The Silent Girls (22 page)
Authors: Eric Rickstad
T
HE MEETING WAS
held, of all places, in a defunct church rectory, a stone building next door to St. Catherine’s Catholic Church that had been shuttered in 2008 after a pedophile-priest scandal.
It felt weird to have the meeting in a place associated with a church. As if the eyes of God were upon her. Except the eyes of God were supposedly everywhere, Rachel mused as she strolled up the walk.
To her relief, there were no protestors tonight. She entered the rectory’s long, empty hall, hit with a glary fluorescent light from the suspended ceiling. She was early, not wanting to be The Late Girl, and found herself alone.
The hall was bare except for a ring of folding chairs at the far end, near a counter that bordered the back kitchen. The stained indoor/outdoor carpet gave off the odor of damp laundry. Rachel smelled something else, too. Coffee. She walked to the back, peeked into the kitchen to see only a Mr. Coffee chugging away. A water stain darkened the ceiling. The coffeemaker belched.
“Not the tidiest locale,” a voice said behind her.
Rachel spun to see a woman blocking the doorway.
“Sorry, thought you’d heard me,” the woman said.
“My mind was someplace else,” Rachel said.
“Of course.”
The woman was perhaps thirty, with a sense of fashion, for Vermont: Smart, purple eyeglasses, black hair cut in a severe bob not unlike Rachel’s cut. It made Rachel feel self-conscious. She’d had a crazy notion she had sole claim to her new do, and that illusion was shattered now. The young woman wore a trim-fitting Patagonia fleece jacket and slenderizing, charcoal wool pants with cuffs that fit snugly over black Sorels with faux-fur collars. “I’m Jolene,” the woman said, as if this explained her presence.
Rachel wanted to squeeze past Jolene, escape into the open space of the hall. But Jolene did not budge. She leaned against the jamb, blocking the exit. “Don’t forget to sign in,” she said, nodding at a clipboard on the counter as she straightened and slipped past Rachel to the coffeemaker.
Rachel stepped out to the dining hall, frazzled. What was wrong with her?
The meeting started with three other girls joining, none older than sixteen, all of them twitchy and tense, chewing fingernails or teasing the ends of their long hair with their fingers, eyes wandering, all bundled in winter coats they left zipped as if they could not wait to flee. None of them had been at the other meeting. Why would they have been? It was an hour away.
And none was Mandy.
With all who were coming apparently in attendance, Jolene started. “You’re not alone . . .”
Halfway through the meeting, in the midst of a girl speaking of her pending abortion as if discussing having to return a dress that didn’t fit, the door blew open.
“Sorry!” a girl’s voice rang from the darkened entrance. Purple Hair. She strode in, shaking off snow and stomping her feet, the tip of her leaky nose red as a cherry. When her eyes caught Rachel’s, she froze, startled, then joined with an apologetic smile.
Rachel looked away as her mistake smacked her in the face: If it was odd that Purple Hair was here, how odd was it that
Rachel
was here? What reason could Rachel give to be forty miles from the other meeting just two nights before? She tried to form a plausible excuse, but her mind was a Fourth of July sparkler, spewing spastic sparks of thought that died as quickly as they were born. She had no story. She swallowed sticky spit. Purple Hair winked at her, and Rachel felt her heart flip the way it did whenever she was caught lying.
The rest of the meeting, Rachel’s mind was stuck on the wink, the other girls’ stories a muddle of background noise. She declined to tell her own
story.
Did other girls attend other meetings to get a rounded perspective, or preserve anonymity? Maybe attending multiple meetings was common.
Jolene was wrapping up, saying something about staying strong. Rachel eyed the exit, willing herself to breathe normally but nearly panting with anxiety to escape.
She was about to make quick flight when Purple Hair mouthed:
Let’s talk.
Well, so what if Purple Hair sensed something was off? Rachel was here to investigate. Rachel was the hunter, not the prey, as her father would say.
The group was disassembling.
