going to focus on a general time line of the six years she had been away.
“I’ll do my best,” Sis said, but some of the days and months were muddled in her mind. “I didn’t have a calendar or watch, and he threw my cell phone into the woods that first day when he pulled off the road.” The phone had slipped out of her pocket, and she had been trying to use it with her bound hands when he’d caught her.
“The police located your cell phone in the Tillamook Forest. The beacon from your phone launched a huge search in the area.”
“Really?” Not huge enough, if they couldn’t find her.
“Do you remember the first night?”
She told Paula about the windowless laundry room he’d kept her in at first, in the small house at the coast that he had called “the beach house.” She recalled how she had screamed and cried and put up a fight when he touched her the first time. The bad touch. And then that scary trip to the beach, the threat of what would happen if she didn’t follow his orders. “I thought about dying. I was so tired and scared, and I knew what he wanted to do to me was wrong. I thought about jumping into the ocean, but I didn’t do it.”
“I’m glad you didn’t,” Paula said quietly. “Do you remember what stopped you?”
Sis nodded. It was simple. “I wanted to live.”
Paula nodded. “As I said, you’re a survivor.”
As the words spilled out, so did the memories.
That first night when he had released the handcuffs in the laundry room, she had been surprised by the way he looked. She had thought a kidnapper would be ugly, with scars or a pinched nose or close, beady eyes. But Kevin had pretty blue eyes and a nice smile. He was strong and fit. Most times he tried to be nice. He apologized for putting the handcuffs on her. After the hard metal edge bruised her wrists, he wrapped gauze and padded tape around them, trying to help her feel better.
Those first few minutes and hours and days, she thought her rescue would come at any moment. Her mother had a stubborn streak, and Sis had been convinced she would not rest a moment until her daughter had been found. And her dad, her dad saved people’s lives all the time, carrying them out of burning buildings or shocking their heart back to the steady beat of life. Dad was a hero, and with each sunset she told herself that this would be the night when the door would open with a bang and her dad would come rush
ing in.
Those days were torture. By day she had to close her eyes against Kevin’s physical assaults on the most private parts of her body. Riding her, he called it, but she thought of it as splitting her spirit in half. Killing a unicorn, that was what he was doing. But knowing Kevin, if she told him that, he would have tossed off responsibility, saying that everybody had to die sometime, or that hunters killed animals all the time. Kevin had a way of explaining his bad behavior. By night, it was just her, all alone, so lonely. If a person could die of loneliness, she would definitely be dead now. She stared through the narrow skylight, searching for the moon and stars, telling herself not to cry because she wouldn’t be able to find every wishing star with her eyes full of tears.
A few terrible months after she’d been taken, Kevin loaded her into the van for another trip. It was a big deal; she could tell because she rarely got to leave the laundry room, let alone go for a ride in the van. This time, the blanket on top of her wasn’t so hot because of the chill in the air.
Autumn.
The summer had come and gone without her. Her birthday, too. One of those, hot, airless days in the laundry room had been her twelfth birthday.
The ride ended on a very bumpy road that made her feel like her brain was rattling around in her head. When the blanket was lifted from her, it was night, and they were outside surrounded by velvet stillness. The yard around them wasn’t anything special, but it was a good size—bigger than the playground at her school—and the sky? It spread over them, a field of black into which God had flung handfuls of diamonds. She had stared up at that sky while he told her she could move around freely here, at least most of the time. There was a toilet in the house—no more pee bucket, thank goodness. Things would be good for them here, as long as she followed the rules. “Never go outside the fence—don’t even try. And if you raise your voice or scream, I’m going to have to put a gag on you again and lock you up.” He showed her the shed, which smelled of oil and fertilizer. At one side was a cage, a kennel for a big dog, he said. If she broke the rules, she was going to have to live in the cage. “Got it?” She understood that if she tried to leave, he would make her life miserable again. She would be a caged animal.
Maybe a smarter girl would have given up on escaping right then and there, but she tried again one gray day in the gloom of winter. Kevin had gone off with his truck to get rice and noodles for her to cook on the electric hot plate. She thought he’d be gone a while, but she was wrong. It took her a while to get over the fence, and when he spotted her, she hadn’t even made it to the creek. She paid the price with a beating and days in the cage, and she vowed that she would never do that again. Her parents would just have to find her on their own. What was wrong with them, anyway? Why weren’t they sending out search parties or following Kevin around? He always bragged about getting over on the government. Why wasn’t anyone catching him?
That was when she had started giving up on her family and the police and the idea of a big, dramatic rescue from her heroic father. It was easier to let those dreams and hopes go than to wake up every morning sad and disappointed. By then, Kevin had discovered that she was an artist, and they were making regular trips to flea markets and festivals. Her hair was dyed a goth shade of black, and he made her wear goofy hats, but she liked drawing people. He bought her a white sketchpad and a fresh box of pastels for the work, and the smooth, soft texture was magic under her fingers. She found that when people sat for a portrait, they tried to let out that little glimmer of light that made them so distinctive. That singular light inside them. Sis never had trouble finding the light. After customers left the stand, Kevin made wisecracks and comments, but not Sis. That little flicker of connection put hope in her heart. She liked to think that it made her light shine stronger, but Kevin said that was a load of touchy-feely crap.
