The Girls She Left Behind

by Sarah Graves

  “Hi,” said the tech with the barest glance at Lizzie. “See you inside,” she told Dylan with a brilliantly white smile.

  Lizzie watched the technician return to the motel. “Isn’t it amazing what diet and exercise can do for a person?”

  “Yeah,” said Dylan, still watching, too. She was about to ask if he wanted a can of Alpo to go with his houndlike tendencies, but Peg interrupted.

  “What’s going on?” she demanded, squinting suspiciously from Lizzie to Dylan and back again.

  “I’ll tell you later,” said Lizzie, and Dylan shot her a look of gratitude, having no wish to explain to Peg now about the hole in the ground where a broken cell phone had been located.

  “You’ve got this other thing?” Lizzie added to him, meaning the bloody motel room.

  “Yeah.” His grim nod confirmed her own earlier assessment that this was his case. There’d been too much blood in that room to believe otherwise, and she could see from his face that he was already making his mental to-do list.

  Then he caught her expression. “Something wrong?”

  The crime-scene tech had already entered the motel but her image felt burnt on Lizzie’s retinas; that and the way Dylan had watched the young woman’s lithe figure as she’d departed.

  Lizzie shook her head irritably. “I gave the motel manager more grief than he deserved in there, that’s all.”

  Dylan’s eyebrows raised. “You could apologize.”

  She turned. “I don’t feel that bad about it,” she said, and stalked away from him.

  But by the time she reached the Blazer with Peg Wylie already in the passenger seat, she’d cooled off enough to think straight again. Today wasn’t about Dylan, or about Nicki, either.

  It was about Peg’s missing daughter, Tara, and Peg was still lying about something. Which was why, on Lizzie’s own to-do list, changing that fact had just become job one.

  —

  On a cold December morning in New Haven two weeks after her brain surgery, I brought a still-recuperating Cam home from the hospital. The cab let us out in front of our building. I’d bought a car by then, a nearly new Lexus, with some of the money I’d gotten from selling my parents’ house. But I didn’t want to watch out for traffic or pay attention to street signs that day; I wanted to focus on her.

  Gripping my arm, she made her halting way up the front walk; inside, she stood gazing around as if to make sure she was really there at last. She went into the kitchen where everything gleamed, to the living and dining rooms bright with fresh flowers in readiness for her, and at last to her own room with its familiar braided rag rug, low wooden bed, and white chenille spread.

  I’d thought about new curtains but when I saw her I was glad I’d kept the old lace tie-backs, merely washing and ironing them to pristine whiteness. Only when she was satisfied that everything was as she’d left it did she let me take her coat and carefully lift her soft knitted cap from her head.

  The staples from surgery had been removed and prickles of new hair had begun sprouting on her bluish-white scalp. She would need help with bathing, I’d been told, and there was a whole long list of other things she wasn’t yet allowed to do alone, too.

  “This is an elaborate care plan,” the nurse had said, “which must be followed strictly. Are you certain you can handle it?”

  But in fact the only hard part was hiding my happiness. It would be like when Cam first got freed, I thought. When she could barely do anything on her own and had turned to me for everything.

  And it was that way, too, for a month while I nursed and cosseted her. Dainty sandwiches, nourishing broths…nothing was too good for her. Even the plan to punish Henry Gemerle was put on hold, waiting for her recovery. But then:

  “Oh, my God!” In the kitchen I was making a mushroom stew with cream and shallots; dropping the spoon, I rushed in to find her already halfway out of her chair, her lap robe fallen to the floor.

  “What is it, what’s wrong?” I put my arm around her to guide her down again. She was not supposed to get up unaided without her walker, which I’d left out in the hall because it took up so much room in the apartment.

  And besides, she had me. She gestured at the TV. “He…”

  I followed her anguished gaze to the screen, where a courtroom news story was being reported. Then I saw the prisoner in his bright-orange jumpsuit being led in between two bailiffs.

  It was Gemerle. Cam turned accusingly. “You didn’t tell me.”

  I hadn’t prepared her for this new torture, that he might suddenly appear right there in our own living room.

