by Kara Thomas
On the third night, she brings me a bowl of corn. I’m too tired to lift my head off the pillow. She feeds it to me with the plastic fork, a few kernels at a time. I store every one in the fold of my cheek like a hamster.
“I can do it myself,” I say.
Annette gives a thin-lipped smile. Hands me the fork. “Last time I saw you, you still needed help zipping up your winter coat.”
Because I’m pathetic, I want to say. I have trouble ordering a sandwich because of you. Because you wanted us to be this way, so we’d always need you.
Except Jos didn’t. She never needed my mother, unlike whiny little me, who got stressed about everything. A stuck zipper. Gum on the bottom of my shoe. MommymommyJos. Someone help me.
She leaves without noticing that I slipped the fork beneath the sheets.
I wait until the faint glow from the oil lamps in the living room disappears from beneath my bedroom door before I crawl out of bed.
There’s only half a moon tonight, so I have to feel around for them—the screws holding the metal bar beneath the bed in place. One wiggles under my finger. I silently thank my father’s proclivity for cheap pieces of shit, this one most likely taken from someone’s front lawn.
The bottom of the fork doesn’t slide into the top of the screw like I convinced myself it would. I break into a flush, sweat beads on the back of my neck. It would help if I could see.
I tilt the fork so it sticks into the screw. I hold my breath and turn. Too forceful—the plastic is going to snap. I angle myself so I can turn the fork gently and push the screw from the bottom.
It takes a few minutes, but the screw starts to wiggle free. Maybe I wouldn’t do so badly in jail. I’ve broken out in a full sweat by the time the screw pops out. And that was just one of them. I repeat the process, the back of my shirt soaking through with sweat and my face red-hot.
The bar comes loose once I undo the second screw. The bar feels hollow, but it’ll do. I hope. I try to wedge the bottom between the windowsill and the lock, but it keeps slipping. I need a real crowbar, I realize with an ache of defeat.
My eyes prick. I stifle a sob as I force the bar behind the lock. I yank it toward me until it feels like the bones in my arms are going to snap.
The lock gives out first. It pops right off the window; a crack splits across the glass. I push the bar into the crack until the window gives out, taking the screen with it, and I hoist myself up onto the ledge. The top of the window scrapes my back, but I’m so elated that it barely hurts.
I’m out. I got out of the damn cabin.
I run. Stumble is more like it. Rocks, twigs stab the soft, fleshy part of my feet, but I don’t stop. Even though it’s dark and I can’t see. I can’t even tell if I’m going up the mountain or down it.
So, so tired. I see a light; an orange bulb on someone’s porch. I keep going, past the cabin. No one is going to help me out here, even if they had cell phone reception. I’d rather be back with my mother than knocking on the door of someone like the skinhead Decker and I met outside the store in Bear Creek. Better the devil you know than the one you don’t, and all that.
I keep going until my feet are bloody and my body can’t carry the weight of my sobs. I’ve been walking for almost an hour, I figure, and the town is nowhere in sight. Hours of darkness are ahead of me.
I find a dark spot between two trees, where the moon can’t reach, and I curl up on my side and I sleep.
•••
The sun hangs in a sea of orange, yellow, and pink when I wake. The first thing I hear is a dog barking. And voices. Two of them. Men.
I shell up like a box turtle. Convince myself this is the end.
Until one of the men emerges from the trees. He’s in a tan uniform, a badge over his shirt pocket. The German shepherd he’s leading spots me and starts barking.
“Hey, Ed,” the man calls out, not breaking eye contact with me. “Over here.”
Someone was looking for me.
The officer extends a hand to me as I hear the crackle of a radio in the trees behind him. “Are you Tessa?”
The blood pounds in my feet, dirt and dust caked in my cuts. My bare legs are cold, and my neck aches from sleeping on the forest floor, but I manage to nod and croak out two words. Help me.
I don’t know what day it is when I wake up, or where the men from the mountain brought me. But I feel like I’ve been here for a while, sleeping.
