The Never List

by Zan, Koethi

  I could only stammer out the words, “I’m sorry … I’m so sorry … I—”

  But at that moment, we heard a new sound from the front of the house.

  CHAPTER 38

  We all turned to the entrance of the library, where Adele had left the double doors ajar. We heard footsteps approaching. The outline of a woman appeared in the shadows, like a ghost, gliding along the floor into the room. Then I saw it: she was holding a gun. And moving in closer.

  “Sylvia!!!” Ray shouted.

  I could not believe what I was seeing. At first the room seemed to spin around me, and then to disappear altogether. A world came crashing down in my head. A thousand worlds. My mind couldn’t put together the pieces of the puzzle, so disorienting was the reality in front of me. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t do the math.

  “That’s not Sylvia,” I finally said, feeling all of my blood surging to my head. “That’s … Jennifer!”

  “Oh. My. God,” I heard Christine say from the back of the room, as Tracy stood there stunned, only able to mutter a quiet “What the fuck?”

  “But that is Sylvia,” said Ray again, in an almost pleading voice. “It is.”

  The woman with the gun walked closer to us.

  Finally, she spoke. “Everyone get close together. Sit on the floor. Hands up in the air.”

  I felt confused, disoriented, split apart. And yet what I felt most was joy, a sensation of completeness that I hadn’t experienced since before our abduction all those years ago. It was Jennifer. Jennifer. It was really her. We were reunited again, after what was surely only an aberration, a fluke, a thirteen-year detour in what should have been our lives together. It seemed to me I should be able to run over to her, throw my arms around her, and whisper into her ear the way we always had. She was safe. We were safe. We were both alive.

  I was whispering her name, despite myself. I thought somehow that once she realized it was me, she would put the gun down and we could all go home, and the past thirteen years could be erased. We could write up a new Never List, and we would follow it to the letter and be safe, together, forever. Surely she was not the one who had imprisoned us again. Surely we had all the facts mixed up, and there was another explanation.

  The gun did not waver, though. We did as we were told.

  Then out of the corner of my eye, I saw it. The front door of the house was wide open behind Jennifer. Even in my shock, my mind, so set to self-preservation, immediately started calculating the odds. How could I get past her and out that door? Then I recognized that once again all I could think of was saving myself, leaving the others to their fate. I’d save them if I could, but only as an afterthought, once I had secured my own future.

  The realization of what I was doing, even in that moment, forced me to face something about myself. Tracy and Christine were right. What had Jack Derber done to me? In that instant, a part of me was ready to give up. Now anything could happen, and in a way I didn’t care what did.

  But no, I thought, pushing away that despair, I wanted to live. I wanted to be strong. And I needed to understand.

  “Jennifer, I thought—I thought you were dead … the body … with me in the box …” I stammered.

  “Yes, I know you thought that. There were other bodies, Sarah. That one wasn’t mine.”

  “‘Other bodies’? Where were you then?” I could barely process the implications of what she’d said. I had thought I was the turncoat. Now I realized Jennifer had made it much further down that road. “Did you know … did you know I’d been left in that box?”

  Jennifer’s eyes flickered for a moment, and then she turned away from me. Tracy stirred, and Jennifer trained the gun on her.

  “Don’t move, Tracy, or I will kill you first.”

  “‘First’?” shrieked Christine, who was right behind me.

  “Shhh … shh …” I tried to calm her, careful not to turn all the way around and not to take my eyes off Jennifer.

  I saw Ray’s look of utter confusion, but there was no time to explain to him what must have happened. That there was a real Sylvia Dunham, but this was not her, and he’d never met her. That Tracy and I had met the real Sylvia Dunham’s parents and seen her photograph. That she must have been abducted too, long ago. That Jack had handed over her identity to Jennifer, so she could be out in the world, acting under his orders. That they must have needed marriage documents for her to enter the jail. Anything could have happened to the real Sylvia, and everything probably had.

  Then I saw her. Adele was walking back into the room behind Jennifer. I wanted to signal to her but wasn’t sure how. She was our only hope. I could see she’d been crying, that she was lost in thought, not even looking up as she walked along the hall.

  I hoped against hope the others would not show any sign that they saw her.

  Christine caught her breath, and out of the corner of my eye, I could see Tracy nudging her knee into Christine’s leg. We all saw at once how our fate now lay in Adele’s hands. The seconds were painful. Adele’s steps, one, two, three. Jennifer in front of her, staring at us with an odd sort of victory playing in her eyes.

