The Lost Girls (33 page)

There were no fishermen at dawn. It was the last morning, so it was for packing trunks and loading cars. Lilith and I had changed into dry nightgowns. We had covered the scratches on her face with makeup as best we could. Now we lay together in my bed, waiting. As the air warmed, we heard the first risers open their doors and greet one another. A wind rose, filling the morning with whispers.

At last we heard Mother cry out: Emily? Lilith's arms tightened around me as Mother ran first to the room where Father slept and then to ours. Mother's eyes were dark, as though her pupils had eaten the blue of her irises, and I could see the knowledge there. She knew already that Emily would not be found in the house, at the beach, or under the lodge. She knew already that she was lost.

All that morning we searched, fanning out through the forest, our neighbors calling anxiously now, for this time was not like before. This time a child had disappeared in the night, every mother's greatest fear. Lilith and I stayed together as we walked the forest with our neighbors. I couldn't look at the wind-blown lake, the color of chipped sapphires in the sun, so I kept my eyes on the dead leaves on the forest floor. Wherever we went we heard Mother's voice above the others', a high, feral cry shaped into a human sound only by the syllables of Emily's name. I shook when I heard it, my body clenching until finally I vomited, crouching behind a tree. “Poor thing,” Mr. Jones said when he found me covering my mess with leaves. “Don't worry. We'll find your sister.”

It was midmorning when Dr. Pugh and Mayor Lloyd suggested
that “the Miller boy” should be questioned. The police had been called, but they hadn't yet arrived, so this was the last opportunity for vigilantism. Lilith and I had just come from the woods. It had occurred to me that someone might notice one of the fishing boats was missing an anchor, and the thought had made me so ill I needed to go to the docks to make sure no one had. They hadn't, and they never would. I don't know what the Millers thought when they stowed the boats for the winter, but they never said a thing.

Abe wasn't hard to find. He and Matthew had been helping the searchers that morning, but as lunch drew near, Mrs. Lloyd had asked them to make sandwiches for us. Mayor Lloyd walked into the kitchen as though he had the right and brought Abe out to the main room where Dr. Pugh, Mr. Davies, and their wives waited. Matthew and his grandmother followed, and the men made a half circle around them. Mr. Miller wasn't there, and I wished he were. His wife's mother wasn't going to be able to protect her grandson; I could see that in her face, which was the color of mahogany, and in her thick fingers knotted in her apron.

Abe looked at the men in confusion. As he had that first summer day when Lilith and I came for groceries, Matthew moved to stand in front of his brother. His muscles were tense. He knew what Mayor Lloyd was after.

“Son, I'm going to ask you a question, and I'm going to want your honest answer,” Mayor Lloyd said. I hated him, I realized. I hated his red, beefy features that might have been handsome on the young boxer but were swollen and pitted on the overfed politician. “Did you see Emily Evans last night or this morning?”

Matthew said, “He was in his bed all night. I can swear to it. We're in the same room, him and me.”

“And were you awake all night?”

“No. But if he'd gone anywhere, I'd have woken up.”

It was the only thing he could say, but of course it was a lie—Abe had left, and Matthew knew it. I could see it in his face. He
had woken up, sometime during that quiet hour when Lilith and I rowed out to the pontoon, and Abe hadn't been there. When his brother came back, creeping through the damp dark, had Matthew asked him where he'd been? What had Abe told him? I was in plain view, but Matthew didn't look at me.

The men exchanged glances. Mayor Lloyd was puffing himself up. They were going to take Abe and hold him for the police, and my head felt light. It was never part of our plan to have blame fall on any innocent person. I looked at Lilith: now was the time to lead them to the conclusion we needed them to reach. She was watching the scene with a small frown, but she didn't say anything. So I did.

“Maybe she's just run away again.” Every head in the room swiveled to me, even Matthew's. I swallowed, though my throat was dry. “She's done it before.”

At this Mrs. Davies nodded her head. “About a month ago. We found her pretty quickly, but she was wearing a lot of dresses and skirts, and she had a little bag with her.”

“Why would she run away?” Dr. Pugh asked, and I knew why they would doubt it, just as I had at first. Sweet, docile Emily, beloved daughter of a decent family—such girls did not run away. In our haste the night before, Lilith and I hadn't talked about the answer to this critical question.

Then Lilith said, “Mother told her she couldn't take this kitten she'd found back to Williamsburg. She was very upset about it.” In a smooth voice she explained about the kittens and how Emily had a favorite she'd hoped to adopt as a pet. The ugly current that charged the air weakened as the grown-ups listened, and though I wouldn't look at him, I could feel Matthew's relief.

