“I say the needle would be too kind for the likes of him,” one man said to her. He’d been standing outside Hops Haven when she randomly asked his opinion. He’d looked kind and gentle, but his response had been far from it. When she’d asked for his name, she’d expected him to say he preferred to remain anonymous, but he’d proudly given it to her, even spelled it to make sure she got it right.
Damon had grudgingly agreed to run the article this morning, then hit her with the wedding story assignment. Laurel felt certain it was his way of putting her back in her place, a reminder of what she was hired to do, a subtle hint that she wasn’t so great after all. She can’t help but think that Damon secretly likes this, getting a front-row seat for her downfall. She used to tell anyone who would listen that she was going to travel the world someday, that she was going to interview famous people. She’d been so vocal, so obnoxious about it. Why hadn’t someone told her to just shut up already? Why hadn’t someone warned her that life had a way of tearing down your dreams, so you better keep them to yourself lest you have to eat a very public serving of crow at twenty-six years old?
There was no way to take it all back now. She just hoped that, with time, people would forget about her stupid dreams. She had. If Glynnis hadn’t signed her up for this job, she’d be spending her afternoons at the country club pool, reading and coming up with a whole new dream. A dream for grown-up Laurel—forget that kid with her head full of nonsense. Maybe she would do what her mother wanted and find some rich guy, marry him, have some kids, and take up bridge. Did people even play bridge anymore? Tennis might be better. She’d seen some women in white skirts chasing the little yellow ball at the club just the other day. Never mind that she’d never been particularly athletic. She always thought she’d interview the athletes, not be one.
Glynnis gives her a thumbs-up and grins, nodding in the direction of the newspaper. “Way to go, honey!” she says, her eyes wide and bright. Laurel knows that Glynnis couldn’t care less about the news, unless it’s a particularly juicy piece of gossip about one of the women she calls her friends. She is only pretending to care for Laurel’s sake. Appreciating her effort, Laurel pats her mother’s shoulder and kisses the top of her head.
“Thanks, Mom,” she says, then yawns loudly for effect. “I’m wiped out. Just gonna head straight to bed.”
She leaves the room before Glynnis can say more. Though she appreciates her mother’s attempt at support, the last thing she wants right now is to discuss the newspaper with her. Her mother had thought she was doing the right thing in getting the job for Laurel, who hadn’t the heart to tell her she’d learned something valuable in her time out in the big, wide world: she isn’t cut out for journalism. She isn’t any good. You can have a dream all you want, but if you don’t have the talent to go with it, the dream isn’t going to get you very far.
“You weren’t fired,” Glynnis had always corrected her. “You were let go.”
“It’s semantics, Mom,” she’d argued. As she spoke, she’d felt the pain in her throat that came with keeping her tears bottled up. “If they really thought I was worth keeping, they’d have kept me.”
Glynnis had acted like she hadn’t heard her daughter, expounding on what a good opportunity this job with the Ledger was. “It’s in your field, honey,” she’d said, clearly proud of herself. She’d sprung this news on Laurel the day she got home, the tone of her voice telling Laurel all she needed to know about the stipulations of this new living arrangement. She would be allowed to move back home at age twenty-six, but she’d earn her keep by working for the Collins family, which included their son. As her boss. She didn’t find out that part till the day she started, and by then she was already there, wearing a dress her mother bought her for her first day and holding a lunch her mother had packed her. It was the first day of kindergarten 2.0. Damon had lost no time in teasing her about that, quickly proving he was still just as annoying as he’d been as a little kid.
“Lemme see,” he’d teased, making a grab for the bag as she deftly moved it out of reach. Good thing her reflexes where Damon was concerned were still on point. Undaunted, he’d kept trying. “What’d she pack for you? I bet she cut the crusts off. Come onnnn. Just lemme see if she cut the crusts off.”
Then he pretended to pout that Glynnis hadn’t made him a lunch, too. Laurel had fought the urge to run screaming from the building, from the town, from the entire state of South Carolina.
When she was a little girl, she thought that people lived where they decided to live and did the job they decided to do. She’d thought the hardest part was deciding, and she couldn’t figure out for the life of her why some people made the decisions they did. She’d told everyone that she’d decided not to live in Ludlow when she grew up. She’d decided to see the world. As if that settled it.
She walks through the den, edging past her father, who looks momentarily displeased when she crosses in front of his view of the TV. She mumbles a “Hey, Daddy” and hears his grunt in return as she climbs the stairs, her feet carrying her away from her parents’ mundane existence and into the sanctuary of her bedroom. She slips inside, reaches for the light switch, and closes the door behind her. Golden light from an out-of-date fixture illuminates her walls, covered in her collection of newspaper clippings, the pulpy paper gone yellow and thin over the years. She has the headlines from 9/11, Sandy Hook, Obama’s election, the killing of Osama bin Laden, Prince’s and Michael Jackson’s deaths. There are the smaller stories, too, the ones that mattered only to people in this town, to her: the year her high school football team won the state championship, the headline about a classmate killed in a car accident one rainy night.
