I Hope You're Listening

by Tom Ryan

  And please, listeners, whatever happens to me, spread the word that Sibyl Carmichael is alive.

  She’s alive.

  She’s alive, and it’s time for us to bring her home.

  42.

  Pierre is at the base of the tree now, and there’s no doubt that he’s seen me.

  “Over here!” he yells louder. I realize he’s trying to get the attention of his coconspirators.

  The light drops, and begins to shake around on the ground. He’s trying to jump up into the tree.

  “Don’t even think about it, old man,” I yell.

  “Hey!” he yells again. “I’ve got her! Over here!”

  In the distance, I hear a hollered reply. They’ve heard him. Then he begins trying to get up into the tree again.

  I’ve got few options left. I can hear the rest of them, Barnabas and Noah and Bill and likely some of the others, approaching through the woods, yelling. Below me, Pierre is moving quicker than I would have expected, clambering from limb to limb, making his way through the lower section of the tree.

  I glance up. The tree goes a lot higher, and I’ve got a lot of room to go if I want to keep moving up, but there’s an obvious issue. At some point, I won’t be able to climb any higher. I don’t know what Pierre intends to do when he gets to me, but even if he does find himself at an impasse, all he has to do is keep us both up in the tree until his backup returns.

  “There’s no point in hiding,” he says. “There’s nowhere to go.” Although his voice is calm and almost agreeable, I can hear the exertion in it, a light wheezing, pauses as he catches his breath. Still, he keeps moving, higher and higher up the tree, approaching me more rapidly than I like.

  My only option is to try to stall him.

  “How did you do it?” I call down from my perch. “How did you figure out where she was going to be?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he calls back.

  I laugh. “Give me a break. I saw her. You realize that, right? She was my best friend. Of course I was going to recognize her.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about!” he yells again.

  “I was the other girl in the woods!” I yell, losing my patience. “How stupid are you people?”

  To my surprise, he laughs.

  “You were that girl?”

  “Yes!” I yell. “And now I’ve found you, and you’re going to pay for what you did!”

  He laughs again. “The only one paying for anything around here is going to be you,” he yells. “You and that girlfriend of yours.”

  The branches have stopped creaking, and I can tell that he’s stopped moving as well, as his attention is drawn away to my revelation.

  “Pierre! Where are you?” It’s Barnabas, calling from the woods, much closer than before.

  In the instant that I register Pierre shifting his position in the branches beneath me, turning to yell back, I make my move. The moment I decide to let go, I do, and somehow I manage to slide down, through the branches, without getting caught on them, other than a few hard whacks along the way.

  I slam into Pierre before he has a chance to holler back to Barnabas, and the two of us plummet the rest of the way out of the tree, slamming to the ground with a tremendous force. Lucky for me, he’s broken my fall, and I’m able to quickly catch my wind and stand up.

  From the low groan Pierre emits, I can tell he isn’t going to be getting up anytime soon, but at this moment, he’s the least of my worries. A light filters through the woods and into the small clearing, and I look up to see Barnabas stepping out of the trees. I don’t wait to find out if he sees me.

  I run.

  This time, I don’t bother trying to be quiet or to hide my footsteps. I race through the clearing and into the trees on the other side, aware of a shout from behind me and the sudden erratic bobbing of the flashlight’s beam as Barnabas begins to chase me.

  I fly through the trees, only vaguely aware of being slapped in the face by branches, righting myself when I stumble over roots and hidden hollows in the uneven ground.

  “You can’t get away, Delia!” Barnabas screams from behind me. “We’re not going to let you!”

  I’m gasping by this point, not sure which direction I’m running in, but I keep going. I just need to buy myself time. Surely, someone will come for me soon?

  There’s a loud snap, followed by a blast of light, and a small explosion in front of me as a bullet rips a hole into the side of a birch tree. He’s shooting at me, and a hot jet of fear propels me forward even faster, as another shot echoes through the night.

  Then, like a miracle, I see more light, and the blare of a car horn, followed by several more, and the brightness and the noise are closer than I would have ever dared hope. I adjust and run toward them, the movements of my body disconnected from my rational mind, propelled only by the animal instinct to survive, and then I crash through the edge of the forest and leap across the frozen stream and as one last shot comes slicing through the air out of the forest and misses me by just a few inches, I clamber up an embankment.

  I stop in astonishment as I see the cars and trucks that have parked along the side of the road, at least two dozen, stretching in both directions. Outside of the woods, the sky is lighter than I expected, and I blink, letting my eyes adjust as I take in the people who have gathered in small groups. Several people are on their phones, talking quickly and urgently, still others are taking photos, or reaching into their cars for food and blankets.

  A middle-aged woman steps forward and hurriedly wraps a blanket around me.

  “Are you Delia Skinner?” she asks me.

  I can only nod, my teeth suddenly chattering, and the cold rapidly taking over now that I’ve stopped running.

  “My name is Diane,” she says. She turns and gestures at the other people. “We’re all Laptop Detectives.”

  Someone farther down the line shouts, and I turn with the crowd as Barnabas steps out of the woods. He freezes as he glances up and sees the crowd that has inexplicably gathered along Brewster Road.

