by Laura McHugh
“Yeah. She was gettin’ twitchy in the house, wanted her own bedroom. You know how teenagers are.” She rolled her eyes. “Gotta have their privacy.” Trina pitched her cigarette butt toward a rusted coffee can sitting between the lawn chairs and missed, then pushed her hair back behind her ears with both hands.
“When did you notice Destiny was missing?”
“Woke up Thursday, had my coffee. I saw maybe around ten she hadn’t let the chickens out yet, went and banged on the door and she didn’t answer. Thought I’d better pull her outta bed, but she wasn’t there. I was pissed, at first, figured she’d gone off without doing her chores.” Trina tugged at her shirt collar. It was dark with sweat.
“Gone off? Where did you think she’d gone?”
“She likes to walk in the woods, spend the day outdoors, visit her friend across the holler. Loses track of time. Reckoned she’d be home in time for evening chores. When the sun went down, I lit a big fire in case she was trying to walk back in the dark. So she could find her way. I figured maybe she’d stayed too late at Hailey’s house, decided to wait for daylight to head back. She’s done that before.”
“Did you try to call her, text her?”
“No, she don’t have a phone anymore. Dropped it in the pond a while back and that was that. Told her she’d have to prove she’s responsible if she wants a new one.”
The sun pressed against my back, hot and insistent as an iron. It still felt like summer here. Sweat greased the roots of Trina’s pale hair and crept down to her forehead. She mopped her face with her shirtsleeve.
“When did you realize something was wrong?” Farrow asked.
“Friday morning when she still wasn’t back, I got ahold of Hailey, but Destiny wasn’t with her. So I got on Facebook, asked if anybody’d seen her. Nobody had, not since youth group Wednesday afternoon. Neighbors offered to come over and help look for her and one of ’em found her glasses in the trailer. It’s her only pair, and she can’t see worth shit without ’em, so she wouldn’t take off and leave ’em behind.”
Farrow nodded. “Do you know if she might have been communicating with someone online?”
“I don’t know how she would. No internet out here. Sometimes she’d have to get online for school stuff. The homeschool group had a deal with the community center in town, the kids could go and use the Wi-Fi certain days.” Trina squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head back and forth, back and forth. “I tried to raise her right, keep her safe. Protect her from all the horseshit out there.”
“Mm-hm.” Farrow paused for a moment while Trina took in a deep shuddering breath and wiped away tears. “You mentioned youth group. Which church?”
“Barren Branch,” Trina croaked. “Just down the road a piece.”
Music blared out of nowhere and I jumped, startled, knocking into Farrow’s arm. Trina dug her phone out of her pocket and squinted at the screen while the chorus of “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” played at top volume. “Gotta take this, sorry.” We watched Trina disappear into the house, the phone pressed to her ear.
“You all right?” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Fine.”
“Let’s check out the camper.”
We crossed the yard, but I hung back as he stepped up on the cinder block that served as a step. “You sure it’s okay for me to go in there?”
“It’s already been processed, and it was compromised before that. Won’t hurt for you to look.”
We wedged ourselves into the doorway of the sweltering camper. Broken mini blinds hung askew in the windows. There was a narrow bunk against the wall and a shelf holding a few textbooks and a small collection of neatly folded shirts, underwear, and socks. A menagerie of well-worn stuffed animals lay on the floor, including a corduroy pig with button eyes and a grubby teddy bear that might have once been white. A Taylor Swift poster was tacked to the wall. It had been torn apart and taped back together. There was nothing on the bed, just a bare, dingy mattress, and I wondered if the bedding had been collected to check for evidence, if the stuffed toys had been tossed to the floor of the otherwise tidy room. The space had a musty, mothball odor and I felt the stagnant air pressing against my skin, seeping into my hair and clothing. I didn’t want to breathe it in.
“Not much to see,” I said, stepping down.
Farrow joined me, glancing at his phone. “I’d like to talk to the friend. Let me get some information from the sheriff and we can head out.”
