The Girls She Left Behind

by Sarah Graves

  “I know how much you hated me,” Cam slurred unevenly.

  I glanced over at her again. In the dashboard’s pale glow her face was swollen and misshapen, bruised and lumpy where he’d hit her.

  Bleeding from where I had hit her, too, days earlier, a thin trickle now oozing from beneath the bandage on her head. When she turned to face me again, in just those few moments her right eye had bulged out to golf-ball size.

  “Because I was pretty and I cared about being alive,” she went on. “Because I had fun. And you couldn’t. You just didn’t know how.”

  We bumped off the paved part of the road. Gemerle had said it was another half mile or so from there and to look for a red rag tied to a branch stuck in the ground.

  “You hated me,” Cam said, “because you were jealous. Once I was gone, you wouldn’t be getting compared with me all the time.

  “Had you going for a while, though, didn’t I?” Cam’s words were barely understandable now but her grip on the gun still looked steady.

  I swallowed hard. “Cam, I thought you were dead back in his cellar. I swear, I would never have left you there if I had any idea.”

  The road was rough and heavily rutted, the van jouncing in and out of deep holes and through soft, ground-up patches where the tires spun briefly before catching traction again.

  “And then it’s true, I did forget,” I said. “What he did to me, everything about it, yes, I forgot it all as fast as I could, I admit it.”

  The gun was pointed at my head. “But afterward, when I found out the truth, when I found you, I was sorry. I took care of you, Cam, and…and I loved you. And doesn’t that count for something?”

  Had loved her. Now only the fear remained, so as I spoke I thrust my hand out very fast. And maybe her reflexes weren’t so good after the beating she’d taken, or maybe she didn’t really want to shoot me.

  Maybe somewhere in that hard-as-nails little heart of hers, she’d loved me, too. But I knew she would never admit it and anyway, I didn’t care. Not anymore. So I straight-armed her hard, hitting her in the throat, and her head slammed backward against the passenger-side window with a sick-sounding thud.

  Then I saw the red rag like a danger flag in the headlights. Gemerle had said it marked the place he’d left Tara. I hit the van’s brakes and Cam slid like a rag doll onto the dashboard, the gun falling from her hand. Scrabbling around in the darkness I found it. But by then she was on me, wide awake again, scratching and biting.

  “You weren’t taking care of me!” she shrieked. “You just wanted to shut me up so I wouldn’t tell on you! Henry was the only one who ever—”

  From down in the van’s foot well I flung my head up and back hard and felt it connect with her jaw.

  “The only one who ever what?” I demanded. “Raped you, beat you, locked you up and terrorized you?”

  I hauled myself up, panting, and shoved the gun in my pocket. “He’s the one who killed you, Cam. Or he as good as killed you. It wasn’t me. I made a mistake, I admit that.”

  Fallen back against the window, she curled her split lip at me in revulsion. One side of her face was already puffing up from where she’d hit the dashboard.

  “I made a lot of bad mistakes,” I went on. “But if you still think Henry was anything but a monster, if your head’s so twisted around that you believe you were ever anything but his victim—”

  Her eyes widened. “Was?” she whispered.

  She glanced toward the darkened rear of the van where Henry Gemerle lay on the other side of the metal divider screen behind the passenger seats. She hadn’t known he was back there, but now she saw his shape and got it.

  “Is that what we’re doing here?” She glanced out at the smoky night. The fires seemed much closer, runnels of flame streaming up nearly to us and falling away again.

  “He’s dead? You killed him?” Before I could stop her she was out of the van, staggering through the headlight beams, her gait crablike and her face a misshapen horror as she struggled into the gloom beyond.

  “Help!” she cried. “Help! Murder!” Not loud; she didn’t have the breath to make much noise. But it was enough, if anyone heard her, to put me in prison, wasn’t it?

  Or it could be. She might say anything. So I went after her: out of the van, across the dusty soil, stumbling in the dark. Ahead I could hear her weeping, still gasping out cries for help.

  “Cam!” I breathed. “Cam, wait!” But she didn’t, and then it got very quiet. “Cam?”

