Vanishing Girls

by Lisa Regan

“Yeah. Dirk took his car to get serviced one Saturday morning, and when he came home she was gone.”

  “No sign that anyone had been in the house?” Josie asked.

  “Nope. She was just gone. We talked to all the neighbors—there’s this one really nosy older lady who is always in everyone’s business—but no one saw anything. We thought—well, I thought—maybe she had gone off into the woods, and you know, killed herself or something.”

  Josie knew from experience that this was more common in central Pennsylvania than anyone would care to admit.

  “You searched the woods?”

  “Dirk got a bunch of other teachers from school to help. It took weeks, but yeah, we searched the woods in every direction. No sign of her at all. No one saw anything. He tried to get it on the news, but they said runaways weren’t news. He put up some fliers around town, but nothing ever came of it.”

  At this, Josie felt a stab of recognition. “When she disappeared, June had dark hair,” she said, “and lots of piercings. Eyebrow and nose, right?”

  “Yeah. That’s right. Dirk hated those things, but her mom let her do whatever she wanted.”

  A memory floated to the surface of Josie’s mind. The mention of the fliers brought it back. She had seen June’s face before: older and with more face jewelry than in the photos on Dirk’s fridge, but definitely the same girl. Josie had asked her chief why they weren’t aiding in the search, and he had told her they’d already expended as many resources as they could to look for the girl, but that in his estimation the most likely scenario was that she’d simply gone back to Philadelphia and taken up with people there. Philadelphia was out of their jurisdiction. Josie hadn’t questioned it at the time. She had no reason to question it and no reason to seek out more details about the case. They did get runaways in Denton: troubled kids, kids with terrible home lives, kids who were addicted to drugs. Most of the time, the families’ efforts to bring their troubled souls back into the fold were half-hearted at best. By the time those kids ran away, it came as a relief. It was sad, but Josie had seen it again and again on the job.

  But something about June Spencer’s disappearance didn’t sit well with her now that she knew the details. The only reason that June had been deemed a runaway was her tortured history. Josie had just been out to Dirk Spencer’s house—in the boonies, as they liked to say in Denton—and there was no way that June had just walked off. She would have been miles from anything. She had to have gone somewhere, with someone. Perhaps she had intended to run away, had been walking along the lonely mountain road and been picked up by someone, but there was no way she had run away from Dirk’s house alone, on foot. She may have gotten a lift, but whether she made it to her destination was another story. Josie could see why Dirk had insisted on searching.

  “Does Dirk go to Philadelphia often?” Josie asked.

  “Hardly ever. He hates it there.”

  “Does he keep in touch with anyone from there?”

  “Other than his sister? No.”

  “No old friends who might be members of a gang?”

  Solange’s eyes widened. She pointed to the television. “Oh, right. They’re saying on TV that the men in the car were in a gang, right? What kind of gang?”

  “The 23,” Josie told her. “Latino.”

  Solange looked even more nonplussed than she had earlier. “I never knew Dirk to have any friends from Philadelphia, much less friends who were in a gang. You’ve, um, seen him, right?”

  She nodded; she knew what she meant.

  “He’s kind of like, a nerd, you know? I mean, he’s not like, a tough guy or anything. He’s into books and theater and art history.”

  Josie thought about the bookshelves lining Dirk’s living room walls. “Yeah, I got that.”

  “I don’t think he ever even shot a gun.”

  He hadn’t had a gun that morning when Josie had seen him. In fact, he’d been the only person in the vehicle dutifully wearing his seat belt. He didn’t fit. They’d come to pick him up at his home. He’d gotten into the SUV willingly. But he didn’t fit.

  Nothing that Josie had heard so far that day fit.

  Chapter Ten

  The girl woke to total darkness. She lay very still, panic rising in her chest as she blinked several times to make sure her eyes were really open. They were. Around her there was only blackness. Could it have all been a dream? The man in the woods. His hand over her mouth. Him dragging her deeper and deeper into the forest. Then she remembered her very real fear as his hand squeezed more tightly over her mouth and her nose, cutting off her air until her lungs burned and her vision grayed.

