We walked the hallway in silence, the sound of footsteps echoing. Without a word, Tessa took my hand in hers and squeezed hard.
In the school office, Mom waited for me, pale and red-eyed. “They think they’ve found her,” she started to say, but that was nothing new. When I pulled a face, she added, “It’s a body.” She broke down, sobbing. I didn’t know what to do so I patted her shoulder, knowing that everyone who worked in the school office was watching us. I wanted to say It won’t be her, Mom, but I couldn’t form the words.
I walked behind her to the car, where Dad waited for us. I slipped into the backseat and pulled on my seat belt almost robotically. A body. I felt my stomach roll over at the word.
“We should have left her at school,” Dad said, as if I wasn’t there.
“I want her with us.” Mom turned to him. “Where is she supposed to go after, if . . .”
“She could have gone home with someone. That girl with the purple hair, whoever. Christ,” Dad mumbled, pulling out of the parking lot.
Mom said nothing for a moment, then she turned and her eyes locked on mine. There was no way she was letting me out of her sight for any longer than she had to. “We’ll have a police escort,” she explained to me calmly, “or it would take two hours to get there.”
We sped along the highway, doing close to ninety miles an hour, a police cruiser with lights swirling leading the way. Mom was calm enough to fill me in on the basics: the body was that of a young blond woman, too decomposed for easy identification. They needed us to come and have a look, to see if we recognized the clothing, the shoes . . . what was left. No one spoke for the rest of the drive, although Mom continued to cry quietly on and off.
My memories of that afternoon are so vivid: the sound of gravel under the car tires as we pulled off the paved road, the clearing in the trees, water glittering dark and blue in the distance, a rusted chain drawn across the end of the path, a No Trespassing sign. A man in a dark suit, glasses pushed up on his head, his hands covered in surgical gloves, walking toward the car as we pulled in. Mom opening the door before we had stopped, dust from the gravel on her black boots. The man holding up his hands, then the words: “It’s not her.”
It’s not her.
This time, our hopes were not dashed—they were raised. We were elated. Mom collapsed to the ground, sobbing as the man explained quietly how sure they were. How it couldn’t be her. The girl had a scar where her appendix had been removed. Dad crouched next to Mom, his arms around her, his face unreadable.
“I knew it wasn’t her, I knew it. She’s still alive, I know it, I know it, I can feel it, I’m her mother. . . .” Mom couldn’t stop talking. The man in the gloves just nodded and the other cops stood around uncomfortably.
I climbed from the car and looked out over the dusty quarry to where a body was covered with a white sheet. Other cops and detectives were poking around the tall grass with long poles, putting evidence into plastic bags.
That wasn’t my sister under that sheet. But it was still someone. Some blond girl, who had once been living and now was dead. Someone’s daughter. Someone’s sister.
CHAPTER 3
I WISH THAT I could say that was the last time my parents had to look at a body, but it wasn’t. After that first time at the quarry, there were others: in the morgue of a town a half hour away; in photos shown by detectives; and once more, a year after Sarah disappeared, at a location far from our home—and that was body parts, found stuffed in a suitcase and left in a dump up north. Thankfully they didn’t take me along for that excruciating ride, for that horrifying misidentification. I was thirteen, old enough to be left at home. Of course, I wasn’t left alone. My parents would never do that. They had a detective sit in a cruiser outside the house while they went to look at the hands and clothing of the dead girl in the suitcase. So many dead girls, so many blond girls—but none of them were Sarah.