Lost Girls(29)

I fidgeted, longing for something to replace the words I needed to say, wishing I was selling magazine subscriptions or candy bars or time-shares, that I was here for some other reason. Molly jostled my hand, looking at me expectantly, waiting for me to speak.

I opened my mouth and nothing came out. Then I tried again, disappointed when words rolled out of my mouth, vibrations making my vocal cords tremble. I longed for silence, because I didn’t want to know what the woman was going to tell me.

The inside of the house continued to whisper while I spoke. Where are you, why don’t you come home, come home, come home...

“Good evening, Mrs. Hernandez. Is Nicole home?” I asked, hating the sound of my own voice. I knew what her answer was going to be, Agent Bennet had already told me that Nicole had been kidnapped and I was the only girl who had made it back home. That ache rolled from Nicole’s mother to me and back again, sucking the air from my chest and making it difficult to stay standing upright. I braced myself for a different kind of battle than the one I’d had back at Janie’s.

I didn’t think I was going to survive this one.

She stared at me, running a quick gaze over my features, maybe wondering who I was and what I wanted. “Did you go to school with my Nicole?”

Molly jumped in. “No. We met at a football game last year. We haven’t seen her in a while.”

The woman nodded. “Then you don’t know.” She pulled herself straight, staring off to the right, getting ready to tell us something she’d repeated so many times she probably had it memorized. “Nicole went off to a game with a group of her friends a few weeks ago, but she never made it there. She disappeared for a while, two whole days, before somebody found her on the side of the road—”

With every word she spoke, the night air around us got heavier and thicker and more ominous. I slid an apprehensive gaze toward Molly. Mrs. Hernandez didn’t say anything else for a long time, as if there was no end to this story, as if she’d just gotten the call that told her where her daughter was and she was now heading off to get her. That was why her sweater was on crooked and why she seemed so distracted.

“Is she, is Nicole—” I didn’t know what to say. At that point, words refused to come out.

“She’s dead.” Her voice was flat and a long sigh followed, her eyes closed now that the worst words of all had been spoken.

I stopped breathing.

In my mind, it was me who was dead, sprawled on the cement, broken and bloody.

I unconsciously took a step backward, not wanting to hear more. But Nicole’s mother wasn’t finished. Now that she had a live audience, she had more to say. A lot more.

“Somebody beat her to death,” she said, every word striking me across the face and kicking me in the gut. “She was covered with so many bruises and had so many broken bones that I almost didn’t recognize her at first. I didn’t know my own little girl.” Tears glistened in the corners of her eyes but they didn’t fall. They stayed there reflecting the light, making her eyes look unearthly. Her chest heaved beneath the weight of her words, yet she didn’t stop. “They just threw her out on the side of the freeway, her poor little body broken to bits. She might have been alive at first, but in too much pain to get up and cry for help.”

I thought of myself and how I’d desperately climbed up the side of that gully, clawing my way up through mud and rain, how I’d poised, wavering and weary, on the side of a busy freeway. Had Nicole been kidnapped, like I had, or had something else happened to her?

“I’m so sorry, I didn’t know—”

“The police say they’re looking for whoever murdered her,” she said. “But they don’t have any leads.”

“Did the FBI contact you?” I asked.

She nodded and the motion kicked those tears loose. They tumbled over bronzed skin, sliding down until they reached the corners of her mouth. “Do you know something?” She reached out and took hold of one of my hands. “Is there something they’re not telling me?”

I wasn’t sure what to say at first, but I knew that my mom would want to know everything if our situations had been reversed and I was the one found beaten to death.

“I was kidnapped, too,” I confessed. “But I lost my memory, that’s why I wanted to see Nicole. I found her name written on a piece of paper and I thought she might know something.”

“Did they beat you, too?” Mrs. Hernandez asked, a concerned expression on her face.

“No, I wasn’t beaten.”

“But you think the same person took my Nicole?”

I paused, not sure if I should tell her the truth. Even if it was the same person, that still didn’t mean we’d ever be able to find them. “I do,” I answered at last. “I definitely think it was the same person.”

...

Mrs. Hernandez made us come in for hot chocolate and cookies, which we ate sitting in cozy, overstuffed chairs in front of the fire. The mantle was covered with photos of Nicole. One showed her playing varsity basketball—she’d been hoping to get a scholarship to UCLA—while in another she wore soccer shorts and a T-shirt. There was a snapshot of her as a little girl standing before a Christmas tree—she was dressed as an angel with broad, white wings—and a large, silver-framed photo showed her in a floor-length, white quincea?era dress, a glittering tiara holding her long, dark, curly hair in place.