“The door at the end of the hall,” Kyle said as she stood, then he and Aaron turned their attention to which day to leave and which airline to use.
The hallway to the bathroom was short and narrow. As she passed a dark bedroom, a bright bit of light inside the room caught her eye. She paused, looked back toward the kitchen, then stepped into the bedroom and around the end of the bed, where she could see better. In the corner was a folding card table where a laptop computer sat, a camera tethered to it.
And where the pictures of her now scrolled across the screen.
She stared, cringing—they were…revolting. Nauseating. Kyle, Aaron, they saw her like this.
It took her less than a minute to decide what to do.
NOW, AFTER CLIMBING OUT THROUGH THE BEDROOM WINDOW WITH KYLE’S camera and computer stuffed into her bag, she was crouched, trembling, in the woods.
Aaron’s voice carried from somewhere behind her and to her right. “That sneaky little bitch—I told you to get someone older.”
“She said she was twenty.”
“And then she said she was fifteen and you fucked her again anyway! Use your brain. Jesus!” They were coming closer. “I can’t believe we don’t have a fucking flashlight!”
Savannah said a prayer of thanks.
“When I find you,” Aaron yelled, “I’m gonna teach you a lesson, little girl! You’ll be screaming for help, I promise you that! You won’t walk for a week!”
Kyle again. “Chill, man, you’ll freak her out.”
Too late.
Her whole body shook. She clutched at the damp ground to help keep herself balanced and still. How long since she’d called her mom? How long before someone showed up and rescued her? What if Aaron found her first? A sob rose in her throat and she clenched her jaw to stifle it.
The bug—spider?—crawled from her neck down onto her back, and she started to cry.
Fifty-four
MEG TRIED CALLING SAVANNAH BACK TWICE BUT GOT NO ANSWER. WORRIED, she hobbled toward the kitchen to find her purse. Then, remembering that Rachel was supposed to be staying over, she yelled for her in the off chance she was still here.
Rachel appeared in the hall with cell phone to ear. “Yeah?”
“Is that Savannah?”
“Uh, no—she’s, um, she’s in the bathroom.”
Meg was confused. “Are you sure? Because she just called and said she needs me to go get her—but her phone cut out, and now I can’t reach her.”
Rachel hung up her phone. “Ohmigod, did she wreck her car?”
“Wreck her—? So she’s not in the bathroom?”
Rachel shook her head. “Is she okay? I told her to be careful…”
Meg waved Rachel into the kitchen. “Talk,” she said.
Rachel told Meg what time Kyle had called and what little she knew about him based on what Savannah had told her.
“She met him online, and—”
“Wait. Online, like, from the Internet?”
“Yeah—from her webpage.”
“She has her own webpage?”
Rachel gave her a funny look. “Um, we all do. I can show you—”
“No—I mean, thank you, but I’ll look into that later.” They all had their own webpages? What else did they “all” have? Diaphragms? VD? And how had she missed this apparently essential element of her daughter’s life? Why hadn’t Savannah told her, or showed her? What other secrets did she have?
She asked Rachel, “What else?”
“Well…she said he’s nineteen, and I guess he lives near Summerfield.”
Now things were adding up. “Right, okay—but where? Where near Summerfield?”
Rachel looked as if she might cry. “If she’s hurt—oh God, I’m so sorry! I never should’ve gone along with her plan. I never asked her exactly where he lives, ’cause, you know, she was coming back tonight—she’s not hurt, is she? I never thought—”
“Of course you didn’t,” Meg said, then pressed her hand to her mouth. That was the problem: none of them ever thought things might not work out the way they planned. They were all too smart, too lucky, too deserving, too well intentioned.
In truth, they were too naïve.
She told Rachel, “I don’t know if Savannah’s okay.” Saying the words sharpened the reality, and Meg had the urge to run to Summerfield…as if she could.
She tried Savannah again. The phone rang several times, then went to voice mail. Meg left a brief message saying she was on her way, trying to sound calm and assured. Next, she tried to reach Brian—who also didn’t answer. Out of pettiness, probably. She left a message saying Savannah was in trouble and he needed to call back now.
