The Girls She Left Behind

by Sarah Graves

  “Where do you think your daughter might’ve gone? Are there any hangouts that she frequents or people she might want to see, maybe that you don’t approve of?”

  “My daughter,” she snapped nastily in reply, “doesn’t go to hangouts.” She put an ugly twist on the word. “Or see any people I don’t approve of, either.”

  Even scared as I was, it was hard not to laugh. She was so stupid and I felt, momentarily, so exultant. Because so far, the cops seemed to believe I didn’t know anything.

  “And if I’d had any idea,” she added, “I wouldn’t ever have approved of her being out anywhere with this little freak.”

  By now her whole face was so red, you could hardly see the gin-blossoms.

  “Oh, you think you’re so smart, don’t you?” she went on furiously. “Well, I’ve got news for you, little miss, I’m not fooled by all your la-di-dah book reading and your piano playing. It’s not even natural, the way she is, just look at her.”

  At my modest pedal pushers and gingham blouse. At my lack of makeup. I was, after all, a St. Anselm’s girl and I tried hard to fit in.

  “It’s all fake,” my aunt Rose spluttered, “she’s a…”

  But at this point my mother had finally heard enough. “Rose. Janie says they split up. That she went one way and Cam went the other. So don’t you think that maybe—”

  That maybe I was telling the truth, she was about to finish. Which was what it looked to me like the detectives thought, too. My dislikable aunt’s seemingly baseless accusations just sealed the deal for me, because they didn’t want to believe her.

  So that’s when I knew I was probably going to get away with it. They thought Cam and I had simply gone to the dance together when we weren’t supposed to, which was plenty bad enough, and I’d be punished for it.

  But if they’d known what happened afterward…

  Even then all I really wanted was to tell. What had happened to Cam, that she was dead, and what he’d done to me…with the detectives standing right there, stopping the words from erupting out of my mouth was like trying not to vomit.

  I silenced myself by recalling what Cam had said: about the questions I’d be asked, the violations I’d be made to endure. I’d had much more time to think about it by then and I’d decided that if anyone tried any of that on me I really would come right out of my skin and run away all bloody and screaming.

  Not only that, but if I told, I’d be the raped girl, wouldn’t I? There’d be the pointing and whispering at school, comments and stares. Bad enough that I was already so different: shy, bookish, all the things my aunt had implied. But if I told anyone the truth I’d be dirty-different, a filthy joke.

  And I wasn’t going to be, I just wasn’t. After all, Cam was already dead. Nothing could help her, and as for the other girls, I was starting to wonder if maybe the drugs in that juice he had given me to drink had made me imagine them.

  Probably I had; I’d been so hurt and scared, so messed up that I’d hallucinated them. And besides, all that couldn’t really be true, could it? That there were girls locked up in a cellar?

  Surely not. It was like things on TV, either made up or they had nothing to do with me.

  Nothing at all. “Can we look at Cam’s room?” said one of the detectives to Aunt Rose. They were done with me.

  Later when Cam still didn’t turn up they talked to me again: Had there been anyone at the park that night? Or on the street going home? Was I sure that we hadn’t gone anywhere else at all?

  But I just stuck to my story, that beyond our going to the dance nothing had happened.

  Not that I knew about, anyway.

  SIX

  Moments after Dylan’s call about the body in the car trunk, the phone rang again. This time it was Peg Wylie, demanding yet another meeting.

  By then it was Wednesday afternoon. Barely containing her impatience, Lizzie found the worried mother in the white-painted wooden gazebo outside the Bearkill library.

  “What do you want, Peg?” Lizzie stomped up the gazebo steps, the news of Gemerle’s likely arrival in Maine fresh in her mind, shortening her temper. “What lies are you going to tell me now?”

  “What?” Just out of her interviews with the child welfare people, Peg’s eyes were swollen and red-rimmed, her short, bleached hair an unruly mess.

  She dragged miserably on a cigarette, a paper cup full of water and soggy butts perched on the gazebo’s rail. “They said I was lying, too, the investigators from—”

  Oh, boo-hoo, Lizzie thought. “Well, they think everyone is lying to them, Peg. Because you know what? Usually everyone is.”

