“I know you think my kidnapping is related to Nancy Dee and Paula D’Amato,” Megan said. “I know you’ve tried to find ways to link them and find all the similarities between us. And there are, Livia. So many things are the same. But only when you pointed out those similarities did I notice the differences. The startling ways our cases are unalike.”
“I don’t understand,” Livia said. “What are you talking about, Megan?”
“The book,” Megan gave a disgusted laugh. “It’s such bullshit. My celebrity? Fake. Based on a lie. All the girls the book has helped? Nonsense. I used to help girls, back when I ran that retreat. I helped girls fit into high school. That was real. This? Everything I have now from that book, none of it helps anyone. It’s all a lie.”
“What’s a lie, Megan? What lie are you talking about?”
“Nancy and Paula were both abused. Sexually assaulted, for months and years. It sickens me. Paula was beaten until she died.”
“I know, Megan. It’s awful.”
“Yes. But why was I never touched?”
Livia squinted in the darkness.
“He never assaulted me, Livia. Never physically touched me. Dr. Mattingly initially believed I suppressed the abuse, hid it under the effects of the ketamine. But that’s not it, Livia. The physicians who examined me confirmed there was no sexual abuse. No sexual intercourse. Dr. Mattingly speculated that I repressed the memory of other sexual abuse, and he has worked carefully with me during therapy sessions to tease these buried memories from me. The problem is, they don’t exist. He never assaulted me, Livia. So much is similar between Nancy and Paula and me. But so much is different.”
“I believe you, Megan. He never assaulted you. I believe that. But you never claimed he assaulted you. Not in your book or your interviews. That was never part of your story. You don’t have to defend this point with me or anyone else. There was no lie, Megan. You didn’t lie.”
“Yes, I did. Not about the abuse. But it helps explain everything else. It makes everything else line up. It exposes my lie for what it is—a goddamn farce that’s taken on a life of its own. For a while, even I believed it.”
Livia walked closer. “Tell me. What lie, Megan?”
“About the bunker.”
Livia waited as Megan continued to play the flashlight over the ghost houses around them. Clearly, her mind was confused and overloaded, processing too many things at once.
“No, Megan. You were at that bunker. There’s proof of your being there.”
“I was there. He brought me there. But I never escaped.”
Livia watched Megan. Tried to read her eyes through the darkness and diagnose if this poor young girl had gone mad from the recent events and the possibility of her abduction being tied to Nancy Dee and Paula D’Amato, two girls who had turned up dead.
“Of course you escaped, Megan. You are here now. You’re safe. There is no lie.”
“No,” Megan said, finally taking her eyes off the houses and staring at Livia. “You don’t understand. I am here. I am alive. Nancy and Paula are not. But I’m alive not because I escaped from that bunker. It’s because he let me go.”
CHAPTER 54
August 2016
The Night of the Abduction
The headlights of Nicole’s car shined into the backseat of the Buick Regal. The girl had settled down now. She no longer kicked at the door or pounded her shoulder into the window. Casey was certain she was lying on the backseat, sleeping in a coma-like slumber. He’d seen it before.
“Come on,” he said. “It’s time.”
He climbed from Nicole’s car and opened the back door of the Regal. The girl was indeed unconscious, lying like a drunk in the backseat, burlap over her head and zip ties securing her wrists behind her back, one leg splayed across the torn vinyl seat and the other limp on the floorboard.
“What’s wrong with her?” Nicole asked. She and Casey where bleached by the headlights from Nicole’s car, which also highlighted Megan’s unconscious body.
“Just taking a little nap.”
Nicole hesitated. “You give her something?”
“She’ll be good as new in about an hour.”
Casey reached in and pulled Megan—floppy-armed and bobbleheaded—out of the car and over his shoulder. He clicked on a flashlight and headed toward one of the houses.
“What are we doing with her?” Nicole asked.
Casey didn’t answer, just walked ahead. After a moment of hesitation, Nicole followed.
Away from the headlights it was pitch-black. Casey shined his flashlight onto the house numbers above the front door. 67. He’d delivered Nancy Dee, a year before, to the house next to this one. And a year before that, he’d brought the Georgia Tech girl named Paula D’Amato to the house two doors down. He’d never had the courage to revisit those homes to see what remained. He knew the Dee girl was gone. But the others . . . he never gathered the nerve to check.
He walked through the front door with the unconscious girl over his shoulder and Nicole following.
“What are these empty houses doing here?” Nicole asked.
Casey kept moving. Toward the cellar door, which he kicked open with his foot and then started down.
“Casey, stop! This is screwed up.”
But he was gone a moment later. Swallowed by the dark stairwell.
CHAPTER 55
November 2017
Fourteen Months Since Megan’s Escape
Megan took off, heading with her flashlight to one of the empty homes. Livia followed. Toward the dark house up the road from where Livia had parked, adjacent to the home bathed by the car’s headlights.
“You ran from that bunker,” Livia said. “The police know you were there. Your prints were found on the door handle. The burlap bag he placed over your head was found in that bunker. Your hair follicles were in the bag. That was a real thing, Megan. You did escape that night. You ran through the woods until Mr. Steinman found you on Highway Fifty-Seven.”
Megan, a few paces in front of Livia, spoke over her shoulder. “Yes. The bunker was real. It was all real. The forest, the highway. Mr. Steinman, too. But not the escape. The media created that. Dante Campbell and all the others, they wanted the sensationalism. The whole country took that myth and ran with it. I did, too. Embellishing the details in my book until I believed the story myself. But it’s not true.”
She continued walking toward the house, the beam of her flashlight widening on the brick exterior. Megan jogged to the back of the house and shined the light onto the English windows of the basement. The light shined straight through the windows and into the empty basement. No plywood. She redirected the light to the next house, across two acres of construction and clay and rubble. She ran for it.
Livia worked to keep up, stumbling over the rubble as she finally came alongside Megan. “Tell me about the bunker, Megan. What’s not true with your story?”
“I didn’t escape. He left that bunker door open. He did it so I would run.”
“Why? Megan, why would he do that?”
“Because there was no other way.”