The Quarry Girls(44)

She took the tumbler, still full of water, from me. I was grateful she didn’t follow me to Maureen’s room, though it made my heart hurt to think of where she would go. There was so little space left. She was burying herself alive. Maureen’s room, as messy as it was, felt like the only place I could breathe in the whole house.

I started at Maureen’s drawers. I didn’t locate a diary, but I found the shirt that I’d let her borrow so long ago it wouldn’t fit either of us anymore. I tucked it in my back pocket so I could show it to Mrs. Hansen if I ran into her on the way out. Then I ran my hand behind her vanity mirror, scoured the corners of her closet, shuffled the sticky stash of lip gloss on her nightstand. Nothing. I flopped on her bed and stared outside. Claude’s house was directly across, his bedroom window matching up almost perfectly with Maureen’s. He’d had to tell her to pull her shades on more than one occasion.

The only place left to search was under her mattress, exactly where I kept my diary. I shoved my hand between her box spring and mattress. It seemed too cliché, too teen-girl-normal for someone like Maureen to not only keep a diary but to tuck it in her bed, but there it was, a hard angle that bit my fingers. I tugged it out. It was a college-ruled spiral-bound notebook, a slobbering, rabid-looking dog sketched on the front cover above the words “Open at Your Own Risk.”

I ran my hands over the image. I didn’t know Maureen could draw.

What else hadn’t I known about Maureen?

I opened to the first page. It contained two bleak sentences, scribbled so heavily that they scratched through to the next page.

If I disappear, I’ve been murdered. Don’t let him get away with it.





BETH


The men’s voices overhead grew louder, like they were coming closer.

Beth hadn’t thought much of him when he visited the diner. He was just a man she recognized from the background of her life. Sure, he’d sometimes wait for a table in her section rather than take an open one. Her skin had prickled, the way he always kept one eye on her even when he was talking to other people, when he thought she wouldn’t notice.

She noticed.

The problem was that he was one of a handful of men treating her that way.

Every waitress had a group of guys who mistook professional courtesy for a personal relationship. She’d never liked it, but she’d thought she understood it. As far as she could tell, men didn’t have close friendships, not like women did, but they still had that human need for connection. Every movie and TV show and magazine article told them it was their job to go out and grab what they wanted at the same time it told them that women were theirs for the taking. It made sense that a few of the duller knives in the drawer would get their wires crossed, confuse lurking for courtship, and who could blame them?

That’s what she used to think.

Now she knew better.

They weren’t misguided, these men who couldn’t take a hint, who kept at a woman who was clearly uninterested. They were broken. Few of them would go so far as kidnapping, sure, but every one of them was after someone they could make feel less than, someone they imagined was beneath them, and they believed every woman was beneath them.

He’d forced her into his game before she knew the rules, but her blinders were off now.

She was close to freeing the spike, maybe another couple hours of digging, but if he came into the room before she got it out, she wasn’t going to lie down for him again. Didn’t matter if she didn’t have the railroad spike loose. She’d eat his face. Twist his balls. Draw far enough back that she could drive her fist into his throat, just like he’d done to her, and laugh like a banshee the entire time.

She realized she was gulping air.

He’d dropped by the Northside Diner the day before he’d abducted her. It was the beginning of dinner rush, so he’d had to wait fifteen minutes for her section. She had spotted him as she bustled around, staring at her but trying to look like he wasn’t. It was so obvious. Didn’t he know how obvious he was? Then he was seated. He didn’t bother opening his menu because he always ordered the Pantown special—Salisbury steak with mashed potatoes and gravy, side of creamed corn—but this time, for the first time, he’d asked her about her day.

“It’s good,” she’d said, pushing her hair from her face, leaning back to glance into the kitchen. Table seven’s fish fry was up. “The usual?”

“Aren’t you going to ask me about my day?” he’d asked. His voice was sharp.

She slapped on her best grin. “How was your day?”

“Poor, until now.”

She nodded. He ordered. See? It was so normal.

He’d even asked her about college later, after the rush slowed. Feeling generous, her apron pocket fat with tips, she’d told him she was heading to Berkeley in three short weeks. He’d seemed delighted at that.

Nice, even.

He’d been hiding. Were they all hiding in plain sight, the monsters? She thought of her dad, and it about split her heart in two. He was a gentle man, an accountant who loved to garden. He’d married her mom during their sophomore year of college, twenty-four years earlier. Their faces still went blurry with love when they looked at each other, and to this day, they shored each other up even when they were annoyed. They held hands when they watched television, for chrissakes. It was their love that had made her realize Mark wasn’t her forever guy, even though he was a kind man, truly kind.