  No answer. In the distance, flames flared up and flattened again. It was as if they were teasing, creeping near, dancing away.

  Then a breathy shriek sent me back toward the van. When I got there Cam stood bent at an awkward angle, one foot on the ground and the other plunged into it somehow, pinned in the headlights.

  “Cam?” Squinting to try to make sense of what I was seeing, I ventured nearer. “Cam, are you okay?”

  But she only bared her teeth at me like an animal, and as I got nearer I could see that her foot really had gone through the earth somehow. She had stepped into some kind of a hole, or…

  “It’s biting me!” she screamed, trying frantically to yank her foot out all of a sudden. But something held it.

  “Cam!” I grabbed her calf in both my hands, pulling up with all my strength. Finally her foot emerged, shoeless and with fresh oozing bite marks around the heel.

  Human bite marks. As soon as I’d freed her, Cam fell sobbing to the ground. I dropped beside her, hearing faint cries that I knew could mean only one thing. I dug frantically into the dry, loose soil with my fingers in the place she’d stepped through.

  Almost at once I’d uncovered a box with one wooden top slat broken in, the splinters blood-streaked. Scrambling back to the van I found a tire iron by the spare tire in the cargo area, and in the next few moments I managed to pry the rest of the slats up and off the box. Inside, flat on her back and staring wildly up at me, lay a girl with a daggerlike shard of black plastic clutched in her two hands.

  Blood smeared her lips, stretched into a feral expression as if in the next instant she might fly up at me and rip my throat out. Then Cam rose beside me, letting out a shuddery sigh as she peered down and glimpsed the girl in the box.

  It was Tara Wylie.

  TWELVE

  Tara didn’t recall when she’d found the sharp plastic piece.

  She’d felt something digging into her leg and searched around with her hands as best she could, to try moving it where it wouldn’t poke her.

  The next thing she knew, she had the sharp thing in her hands, knew it for a tool, and began using it immediately on one of the box- top slats. Dragging the plastic shard’s sharp point across the grain of the wooden slat nailed down inches from her face, she began digging a groove in it.

  Don’t give up, she thought, her mind echoing what her mother had always told her. Nagged her, actually: About homework. About cheerleading. Whatever. Be lousy at it if you have to, Tara. But don’t you ever, ever…

  She wasn’t hungry. She wasn’t even thirsty, or if she was, she was not letting herself know about it. She was very, very scared, but as her mom always said, too, sometimes being scared just means you’ve got a brain in your head.

  All Tara really knew, though, was that if she didn’t find a way out of this box she was buried in, she was going to die.

  And she did not fucking want to. She just didn’t. Dig at that thing, she told herself. Dig, dammit: like her mom lifted weights and did pull-ups, and ran miles every morning before breakfast, so she could get in good enough shape to pass the firefighter test.

  Just do it…Tara dragged the plastic shard yet again through the groove she’d already worn into one of the slats that imprisoned her in the box. Bits of dry wood flaked down itchily onto her lips; she blew them away and dragged the shard again.

  And again. A while later, she thought she heard voices and then knew she did. Two women were arguing up there, practically on top of her. Elated, Tara open
ed her mouth to cry out to them for help. But only a whispery croak escaped her, and from above it seemed that the two women were actually fighting now, physically struggling with each other.

  So they couldn’t hear her weak thumping, which was all she could manage with her arms so restricted by the tight quarters she was in. All they cared about, Tara thought resentfully, was that stupid quarrel they were so involved in, and the more she thought about this the madder she got.

  For God’s sake, I’m going to die while you two bitch at each other, she thought. So when a foot suddenly came crashing into the box through the weak spot in the slat, Tara knew just what to do and by then she was pissed off enough to do it.

  She grabbed it with both hands and bit into it. Hard, as hard as she could. The foot yanked away, leaving a satisfying amount of blood and tissue between her teeth. Then the broken slats were being torn away, dirt and ash cascading down onto her face.

