Turns out Abby Sinclair was still alive.
Officer Heaney was no police officer —he’s a man who worked maintaining the campgrounds, who visited often during the off-season, who lived nearby.
He’s a man who was working at Lady-of-the-Pines the summer Abby Sinclair disappeared. What was found in that maintenance shed, what I handed over to police, with my descriptions and Jamie’s of the man we saw, led to uncover who he was, and where he lived, and what— who—he’d stolen.
I was told she knew him. All the Lady-of-the-Pines girls did. So when she was walking back on foot after overhearing Luke on the phone with another girl, after stumbling off her bike and leaving it behind at Luke’s and rushing off into the dark to get away from him, she ran into this man on the road. I don’t know where on the road; no one told me so specifically. But I can imagine it.
Like Isabeth, she got in the car. Even though, like Shyann, she wanted to run off and hide forever in the trees, because her heart was broken. Like Jannah, she went off with someone she thought she could trust. And like Hailey, she was assumed to have run away . . . even though all this time she was really missing.
The car pulled over, and the man leaned out an arm. “Hey, hey, Abby— Your name’s Abby, right? What are you doing out there? You okay?”
And she was nervous at first—anyone hearing a car stop short on a lone road at night would be—and, besides, she didn’t want him to turn her in to the counselors.
She’d get kicked out. But his face was friendly enough, and she’d talked to him before, that one time the sink got clogged full of hair and he came to Cabin 3 to fix it. Not to mention, she’d skinned her knee when she fell off the bicycle in Luke’s driveway, before she left the bike there and took off on foot, and she still had another mile to walk back to camp with her knee bleeding.
He said he wouldn’t tell on her. He said he’d help her sneak back in.
I wish Abby didn’t believe him and accept the ride that night, but she did.
She did.
Parts of this I tell myself, and parts of this are unalterably true—news articles and police officers have told me.
I don’t know what happened to her all the months she was kept by him, and I can’t make myself ask. The horror of it gouges me open.
How easy it was for the man to get away with taking her and keeping her— because everyone so quickly believed she ran away. It was never questioned, not by anyone who knew her, not by friends or family, not by the girls she spent her summer with, not by the boy she kissed under the stars.
It was questioned by no one—until me.
At some point, and I don’t know if it’s the night of, or a different day, someone approaches to tell me something important. One police officer remembers me from when I visited the station asking about Abby Sinclair and her bike. He comes over when they’re processing me for setting the fires, and he takes one of my hands, even though it’s got ink from the fingerprinting on it, and he tells me some things.
Thanks
to
me
convincing
her
grandparents, Abby’s file was reopened.
He says that my visit to New Jersey, not to mention the letter I sent Abby’s grandparents—creepy
as
it
was,
upsetting them as much as it did—did have them looking into it, but it was my finding the wallet that broke open the case. My poking around, my insisting no one give up looking, that’s what did this, he says. He was telling me I helped save a missing girl.
I don’t see her myself, but I think of her. I am always thinking of her.