“Sign in if you haven’t,” Jolene said.
Rachel tugged on her peacoat as she approached Purple Hair. “Hey there,” Rachel said. Her tone was wrong. Too casual. Be serious, she reminded herself:
You’re pregnant.
“Hello back,” Purple Hair said. Jolene strode over with the clipboard. “If you would,” she said, and tapped a pen on the clipboard for Purple to use. Purple Hair paused, then took the pen and jotted her name. “There’s coffee left. If anyone wants some before I throw it out—” Jolene said, and strolled into the kitchen.
“What brings you here?” Rachel asked Purple Hair, to get the upper hand.
Purple Hair shrugged. “I make it a point to come to as many as I can. Reach out.”
“They let you do that? I mean—”
“
Anyone
is welcome. As long as you are respectful and preggers.” She laughed.
“What’s that called, infiltrating?”
Purple Hair’s eyes went cold. “Where’d you get that language?”
Rachel felt panic leap into her chest. “I read somewhere online that—” She’d done her due diligence. She and Felix had researched how radicals did this sort of thing.
“That’s
not
me. What about
you
? Why are you
here
?”
“It, the other place,” Rachel began. “It was too close to home. I thought, what if someone sees me? It was our conversation that made me think of it.”
“Really?”
Rachel nodded, getting hold of the thread of truth in the web of lies. “We were talking about my going to Middlebury, and one of the reasons I didn’t go to a meeting there was I didn’t want to be seen by friends or professors.”
“Mmm.” Purple Hair cocked her head like:
Go on, I’m listening. I don’t believe a word, but I’m listening.
“And when we came out of the last meeting, I saw someone I knew. Luckily before they saw me. And I thought, this town is
way
too small.”
“Mmmm.”
“You act like you don’t believe me.”
“Why should I not believe you?”
Rachel glowed with panic.
“I wouldn’t want to be seen if I were
you
either,” Purple Hair said, her voice metallic.
“What do you mean?”
Purple Hair cast a look to the last two girls heading for the door. “I have to talk to those two,” she said, and charged after the girls.
What did she mean?
Rachel realized she was alone with the list, took her iPhone, out and clicked a quick pic.
Outside, the winter wind bit Rachel’s face. She spied Purple Hair across the street under the pulsing light of a streetlamp, speaking to one of the girls.
As Rachel advanced on her, the other girl shuffled down the walk, her head down.
Rachel came up, ready to assail. But Purple Hair smiled, and said, “Oh good, you haven’t trucked off just yet.”
“I’m parked over there,” Rachel said, angered. She’d come alone tonight. Felix had been swamped with a lab and two papers due the next day. He’d not wanted her to come alone, but she’d insisted. What could possibly happen? “Look, I—”
“I was rude. I apologize,” Purple Hair said, her voice soft as kitten fur now. “If I were you, I’d have changed meeting places, too.”
“Why do you keep saying, if you were
me
—” Rachel said.
“Who you
are.
”
“Who I am?” A bright star of fear stabbed at the front of her skull.
“Yeah, who you are.”
Purple Hair looked at her, quizzically.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rachel said.
“If what had happened
when you were a baby
had happened to me, I’d be even more ashamed about killing my baby, keep it a secret at all costs.”
Before she knew what was happening, Rachel had Purple’s wrist squeezed in a pit-bull grip and was twisting.
“It’s all right to be angry,” Purple said, her voice steady, tranquil. “I’d want to hurt someone, too.”
“What are you
talking
about?”
“What happened to your parents when you were a baby. How lucky you were to survive it.”
Rachel’s grip eased, her fingers sore from clutching so hard.
“I didn’t
survive
anything,” Rachel said. “I wasn’t even in the car.”
“Car?”