Mrs. Davies sent Ben to find Mother and asked her, in the gentlest way, to check Emily's things. Mother stiffened as she realized what Mrs. Davies meant, but she went to the lavender bedroom, where she found several dresses were missing along with Emily's saddle shoes and her Christmas purse. Then Lilith came and said
Emily's kitten was gone from under the lodge. Mother put her hand to her mouth and moaned, a wrenching, shuddering sound that came from a territory beyond weeping. She would have fallen if Father hadn't caught her.

Later that afternoon, Lilith and I were in the woods beyond the Lloyds', where no one else was searching. We walked a little ways, then we stopped in a clearing. Lilith sat on a large rock, closing her eyes and letting her shoulders slump. I sat beside her. I closed my eyes, too, and the sun made the insides of my eyelids red. From this distance, the faraway calls of the searchers sounded almost like birds. Long minutes passed. I wished I could stay like that forever; I was so tired. Then I felt Lilith move beside me. I opened my eyes to see Abe standing there. In his hands he held one of Emily's blue slippers.

“Give that to me,” Lilith said, and he did. The slipper was caked with dried mud on the bottom, but it was dry. It hadn't gone into the creek. I had a small bag with two of the sandwiches the Millers had made, so I took it and put it inside. Later I would hide it deep in our closet, and I would keep it even after Lilith and I burned Emily's clothes and purse in the clearing by the Hundred Tree. I have it still.

“Do you know where she is?” Abe asked Lilith.

“Why would you think that?”

“I found that on the bridge last night, while I was waiting for you.” His cow eyes were gloomy and afraid. “And the boat. You wanted the boat.”

“What are you saying? She's my sister.” I was struck rigid by the utterly convincing indignation on Lilith's face. She put her hand on Abe's chest. “You're not to tell about the boat, remember? Other people might wonder the same thing if they knew.”

I waited for him to ask the obvious questions: What had she wanted the boat for? Why had she been wet to the skin when she'd met him? I didn't know what she would say if he did. But he didn't
ask. Maybe because he was so slow. Or maybe for the same reason I never asked what she did with the kitten: he didn't want to hear her answer. Instead he said, “Are we still going to California?”

Lilith shook her head. “I can't go until I know Emily is safe. I'm sorry.”

Days passed. The sheriff came with his deputies, and they sent for volunteers from Williamsburg and Olema who walked for miles in every direction. More days passed as they searched through trees turning russet and gold, their hunting jackets red and their dogs bounding through the bracken. Much later, in the quiet of another autumn day, Mother would tell me she heard those dogs every year when the leaves turned. I never did, but I've not forgotten the sound they made, either. The excited yowls, like laughter. Then, at odd moments, a lonely, mournful cry, the sound of loss itself.

Near the end of September they dragged the lake, but only to a distance of a few hundred yards, because no one thought Emily could swim farther than that. And, of course, no one thought she'd gone swimming. Lilith and I watched from our bedroom window, our hands clasped together, until they stopped well short of the pontoon and brought the boats back in.

In early October, when the frost came, the search became a weekend enterprise and the searchers became fewer. They were no longer looking for a living child. Then, when late October brought the first snow, Sheriff Llewellyn came to Mother, hat in hand, and said with gentle gravity that they had done all they could. After he left, Mother sat in the parlor staring into the gray air, her face still but her hands kneading.

Through all of this, Father diminished. In the beginning, he seemed to recover some of the strength he'd lost since Independence Day: he strode through the trees, his great baritone roar
ing out Emily's name. Each evening he gathered us in the parlor and led us in prayer:
Gracious Lord, Father of all children, shine a light in the darkness for Your lamb, that has wandered from Your fold
. But each day that brought no news of her made him smaller and quieter. He kept his distance from Lilith and me, and his nightly prayers became open pleas for absolution, for forgiveness for sins he could not name. I pitied him, for I loved him still. Lilith watched him with merciless eyes.

When the sheriff's car drove away, he stood in the doorway, watching it go. We were the only lake family still there. Many had stayed long past the end of summer to help us search, but one after another they returned to their jobs and homes in town. Just Mrs. Williams was left, bringing us food we barely ate and comfort we barely took. Now she sat beside Mother on the davenport. The little house was cold; it had no radiators yet. Outside, the trees were bare except for the new snow that dusted their branches.

“Eleanor,” Father said, “we have to go.”