I walked back toward the truck, passing a group of elderly women who had set up a lunch station in the shade. “Hungry?” one of the ladies asked, extending a palsied arm to offer a sandwich on a paper plate. She wore a curly brown wig that had seen better days. “It’s peanut butter with homemade jelly.”
“Thank you,” I said, accepting the wobbling plate before the sandwich could slide off.
“Have some water, too. It’s awful hot out.” She handed me a cup and I filled it from a cooler with a spigot. It was well water, I could tell, drawn up from dark veins in the earth, cold enough to crack your teeth. The woman eyed me as I wiped my mouth and refilled the cup.
“This kind of thing doesn’t happen around here,” she said.
I nodded, knowing she was wrong.
“Whereabouts you from?”
“Uh, St. Louis.”
“Ah, you must be used to this kind of thing then, being from the city,” she said. “Destiny was a country girl, through and through. A good girl. Hard worker. Loved Jesus. We share a table every week at the farmers market, her with her eggs and me with my plum jelly. But nobody’ll be at the market today, I bet. Everybody’s here, searching, praying. I’ll pray for you, too, that you find her.”
I took a bite of the sandwich as I walked away. The jelly was gritty and left an odd aftertaste. A group of men in Lone Ridge Volunteer Fire Department shirts gathered in a circle nearby, tightening their bootlaces and dousing themselves with bug spray, preparing to head out into the woods. I wondered if the man who took Destiny might be among the searchers, playing along, pretending to help. I closed my eyes behind my sunglasses, listened, like Farrow had said. There was the familiar Ozark twang, the distinctive dialect you didn’t hear in the city—cain’t instead of can’t, you’ns instead of you or y’all. But no voice that I recognized.
“We’re gonna spread out and make our way down to the base of the cliff,” one of them said. “Check the ravine.”
“Watch the trees, too. Me and my brother saw a deer go right over the edge of a bluff once, when we was hunting. Thought we’d find it down at the bottom, but it wasn’t there. Couldn’t figure how it got away. Days later we smelled it. It’d got stuck in a tree on the way down. It’s probably still up there, skeleton hanging on a branch.”
They were quiet for a moment. No one said Destiny’s name, though they had to be imagining, as I was, her body broken on the rocks below or dangling from the trees. They gathered up their things and headed toward the woods. I breathed in deeply, checking for the scent of rot, but smelled only fresh air and cedar and a hint of smoke from the bonfire.
“Anything strike a chord?” Farrow asked, joining me.
“No.”
“Well, let’s get going,” he said. “We’re interviewing Destiny’s friend.”
As we made our way back to the main road, Farrow checked the odometer. “Driveway’s more than two miles long. Kids do get snatched out in the country, but more often than not it’s a crime of opportunity—the perp’s driving around, comes across a kid riding a bike, or getting off a school bus in the middle of nowhere, all alone. How likely would it be that someone would drive all the way out here in the middle of the night, open up that camper, and randomly find a girl to take?”
“He knew she was there. He came for her.”
“Yeah.”
“So, what about me? I was alone, at the side of the
road, in the middle of nowhere. Perfect opportunity for anybody driving by. That’s how you said it usually happens, right?”
“Yes. But that doesn’t mean it was random. Just that you were easier to find. If this was someone who knew Destiny, or knew where she lived, that’s a pretty narrow group. She’s fairly isolated. Like you were. She’s got her mom, church, homeschool, that’s about it.”
“One of the volunteers told me she sells eggs at the farmers market.”
He shot me a look. “One more thing you have in common.”
“But each girl went missing from a different place. We’re spread out. If it’s someone I know, someone from Wisteria, he’d stick out in some other small town.”
“That’s what we have to figure out,” he said. “There’s a connection. One of those common threads ties the three of you together and leads back to him. We just have to find it.”
CHAPTER 8
SARABETH, THEN
AGE 16
“So Eli’s not coming?” Tom asked. He was trying hard to sound like he didn’t care one way or the other, but he couldn’t keep the disappointment from showing on his face. I felt a pinprick of guilt.