Rachel felt something inside her shift; her guts wormy. Recently, the idea to find out more about her parents had slipped into her brain. She’d gone through old photos and watched old videos, heard her mother’s voice, her laughter. She’d studied her mother’s face, set to memory her expressions. She’d watched the video of her mother in the hospital minutes after Rachel’s birth, cuddling Rachel, who was all kicking legs and pumping fists. And, just before Rachel had left for school, she’d wanted to ask her father about the details of the wreck. Felt that the gnawing emptiness inside her would go away if she knew more. She’d typed her parents’ names into Google but had never hit
SEARCH
. In the end, as much as she
needed
to know, she did not
want to
know. She’d turned her parents into romanticized idols. Victims. But what if the crash had been their fault? What if they’d been drunk? Or killed someone else in the crash? In the end, she hadn’t wanted to taint her ideal with fact.
Rachel’s eyes teared in the stinging cold. “Right,” she said. “It’s not like I was in the car.”
“The house, you mean.”
Rachel felt the ground turn to quicksand.
“Your parents didn’t die in a car crash,” Purple Hair said.
The wind was howling in Rachel’s emptied skull.
“They were murdered,” Purple Hair said, “stabbed to death by a monster.”
R
ACHEL STAL
KED DOWN
the sidewalk blindly, tripping and falling, picking herself up, buttoning her coat up tight for once against the sudden cold she felt. She sensed a sob working in her chest, wanting out, but her mind had not quite grasped what she’d been told. Not quite believed it. Every time she thought of what Purple Hair had said, she grabbed the sides of her head and squeezed, as if trying to rid herself of a migraine. She called Felix and got his voice mail, left a brief but babbling message. She tried to calm herself, breathe deeply.
From behind her she heard Purple Hair calling after her.
Rachel hurried along.
What Purple Hair had said rooted in her mind like a malignant tumor. She wanted to take a knife and cut it out.
R
ATH SAT
SLUMPED
in a recliner in one of the Spine Center’s inner sanctums, recovering from the procedure, his stomach oily, his skin hot and sticky. What an embarrassing display he’d made, vomiting at the tail end of the procedure. The nurse had told him all would be fine in a few days, he’d never even know his back had hurt. But that
needle.
Fuck. It had jammed in there so deep inside him, he had felt it piercing what he could only be marrow. Or raw nerve. It
killed.
Rankin had been right. Pain could always get worse.
G
ROUT TO
SSED A
dart at the board in his office. He’d just gotten off the horn with Jen and was fried from her asking where the force budget was at and when the new positions were going to open up, both of which he had no control over or information to share. She’d said she’d seen a position online, for security, at the Littleton, NH, mall.
A mall.
In
New Hampshire.
Was she trying to give him reasons to strangle her? Had she not heard him all these years about how New Hampshire was the state they were forced to drive through to get to the Maine coast and back for vacation.
A fucking mall.
Fucking New Hampshire.
He thought about Boyd Pratt. Something was off about that one. Grout tossed a dart and almost struck Larkin’s eye with it as he poked his head into the office.
Larkin looked at Grout, who held a pair of darts, his feet propped on the desk next to a growler of his home-brew stout and a half-tanked pint glass of the beer beside it, and said, “Am I interrupting something important?”
“What’s it look like, given the evidence?” Grout said, and finished his pint.
“I guess not, sir.”
“Skip the ‘sir,’ will you?”
“Yes, sir.”
Grout sighed. “What is it?”
Larkin produced a folder from behind his back and slapped it against his thigh. “I got her.”
“Got who?”
“Betty Malroy. I know where she lives.”
Grout sat up, nearly knocked over his growler, just saved it with a lucky, buzzed grasp. “I thought I put you on the satanic bullshit deep dive.”
“I finished with that, last night.”
Grout eyed him skeptically.
“This morning, I should say, at 4
A.M.
, I’ve been on it like a beagle on a bunny straight out, like you asked,” Larkin said.
Grout had no doubt it was true. It was clear the young officer had stayed up all night not just to impress his superior, or for any delusion of advancement at this stage in his career, but because he loved the work. And was thorough. He’d pulled an all-nighter, and he looked as scrubbed the day after at two in the afternoon as an altar boy at Sunday Mass. And he’d beaten Detective Test to the punch.
