And Then She Was Gone

by Noonan, Rosalind

  “That’s technology for you. So you’re happy with the plan?”

  “I’d be happy staying there forever. You’ll be there, too, right?”

  Paula nodded. “Along with an FBI agent. A female agent.”

  Lauren seemed to sit taller as she soaked that in. “And so I don’t have to go back to Dan and Rachel O’Neil?”

  “Eventually you will. That’s the plan.”

  Lauren pulled the sleeves of her new hoodie over her hands and pressed them over her mouth. “That’s the only part that makes me uncomfortable—living with the O’Neils.”

  “They are your parents. Your family.” To watch Lauren, you would think they were terrible people, but Paula knew better. These people had been investigated years ago, when Lauren went missing. They had put their information out there, and they were genuine. But Lauren’s feelings about them were complicated, all rolled into the tangle of her fear and loyalty for her captor. “Think of the imprinting . . . the baby chick following its mother. Once upon a time, that was you and your mom. You and your dad. They really want to be a family again.”

  “They don’t love me. Maybe they did in the beginning, but it all trickled out and they stopped looking. If they hadn’t stopped looking after the first few weeks, they might have found me hidden away right in their own backyard.”

  “Did you know you were living in Mirror Lake?” Paula asked.

  “No. I told you. Kevin covered me up in the back of the van whenever we left the compound.”

  “It is a shame that no one thought to search Green Spring Farm a second time,” Paula said. “But you’re wrong about the O’Neils. They never gave up. They were vigilant . . . relentless.”

  “Your mom always believed you’d come back,” CeeCee added. “And your dad, he led a search every weekend, through local parks and forests. I volunteered a few times with my husband.” As CeeCee spoke, Paula made a note to gather some news clippings and video about the Find Lauren campaign her parents had run. Sometimes, seeing was believing.

  “But Kevin told me that they didn’t care anymore. That I was just a pretty butterfly that flew away. Something that makes you smile, but you forget about it a minute later. That’s what Kevin said.”

  “He lied,” Paula said flatly. She explained that the search for her had been going strong for six whole years. “It was on the news a few times a year. If you’d had regular TV, you would have seen your face on news programs every few weeks. You would have seen your mom and dad organizing searches and speaking about you at meetings and concerts and press conferences.”

  “If we had regular TV?” Lauren scowled. “That’s like saying, if we lived in a nice house instead of a shack. If I had never been kidnapped. I learned you can’t live your life crying over things that didn’t happen.”

  “You’re right.” There was more than a touch of anger in Lauren’s words, but Paula wasn’t ready to explore that. Right now they needed to get the sequence of events on record for the police. She tried to switch to a more concrete topic.

  “So what kind of things did you watch on your VCR?” Paula asked. “How did you get tapes?”

  “Kevin found videotapes at thrift stores or flea markets. Real deals, he said. He got kiddy shows for Mac to watch and family shows for me. My favorites were Full House and Seventh Heaven, and I let Mac watch them, too. I wanted her to see happy families who laughed at their own mistakes and helped each other with their problems. Kevin never admitted to making a mistake, but he never let me forget mine. But the shows . . . the shows were an escape, and I thought they were good for Mac. Besides that, I let her watch some Sesame Street tapes and Disney movies and some other kids’ shows that Kevin got real cheap from a yard sale. Her favorite was Bear in the Big Blue House. I liked it, too, because Bear is cheerful about everything, and he’s friends with other animals and the sun and Luna, the moon. Have you ever seen Bear?”

  “I have not, but it sounds great.” Paula made a note to search for copies of Lauren’s favorite shows on DVD. She could order them from the Mirror Lake Library during the next break and pick them up this evening. It would be good for Lauren to have something comforting and familiar.

  Happy families who laughed at their own mistakes and helped each other with their problems. Healthy family relationships. It was a wonder Lauren still recognized that.