  Now this. A blackness so complete that she couldn’t even see her own body. This was no nightmare. She had been taken.

  Beneath her was what felt like a bed of dirt, rocks, and twigs. The soil slid through her fingers as she felt for something—anything—familiar. The air was moist and fetid. She wondered if she’d been buried alive. No, she told herself as she stood on wobbly legs. The space she was in was too large; she could move around it, and she should. Her hands reached desperately for the walls and a way out, but found nothing except cold, wet stone. The sound of her own sobbing bounced back at her every which way she turned. She used the hem of her shirt to wipe her nose and kept moving, frantically chasing the sides of the chamber, her hands running up and down the brickwork until she was certain there was no way out. “Hello?” she screamed into the thick, muting darkness. Not even an echo returned.

  She forced herself to slow down, taking long slow breaths to calm her racing heart as she moved her hands methodically around her, feeling every inch of her cell until, at last, her fingers found something wooden. A door. She pushed against it with all her might but it was thick and immovable. She swept along the edges of it, digging her fingers into the seams, searching for light. There was not one crack, no handle, no lock. Her small fists pounded against the wood until her bones filled with fire and all she could do was scream and scream until her throat was raw and the sound broken.

  No one came.

  She collapsed, curling into a tiny ball as the chamber grew colder and colder around her. She folded her legs up and inside her skirt to cover them completely, tucked her arms inside her shirt and held her trembling body close.

  “Please,” she whispered, rocking back and forth. “I want to go home.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Josie resisted the urge to have more shots before she left Sandman’s. All the talk about June’s horrific childhood had agitated some of Josie’s own demons—black, amorphous ghosts that lay dormant until disturbed and then threatened to suffocate her. Too much had happened that day, too much had been said. They’d been summoned, and now she felt them swirling around her, pulling her under like a rip current, carrying her off to a dark, fathomless sea. Her limbs dragged as she walked back to her vehicle.

  Luke would be working into the night on the interstate shootout, which meant she would be alone. Alone with the stirred-up memories of her past. Luke didn’t know about any of it. She didn’t want him to. She preferred him to see her as she was now—capable, confident, fearless, and whole. Only Ray knew about her past, and he was her past now too. Josie didn’t have many friends who weren’t on the force, which meant everyone was working. There was her grandmother, Lisette—probably her best friend, above all—but she lived in an assisted living facility on the outskirts of town. There really was no one she could call.

  Everything had been fine when she was on the job; she worked more than she didn’t, and she loved it. When she wasn’t working, she was with Luke. Tonight she had only her ghosts, her suspicions, a head full of questions and nothing to distract her. She doubled back as she drove past the liquor store; maybe Jim Beam would be a good friend to her tonight.

  She was browsing the aisles slowly when she saw a woman from the corner of her eye. At first, Josie nearly didn’t recognize her. She was standing in front of the boxed wine, wearing more clothes than she had probably
ever worn in her life. Her long blond hair was pulled back into a pony tail and she wore no make-up or body glitter, just a pair of jeans and a thin blue T-shirt under a brown denim jacket. The transformation was quite amazing, actually. Looking at her in regular clothes, browsing the shelves, Josie would never peg her for the scantily clad, notoriously promiscuous dancer at the local strip club.

  Misty must have felt Josie’s heated gaze bearing down on her because she looked up, her eyes widening, cartoon-like, as she saw Josie at the other end of the aisle. Josie noticed she was carrying both a wallet and a cell phone in her hands. No pockets, Josie guessed, as she bit back a joke about there being plenty of room in her panties.

  Misty said, “Leave me alone.”

