Last Girl Gone

by J. G. Hetherton

  She leaned in and put her head on Laura’s shoulder. “But secretly,” she whispered, “I was pleased when you didn’t listen. I’m so glad I don’t have to do this part alone.”

  She reached over, picked up one of the canisters, and popped the top off with her thumb. Almost instantly the unmistakable odor of nail polish remover filled the room, and Laura realized it was a can of industrial acetone. Jasmine turned it over, letting the clear liquid run out onto the floor, then holding the open mouth over Laura’s head. It ran down through her hair like fingers of ice, burning her eyes, dribbling down the outside of her sheepskin jacket. Already she could feel it sucking the heat off her skin as it evaporated into the room.

  “They’ll never believe it,” she managed.

  “Why not?” Jasmine opened a second canister and splashed it around the room. “Plenty of people know about your connection to these girls, and I was Samantha Powell’s doctor. It won’t take them long to find the note under the rock behind your house, and they’ll find a nearly identical one on the desk in my office. We were quarry of the same predator, and we suffered the same fate. That’s the story they’ll put together.”

  The smell was overpowering, nearly unbearable, but Jasmine seemed unaffected. She broke the seal on the second can and upended it over her own head, its mouth spitting clear fluid into her hair, onto her face, her coat, even her socks were soaked.

  She reached into her pocket and came out with a small lighter.

  Laura knew from personal experience the properties of acetone. It evaporated faster than alcohol and was more flammable than gasoline. Already the room around them was brimming with its fumes. Jasmine wouldn’t need to light the fire. She wouldn’t need to touch the flame to anything at all. The moment flint struck steel, at the first hint of a spark, the air itself would ignite. In an instant, a fireball would consume them.

  But it would be over just as fast. Laura could remember watching videos of people dipping their hands in acetone, lighting them on fire, and then snuffing them out. The liquid evaporated so quickly that it had a tendency to form a cool barrier near surfaces, above which the vapors burned.

  That was it then—her only chance.

  Jasmine held the lighter out in front of her. Her eyes glistened, and she opened her mouth, probably to say some final words.

  Laura would never know for sure. She lashed out with all her strength, whipping both legs upward into the bottom of Jasmine’s wrist. She didn’t let go of the lighter, but the tie around Laura’s ankles snapped in half.

  She rolled once, twice, three times across the concrete floor, then pulled her knees into her chest. She reached over her shoulder, got a grip on her coat’s collar, and yanked it up over head before balling herself up, making herself as small as possible inside the thick sheepskin lining.

  The lighter clicked.

  An intense bloom of heat washed over her, accompanied by a deep percussive report. All the air in the room suddenly went missing, and she gasped and opened her eyes. The ends of her hair were on fire. The coat was in flames. There was no way to remove it, not with her hands tied together.

  A glint in the corner caught her eye, and she recognized the knife only a few feet away. Pinning it between the toes of her boots, she bent forward and sawed her wrists back and forth across the blade, begging the plastic to give. Her left shoulder and the center of her back started to sear, but she ignored it, kept moving, kept cutting.

  With a crack, the plastic parted. She slipped out of the jacket and kicked it away. The walls were burning, and she could hear the tin roof starting to pop as it reshaped itself in the heat. She turned, and for second she froze.

  Jasmine was in the corner of the room, on her knees, her face invisible, a sheet of dripping flame where it used to be. But she was alive. She reached her bound hands out toward Laura, as though begging her to stay. Then came a sound like crumpling paper as the fire ate through the last can of acetone. The entire back wall erupted in a furious blaze.

  Laura threw herself against the door, but it didn’t move. She shoved her fingers under the articulated metal door closing off one of the serving windows and pulled, screaming. It screeched upward, the wheels turning ponderously in their rusted tracks. It came up ten inches, and stopped. She jerked savagely at it, the metal cutting her palms, the heat growing at her back, but it wouldn’t move again. She turned her head and forced it out though the opening, then expelled all the air out of her lungs and pushed, but couldn’t get herself through the gap. The pain in her feet was unbearable.