  Chapter 22

  Rachel knew it was time to get going, but it was hard to tear herself away from these tumbledown buildings that had been her daughter’s home. She sensed that Dan felt the same way. Although their tour of the compound was complete, they stood at the edge of the garden, drawn to the ghosts that loomed in the whispering drizzle. Dan and Hank were nattering on the topic of the death penalty in Oregon, and Rachel tuned them out to focus on her daughter. Had Lauren enjoyed gardening here? The neat rows in well-tended soil spoke of a gardener who cared. Although the compound was surrounded by trees, the space was wide enough to catch a wide swath of sunlight in the growing season.

  “We need to talk about Lauren’s lodging,” Hank said, garnering Rachel’s attention. “A few points came up at our task force meeting this morning—Lauren’s security being one. The FBI is assigning an agent to watch over her, and it was agreed that she should be moved to a safe house where—”

  “What?” Rachel interrupted.

  “Just temporarily. You saw those reporters outside your house this morning. Is that what you want for Lauren? Having to pass through a barrier of media people every time she wants to leave the house? Granted, she’s still a minor and they probably will decline to publish her photo for the time being. But that doesn’t mean they won’t follow her every time she goes out to catch a movie or visit the dentist.”

  “We can keep her safe.” Rachel looked to Dan for support, but he was shaking his head.

  “Rach, you saw the trucks out there this morning . . . the people in the street. The cameras pointed at our car as we drove out.”

  “But a few small obstacles doesn’t mean we just give up.” Why was she so alone in this battle? “I think everyone is overreacting right now. We’re not talking about protecting her from Hawkins or a killer. Hank, you yourself said that it looks like he acted alone. It’s about privacy, which is important, I know. But at the end of the day, if someone prints a snarky article about her, what’s the consequence? Bad press, but she’ll still be safe. She’ll be fine at our house.”

  Knuckles pressed to his lips, Dan frowned in concern. “Hank has a good point. Yeah, I want her home, too, but right now, for Lauren, safety is everything. We can’t take any chances, Rach. If the FBI is willing to give us someone to protect her, I say we go with it.”

  Rachel shook her head. Her daughter was slipping away from her, and she was powerless to stop it. “So I’m outnumbered. Overruled.” Both men remained stoic as she vented. “Why even bother to mention it to me? I don’t even have a chance to speak my mind.” She threw up her hands and marched in the opposite direction.

  She paced the length of the garden in anger, and then let out a hissy breath. It was wrong to lash out at Hank, the messenger. And Dan . . . had she really snapped at him this morning for being too cheerful and positive? Good God, she was off-kilter. A planet circling a star that had burned out and gone dark.

  Find your center. She took a deep, yoga breath, then released it as she focused on the soil beneath her feet. Knowing her daughter had hoed and planted these neat rows of lettuce, carrots, peppers, and radishes, Rachel felt a connection as her shoes trod on the earth.

  When she came to the end of a row, the sign on the little placard labeled BEETS was different—printed in slanted, scraggly letters instead of Lauren’s rounded bubble letters.

  His writing.

  If this wasn’t a crime scene, she would have gone over and ripped the sign from the ground. Turning away, she faced the FBI technicians. Although they were a good thirty yards from the rest of the action, they had been quiet this whole time, scratching and digging like archaeol
ogists.

  Just what were they digging for? Pressing a fingertip to the cuticle of her thumb, she imagined bodies . . . young girls. She squeezed her eyes shut against the agonizing vision.

  Crazy thoughts, but she had to find out what they were doing. Although Rachel sensed that she wasn’t supposed to engage the FBI forensic specialists, she cut across the garden and headed right over.

  “Hey, there. How’s it going?”

  “Hold on there.” The agent replaced the lid on a plastic bin and came toward her. “I need you to stay on the other side of the yellow tape. Got to preserve the crime scene.”

  “Oh.” Rachel froze at the edge of the mud path. “Sorry.”

  The agent stepped over the low barriers and tipped his baseball cap politely. “Mrs. O’Neil. How are you doing?” He had a broad smile and kind eyes.

  “I’m sorry, have we met?”