Mother hadn't left the lake once since Emily disappeared. Father had been to town many times, meeting with the bankers who held off on collection in deference to our loss. Two weeks later he would sell his grandfather's pharmacy to Mayor Lloyd for less than his debts. By January the lake house was all we had, and Father was in his grave.

Mother said, “I won't leave her here alone.”

“The house isn't fit for winter,” Mrs. Williams said.

“I'll manage.” Mother was so thin. Insubstantial, like a ghost. But her voice was resolute. As long as I could remember, she had bent to Father's will. Now, when it didn't matter and she couldn't save anyone, she would not.

Before he left, Father came to Lilith and me in our room. “You'll come with me,” he said from the doorway. He said it to both of us, but he was looking at me. I remembered the first day of summer,
when he'd stood there, looking first at Lilith in her Cinderella headdress, then sliding his eyes to me. My legs went wobbly with fear.

Lilith said, “Mother needs us here.”

“I need you, too.”

I knew he did. I could see it in the way his hand shook on the doorjamb. And I am certain—I have no doubt at all—that I would have gone with him if Lilith hadn't said, as though stating an unarguable fact, like the month of the year or the color of the sky: “You can't have us.”

He dropped his eyes, and for the first time in my life I beheld him without those dark, mesmerizing irises. I saw a tired man, bowed and old before his time. When he raised them again he raised them to Lilith, not to me, and unlike on that first summer day, she didn't look away. She stood between our beds, every muscle frozen save for her hands, which trembled a little. A filament of understanding crackled between them, like the one that had joined him to me for that brief moment at breakfast the morning we fished, then snapped with a sound that was almost audible. Lilith's hands stopped shaking. Father took a step back, as though he'd lost his balance. He went to Williamsburg later that afternoon, alone.

Mrs. Williams brought us our winter clothes and space heaters. When the snow came in earnest, Mr. Miller plowed the dirt track to the county road so Lilith and I could walk to where the school bus picked us up. The other children whispered about us, but we didn't care. Lilith's summer friends, Jeannette and Betty and the lot, were at the high school across town, and she never mentioned them again. At night, Mother made our supper and we did our homework in the kitchen, warmed by a little heater. Father, busy with the business of bankruptcy, came on the weekends, and after supper Lilith and I went upstairs while he and Mother sat in the parlor without speaking. On Christmas Day, when he didn't
come, the three of us sat in the thin light filtering through the front window and waited for the phone to ring.

Every day of that first winter, Lilith and I returned from school to find Mother sitting in the kitchen with her eyes on the back door. She wasn't waiting for us. Long past the time anyone could think a six-year-old girl might survive in that wild country, Mother hoped Emily would walk out of the woods. She never stopped hoping it. As the years passed she stopped watching the door, and if anyone asked why she stayed at the lake she said it was where she felt closest to her lost child. But she left the back porch light on every night for the next forty-four years, until the day she couldn't get out of bed. And it is only now, as I look back upon that summer and find my bitterness toward her has mellowed enough to permit something almost like pity, that I understand what it was I did to her the night I gave my sister to the lake.

Lilith killed Emily. But I kept her alive.

The morning after the fire was one of almost impossible beauty. The skies were a scrubbed and perfect blue, and the sun starred the new snow with millions of tiny lights, winking and sharp like diamonds. But the chaos of the night was written in the tire treads and footprints that dirtied the road and in the blackened husk of the old house. The smoke seeping from the ruins tainted the air even inside the lodge.

Matthew had made up three of his upstairs guest rooms. Melanie and Angela fell asleep in one of them around dawn, the thin summer blankets pulled up to their chins. Maurie and Patrick took the other two. Justine and Matthew were still awake when, at nine, the last of the fire trucks drove away, leaving the lake to its accustomed quiet once more.

Matthew went to the bar and started washing the mugs in which he'd served the firefighters coffee. Justine picked up a towel and dried them. Matthew's hands shook a little, and when Justine saw this she was overcome with gratitude and affection for him. All night long he'd been steadfast. Without being asked, he'd made up their beds. At five he'd made a breakfast none of them thought they could eat until he placed it before them. At seven he'd stood beside her as the fire chief told her what she already knew, that the fire started in the kitchen and they were lucky to have gotten out alive.

She said, “You should get some sleep.”

He nodded, but when she went upstairs he was still there, behind his bar, wiping the counter that needed no wiping.

Her daughters lay in narrow twin beds in the first room at the top of the stairs. She went to their window to pull the shade so the light wouldn't wake them, and as she reached for the cord she saw the Emily book sticking out from under Melanie's pillow. Justine slipped it out and opened the cover. But it wasn't a book of Emily stories. On the first page, in an old woman's shaky hand, was written, “For Justine.” On the second began what appeared to be a journal.

