by Dale Bailey
They’d simply vanished.
And Betty Grishnam, who once upon a time many years ago had lost a child of her own, plowed back into the center of camp, her head lowered like a bull’s with terror. “Susan?” she called, and then, louder: “Susan? Louise?”
Nothing. Leaves rustled in the breeze. Sweat beaded on Betty’s forehead in the July heat and she could suddenly smell herself, the bright, glittering whiff of panic, as she staggered in a circle around the dead fire, cupping her hands around her mouth and calling their names until she was throat-sore and hoarse.
At some point—she’d lost track of time by then—the panic tipped over into dread and she found herself in Ern’s old truck, bouncing down the rutted track toward town. By one, she’d alerted John Hardesty that their children were missing, by two the whole town knew, and by three the men were organizing a search party. It was four-thirty when two pickups—one of them Ern’s battered Ford, which had already earned its keep today—jounced to a stop at the edge of the campsite. Twenty men spilled out of the beds, rifles in hand—though why they needed rifles no one had paused to consider.
Hardesty, with military precision, had divided the woods into a rough grid, although he knew with a heavy heart that these same woods—forest would really be the better word—extended miles and miles on every side of the town, climbing high into the Adirondacks, where they gave way to true wilderness. The men lurched into the trees, and the Girl Scouts, naked and streaked with mud, watched them blunder by. Their eyes sparkled with the fun of it. From a thicket of lilac, Susan Hardesty squatted on her hunkers and peered out at her father, hardly recognizing him as he searched for sign. She laughed, knowing they had left none. It was the best prank ever, she thought in a remote corner of her mind. They would go home tomorrow.
But when the men finally gave it up for the night, Troop 9, by silent consent, moved deeper into the woods, beyond the lake. Shafts of moonlight among the trees lit their way. They settled down at last in a grove of white pine. The thick-piled needles were soft, the flesh of close-huddled sisters comforting. Tomorrow, some of them thought as they drifted toward sleep. Or the day after that, for sure. But no one spoke and some of them thought nothing at all.
A Girl Scout Is Loyal
The next day, the search was more organized. Hardesty and the other men were forced to wait on the sidelines as cops scoured the campsite and the woods beyond. The police had laid out a tighter grid than Hardesty’s, this one based on doctors’ estimates of how far the girls could have gotten on foot. (Not far, was the official verdict, not on bare feet; none of them knew how often over the war years the girls had kicked off their shoes and hiked the trails around the lake without them.) And there were the dogs. “The dogs’ll hunt ‘em down,” the sheriff told Hardesty. “You wait and see.” But the dogs couldn’t hold the scent, not as many times as the girls had crossed and re-crossed the network of streams that drained into the lake.
There was a single close call toward dusk, as a lone, deeply discouraged state trooper named Asa Wilson trudged back toward the desolate camp. The Girl Scouts had taken shelter in a blind of dead brush, and as Wilson passed, one of the girls—it was Kate Robinson—shifted ever so slightly, rustling the undergrowth. Wilson paused, turning. In the same breath, Kate froze. Wilson stood there, trying to puzzle out the shape in the gloom. Was that pale smudge a face? For her part, Kate endured a moment of intense longing. From the time they had melted into the woods that first night, driven by some wild consensus they understood no better than Betty Grishnam or John Hardesty would have, they had all sensed in an inarticulate way what they were becoming, and what it might cost them. Now, Kate had a sudden visceral understanding of what was truly at stake—an almost unbearable yearning to hold her baby brother one more time seized her—and she would have stepped out into the open had not Susan Hardesty’s hand closed around her wrist. Kate felt then the titanic will of the troop bearing down upon her. It was a prank, that’s all, she thought. The most wonderful prank in the world. They would go home tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that, for sure. Until then, she would stay with her sisters. And so she held her breath until Wilson spat into the mulch, snorted, and pivoted back toward camp.
