The Hanging Girl

by Eileen Cook

  “If you happen to see Paige, you give her that and let her know that I’m done for good. She wanted it, and now she has it. She can leave me the hell alone, and we’ll go our separate ways, but if she tries to get me in trouble, I’ll tell all her secrets.” He leaned closer to my face, and his breath smelled like bitter coffee. “Tell her that’s a promise.”

  Twenty-Three

  The cabin door flew open, and Paige stormed out. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “We need to talk,” I said. I took a stance with my legs wide. She wasn’t going to push me around this time.

  “Tell me you didn’t drive here.” Paige looked around as if she half expected to see a car parked on the trail behind me.

  “You don’t need to worry about it.” At least I hoped she didn’t. I’d left Drew’s car outside the park on the street and hiked in, just in case there were security cameras hiding in the trees or in the parking lot. And, despite risking heat stroke, I’d worn my hoodie to hide my face until I was well down the trail. I figured I had less than an hour before Drew had lunch. I didn’t think she’d notice her keys missing before then.

  “I said I would call you,” Paige said. “You shouldn’t have come here.” She looked behind me again, and I heard the crack of a branch.

  I spun to look over my shoulder. Someone had been there right before me. Someone I’d just missed. “Who’s out there?”

  “No one.”

  I turned back to her. When she stepped away from the shadows near the cabin door, I saw her face and gasped. I pointed to the giant black eye, the dark purple bruise spreading across her face. “Jesus, what happened?”

  Paige lightly touched her face, blinking rapidly. “This? Nothing.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  She thrust a hip out, striking a pose, as if daring me to look at her. “Not bad, huh?” She turned her head from side to side. “You told me I’d better prepare to be found. This will look suitably tragic in the photos.”

  “You did that to yourself?” The idea repulsed me.

  She nodded, but her glance slid past me. I turned to look again, but couldn’t see anything. I traced the outline of the trees, searching for anything out of place. A few branches waved in the wind. “Was someone here? Did they—” I motioned to her eye.

  Paige shook slightly, but I couldn’t tell if it was from the cold or if she was afraid. “Who would be out here?”

  “You tell me.” Was someone else involved—someone who wasn’t too happy with how things were going?

  Paige took a few steps down and sat on the bottom riser. She patted the wood for me to join her. “Don’t freak out. I hit myself. You shouldn’t be surprised. I told you I was in one hundred percent.” Her voice hinted at the contrast between us, that she was doing her part but I wasn’t doing mine.

  “Why are you doing all of this?” I asked. I waved my arm around toward the cabin and her face. “You don’t need the money. What did your dad do to piss you off?”

  “Why does it matter?”

  “It matters to me.”

  Paige picked up a stick and drew in the dirt at her bare feet. “Parent stuff. The usual.” She broke the stick over her knee. “How pathetic is that? Even my problems are ordinary and unoriginal. No wonder he’s disappointed in me. I figured if I went missing, maybe it would remind my dad that he did love me.” She smiled sadly. “You know how it is. You never really appreciate anything until it’s gone. Think of the ransom as, like, a late fee, for not telling me he loved me enough.”

  “Promise me that this whole thing isn’t about a boy. No guy is worth it.”

  Paige’s eyes narrowed. “Ryan said something to you.”

  I pulled the gold bracelet out of my pocket, and she snatched it from me, inspecting it carefully. “He wanted me to give that to you,” I said.

  “I hope you weren’t so stupid that you told him what we’re doing.”

  I ground my back teeth together. “I’m not stupid.”

  Paige snorted. “You certainly aren’t smart enough to follow directions. Every time you come out here, you risk getting us caught.” She tossed the bracelet from hand to hand.

  “Ryan thinks you might be doing this to get him into trouble.” I took a deep breath. “You’re not, are you?”