  He waved that off. “I just recognized you from television, the search campaign for Lauren. You’ve been in the media a lot these past few years.”

  Rachel’s smile was halfhearted. “That’s about to end, I hope.”

  He introduced himself as agent Mike Turk while Rachel surveyed the low beds of dirt and graded mud cordoned off in sections by sticks and tape. “It looks like you’re digging for dinosaurs with those brushes and spoons. What do you expect to find?”

  He rubbed his gloved hands together. “The chief didn’t explain it to you?”

  She sighed. “Maybe he did. Right now I’m on information overload.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t want to make things worse.”

  She caught him with the stern gaze of a junior high teacher. “Tell me now, please.”

  “We’re interested in anything Hawkins might have buried. We’ve gone over the grounds with a metal detector, but that led us to an old wrench and screwdriver. But this corner, we thought we’d find something more.”

  “Bodies?”

  “One body. The remains of the three-year-old girl.” Turk winced, clearly uncomfortable with having to be the one to give her this information. “When we came on the scene, there was a sign over in this corner. We thought it was a grave marker.”

  He opened a plastic bin and held up a wooden placard painted with a benevolent angel that could have been floating on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel. Beneath her billowing gown was written: R.I.P. Mac.

  “Mackenzie?” The little girl . . . her granddaughter. Of course, Hawkins would have buried her here; he didn’t have the money to spring for a legal interment. She pressed a fist to her mouth, and then forced herself to pull it away. If she wanted Turk to take her seriously, she had to keep her cool. “They buried Mac in this spot?”

  “So we assumed. But we were wrong.” He opened another bin to reveal a small box—a shoe box. The cardboard was mottled with mold and caked with dusty soil, but there was no mistaking the exquisitely painted angel on the top as Lauren’s artwork.

  Rachel’s voice dropped to a hush. “Is that a makeshift coffin? Mac’s remains?”

  “You wouldn’t be here if that was the case.” Detective Turk gave her a wary smile. “We wouldn’t subject you to that. It’s just a shoe box we found buried here. A few little baby mementoes inside. A pacifier and some clothes and what not. Two videotapes. Sesame Street and Bear in the Big Blue House.”

  “They buried her belongings, but you haven’t found a body.”

  He shook his head. “It’s not here. At least not in this section, and I doubt that he put it under the garden.”

  A chill ran down Rachel’s spine as a she shifted in the damp grass. “So it’s not really a grave?”

  “Doesn’t look that way, though we’re still digging. Digging very gently.” Turk held up a few of the small tools—a brush and a small spade that resembled a serving spoon. “That’s why it takes a while. If we end up checking the garden, we might be here for the summer.”

  Suddenly, the one-acre plot of land opened up around Rachel like an expanding ocean. What would it take to sift through all the dirt here, to carefully overturn the topsoil to screen for a small corpse? Such tedious work would take forever, and yet, it was important—vitally important—to find Mac’s body. Without it, there wouldn’t be much of a homicide case against Kevin Hawkins, and Lauren would have trouble finding closure on the loss of her little girl.

  It was the kick in the pants she needed.

  “Hank? Dan?” She motioned to the men. “Over here. Agent Turk is onto something essential to the case.”

  Chapter 23

  Sis snuggled against the soft hood of her new jacket and soaked up the warmth of the mug in her hands.

  It was chilly again, with that gray afternoon dampness that would hang in through the evening. Sis knew, because she lived in the weather now, outside whenever Kevin would let her. Well, out in the tent. She figured that was as close to Mother Nature as a person could get without waking up soaked in dew each morning.

  But that wasn’t true anymore. As of today, she’d be staying in this lake house, a safe house, with a social worker and an FBI guard to ward off anyone who came too close. That part was nice, but Sis didn’t know how to explain her worries. They could keep her physically safe, but no one could fix the holes in her heart, the twisted emotions that dragged her down with guilt and fear. When she closed her eyes, there was no safety, no peace. Deep inside, she was broken.