  Suddenly Cooper, Rodgers’s bloodhound, burst from the tree line, came to heel in front of her, threw back his head, and bayed. Don Rodgers struggled out of the trees and skidded to a stop behind the dog, thick blankets of mist pouring out of his mouth.

  “Gotta lift it,” she managed to say, and he understood.

  He braced himself against the outer wall and got his palms up under the door. “Ready?” he said. “Together. One. Two. Three.”

  The door groaned once, then shot up another two inches before wedging in place again.

  He grabbed her by the elbows and squeezed her out under the door. She hit the ground roughly, but he kept dragging her backward. Glancing down, she noticed her pantlegs were burning. Somehow the pain didn’t seem to register in the moment.

  “My legs are on fire,” she said.

  “Shit.” He rolled her back and forth through the snow, then pulled off his jacket and beat out the final flames before collapsing in a heap next to her.

  Laura forced herself to speak. “Samantha?”

  He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “She’s back there, wrapped in a blanket. Couldn’t wake her up, but she’s alive.”

  Laura nodded and closed her eyes. She thought she had never been so tired in all her life.

  Cooper bounded up and licked her hand. Rodgers tousled his ears. “He found you, followed your scent right up the slope. The police showed up to investigate that call, your mother told me, although it wasn’t easy getting it out of her. Cooper led me right to the spot you’d been standing, and I saw your message scratched in the dirt.”

  “Good boy,” she said.

  Rodgers looked at the shed, now totally engulfed in flame. “Anyone else in there?”

  “No one who could be saved,” she said, and let her head fall back against the ground. The last thing she saw before slipping into unconsciousness was the orange and red sparks shooting upward between the pines.

  CHAPTER

  38

  HER CALL WAS picked up on the third ring. “Finch residence, Francine speaking.”

  “Francine, is your mom there?”

  She could hear a muffled shout for her mother, and then, “May I ask who’s calling, please?”

  “It’s Laura Chambers, the reporter. I came out there and visited you.”

  “Yes, I remember. Did you find what you were looking for?”

  Laura didn’t know how to answer that.

  “Hello?”

  Do you have a second to talk? Maybe away from Francine.”

  Another muffled conversation, then the swing and squeak of a screen door. Laura could picture her on the sunny front porch.

  “I’m here. Is it about my cousin?”

  “I wanted to ask you: did Patrick have a favorite spot to hide? Maybe near a tree, one by the pond?”

  A pause. “There’s only one way you could know that. You found him. Where is he?”

  Laura tried to keep the falter out of her voice. “He never left,” she said.

  * * *

  It was Christmas morning, and the icicles hung in the trees like God’s ornaments.

  Shacks speckled the ridges and ravines, low-slung homemade constructions with walls of exposed gypsum board and used pallets. The Dart’s engine struggled on the upslopes; this part of the Blue Ridge Mountains ran steeper than Laura had expected. Working the manual transmission was a bitch. She wore a heavy parka, a leftover from Boston, on her upper body, but j
ust a loose-fitting skirt on her legs. Thick white gauze wrapped them from the ankles to just above her knees, where her injuries from the fire had crescendoed. Her feet and back had been burned as well, but heavy boots and a thick sheepskin coat had protected her to some degree. Those places on her body would mend completely, the doctors said, but the scars on her legs would never heal. She would carry them for the rest of her life.

  The building, when it came into view, stood in shocking contrast to the others in these mountains. Tall ramparts of gray stone. A Tudor-style roof shingled in slate. The gravel drive ended in front of a set of thick wooden doors. Above them, etched into the stone, the words ST. JUDE SCHOOL. She had never seen a place quite like it.

  Laura took a deep breath, then knocked. The left-hand door opened almost immediately. She’d called ahead. They were expecting her.

