A Flicker in the Dark(5)

She’ll turn up, I thought. And when she does, I bet she’ll feel silly for causing such a fuss.

But she didn’t turn up. And three weeks later, another girl went missing.

Four weeks after that, another.

By the end of the summer, six girls had disappeared. One day they were there, and the next—gone. Vanished without a trace.

Now, six missing girls will always be six too many, but in a town like Breaux Bridge, a town so tiny that there’s a noticeable gap in a classroom when one child drops out or a quietness to a neighborhood when a single family moves away, six girls was a weight almost too heavy to bear. Their goneness was impossible to ignore; it was an evil that had settled over the sky the way an impending storm can make your bones throb. You could feel it, taste it, see it in the eyes of every person you met. An inherent distrust had captivated a town that was once so trusting; a suspicion had taken hold that was impossible to shake. One single, unspoken question lingered among us all.

Who’s next?

Curfews were put into place; stores and restaurants closed at dusk. I, like every other girl in town, was forbidden to be outside after dark. Even in the daytime, I felt the evil lurking just behind every corner. The anticipation that it would be me—that I would be next—was always there, always present, always suffocating.

“You’ll be fine, Chloe. You don’t have anything to worry about.”

I remember my brother hoisting on his backpack one morning before summer camp; I was crying, again, too afraid to leave the house.

“She does have something to worry about, Cooper. This is serious.”

“She’s too young,” he said. “She’s only twelve. He likes teenagers, remember?”

“Cooper, please.”

My mother crouched down to the floor, positioned herself at eye level, tucked a strand of hair behind my ear.

“This is serious, honey, but just be careful. Be vigilant.”

“Don’t get into a car with strangers,” Cooper said, sighing. “Don’t walk down dark alleys alone. It’s all pretty obvious, Chlo. Just don’t be stupid.”

“Those girls weren’t stupid,” my mother snapped, her voice quiet but sharp. “They were unlucky. In the wrong place at the wrong time.”

I turn in to the CVS parking lot now and pull through the pharmacy drive-through. There’s a man standing behind the sliding glass window, busying himself with stapling various bottles into paper bags. He slides the window open and doesn’t bother to look up.

“Name?”

“Daniel Briggs.”

He glances at me, clearly not a Daniel. He taps a few keys on the computer before him and speaks again.

“Date of birth?”

“May 2, 1982.”

He turns around, shuffles through the B basket. I watch him grab a paper bag and walk toward me again, my hands gripped tightly on the wheel to stop them from fidgeting. He aims his scanner at the bar code and I hear a beep.

“Do you have any questions about the prescription?”

“Nope,” I say, smiling. “All good.”

He pushes the bag through his window and into mine; I snatch it, push it deep into my purse, and roll the window up again, pulling away without so much as a goodbye.

I drive for a few more minutes, my purse on the passenger seat radiating from the mere presence of the pills inside. It used to baffle me how easy it was to pick up prescriptions for other people; as long as you know the birthday that matches the name on file, most pharmacists never even ask for a driver’s license. And if they do, simple explanations usually work.

Oh, shoot, it’s in my other purse.

I’m actually his fiancée—do you need me to provide the address on file?

I turn in to my Garden District neighborhood and start the journey down a mile-long stretch of road that always leaves me disoriented, the way I imagine scuba divers feel when they find themselves completely enveloped in darkness, a darkness so dark even their own hand placed inches from their face would get lost.

All sense of direction—gone. All sense of control—gone.

Without any houses to illuminate the roadway or floodlights to reveal the twisting arms of the trees that line the street, when the sun goes down, this road gives the illusion of driving straight into a pool of ink, disappearing into a vast nothingness, falling endlessly into a bottomless hole.

I hold my breath, push my foot down on the gas just a little bit harder.

Finally, I can sense my turn approaching. I flick on my blinker, even though there’s nobody behind me, just more black, and veer right into our cul-de-sac, releasing my breath when I pass the first streetlight revealing the road toward home.

Home.

That, too, is a loaded phrase. A home isn’t just a house, a collection of bricks and boards held together by concrete and nails. It’s more emotional than that. A home is safety, security. The place you go back to when the curfew clock strikes nine.

But what if your home isn’t safe? Isn’t secure?

What if the outstretched arms you collapse into on your porch steps are the same arms you should be running from? The same arms that grabbed those girls, squeezed their necks, and buried their bodies before washing their own hands clean?

What if your home is where it all started: the epicenter of the earthquake that shook your town to the core? The eye of the hurricane that ripped apart families, lives, you? Everything you had ever known?