The Girls She Left Behind

by Sarah Graves

  He turned toward the window; I ducked down fast. “She knows I’m here,” he added coldly. “She’s been behind me getting out all along, the orderly said so. I got it out of him and then I got rid of him. But she knows.”

  Suspicions confirmed; poor Finny. I heard Cam sniffling. “All right,” she replied faintly. “Whatever you say.”

  Then without warning she turned and threw up, barely making it to the sink, and I heard him cursing her.

  I jumped off the deck and backed away, dry-mouthed, stumbling up the path as quietly as I could. But I must’ve made some sound; as I reached the clearing and plunged into the brambles along the driveway, the cottage’s front door creaked open.

  Footsteps clomped out onto the porch; glancing back, I saw him peering around suspiciously.

  I froze. My legs felt watery, my lungs struggling to suck in enough air. The footsteps stomped nearer, sticks and dry leaves crunching as they approached me. I huddled, shivering, ducked down among the pine boughs, as he stopped, finally.

  But he didn’t come any farther. I waited, still nauseated and in terror, until he went back inside; then came more shouting, her shrieks of protest, and finally a dull smacking sound, again and again.

  As I crept away toward my car I heard her sobbing. But there was nothing I could do about it. Anyway, she’d made her choice.

  Nothing I could do about that, either, I told myself as I pushed through the brushy brambles. Scratched and filthy, horridly thirsty, and so scared I could barely breathe, I found my car and got in, not daring to slam the door or start the engine.

  Luckily I’d backed up onto a slight hill, so I took the brake off and rolled silently out onto the road, then turned the key. As I sped away, I kept glancing in the rearview mirror, sure that at any moment he would be there, his face full of rage.

  And Cam beside him, of course, urging him on. When I got to a crossroads I was crying so hard I couldn’t see, and I must have taken a wrong turn. Soon I was in a forest, trees all around and no one to tell me where I’d gotten to, or how to get back.

  No bars showed on my cell phone. I had no food or water with me, either; only the rest of the pills I’d poured into a secret compartment of my purse, not wanting to leave them in the motel room.

  So I chewed two more, hoping the energy they gave would last me until I found my way to town again. The afternoon sun filtered weakly through the tall trees, then slid behind clouds. A drop of rain fell, then another, but as evening came on and the temperature plummeted the rain quickly changed to sleet.

  A logging truck roared by, and then two more, but none of the drivers paid any attention to me. Finally, on a dirt road that was not much more than a rough track, I found a carved wooden sign with an arrow: BEARKILL, 2 MI.

  Following it, I reached the town in a few minutes, and with it the realization that I’d been circling it for hours. Screwing up, in other words, and now here I was in a strange place, sick and tired and so scared I could barely think, all my courage shattered by what I had just seen and without an idea in the world of what I ought to do next.

  Blinking to clear the spots swarming in my eyes, I parked in the Food King lot. By now it was past dusk, though the clock on the dashboard said only a little after four. Sleet slanted down in sheets, thundering across the lot’s asphalt.

  In the grocery store, people were buying food for dinner and chatting with acquaintances while I sat outside alone, hungry and tired and still so scared. I swallowed another pill, felt it hit my empty stomach and then the ugly rush it brought on, the harsh jagged-edged alertness like chewing on broken glass.

  Then, fluttering in the icy gusts of wind on the wooden pole of a streetlamp not far away, I saw it: a paper poster with a photograph on it. Sick with premonition, I clambered from the car and staggered toward it, not wanting it to be true.

  But it was. The heavy sleet had already soaked through the paper, but the photograph on the homemade poster was the same one I’d seen in the library. MISSING, the poster said, and then a description of the girl.

  Tara Wylie was already missing. Which meant he must have her. What other explanation could there be?

  Desperately I struggled back to my car; first sweating, then shivering, I fell into the front seat half conscious. Outside, the sky went light-dark, light-dark like a strobe light flickering while my brain sizzled hotly as if frying in its own fat, one despairing thought slamming the inside of my head:

  The monster had won. Somehow he’d already snatched the girl. Maybe he’d even killed her, like he would kill Cam.