  Look up, Adele. Look up. I knew we were all thinking it. No one was breathing.

  Then Adele looked up. Don’t scream, I thought. Don’t fucking scream.

  After that, everything was in slow motion for me. Adele didn’t scream. Instead she slowly leaned down and picked up the frying pan she’d left on the floor. She hesitated only a fraction of an instant.

  I could see in her eyes, though, that even after all her years as a dominatrix, Adele was not prepared to inflict actual pain, and maybe even death, on someone else. And I didn’t want that either. I was even afraid for Jennifer at that moment. Even then, I did not want Jennifer to die. Not after I had found her again after all those years. Not even after I was pretty certain she was about to kill me. Not even then.

  Adele suddenly pulled the pan back over her head and in one swift motion brought it down on Jennifer’s hand. The gun fired as it flew across the room. Adele tripped and fell from the weight of the pan, the awkward angle of her swing bringing her crashing to the floor.

  I quickly scanned the room. Ray had been hit in the foot. He was howling, his blood spreading out onto the polished wood floor. Christine looked stunned, paralyzed by fear.

  Tracy and I both jumped up, lunging toward Jennifer. I got there first. Jennifer was already turning, running for the open door, ready to slam it behind her. To leave us trapped again, this time for good.

  This was the moment. I could tell Tracy was not going to reach her in time. I was going to have to do it. To grab not just any body, but the body I had so longed for and yet feared in my memory, from the box. The idea of it made me sick, made my flesh crawl. But I fought it. I fought through.

  I ran as fast as I could and tackled her hard, throwing my arms around her in a sick embrace of reunion. I held her firmly, wrapping my arms far enough around her to clasp my hands together. She twisted around to face me, to push me off. I could feel her breath on my face. No one had been this close to me in years. Her arms flailing, she fought like hell, but this time I was strong. This time I would save us all.

  Tracy was right behind me and helped me pin Jennifer’s arms. Adele had gotten back up, raced out of the room, and come back with the rope from the cellar. Together we tied Jennifer up tightly. Afraid to stay in the house for a second longer, we dragged her out into the yard and stood around her, staring in disbelief.

  CHAPTER 39

  No one said anything. While we didn’t understand the full details of the story yet, we understood enough to get a sense of what had happened. We would learn later about Jennifer’s terrible ordeal, the years of torture and manipulation she had spent with Jack at the house and then, later, in Noah Philben’s cult. The way they had passed her around to satisfy their sadistic needs, then used her as a go-between for Jack in prison. The things she had had to do to survive. The pain she had encountered and, worse, been f
orced to inflict.

  Tracy walked down the hill desperately trying to find cell reception and eventually reached Jim. He arrived with blazes, lights flashing, sirens blaring. It was an echo of that time, ten years ago, when he’d come here to save Tracy and Christine.

  I knew they would take Jennifer away to a hospital, and eventually, I figured, she would end up in a mental institution. When she was fully restrained by the police, I walked over to her.

  It was really her. Older, her face bore the signs of a hard life filled with nothing but tragedy—it was prematurely lined, her skin colorless—but it was still her. After all these years thinking that the cold body in the barn had been my precious Jennifer, it was almost eerie to see her flesh move, alive and real. Like seeing that corpse from my dreams come to life. I wondered fleetingly who could have been in the box with me back then but pushed the thought out of my mind. The important thing now was that I had Jennifer here with me.

  She was strapped down on a gurney, but the restraints hardly seemed necessary, for she didn’t move at all. She didn’t look around. Her eyes were fixed on some remote point in the distance.

  Was she thinking of Jack Derber?

  I didn’t want to ask, and yet I wanted to know how—how could she have gotten to this point? I turned to her.

  “Jennifer.” I could barely speak. “Jennifer, what happened to you?”

  She didn’t look at me for a long time, and then finally she shifted her eyes to me without moving her head. Did her look soften? I wanted to believe I saw a trace of the Jennifer I’d known, somewhere in there, her eyes pleading with me, like in the old days.

  Her voice was clear when she finally spoke. “I’m not afraid anymore,” she said. “Now nothing scares me.”

  That was all. Then she looked away. The horror of it pierced through me like a knife. She wasn’t the same person anymore.

