First Girl Gone(80)

The door to the last bedroom stood slightly ajar. Charlie elbowed her way in, eyes scanning all around her.

A shape stood there. A silhouette backlit by the moonlight filtering in through the open curtains.

Someone was in the room.

Charlie choked. Breath caught in her throat.

She stumbled backward, bashing into the wall behind her. Shoulder blades jabbing into the wood paneling.

She fumbled with her flashlight. Brought it up to illuminate the person before her.

The shape lost its detail. Morphing to a blankness under the light’s touch. Then it lost its menace.

A mannequin was propped in front of the window. Probably used by a dressmaker in the Gibbs family decades ago. Tattered gray fabric showed the thing’s age.

Charlie let out a shaky breath. The tightness in her chest wouldn’t quite recede.

She tried to laugh it off as she pressed back into the room, but she couldn’t deny the fact that the Gibbs house was doing a number on her nerves. She didn’t like the quiet. Couldn’t shake the feeling that she shouldn’t be here. The way the house was frozen in time made her feel like a trespasser in an arcane realm.

She made her way back to the ground floor, wondering if anything in the place had been updated in twenty or thirty years. The wallpaper looked like it was from the sixties, the appliances the eighties. The most technologically advanced thing in the whole place was probably an electric razor she’d seen in the upstairs bathroom. Gibbs didn’t even seem to have a computer.

Back downstairs, Charlie returned to a door off the kitchen she’d decided to save for last. The basement.

If she was honest with herself, she didn’t want to go down there. She couldn’t stop imagining the door slamming shut behind her the moment she entered the stairwell. But she had to be thorough. Had to make sure she checked every square inch of this house.

Charlie’s heart thudded again as she took the first step down. Breathing seemed difficult in this moment. Her chest wanted to race through the motions, fluttering like a moth adhered to a screen door, the breaths coming too shallow to count for much. She had to concentrate to draw full breaths, fight the pulsating muscles along her ribcage, hold each lungful of air for a beat before she breathed out again.

The stairs creaked beneath her. The old wood straining and moaning.

Her flashlight shone down into the dark below. One lone spotlight surrounded by shadows. The glowing circle twitched on the concrete floor as she struggled to still her trembling hands.

Could this be where he hid the girls? Could Allie’s remains be down here even now? Her bones tucked in some cobwebbed corner, sprawled on the floor. Waiting. Waiting for all these years.

As she reached the bottom of the steps, her light caught on a string hanging down from the ceiling. She pulled it. An overhead fluorescent bulb flickered to life.

The room seemed a little less scary once illuminated. It looked like a normal basement with poured concrete walls painted a pale gray, same as the floor, quite smooth in texture. More junk cluttered much of the floor space down here. Milk crates full of odd collections—old glass bottles, yarn, hundreds of warped records. Charlie flipped through a few of the albums. Big band stuff from the forties, mostly. Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman. They must have belonged to Gibbs’ parents. Maybe even his grandparents.

She waded through the narrow path between the stacks of milk crates and found more rubbish still. A heap of empty beer cans crowded one corner. A few boxes of clothes even older than those she’d found in Gibbs’ room. An old stove, crusted with grease.

When she finally reached the farthest wall from the steps, she stopped. Turned back. Looked over all that she’d made her way through.

It seemed obvious enough, even doing a cursory search. There was nothing here. The worst she could say about it was that it was messy and smelled like radishes.

She started back through the basement, returning the way she’d come, twisting sideways at times to squeeze through the sliver of an opening. Nausea creeping its way into her middle.

She paused a moment at the bottom of the steps, one hand resting on the rail. She reached up and pulled the string again, the room going full dark around her. And for just a second she didn’t turn on her flashlight. She just stared into the abyss, into the vast black nothingness that seemed to fill all of the universe around her.

If she didn’t find anything here, then she really was headed into the abyss, wasn’t she? Nothing left to guide her. A cannonball plunge into the endless deep.

But no. She shouldn’t think like that. She had to keep looking.

She clicked on her light again, shined it up the incline of the steps. Again she wished that Allie would speak. Would say something to reassure her or crack a joke to break the tension. Before she reached the top of the stairs, however, another thought occurred to her. What if Allie was gone for good?





Chapter Sixty-Four





After poking through Leroy Gibbs’ random junk collections one more time and finding only more garbage, Charlie went outside. She tromped through the snow toward the back of the property. The beam of her flashlight bounced along in front of her, following the up and down movement of her steps.

She thought about saying something to Allie, attempting to engage her or spur some conversation out of her, but she dared not risk it. What if her sister said nothing back? The notion of confirming this mounting fear, that Allie wasn’t here with her now, was too much to bear.