  So it was over. I must have sat there for several hours just listening to the sleet pellets rattle wetly on the car’s roof. I couldn’t go home; my life there was over and I couldn’t bear to see it again, to face what I’d lost.

  But I couldn’t go on, either; I didn’t have the strength, and everything I’d lived for was gone, anyway. Maybe I should just kill myself, I thought. Swallow all the pills and end this misery that I’d brought on myself.

  At last, though, through the sleet I saw people in an office across the street, behind the big front window. It was a sheriff’s department office; I’d noticed it when I first got to town and now in my confusion I felt it might actually be my salvation.

  I could tell the police everything and they might help me, I thought. After all, what did it matter if they put me in prison? My life was ruined anyway. So I did try telling them, but when I got into the office I couldn’t even do that properly—

  Fortunately, as it turned out. Because by the next morning all those pills had worn off and everything was different again.

  Different, and better.

  —

  After the tranquilizers, the IV fluids, and sleep in the Bearkill hospital, by that Wednesday morning I felt like a new person. There were a dicey few moments when the woman sheriff’s deputy took me back to the same motel where I’d already registered once and checked me in. But the desk clerk didn’t notice, or at any rate he didn’t mention it, and once Lizzie Snow left me I just moved my things.

  My new room was next to a compressor clanking noisily in the hallway. But that might turn out to be useful, I thought, and so was the room’s other flaw, a chronically running toilet. I had to take the lid off the tank to put the float up so it would stop. And that tank lid, I discovered, was heavy.

  Once I could think clearly again I’d realized I didn’t need Tara to lure Gemerle. After all, he wanted to find me, too, didn’t he?

  So I let him. I waited until late afternoon, then texted the name of my motel to Finny Brill’s phone, figuring that if Gemerle had even half a brain, he’d have kept it. And it turned out he had, because later that Wednesday evening a van with Gemerle at the wheel pulled into the parking lot.

  By then it was long past dark. I watched from the lobby as the dome light went on in the van and he got out. Cam was there, too, looking awful, her face bruised and swollen.

  He came in the lobby’s front door as I turned and scampered back to my room; I’d told the desk clerk it was all right to send him along, and soon I heard him out in the hall.

  “Jane?” He tapped on the door quietly.

  Like a normal person. But he wasn’t. I stepped fast into the bathroom where he wouldn’t see me. That noisy compressor in the hall clanked and rattled like a plane getting ready to take off.

  “Jane?” I’d slipped a bit of paper into the latch so the door opened as soon as he touched it.

  “Jane?” Third time’s the charm…As he took another step I raised that heavy ceramic toilet tank lid and brought it down on the back of his skull. He must have sensed something in the last instant, because he ducked a little. So I didn’t quite hit him squarely.

  He dropped, though, and I snapped the light back on. He lay between the dresser and the foot of the bed, one arm flung out. A gun lay fallen from his hand, and the back of his head pulsed red.

  But he still breathed, his ribs heaving under his sweatshirt, and even now he was coming aro
und a little. So my being slightly off-target with the tank lid was good luck, too, I realized; it meant I would still be able to do the rest of what I had planned.

  Only I would have to hurry. I’d already prepared the chair, wedging it between the two beds, and readied the duct tape. Now I heaved him up into the chair and secured him there.

  Finally I threw water in his face. Spluttering, he came to. “Wha?” he muttered, but then his eyes focused on me.

  I flicked the switch on the barbecue lighter from the Food King. Blue flame shot from it, and that really got his attention; I could see him frantically trying to find something to say that would get him out of this.

  The way I had, long ago. “Don’t bother,” I told him softly.

  The barbecue lighter was tempting. But even that rattletrap old compressor out in the hall wasn’t loud enough for some things. Besides, I wasn’t here to hurt him.

  Not yet, anyway. “Come on,” he wheedled. “I’m not—”

  The motel-room phone book was surprisingly thick. I smacked him with it.

  His gaze darkened to a scowl; it had dawned on him now that this wasn’t going to be so easy. He didn’t have me tied up in a gloomy dungeon, did he?