  “I didn’t know,” I whispered, and truly I hadn’t. For weeks all I’d thought of was Cam’s surgery and her recovery…it was as if nothing else in the world existed.

  For me, nothing else had. True, there had been calls on the answering machine from the district attorney’s office, asking if Cam would testify; at the very hearing, I realized, that we were watching on TV right now.

  But she couldn’t, of course, and not only because she was so ill. After all, who knew what a clever attorney might manage to coax or trick her into saying?

  Fortunately, her surgery had given me a perfect excuse to tell them that she wasn’t able to talk on the phone, that she was much too ill to appear in court, and that she would be that way for the foreseeable future.

  And her doctors had backed me up on this. Still, to make absolutely sure she’d keep silent when I wasn’t around, I’d been sedating her with Valium tablets when I went to work. Orders for prescriptions, I’d found, could be put into the medical database like anything else, then filled at the hospital pharmacy.

  But now Cam was wide awake, staring at the TV as Henry Gemerle shuffled to the defendant’s table, his wrists manacled and his ankles in chains. Seeing him I turned, expecting to find her hatred of him mirroring my own. Instead, though, her face was full of sorrow and yearning. After a moment of utter confusion I believed I knew why.

  It had been in the news that there’d been infant things in that cellar—tiny clothes and other items moldering in a storage cabinet. But no infant anywhere.

  “Cam,” I said gently, sitting beside her. “Where is…?”

  That old midline abdominal scar I’d seen explained her look of sorrow now, I thought.

  …your baby? I was about to finish. But before I could do so, Cam shook her head impatiently to silence me.

  “There they are,” she whispered as the camera panned over the courtroom spectators, and then I saw them, two young women in the front row. They were flanked on either side by a pair of guardlike older ladies in dark business suits, the kind of outfits that frilly blouses are meant to soften but don’t.

  “Victim advocates,” Cam said contemptuously of the women. She’d never spoken to another social worker after the Davenport fiasco. The crawl at the bottom of the TV screen read, EXPERTS SAY ACCUSED UNFIT, JUDGE TO RULE ON ABILITY TO ASSIST DEFENSE.

  “The girls look all right,” I said. Cam shrugged, waiting only for the moment when the camera found Gemerle again, his lips curved in a smirk I recalled too well. No shame troubled his face, only a kind of puzzled curiosity, as if he didn’t understand what everybody was so upset about. Those deep-blue eyes of his glinted with the same cruel glee I’d witnessed at his house that night.

  Seeing him, I knew suddenly that the experts were wrong; Henry Gemerle was no more unfit to stand trial than I was. At the thought that he might fool them an awful drowning feeling went through me, like I was falling down a dark well.

  Still gazing at the TV, Cam reached over and put her hand on mine. She’d never done such a thing before.

  “He looks just the same,” she said, not removing her hand.

  “Yes,” I replied faintly, still fearing that before we could team up to punish him she would tell, that with a word she would ruin my life. Seeing him would remind her, I thought, of what had happened to her.

  And why. That it was my fault. “Yes,” I repeated, dry-mouthed with
fear suddenly. “Older. But the same.”

  The yellow hair, thick swatches of blond eyebrows, and once-slim build now gone a little to flab since he’d been imprisoned were all the same as I recalled.

  “Cam, is the baby still alive?”

  She looked startled. I was, too; I hadn’t known I would say it. But she nodded in the affirmative. “Oh, yes.”

  “Do you…do you know where?” But to this she gave only a small, negative shake of her shaved head.

  A smell came from the kitchen, of frying potatoes needing to be turned. I got up, letting Cam’s hand fall. The TV crawl read, JUDGE OKAYS CAMERAS IN HEARINGS RE ACCUSED’S TRIAL COMPETENCY.

  So we would see him again. I hurried back to finish cooking our dinner, my heart thumping wildly at the memories that his face had brought on; for Cam, too, I supposed.

  But seeing him had brought on another feeling, also. Stirring the soup, I imagined future evenings when Cam and I would sit together watching the court proceedings on TV, sharing memories that only we two could possibly understand.