  “Miss Chambers?”

  A thin, beak-nosed woman peered out at her. She wore a dress of gray flannel, black stockings, and simple penny loafers.

  “Sister James?”

  “Yes, we spoke on the phone. Please come in.”

  The sister stood aside and Laura moved past her into a large stone-walled foyer. It smelled of incense, and the only light came from a pair of high casement windows facing south.

  The door creaked shut behind her. The room darkened.

  “Your phone call was very vague,” Sister James said. “We endeavor to help wherever we can, but more information may be required.”

  The sister spoke with a relearned elocution. She had clearly worked hard to transform herself, but every third syllable betrayed a local heritage. She was born and bred in western North Carolina.

  “On the phone,” Laura said, “you mentioned—”

  “Sister Coleman, yes.” She cut her off casually, like a teacher overruling a student. Laura supposed she was a teacher. They all were here.

  “Can I speak to her?”

  “Of course, of course.”

  They moved through another door and up a set of winding stairs, down a hall, and into a library or a sitting room. It too had casement-style windows and walls covered with books. A row of chairs ran down the middle. In the last chair sat an old woman wearing a nun’s habit.

  Sister James indicated toward the end of the room, and Laura went and sat in the opposite chair.

  “Sister Coleman?”

  The old woman, who Laura had thought asleep, opened one eye and peered out from under a thick eyelid. “The one and only.”

  Laura smiled. Where Sister James was trying to mimic something like received pronunciation, like an actress playing a nun in a movie, Sister Coleman seemed to have discarded such theater long ago. Her voice was pure Brooklyn.

  “Well, wadda you want?”

  “Sister Coleman, I’m Laura Chambers.”

  Sister Coleman made the sign of the cross. “Glory be, the one who fought that devil.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “The one who called.”

  “Yes.”

  “The one who sent us that picture.”

  From over her shoulder, Sister James said, “We have a computer in the office. It doesn’t get much use, and I’m afraid I didn’t see your email until a day or two after it came in. But I passed it around after that. Sister Coleman recognized it right away.”

  “Still have my eyes, you know,” Sister Coleman said.

  “Thank God for that,” Laura said.

  “What?” She rapped her cane twice on the polished wood floor. “You’ll have to speak up. My ears are a different story.”

  “You recognized the picture,” Laura said, spacing the words out.

  “Of course I did. This place is beautiful, isn’t it?”

  Laura just nodded.

  “Was a convent back before we started taking in children, back when people actually became nuns. Even today this property, this building, is just about all of our net worth.”

  Laura looked at Sister James.

  Sister Coleman reached out with the tip of her cane and poked Laura in the shin. “Don’t do that. Don’t give her that look, like, is the old woman senile? I’m not. This”—she tapped her temple—“is like a steel trap. I’ve got a point, you know. My point is, we never had much. Not much money in raising unwanted children, if you can believe it. So when a company had a misprint and asked us if we wanted that load of coloring books, we said send over the lot.” She grinned, half of her teeth missing. “Turned out to be a truck’s worth. We used those things for years and years. I may be ninety-one years old, but how could I forget?”

  Laura studied her for a second, then asked, “And the name?”

  “Yes, yes, I recognized that too. Strange case, that girl. She disappeared. We figured her for a runaway—we get plenty of those up here—but almost two years later a man with a pockmarked face drops her back off along with a very healthy donation. We never saw him again. We recognized the girl, but she’d changed her name. Insisted we call her Patty.” She paused. “It didn’t go well for her here.”

  “What happened?”

  “Well, she was here for another three, perhaps four years. By that time she was a young woman, and one day she just vanished.”

  “Ran away again?”

  “So we guessed.”

  “Ever see her after that?”

  The old woman closed her eyes, swayed side to side. “Maybe,” she muttered. “Maybe.”

  “Sister Coleman?”