  “Aw, did you fall for those deep blue eyes of his too? You rushed out here to protect him from big bad me?” She laughed. “Damn, he’s good.” She shoved the bracelet into her pocket, and I could see there was grime under her fingernails. “No. I didn’t do this to get Ryan in trouble.” She looked up at me. “Not that I’d mind if it did. Jesus, it’s hot. Who thought it would get this hot in May?” Paige lifted the bottom of her shirt and waved it up and down to make a breeze. “The first thing I’m going to do when I get back home is have a Diet Coke in a glass with about a thousand ice cubes.”

  My jaw creaked with tension, but I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of asking her to say more.

  “My dad tried to make me break up with Ryan, you know. He was all ‘his reputation hurts your reputation, blah blah blah.’” She snorted. “What he meant is that it hurt his reputation. Can’t have a senator’s daughter dating one of the common people.”

  “Or maybe he was worried. It’s possible, you know. Or is that why you went out with Ryan?” I asked. “To piss off your dad?”

  Paige threw her head back and laughed. “Yeah. That was part of it. You should have seen his face the first time Ryan came over.” Her mouth pulled into a sexy pout. “And besides, Ryan wasn’t terrible in bed either.” She laughed at my expression. “Who knew you were such a prude?”

  “You have to come back,” I said. “This is getting crazy.”

  “Yeah. Maybe.” She poked my foot with her stick. “You worry too much. Trust me.”

  “It’s not you, it’s everyone else I don’t trust. If this comes out—”

  She stood and brushed the dust off the back of her shorts. “Give it a rest. We’ll do it your way. You want me to admit you’re right. Fine. You win. Give them a vision tomorrow morning about the cabin.”

  The feeling of relief was so strong my bones turned to liquid. I felt as if I could pour in between the pine needles on the ground and disappear, but I also wondered what had made her change her mind. If someone had been out here, someone who was willing to hurt her, she might realize how dangerous all of this could be.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  She thrust her chin in the air. “No one scares me. But whatever you do, don’t tell Ryan anything,” Paige warned me. “He might seem nice, but like most men, he can’t be trusted.”

  Twenty-Four

  Paige

  I took a deep breath after Skye left. I had a headache that radiated through my face and even into my teeth. I touched the skin below my eye and winced. All I wanted to do was take a nap. Being out here had been exciting at first, an adventure, but I was tired now. Days of doing nothing hadn’t been restful; they’d been exhausting.

  I forced myself to stand. There was a lot to do before tomorrow. I reached into my pocket and felt Ryan’s bracelet. I hadn’t thought he would hunt down Skye. That was unexpected. And here I didn’t think anything would surprise me anymore.

  Skye wanted a clear reason for everything—that X happened and resulted in me doing Y—but things are rarely that cut-and-dried. The idea of the ransom started when Charles came for dinner, but the idea of wanting my dad to pay had been festering for long before that.

  He was eating up all the media attention with this abduction. I bet his campaign staff felt like Christmas had come early. They might not even want me to be found. Not like last time I was gone.

  When my parents wouldn’t let me go on spring break last year, I simply took off without their permission. What I hated more than anything was having to call them for help three days later from the police station. I called crying, and they came to get me, but if I thought there would be sympathy, I was wrong.

  My dad pa
ced back and forth in the tiny room. “Get your stuff, and let’s go.”

  “What about what happened?”

  He rubbed his face. “I’ve told them not to go forward with charges.”

  I sat up straighter. “Why? I want to.”

  “Trust me, you don’t want to. Let’s just get you home.”

  I crossed my arms. “I want to file charges.”

  Mom sat rubbing my arm, looking back and forth between us. “Donald?”

  “I know what I’m doing, and we don’t want to do this. You know what will happen, right? Let’s figure out the questions they’re going to ask. How much did you have to drink last night? Is that what you were wearing?”

  I flinched and shivered in my crop top and shorts.

  “Are your friends going to say you went with that guy of your own free will?”

  “I didn’t mean to get that drunk. He kept giving me drinks.”

  Dad shook his head. “Did he pour them down your throat? What did you think he wanted when he took you back to his room? To play cards? Think about how it looks.”