  Let the other girls be there in person, I thought, in front of the greedy cameras where merely by tuning in, the whole world could gawk at them. We had each other, Cam and I, and despite my fear that she might still turn on me, for now that was enough.

  Or it was until I realized the enormity of what she’d told me. That with it I had the means, finally, to cement her loyalty to me permanently. The thought came suddenly as I laid the soupspoons on the dining-room table, lining them up carefully atop the linen napkins and then filling the wineglasses.

  Because the two of us punishing the monster together was one thing. But bringing Cam’s lost child back to her would be another, wouldn’t it?

  After all, for creating the ties that bind there is nothing like flesh and blood.

  —

  “You know what I think?”

  Lizzie gripped the Blazer’s steering wheel as the vehicle bounced along; not many roads led out to the brushland where the gravelike hole had been found, and of those none was paved all the way to the end.

  Peg listened stonily as Lizzie went on: “I think you think Tara will be in worse trouble somehow if you tell the truth than if you don’t.”

  No answer from Peg. On either side of the washboard-gravel road, teams of men and women dug firebreaks, swinging at them with pickaxes and shoveling dirt onto hot spots. The air smelled like ashes mixed with exhaust from the constantly howling chain saws, as workers cut brush and whippy saplings and hauled them away before the fires could use them for fuel.

  Chevrier had said he’d let the workers up here know to expect her. Now a guy in a yellow vest spotted her and waved her forward.

  “Up there?” She stuck her head out the window.

  “Yeah! Quarter mile or so!” The guy wore bulky ear protection and an air pack strapped to his back. “Over on the right you’ll see a red bandanna tied to a sapling? Turn in there!”

  She buzzed the window back up and switched on the Blazer’s air-conditioning to clear the smoke from the cab; not cigarettes, this time, but the real deal.

  “I’ve brought you here to show you something,” she told Peg.

  The missing teen’s mother spoke resentfully. “You’ve got the wrong idea. I’m telling the truth, I don’t see why you think—”

  “Hold on.” Lizzie hit the brakes as a girl in an orange slicker stepped onto the dirt road, hands up in a halt gesture.

  Flames lapped at the road. They’d already eaten right up to the gravel edges, leaving black ash. Two guys beat monotonously at the flickering remnants that kept springing up again.

  Peg scowled as the girl in the vest waved them by. “Why are we even out here?” she began again.

  Lizzie pulled onto the blackened grass. The red rag fluttered from the trunk of a small tree. “Just get out.”

  She led Peg across soft, powdery soil, its burnt structure falling away beneath a solid-looking surface.

  Finally she stopped, putting a hand out, and then Peg saw it, too. A hole gaped in the baked earth, and beside it sat a wooden box about six feet long and half as wide.

  It looked like a coffin except for the slats that lay around near it. From the nail holes in them, it was pretty clear they’d been nailed crosswise onto the box.

  Peg dropped to her knees. “Oh, God…”

  From around them rose yells from the fire volunteers trying desperately to keep one another in view in the smoky conditions, or at least within shouting range. A pickup truck moved slowly on the dirt road, barely visible through the haze, the support teams perched in the vehicle’s bed handing out water and fresh bandannas to the ground crews.

  “Oh,” Peg said helplessly again. The hole was only a few inches deeper than the box itself.

  So you put the box in the hole, then the person into the box. Threatening them with a weapon, maybe, to make them get in, Lizzie thought. Then you put the separate boards of the lid on, fastening them with what looked like…yeah, those were roofing nails.

  Whoever had been in this box had been let out again, though. She knew from the two sets of human footprints in the ashy soil of what had been pasture, leading away on a trail deeply trodden into the soil by—Lizzie supposed—animals.

  Sheep, maybe. Or cows. “Jesus,” Peg whispered faintly. “She was in there? You think Tara was—”

  The feds working the kidnapping would arrive soon. Chevrier had already put them in the picture, which was fine with Lizzie. Not having to do crime-scene chores meant she could use the time instead to try again at getting something useful out of Peg.