One day, after a busy day of painting portraits, Kevin rewarded her by letting her buy a tent. Unlike the little tent she had made out of blankets for sleeping, this one was tall enough the stand in and waterproof, too. She pitched it in a spot away from the house, and made it into her own little nest. A cocoon, like her room at home had been. Not a fan of camping, Kevin didn’t care to come inside, so in her mind, the tent wasn’t tainted by him. That tent became her escape within the compound.
Later in the summer, maybe it was August, and she’d been gone from home a year—that was when Kevin found the bump in her belly that showed she was pregnant. She had cried a lot over that. Twelve years old and pregnant! But mostly she cried because she knew it sealed the door shut behind her. She could never go home after this . . . this terrible shame.
But after Mac was born, the shame faded with the attachment that formed for her baby. Yes, it was hard caring for a baby and doing her other chores like gardening and cooking on the hot plate, but from the moment she was born, Mac won her heart. At first, taking care of the baby was like caring for a puppy. Mac relied on her for everything; Mac needed her. And for all the care she gave to her little girl, the love came streaming back to her in joyful ways.
Mac changed everything at the compound. Even Kevin lightened up. And when they went out to the flea markets so Sis could do portraits for money, Kevin would carry Mac around and show her off, like she was a trophy he’d earned. Sis wanted to think that he loved the little girl, but with Kevin you couldn’t trust anything.
One day, while she was making portraits at the state fair, a female police officer started talking with her, just being friendly. The cop was young, and she complimented Sis’s drawing skills. Sis drew a unicorn for her for free, and the cop told her partner she was going to frame it. In that moment, Sis realized she had a ticket out. This cop would help her escape from Kevin. But he was off wandering the fairgrounds with Mac, and Sis couldn’t run away and leave her little girl behind. That was when she realized that she would never get away. Even if she managed to escape with Mac, once she and her little girl got out, she didn’t know where they would go. No one out there would let a teenage girl keep her baby. Kevin was always complaining about how expensive things were, how hard it was with another mouth to feed. And Lauren would sooner keep living in a tent, keeping putting up with Kevin, if it was the only way she could keep Mac. Mac was the rubber cement that glued her past shut. Forever.
Chapter 20
“We’ve combed most of the area, but it’s still a crime scene,” Hank Todd said that afternoon as they began the trek on the bald path behind Green Spring Farm.
Rachel stepped carefully in her black canvas Toms, a poor choice for a damp excursion on this overcast June gloom day. Since Lauren’s afternoon would be taken up with the video interview process, Dan and Rachel had sent Sierra home with Dan’s parents and accepted the police chief’s offer to see the place where Lauren had lived. Hank had warned that the living conditions had been grim and squalid, but there was something special he wanted to them to see.
Gray, misty clouds slid along the horizon as they made the hike from the farm parking lot. Hank filled them in regarding Kevin Hawkins. Now twenty-nine, Hawkins had raped three girls in the Woodburn area more than a decade before. Hawkins had been fifteen years old at the time, and his parents had engaged a good lawyer, who managed to convince the judge to try Hawkins as a juvenile and to seal the record. That explained why his name had not popped up in those computer searches of local sex offenders when the cops were looking for Lauren’s abductor.
At the age of sixteen, Hawkins had joined the army and trained at a base in Colorado until he was dishonorably discharged after three years. When he’d returned to Oregon his parents had refused to take him back. His aunt, Vera Hawkins, had offered him a job on the farm and let him stay in the outbuildings on the back acres. Vera Hawkins said he had stopped working several years ago, but as far as she knew, he still occupied the outbuildings. When Rachel asked if someone like the aunt might have helped Hawkins, Hank had explained that the law-enforcement community thought that he had acted alone.
Alone . . .
that always brought her to the question of how he’d handled it. How could one man manage to keep a young woman hidden and submissive for the better part of six years? She knew that the answer was control. Control gained through psychological and physical abuse. Logically, she knew that. But it was hard to wrap her mind around it when she and Dan struggled to “control” Sierra, with mixed results. And she was just twelve—not into the tough teen years yet.
Green hills and fields surrounded them. It was that lush, bright green that had attracted Rachel to Oregon when she’d first visited as a college student. As they made it to the summit of a low ridge, Rachel spotted Mount Hood, its crest crisp and white. It seemed close enough to reach out and scratch the ice of the glacier, though it was a good hour’s drive away. A second later, the dark clouds tumbled past it, obscuring the view.
“It’s the same view we have from our house,” Dan noted.
“Which is just down the road. How could Lauren live within a mile or two of home all these years?” Rachel plodded ahead. “This close, but we couldn’t find her. We beat every bush and scoured every path, every park.”
“It was a combination of bad circumstances,” Hank said. “This farm is private property. Yes, we checked it, but not repeatedly. Although Kevin Hawkins had a juvenile record, he wasn’t in our system because a judge sealed it when he was a teen. The law-enforcement community—even the next neighbors down the road—had no idea anyone was living back here. And Hawkins’s aunt had no idea her nephew was capable of such a crime. In many ways, it was the perfect storm.”
And a cruel irony. “All the times we went to the farm, for parties or class trips, I had no idea this was back here.”
“You can’t see it from the road, and the walking path doesn’t cross the creek.” Hank led the way. “It was a pretty effective hiding place.”
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