The Lost Girls (9 page)

On Monday the girls went to school. Justine drove them to the end of the dirt road, and they waited in the car for the bus to rumble over the hill and collect them on its way to Kishawnee and West Liberty and Red Arrow before getting to the school an hour later. It was still dark at seven thirty, and bitter cold. Justine watched Angela's shoulders sag as she climbed onto the bus, and tried not to think about the sunny six-minute drive to the San Diego elementary school.

The night before, she'd scrabbled through the coupons, paper clips, and buttons in Lucy's junk drawer to find a piece of paper and pen. Then she made a list of the things she needed to do. She needed to find out where Lucy got her mail. She needed to send her mother the jewelry and find that diamond ring. She needed to get the oven fixed, and she needed to find a job. Now the list lay on the counter next to the blank Walmart job application while she sat at the old elm table, still in her coat. The draft had kicked in again, and it fingered the nape of her neck. In the empty room it felt as if the house itself were watching her.

Over the weekend she'd confirmed what she suspected: nobody lived in any of the other houses. They were probably summer homes, so she supposed she and the girls would have neighbors come June, but right now there was only the vastness of the woods and the silent, frozen lake, and creepy Matthew Miller and his unseen brother in the lodge. She couldn't stop thinking about the San Diego apartment. It was five thirty in the morning in Califor
nia. Patrick would still be sleeping, and if she were there she'd be tucked against him, feeling anything but alone.

The doorbell rang. It startled her—she'd just been thinking about how isolated this place was, and now somebody was here. She answered the door to find Matthew Miller standing with his neck thrust forward like a buzzard in his dirty coat. She stifled a sigh. Of course it was him. Who else could it be? She hoped he wasn't going to keep dropping by like this.

He made a wet, gurgling noise in his throat. “I'm heading to town. If you need anything, I could pick it up for you.”

“No, that's all right. I'm going myself, in a little while.”

He nodded and left. Ten minutes later, a heavy motor turned over, and Justine watched through the living room window as he drove his black pickup onto the ice, heading to where the frozen lake collided with the hills in a colorless line. There was no way she was trying that in the Tercel. But as she watched, she decided she really would go into town. The thought of spending the day in this cold house filled with a dead woman's clothes and unused coupons was unbearable. In Williamsburg she could get some coffee, maybe find a library, and pick the girls up after school so they wouldn't have to take the bus back.

She found the coffee in Ray's Diner, a café down the street from the Williams law firm. It was a small place built in the 1950s and unimproved since then, but it was warm inside, and humid with melted snow. Two older men sat at the blue Formica counter, remnants of egg and toast on their plates, and three middle-aged women were talking in a booth. Justine stood at the door for a beat too long, and the women looked up, curious, and scanned her secondhand coat: the new girl in school. Justine grabbed a newspaper from the stack on the counter and slipped into the nearest booth.

She'd just finished reading about the local movie theater's impending closure when a voice said, “Hon, we don't have table
service until lunch. You want something, you gotta order at the counter.” The woman who spoke was about sixty, with dyed black hair in a misshapen bouffant, heavy brows, and thick lips painted a red that disagreed with her sallow skin. When she caught Justine's eye she smiled, and the smile made her oddly appealing, like a friendly goblin.

Justine obeyed, ordering coffee and a cinnamon roll. As she walked away with her cup and plate one of the men at the counter said, “Ray, fill me up, why don't you,” and the woman answered, her voice low and musical, saying something that made both men laugh.

Next Justine found the library, a new-looking building with its own parking lot two blocks off the square. Inside, she breathed deeply and happily, inhaling the familiar library smell of wood and paper and dust. All around were the sibilant sounds that libraries make: the turning of pages, the shelving of books, and the whispering of librarians colluding to make a shush like the ocean on a still day. Sometimes Justine imagined this was how the world sounded to babies listening from the womb.

