For the next week, Darby looked through binders packed with mug shots. The police were hoping a face might spark something. It never did. They tried hypnosis more than once and finally gave up when detectives were told she wasn’t a ‘willing subject.’
Darby went to bed each night with her head stuffed with mug-shot faces and unanswered questions. The police wouldn’t tell her anything beyond variations of ‘everyone’s working real hard.’
Both the newspapers and TV had talked about the vicious stabbing of Stacey Stephens and the frantic search efforts for Melanie Cruz, who had been abducted from the house of a friend. The friend was a minor and her name couldn’t be released, but an ‘unnamed source close to the investigation’ stated this ‘friend’ was believed to be the intended target. The only piece of evidence ever mentioned was a chloroform-soaked rag the police found in the woods behind the house.
By the end of the week, with no new information coming in on the case, reporters started focusing on Stacey’s and Melanie’s parents. Darby found she couldn’t read their tearful pleas, couldn’t face the anguished looks captured in the pictures and video footage.
One evening, after Sheila had left for work, the FBI agent, Evan Manning, stopped by with a pizza and two cans of Coke. They ate on a rickety table near the pool. They had a lovely view of the liquor store and trailer park.
‘How are you holding up?’ he asked.
Darby shrugged. The droning sound of traffic and the smell of exhaust filled the warm air.
‘If you don’t want to talk, that’s fine,’ Manning said. ‘I’m not here to pump you with questions.’
Darby thought about telling him about school, how everyone, including most of her teachers, stared at her as though she had stepped off a UFO. Even her friends were treating her differently, talking to her in cautious tones, the way you’d speak to someone afflicted with some rare, terminal disease. Suddenly, she was interesting.
Only she didn’t want to be interesting. She wanted to go back to being her old boring self, back to being a normal teenager looking forward to a long summer of reading books and pool parties and hanging out with Mel down at the Cape.
‘I want to help find Mel,’ Darby said. The way she figured it, if she helped find Melanie, then all would be forgiven, and people would stop staring at her as though what had happened to Mel and Stacey were her fault.
Manning placed a hand on her arm, squeezing it. ‘I’ll do everything in my power to help find Melanie. And I’m going to find the man who did this to you. That’s a promise.’
After Manning left, Darby headed to the vending machine for another Coke. She saw the pay phone outside the office door. The words she had practiced saying over and over again this past week were now burning to get out.
She dropped a quarter into the pay phone.
‘Hello?’ Mrs Cruz said.
I’m sorry for everything that’s happened. I’m sorry for Mel and I’m sorry for what you’re going through I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.
As hard as she tried, Darby couldn’t get the words out. They were stuck in her throat, lodged in there like hot stones.
‘Mel, is that you?’ Mrs Cruz said. ‘Are you okay? Tell me you’re okay.’
Mrs Cruz’s hope, bright and so alive, made Darby hang up and want to run someplace far away, someplace where nobody, not even her own mother, would ever find her.
Sheila couldn’t afford the motel anymore. The house still hadn’t been released by the police, and when it was, there would be cleanup and repairs. Darby was going to spend the summer at her aunt and uncle’s beach house in Maine. Sheila was going to stay in town with a coworker. She would drive to Maine on her days off.
Darby went with her mother to a grocery store in Saugus to stock up on food for the long drive. Taped inside the grocery store window, right near the front door so no one would miss it, was a poster board holding a blown-up picture of Melanie. It was yellowed from the sun. The word missing was written in big, bold red letters above her smiling face. A reward for $25,000 was listed, along with a toll-free phone number.
Sheila was rummaging through her coupon folder when Darby turned the corner near the cash registers and spotted Mrs Cruz talking to the store owner. He took the rolled-up poster board from Melanie’s mother and walked toward the front window.
Mrs Cruz saw her. Their eyes locked, and Darby felt the full weight of Helena Cruz’s stare, only this stare carried something that made Darby want to duck and run: hatred, cold and hard and fixed on her. If given the chance, she was sure Mrs Cruz would, without a moment’s hesitation, trade Darby’s life for Melanie’s.
Sheila slipped her hand around her daughter’s shoulder, and Mrs Cruz’s stare withered and died.
The store owner handed Mrs Cruz the old poster board with the sun-faded picture of her daughter. Melanie’s mother walked away, taking small, deliberate steps as though the floor were a thin sheet of ice that might break. Darby recognized that walk. Her mother had moved the same way when she had walked to Big Red’s casket that final time to say good-bye.
Maybe there was still time. Maybe Evan Manning would still find Melanie alive. Maybe he would find the man from the woods and kill him. At the end of the movie, the hero always killed the monster. If Special Agent Manning found Mel and brought her home, life would be okay – definitely not the way it was before the monster had arrived, and certainly not back to being normal, but okay.
On Saturday morning, the start of Labor Day weekend, Darby woke up early to help her uncle dig the fire pit for the annual lobster bake. By noon, they were sweating. Uncle Ron put his shovel in the sand and said he was heading up to the house to grab a couple of sodas.
Darby kept digging. As she breathed in the cool, salty air blowing off the water, she kept thinking of Melanie, wondering about the kind of air she was breathing right now, if she was still breathing at all.
Three more women had disappeared back home. Darby had found out two weeks ago when Uncle Ron and Aunt Barb had taken her to breakfast. While they were waiting for a table, Darby had spotted a copy of the Boston Globe lying on a table. The phrase ‘Summer of Fear’ was stretched across the top page above the smiling faces of five women and a teenage girl in braces.
Darby recognized Melanie’s picture right away, along with the pictures of the first two women, Tara Hardy and Samantha Kent. Darby had held the exact same photographs in her own hands.
The information on Hardy and Kent was pretty much a rehash of everything she already knew. The article’s main focus seemed to be on the three women who had disappeared after Melanie – Pamela Driscol, twenty-three, from Charlestown, going to school nights for her nursing degree and last seen walking through a campus parking lot; Lucinda Billingham, twenty-one, from Lynn, a single mother who went out for cigarettes and was never seen again; and Debbie Kessler, also twenty-one, a Boston secretary who went out for drinks one night after work and never made it home.
The police handling each of these investigations wouldn’t comment on what evidence linked these women together, but they did confirm that a task force had been established headed up by a special agent who belonged to the FBI’s newly formed unit called Behavioral Science. The agents who worked in this group, the article said, were specialists in studying the criminal mind, especially those who were serial murderers.
‘Hello, Darby.’
Not Uncle Ron but Evan Manning, holding out a can of Coke. She caught the sad, almost empty look in his eyes and knew, right then, what he was here to say.
She dropped the shovel and ran.
‘Darby.’
She kept running. If she didn’t hear him say the words, then they couldn’t come true.