First Girl Gone(5)
Charlie closed her eyes, trying not to listen to her sister prattle on.
For a dead girl, she sure never shut up.
Chapter Two
With Misty Dawkins gone and the office empty once more, a cold feeling settled over Charlie—that bone-deep chill that belonged to the deepest, darkest parts of winter. Even as she worked—setting up interviews with Kara Dawkins’ friends and family and running basic background checks—her mind lingered on Allie’s disappearance all those years ago. Creeping gray memories flashed through her mind.
She saw Allie as a cackling toddler, cookies crammed into her sticky little fists. She’d pushed a dining room chair into the kitchen to commandeer the sweets in the highest cupboard for her and Charlie. So long ago now.
Next, she saw Allie as a teenager, perpetually smirking, her hair chopped short and dyed pitch-black for that one year—the year she hated everything, as Allie herself later described it.
Allie would have been sixteen that year. Only two years before she’d disappeared, and yet she’d changed so much in such a short time after, changed and changed again. Every year seemed so much longer at that age, the personality shifts coming hard and fast every three months or so.
And then, jumping to the time after Allie had vanished, Charlie saw the empty bed where Allie was supposed to be, her sister’s half of the room taking on a hushed reverence during the time she was missing. A quiet place, somber, it felt more like being in church than a bedroom, felt terribly empty without her.
They searched for nearly three weeks, and during that time, everyone kept holding on to the hope that she was still alive. That’s what they kept saying, anyway. “She’s out there somewhere.”
Until her sister’s foot washed up on one of the public beaches. No one pretended she was alive after that.
Charlie saw the funeral, all the people draped in black. Uncomfortable. Muted. Her mother sobbing the whole way through. The visitations. The service. The wake. Rituals stripped of meaning, reduced to a blur of strangely formal images in her memory.
Each of these memories conjured ancient feelings, awakened them, brought them back fully fleshed out, just as intricate and potent as they were back then. The level of detail in each one bewildered Charlie. Together they overwhelmed her.
Charlie moved to the coffee machine in the corner of her office, the too-hot burner there slowly cooking decent coffee down into a thick gloop. She poured herself a cup. Drank. The coffee still tasted good enough for now—only faintly burned—but the scalding liquid couldn’t touch the cold feeling that had settled over her. Maybe nothing could.
The investigation into Allie’s disappearance had focused heavily on a local hermit, Leroy Gibbs, who did odd jobs around town, but the evidence was circumstantial, and despite a media frenzy upon his arrest, the charges were eventually dropped due to a lack of evidence. The crime was never solved, the wound never closed. And while the town moved on and mostly forgot as the years crept by, the Winters family never recovered.
The grief killed Charlie’s father rapidly, taking him out by way of a stroke just two years later at forty-nine. It drove her mother to madness, a series of mental breakdowns that shuffled her in and out of the hospital and on and off various medications.
It was during Allie’s funeral that her voice first made an appearance. Charlie couldn’t stop staring at the closed casket.
“You think it’s in there?”
Charlie’s gaze swept to the right, to where she’d heard the voice. There was nothing there but a table with an antique-looking lamp and a vase of tulips.
“The foot, I mean,” Allie’s voice clarified. “My foot. Can they embalm just a foot? Do they put makeup on it? I hope they gave it some polish at least. Nice pop of color.”
Charlie blinked, certain she was going crazy but feeling completely calm about it.
The voice never left after that. Her sister was her constant companion now, sarcastically commenting on everything that happened.
Whether Allie’s presence was psychological or supernatural, Charlie couldn’t say, but she was in no hurry to fix the problem. Even if Allie only existed in her imagination, she didn’t want to lose her again.
Charlie went to take another sip of coffee but found her mug empty. She moved to the kitchenette in the room beyond the office. Rinsed her mug. The warm water felt good on the tips of her fingers.
She still couldn’t believe she was back here on Salem Island, working in the office her uncle Frank had set up decades ago: A1 Investigations. He’d worked the standard private investigator jobs for all those years—cheating spouses, background checks, a touch of surveillance now and again. With him out of commission due to cancer and her stepping in, it was as though she’d inherited the family business by default—the prodigal niece returning to fulfill her destiny—even if Frank was still hanging in there for now, going through chemo treatments, looking quite hairless at the moment.
But this wasn’t Charlie’s destiny. She wasn’t supposed to be here, didn’t belong here at all.
With what had happened to Allie and her parents, Charlie had taken her first opportunity to flee Salem Island. She’d planned to get far from here and managed to accomplish it pretty well, making it the full 2,395 miles from the east coast of Michigan to the Pacific Ocean.
She’d worked the last eight years as an investigator for a law firm in Seattle. There she did real investigative work—nothing like the menial cases Uncle Frank worked around Salem Island. Corporate fraud, pollution cover-ups, political espionage, hacked elections, embezzled charity money, all the sordid trappings one would expect in a world as corrupt as this one.