Don't Look for Me(48)

I pull Alice close. “It’s fine now. You’re safe.”

“Thank you so much!” she says. She is not a good actress, and I file this away with everything else I know about her.

“How did the butter get on the stove?” I ask her.

“I was trying to put it on the bread and it just fell off. I didn’t think it would cause any problems. I didn’t know butter could burn like that.” She says this very loud, as though she knows her voice has to carry. I think that maybe there are no cameras in this kitchen after all.

“Okay,” I say. “It’s okay. How could you know that?”

I finish cleaning up. I heat the soup, butter the bread, and serve us dinner at the table. Alice glances out the door to the living room.

“Alice,” I say.

“Yes?”

“Can Dolly see in the kitchen?”

Coy Face comes, and Alice slowly moves her head left to right. No.

Then her eyes move back to the living room. I follow them and see a monitor on the wall in the corner near the door. It sits at an angle that can see the table, but not the stove. Not the sink.

And not the cupboard beneath the sink.

The cupboard which I opened to look for a dish towel, and where I found remnants of some household products. Old sponges. Dish soap. WD-40.

And a bottle of antifreeze.

I smile at Alice. I place my hand on her back and gently rub it up and down. Coy Face becomes Happy Face, which has a nice big smile.

And then I smile too.





20


Day fourteen





Nic walked quickly through the parking lot. The air was cold enough to see her breath. And still enough to hear her steps on the pavement. Watkins was long gone. The woman had vanished as well, between a row of cars, maybe to the back of the building.

Inside, Nic stopped, leaned against a wall just beneath one of the mounted cameras. She didn’t want to be seen. Not by anyone.

She pulled out her phone but there was no one to call.

Her father had lied to her about the handwriting analysis.

Roger Booth had lied about Daisy Hollander, about being the boyfriend she’d been running away from when she disappeared.

And Watkins had failed to mention he owned a dark gray truck. Now that she thought about it, so had Officer Reyes. And who else? This was a small town. Watkins must drive that truck when he is off duty. Up and down Hastings Pass. Day after day. Year after year. All of them would have seen it—Booth, Mrs. Urbansky. Reyes. Even Kurt Kent, the bartender.

And what about Kurt? He’d driven her all the way into those woods to meet Daisy’s sister, knowing about Roger Booth the whole time.

There was no one she trusted.

Was that true? Or was she just being paranoid? So what if Watkins drove a gray truck? Edith Moore couldn’t even be sure of the color. It might have been black or brown. And so what if Watkins picked up a prostitute one day, then helped teenagers with scholarships the next? People were complicated. She’d learned that from all those nights spent in bars. She wasn’t a sheltered teenager anymore.

Still, her life these past five years had left her with just one person she could trust—and that person was now missing.

What now? She thought about her car just outside. She could leave—drive straight home. Her father would come and collect her things from the inn. She didn’t have to stay here. There was nothing left to do.

The sea of humanity was all around her, coming from or going to the casino that was just on the other side of the lobby. So many faces—happy, pensive, worried, excited. The energy began to seep inside, feeding the panic that had already taken hold.

Maybe everyone was lying to her for this very reason. Because she couldn’t handle the facts. The truth. Because she hadn’t been able to navigate her life since Annie died.

She drew a breath but couldn’t feel it reach her lungs. It felt shallow. Suffocating.

They weren’t wrong. After that Sunday afternoon when she’d had that first drink, she hadn’t been able to go back. It’s just peer pressure, the school had told her worried parents after she’d been drunk at a dance. This will scare her and she’ll stop. After all, she had so much to lose. Williams College had offered her early acceptance. She was captain of the cross country team. In the running for valedictorian.

And then, after they’d found vodka in a water bottle she kept in her locker, the counselors had gotten involved. It’s survivor’s guilt, they’d said. That one she’d read just recently in her mother’s emails and it all made perfect sense now. How they made her go to therapy sessions where they talked about how she’d done nothing wrong by continuing to live.

After the third time when she’d passed out in the school bathroom, drunk off her ass, the month before graduation—her grades on free fall—they’d had no choice but to expel her. The new theory—she was looking for attention. She’d tried to get it by being good but it hadn’t been enough. Now she had to be bad. The horror that had followed was now a powerful, visceral memory. Therapy sessions with both parents, telling her they loved her and how sorry they were that they hadn’t noticed her suffering because they’d been dealing with their own.

No one listened to her about the hollow spaces that nothing could fill. They didn’t understand how they’d come to be there if not from some affliction out of their textbooks. She wished she’d had a film of it—of Annie running and Nic screaming and then the car and the blood. The dozens of missed calls on her phone from their mother, begging to know if they were all right. Why hadn’t Annie made it to her friend’s house for the playdate?