A moment later the oncoming night swallowed him, and the girls—they really were sisters, just as the Girl Scout Laws commanded—were alone again. That night they slept in a ravine on the far side of the lake. The next morning they were on the move again, and if Kate Robinson still nursed a spark of regret so deeply buried that even she no longer felt its glow, Susan Hardesty felt nothing but animal freedom, unfettered by thought or conscience, and the other girls, as they always had, followed her lead. So another day passed, and another, the men conducting their fruitless search around the lake, the girls effortlessly eluding them. They had learned their woodcraft from Scouting for Girls, and in their eight years together they’d learned the woods around town even better.
Two weeks passed, and then another. The case gradually faded from the headlines. A month later, just as the heat of August broke and Indian summer fell like a benediction across the land, the search was discontinued. John and Mary Hardesty grieved their loss deeply and long, and John often spent his weekends tramping the woods around town. Early in September the new baby—a boy; they named him Frank—was born. They were busier after that, but they still met with the parents of the other girls two or three times a week. And not a night passed that Hardesty didn’t lay rigid and sleepless long into the morning, thinking about that other Frank, dissolved by a German buzzsaw on Omaha Beach, and the German soldier he had executed in retribution, and his lost daughter most of all.
Rumors of the girls still floated through town. They always would, Hardesty supposed. The Lost Girls of Troop 9. Ed Grier claimed he’d seen a pale blur in the underbrush as he fished for bluegill out on the lake, but everyone knew that Ed did more drinking than fishing out there most days, and most folks agreed that he’d poured his testimony out of the bottom of a fifth of Ten High. But it was harder to dismiss the testimony of Max Brock, a deacon down at the Baptist Church on Main Street, who claimed to have seen two or three girls scatter like coyotes as he topped a hill west of the lake, deer rifle in hand, or Fred Stockton, the assistant manager of the A&P, who said he’d seen a naked girl hovering in the stunted copse of woods behind the store one Saturday night. He must have spooked her when he stepped out on the loading dock for a midnight smoke. She’d disappeared into the shadows as soon as the door clanged shut behind him.
In any case, each fresh rumor gave Hardesty hope. Daily, hourly, he imagined Susan home again, holding her baby brother in her arms. And the occasional sightings haunted him. “Maybe it’s just a phase,” he said to Mary one night as she put his dinner on the table, cradling the baby in one arm.
“Maybe,” she said as she sat down across from him. “Maybe it is.”
A Girl Scout Is Thrifty
They were filthy by then, so grimy with dirt and mud that the whites of their eyes were startling to behold in the dim forest. Tangles clotted their hair, and the bottoms of their feet had hardened into pads of callus so thick that they could splash through a stony creek bed without so much as wincing. They moved without speaking among the trees, their feet silent in the bracken. An easy and unspoken understanding ruled them. They took their cues from Susan Hardesty. They were still when she was still, they moved when she moved, and their minds were as blank as midnight silence, when even the wind falls still and only the stars gaze down in their supreme indifference.
They were all sinew and muscle, ribs visible beneath their fleshless breasts. They slipped through the woods like deer, and they ate like deer as well: rosewood buds and apples plucked from midnight orchards in the deepest gutter of the night, wild onions and Indian cucumber excavated with work-toughened hands. As the season turned, they collected nuts—hickory and walnut, and the rare, yellow delicacy of the chestnut—and cached them away, clawing holes for them with ragged, dirty finger
nails, and marking them with stones. They lapped cool water from the lake, covered their feces like cats, and marked their territory with hot streams of urine. They cycled as one, blood streaking their inner thighs. They exuded a deep animal musk that came to be as natural to them as the perfumed lotions and poultices of their former lives, dim echoes of this, their true and untamed condition.