  I had him. But more to the point, he had Tara. “Tell me what you’ve done with that girl. Tell me now, or—”

  He laughed, rearing forward, trying to break the duct tape. Putting a foot in his chest I shoved him back.

  “Wrong answer.” I touched flame to his earlobe; just briefly, enough to make him howl. “Next time it’s your eye. Understand?”

  He nodded. I suppose he thought that if he did what I asked, things might go better for him. After all, hope springs eternal.

  It had for the girls, too. And for me. “Where’s Tara?”

  His eyes narrowed cunningly. “What makes you think—?”

  I toasted the other ear. He screeched again briefly, eyeing the lighter wildly afterward.

  “Another wrong answer, Henry. Seems to me you keep forgetting who the boss is here. Maybe I should refresh your memory.”

  This time I didn’t even have to flick the lighter on. “All right, Jesus, how the hell do you know about that, anyway? I just found her last night, so how’d you—no, don’t!”

  I drew the lighter back. So I’d been wrong. He hadn’t had her yesterday when I saw the MISSING poster. She’d been somewhere else. But the important thing was, he had her now.

  “All right, I took her up the hill,” he said grudgingly. “Last night.”

  He angled his head toward the window. “I put her up in the fire zone. I left her there, let her get a taste of what’s coming to that dumb bitch cousin of mine, too.”

  “You mean Peg Wylie? You mean she’s your—” A mental picture of the blond woman in the courtroom popped into my head.

  “I warned her,” Gemerle said, more to himself than me. “You say anything about me, I told her, I’ll make your life hard. Like I did for the others. It won’t matter how far you run.”

  I must have recoiled. Noticing, he grinned. “I kept a little list,” he said proudly to me. “So I could find them again if ever I got lonesome.”

  He licked his lips as if relishing the thought. “That’s how I knew she’d be here.” Another idea seemed to strike him. “You, though. I never found you.”

  I’d been right to stay away from his neighborhood all those years, to keep my head down and stay out of sight as much as I could.

  “Cam said she didn’t even know you, that you two girls had just met in the park. And I believed her. Maybe,” he added, “on account of what she was doing to me when she said it…”

  His grin was lascivious. “Hey, what can I say? Thinkin’ with the wrong head, I was, and I thought she was telling the truth.”

  It was all I could do not to burn that filthy tongue of his right out of his head. But I needed it.

  I needed what it could reveal. “Where?” I said calmly. “Tell me exactly where Tara Wylie is and how to find her.”

  Because she might still be alive. And if she was, now I had a new reason to find her: Who knew what the monster might’ve told her? About me, maybe; about what I had done. Cam might’ve confided something to him about that, too, trying to humor him, get on his good side.

  “You’ll let me go, though, right?” Gemerle wheedled. “If I tell?”

  I pretended to think about it. Then, “Sure. I want Tara. Once I have her, I won’t need you anymore. So yeah, go ahead. I’m listening.”

  Make my day, I added silently. You sick fuck. And then he did tell: the road. A red bandanna marking the hole he’d buried her in. It was near some kind of a primitive shed, he added.

  “Okay, so now I’ve told you.” He worked his face into a fake smile. “So you keep your part of the bargain and—”

  Right. My part. He was still talking, trying to weasel his way out of this as I slipped behind him, wrapped the heavy length of wire that I’d secured to the mop handles twice around his neck, and shoved the chair over frontwise. Then I climbed atop it, gripping the pair of mop handles and ignoring his wheezed pleas.

  It was more difficult than I’d expected. Somehow he got the chair out from between the two beds; a lamp went over, then the TV on its metal stand. But as he squeaked and struggled, I hung on, fighting to keep my grip.

  Until suddenly he went limp. Cautiously I let the wire go slack, ready for him to roar up again. But he lay motionless. In the struggle, his gun had gotten kicked away. Grabbing it up, I moved around to the front of the chair where his face lay mashed into the carpet, one eye goggling at me.