She’d discovered a passion for news when she was eight years old, in the third grade. A boy in her class got cancer and needed a bone marrow transplant. The class decided to all get tested to see if any of them was a match. The story became news, covered first in the town paper and then spreading to larger outlets, until it became a nationwide story. Before they knew it, Mrs. Wiley’s third grade class became the national poster children for the need for bone marrow donors. They were in papers clear up to New Jersey and as far west as Santa Fe. TV stations came to interview them, showing footage of them healthy, playing and running on the playground, juxtaposed with film of the sick boy limping down a hospital hallway, clutching an IV pole, his skinny body clearly ravaged by the cancer.
But all that coverage was not what forever changed Laurel. That came later, when a woman in Manteo, North Carolina, read the story, was inspired to get typed, and became the match for her classmate. Danny, who came back to school the following year, is still alive. Laurel ran into him not so long ago in the Walgreens. He’s getting married, he told her. He’s got a job as an electrician.
Her phone buzzes in her pocket, and she fishes it out, confused. No one calls her this late. She doesn’t really have any friends here in Ludlow—hasn’t made the effort, to be honest. It’s as if making friends will mean her return is permanent. She prefers to perpetuate the illusion that this time at home is just a pit stop. Yeah, right. Just like the amputation in the Monty Python movie was just a flesh wound.
She grimaces when she sees Damon’s number on the screen. It’s awfully late to be calling her and definitely not professional. She will scold him if this is for something stupid. Maybe he’s drunk and has dialed her by mistake. He’s probably trying to hook up with someone, looking for a booty call, and hit Laurel’s name instead of some chick named Laura or Lauren. Though she thinks he looks like exactly what he is—an overgrown frat boy—he definitely has his share of interested girls, based on his Instagram feed. Not that Laurel cares. The only reason she’s even seen his Insta feed is because of the social media work she’s been doing for the paper, trying to bring them into the twenty-first century and not stuck in the eighties forever. She had to tag him in a post one time, and she had the paper follow him, just for good measure.
“Hello?” She answers the call just bef
ore it rolls over to voice mail.
“Laurel?” Damon asks, surprising her with the admission that he knows who he has called.
“Yes?” she asks, intrigued now. She braces herself for exactly why he has called.
“Sorry for calling so late,” he says, sounding like a grown-up. “But I wanted to tell you about a rumor I heard. Thought you might want to look into it.”
“Okay . . . ,” she says. The word rumor piques her interest. If he tells her the rumor is that the library is moving the book sale to another date, she will throw her phone across the room.
“Word on the street is that you aren’t the only person who can’t get ahold of Annie Taft. No one can.”
She thinks about this, about how Faye spoke to her today, how frazzled and prickly she acted. Maybe it wasn’t because she didn’t like a reporter asking questions about the wedding. Maybe it was because Faye was worried about her niece because she couldn’t find her.
“I think you should poke around tomorrow, see if you can find out anything. If Annie Taft is really and truly missing, we have the makings of quite a story.”
“Maybe she’s just a runaway bride,” Laurel says, trying for a rational explanation. She’s heard this happens. Hell, they even made a movie about it. She pictures Julia Roberts riding that horse in a wedding dress, but in her mind it’s Annie on the horse, Annie making her getaway. But what would make Annie want to run? By all accounts, she’s marrying a great guy and having a beautiful wedding. But if there’s anything Laurel knows, it’s that nothing is ever as it seems.
There is a pause as Damon thinks this over. “Maybe so, but maybe that’s a story in itself.”
Laurel tries to think if it would be appropriate to write about Annie being a runaway bride. It’s not exactly the stuff of front page news, unless it had something to do with Lewis’s release—then it would be: Bride Cancels Wedding in Wake of Suspected Murderer’s Release.
“Yeah, maybe,” she says. “Either way, I’ll look into it first thing in the morning.”
“Good deal,” Damon says. “Sorry for calling so late. I just couldn’t stop thinking about it, and I thought you’d want to know. You know, so you can think up a game plan then hit the ground running in the morning,” he says. He laughs, but it is not the laugh of a sneaky, mischievous boy. It is the laugh of a peer, one she spends more time with than anyone else, if she’s honest. “I know how you are,” he says.
“Yeah,” she says, “I guess you do.” And the realization hits her that this is actually true. Suddenly she feels vulnerable, self-conscious, like he is in the room with her and can see the newspaper clippings on her walls, the mascara smeared under her eyes.
“Thanks for letting me know,” she says, anxious to be off the phone, to end this call that feels different than their usual conversations. She wants to go back to the way things were this afternoon in the office when she was yelling at him about Annie’s fiancé. Come to think of it, Annie’s fiancé hadn’t replied to her email. Wait a minute.
“How’d you come by this information?” she asks Damon. “Who told you no one can find Annie?”
“I might’ve taken your advice and capitalized on a little brotherly love,” he says, and chuckles. And though he definitely still has a streak of mischievous boy in him, she’s happy that this time he’s used it for good.
“At least he talked to you. He never replied to me,” she says glumly.
“Because I told him he didn’t have to. He’s pretty upset, so I said I’d pass along what was happening. So now you are, officially, informed. And he said he’d keep us informed, too.”