The walls are white, the floor piss-yellow. Cool white sheets beneath me, and a remote tucked under my arm. I press the red button that says CALL NURSE beneath it.
A man in scrubs hurries in, followed by the sheriff who found me on Bear Mountain. I wonder if they were outside my door the whole time, waiting.
“How long have I been sleeping?” My throat is dry. The nurse lifts a paper cup of water to my lips.
“About twenty hours,” the sheriff says. “The doctors found thirty milligrams of Ambien in your system. That’s three times the normal dosage.”
While the nurse siphons blood from my arm and gives me antinausea medication, the sheriff tells me that my cell phone pinged five miles from Bear Creek. Annette tried to turn it on to text Callie that I was fine and with friends, and the battery survived just long enough to make contact with the closest cell tower.
“Friend of yours told the Fayette police you may have been headed up here,” he says. “Dexter Something-or-other?”
I make a mental note to get Decker Lucas the biggest bag of Twizzlers I can find.
The sheriff tells me that I slept through the rangers picking up my mother. I slept through Maggie arriving at Allegheny Valley hospital and yelling at the doctors until they let her in to see me.
“When did she leave?” I ask.
The nurse shakes his head and puts a blood pressure cuff on me. “She didn’t. She’s downstairs getting something to eat.”
•••
Callie wanted to come with Maggie to bring me home from Linesville, the nearest functional town to Bear Creek, where I stayed in the hospital, but she’s only three days into her month-long stay at Healing Horizons Center for Youth Addiction. She tells me that after Jimmy Wozniak blew his brains out all over her, she locked herself in her room and drank half a handle of vodka. Maggie and Rick drove her to the rehab center that night. She calls to tell me all this as they’re getting ready to discharge me from the hospital.
“We searched for you when we were leaving the hospital that day. My dad called the cops when your cell went to voice mail,” she says in a hushed voice. “We thought maybe you were still at the station, but the receptionist at the hospital showed that you signed in….She called the wrong room, that’s why no one came to get you.”
Callie lowers her voice even further, like maybe someone’s listening to her. “The police didn’t take us seriously. They said you’d come home soon….If I hadn’t freaking lost my shit, I’d have been able to help look for you.”
“Don’t blame yourself,” I say, and add a feeble attempt at a joke: “The doctors say the psychological trauma shouldn’t be permanent.”
Callie breathes, a small heh. “You just had to one-up me by getting kidnapped too, huh?”
“You still win,” I say softly. “She wouldn’t have killed me.”
Callie’s quiet, and I know I’ve said the wrong thing. It’s enough that she has to live the rest of her life with the memory of Jimmy Wozniak’s gun barrel pressed to her head.
“You know what the worst thing is?” she whispers. “Stokes is still in jail.”
“I know.”
I guess we thought it’d be that easy—that we’d find the real Monster, find Lori’s real killer, and Stokes would walk free. But overturning his conviction based on the new evidence against Wozniak is going to take time, even though Lori’s killer is in custody at the Bear Mountain police precinct. Even though preliminary tests confirm that the partial DNA profile found on some of the victims matches Jimmy Wozniak’s.
That was t
he “new” evidence Stokes’s lawyers had, advancements in DNA testing that proved the partial profile could have come from one of thousands of men.
The DA said she’s willing to consider a conditional release so Stokes can go free pending the decision from the judge. That will take time too.
But he won’t be executed.
“Hey,” Callie says quietly. “Did you have any idea—about your mom? I mean, Annette. I just…She always seemed like she loved you guys so much.”
I swallow. “No. I had no idea.”
“Of course not,” Callie says. “I’m sorry I even asked. Hold up.”
There are voices in the background. A rustling sound like Callie is covering the receiver.
“My phone time is up,” she says. “Can I call you again?”
I nod. Catch myself. Callie wants to call me, and not because she has to. “Yeah. Of course.”
We hang up, and I look around the hospital room for the last time. My throat is tight, and my heart feels heavy. My flight back home takes off at five-forty-five tonight.