She had spent many hours in libraries. By the time she was ten she'd stopped trying to make friends at every new school and instead spent her time at the closest library. She'd been in all sorts, from small town libraries no bigger than a double-wide to the city libraries of Kansas City and St. Louis. She went after school, on weekends, and in the evenings if they were open. She walked to them, took buses to them, begged her mother for rides to them. To be fair, she hadn't had to beg very hard—dropping her daughter at the library was easier for Maurie than convincing a neighbor to watch her.

She went to the counter and put
The God of Small Things
in the returns box. When the librarian greeted her, Justine told her she'd like a library card. “Where are you from?” the woman asked as she gave her the form. She was in her mid-fifties, with
dyed blond hair, and though her smile was warm, she had gossipy eyes.

“California.” Justine filled out the form and slid it across the desk.

The librarian gasped when she saw her name. “Are you related to Lucy Evans?” When Justine gave a reluctant yes, the librarian looked as if she wanted to jump over the counter. “That's wonderful! We heard she had a relative somewhere! I'm Dinah, so happy to meet you. Oh, but I'm so sorry for your loss. So sudden. But such a blessing, to go in her sleep like that.” She leaned closer. “Did you know she worked here, at the library?”

Justine took a step back. “No.”

“Well she did, for decades. We even had a party for her fiftieth anniversary. She retired about three years ago, but she still did her weekly story hour for the kiddies. Although I think the driving was getting to be too much. I told her she should sell that place, move into town, but she wouldn't hear of it. She loved it out there, she said. But with her sister gone, she was all by herself. Except for the Miller brothers, of course.” She gave Justine a significant nod, and when Justine didn't say anything, went on, “She was supposed to come in for her reading that Saturday, but she didn't. That's how we found out she'd passed.”

Justine had taken her girls to a story hour at their neighborhood library in San Diego when they were younger. The reader was a rangy woman with a severe face, but when she opened the book, her body curved toward the children.

Dinah was watching her expectantly. Justine said, “How long until the card is ready?”

The librarian squared her shoulders. Justine had offended her. To mend the breach she asked where the fiction stacks were. Dinah pointed to the back of the library. “We don't have a big selection. Not like what you're used to in California.”

“That's okay.” This, too, felt like the wrong thing to say, so Justine hurried off, anxious to put several bookshelves between herself and the front desk.

The stacks were indeed small, but the mystery collection was impressive for a library this size. Justine picked out an Elizabeth George—she loved the character Barbara Havers, the awkward and homely deputy to the handsome, highborn detective. She sat in a chair, and before she knew it, it was past noon and the library was busy. Half a dozen people were browsing or sitting at the computers by the wall.

Dinah was still at the desk. Justine debated coming back later, but she took herself in hand and put the book on the counter.

“I've got your card right here,” Dinah said, all-business as she swiped the barcode.

“You have a beautiful library,” Justine said, tentatively.

This was the right thing to say. Dinah puffed up like a rooster and stroked the wooden counter as though she'd built it herself. “We're the only town in the county that has a new library. All the others are falling apart.” Williamsburg, she explained, had received a large gift from a local patron, Agnes Lloyd. “If you like to read, you've come to the right place.” She paused. “You know, I have something you may want. Wait just a minute.” She disappeared through a door and returned with a large cardboard box. “Lucy read the children all the usual things. Dr. Seuss, Winnie-the-Pooh, and all that. But she also read them stories she wrote, and those were the children's favorites.” She slid the box toward Justine. “Now that she's gone, we don't know what to do with them. She read them in such a particular way. Maybe you'd like to have them?”

Justine lifted the flaps. Inside were two dozen notebooks with black-and-white marbled covers and black spines. She pulled one out and opened it. On the first page was written, “Emily Catches
a Star,” in the neat, careful cursive of a young girl. The rest of the pages were filled with the same handwriting, story flowing into story, all with titles beginning with the name Emily.

“They're set at the lake,” Dinah said. “Of course, the children didn't know the history. They thought Lucy made Emily up.”

Justine ran her hand over the spines of the little books. “Are all the stories about her?”