  It was all Lizzie could do not to shake the woman until her teeth rattled. “Including you. But if you want your daughter back then you’d better drop the game you’ve been playing with me.”

  “I don’t understand. I’m not playing any—”

  Lizzie grabbed the paper cup and hurled it, the wet tobacco shreds and brown droplets of water flying in a shining arc.

  “Cut it out, dammit. It’s over, okay? I mean it, I don’t want any more crappy stories out of you.” She stopped, struggling to control her anger, then tried again.

  “Peg. A woman by the name of Jane Crimmins was in my office last night. She’s from New Haven. Like you and Tara.”

  A look of stark fear crossed Peg’s face before she could stop it. Good, Lizzie thought, now maybe you’ll break down and tell me the truth.

  “She took care of one of Henry Gemerle’s victims,” Lizzie went on, “after the three women he’d been holding prisoner for fifteen years were finally set free. You know who he is, right?”

  Peg’s frightened look said she did. “Peg, I think the Crimmins woman might be trying to say something about that, and about Tara, too, maybe. But she’s so screwed up, she can’t.”

  It was only a guess. But what else made sense? Jane Crimmins wasn’t here by accident. “And,” Lizzie added, watching for Peg’s reaction, “Henry Gemerle has escaped from a locked hospital ward in Connecticut.”

  This time there was no hiding Peg’s reflexive shudder. She knew the name, all right. But:

  “Nothing to do with me,” Peg said tightly. “Or Tara, either. What, you think I was somehow involved in a multiple kidnapping? Just because we’re from New Haven, that doesn’t mean—”

  Lizzie flung her hands up in disgust. “Right. It’s all a big coincidence. Come on, what’re you, stupid? Or maybe you just think I’m—”

  Peg pulled another cigarette from her pack and lit it with shaking hands. “Do they know where he is?” she asked, trying to make her voice sound casual.

  Lizzie had seen this reaction before, too. People got fixed on the story they were telling even when the truth became obvious.

  Especially if the truth was bad. “Gemerle’s still on the run but the car he was in was found abandoned just off the highway in Houlton this morning.”

  With a body in the trunk, she added mentally. But there was no use telling Peg so, especially since the revelation might turn out to be useful later. Dylan said the ID in the body’s wallet was that of the forensic hospital orderly, a guy named Finny Brill.

  So either Gemerle had somehow forced Brill to get him out of the locked ward and drive him here, or Brill had willingly helped Gemerle for some reason and things had gone wrong.

  “You’re sure, Peg. You’re sure you don’t have any connection at all with Henry Gemerle. That’s not why you called me a little while ago, to tell me about it?”

  Peg shook her head stubbornly. “Never heard of him.” She dragged on the smoke. “I just…I just wanted to know if there’ve been any developments. Anyway, Tara left home before he ever—”

  It was another familiar reaction, this clinging to hope. “I know that,” said Lizzie. “He was locked up when she went missing.”

  So he couldn’t have grabbed Tara; not right away, at least. But what about later?

  “There’s still too much that points to a connection, though, and you think
so, too,” she told Peg. “I can tell by the way you reacted when I told you about his escape.”

  The state cops would have the car on a flatbed by now, taking it to Augusta where their techs would go over it for fingerprints and other evidence. Hair samples, for instance.

  And blood. “Now, I can find that connection eventually. Tax records, city directories…if there’s a link between you and that guy, I’ll locate it. But meanwhile, Tara’s still out there and so is he.”

  She let her voice soften. “So Peg, if you know anything at all about any of this, you need to tell me now.”

  Her phone chirped. She let it go to voicemail. “Because Tara could’ve left on her own or with Aaron, just like you think.”

  The phone chirped again. “But maybe then she decided to come home again. Walked away from wherever they’d gone together, maybe because they had a fight. Could she have been hitchhiking?”

  Peg’s face rang a suspicions confirmed bell. “Sure. Tara’s very independent, so if she didn’t like what was going on she’d have left. And…and she’s hitchhiked before. I’ve warned her not to, but—”

  The phone rang a third time. “What?” Lizzie snapped into it.