I knew this moment would come. Leaving Pennsylvania. I just never expected to be leaving with more than I had when I came.
•••
After four hours of insisting that I was her daughter and had gone willingly with her to Bear Creek, Annette broke down and gave the following account to detectives:
Twenty-five years ago, Annette Lowell was at a gas station in Tennessee, where she’d been living for the past year. A young woman at the pump next to her left her two-year-old-daughter in the car while she went inside the convenience store to buy cigarettes. When she came back out, Annette told the woman she had a beautiful baby. The woman thanked her. Annette would later learn, from the news, that her name was Amanda Stevens.
Annette followed Amanda to find out where she lived. Later that night, Annette came back and saw that the woman’s car wasn’t in the driveway. She walked around the back of the house, where she heard a baby crying through a window opened a crack. Annette found a spare key under the back door mat, waltzed into Amanda Stevens’s house, and stole Macy Stevens from her crib. She made it all the way to Pennsylvania before anyone reported the baby missing.
When the police asked Annette how she’d left Tennessee without being concerned that someone had seen her kidnap Macy, she said that no one really noticed her to begin with. When she settled in Fayette, Pennsylvania, and introduced herself as the mother of two-year-old Joslin Mowdy, no one really noticed her either.
Then, shortly after, she met Glenn Lowell. Eight years later, Annette Lowell announced to her husband and friends in Fayette, Pennsylvania, that she was pregnant. She put on twenty pounds and claimed that her doctor had put her on mandatory bed rest until her due date. During this time, she went to the library once Joslin was at school and Glenn was at work. She spent her days in an online chat room for expectant mothers. There, she met a woman named Taylor from Warren, Ohio. Taylor, also four months pregnant, revealed that she worked at an OshKosh store half a mile from her house, and in her free time rescued retired greyhound dogs.
One week before Taylor’s due date, Annette left Joslin with Glenn and drove to the OshKosh in Warren, Ohio, and waited for Taylor Lesley to close the store. She followed Taylor onto the highway and rear-ended her. When Taylor got out of the car, Annette pepper-sprayed her and forced her into the back of her car. Taylor’s car was found burned at the bottom of the overpass a week after she was reported missing.
By the time the car was found, Annette was already in Bear Creek with Taylor, where she kept her hostage in the cabin until she gave birth to a baby girl.
Annette returned to Fayette one week before the due date she’d given her family and acquaintances. She told her husband she’d been visiting a relative in Philadelphia. She hid Taylor’s child in her shed for two days, until nine-year-old Joslin came home from school and found Annette cradling a newborn baby in the living room. Annette said the midwife had come and gone in the early-morning hours. Glenn Lowell rushed home from work, and they named the baby Tessa. Glenn hadn’t had a clue that Annette had faked the pregnancy—stupid Glenn Lowell, who would stumble into the house drunk every night, smelling of the women in bars who could give him what his frail, bedridden wife couldn’t.
I had to stop listening when the detective described what Annette had done with my mother after she’d given birth. What I do know is this: Taylor and her unborn child were declared dead several years ago, her estranged husband the only person of interest in the case. Taylor’s husband had been arrested for assaulting her before, and he didn’t have an alibi for the night his pregnant wife went missing.
Authorities are mystified that a five-foot-six woman in a Toyota Camry was responsible for two of the highest-profile kidnappings in the past twenty years. When they asked Annette why she’d killed Taylor Lesley, Annette simply said that she’d lied about being pregnant and had had to come up with a baby somehow.
She said the police would find Taylor Lesley’s remains buried beneath the porch at the cabin in the woods.
Two days after I was rescued, the police discovered a jewelry box in Jimmy Wozniak’s bedroom. Inside were the following:
Rae Felice’s locket,
Kristal Davis’s watch,
Marisa Perez’s gold bracelet,
And Ariel Kouchinsky’s bracelet, identified by Nick Snyder as having belonged to his dead mother.