At night they howled at the moon, and the townsfolk wakeful in these small hours cringed to hear them. John Hardesty would climb from his sleepless sheets and check on little Frank, pressing a hand gently to his breast to feel the thump of his tiny heart before turning away to test the locks on the nursery windows. Afterward, he’d stand shivering on the porch until the distant clamor died away. Then he would brew coffee and sit smoking in the half-lit kitchen, mashing cigarette after cigarette into a beanbag ashtray that they’d inherited from somewhere, he couldn’t say or imagine where. The loss of his daughter had stripped his life of such petty details. By day he drove to his office and sold insurance to people who bought it out of pity and terror, inspired by his bereavement. In the evenings he drank Falls City Beer and ate the meals Mary set upon his table, barely tasting the food. And at night he held these lonesome vigils, until sometime in the dead hours before dawn, Mary would join him, her eyes rimmed red from midnight weeping. In little Frank alone they found some shard of solace. So they lived—a mere existence really—stranded on a narrow isthmus between grief and joy.
The season turned.
The leaves fell in their spendthrift beauty. In the woods, Troop 9 huddled close against the cold, and glided like wraiths through the naked trees. In town, Halloween came, but few parents risked their costumed children to the howling streets, and those who did squired them quickly from house to house, snatching glances over their shoulders for pale shapes that moved in the shadows beyond the bright circles cast by the streetlights.
In November, the first real cold spell clutched the town. Snow flurries drifted through the pristine air and the Girl Scouts of Troop 9 caught them on extended tongues, crying aloud with animal joy. They scraped lichen from stones and stripped the bark from pine and birch, elm and cedar, to feast upon the rich meat that lay closest to the wood. Then the snows came for real, driving icy storms that stung their upturned faces and piled in drifts against the trees. They nested in stands of tall pine, in bowls under the low snow-burdened branches where the scalpels of wind could not carve them up. When the lake froze over, they used stones to batter their way through the ice to the brutally cold water underneath. They grew thinner still. Their deflated breasts lay flat upon their chests, and their ribs ridged their flesh like the curving spars of a sunken galleon. During the days leading up to Christmas—a cheerless holiday in the Hardesty household and not even a ghost of memory to the girls—they began to push aside the stones that marked their stashes of nuts. For a time, their thrift paid off. But by the middle of January, they had exhausted even these feeble stores.
There were two months of winter left. They were starving.
A Girl Scout Is a Friend to Animals
The Girl Who Had Been Joan Brown saved them. Handy with a stone, she stunned an inattentive rabbit. The pack tore it apart alive, fighting like wolves for handfuls of bloody flesh. Afterward, in the vigilant dark, The Girl Who Had Been Susan Hardesty stayed awake to watch over the pack. There were only six of them by then. The Girl Who Had Been Jo Anderson had sickened during the first bad cold spell, and died after three days of hacking up clots of blood, bright red splashes in the snow. And The Girl Who Had Been Louise Jackson had slipped upon a patch of ice and smashed her head against a stone. She died convulsing, leaking brain and blood from her shattered skull. Each time, the Girl Scouts of Troop 9, weeping in distress, had lingered by the bodies for days, poking them with sticks to prod them back into life, but the dead girls had lain unmoving, and at last the pack turned away, back to the forest and their own blank, animal lives.
The Girl Who Had Been Susan Hardesty alone nursed some dim memory of these losses. If they were to survive until the seasons turned again, she sensed, she would have to save them. And her impulses told her that the arm of The Girl Who Had Been Joan Brown could not alone sustain them. Not in the wild. They would have to go back.
In the dark, in silence, they returned. They stuck to the outskirts of town at first, raiding trashcans and scurrying back into the shadows if lights anywhere sprang to life. But soon, emboldened by success, their forays into the night streets grew more daring. They burrowed into restaurant dumpsters, feasting on a rich pottage of rotting meat and putrid vegetables. And then came the animals. The memory of the rabbit’s bloody succulence, its entrails hot and pulsing in her cupped palms, lingered in The Girl Who Had Been Susan Hardesty’s mind. The pack began to hunt. Cats fled their wild musk and dogs feared it—they erupted into wild barking when they scented it—but they were slow and fat, their instincts dull. And the pack was six. It was easy to box them in, stone them to death, drag them into the woods, and devour them even as the warm flesh cooled. The pack moved as one now, each to her place, without thought or hesitation. The pack was swift and vicious.