  He turns back toward the woods, and for a moment, I’m sure he’s going to run, but then he drops his gun to the ground, and as sirens sound in the distance, rapidly getting louder, he drops to his knees and puts his face in his hands.

  43.

  In the aftermath of everything, from the moment I allowed myself to climb down from the trees, to my first sight of the many, many people who had arrived on the road outside the farm, lined up against their cars, witnesses to this weird, specific rescue, to the first sharp call of sirens slicing like a blade through the cold night air, there was only one thing on my mind.

  Sibby.

  Sibby was coming home.

  There was no armed standoff, no hostage situation. No shots fired. No burning farmhouse or spiteful orgy of self-sacrifice. In this way, we were lucky.

  What there was:

  Ginette, crumpled on the ground, keening and wailing as her husband was cuffed and shoved into the back of a cruiser. Police leaning down to put the handcuffs on her as well, and her mournful whimpering cries as she was loaded into the back of another car.

  A scream of relief and joy catching in my throat as I caught sight of Sarah across the crowd of people, and the open look of pure joy on her face when she saw me. The way everyone else slipped away as we hurried toward each other, falling into an embrace, the tears that I’d been holding up inside me for what seemed like years, falling so steadily that I thought they might never stop, that I might be like this forever. Sarah holding me tight, letting me know without words that she’d keep holding me as long as I needed her to.

  “Where is Sibby?” I finally asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head. “Everything happened so quickly. There were cops coming up the driveway, and we both started to run. But we got separated.”

  A tremble began in my legs, and then I was shaking violently, unable to speak. Is she really gone? Did I really l
et her disappear again?

  And then there she was, being led from a crowd of people toward a police car. Someone had put a coat over her shoulders, and she looked scared and confused. At the police car, someone reached to open a door for her, and she stopped and scanned the crowd, desperate.

  Her eyes skimmed right over me, continued past me, and I knew then that our reunion would never be what I’d hoped for. In the years since I’d lost her, every cell in each of our bodies had regenerated. The thin, delicate thread of connection that had been feeding back to me from the past, that I’d been hanging on to for so long, had already been broken, and I’d been the only one still hanging on to an end.

  There was nothing left to hold us together.

  But then her gaze darted back, stopped at me, and the fear on her face subsided. Replaced by something else.

  Recognition.

  The police station in Finley is small, and by the time we arrive, pulling into the back lot, there are already members of the press beginning to arrive. I spot the BNN van as it comes to a screeching halt on the other side of the chain-link fence, and I lean forward to the police officer in front of me.

  “Someone should make sure that Sibyl is totally protected from prying eyes,” I say. “That’s Quinlee Ellacott in that red van back there, and I know she’ll try to exploit this any way she can.”

  The cop glances out the back window, unsure, but then he nods and reaches for his radio.

  “We’ve got some press outside,” he reports.

  A response crackles back right away. “Copy that. Someone’s coming out to help.”

  A few moments later, Sibby, Sarah, and I are being ushered into a back door behind a blanket that’s being held up by the officer and a receptionist. Then we are taken in different directions, all of us to different rooms, and although I know I’ll see Sarah again in a few hours, I have a feeling that it is the last time I’ll see Sibby for a while.

  And it turns out, I’m right.

  By the time I am in a car being shuttled back to the Finley Police Detachment, my parents already have some idea what was going on thanks to Quinlee Ellacott. She’d been up and out of her hotel within ten minutes of my plea being posted on the Radio Silent Twitter account, driving to my house, desperate for a comment, for something that would give her the scoop. Of course, even Quinlee Ellacott and the fast breaking news team at BNN are no match for the sheer power of virality on social media.

  By the time she stumbled through a rough explanation to my bewildered parents, my plea had already gone viral, sweeping the internet, even being turned into a video, the clip of my cold, frightened voice laid down under a photo collage that someone had assembled of old newspaper clippings of the Sibby case, photos of her that had been pulled from the internet in no time at all, in the blink of an eye, the snap of a finger, as quickly as someone can snatch a small girl out of her life.

  Quinlee wasn’t able to get more out of my parents than bewildered looks before they shut the door in her face. She used it, of course. She used every scrap she could find to pull together a narrative. She’d missed the scoop, but she wouldn’t miss the story now that it was playing out, and she was already on its doorstep.

  I was in a room at the police station when they arrived, my phone charging in another room, thanks to a nice young female cop.

  I explained what I could to them, their facial expressions shifting between horrified, relieved, and proud. It was a lot to take in, but nothing they couldn’t handle. They’d made it through the events of a decade ago, and now here I was safe, and Sibby had been found, and wasn’t that all a miracle?

  Burke comes to visit me the day I get home, running up the stairs to my room without knocking and surprising me with a tight hug. When he pulls away, I’m even more surprised to see tears in his eyes.

  “I’m really glad you’re okay, Dee,” he says. “And I’m so happy you found her. I really am. I always knew you had it in you.”

  “I don’t know about that,” I say. “Right place at the right time.”

  “Bullshit,” he says, dropping onto my couch. “You made this happen.”