  “Hey, Lizzie, it’s Emily.” The emergency-room doc sounded harassed. “Sorry to have to bug you, but things are getting nuts here. There was an accident out on the Ridge Road and we’ve got a full house all of a sudden.”

  From behind her in the ER treatment area came a confusion of sounds: a monitor alarm jangling, someone crying out in pain, and someone else shouting something.

  “But I thought I’d better let you know the Crimmins woman is getting itchy,” Emily said. “I told her you want to talk with her but she wants to leave, and now I’m all out of reasons to—”

  Damn, Lizzie thought. “Okay,” she said as Peg finished her cigarette and lit another from the end of the first. From her face it was clear she wasn’t stepping off that story of hers, that she knew nothing about Henry Gemerle.

  Yeah, sure she didn’t. “Tell Jane Crimmins I’ll be right over,” said Lizzie, then stuck the phone in her jacket pocket and spun away from Peg.

  “Three strikes, you’re out,” she called over her shoulder as she stomped toward the Blazer.

  “I mean it, Peg. Next time you call me you’d better be ready with the truth. Because if you’re not,” Lizzie added, swinging up into the big vehicle, “don’t bother me at all.”

  —

  Headed out of town Lizzie passed a small housing development, clusters of small ranch-style houses built around a newly blacktopped circle drive where people were loading their cars full of pets and kids, their faces grim and puzzled. Nothing like the fires had happened around here in living memory and they were having trouble believing it.

  But the smoke was convincing them. Thick billows rolled over the roadway, then cleared as the wind shifted. Gripping the wheel, Lizzie peered into visibility that went from fine to zero in the space of a few moments.

  Once she nearly missed a curve, the crunch of gravel under the front tire shocking a surprised curse out of her. Loosening her grasp on the steering wheel slightly, she let the Blazer roll along with the right-side tires in the stones until it stabilized, then popped back up onto the pavement with no harm done.

  None so far. A heavy burning smell hung in the air, and a thin, smeary ash fouled the Blazer’s windshield after each successive drift of smoke. As she neared the hospital entrance she hit the speed dial on the vehicle’s console.

  “Peg’s dug her heels in,” she told Dylan, still at the crime scene in Houlton. “I don’t know why she thinks that’s better than spilling the whole story, but—”

  She swung the Blazer around a slow-moving pickup, its bed packed with garden hoses, buckets, and sprayer handles, all with the Agway labels still on them. To protect houses, she realized; it was heartbreaking, the determination these people were showing.

  “I’ll have another go at Peg later, or the state cops can try again, maybe.” She put a hand up in a wave at the pickup driver in her rearview and got a solemn dip of his gimme cap’s bill in reply.

  “Right now,” she added into the phone, “I’m headed back to the hospital to see the Crimmins woman, she’s getting antsy. But how about your end, anything more on that car or the body yet?”

  “Yeah.” Dylan sounded disgusted. “Looks like the orderly got a blunt-force head injury. Bashed with the butt of a gun, maybe.”

  He said something sharply to someone nearby, then came back to the phone. “Gemerle loaded Brill into the trunk as a quick way of getting the body out of sight, seems like. Then he took off.”

  She pulled over as an ambulance roared up behind her and passed, siren shrieking. “You’re sure it’s Brill?”

  “They’re confirming the driver’s license ID with fingerprints now,” Dylan said. “He had to have them taken to work at the forensic hospital. But Brill’s been missing since Gemerle left, and so’s the spare orderly outfit his work pals say he kept in his locker, shoes and all.”

  So their theory about the escape was probably correct. Lizzie pulled up to the hospital, a low, yellow-brick structure with big windows and a wide front terrace furnished with café tables and chairs. Under the portico around the side, EMTs from the ambulance that had passed her moments ago were already bringing their gurney back out the ER’s sliding doors, having delivered their patient.

  “So what’s Gemerle using for transportation now?” she asked. In the city there were plenty of ways to get around, but in Maine public transport was absent except in the largest cities.