With a frightened Rachel watching her, Meg called the police, though she suspected, rightly, that they wouldn’t see the situation as urgently as she. They’d “send a patrol ’round out Summerfield way,” the dispatcher said, and give her a call if anything turned up. “Don’t worry, ma’am—teens, they just get wild hairs now and then. Almost always turns out okay.”
Almost always.
She told Rachel, “Have your sister pick you up, all right? I have to go.”
MEG’S PLAN WAS TO DRIVE DOWN 301 AND, LIKE THE POLICE, LOOK FOR SAVANNAH’S car. Hopefully she’d be able to get through to Savannah when she was closer—or Savannah would get through to her, either way, and then she’d know exactly where to find her. It wasn’t a terrific plan, but it was better than waiting at home.
She managed to get the Lexus started and out onto the street. Her weakening left arm was tasked with the gearshift, the turn signal, the steering wheel. As she drove down the block, her right leg seemed to be failing, growing feebler by the moment. Five blocks from the house, a rabbit darted into the road; Meg swerved and tried to brake, but her reflexes were too slow, her foot too weak. She felt the sickening bump and, horrified, realized that the poor rabbit she’d just hit could have been a child. In a cold sweat, she pulled to the roadside and parked.
As determined as she was to find Savannah, there was no way she could make it to Summerfield safely.
Choking back her frustration, she called Savannah’s cell again. Then Brian’s, where she left another message. Then she tried Savannah yet again; still no answer.
Meg pressed her forehead to the steering wheel and looked at her useless arm in the glow of the dashboard lights. Dismay and anger flared in her belly. Her daughter needed her, and she was sitting here half-paralyzed in an SUV that cost more than her parents’ first house. Ludicrous! “God damn this disease!” she yelled, then sobbed. “God damn it!”
There was no time to lose, though. Her daughter, her baby, was waiting, somewhere. Please, God, tell me she’s okay…. She wiped her eyes and her nose and then, because she knew she could count on him, she called Carson.
A few minutes later, when she was back home waiting for him to pick her up, she suddenly knew how they might locate Savannah: the Honda had a GPS transmitter. So not only could Savannah find her way to and from anyplace on the continent, she could also be found—or the car could. Brian had explained it all back in March when he’d ordered the car. At the time Meg had only half listened as he listed its features, seeing the GPS as just another of his gadget-geek interests. Now she blessed him for his foresight and went to his desk to find the receiver he’d also bought—the device that would get her closer to her daughter, where she should’ve been all along.
FIFTEEN MINUTES AFTER SHE’D CALLED HIM, CARSON WAS THERE HELPING her into the passenger side of the Lexus, getting her seat belt buckled, listening to her directions. She was glad he didn’t ask questions, didn’t speculate about Savannah’s behavior or accuse Meg of being a neglectful mother—though she certainly felt like one. She felt criminal in her lax attention to how Savannah was spending her time. The only thing that helped was that Carson simply drove them toward the Honda’s location, fast.
Once off 301, the blackness of the night surrounded them. The roads were poorly marked. Each wrong or misse
d turn put another knot in her gut, made her heart rise a little higher in her throat. Each passing minute added a new brick to the load of guilt she was shouldering—about Savannah and everything else.
She looked at Carson, tempted, suddenly, to off-load some of the weight by confessing the possibility that Savannah was his.
As they bumped along rough, patched pavement, Meg crafted her confession silently: Carson, remember the morning of my wedding? Well, there’s something I think you should know…. Her heart thudded, wishing, hoping—yet she couldn’t tell him now, not like this. Maybe not at all. To lighten her burden would only create a burden for him, and she wasn’t willing to do that.
Finally they found the right road and rolled to a stop, fifty feet from where Savannah’s Honda sat, ghostly in the darkness of the ramshackle street. The car, its wheels off the edge of crumbling macadam, was parked in front of a mailbox missing both door and flag.