Justine took the book to the room she was sharing with Maurie. While Maurie slept she read it, turning the pages first with curiosity, then with dread, and finally with horror. When she was done it was late afternoon, and Maurie was still sleeping.

She went down to the main room, which was empty. Matthew had gone to bed at last. She sat at a table with the book in front of her and drew her knees up under her chin. The sun poured through the mullioned windows on the western wall in columns of gold, and dust motes hung motionless in the air. Justine closed her eyes. The insides of her eyelids were scratchy with soot. Against them a little girl in a white nightgown sank through dark water to the words of a prayer.

They were her family. The family she'd brushed against as a girl and forgotten, the family whose legacy she'd planned to take with her now, in photographs and books and brass-faced clocks. As if legacies lay in things that could be bought and sold. As if families could be left behind or taken with you as you chose.

She tightened her arms around her legs, feeling the weight and wonder of it. Their history, Lucy's story, had directed her life even though she'd known nothing about it. It was a legacy of loyalty and betrayal. Weakness and regret. Love, and tender, harrowing violence. Lucy and Lilith, Emily, Eleanor with her nervous, ineffectual hands: they'd followed her everywhere she'd ever been, no matter how many times she'd shaken the dust off her feet in Maurie's car and her own.

She felt someone watching her and opened her eyes to find Melanie standing in front of her, wearing the adult extra-large sweatshirt Matthew had given her to sleep in. It had a silk-screened orange sun and the name of the lodge in kitschy log letters, and it hung to Melanie's knees. Justine thought: she has no clothes. Everything is ashes.

Melanie sat in the chair opposite Justine's. The book lay between them. It looked like all the others, the same black-and-white marbled cover, just as old. But its binding wasn't creased with decades of openings and closings. It hadn't been in the box Justine had gotten from the librarian, she was certain. “Where did you find it?”

“In the table by my bed.” In the faint challenge of Melanie's gaze Justine saw that it hadn't been an Emily book Melanie had hidden beneath her covers the night they fought. It had been this. She'd had it for weeks, reading it in secret and illustrating it in dark strokes in notebooks of her own. It was she, Justine realized, who'd lit the candles beneath Emily's portrait, creeping down the stairs in the night, striking the matches while Justine and Angela and Maurie slept.

She pulled her feet off the chair and rested her arms on the table. “Why didn't you give it to me?”

The last ray of sun burst through the window like a solar flare before guttering out. It took the colors of the day with it. Melanie said, “Because I can give her what she wants. Better than you.”

“She wanted me to know what happened to Emily.”

“That's not all she wants.” One of Melanie's fingers touched the corner of the book, lingering on the binding in a small caress.

Justine slid the book away and folded her hands on top of it. Melanie's finger picked at a divot on the table instead. The white bandage was bulky on her thin wrist. When had she become so thin? She didn't even look like a child anymore. She looked like an old woman with the smooth skin of a girl. “You shouldn't have gone back for it,” Justine said. “You could have been killed.”

A small muscle in Melanie's cheek tightened. “I know,” she said, and for a time they sat with the memory of the choking heat in the green bedroom and the wailing of the house as it died, the stain of Melanie's blood on the snow and the cold metal of the gutter in their hands.

Then Justine said, “What happened at the Padres game?”

Melanie blanched. She looked away and gave the smallest of shrugs. “Nothing. He just told me I should be nicer to him.”

Part of Justine wanted to accept this half-truth as the whole. Even after reading Lucy's book, that part of her could still make its cowardly argument. But she could not let it win. Not now, when she had seen the terrible wages a mother's cowardice could reap—had already reaped. So she said, “What else?”

Melanie's fingers worked at one another. Justine gathered the courage to push harder, but before she had to, Melanie's fingers stopped. She raised her chin. “He said sometimes kids disappeared, and nobody ever found them. But if anything happened to me, I shouldn't worry. Because he'd take good care of you.”

Justine kept her face still. At the Padres game she'd left Melanie with Patrick while she took Angela to the bathroom. She thought it would let Melanie get to know him, see what a nice guy he was. She'd told herself it had worked; that Melanie had decided to give him a chance. Because afterward Melanie accepted his place in their lives without complaint. Now she remembered it was Melanie who had convinced Angela to leave the San Diego school, and she felt faint.