Even so, they were spotted. More than once an errant shotgun blast scattered them into the trees to regroup in the depths of the forest. And once again the town turned its mind to the problem of Troop 9. The mayor called a hasty meeting and summoned the parents of the missing girls. Troop 9 had gone too far. Pets first, children next, someone reasoned, and then reason was abandoned. Complex schemes to drive the girls deeper into the Adirondacks were proposed and dismissed as unrealistic, traps were discussed, and measures to lure the girls into them, but everyone knew that the pack was too wily by far for such stratagems. And at last the debate hinged, as John Hardesty had known it would, upon hunting the girls down. His mind turned to the dead German’s rifle and he felt something like despair. They’re hardly human anymore, someone shouted and someone else—it was Betty Grishnam, who’d lost her prized Chihuahua to the pack—screamed in something like despair, They’re not human at all.
The meeting fell silent.
Ern Grishnam tried to pull her back into her seat, but it was too late for that.
“Point of order,” John Hardesty cried, but even the parliamentarian could not stand before the ire of Betty Grishnam. She was already mounting the stage.
“I knew them,” she wept. “I was their Scout Leader, I knew them better than anyone else in town. I tried to discipline them. I tried to tame them. I tried. But you don’t know how strange they were. How they never spoke, how they moved to the whims of that Hardesty girl”—and here she plunged a blunt finger at John Hardesty—“your daughter, sir, and now you dare stand up and oppose me. During the war, when you were gone, and we were in the factories doing men’s work, where were they? In the kitchen, cooking for their exhausted mothers? No! In the nursery, caring for their little brothers and sisters, the very children they now threaten to devour—were they in the nursery, sir? No! And when their mothers returned at the end of a long shift, were their houses—the very houses you came home to, sir—were their houses tidy?” And now her voice dropped to a whisper. “No, sir, they were not.”
Hardesty stood, his hands outstretched. “Betty,” he said, “If you’ll just—”
“Let her talk, Hardesty,” someone said into the silence.
But Hardesty, shrugging off Mary’s hand, had started down the central aisle to the stage. Little Frankie began to cry.
That didn’t stop Betty Grishnam. She merely cranked up the volume.
“Where were they?” she cried. “They were in the woods, roving like a pack of wolves! They were probably hunting the small creatures of the forest even then! I saw the way they looked at your girl, sir”—she swallowed as if she could barely bring herself to speak the next words—“I saw the way they looked at her body and the way she looked at them in return, so silky and smooth. They were probably doing—”
“Shut that baby up,” someone said, and Mary, cuddl
ing Frank against her breasts, slipped down the aisle and into the lobby, so she didn’t hear the words that came next, words that Betty Grishnam nearly spat, they were so repugnant—
“They were probably doing dirty . . . sex things!”
She ran out of steam at last.
By then, Hardesty had mounted the stage himself. “And to think you were the one we passed our daughters’ care into,” he said.
“I tried,” she said softly. “I gave those girls my all,” she said, but Hardesty ignored her. He turned and looked out over the shocked crowd. “Terrible things have happened,” he said, “terrible things. They have been driven by hunger and by . . . by instinct. By forces we can hardly understand. But they are our daughters,” he said, and now the parents of the other lost girls began to nod their heads.
“That’s right, John,” someone said.
“They are our daughters, and we must not give up on them.”
“You tell them, John.”
“I beg of you— I beg of you. Give us some time, a little time. Spring is coming. Spring is just around the corner. Things will get better. They will not be so driven by hunger. They may— They may even come home.”
On this note of counterfeit hope, he fell silent.
And because everyone knew Betty Grishnam to be riven with griefs of her own—for the dog, for the Lost Girls of Troop 9, for her own lost child most of all—and because deep down they sympathized with these friends and neighbors who had already lost their children, and most of all because they were fundamentally decent people, John Hardesty carried his point.