First Girl Gone(81)

The cold gripped her again within those first few steps out of the house. Harsh and dry. It numbed her face right away, reaching right through the acrylic fabric of the ski mask. For this moment she was glad for the chill, for the numbness, for all of it. In some way, the physical anesthetic slowly taking over her body kept the emotions at a distance along with the rest. She needed that now, a dulling of her feelings, because of all the possible outcomes of this search, the idea of finding nothing had never really occurred to her.

A structure took shape at the back edge of what was once the yard: a steel-sided barn crouching in a snarl of overgrown sumacs. The building stood out as blacker than the rest in this black-on-black night. As she trudged closer, she could see that it was a ramshackle thing, just like the house—rusted siding, peeling paint, and what looked like a pretty good-sized hole in the roof where the weather had invaded, peeling back the shingles and slowly but surely softening the wood to mush.

She had the hammer with her, expecting to find some kind of padlock out here, but the door was unlocked, already open a crack, in fact. The barn door groaned as she slid it a few more inches to the right, just enough to sidle through the opening.

At first, she could only see the bare dirt floor decorated with small clumps of straw. The beam of her flashlight illuminated yet more clutter here. An old claw-foot bathtub. A tangled heap of rusty bicycles. Pitchforks, shovels, rakes. A pyramid of paint cans.

Swinging her light to the right, though, she found something more interesting. A bulky form bungeed under a blue tarp. Lumpy in some places. Smooth in others. It wasn’t the body she was half-expecting to find, however. It was a boat.

She swept the flashlight over the vessel, examining the exposed hull. It was made of wood with metallic-looking paint the color of copper. A motorboat, she realized. Old and dirty. It looked like it’d been trapped in this barn, swaddled beneath this very tarp, since about 1957.

She walked around the vessel, shining her light into the stalls on the other side. Empty. Nothing but more bare dirt and clumps of straw.

The nausea lurched in Charlie’s gut. She lowered her light. Tried to think.

No girl. No evidence. Just the signs of a hermit, perhaps a mentally ill one at that. The reality that she couldn’t prove Gibbs was the guy had started to seep in along the way, and the aftereffect was settling over her now, seeming more and more undeniable.

She swallowed. Not ready yet to face what these conclusions meant. Not ready… for what? Not ready to give up on Allie.

She swung her light up onto the boat again. The entire tarp was covered in a fine layer of dust, except for one spot. She could almost see where someone’s hand had smeared the grit away. Loosening a few of the bungee cords, Charlie peeled back one side of the tarp and clambered up the wooden side.

She spotted more places where the dust had been disturbed on the deck, and she followed the trail to a small compartment near the motor. This place had been almost completely cleared of the grime that covered the rest of the boat.

She knelt. A seating pad covered the compartment, attached to the lid, and she slid her gloved fingers into the seams to remove it. The hinged lid popped as she pulled it free.

The smell hit her first. Like the time they’d lost power for a week in July when she was a kid, and fifty pounds of ground beef in their chest freezer had spoiled.

Her breath ceased as she gazed down into the chamber, the hollow place under the bench seat glowing under the glare of her flashlight. The package was irregularly shaped. Neatly wrapped in black plastic. Red-and-white baker’s twine crisscrossed the bundle, looping into a precise bow on top.

Charlie’s hand trembled as she reached for one loose end of the knotted twine, already certain she knew what was inside.

She tugged at the knot. With the bindings loosened, the wrapping opened and fell away like a flower blooming and withering in fast motion.

Nestled in the wrinkled sheet of black plastic, she found a pair of severed feet.





Chapter Sixty-Five





Charlie jerked backward, gagging.

She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. Swirls danced along the edges of her vision, and a woozy feeling came over her, made her certain she was about to faint.

She closed her eyes. Forced a big breath into her lungs. Held it, then let it out. She repeated this three times and felt the dizziness recede, even if her body still trembled.

Her eyelids fluttered open, and she stared down at the grisly bundle again. The cuts were neat. Precise. Much more surgical than what she remembered from Allie’s case all those years ago.

And the nausea reeled in her belly again. Sickness. Anxiety. Dread.

She sat back from the gory package shoved down in the storage compartment and stared hard at nothing. Eyes going out of focus. Blinking in fast motion. She thought back over her search of the house. The filthy bathrooms, the junk piled everywhere, the dust that puffed up from the carpet with each step she took. The barn was no different. Messy and dirty and disorganized. Every corner filled with clutter.

And yet the feet had been wrapped so carefully. Neat and precise. Like a Christmas present from a department store. Even the grime around the area had been cleared away, as if the person who’d planted the feet here couldn’t resist tidying up along the way.

Charlie froze.

Planted. The word had bubbled up from her subconscious all on its own, answering the question for her. Because that was what was wrong with the scene, wasn’t it? It felt fake. Staged.