  I tried to console myself with the thought that, whoever she was now, she would be safe going forward. She’d be safe where they would put her. Where nothing could ever hurt her again.

  I wondered if there was any chance they could restore her to that girl in my attic bedroom. I made a pact with myself then and there that I would be there for her from now on. I’d try to save her for real this time, if there was even the remotest possibility that she could be saved.

  She had been taken away by the time Jim walked over to me, in a corner of Jack’s yard, as far as possible from the barn. The paramedics were wrapping Ray’s foot, and Christine was being interviewed by one officer, Tracy by another. Adele sat alone in stunned silence, watching as the police unspooled yellow tape around the perimeter.

  Jim sat down beside me, plucking at a piece of grass he turned between his fingers. He kept his distance.

  “That was pretty tough in there. Are you okay?”

  “Okay? No, not really.”

  “I understand.” He looked at me intently. “Sarah … Box one eighty-two? One of our guys took a photo of Jack Derber. Showed it to the postal agent who worked in River Bend all those years ago.”

  “And?”

  “She called him Tommy Philben. That’s the name he’d used on the form.” He paused, letting me take that in.

  “So they’ve always been in it together, haven’t they? One way or another. Noah and Jack.”

  “Seems like it.” We sank back into silence.

  “Sarah, I spoke to Dr. Simmons. She wants to help.”

  “No, thanks.” I turned toward him. “There isn’t going to be any ‘getting over it’ this time. I realized something in there.”

  “What?”

  “That no matter what I’ve been telling myself, at some level I was only looking out for myself all those years ago. I was selfish, weak. And that’s how I’d gotten so close to becoming like Jennifer. Now that I see that, I have to change something.”

  “Change what?”

  “The other fifty-four.”

  “What?”

  “I need the list.”

  “Sarah, I can’t give that to you.”

  “Jim.”

  I didn’t look at him. I just waited.

  We sat in silence for a few minutes. Then without another word, he got up and went over to his car.

  A moment later he walked back over to me holding a manila envelope. He sighed, shrugged his shoulders, and handed it to me.

  “You didn’t get this from me,” he said.

  I took out the sheet of paper and looked at the names. The typeface blurred in front of my eyes for a moment. I took a deep breath.

  “Got a pen?” I asked. He reached into his pocket and handed me one.

  I clicked it open and wrote at the top of the list, in the familiar big block letters of those long-ago journals, SYLVIA DUNHAM.

  I handed him the pen and the empty envelope, folded the paper into a small square, and put it in my pocket.

  I wondered where Sylvia Dunham could be, that girl in the photograph. Junior year. The girl who was lost somewhere without a name. But I would find her. Find her somehow and help her parents understand that she hadn’t chosen evil over them. I wanted to erase that pain at least, if I could do nothing else.

  And I felt that sense of purpose burning inside me. Burning away the hollowness, the emptiness. Taking away my own sorrow, swallowing it up in this need. This need to fix things. To save them all.

  I looked at Jim. He was smiling. We both stood up. I wondered if the change in me was visible.

  I reached out my hand to him. He looked surprised but took it in his own, and we shook. His hand was warm, and his skin smooth. His grasp felt safe and comfortable. I looked into his eyes. I’d never noticed they were green before. Then we were both smiling.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank my brilliant agent, Alexandra Machinist, who expertly shepherded this book from the initial draft; Dorothy Vincent, for her excellent international representation; Tina Bennett, for opening the first door; Pam Dorman and Beena Kamlani, for their skillful and insightful editing, and the entire team at Pamela Dorman Books/Viking, for their hard work and commitment to this book; my husband, Stephen Metcalf, who helped me enormously, both emotionally and editorially, in bringing it to fruition; Stella and Kate, who are not allowed to read one word of it until college; my fabulous sister, Lindsy Farina; my best friend and inspiration, Lisa Gifford; the other dear friends who supported this book in a myriad of ways: George Cheeks, Emily Kirven, Michael Kirven, Corey Powell, Paige Orloff, David Grann, Jeff Roda, Jennifer Warner, Virginia Lazalde-McPherson, Mike Minden, and Marshall Eisen; and, for helping me make sense of it all, Melissa Wacks.

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

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  Published by Harvill Secker 2013

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  Copyright © Koethi Zan 2013

  Koethi Zan has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental

  First published in Great Britain in 2013 by

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  ISBN 9781846556555 (hardback)

  ISBN 9781846556562 (trade paperback)