  Josie laughed. She couldn’t help it. The sound made Misty jump. She was only a few years younger than Josie. In fact, she had probably been a freshman at Denton East when Ray and Josie were seniors. Josie didn’t remember her. Didn’t know what had driven her to work at Denton’s one and only strip club, Foxy Tails. Still, she had a childlike quality about her and Josie hated that. She always looked like she was genuinely surprised by other peoples’ animosity, which Josie found strange. Surely, she wasn’t the only wife to catch her husband in bed with Misty. She was certain that Misty had been confronted by angry wives many times. Josie took a step toward her.

  “I mean it,” Misty said. “I’ll call Ray.”

  “Go ahead,” Josie said.

  A flush crept upward from Misty’s throat to the roots of her hair. She held up her cell phone. “I mean it. Leave me alone.”

  Josie put a hand on her hip and narrowed her eyes. “What do you think I’m going to do to you, Misty?”

  Her doe eyes went blank. “I… I don’t have to talk to you.”

  Josie laughed again, causing Misty to shrink backward. “Oh, I have no interest in talking to you, but people go to jail for doing the things I’d like to do to you.”

  The flush deepened. “Is… is that a threat?”

  Josie lowered her voice. “Are you afraid?”

  Misty’s voice went up an octave. Her fingers scrabbled across the phone’s screen. “I’m calling Ray.”

  Josie didn’t take her eyes off Misty. She could hear the thin sound of Ray’s phone ringing and ringing and then his voicemail clicking on. “You have reached Ray Quinn…”

  “He’s not going to answer. He’s busy,” she told Misty.

  Misty lowered the cell phone from her ear. She backed up two steps. “Get away from me,” she said without conviction.

  Josie advanced on her. “Why? Why should I? You have no respect for other people. Why should I respect you?”

  Misty’s face twisted, and Josie knew she was about to see her real side. “Oh, please. Maybe if you could keep your husband happy he wouldn’t have come looking for me.”

  The words stung. Wasn’t that at the root of Josie’s grief over her failed marriage? That she wasn’t enough for him? That maybe if she had been able to forgive him for what had happened he wouldn’t have gone looking elsewhere? She had always told herself that it wasn’t her fault. They’d been together since high school. On her weaker days, she could see that maybe he had grown bored—she had felt that way sometimes as well. But Ray sleeping with Misty wasn’t what truly wounded her. It was that he had fallen in love with her.

  Who fell in love with a woman named Misty? A stripper, no less. It was such a cliché. It made her physically ill.

  “I wouldn’t be proud of being a homewrecker,” Josie told her.

  A thin, cruel smile spread across Misty’s face like a snake. “Ray said you don’t satisfy him anymore,” she said, quietly.

  Maybe it was the alcohol, or the day she had just had, or the suspension, or the months of rage over the dissolution of her marriage and then Ray’s refusal to sign the divorce papers. Maybe it was all of those things. But it happened, lightning fast. Before she even had time to realize what she was doing, Josie stepped forward and drove her shoulder into Misty’s chest, knocking her back so she stumbled, her arms flailing as she tried to keep her balance, her feet flying out from beneath her as she crashed into a wall of bottles behind her. Bottles of red wine shattered onto the floor, splashing crimson liquid everywhere. The sound was deafening.

  Before Misty or anyone else in the store could react, Josie fled, squeezing through the automatic exit door before it had a chance to fully open. The cool evening air felt good on her face as she walked quickly toward her car, her whole body trembling.

  She leaned against her car door, sucking in the fresh air and willing her body to calm down. Looking down at her hands, she saw that they were clenched into fists. She opened them only to discover that her fingers too, were shaking.

  “You bitch!” Misty’s voice was a screech. She stood twenty feet away, outside of the liquor store, covered in red wine and shards of glass. Josie stared at her for a long moment. Misty’s chest heaved, tears streaming down her cheeks as she shrieked at Josie once more, “You stupid bitch!”

  Josie couldn’t speak. She could barely breathe. She had thought the sight of Misty, visibly shaken and humiliated, would make her feel better. But she felt worse. She felt empty and hollow and ashamed.

  She couldn’t get home fast enough.

