The Children on the Hill(90)

“Take her upstairs, Skink,” I ordered. “Now.”

The two teens left the room.

“Down to you and me, Iris,” Vi said. “Just like old times.”

“No one calls me that anymore.”

“I’m sorry. Lizzy, then. Lizzy Shelley. A beautiful name. I’m happy to see you. I’ve been waiting a long time for this.”

“For what, exactly?”

“To show you. To show you what I’ve become. Isn’t that why you’re here? Why you’ve hunted me down? You’re very clever, you know. Catching on. Following me around the country. And now we’ve come full circle, haven’t we? Back here, where it all began. Really, it just seems perfect.”

“Were you going to kill her in front of me?”

Vi laughed. “Is that really what you think?”

“I think at least ten girls have gone missing, never to be seen again,” I said. “If you’re not killing them, then what—”

“Some monsters,” Vi interrupted, “use their powers for good. Please, come sit. I have something to show you.”

She bent down to reach into the pack beside her, and I yelled, “Stop! You need to keep your hands where I can see them.”

Vi put her hands above her head. “Fine. Will you please get my laptop out for me, then? I don’t have any weapons.”

She shoved the pack toward me, and I peered in. Yes, a laptop. Some apples and granola bars, a first aid kit and a flashlight. I pulled out the computer, handed it over.

“May I sit down?” Vi asked.

I nodded. Vi took a seat on a pile of blankets on the floor, opened the computer on her lap, started typing.

“Here,” she said. “Look.”

I stepped closer, just behind Vi, and looked down at the screen.

Vi had opened to a page showing a woman in business attire, a profile page of some sort. Claire Michaels. Forty-four years old, executive at Livewire Multimedia in Burbank, California. Married with two kids. All her contact info.

Vi flipped to another profile page, another woman. Jessica Blankenship, thirty-six, a nurse midwife in Akron, Ohio. Single.

“What is this?” I asked. “Some kind of dating app?”

“Look at the bottom of the pages,” Vi said. She flipped back to Claire Michaels. I leaned closer. There, in little letters at the bottom of the page: FKA Jennifer Rothchild.

The name pinged in my brain. I looked at the photo again of the woman in the white collared shirt and blazer, frosted hair, full makeup.

Jennifer Rothchild had been the monster’s first victim. She’d disappeared in the summer of 1988 after claiming to have met a bigfoot-type creature in the woods of her little town in Washington State. She was never heard from again.

“Look,” Vi said, clicking to another page, showing a photo of Jennifer Rothchild at thirteen. The one they’d circulated to the media and put on posters when she went missing. Vi tapped again so that the photo of thirteen-year-old Jennifer Rothchild was next to forty-four-year-old Claire Michaels. Same heart-shaped face, same blue eyes, same little dimple in the left cheek. The same person.

I put the gun back in the holster, dropped down to my knees on the floor beside Vi, took hold of the laptop with both hands, using the track pad to click through one profile after another. All the adult versions of girls who’d been taken. Each profile had the FKA name and photograph: Vanessa Morales, Sandra Novotny, Anna Larson. I knew those names, those photos so well—those ten missing girls. I had a whole folder stuffed full of information on them—cataloging my desperate attempts to find out what had happened to them. But there they were, all found. All living good lives with new names: an executive, a doctor, a marine biology professor, a filmmaker. And there were more than ten, girls I didn’t even know about. Girls who’d wandered away from their teenage lives and shown up as successful adults with new names.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“It’s what I do,” Vi said. “What we do. Take girls in bad situations: girls who are being abused by family members or boyfriends, girls with drug problems, girls who’ve made terrible mistakes, even girls who’ve killed people. The girls other people call monsters,” she said, emphasizing the last word, then pausing to let it mingle with our own shadows in the flickering light. “We give them a second chance. We transform them. Teach them that the anger they feel inside, the thing that makes them different, can be a source of strength and power. We show them how to slip away from who they once were and start again.”

I blinked at her, still not believing what I was hearing. “Who’s we?”

“I have benefactors, collaborators. Mostly women I’ve helped who’ve reached out to me, who want to do what they can for other girls. Claire Michaels, for instance. She sends money every month and has a carriage house behind her home where she can host girls who are starting over. Nearly all of the women I’ve transformed contribute what they can. The money goes to getting the girls set up in new lives. New schools. College, even. It’s a network—a monster club, sort of.”

I thought of what Gran had done, the lives she’d ruined trying to wipe people’s old selves away. Vi was giving these lost girls, girls like we had once been, second chances.

“You’re not killing them. You’re not hurting them. You’re saving them?”