  “It looks like this.” I yanked my shorts up so he could see the bruises on my thighs.

  He looked away. “It looks like you put yourself in a bad situation and bad things happened. There’s no point in filing charges—any decent defense lawyer will get that boy off. They’re going to say you wanted it until you woke up the next morning.”

  Yes, I wanted him to kiss me, but I hadn’t wanted what came next. I’d been very clear. No. And my dad didn’t even care what really happened.

  “You think I had it coming,” I said.

  He shook his head sadly. “No. Of course not. But I don’t think this is a battle we’ll win. I know how these lawyers will act. All that filing a case is going to do is drag what’s left of your reputation through the mud. Believe it or not, I’m thinking of you. Let’s just go home.”

  He made it sound like he was doing it for me, but even with a huge hangover and feeling sick from what happened, I knew it wasn’t ever about me. It was about him. About what people would say. He came up with a story about me having my stomach pumped. Just a girl gone wild.

  He didn’t think I was a slut who deserved it—but he believed it. And belief is stronger than logical thought.

  My dad tried to make it up to me. He made plans for us—talked about how we could both move forward. But I’d been making some plans of my own. And I wasn’t done yet.

  Twenty-Five

  Mr. Lester’s secretary was an easy read. “I’m going to draw another card to see if we can get at the heart of what’s going on.” I tapped the nine of swords—it has an illustration of a woman in bed weeping into her hands, which is only fair, because she has nine sharp blades suspended over her head. It typically means anxiety or worry.

  Basically this card is my life.

  Ms. Brew admitted she had been feeling stressed lately, which I didn’t have to be psychic to figure out. She had about a million coffee cups on her desk, and there were the wrappers for what looked like an entire pack of Nicorette gum in her trashcan. I flipped another card. Two of cups.

  “And that one?” she asked.

  “It can mean a change in an existing relationship. Is there anything going on at home?”

  She fidgeted in her chair. Maybe it occurred to her that asking a student about her married life wasn’t exactly going to meet the standard of conduct in the employee handbook. “Tom, my husband, wants to start a new business.”

  “And you’re worried about the idea,” I finished for her.

  She sighed. “He works at a place with a good pension. This economy doesn’t seem like a great time to launch—” She flushed.

  I smiled. “It’s fine. You don’t have to tell me about it.” I passed her the rest of the cards. “Shuffle these while you think about all the stuff that’s stressing you out. You can close your eyes if it makes it easier. Then pick a card, and it will give us an idea of what happens next.”

  When she was done, I put the deck down in the center of her desk. I tapped the top card and then flipped it. “Three of wands. It means good things are coming, but you may need to wait.” She picked up the card and inspected it more closely.

  She nodded, satisfied, and put it back down. “Can you do a reading about my daughter and her new partner, Amy? They’re thinking about adoption.”

  I picked up the deck. It was starting to feel like it weighed a thousand pounds. When this was over, I would burn them. Before I could lay out another deal, Mr. Lester rushed back in, and Ms. Brew and I stood.

  “They found where Paige was being kept.” He was practically panting with excitement. I made sure I didn’t smile. This was it.

  Ms. Brew’s hand covered her heart. “Is the poor girl—” She couldn’t bring herself to finish the sentence, in case the words alone had the power to shape what had happened.

  “She wasn’t there.”

  The sound of the blood rushing inside my ears blocked out what he said next. There was just a whooshing noise growing louder and louder.

  “Sit down.” Mr. Lester pushed me into the closest seat and shoved the back of my head toward my knees. I struggled at first, then realized he was trying to keep me from passing out. “Take a slow, deep breath.”

  His arm had me pinned to the chair. I tried to wriggle away from him.

  “Stay where you are. Just keep breathing.”

  I stared down at the linoleum floor and made myself count the squares to distract my brain until my breathing evened out and I no longer saw black dots around the edges of my vision.

