Vanishing Girls (Detective Josie Quinn #1)(40)

“I’m glad,” Josie said.

“I doubt any of this is helpful to you, but that’s what happened.”

“It was helpful,” Josie assured her. She looked at her cell phone. “My time is almost up. I’ll get out of your life. Let me give you my cell phone number though. If you remember anything else—anything at all—you can call me.”





Chapter Thirty-One





She lost track of how much time had passed. Her terror was a never-ending cycle of darkness and deprivation. When her stomach clenched from hunger, she couldn’t tell if it had been hours or days since she had last eaten. Whether her eyes were open or closed, she saw nothing. Every inch of her small prison had been carefully catalogued; there was no way out. Part of her feared the return of the man, but another part of her longed for an interruption to the utter darkness. To the silence.

She began to fear the light more than the darkness: the chink of the door opening, the slice of his flashlight stabbing through her pupils like shards of glass. When she could pry her eyes open long enough to try to see him, she couldn’t focus. He seemed to be everywhere at once, and nowhere at all. The center of a blinding sun. When he finally brought food, she ate it with her eyes closed, shoveling it into her mouth hungrily with both hands, squatting in the corner of the chamber like a wild animal.

All she could depend on was her sense of smell. By the third time he came to her, she could sense him before the door to her cell creaked open. His scent traveled along the dirt floor like a colorless mist, filtering through the cracks, jabbing her awake like the elbow of an unwanted visitor. He smelled of tobacco, detergent, and onions. If she ever got away from him, she would know that smell anywhere.

Sometimes he knelt beside her and stroked her hair. For once, gentle. But she didn’t like it. There was something worse about that than the way he had dragged her through the woods or thrown her against the wall. She didn’t like the way his breath quickened as he did it.





Chapter Thirty-Two





Josie’s mind worked through the facts as she drove away from Ginger Blackwell’s house. So Ginger had been drugged. Josie had taken enough statements from girls at the college in Denton who’d been roofied to know that Ginger Blackwell’s abductors had used date rape drugs: Rohypnol, GHB, ketamine. It could have been any one of the most popular ones, or a combination. Any of them would lower inhibitions, sedate, and generally destroy any chance of her remembering what happened. That would certainly account for the flash-cut memories.

She wondered if the woman on the side of the road was involved. She must have been, otherwise she would have come forward after Ginger’s disappearance. Although it was difficult to imagine a woman nearing eighty being involved in abducting women. Josie had seen news footage of the salon owner who had found Ginger’s abandoned vehicle. She didn’t look sick, and she certainly wasn’t elderly. So who was Chemo Lady, and was she really sick or was the headscarf just a disguise to inspire sympathy in a passerby? If she wasn’t involved, what happened to her and why hadn’t she come forward?

Then there was the rock formation. The one that looked like a standing man. Josie vaguely remembered something like this from her childhood but couldn’t remember how old she had been or where she had seen it. There was something there, at the edge of her consciousness, but she couldn’t reach it. Mentally, she ticked through all the rock formations she and Ray had catalogued during their childhood. They used to use them as markers. Meet me at Broken Heart. The one in the woods behind Denton East High School that looked like a heart with one of its humps missing. I’ll be at Turtle at ten. The one a mile behind Ray’s childhood home shaped like a turtle’s shell that they used to sit on and get drunk and fool around on in high school. See you at the Stacks. That one was used by lots of kids in Denton, in the woods near the old textile mill at the bottom of a rock face where several slabs of rocks had fallen from the side of the mountain, making large stacks of flat rocks. She and Ray had made out there too. She smiled to herself. There were many more, she knew; she just couldn’t think of them.

They would be in her photos from high school though. She could look through them when she got home. From the cup holder next to her seat, her cell phone rang. Glancing down quickly she saw a selfie of her and Luke, their faces pressed together, all smiles. She reached down, pressed answer and then speaker, and said, “Hello, darling.”

Luke’s voice sounded tinny. “Are you in the car?”

“Yeah, what’s up?”

“Where are you?”

“I, uh, drove to the craft store,” she said.

“The what?”

“The craft store. You told me to take up knitting.”

She could picture him shaking his head, that adorable little smile he got on his face that told her he was only half-serious about whatever it was they were talking about. “I said you should look into getting a hobby. I’m not sure you’ll be satisfied with knitting. Although, hey, maybe you could do it with your grandmother.”

“She crochets.”

“What’s the difference?”

A green sign to her right indicated the first Denton exit ramp was two miles ahead. She put on her turn signal and got into the right lane. “I’m not sure,” she said with a laugh. “Guess I should find out.”