Meg stared at the tiny house sitting back in an overgrown lot and wondered why, if Savannah made it here, she’d called so soon wanting to be picked up.
“Maybe she’s not here,” she said. “She could’ve been carjacked.”
Carson nodded. “Could be, but if this Kyle guy lives out this way—”
“Yeah, too much of a coincidence. So she must be here.” And something must be wrong.
The sand driveway was thick with weeds and hosted a Pontiac with badly sagging rear suspension. No wonder Savannah hadn’t wanted to say where Kyle went to school, didn’t want to talk about a guy who came from such meager beginnings. For a moment Meg was embarrassed by how far she, and by extension Savannah, had traveled from her own inelegant beginnings, so far that Savannah had felt unable to tell her anything specific about Kyle.
She’d been surprised, when she and Brian were dating, that he had seen past her family’s poverty, that he’d selected her when he might have picked someone much more like himself. She asked him why, once—years later, when they’d been to a party of his peers and were more than tipsy on hundred-dollar-a-bottle wine, and he’d looked at her and grinned. “Opportunity,” he’d said. “You had great growth potential.” As if she were an investment fund. Even then, she wasn’t sure how much of a compliment it was.
Maybe Savannah looked at Kyle that way, like a promising opportunity that would grow ever better under her care. Maybe she was Brian’s daughter, through and through.
Carson turned the car off. “Let me go first.”
“Wait—I’ll try calling her again.” She peered at the house while she called; only one thin line of light was visible, through a gap in the living room curtains. “Still no answer.”
“How long since she called you?”
“Almost an hour,” she said, her throat constricting. “Let’s try the house.”
“Meg—”
“I’m not going to just sit here.”
With Carson following, she limped through the damp weeds to the front door. Breath held, she knocked.
The sound of footsteps was followed by the sudden glare of a bare-bulb porch light, and the door was opened by a young man in ragged khaki shorts and a dirt-smudged T-shirt. “Yeah?”
“I’m looking for Savannah.”
“Don’t know who you’re talking about.” He started to close the door.
“Wait!” she yelled, trying to see around him. “Are you Kyle?” He was very good looking, but definitely not a high school student.
He hesitated to answer, but his face gave him away. Finally he said, “Maybe.”
She moved the strap of her sling where it pulled against her neck. “Let’s not play games, all right? I tracked her car by GPS. The police are on the way here.” Or they should be—would be with one quick call, if needed. She hoped. Then hoped not to need to call. “Where is she?”
Kyle sighed and opened the door. “Why don’t you come in? You’ll get eaten up by mosquitoes out there, right?”
Meg looked at Carson. He shrugged as if to say, What choice is there?
Inside, the smell assaulted her, stale, pungent, like old grease and sour milk and something else, a sweet, smoky odor—marijuana? She looked, first, toward the darkened kitchen doorway, and then to her right, to a dirty gold sofa. The floor, chipped Formica tile circa 1965, was stained and grimy with spills that had collected dirt, giving the grayish floor a haphazard pattern of moldy-looking amoebas. She didn’t want to even guess at what all the spills might have been.
Meg’s patience was wearing out. “Where’s my daughter?”
Kyle scratched his jaw. “Wish I knew.”
Just then Carson tapped her shoulder. She turned and saw that he was pointing outside—at the Honda. From here they could see what they hadn’t noticed walking up to the house: the headlights were smashed out and the front bumper and hood dented as if someone had taken a baseball bat to it. Meg opened her mouth but no words came, just a small, animal-like noise.
Carson stepped past her and gripped Kyle’s arm. “Answers,” he said. “Now.”
Fifty-five
“SAVANNAH METALLIC,” SAVANNAH WHISPERED. HER THROAT FELT TIGHT, but the ache in her chest was easing now that she saw her mom’s SUV a hundred yards away, through the trees.