  Chapter Twelve

  Josie woke to an incessant dinging, her head foggy and thick, like someone had stuffed gauze into her eye sockets and cotton into her mouth. Dry-heaving over the side of the bed, she spied the digital clock. She’d slept past noon. The last time that had happened she was in college. The sound came rapid fire now, the headache behind her eyes pulsing in time with it. She rolled over and tried to sit up on the edge of the bed. Huge mistake. She tried to think back to a time in her life when her body hurt this badly, and she couldn’t think of one. A dull ache spread across her lower back and the throbbing in her leg was a like a drumbeat. Items flew from her nightstand drawer as she searched desperately for the ibuprofen. She tried taking them dry like she always did, but the pills turned to a bitter paste in her mouth.

  Dingdingdingdingdingding.

  A quick scan of the room didn’t turn up her cell phone. Next to her pillow lay a bottle of tequila, a finger of amber liquid still in the bottom. She used it to wash the painkillers down and stood gingerly.

  Dingdingdingdingdingding.

  Then a familiar voice. It was muffled, but she could just make out the words. “Goddamn it, Jo! I know you’re in there.”

  Only Ray ever called her Jo. She let him machine-gun her doorbell and holler until his throat was raw as she took her time getting down the stairs. The door swung open and blinding sunlight flooded her foyer. Ray was just a blurred, headless blob in her light-stung vision. She put a hand to her head. Her hair was matted on one side. She must look like hell.

  “Is Luke here?” he asked.

  She blinked, trying to bring him into focus. “What do you think?”

  “I think you look like shit. Are you sick?” He sniffed the air and recoiled. “Tequila? Really, Jo?”

  She sighed. She wasn’t sure how much longer she could remain standing, the pain in her body was so intense, but she didn’t want to invite him in. She didn’t want him in her sanctuary. “I’m not the one with the drinking problem, Ray,” she muttered, knowing it would sting. “What do you want?”

  As her eyes adjusted she saw that he held his hat in both hands, squeezing. He always looked like this now—hat in both hands, like some kind of supplicant. Like he was going to beg her for something. He said, “Misty told me what happened last night.”

  She squinted at him. “So?”

  “You can’t treat her like that, Jo.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “You’re lucky she isn’t pressing charges,” he said.

  “Oh, please.”

  “I’m serious. Just leave her alone. I’m the one who cheated.”

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right. She’s just a garden-variety whore.”

  A muscle in his
jaw quivered. “Jo,” he cautioned.

  Josie rolled her eyes. “Ray, I didn’t do anything to her. I was just walking down the aisle.”

  He gave her a skeptical look. He was coming into focus now, and she could see how terrible he really looked. A patchy beard had grown in on his face. His eyes were glassy, with large bags beneath them. His blue Denton PD uniform hung off him. “She said you pushed her.”

  “I might have bumped into her.”

  “Jo, really.”

  “Oh, come on, Ray. How can a woman who can take so much pounding be so sensitive about me bumping into her? She’s not made of glass, for Chrissake.”

  He closed his eyes, white knuckling the hat in his hands. She could see him silently counting to ten.

  “We can keep arguing about this,” she added, “but you’re never going to be right. Why are you really here?”

  His eyes popped open. He sighed loudly. “You know how you said to shake down all the registered sex offenders in the area?”

  A spiral of excitement shot up through Josie. “You found Isabelle Coleman?”

  “No. Not Coleman. A different girl. We didn’t—we didn’t realize she was missing. She was marked as a runaway.”

  She knew what he was going to say before he even said it, but she let him speak anyway.

  “Her name is June Spencer.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Wait, you said her name is June Spencer. So, she’s alive?”

  “Yeah.”

  Josie’s relief quickly turned to unease. June had been missing for a year; that was a long time to be in captivity. She couldn’t even imagine what the girl had been through. The nausea she had fought earlier came back with a vengeance. Her body folded in half, and she puked up what was left of the tequila on her front stoop.

  “Jesus,” Ray said, putting a comforting hand on her lower back. She wriggled away from him.