  Coughing and gagging, she felt herself lifted up by her arms, and screamed at the agony of moving her stiffened legs. Soon she was on her feet, wobbly and squinting in darkness at the two women whose faces, masklike in the glare of headlights from a vehicle not far away, peered astonishedly at her.

  “It’s her,” one of the women whispered wonderingly, the one with the bandage on her head. But Tara didn’t care.

  “I want,” she began, the words coming out a whisper. Where was she? Unsure, she scanned the darkness anxiously. And why was that van sitting there, the van he had been driving?

  “I want…” At the sight of the van, terror hit her. She took a step, fell, and began scrabbling away on hands and knees as fast as she could, heedless of the stones bruising her hands.

  Her fingers brushed something and closed onto it. The shovel lay there; the one he’d made her use to dig her own grave. She had forgotten it, but now her hands wrapped tightly around it.

  She struggled to her knees, still gripping the shovel. One chance, just one, would she have to make use of it. Footsteps from behind her crunched softly in the dry earth.

  Soon, whoever it was would be near enough. Tara took a deep breath and then hopped a little hop up onto the balls of her feet. Next, with the last of her strength she sprang up, swinging the shovel, letting its weight carry it out and away—

  Hands seized her, knocking the shovel aside. Tara ducked fast and away from them, knowing she had to escape.

  That her life depended on it. “No!” she cried desperately as she kicked out hard and felt the heel of her left foot hit flesh. Then she wriggled away once more, but the smoky night around her was now all at once hotly peppered with flying embers.

  There was nowhere to go. Fire rose all around her, closed in smotheringly, and everything was in flames.

  “Come on,” someone gasped. “Come on, come on…”

  Her shirt was on fire. One of the women was slapping at it, trying to put it out, but all Tara could do was sob.

  “I want…my mother!” she wailed helplessly, and when the fire on her shirt was finally extinguished she didn’t care about that, either. She was just so thirsty, just suddenly so thirsty and very tired, and after that she must have passed out.

  Later she found herself being half dragged and half carried uphill in the dark. The fire was behind them but gaining hungrily, streamers of flame creeping out, falling back, nearer each time.

  We have to get away from here, thought Tara. But they were heading in the wrong direction. The lights of Bearkill glowed hazily in the distance through a pall of heavily drifting smoke.

  There, she thought yearningly. Ordinarily she could reach it no problem, even in the dark. But her legs felt as if they would dissolve beneath her; no way would she be able to run.

  And that wasn’t the worst of it. “He’s coming,” she whispered tremblingly. “You don’t get it, he’s out here.”

  “No, he’s not.” The bandaged woman spoke. She looked awful.

  “He’s not out there because he’s dead. She killed him,” the injured woman added nastily, slurring her words. “The way she’ll kill us,” the woman added.

  The smoke smell was still gaggingly strong. When Tara’s foot hit a rock and she stumbled, the woman gripping her arm jerked her roughly upright again.

  “Please,” said the injured woman. Pleading, her mood shifting like the smoke-billows that had begun rising and falling around them in the hot breeze. “Before you do it, please let me…”

  Before she does what? Tara wondered, fright jabbing her, and then, I need to get out of here, she thought again, but the woman marching her along held on tight and she was too weak to struggle.

  Then just ahead a low shed took shape in the gloom, with a dark rectangle suggesting a door. Tara balked, frowning at the structure. “No. No, I don’t want to go in there.”

  “Sometimes we all have to do things we don’t want to,” said the woman who held Tara, before letting her go.

  Tara stood swaying, gathering herself to run. But then she saw the gun. “Go on now,” said the woman, waving it.

  “Oh,” murmured the other one suddenly, and fumbling at the bandage on her head she collapsed all at once like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

  The woman with the gun dropped to her knees. “Cam?”

  Tara backed carefully away toward some unburnt scrub trees. Beyond their whippy trunks, incongruous on the barren hillside, stood a bathtub, and suddenly she could see nothing else because maybe the tub had—

  Yes! There was water in it. The tub was a makeshift trough, and the shed must be for a local farmer’s grazing animals; goats or sheep, maybe, Tara realized, not caring how the young saplings cut her as she swept them aside, thirst urging her on.