He wouldn't have hurt her. He didn't have real violence in him, she was sure. He was a man of neatly overturned sofas, sly fingers under a car's hood. But. If Melanie had disappeared, he would have been Justine's rock. He would have talked to the police, coordinated the search parties, made the flyers. He would have bought groceries and made their meals, and driven Angela back and forth to school. He would have comforted Justine in her shattering terror
and, ultimately, her grief, which she would pour into his arms as he held her in their bed each night. He would have saved her, to the extent she could have been saved.

“We're going to go somewhere he'll never find us,” she said, thickly. “I promise.”

Melanie folded her bandaged arms, their bones skeptical in the too-big sweatshirt. They were as thin as Eleanor's arms in her wedding dress, in the photograph in the foyer. Above them her eyes were as black as her great-great-grandfather's must have been, as black as her great-grandfather's—for so Abe was, Justine now believed—still were. She said, “I don't want to go anywhere. I want to stay here.”

Justine sat back in her chair. Her wool sweater scratched against her shoulders.

Melanie's fingers picked at one another. “Please, Mommy.” She hadn't called Justine that in a long time. The two syllables were as soft and round as a baby's cheek.

Before Justine could answer, before she knew how she wanted to answer, she heard footsteps on the stairs. Melanie sat up, every muscle tense, as Patrick came into the main room and slumped into the seat next to Justine. He looked exhausted, as though he hadn't slept at all. “How you girls doing?” he asked. “Okay?”

“We're fine,” Justine made herself say. She had gone as rigid as Melanie.

Patrick rested his hands on the table. He smoothed the right with the left in a nervous habit Justine knew well. He cut his eyes to her, then back to his hands. She knew what he was going to say. He kept his eyes on his hands as he said it. “I guess you'll have to come back to San Diego now.”

She didn't answer. And as she studied him, she realized something. His face was clean. Unlike hers and Melanie's, which were dusky with soot. He hadn't run into a burning house after a book. He hadn't run into it after a child. He hadn't even run into it after
the child's mother. He'd paced in circles in the snow instead. And he was ashamed of this. Justine's pulse quickened. She leaned forward. “Patrick, you need to leave. We don't want you here.”

Melanie's eyes flicked to her in surprise. Patrick looked as if she'd slapped him. “But—I saved you. I saved all of you.” He saw her disbelief and rushed on. “The fire started in the oven. I smelled the smoke, and I went in there, but it was already too late. So I came to get you. If it weren't for me, you'd all be dead.”

Justine felt a flapping in her chest. It was true he'd woken them up, and he'd helped Maurie out of the house. But he hadn't saved Melanie, and he hadn't saved Justine. In the end, Justine herself had done the saving he'd wanted so desperately to do. She'd changed his script. Now he was trying to pivot.

She still had her hand on Lucy's book. The edges of its pages were warped with damp from lying in the snow where she'd thrown it. Long ago, two girls knelt on a beach in the moonlight, pressing a secret between their palms. But not only a secret. The promise the secret bought was pressed there, too.

The flurry of wings quieted. She felt again that surreal, distant calm she'd felt in Lucy's bedroom. She said, “The oven hasn't worked since we got here.”

“What?”

She raised her head and looked him in the eyes. “I said the oven is broken. And if you don't leave, I'm going to tell the firefighters that.”

Patrick's mouth fell open. He looked like one of the fish in the photographs on the wall, with their gaping jaws and stunned eyes. The rest of the room seemed to disappear, and Justine could see every small hair on his face, every blood vessel in the whites of his eyes. Seconds ticked by. She waited. She waited for him to think it through. To understand exactly what she meant, and to believe she would do it.

Finally he blinked several times, and she knew it was done. He
looked away, at the window. Then he pressed his hands on the table and stood. Now his face was shadowed; she couldn't see his expression. His arms hung from his shoulders, and his body seemed heavier than when he'd walked in. He said, “You will never find anyone who loves you like I do,” and she knew he was right. Then he walked out.

When the screen door slammed she dropped her head into her hands and felt the breath leave her body through every pore. Across from her, Melanie picked up Lucy's book and put it in her lap.

Justine didn't know how long Matthew would let them stay in the lodge, or where they'd live when summer came and he needed the rooms. How they'd deal with the girls at school, or the assistant principal and her antibullying campaign. How she'd find a job. She couldn't think about any of these things until she'd slept fourteen hours in one of Matthew's beds, with her daughters safe and whole down the hall. But when she woke up, she would come down to the kitchen and help Matthew make breakfast. Then, as she cracked eggs into a bowl, no longer trying to make them exactly right, she would ask him if they could stay for a little while.

In the silence they heard Patrick's engine start. Justine reached across the table and took Melanie's hand. Though it was smaller, their fingers were the same. Slender and strong.