  “You okay?” I nodded, and Mr. Lester let me sit up. “Monica, can you grab a glass of water for Skye?”

  She looked like she was scared of me. She rushed out to the water cooler and came back a second later with a tiny paper cup.

  “They didn’t find Paige?” I finally managed to ask.

  “No, they found the cabin you saw in your vision, but it was empty.” Mr. Lester bent down so he was even with my face. “Hey, it’s okay. It’s not your responsibility to find her. What you told them was great. It’s going to give them all kinds of new leads.”

  I wanted to grab his shirt collar and tell him I knew it wasn’t my fault. It was Paige’s. She was supposed to be there. Where the hell was she?

  I’d gone into Mr. Lester’s office this morning and told him I’d had another vision. He called in the detectives, and I told them what I’d seen. A lot of trees. Maybe a trail. There was a cabin. I knew that could be a thousand places in our town alone, let alone all of Michigan, so I had to narrow it down. I mentioned I saw an owl.

  They were all clustered around me like I was telling them the best bedtime story ever, and when I mentioned the owl, they all looked at one another, trying to see if anyone else knew what that meant.

  “Do owls have some kind of symbolism?” Detective Jay asked.

  “In the Sioux tribe the owl was considered a messenger of evil.” Mr. Lester played with his beard.

  I wanted to scream in frustration. I couldn’t be too specific, but I also wasn’t interested in playing twenty questions while they tried to piece it together. Detective Chan looked out the window while Mr. Lester talked about calling someone he knew who was some kind of bird expert and who might know if there was a place owls liked to nest around here. Suddenly, Chan interrupted him.

  “The park. Out by the highway. Doesn’t their sign have an owl on it?”

  Everyone went silent.

  “Comstock Park,” Jay added.

  Jesus, finally.

  “Isn’t there a ranger cabin out there too? One they don’t use anymore?”

  The two detectives stood in unison. Chan pointed at me. “You stay here while we check this out, and don’t anyone say anything until we get back. The last thing we need is the media crawling all over the place.”

  Lester and Ms. Brew nodded solemnly, and then we were stuck waiting. Three hours. I’d finally busted out my tarot cards to do a r
eading for Ms. Brew while Lester sent notes to my teachers giving vague reasons why I couldn’t be in my classes.

  Paige was supposed to have been tied up nice and tidy in the corner waiting to be found.

  “Were there signs of a struggle?” I asked.

  “No. They found some of her clothing and food. There were also some diary pages in her handwriting.”

  “She kept a diary?” My stomach twisted. What the hell had she been writing down?

  “It looks like she wrote as a way to pass time. Detective Jay says the pages are heartbreaking. You can tell how scared she is, even though she’s trying to be brave.”

  Ms. Brew grabbed a Kleenex from her desk and wiped her eyes.

  “Once the police have collected evidence, they may have you touch the pages, see if you can get a vibe or something.” He patted me on the shoulder. “We’re getting closer.”

  There was a sour knot of bile pushing its way up my throat, keeping any words from coming out. I wanted to kill her. I should have known she was going to screw me when she gave in so easily. We had a plan. Now who was the one who couldn’t follow directions?

  Lester smiled. “The good news is that the diary shows that she’s alive.”

  Not for much longer if I had anything to do with it.

  Twenty-Six

  I opened the apartment door slowly, but it was quiet. My mom must’ve been working. I shut and locked it behind me. I waited for a beat, half expecting someone might suddenly start pounding on it, but when nothing happened, I bolted to my bedroom. I shut that door too and then fished the burner phone out from under my mattress.

  No answer.

  I dialed again. Pick up the phone. Pick it up, I chanted inside my head.

  Pick.

  Up.

  The.

  Freaking.

  Phone.

  I hurled it against the wall and then dropped to my knees to make sure I hadn’t broken it. It was the only way I had to reach Paige. I couldn’t go out to the cabin and drag her back by her hair. I didn’t have any idea where to find her anymore.