  But she was relieved for the time they would let her spend with Paula and Bija. She was leaning back in a lawn chair—an Adirondack chair, Paula called it—with her bright tangerine cast propped up on a little stool that matched the chair. She and Paula were talking, facing out toward the water when a goose flapped onto the lawn near her feet and let out an obnoxious honk.

  “Silly goose,” Paula joked.

  They laughed out loud.

  “Don’t you know this is a safe house? You can’t be here unless you have proper authorization. You have to be cleared by my case worker,” Sis told the goose, repeating the warning she had heard Paula give to some people on the phone.

  Undaunted, the goose honked again and waddled over toward the dock. Having dealt with a few geese at her grandparents’ lake house, she knew not to be afraid. But she also knew that waterfowl were called that for a reason. “Go poop on someone else’s lawn.”

  Paula chuckled again. “That’s right.” Her cell phone jingled and she looked down at it. “That’s a text from Bija. Your parents are here.”

  “Oh, not them again.”

  “We talked about this, remember? You’re going to keep an open mind.”

  “And you’re not going to make me go home with them, right?”

  “Not this week,” Paula admitted. “But I think we should offer the extra room here to your mom. It would be a nice way to ease back into the relationship, spending some easy time together.”

  “Maybe tomorrow.” Sis was determined to keep the O’Neils at bay as long as she could. It wasn’t that they’d ever mistreated her. CeeCee, the woman at the Children’s Center who had videotaped Lauren, had asked her about that a few times, which had begun to get annoying.

  It had got her to thinking about that day when Kevin took her. Walking home alone from school had been a pleasure, her treat, hard-won after she had finally convinced her parents that she could walk home like other kids her age and handle herself alone at home. She still remembered the steely look in her mother’s eyes when they’d had the discussion. Dad had defended Lauren. He understood that it was humiliating and boring to be lumped in with the babies, and he reminded Mom that they had chosen to live in Mirror Lake because it was a safe neighborhood. “I think it’s time to empower Lauren, time to let her grow up.”

  How many times after the kidnapping had she regretted that discussion? The horror of her mistake had stuck in her chest like an immovable pit, a stone that threatened to swell up until she could no longer manage a breath.

  I was wrong, she had murmured, half confession, half prayer. I was wrong. I wasn’t ready to wal
k home alone or defend myself from the world.

  But there was no taking that back.

  And it wasn’t her parents’ fault, though CeeCee had kept probing as if her next jab would hit gold. “The O’Neils didn’t do anything terrible to me,” Sis had said. “They’re not bad people. I just can’t live with them.”

  At least Paula understood that her feelings toward the family were complicated. She could not trust that Kevin wouldn’t be coming back for her, coming after her family, which he swore he would do. In the back of her mind, she longed for her tent in the compound. And anyone who thought they could return to a family after six years away and just fit right in, well, that person was fooling herself.

  “Hey, there!” Paula called to the people descending the deck and heading down the paved path to the lakefront.

  In a television show, she would think they were a cute couple. Dan’s hair was still the color of wheat, and he was trim and quick to smile, like the dad on Full House. Rachel had all the right features, shiny auburn hair, thick lips that now were more sour than sweet. Today, something must have sweetened for her, because the light was back in her eyes.

  That single, beautiful light, Sis thought.

  “We just came from the compound behind Green Spring Farm.” Dan turned a chair toward Sis and gestured for Rachel to sit. “We were there with Hank. He noticed your artwork, Lauren, and he wanted us to see it.”

  The paintings.

  The people and angels and creatures and plants that adorned every wall and beam in the cabin. Although artwork was a quiet companion, some of those paintings had helped her through dark times of doubt. Just the process of being able to brighten up a dingy wall with a unicorn or to layer melted crayon into speckled confetti over a splintered beam had given her hope and confidence in her worth as a person.

  “That’s right,” Paula said. “I heard you decorated the entire house.”

  “Not so much decorating. I wanted to make something beautiful out of something ugly. And it filled the lonely spaces.”