  All three of them, she thought wryly. “No idea,” said Dylan. “I hope we don’t find another vehicle with another body in it.” He fell silent briefly. Then:

  “Hey, though, when we get done d’you want to get dinner? I heard,” he added, as if as an afterthought, “from another guy who thinks he’s seen Nicki. Over in Skowhegan this time.”

  The town was south of Bearkill, and way over in the western part of the state. To quell the pulse of fury she felt at his words, she tried recalling exactly where. But she hadn’t been in Maine long enough to memorize territory that wasn’t her own.

  “Really,” she said at last. She shut off the Blazer, feeling annoyed and like she was being manipulated, like the mention of Nicki was a lure.

  He wouldn’t lie to me, one side of her head assured her. Not about that.

  But then the other side chimed in: Like he didn’t lie about his wife? About them being already separated and in the process of getting a—

  “You know what, that’s nice of you, but I think I might just stick around and follow up on the Jane Crimmins angle,” she said. “I’m here at the hospital, maybe I’ll try hanging around with her, take her out somewhere for supper later or something.”

  From the corner of her eye she glimpsed Bearkill’s only taxi driving up to the ER entrance. The old sedan bore a magnetic sign—RIDE THE BEAR!—on the door. Moments later it headed off again down the long driveway and onto the highway toward town.

  “I mean,” Lizzie went on, “we don’t know yet why she freaked out with you, so I think I ought to see her alone and find out if that makes any difference.”

  “Oh.” Dylan covered his unhappy surprise well. Just not quite well enough. “Okay, then,” he said. “Well, I’ll be around, though. We can—”

  Then she realized: A taxi. “Dylan, I’ve got to go.”

  She crossed the blacktop at a sprint, ran through the sliding glass doors and across the tiled lobby. Down a corridor past shocked-looking nurses and orderlies, into the waiting area, and through the automatic doors while a clerk scurried after her…

  “Miss? Miss, I’m sorry, you can’t—”

  The hell I can’t. “Where is she?”

  All the cubicles in the emergency area had patients in them, all being treated for injuries that, through the gaps between the curtains as she passed, looked bloody and painful.

  But the curtains hanging around
the sixth cubicle, where Jane Crimmins had been the night before, were closed completely. Lizzie yanked them open, then stopped short. This cubicle’s patient lay still, covered by a white sheet. Completely covered.

  “Driver from the accident on Ridge Road,” said Emily Ektari, coming up to Lizzie with a stack of charts in her hands. “Big-time blunt-force chest injury. He bled to death.”

  Someone’s going to get killed…Emily had predicted it hours earlier, and Missy, too. And they’d been right. “Couldn’t you—?”

  “What, surgery?” Emily blew an exhausted breath out.

  “This is a rural hospital, Lizzie, it’s not a major medical center like you’re used to. We transfer the complicated ones to a trauma center, and even there, what he had, it’s fatal more times than not.”

  “And Jane Crimmins, how long has she been gone?”

  “Couple minutes. I tried to stall her for you, but—”

  “Yeah, I know. Thanks anyway.”

  Back in the Blazer she hit the RADIO button, jammed her foot on the gas, and took off. She crushed the speed limit, racing through smoke-billows and yelling for dispatch to alert all patrol units, ordering them to stop that cab. Then, when she was finished using dispatch for a punching bag, she cursed fluently again at herself.

  All of which made her feel pretty silly when, outside her office minutes later, she found Jane Crimmins pacing the sidewalk, waiting for her.

  —

  “You got a knife or a gun in there, anything like that?”

  Driving with Jane Crimmins beside her in the Blazer, Lizzie waved at the faux-leather satchel on the woman’s lap.

  Crimmins still didn’t look dangerous, with her pale, narrow face and short, dark hair, her fragile-appearing hands so small they were almost childlike. But Lizzie sensed some kind of a weird vibe anyway, a bizarre whiff of something she couldn’t identify.

  “No,” Crimmins replied softly. Even her voice seemed that of a child, breathy and tentative. “No weapons.”

  They drove past the old potato barn on the outskirts of town; the wholesaler’s warehouse was a weathered structure with a high wooden false front and a long front porch where day laborers lined up in potato-digging season, waiting to be hired.