“Us?” she asks.
“I figured we’d work on this one together, since I’m kind of involved now.”
Great, she thinks. “Oh,” she says.
“Don’t sound so thrilled,” he says.
“No, it’s fine, I’m just, um, used to working alone.”
“It’ll be fun,” he says. “You’ll see. So, I’ll see you tomorrow, partner?”
“Yes,” she says, willing her voice to express more excitement than she feels, unable to keep her teeth from clenching at his use of the word partner. What has she gotten herself into?
Clary
She wakes to the low murmur of voices coming from the den and realizes she has fallen asleep waiting on her mother to return from driving around, looking for Annie. “I can’t just sit here anymore,” Faye had announced as she picked up her keys and left.
It was too late and too dark to do much good, but she didn’t give Clary time to point that out. Besides, she understood. When Mica had first gone missing, she’d searched in the dark, hoping his white and silver feathers would shine brightly against the black night. But of course that hadn’t happened.
A half hour after her mother left, Clary had checked on the doves, then stretched out across her bed to wait for Faye to return. She’d fallen asleep. Now, groggy and disoriented, Clary sits up and looks around her dark bedroom, grabs her phone to check the time, hoping that there will be a missed call or text from Annie, that this will all be over. But it is 11:13 p.m., there’s nothing from Annie, and there are strange voices out in the den. She knows that it’s not over.
A foreboding feeling nags at her: this will not be like the other times her cousin has pulled her disappearing act, that Annie will not come strolling in the front door, drop her keys, kick off her shoes, and announce, “Hey, I’m here!” the phrase in itself an admission: you can stop looking for me because I’m here now. Clary fears that, like Mica, this time Annie isn’t coming back.
She does her best to push the negative thought from her mind, slips from her bed, and pads into the den, straining to discern the voices. One is male; two are female. She peers around the corner to check if her hunch is right. It is: Scott is there, along with her mom and Tracy Douglas, Annie’s best friend. Clary knows she must look like a hot mess but doesn’t care if these three see, so she walks into the room.
“Oh, Clary,” her mother says when she sees her. She starts to rise, but Clary waves at her to sit back down. She can see exhaustion in her mother’s eyes. The poor woman has to be beyond tired. She goes over to where Faye is sitting and plops down beside her, rests her head on her shoulder as she feels her mom’s arm slip around her. Faye’s affections are rare and fleeting; Clary has learned to soak them in when she can get them. She is still like a child in that way, always straining for her mother’s touch. But Faye is tough and reserved; she was never a touchy-feely mom. Faye is just the way she is. Clary accepts that, but sometimes she wishes it were different.
“Why didn’t you guys wake me up when you got in?” she asks, hearing the note of accusation in her voice. In not being a part of this conversation, she is already behind, already on the outside. She eyes Tracy, feeling the old jealousy she once felt—the unspoken rivalry between them for Annie’s attention—crop up unexpectedly. She thought they’d all outgrown that.
Faye presses her mouth to Clary’s temple in what passes for a kiss, then rises. “There’s nothing to tell. We’re just guessing at this point,” she says as she crosses the den toward the kitchen. “I’m making coffee; who wants some?”
Scott and Tracy both raise their hands, even though Faye’s back is turned and she can’t see them respond to her question. Clary sees them eye each other and smile at their mutual gaffe. In unison, they both say, “Me,” and then smile at each other again. Clary refrains from rolling her eyes at the two of them and their chumminess. She rises and follows her mother into the kitchen to help make coffee, though Faye doesn’t need help to do this most basic of tasks.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say Tracy has herself a schoolgirl crush,” Clary remarks.
Faye pauses long enough to shrug. “Doesn’t surprise me. Tracy’s always wanted what Annie had.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right. Still, though . . .” She stands awkwardly, moving out of the way when her mother shoos her. Their galley kitchen isn’t large. Faye has always
complained about it. “Anything more from Hal?” she asks, just to fill the silence as Faye measures grounds into the machine.
Faye stops what she’s doing and asks, “You?” She raises the scoop to indicate what she means.
Clary does not want coffee this late at night. She wants to go back to sleep. But she suspects that’s not going to happen. Not with Tracy and Scott here and her cousin missing. It would be rude and insensitive to go back to bed. She shrugs. “Sure.”
Faye looks at her. “Hal is investigating,” she says, her words succinct, telling Clary all she needs to know. Nothing has changed; it’s a waiting game.
“Why’s Scott here?” she asks, because, though she has nothing against Scott, she feels inexplicably angry with him, as if he should’ve prevented this somehow.
“He wanted some company.” Faye shrugs. “You can’t blame him, really.” She points across the room at the refrigerator. “You should get out the cream, in case someone takes it.”
Obediently, Clary crosses to the fridge and tugs it open, the sucking sound of the seal echoing loudly in the kitchen. She stares into the refrigerator and sees the almond milk there—Annie’s almond milk. It’s only ever her who drinks it, and most of the time they throw out the full carton when one of them thinks to check the expiration date and finds it long past. Clary blinks back tears and closes the fridge, forgetting what she opened it for.
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