  The truth, for instance. “You’re still lying to me, Peg. You know it and I know it. Two blue-eyed parents are very unlikely to have had—”

  “Don’t lecture me, all right?” Peg retorted. “It was all I could think of on short notice.”

  She fumbled in her shirt pocket for a smoke and cursed when she was out, then rummaged angrily until she located a loose cigarette in the bottom of her purse. “Tara still thinks she’s my ex’s kid, I don’t want her to—”

  “But what’s so bad about that? I’ve heard worse, and at her age probably Tara has, too.”

  Peg only shook her head stubbornly, blowing out smoke. “I don’t care, I just don’t want her to know.”

  Lizzie scanned the makeshift grave impatiently. What Peg was saying didn’t make sense. For one thing, sooner or later the girl would figure it out. “That hers?”

  It was a cell phone, badly smashed, one large daggerlike shard the only recognizable piece. It had been left here because it was evidence for the crime-scene team to process.

  “Yeah,” said Peg shakily. “It used to be mine but she really wanted one, and—”

  “Okay.” Lizzie counted to ten, controlling her temper.

  Turning, she herded Peg along. The smoke was eye-wateringly thick. “While we drive back to town, I want you to think hard about where Tara might be right now.”

  Peg nodded mutely. Lizzie could see that the sight of the hole and the broken phone had shocked the woman, knocked all the magical thinking or whatever it was right out of her head.

  But it hadn’t yet persuaded her to tell the truth. “And who she might be with,” Lizzie added cruelly.

  Her boots raised small clouds of parched dust. “Because I don’t know yet how he found her here, but I’m pretty sure Tara’s the reason why Henry Gemerle came to Bearkill.”

  Hopping into the driver’s seat, she slammed the heavy door. The vehicle felt soundproofed suddenly, the whole outside world held off by a couple of tons of steel and glass.

  Too bad the feeling couldn’t last, she thought as she turned the Blazer around on the gravel, aiming back downhill through the smoke. Not until they bumped back onto the paved road once more did she speak.

  “Look, Peg. I told you this once, but I need to be sure you understand that I’m not on Tara’s case, officially. It’s the state cops and the FBI who—”

  “I’m not telling them an
ything,” Peg cut in flatly.

  Lizzie counted to ten. “Peg. You called me, remember?”

  On the highway they passed a farmyard where a dozen brown cows walked up a ramp into an enclosed trailer. The drought meant local feed production was way down, and if they couldn’t buy feed for the animals the farmers had to sell them.

  “You wanted my help,” Lizzie went on, “but I guess now you’ve decided that confiding in me will only hurt Tara somehow.”

  In the farmyard, two small children watched the herd being loaded, waving farewell as the trailer’s doors swung shut.

  “Still,” Lizzie went on carefully, “I get the feeling you’re leaving the door open a crack.”

  Silence from Peg. But a listening silence. Lizzie took a deep breath. “So here’s the deal. If you tell me the truth about what’s going on I…I’ll keep it to myself.”

  It was maybe the worst idea she’d ever had, and for sure it was illegal. But Tara Wylie was still out there somewhere and in danger, if she was even alive.

  So never mind the rules, Lizzie thought, or the job. What mattered was the oath she had taken: to serve and protect.

  Nothing else was working for her in Bearkill; not finding Nicki or settling things with Dylan, not even playing straight with Trey, one of the most decent guys she’d ever met. He deserved better from her; everyone did.

  “I don’t get it,” Peg said.

  “Yeah, I don’t, either.” Because what she’d decided was wrong and yet at the moment, it felt like the only possible thing. So she would hear whatever Peg said, act on it as best she could, and figure out on her own when or whether to confide in anyone else.

  So maybe I’ll tell. And maybe, she thought, feeling suddenly much better about everything—

  Maybe I won’t.

  NINE

  Patient confidentiality doesn’t only mean not talking about what you know. It also means not trying to find out things that are none of your business.

  That’s why what I did next was against the rules: I had no job-related reason for retrieving the records of cesarean births that occurred in New Haven hospitals during the relevant years. But I did it anyway, since for the sort of plan I was devising now I couldn’t rely just on Cam’s word.