It was enough for the district attorney to announce plans to reopen the case of the Ohio River Monster.
A day later, Annette Lowell confessed to killing Lori, in exchange for the DA’s office promising not to seek the death penalty.
In an attempt to get Joslin to listen to her theory, Lori had printed a picture of Amanda Stevens and pointed out all the genetic similarities. Attached earlobes. Green eyes.
Annette found the photo in our bedroom. When Joslin didn’t say anything, Annette was sure that Joslin knew only one person smart enough to have figured it out.
Annette claims she only wanted to talk to Lori that night. She drove to the Greenwoods’ home and parked in the woods behind the house, then turned the shed light on so Lori would come out to turn it off.
Lori threatened to call the cops when she saw Annette.
Annette says it was an accident. She didn’t mean to kill Lori. She panicked once it was done, and remembered what she’d seen on the news about the Ohio River Monster.
Annette cut the bedroom window to make it look like Lori had been abducted.
People are saying Annette Lowell will never see the outside of a prison again.
People are calling her a monster.
I know it’s true. But I don’t know how to be angry with her for taking me when I still haven’t forgiven her for leaving me.
Now that I’ve been to hell and back, Atlanta airport doesn’t seem all that bad. But this time I have a direct flight to Orlando.
The FBI has arranged for an agent to pick me up from the airport to bring me to Gram’s house. I’m not allowed to be alone with her until she’s cleared of any involvement in my kidnapping. DNA confirmed that I’m Taylor Lesley’s daughter. The press conference was supposed to go down while I was thirty thousand feet in the air.
There are no news vans outside Gram’s house. No men in pit-stained suits shoving microphones into my face. Just a black SUV in the driveway, with Virginia plates.
“Who is that?” I ask the agent driving me. He’s beefy, but kind of soft in the middle. The type of guy probably assigned to paperwork and airport pickups.
“Another one of our people.” The agent unlocks the door for me, and I climb out of the SUV.
Gram answers the door. She doesn’t have her face on, as she would say. Her eyes are red-rimmed, mascara-free. She stumbles toward me and presses me to her chest.
Over her shoulder, I spot a blond woman in the corner. She waits for Gram and me to break apart before she clears her throat and steps toward me.
“It’s nice to mee
t you, Tessa,” she says. “I’m Morgan Doherty. I believe we spoke on the phone.”
Dread pools in my stomach. “You’re assigned to the Macy Stevens case.”
Agent Doherty nods, a twinkle in her eye.
Joslin steps into the living room from the kitchen. Her eyes and the tip of her nose are red. She balls up a tissue in her hand and smiles at me.
I run into my room and slam the door.
•••
When I first moved down here, Gram took me to Disney World. I hadn’t outgrown my Cinderella obsession yet. Two years before that, the Greenwoods had come back from Disney World and Callie had shown me her autograph book. That was the moment when I decided I had to meet Cinderella. I knew she wasn’t the Cinderella, obviously, like the Santa Claus at the mall wasn’t the real Santa, but still. I had to meet her.
In those moments when I got pissed at my mother and Joslin at the same time, I’d lock myself in the closet and pretend that I was Cinderella. My real father had died, leaving me with an evil stepmother and stepsister. I was the orphan princess. I’d never thought in a million years that I was right the whole time.
Anyway. When I finally spotted Cinderella at Disney World, Gram asked if I wanted a picture with her. And I froze. I just couldn’t make my little feet propel me up to her. Cinderella spotted me, probably figured I was one of those shy kids, and smiled. I begged Gram to take me home.
I never thought seeing my sister again would be like that. But I also never thought that my sister wasn’t really my sister.
No one comes after me when I storm into my room. Maybe they figure I’ve earned a tantrum after all I’ve been through.
I press my cheek to my pillow and inhale its scent. The full weight of what I stand to lose hits me. I can’t let them take me from Gram.
There’s a knock at my door a little while later. Gram comes in and sits on the edge of my bed. She smooths down the bedspread by my feet.