“Of course I know that,” I snap back. “It’s been twenty years and nothing has changed. Those girls are still dead, and my father is still in prison. Why are you still interested?”
Aaron is silent on the other end; I’ve already given him too much, I know. I’ve already satisfied that sick journalistic urge that feeds on ripping open the wounds of others just before they’re about to heal. I’ve satisfied it just enough for him to taste metallic and thirst for more, a shark gravitating toward blood in water.
“But you’ve changed,” he says. “You and your brother. The public would love to know how you’re doing—how you’re coping.”
I roll my eyes.
“And your father,” he continues. “Maybe he’s changed. Have you talked to him?”
“I have nothing to say to my father,” I tell him. “And I have nothing to say to you. Please don’t call here again.”
I hang up, slamming the phone back into its base harder than I intend to. I look down and notice my fingers are shaking. I tuck my hair behind my ear in an attempt to busy them and glance back at the window, the sky morphing into a deep, inky blue, the sun a bubble on top of the horizon now, ready to burst.
Then I turn back to my desk and grab my bag, pushing my chair back as I stand. I glance at my desk lamp, exhaling slowly before clicking it off and taking a shaky step into the dark.
CHAPTER THREE
There are so many subtle ways we women subconsciously protect ourselves throughout the day; protect ourselves from shadows, from unseen predators. From cautionary tales and urban legends. So subtle, in fact, that we hardly even realize we’re doing them.
Leave work before dark. Clutch our purses to our chest with one hand, hold our keys between our fingers in the other, like a weapon, as we shuffle toward our car, strategically parked beneath a streetlight in case we weren’t able to leave work before dark. Approach our car, glance in the back seat before unlocking the front. Grip our phone tight, pointer finger just a swipe away from 9-1-1. Step inside. Lock it again. Do not idle. Drive away quickly.
I turn out of the parking lot adjacent to my office building and away from town. I stop at a red light and glance in my rearview mirror—habit, I suppose—wincing at the reflection. I look rough. It’s muggy outside, so muggy that my skin is slick with grease; my usually limp brown hair has a bit of a curl at the tips, a frizziness that only the Louisiana summer can achieve.
Louisiana summer.
Such a loaded phrase. I grew up here. Well, not here. Not in Baton Rouge. In Louisiana, though. A tiny little town called Breaux Bridge—the Crawfish Capital of the World. It’s a distinction we’re proud of, for some reason. The same way Cawker City, Kansas, must be proud of their five-thousand-pound ball of twine. It brings superficial meaning to an otherwise meaningless place.
Breaux Bridge also has a population of less than ten thousand, which means that everybody knows everybody. And more specifically, everybody knows me.
When I was young, I used to live for the summer. The swampy memories are so abundant: spotting gators in Lake Martin, screaming when I caught a glimpse of their beady eyes lurking beneath a carpet of algae. My brother laughing as we sprinted in the opposite direction, screaming See ya later, alligator! Making wigs out of the Spanish moss hanging in our multi-acre backyard then picking chiggers out of my hair in the days that followed, dabbing clear nail polish on the itchy red welts. Twisting the tail off a freshly boiled crawfish and sucking the head dry.
But memories of summer also bring memories of fear.
I was twelve when the girls started to go missing. Girls not much older than me. It was July of 1999, and it was shaping up to be just another hot, humid Louisiana summer.
Until one day, it wasn’t.
I remember walking into the kitchen one morning, early, rubbing the sleep from my eyes, dragging my mint-green blanket across the linoleum floor. I had slept with that blanket ever since I was a baby, loved the edges raw. I remember twisting the fabric between my fingers, a nervous tic, when I saw my parents huddled in front of the TV, worried. Whispering.
“What’s going on?”
They turned around, their eyes wide at the sight of me, turning it off before I could see the screen.
Before they thought I could see the screen.
“Oh, honey,” my father said, walking toward me, holding me tighter than normal. “It’s nothing, sweetheart.”
But it wasn’t nothing. Even then, I knew it wasn’t nothing. The way my father was holding me, the way my mother’s lip quivered as she turned toward the window—the same way Lacey’s lip quivered this afternoon as she forced herself to process the realization she had known all along. The realization she had been trying to push out, trying to pretend wasn’t true. My eyes had caught a glimpse of that bright red headline stamped across the bottom of the screen; it had already been seared into my psyche, a collection of words that would forever alter life as I knew it.
LOCAL BREAUX BRIDGE GIRL GOES MISSING
At twelve years old, GIRL GOES MISSING doesn’t have the same sinister implications as it does when you’re older. Your mind doesn’t automatically flicker to all those horrible places: kidnapping, rape, murder. I remember thinking: Missing where? I thought maybe she had gotten lost. My family’s home was situated on more than ten acres of land; I had gotten lost plenty of times catching toads in the swamp or exploring uncharted patches of woods, scratching my name in the bark of an unmarked tree or constructing forts out of moss-soaked sticks. I had even gotten stuck in a small cave once, the home of some kind of animal, its puckered entrance somehow both frightening and enticing at the exact same time. I remember my brother tying a piece of old rope to my ankle as I lay flat on my belly, wriggling myself into the cold, dark void, holding a flashlight keychain tight between my lips. Letting the darkness swallow me whole as I crawled deeper and deeper—and, finally, the sheer terror that ensued once I realized that I couldn’t pull myself back out. So when I saw clips of the search party scouring through overgrown foliage and wading through bogs, I couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if I ever went “missing” myself, if people would come for me the same way they were coming for her.
She’ll turn up, I thought. And when she does, I bet she’ll feel silly for causing such a fuss.
But she didn’t turn up. And three weeks later, another girl went missing.
Four weeks after that, another.
By the end of the summer, six girls had disappeared. One day they were there, and the next—gone. Vanished without a trace.
Now, six missing girls will always be six too many, but in a town like Breaux Bridge, a town so tiny that there’s a noticeable gap in a classroom when one child drops out or a quietness to a neighborhood when a single family moves away, six girls was a weight almost too heavy to bear. Their goneness was impossible to ignore; it was an evil that had settled over the sky the way an impending storm can make your bones throb. You could feel it, taste it, see it in the eyes of every person you met. An inherent distrust had captivated a town that was once so trusting; a suspicion had taken hold that was impossible to shake. One single, unspoken question lingered among us all.
Who’s next?
Curfews were put into place; stores and restaurants closed at dusk. I, like every other girl in town, was forbidden to be outside after dark. Even in the daytime, I felt the evil lurking just behind every corner. The anticipation that it would be me—that I would be next—was always there, always present, always suffocating.
“You’ll be fine, Chloe. You don’t have anything to worry about.”
I remember my brother hoisting on his backpack one morning before summer camp; I was crying, again, too afraid to leave the house.
“She does have something to worry about, Cooper. This is serious.”
“She’s too young,” he said. “She’s only twelve. He likes teenagers, remember?”
“Cooper, please.”