  I still thought I might have to shoot him. But then I saw all the blood spreading across the carpet. I hadn’t strangled him; instead the wire had been sharp.

  So that’s what did it, ended the monster at last. I stood staring at him for a long time until with a start I came back to myself and began trying to clean up the blood, wiping at it with towels and throwing them in a heap. While I worked, I thought about what I’d expected to feel once he was gone—triumph, satisfaction, relief—and what I did feel:

  Nothing. Only the dull knowledge that he was eliminated at last, like smashing a bug that was poisonous and you knew if you didn’t, it would sting you to death. It was too bad, really, that after all this time of hating him, and then finally slaughtering him, I didn’t even get to enjoy it.

  But it was like I was on autopilot. The room had a sliding glass door leading outside. When I’d used all the towels to mop up as well as I could, I opened it a crack so I could get back in that way, then slipped out the door leading to the hall past the clattering compressor. There was a side exit, so I was able to avoid the lobby.

  Out in the dark parking lot, I jumped into his van where Cam sagged half conscious in the passenger seat. He’d beaten her very badly, her face bruised and fresh blood oozing from beneath the bandage on her head. Her breathing was irregular; for real this time, and in another life I’d have rushed her to the same hospital I’d been in earlier.

  But that life was over. Instead I moved the van around to the motel’s rear service area—the keys, luckily, were still in the ignition—and backed it right up to the sliding glass door of my own room. Inside, I rolled the chair with him in it to the door, cut the tape securing him to the chair, and shoved the chair hard, toppling him halfway into the van’s rear cargo compartment.

  Finally I hauled him all the way in so the doors would close. I flung the chair back into the room and slid the glass door shut. Behind it the heavy draperies swung gently and were still.

  Now I just had to find Tara Wylie. Because now that Finny and Gemerle were dead—and Cam would be too, soon, I was sure of it this time—she was the only one Gemerle might have talked to about all this.

  Not that he definitely had. And that was a chance I couldn’t take; suspicion was one thing, but the girl’s testimony would be another. He might have repeated something Finny said about me, or told the girl something about Cam, for instance. Just some little t
hing.

  But if some smart cop got to hear of it…well, maybe I was being too obsessive. I had to be sure, though—absolutely sure, or I’d never be able to sleep at night—that it wouldn’t happen.

  So, with Gemerle’s body in the rear cargo compartment and Cam slumped alongside me in the van’s passenger seat, I drove toward the fires flaring bright orange and yellow on the dark hillside just outside Bearkill.

  I would dump Gemerle up there and sit beside Cam until she finally died, I decided, and afterward I would leave her there.

  But then she spoke icily. “You didn’t forget.”

  I jumped, nearly sending us careening off the road. It hadn’t occurred to me that she might regain consciousness, she looked and sounded so awful. When I had the van back under control enough to glance over at her, though, she was smiling at me.

  Bleeding, still. And her breathing was very terrible. But she was smiling unpleasantly and watching me from beneath half-lowered eyelids, one eye hideously swollen. “Hi, Janie,” she said.

  Before her surgery, the doctors explained to me that her waxing and waning consciousness—one day drowsy, the next bright as a penny—came from changing pressures in and around her brain.

  That must be what was happening to her now, I thought, something leaking, blood pooling and pressing, then easing temporarily.

  “Hi,” I managed. Then I noticed she had the gun. Gemerle’s gun, I realized with a burst of panic. I’d picked it up in the motel room, laid it on the van console, and Cam must have seen it and snatched it up without my noticing.

  So now she had it. “You didn’t forget,” she repeated, her face contorting in a lopsided snarl. “You lying little bitch, you left me there with him. All those years you left me down there. And even then I protected you. I could have told him where you were, you know.”

  So it was true, what Gemerle had said. Once that might have softened my heart, but now I didn’t have one anymore. She was aiming that gun at me.

  Ash swirled from the sky, sticking like gray snow to the windshield, smearing when I hit the wipers. We were nearly to the Ridge Road turnoff Gemerle had told me about, the one that led to where he’d left Tara Wylie. Uphill in the dark, flickers of orange flared warningly.