First Girl Gone(6)

Approaching these through the civil side rather than through criminal law, her law firm never really achieved justice so much as they made some small group of the crooks pay. They couldn’t stop these crimes. They couldn’t even slow them down, but they could sock each bully in the nose a couple times, bloody them up, and make them pay a few million in punitive damages. Justice? Not really. Vengeance? Yes. That blurred line between vengeance and justice made sense to Charlie, fit the way she saw the world. It made it something like her dream job to be part of it.

But eventually things in Seattle went bad. Things always went bad in time, didn’t they?

And now she was back on Salem Island, back where her family had come apart at the seams, their insides pulled out and put on public display. Maybe you could never really get away from something like Allie’s disappearance. Maybe it followed you.

Even now, years later, Charlie suffered recurring nightmares of finding Allie’s body, kneeling down on a patch of bare earth in the woods, fingers scraping at the rich black soil. Sometimes it was Allie’s face that emerged, eyes closed as though she were only sleeping, peaceful if a little colorless. But usually it was her sister’s bones that emerged, white and stark against the dark of the dirt. Some part of her believed, way down deep, that justice would still be served for her sister in this small way, that she could find her way to Allie’s remains, someway, somehow.

Alas, reality offered no such satisfaction. No body found. No resolution.

In real life, justice was lopsided. Halfhearted. Usually unattainable. Even in the best-case scenario, it occurred in shades of gray. Maybe the real thing couldn’t exist in a world like this one.

Still, she couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like, to get that closure in Allie’s case, to dig up her bones. She wanted it so deeply, but could it offer any satisfaction after all this time?

The body could be found, perhaps—the what finally known definitively, but even then the why would still linger. No explanation. No meaning ascribed. Wasn’t that what every family of a victim truly sought? The why. The reasoning. Some sense of meaning they could hang their emotions on.

So many times over the years, Charlie had driven past Leroy Gibbs’ place—a ramshackle farmhouse near the water’s edge. She repeated the ritual every time she was back for the holidays, dredging all those memories up to the surface again, and again, and again. Here was the main suspect—a quiet type, bearded, with fierce eyes—never fully cleared so much as deemed not guilty due to a lack of real information. Here was the house, the place where perhaps her sister had met her end. Could the woods nearby be her resting place, even now?

She didn’t know. Couldn’t know.

And the not knowing became a second wound to go with the one Allie’s absence made, one that festered, one that rotted from the middle out. Like one of those spider bites that went necrotic and ate the flesh away, Charlie thought. The not knowing ate at the meat of you, stripped you down to the bone.

The grief hurt. The loss ached. But the not knowing? The not knowing killed you.

Charlie ripped her hand out from under the hot water pouring out of the faucet, realizing only after she’d scalded herself that she’d zoned out into ghostly memories once again, letting the water run over her fingertips, the heat growing and growing until the hurt shook her awake.

She spritzed cold water on her reddened fingers to stop the burn from getting worse, then shook her hand. The pain held for a moment and receded.

Back out in the main office, she adjusted her clothing as though that might help refocus her on the task of the day: the Kara Dawkins case. She needed to pull herself together. Do her job. A girl was missing, after all. Misty Dawkins’ crying face flashed in her memory to remind her of that grave reality.

And suddenly it struck Charlie that Allie had been curiously quiet during this whole trip down memory lane. No sarcastic remarks. No crude jokes. Nothing. Maybe that was where the cold feeling came from: Allie’s absence.

The quiet of the office seemed to swell to fill the space until it seemed hollowed out, desolate, cavernous, freezing.

Yes. Charlie was alone. Quite alone.





Chapter Three





In the car that afternoon, Charlie planned her approach to the case. She’d dug through Kara’s social media accounts for the rest of the morning, scanned hundreds of pictures, posts, and comments. She’d started to get a real sense of the girl’s personality in the process: sarcastic yet sensitive. When she wasn’t smiling in her photos, she was making silly faces or posing for comedic effect. And she was witty, too. Several of her tweets had made Charlie laugh out loud.

She’d also checked out the GPS records for the Dawkins family’s vehicles, which Misty had given her access to. These days, much of Charlie’s job came back to checking GPS logs. Everyone agreeing to track their own movements with technology certainly made a private detective’s life easier. Alas, there was nothing out of the ordinary in the Dawkins’ logs—school, work, grocery store. Kara had been grounded from driving for months, and much to Charlie’s chagrin, she had apparently abided by the rules of her punishment.

That led to the question of how to proceed: should Charlie start talking to Kara’s family, or focus on her friends first? She had some time to figure it out. She had to swing by Frank’s first, take him to his chemo appointment.