By the next morning, the news had spread throughout the town. Tracking dogs were brought in by the state police, searched our grounds. Our basement. Our basement, for God’s sake. A rapid response was set in motion. Volunteers organized a search team to aid the police. By nightfall, posters of Lucy appeared tacked to telephone poles and trees around town. We grew used to the phone ringing, to police arriving and departing. We were again asked to account for our whereabouts the day Lucy disappeared. They asked if there was anyone who could verify my actions that day.
“We have to ask these questions, you understand,” Gordon said, his voice apologetic. He was our liaison and kept us informed of every step of the investigation. He reported that Lucy’s friends, her fellow students, and faculty were being interviewed again. He reviewed with us the press release appealing for information before it was sent out. He told us that security tapes from the school had been gathered and played and that they were continuing to amass what he called “electronic and forensic footprints.” To no effect. All these efforts resulted only in dead ends. Lucy’s cell phone held no signal. There were no ATM withdrawals or charges on the credit card. No reports of accidents involving a fifteen-year-old girl matching Lucy’s description.
That first week, friends and parents of Lucy’s classmates stopped by. They dropped off platters of food. Casseroles and cakes, roast chicken, a huge pot of chowder, the kind of things people brought after a death, something I supposed I should have felt grateful for but that only added to a sense of violation. Most of the food ended up tossed in the garbage, just like the lamb tagine I had scraped from the pot in what felt like a lifetime past. The Before life.
Amy drove down from Maine. She helped deal with the reporters—“the cameras,” she called them—who swarmed into town, jackals on the scent of a story: Young, pretty white girl missing. Daughter of an internationally noted artist. There was speculation about kidnapping. We were walked through the procedure and told that if a kidnapper got in touch with us we were to notify them and absolutely not try to handle it on our own. News vans sprouting satellite dishes rotated from the street outside our home to the police station to the school, where they interviewed Lucy’s friends, her teachers. Each time I opened the daily paper or flicked on the television news and saw a picture of Lucy staring back at me I felt a punch in my solar plexus. They’d used the class picture Sophie had given to Gordon and another of her in shorts and tank top holding a tennis racket. Where they had gotten the last one I had no idea. One of her friends I supposed. Amy manned the phone, urged us to rest, to eat. But we slept little, subsisting on endless mugs of coffee. Sophie swung between hope and fear. Several times I found her in Lucy’s room, a rosary in her hands. The days stretched out in one long nightmare that eventually ended, only to be replaced by a far more horrific one.
“Can I get you another?”
The bartender’s voice pulled me back. “What?”
She nodded toward my glass. “Another?”
I needed to get out of there. Without a word, I tossed a twenty on the bar and headed for home.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Rain wished she was at home, wanted only to be left alone, but it was crystal this was so not going to happen.
“How could you forget?” Her mother, as usual, was on a rant. “I told you and told you what time we needed to leave, and you said you’d be ready. Now look at us. We’re already fifteen minutes late.”
Fifteen minutes late because earlier they’d fought about what she was wearing. She’d put on her favorite pair of cutoffs, the ones long enough to cover her scars, but her mother had said they were inappropriate and had told her to go put on a dress. A dress. Like that was going to happen. She compromised by putting on a denim skirt.
“It’s bad form to be late for an appointment,” her mother said in her scolding voice. Her furious voice.
Bad form? Really? “My B.”
“And drop the attitude, Rain. It’s not productive.”
Seriously? Seriously? What was so totally not productive was wasting a Friday afternoon. Right now Christy and Jeannie were at the mall scoping the stores for sales, Jeannie probably looking for something to lift from Macy’s or CVS. They had started stealing a couple of months back, and Rain could not believe how easy it was. Like the stores were asking for it.
Her mother slowed the car to check a road sign. “Cedar Street. This is it. Now look for the third house on the right.” They passed a brick ranch. “That’s one,” her mother counted.
Rain dropped her hand to her upper thigh and pressed her fingers against the cut she’d made earlier that morning.
“That’s two. And here it is. Three.” Her mother swung the car into a gravel drive and switched off the ignition. Hands locked on the steering wheel, she twisted her shoulders so that she could face Rain. “Listen to me, young lady. I want you to give this a chance.”
Rain stared straight ahead through the windshield and eyed a two-story Cape with clapboards painted white and green shutters framing the windows. She had expected an office building or something in the new medical center out by the highway. “This is it? The shrink’s office is in her house? What kind of shrink has her office in her house?”
“Doctor,” her mother said automatically, completely missing the point as usual.
“Whatev.”
“And yes. Dr. Mallory sees patients in her home. Which is so much nicer. More relaxing, don’t you think?”
If her mother had a clue what she was thinking, she’d probably have her shipped off and locked up in some hospital for loonies, which was exactly what Sally Sampson’s parents had done to her last year. A major freak-out over drugs or something. Now Sally was at some lame school for troubled girls. Just shoot me now.
“When I spoke with Dr. Mallory, she said we were to use the side entrance. She said she’d be waiting for us.”
We? Us? No way Rain was going in there with her mother. “I’m going in alone.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m not a baby.”
“I know that. I just thought you’d feel better if I came with you.”
Like she was going to let that happen. She darted an over my cold corpse look at her mother.
“Okay, then, if you’re absolutely sure.” Her mother released one hand from the wheel and lifted her hair off her neck, flipping it to one side. She looked tired. Rain could almost pity her. Last summer, when she’d been looking for a bracelet she wanted to borrow, she’d come across a book in her mother’s top bureau drawer, stashed beneath a pile of scarves like it was some kind of porn. How to Look Ten Years Younger. Well, whatever advice the author gave, it wasn’t working. Her mother looked like hell. It had to suck to be old and getting older.
“I’ll be back in an hour.”
“I’ll walk home,” she said, like that was even a possibility. She knew her mother would be waiting when she came out.