“He wanted to,” I said. “He had to help Daddy with the tractor.”
That wasn’t quite a lie. Eli was helping Daddy, and he probably would have wanted to come, had he known about the invitation. He liked hanging out with Tom. But I looked forward to Secret Thursday all month, and I wasn’t a hundred percent sure that I could trust Eli not to ruin it. He still seemed like his old self sometimes when our parents weren’t around, but he’d started to take everything much more seriously, including our father’s rules, and even though he’d accept the occasional illicit soda from the Darlings, I didn’t think he’d approve of how far Tom and I had taken things. I couldn’t risk losing the one small bit of freedom I had left.
Tom and I had perfected our routine, working together to get the baking done as quickly as possible and taking turns picking what we’d do the rest of the day. Today I’d chosen TV. Again.
“Do you want to maybe take the Gator out instead?” Tom asked. That was unusual, because even though TV was probably his last choice, he’d sometimes pick it for his own turn just because he knew I liked it best. He shook his head before I could respond. “Never mind. I’ll get the snacks.”
I covered the bread dough with a dishcloth and left it to rise. Tom grabbed a bag of Doritos, a box of Froot Loops, and two Cokes and carried them into the den. He closed the blinds to make it darker and then slid the pocket door shut before joining me on the couch. He seemed distracted, glancing at the door as he clicked through the channel guide.
“Price Is Right or Little House on the Prairie?” he said.
“Let’s see which episode of Little House.”
“Oh, hey,” Tom said. “ ‘Sylvia.’ Like your sister. That a good one?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Let’s watch it.” I vaguely remembered that Sylvia was a girl Albert Ingalls had liked. Mainly I remembered that it was one of the few episodes where Albert got the main storyline. There weren’t near enough of those. I was no longer ten years old and obsessed with the adventures of the Ingalls family, but my first crush wouldn’t die.
Tom cracked open a Coke, and as he handed it to me I caught a whiff of cologne or aftershave, musk with a bitter edge of alcohol, like the old perfumes that had sat on my grandma’s vanity for forty years and gone bad. I had never noticed Tom wearing aftershave before. I liked it, even if it was a little off. Perfume was something I associated with my old life, before my mother saw it as a sign of vanity and decadence. No one in my house ever smelled like anything but sweat or lye soap or woodsmoke.
We hadn’t gotten very far into the episode before I realized it wasn’t quite how I remembered it. Something very bad was happening to Sylvia. I glanced at Tom, who sat completely rigid, his hand submerged in the box of Froot Loops, his eyes locked on the screen. I had been younger when I’d watched it before, the darker tone lost on me amid my infatuation with Albert, the hints of abuse just confusing enough for ten-year-old me to know there was a bad guy without understanding exactly what he’d done. Now it made me think of Retta, how she’d told me something awful had happened, but I hadn’t fully grasped what it was. I tried to push all of that away and focus instead on the romance between Sylvia and Albert. He loved her. He wanted to rescue her. Warmth flooded my body when their lips touched, when he kissed her in secret by the creek. I imagined him kissing me.
I felt a feathery sensation, Tom’s fingers brushing against mine. His eyes widened, as though he’d startled himself by touching me. I leaned toward him before I could change my mind, inhaling the scent of his expired aftershave. He squeezed his eyes shut at the last second, like he was bracing for a crash, and I kissed him.
Tom tasted sweet, like the sugared cereal he’d been eating. I tried to pretend that it was Albert I was kissing, or Noah, or Jack, trying each one out to see how it felt, but even with my eyes closed, I couldn’t forget that it was Tom. I pulled away and we wordlessly turned back to the TV, doing our best to pretend that nothing had happened.
“I better put in the first batch of cookies,” I said.
“I can help.”
“I’ve got it,” I said. “Be right back. You can pick the next show. Or we can do something else.”
