17 & Gone(75)

I am holding it in my hands when I hear the sirens. When the fire truck comes and the police after that. I am holding it in my hands.

It’s made of plastic; it’s purple, gaudy,

and

shiny,

with

glitter

sandwiched between the translucent decorative sleeves. Its pockets are stuffed full, so the single snap doesn’t work to keep it closed. And inside there are pictures of her and her friends, and a mass of loose change that spills out all over my boots, nickels mostly, and there’s an ID card from a Catholic school in New Jersey, and ticket stubs and clothing tags and little scrawled notes for things she may have wanted to remember and a dollop of chewed gum making some of the contents stick together forever.

It’s Abby Sinclair’s wallet, and I know this before it comes open because of what her former camp counselor told me about the things she took with her the night she went to meet Luke. And I know simply because I know, in my gut. As if she reached out from the ether and told me so herself. I knew it as soon as I had the thing in my hands.

It’s over soon after I find it.

The fires lured them all here, and with them comes all the noise.

The shouting. A dog barking. Sirens.

The door being kicked all the way open.

The men bursting in. Hands up. Knees in snow. The fire truck, the firemen. Lights.

Confusion. The wallet being taken from me. A girl’s name on my lips. Police on the way, and then here. My mom. The feel of my mom’s intact and pounding heart through her coat. Lights. A blanket wrapped around me. The tight ties around my wrists. Questions. Losing sight of Jamie. The backseat of a police car. Lights. The sound of fires being put out. The darkness as the lights go down.

The remembered feel of that wallet, that old chewed piece of gum. The smell of kerosene on my clothes, in my hair. The taste of it on my tongue.

Out the window: the calm, blue sign that

says LADY-OF-THE-PINES SUMMER

CAMP FOR GIRLS fading away and the quiet oasis of my mind that shrinks off with it.

Then pine trees. The pine trees of Dorsett Road as I’m carried away. The same stretch of pine trees Abby must have seen the last night she was here.

— 63 —

THERE are things I don’t understand, things I was a part of without even knowing I was taking part. I guess I was one girl trying to make sense of them.

And trying to fight them, in a way that made sense only to me.

“How did you know to go looking in that shed?”

I’m asked this again and again, the night of the fires and in the days after. By firemen. By police. By my doctor, once I was returned to the hospital. By my own mom. Never by Jamie, though. He doesn’t ask me how I knew to stay and search in there—I guess because he saw the force that propelled me that night, couldn’t help but see the living fire of it in my eyes.

Because that’s the thing: I thought it was over. I thought finding something that belonged to her (and the glittery purple plastic wallet with her school ID

inside did belong to her; police verified that) meant the worst I could imagine, and I did imagine. I thought it was too late. I thought she was dead. I held something of hers in my hands and then I held only my hands in my hands, when they took the wallet for evidence, my arms wound around my back and zip-tied there as I waited inside the squad car to be taken to the station and charged with arson. I told myself awful things.

Convinced myself she was gone. My voices told me, or some voiceless part of me told me, or the synapses in my head broke open and trotted out a song-and-dance made up of kicking legs and flapping lies to tell me. It doesn’t matter how I thought I knew.

I was wrong.

Turns out Abby Sinclair was still alive.

Officer Heaney was no police officer —he’s a man who worked maintaining the campgrounds, who visited often during the off-season, who lived nearby.

He’s a man who was working at Lady-of-the-Pines the summer Abby Sinclair disappeared. What was found in that maintenance shed, what I handed over to police, with my descriptions and Jamie’s of the man we saw, led to uncover who he was, and where he lived, and what— who—he’d stolen.

I was told she knew him. All the Lady-of-the-Pines girls did. So when she was walking back on foot after overhearing Luke on the phone with another girl, after stumbling off her bike and leaving it behind at Luke’s and rushing off into the dark to get away from him, she ran into this man on the road. I don’t know where on the road; no one told me so specifically. But I can imagine it.

Like Isabeth, she got in the car. Even though, like Shyann, she wanted to run off and hide forever in the trees, because her heart was broken. Like Jannah, she went off with someone she thought she could trust. And like Hailey, she was assumed to have run away . . . even though all this time she was really missing.

The car pulled over, and the man leaned out an arm. “Hey, hey, Abby— Your name’s Abby, right? What are you doing out there? You okay?”

And she was nervous at first—anyone hearing a car stop short on a lone road at night would be—and, besides, she didn’t want him to turn her in to the counselors.

She’d get kicked out. But his face was friendly enough, and she’d talked to him before, that one time the sink got clogged full of hair and he came to Cabin 3 to fix it. Not to mention, she’d skinned her knee when she fell off the bicycle in Luke’s driveway, before she left the bike there and took off on foot, and she still had another mile to walk back to camp with her knee bleeding.