“How’d you find her?” Grout said.
“Tax filings. I tried mortgages, car registration, and the like. Nothing doing.”
“Where is she?”
“Connecticut. Newbury. She also is the backer of another entity, sir, called Better Days. A very exclusive, very private adoption agency.”
Grout gnawed his lower lip and processed what he’d just heard. He clapped his hands together. “Shall we pay her a visit?”
“Us, sir?” Larkin blushed.
“Unless you have plans.”
“No, sir, not at all, sir.”
Sir,
again.
“But. It’s another state,” Larkin said, “we don’t have juris—”
“Let me worry about that.”
“What about Detective Test?”
“She fell sick yesterday afternoon. Her loss.” Grout stood. “How long a drive you figure to Newbury?”
“It’s two hundred and twelve miles, sir. About four hours and thirty-six minutes. Give or take.”
Grout smiled at Larkin’s preparedness as he looped a finger through the growler handle and hefted it up off the desk. “Ready,” he said.
Larkin eyed the growler as he allowed Grout to pass into the hall.
The young officer fell in beside and a step behind Grout down the hall.
“Question,” Grout said. “What about the sadist deep dive?”
“Plenty of sickos, sir. But nothing linked to Julia Pearl.” He paused, slowed his pace.
“What?” Grout said, slowing his pace.
“There was this old case. It seemed a lot like Pearl, but. But it was too long ago and in another state. Halloween of ’85, in Wayland, Massachusetts. It involved a Marianne King, thirty-two years old, and
not
pregnant. An apparent isolated incident. But.
Look.
” Officer Larkin handed his iPhone to Grout.
Grout stared at the image on the screen. “Christ,” he said.
“All sincerity, sir. I don’t think Christ had anything to do with that. But, other than somewhat similar wounds, there are no commonalities. Whoever did this to Marianne King and carved Miss Pearl, maybe had one thing in common though, if I may posit my own theory. The carvings weren’t done by Satanists carving
their
mark of Satan on the girls, but rather by religious fanatics marking their girl, or woman in Marianne King’s case, as the evil entity.”
Grout studied the pic. The
carving
into the woman’s belly looked disturbingly similar to the mess found in Julia’s decomposed flesh. “It looks a lot like our girl’s wounds,” he said.
“But,” Larkin said. His voice was low, as if he were a boy telling a horror story around a campfire. “It was twenty-six years ago.”
“This woman on Halloween. Did she say
anything
before she died?”
“That’s just it, sir. She
didn’t
die. She’s alive.”
Grout gaped at Larkin.
“She’s fifty-eight years old and lives in Beacon Hill in Boston,” Larkin said. “A domestic-abuse advocate. Her husband is a star prosecutor.”
Grout gawked at the .jpeg. That this woman had survived such a butchering could only be considered a miracle.
“I haven’t spoken to her, sir, but I have set up a time to do so,” Larkin said. “I hope that’s OK. I don’t want to step on toes, but—”
Grout nodded. This kid had something Grout lacked. Something the best detectives possessed: conviction. Instead of feeling jealous of it, however, Grout felt what, exactly? Proud.
“Mrs. King,” Larkin said. “From the reports. She swears a child did this to her. Experts say she remembers it wrong; they attribute it to shock and blood loss scrambling her memory.”
Grout looked at the .jpeg again. A child? No. Nothing could drive a child to such violence. “Well, even if there’s no real tie to Julia Pearl, good work,” Grout said, and started down the hall again, Officer Larkin a half step behind him now.
As Grout pushed open the door and strode out into the cold and darkening afternoon, he said “Another question, Officer.”
“Yes, sir?”
If he said
sir one
more time.
“And I want you to think hard about it.”
“Of course, sir.”
“What do you think of New Hampshire?”
“I’m from New Hampshire, sir.”
“I see.”
“That’s why I moved to Vermont.”