She had crept northeast—she was pretty sure it was northeast—farther into the woods and away from the sounds of Aaron bashing her car in spite of Kyle’s protests. An owl had flapped past her head, also in retreat. Aaron’s voice split the cool night air as he yelled, “It’s too risky”—slam—“to sell it now”—slam—“so I hope your little bitch”—crash—“is happy!” When the bashing stopped, she stopped, waiting. A minute later she’d heard the rumble of Aaron’s Camaro as he tore down the road, and she knew the worst was over.
Her legs, scratched and cut by underbrush, hurt everywhere, and God only knew how she must look. Dried mud crusted her fingernails and felt stiff on her face where she’d wiped at her tears. Still, she was here, mostly uninjured, glad to be alive. Alive and ready to confess her stupidity and go home.
Thinking home made the tears well again.
Before she could go home, though, she had some crucial things to do. She lifted the strap of her bag up over head then laid the bag down, drew the laptop out, and dropped it facedown onto the ground. Then she dug into the bag, feeling around for her penlight and the miniature Swiss army knife attached to it.
In the dim light and with careful deliberation, Savannah unscrewed the computer’s hard-drive access cover. That done, she pulled out the drive and unscrewed its cover, squinting to see the tiny screws. She took the cover off; how best to destroy the data that could so easily destroy her future? First, she gripped the knife and stabbed it into the green panel. She scraped the blade across the tiny copper pathways again and again. Then she wedged the blade under the board’s edge and pried it up until it snapped off on one corner. A small round disk—the actual memory?—was easy to pop out. With the blade, she dug into the ground, making a narrow but deep hole in which to bury the disk. No one would find it here, and even if someday someone did, it would be rusted and unidentifiable. Nothing but metal junk. Same for the green board, which she broke off its case and went to bury thirty yards away.
Now the camera: within three minutes, all the pictures were deleted, the memory card removed and pried apart. She heaved the camera off one way, then threw the laptop carcass as far as she could in the opposite direction.
There. Now no one else would ever know.
She headed toward the house, gearing up for whatever she was about to face. Angry parents, for sure. And if Kyle was still there…? What would he be telling them? He was slick, for sure. Charming.
“Bastard,” she said.
Had she ever been anything more to him than a body and a bank?
NO ONE WAITED IN THE LEXUS, SO SHE MOVED ON TO THE HOUSE. MAYBE she’d get away with giving them a simple story about an argument over…drug use. Sure. She could say Kyle and his friend wanted her to join them, but she refused, and because they were st
oned, they got kind of crazy and she got scared—yeah, that might work. Whatever Kyle might’ve told her parents, she’d give them her version and they’d believe her. Not some jerk who lied to their daughter and was now lying to them.
She felt confident she could pull off the scene—right up until the moment she stood inside Kyle’s doorway and saw his rueful face.
“Savannah!” said her mom, Kyle, and Carson—Carson, not her dad—all at once.
Savannah burst into tears. “You are such a fricking liar,” she yelled at Kyle as if she hadn’t heard anyone. She hardly had. “You were just using me! How could you—”
“Wait, babe,” Kyle began.
Her mom, who was sitting on the sofa, stood up. “Honey—dear God, look at you! Are you all right?”
Savannah glanced down. Her legs were a mess of bloody, dirty scratches, her arms too. “I’m okay,” she said, wiping her nose. She pointed at Kyle, who was sitting cross-legged on the floor near the kitchen. “What did he tell you?” Without waiting for an answer, she walked over to Kyle and said, “I loved you, and all you were in it for was…was, like, money,” and sex, of course, but she couldn’t spit that out in public. “So that you and that asshole could get your jollies off the rich girl!”
Kyle stood. “No! I mean, okay, maybe at first, but—”
“Go to hell!” she said, the tears still streaking her dirty face. “But first I want my keys.”
“Aaron—he was pissed so he took ’em with him.”
“And you let him,” she said, and he must have sensed the violence she was feeling, because he didn’t argue.
“Babe,” was all he said, his eyes wide and sad.
“I hope I never see you again.” She choked back a sob and turned for the front door. In half a dozen steps, she was folded into her mom’s waiting arms.
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