Lost Girls(3)

All of them waiting for something.

I glanced up at Agent Bennet, wondering what he wanted.

“Do you know any of these girls?” he asked.

I ran a gaze over them again, imagining them stretching on the barre, wearing one-piece black leotards, or running down the hall at Lincoln High, wearing jeans and Tshirts, backpacks slung over their shoulders. Six girls looked up at me, wanting me to know their names, but I was lucky to remember my own name right now.

I shook my head. “Who are they?”

He started listing them off as if they were his younger sisters; every time he touched a photo he would say the girl’s name and his jaw would shift, just a fraction, as if the muscle was working too hard. As I expected, he said six names I didn’t recognize—Emily, Hannah, Madison, Nicole, Haley, and Brooke—then he spoke again, still staring down at their faces.

“All these girls have gone missing within the past three months. Two of them disappeared after school, like you did. Three left home for sporting events but never came back. One girl told her mother she was spending the weekend with a friend, but the friend waited and waited. The girl never showed up.”

He paused, then looked directly into my eyes, watching me so closely that a trickle of sweat began to run down my neck. “You’re the only girl who has come back,” he said, leaning forward. “How did you get away?”

How was I supposed to know? My skin started to heat up, a feeling of being trapped started to overwhelm me, and my breathing turned ragged and raw. I needed to get out of here.

I shook my head, my stomach roiling. “I don’t remember.”

“There were pine needles stuck to your clothes, Rachel, and seedpods that can only be found in the San Gabriel Mountains. Could someone have been holding you captive in the mountains?”

That smell of cedar and pine came back, as if he had conjured it. It wafted around me, oozing out of the floorboards and the seams where the walls met. It curled like smoke away from the mirror until foggy clouds covered the floor. I fought a gag reflex, holding my right hand over my mouth. Without realizing it, I pushed my chair backward, accidentally knocking it to the floor with a loud crash. I struggled to my feet.

At the same time, the door behind me clicked and swung open. A woman dressed in a navy blue suit looked in at us, a stern expression on her face as she glanced from me to Agent Bennet. “That’s enough for today, Bennet. In fact, it’s enough, period. Miss Evans can go home now. Her parents have been waiting for more than an hour.”

One hand still over my mouth and nose, trying to block out the stench of pine and cedar, I stumbled past her, heading down the hallway. But no matter how fast I walked, I could still hear the two of them arguing.

“You will not follow this line of questioning any further, do you understand, Bennet?” the woman was saying. “This girl has been traumatized enough.”

“But there’s something here that connects these cases. I’m sure of it. Something we’re overlooking—”

“Half of these girls are probably runaways. There’s not enough evidence to prove they fall into the category of Violent Crimes Against Children, or that these cases are related—”

The farther I walked away from them, the more their voices faded, which was what I wanted. I could see Mom and Dad and Kyle through a large glass window up ahead, all of them waving at me, big smiles on their faces like we were going to Disneyland.

The two agents behind me probably hadn’t realized that I could still hear them. It was like I was invisible. I tried to ignore them and forget about what might have happened during that two-week period when I was lost.

Except now, after talking to that FBI agent, I knew that I wasn’t the only one. There were other girls out there who had gone missing, too.

And they were still lost.





Chapter Three


We all piled into Dad’s SUV and headed away from the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office. Dad drove while Mom sat in the front passenger seat, chewing her fingernails, staring out the window, occasionally saying something overly cheerful like, we need to take a family vacation or isn’t the weather gorgeous today? Dad didn’t say much. He’d been a lot quieter since his last tour in Afghanistan, right before he retired from the Navy last year. A new Taylor Swift song played on the radio, one I didn’t recognize—apparently she’d released another album during my missing year. Cars drove past that I’d never seen before, some new model of Mini-Coop and a sporty-looking Kia.

It felt like I’d been to Mars and back since I went to sleep last night.

Even worse, I didn’t fit in with my family.

I was as tall as Mom now, but I used to be two inches shorter. Kyle, my little brother, wasn’t little anymore. He towered over both me and Mom.

Dad was the same. Almost.

There were worry lines on his forehead and around his eyes, an expression of dread that never seemed to leave him. I was used to him making me feel safe. Now something about me put him on edge.

It was weird, but I could remember almost anything, as long as it had happened more than a year ago. It felt like someone had erased the hard drive in my brain, leaving a handful of important folders empty. It didn’t make sense to me. Why had I only been gone for two weeks, but my memories of the whole last year were gone? The therapist had tried to explain it, saying that I had a form of retrograde amnesia, possibly combined with PTSD, and that it would take a while before my memories came back—if ever.