17 & Gone(74)

Jamie echoes what’s coursing through my mind. “You think that’s the same guy?”

I nod.

“I’ve been thinking. About him. That night. I’m not sure he was an officer . . .

A security guard, maybe. But police?”

“My mom said he wasn’t,” I say.

Whatever his name is, whoever he is, we watch him struggling with the locks on the door of the maintenance shed.

Pushing the door open, disappearing inside.

“You saw that, too?” I say quietly to Jamie, wanting to be absolutely sure. My eyes can’t be trusted. I’m not positive if any part of me can be trusted from now on.

Jamie only nods, watching. He stays very, very silent. His body straightens and I swear he goes cold, colder than the snow we’re knee-deep in right now.

Near us, the fires continue to burn. But if we walk the path down and out of the campground, we’d have to pass the maintenance shed. I know now that the man isn’t a police officer, and I feel very sure that we don’t want him to see us.

He comes out carrying some things in his arms—papers? A bag, or some kind of blanket? We’re not close enough to see what—and then he turns fast, down a side path and into the trees, which I guess is another way to get on and off the campground that I didn’t know about.

He’s gone, just like that. He came here only to take some things from that shed, and he left with the fires still burning.

Jamie’s focus is all on me now, saying we have to go. We have to call 911 about the fires, and we have to get me out of here, and he’s torn, I can tell, not sure what to do first. I’m reeking with kerosene, my face surely blackened by fire smoke and ash—I can tell when I cough and wipe my mouth and a streak of soot comes off on my sleeve. But when we reach the bottom of the hill, when we get to the turn that will take us to the camp exit, where my van and whatever car Jamie used to get himself here is parked, I stop and ground my feet in. The door to the maintenance shed is no longer locked. In fact, it hangs partly open, as if there’s nothing in there to hide.

Of course I have to see.

Jamie doesn’t understand; he’s still pulling me away, saying we need to get out of there, I’ll be caught, they’ll know I did this, I’ll be arrested for arson, and more things I can’t hear. The fires are burning. And yet I won’t budge.

I feel sure I’m going to find someone inside that shed.

I imagine her: Abby Sinclair, in the flesh. I imagine with so much of me that I even begin to think I can hear her voice.

That she’s in there. That I’ve brought her to life. That now she’s calling out—for help, from me.

Fiona Burke was right: Setting the fires has led me to her, the real girl she is apart from her Missing poster. It’s happened as Fiona told me it would.

Even Jamie should be able to see.

But now the image before me flickers, and it’s not the dreamscape that comes back to me this time. It’s the questions.

In a rush I think about what the doctor said. Those nurses at the hospital, the ones who couldn’t remember my name, who gave me the pills in the little paper cup. Does this mean they’re right about me?

This girl shouting for my help, she’s a voice in my head—that’s what they’d tell me. They’d tell me Fiona Burke is a figment of my imagination, one grown from a traumatic night in my past and turned real. They’d tell me all the girls are visions I’ve brought to life from the Missing notices I found online and on bulletin boards and in the post office.

Those girls may indeed be real, but my dreams that star them, my conversations among them, the memories of theirs I’ve walked through, all of that, every detail and flash of color and cough of smoke, every ounce, is a delusion I’ve concocted. Isn’t that what the doctor would tell me? These girls don’t know I exist. They don’t know I’ve claimed them and made them a part of my life, sleeping with their photocopied faces under my mattress every night. That this is my psychosis.

That I was—and continue to be— making this all up.

But then I have to answer the questions with more questions: What if that voice calling for help is real?

What if I’ve found Abby Sinclair, who went missing from this place months ago and who’s been kept here, a prisoner, all this time? What if I made everything up except for this?

All I have to do is push open that door to find out.

And if there’s no one inside, if there’s no body attached to the voice that’s screaming and I turn around and I feel my throat and I discover it’s my own voice, my delusion, my dream come to violent life, I’ll admit I’m wrong.

I’ll be what they say I am, and I’ll disown all I’ve seen. I’ll swallow the pills for the rest of my natural-born life.

— 62 —

WHEN the door opens to silence— and darkness; and no girl, alive or not alive; no girl at all—I think I’ve lost everything. Most of all, my mind.

Because I was wrong. Everything about me is wrong.

Maybe that’s why I’m not able to see the shine of it for some time. But when I do—when it catches the light somehow, when it flashes, brighter than the fire outside and brighter than all the snow— my breath goes with it.

It fell, I guess, on the ground, when he was carrying out whatever he had in his arms. It fell facedown, splayed open on the concrete.