I went down the hall to use the bathroom. After washing my hands, I slid the vanity drawer open and carefully picked through Mrs. Darling’s Avon lipstick samples, extracting a pale frosted pink. I drew a stripe on my palm, then looked in the mirror and dabbed the applicator to my lips. It was barely noticeable, but I liked the way it sparkled. I added a bit to my cheeks and rubbed it in, knowing I’d have to make sure every speck of glitter was wiped away before I went home.
When I opened the door, there was a half-naked man standing in the hall, blocking my way. He wore a thin flannel robe and boxer shorts, his hair disheveled, face unshaven, like he’d just woken up. The robe hung open, revealing a muscular chest, tattooed flames consuming his rib cage. I froze.
“Hey, pretty girl,” the man said, his mouth stretching into a suggestive grin. “Who are you?”
“I…work for the Darlings,” I said. The words came out before it could occur to me to ask who he was, what he was doing there in his underwear.
“Mm. So I guess that means you work for me?” He tucked one hand into the waistband of his boxers and let his gaze roll down my body and back up. I remembered the lipstick, the sparkles, and felt my face redden.
“What?”
“I’m part of the family,” he said. “Probably the part they don’t talk about. Ronnie Darling.” He took his hand out of his pants and extended it.
I kept my arms at my sides. “I have to get back to work.”
He stepped closer, his bare feet toeing the threshold. “What kind of work were you and Tommy doing in there with the door shut, hm? What would your daddy think?”
“Excuse me.” I squeezed past him, scraping my arm on the doorframe to avoid touching him.
“Nice to meet you.” He laughed but didn’t follow me. I rushed down the hall and found Tom still in the den, the TV tuned to Judge Judy.
“There’s a man,” I said, not sure how to explain it.
The expression on Tom’s face—horror and then shame—told me that he knew, and he was sorry. “He’s some cousin of my grandpa’s. He’s just…visiting. I didn’t think he’d come down. He sleeps all day.”
“It just scared me for a second, I wasn’t expecting to see anybody.” My hands were still shaking.
“He’s in the army. Grampa says he’ll be going back soon. Did he say something to you?”
“Not much. He was…in a robe.”
“We just try to ignore him,” Tom said. “He mostly stays upstairs, in the spare room.”
“Okay.”
“He’ll be gone soon,” he said for the second time, as though saying it would make it true.
CHAPTER 9
SARAH, NOW
The Barneses’ house was set deep in the woods, completely shrouded by oaks and cedars and snaking vines. There was no yard to speak of, no separation between the house and the forest. Scrub brush and saplings filled every space between the trees and crowded against the narrow front porch, reaching through the decaying spindles to scratch at our legs as we stood knocking on the storm door. Wasps drifted down from the eaves to drone about our heads. There was a chain wrapped around the porch post, and a dried-up water dish, but no dog in sight.
A face appeared behind the screen. Farrow held up his ID and introduced us. “I believe the sheriff called to let you know we were coming,” he said. “We’d like to speak with Hailey Barnes.”
The girl looked us over before replying. She had black chin-length hair that was swept dramatically to one side, covering half her face. “That’s me,” she said.
The door creaked open and she ushered us in. It was dark inside, and I imagined the house must be full of shadows at all times, with the trees closing in outside and a single jaundiced bulb dangling from the ceiling. On the coffee table, an old-fashioned oscillating fan rattled from side to side, its metal cage offering scant protection from the whirling blades.
“You can sit if you want,” Hailey said, moving an overflowing laundry basket and a half-eaten bowl of cereal off the couch to make room. There was a long, sharp crack in the vinyl cushion, and I could feel it through my pants when I sat down, like a blade pressed to my skin.
Hailey straddled the arm of a recliner, careful not to disturb the fluffy white cat curled on the seat. She was dressed in a tank top, jean shorts, and army boots. She pushed her hair behind her ear, revealing a port-wine birthmark that stained the edge of her face from temple to jaw.
“Did you find her?” she said, looking stricken. “The sheriff wouldn’t say, but I thought maybe, if they found her and she was…”