  Reaching the trough she fell gratefully against it, cupped cool, dripping handfuls and flung them greedily into her parched mouth. Once more, she thought each time she drank. Then I’ll run.

  But instead her body took over and she was still bent to the water when she felt what she knew must be the small, cold end of the gun barrel on her neck.

  “Okay, honey, get inside.”

  Full of dread, Tara eyed the shed’s dark door mistrustfully. But then having no other choice, she gave in and ducked through it.

  —

  “He hurt her,” Cam managed when I returned from tying Tara up, using some twine I’d found in the shed. “He hurt my baby.”

  Even dying, Cam was no fool, and despite her delusions about Gemerle she still knew just exactly which sick son of a bitch would bury a girl in a box.

  “Right,” I said, crouched beside her outside the rough structure.

  I saw no reason to tell her the truth, even though I knew it. Had known, actually, since the moment I read Tara’s description on the MISSING poster. Brown hair, brown eyes…

  Cam hadn’t seen Tara Wylie clearly enough to know that the girl couldn’t be her daughter.

  And now she never would. “You hurt him back, though, didn’t you?” she whispered through a grimace of pain. “That was good.”

  I found her hand and held it. My heart, thudding an awful drumbeat, suddenly felt as if it might burst in my chest; I’d felt blessedly numb but now as she squeezed my hand, in my memory Cam skipped down Whalley Avenue beside me again, singing about being free.

  “I’m so sorry,” she murmured. “You were right about him.”

  Something hot and stinging ran down my face, salty-tasting. A sob reached my throat but it wouldn’t come the rest of the way.

  “Never mind,” I whispered. “Don’t worry about anything now.”

  A smile touched her lips, and for an instant it was the old Cam there: funny and full of mischief, a girl who took dares and wore makeup and whose walk was a lovely, loose-limbed dance to music that I couldn’t hear.

  Except through her. And now I wouldn’t ever hear it again. She reached up, childlike, wincing in anguish; I gathered her in my arms and while I held her and whispered to her, she took a shuddery final breath and died there on the dark hillside.

&n
bsp; And then all I could think about was getting away. Looking up I saw fire roaring at me, hurling explosions of yellow-white sparks out ahead of itself. At me, at Cam’s body, and at the girl tied up inside the shed.

  Which was when I realized: I’d been dreading it, but I didn’t have to kill Tara Wylie at all, did I? Not directly, anyway; all I had to do was arrange things so no trace of what had gone on here would ever be discovered.

  And it wasn’t as if the girl would burn alive. The smoke would get her first, surely. After all, I wasn’t a monster.

  —

  “You let her leave?”

  It was Thursday night. Jane Crimmins had been here in the emergency room again; here and gone, Emily Ektari had called Lizzie to say.

  Clad in a blue scrub suit and lab coat, Emily shrugged impatiently, leaning down at the nursing desk to squint at something on the computer screen.

  “Hey, I just got here. And you know we can’t keep people who don’t want to stay,” said Emily. “But…okay, here it is.”

  The waiting area was full of worried-looking women and men, many of them with small children clinging to them. In the air hung a smell that Lizzie remembered from Boston emergency rooms, the sharp sweat of anxiety clinging to clothes flung on any which way.

  Emily looked up. “I didn’t take care of her this time, the nurse practitioner did.”

  “And no one recognized her?” Lizzie demanded impatiently.

  Shrugging, Emily scanned the screen again. “Guess not. We’ve been jammed. But I called you as soon as I heard about it. Anyway it says here she came in with second-degree burns on her hands, a couple third-degree areas.”

  She squinted at the monitor again. “They got the burns cleaned up, applied a loose dressing, and then sent her out with a prescription for pain—they dispensed it here—plus instructions for self-care. She was okay to drive.”

  The blaze had somehow caught Bearkill’s Fire One unawares, sent four men and a woman reeling through smoke and flame before their team finally located and evacuated them. Now Peg Wylie was out in the waiting area commiserating with the victims’ loved ones while they paced through an agonizing wait for news.