“Yes, isn't that sad? She must never have gotten over it, poor dear. They searched for weeks—they dragged the lake and everything—but they never found the slightest sign of that child.” Dinah shook her head, her enjoyment of the tragedy palpable. Justine felt a twinge of affront on Lucy's behalf. To cover it she reached for the box and thanked the librarian. She made sure to smile at her before leaving.

At three o'clock she was in front of the school, the box of Emily books on the seat beside her. She called to her daughters as they shuffled toward their bus and saw relief burst upon their faces. Her heart felt spongy in her chest: she hadn't been so long without them since leaving San Diego. When they climbed in she asked how they'd liked the school.

“It's awful,” Angela said. “My teacher made me stand up and tell everybody where I was from. When I said San Diego somebody said that must be why I wore such stupid boots.” She kicked the back of Justine's seat. “Everybody else has big fuzzy boots, not these dumb ones.”

Justine looked at the clots of children passing by. Several girls wore thick suede boots with fluffy lining. They looked expensive. “Sweetie, the first day is always hard. I've been the new kid lots of times. After a while they'll forget you're new, or another, newer kid will come along.” She didn't add that she'd made few friends at any of her new schools; that wouldn't be Angela's fate, she knew. “How about you, Melanie?”

Melanie's eyes met hers in the mirror, then looked away. “It's just a school, Mom.”

Justine turned on the radio for the drive home.

That night, when the girls were in bed, Justine carried the Elizabeth George mystery and the box of books the librarian had given her up to Lucy's room. She changed into her pajamas, intending to get into bed and read the mystery. But instead she opened the box.

The bindings of the notebooks were creased from many openings and closings, and she pictured an old woman in a chair, reading them to a circle of children. She lifted out the one that started with “Emily Catches a Star.”

Emily had always wanted a star,
it began. They were so bright, and she thought if she had one, she could use it as a night-light. She was a little bit afraid of the dark, even with Mimsy to keep her company. The story went on to tell of a night filled with shooting stars, and how one of them landed in the lake. With the help of her friend Mimsy, who was a talking mouse, and the night nymphs, a shy form of fairy, Emily persuaded the water sprites to give her the star, which she hung on a silver chain by her bed, and she was never afraid of the dark again.

It was a simple story, but sweet, like the children's books of an earlier day. Justine lifted the box to the bed, and over the next two hours she read through the rest of the notebooks. Lucy had written more than a hundred stories in all, and in each one Emily and Mimsy had an adventure in a benign world populated by fairies, fauns, and other forest creatures. They lived in a tree house in a massive oak, with pulleys for raising treasures, buckets for catching rainwater, and bedding made of dandelions and cattails. They ate honey, berries, and the edible gifts of the forest denizens. There were no adults or humans of any kind, and it was always summer.

When Justine was done she wrapped her arms around her knees. The librarian was right. When you knew the history, the stories were incredibly sad. Lucy must have missed her little sister terribly. In her schoolgirl notebooks, in handwriting that evolved from the looping cursive of a girl to the spiky hand of an adult, she'd invented a benevolent world for the lost child in the forest into which she'd disappeared. She'd continued to invent it for what must have been decades.

It was past midnight. The house was quiet except for the low hiss of the radiator in the corner. But Justine felt the forest pressing against the house from behind, and it did not feel quiet. It felt stealthy. Somewhere in its black tangles, under dead leaves and fresh snow, lay the bones of a child. A little girl who died alone and scared, without a night-light. Once Justine conjured that image—the small white bones, curled among shreds of rotting fabric in the hollow of a tree or the heart of a thicket—she knew she'd never stop seeing it. How long had it taken Emily to die, as summer chilled into fall? How many days had she wandered, trying to find her way home, before lying down in that last, desperate shelter? A six-year-old girl. One year younger than Angela.

Stop it. She shook her head. It was a long time ago. Three generations. This was a starting-over place for her and her daughters. The past didn't matter—not their own, not Lucy's, and certainly not the house's. All of it was nothing but dust. Emily most of all.