  Her eyes snapped open again. “Said I never forget, and that’s the truth. But the mind needs more breaks these days. Sometimes I drift off.”

  “You saw her again.”

  “Six months ago, a woman showed up here calling herself Jasmine. If it was the same person, probably she didn’t think there’d be anyone left to remember. I didn’t recognize her at the time, just saw the look in her eyes.”

  “The look.”

  “Young thing like you would hardly understand. When you get old, all your life’s behind you. All that’s left is memories. Spend enough time with memories, good and bad, and it gets so you know the look of someone reliving theirs. That woman from six months ago, she took one look at these old stone walls and got a shimmer in the eyes, like she’d seen a ghost. You might not understand this, but when it comes to memories, some places are more haunted than others.”

  “I do understand,” Laura said.

  The old woman studied her face. “I think you do indeed. Anyway, I saw the newspaper article yesterday, you and that business at the racetrack, and they ran the story again this morning. They printed the picture in full color.”

  “And it’s the same person?”

  Sister Coleman squinted. “I’d be lying if I said I was a hundred percent sure, but that’s where I’d place my bet.”

  “Why did she come? To relive the past?”

  The old nun snorted. “Don’t think so.”

  “Then why?”

  Sister Coleman shrugged, as though it were obvious. “To bring us the girl.”

  * * *

  By the time Laura’s heart had finished fluttering and her hands had stopped shaking, they were down the hall standing in front of another ancient wooden door.

  “She’s in here,” Sister Coleman said. “Physically, she’s in good health.”

  Laura’s mouth was parched. Her tongue felt like an overstuffed pillow. “Other than physically?”

  Sister Coleman leaned against the wall. “Well, there’s no shrinks up here. The nearest regular doctor is almost two hours away. I’m a nurse myself.”

  “But?”

  “She doesn’t look at you, doesn’t interact with the others, doesn’t shed a tear. That’s unusual for a new girl. Even stranger: I been with her six months, and she hasn’t spoken a word. There’s nothing wrong with her tongue or vocal cords—I checked. We called the police, but we get so many strays up here. They don’t always pay attention.”

  Laura nodded. Her hands still trembled, but she pushed the door open anyway. The room was org
anized as a dormitory, long and narrow, with windows on one side and two rows of single beds. At the end, on the second-to-last bed, a girl sat facing away from the door. Laura hobbled down the aisle, the foam bottoms of her hospital flip-flops chafing on the stone floor, lowered herself onto the last bed, and looked at the girl.

  The girl wouldn’t meet her gaze. Her head stayed bent in a permanent bow, and a sheet of tangled black hair hid her face. The girl’s body was too small. Her knees were knobby. The wristbones threatened to poke through the flesh of her arm.

  Laura reached out to touch one.

  The girl gave a start, pulled back.

  “Mildred doesn’t eat much,” Sister James said.

  Laura raised her eyebrows. “Mildred?”

  “That’s the name we were given.”

  “Do you think Mildred and I could have a second alone?”

  Sister James tapped her foot for a second, the sound echoing sharply in the empty dormitory, then retreated.

  Laura waited for her to get to the other side of the room, then said, “Mildred. Is that your name?”

  The girl didn’t move. She could have been a statue.

  “I didn’t think so.”

  The girl said nothing.

  “What about Teresa?”

  That got her attention.

  She sat up so fast it looked like her head was about to pop off. The long black hair flicked off her face and she stared back at Laura with huge brown eyes.

  One ear was missing, a mass of scar tissue in its place.

  Her mouth opened, then closed again. She pointed to herself.

  Laura nodded. “Teresa Mitchem,” she said.

  And the girl began to cry.

  * * *

  An explanation to the Holy Mother, followed by an emotional phone call to Angie Mitchem, was enough for the St. Jude School to sign Teresa Mitchem into Laura’s care. When the school’s headmistress had finished, Sister James took the receiver and passed it along.

  Silence. Then, as if from a million miles away: “Is it really her?”