  “I barely know the whole story,” I say. “Detective Avery called this morning to tell us that your uncle Terry has been filling the police in on everything he knows.”

  “He’s telling them he wasn’t involved,” Burke says. “Do you believe him?”

  “I think maybe he suspected something afterwards,” I say. “But I don’t think he knew at the time. You remember how angry he was at himself about the treehouse?”

  Burke scoffs. “That stupid treehouse. I mean, he built the fucking thing. How can he not have known?”

  “He built it because Sandy suggested that he build it,” I say. “I honestly don’t think he knew what he was doing. I think she played him.”

  Burke considers this. “Mom says she dumped Terry a few weeks after Sibby disappeared, and he was devastated.”

  Other facts have been more solidly established. Barnabas, along with his first followers, Pearl, Pierre, and Noah, started the farm with almost no money and only a small patch of land in the woods.

  When they approached Bill and Ginette Drummond about buying a piece of their land, the couple refused. But when Barnabas approached them again, offering to find them a child, they had a change of heart. They’d had no luck during their attempts to have a child of their own, and the temptation was just too great.

  Sandy, now firmly in police custody just like the rest of them, was among the first, most dedicated members of the commune, and when Barnabas tasked her with finding someone who could lead them to a kid, she began hanging out at a local roadhouse, where she met Terry. He was unattached, unemployed, and when he mentioned his brother’s big family, she floated the idea of going to spend some time with them, and he was only too happy to show up with his friendly, beautiful new girlfriend.

  During the month they spent in Redfields, Sandy made it a point of getting to know all the kids on the block and zoned in on Sibby as the most appropriate target. She orchestrated the building of the treehouse, arranged daily playdates, and knew enough of the children’s schedules that when she suggested that she and Terry take the O’Donnell kids to the movies, she assumed, rightly, that Sibby and I would end up at the treehouse.

  She notified Barnabas of the plans, and he sent Pierre and Noah to wait in the forest. They were there, hiding, when we showed up. The rest is history.

  “He was so relieved to hear that Sibby was alive,” says Burke. “But then he completely broke down. Says he feels responsible.”

  “The farm was responsible,” I say. “Barnabas and Sandy and the rest of them. I really don’t think Terry knew what was happening.”

  Burke slumps in his seat. “I guess it doesn’t really matter either way, since they still think he took Layla.”

  “He’s still denying it?” I ask.

  Burke nods. “He swears he had nothing to do with it, but now he’s changed his story and admits that he was using that room in the empty house. He panicked when they cornered him, because he knew that the scrapbook looked incriminating, which…yeah, the evidence is pretty strong. I don’t know what to believe, Dee.”

  “I don’t blame you,” I say. “A lot of shit has happened really quickly. It’s hard to keep on top of things.”

  “Speaking of that,” he says, and I can tell he’s happy to change the subject, “what’s going on with the podcast? Brianna told me about those women who were found in Houston. That’s pretty wild. You’re just nailing wins to the wall, Dee.”

  “I’d love to say the podcast helped,” I tell him. “But those women saved themselves.”

  When I finally had a minute to respond to Carla’s message, I learned the unbelievable story behind Nia and Vanessa’s escape.

  “Some asshole kidnapped them,” I tell Burke now. “He’d formed some sort of grudge against the two of them and managed to keep them locked up in the basement of his house. Apparently they managed to tric
k him into letting his guard down, and together they overpowered him and knocked him out. They ended up breaking down the front door and walking out on their own.”

  “That’s amazing,” says Burke.

  I nod. “A lot has happened over the past little while, and all of this has me thinking about what I want the podcast to be. I want to make sure it’s focused on women who are fighting for their lives to get out of basements, instead of dirtbags like Danny Lurlee who fake their own disappearances or clueless teens who hide out in cabins without telling their families where—”

  It’s like a switch is flipped inside my brain. I stand up from the table so quickly that I almost knock over my coffee mug.

  “What is going on?” asks Burke, alarmed.

  I realize I’m shaking, and I grab on to the edge of the table for support before lowering myself back into my chair.

  “Burke,” I say. “Something just occurred to me, and if I’m right, your uncle really didn’t have anything to do with Layla’s disappearance.

  44.

  It’s cold but bright, and I have my shades on, and my hood up over my hat as I approach my old street. Sibyl is home, or as close to home as she’s ever going to get, but there is still a girl missing.

  Although I wonder how missing a person is when someone else knows where she is.

  I know where Layla is. At least, I think I know. I think I could prove it without a lot of effort, but first I have a stop to make.

  Standing on the sidewalk, staring across the street at my old house, I pull my phone from my pocket and take a deep breath before making a call. It only takes a few minutes to explain myself, and by the time I hang up, I’m convinced that my story has been taken seriously. I only have a few minutes before things begin to happen, so I force myself to move past my feelings of insecurity and cross the street.

  When I ring the doorbell, I hear the responding muffled chime inside the house, and it triggers a deep and distant memory. A window breaks open inside me, and voices call out from the past. My father? Maybe my mother? Both? “Who’s there?” “Can somebody get that?”