Vanishing Girls(62)

“How did you know?” she says in a whisper. Her expression turns fearful. “Who are you?”

“My sister.” My voice cracks. I swallow down the taste of sawdust. I have a thousand questions, but can’t make a single one come into focus. “My sister works here. Or at least, she used to work here. I think—I think she’s in trouble. I think something bad may have happened to her.” I’m watching Kennedy’s face for signs of recognition or guilt. But she’s still staring up at me with huge, hollowed eyes, as if I’m the one to be afraid of. “Something like what happened to Madeline.”

Immediately I know it was the wrong thing to say. Now she doesn’t look afraid. She looks angry.

“I don’t know anything,” she says firmly, as if it’s a line she’s been practicing repeatedly. She starts to buzz up the window. “Just leave me alone.”

“Wait.” Out of desperation, I stick my hand in the narrowing gap between the car door and the window. Kennedy lets out a hiss of irritation, but at least she rolls the window down again. “I need your help.”

“I told you. I don’t know anything.” She’s losing it again, like she did downstairs in Andre’s office. Her voice hitches higher, wobbling over the words. “I left early that night. I thought Sarah had gone home. She was drunk. That’s what I thought, when I came into the parking lot and saw the car door hanging open—that Sarah had been too wasted to remember to close it. That she’d taken Maddie home in a cab.”

I imagine the car, the open door, the empty backseat. Light spilling from Beamer’s just like it is tonight, the muffled thud of music, the distant crash of waves. Up the street, the peaked roof of an Applebee’s, a few low-rent condominiums clinging to the shore, a diner and a surf shop. Across the street: a greasy clam shack, a former T-shirt shop, now in foreclosure. Everything is so normal, so relentlessly the same—it’s almost impossible to believe in all the bad things, the tragedies, the dark fairy-tale twists.

One second she was there; the next she was gone.

Without realizing it, I’ve been holding on to the car as if it will help me keep on my feet. To my surprise, Kennedy reaches out and grips my hand. Her fingers are icy.

“I didn’t know.” Even though she’s whispering, this is it: the high note, the crescendo. “It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t my fault.”

Her eyes are huge and dark, mirrors of the sky. For a second we stand there, only inches apart, staring at each other, and I know that in some way, we understand each other.

“It wasn’t your fault,” I say, because I know that this is what she wants—or needs—me to tell her.

She withdraws her hand, sighing a little, like someone who’s been walking all day and finally gets to sit.

“Hey!”

I whip around and freeze. Andre has just pushed out of the front doors. Backlit, he seems to be made wholly of shadow. “Hey, you!”

“Shit.” Kennedy twists around in her seat. “Go,” she says to me, her voice low, urgent. Then the window zips up and she guns it, her tires skidding a little on the gravel. I have to jump backward to keep from getting crushed; I bang my shin on a license plate, feel a dull nip of pain in my leg.

“Hey, you. Stop!”


Panic makes me slow. I skid across the lot, regretting my sandals now. My body feels unwieldy, bloated and foreign, like in those nightmares where you try to run and find you haven’t gone anywhere.

Andre is fast. I can hear his footsteps pounding on the gravel as he ricochets between parked cars.

I reach the car at last and hurl myself inside. My fingers are shaking so badly it takes me three tries to get the keys in the ignition. But I do, finally, and wrench the gear into reverse.

“Stop.” Andre slams up against my window, palms flat, face contorted with rage, and I scream. I punch down on the gas, whipping away from him even as he drums a fist against my hood. “Stop, damn it!”

I throw the gear into drive, cutting the wheel to the left, my palms slick with sweat even though my whole body is freezing. Little whimpers are working their way out of my throat, spasms of sound. He makes a final lunge at me, as if to throw himself in front of the car, but I’m already pulling away, bumping onto Route 101 and flooring it, watching the speedometer slowly tick upward.

Come on come on come on.

I half expect him to appear again on the road. But I check the rearview mirror and see nothing but empty highway; and then the road curves and bears me away from Beamer’s, away from Andre, toward home.





JULY 30


Nick


12:35 a.m.

I exit the highway in Springfield, where Dara and I used to take music lessons before our parents realized we had less than no talent, and zigzag through the streets, still paranoid that Andre might be pursuing me. Finally I park in the lot behind an all-night McDonald’s, reassured by the motion of the employees behind the counters, and the sight of a young couple eating burgers in a booth by the window, laughing.

I pull out my phone and do a quick search of the Madeline Snow case.

The most recent results pop up first, a stream of new blog posts, comments, and articles.

What Does the Snow Family Know? The first article I click on was posted to the Blotter only a few hours ago, at 10:00 p.m.