The Missing Page 0,8

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.

Manning caught up with her near the water. The first time she broke free of him. The second time he grabbed her by the arm and spun her around, hard.

‘We caught him, Darby. It’s over. He can’t hurt you.’

‘Where’s Melanie?’

‘Let’s go back to the house.’

‘Tell me what happened!’ Darby was shocked by the sudden anger in her voice. She tried to pull it back, but the fear was already humming through her limbs, telling her to go ahead and scream it out. ‘I don’t want to wait anymore, I’m sick of waiting.’

‘The man’s name was Victor Grady,’ Manning said. ‘He was an auto mechanic and he abducted women.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. Grady died before we got a chance to speak with him.’

‘You killed him?’

‘He killed himself. I don’t know what happened to Mel or any of the other women. Chances are, we’ll never know. I wish I had a better answer for you. I’m sorry.’

Darby opened her mouth to speak, but no sound came out.

‘Come on,’ Evan Manning said. ‘Let’s go back to the house.’

‘She wanted to be a singer,’ Darby said. ‘For her birthday, her grandfather bought her a tape recorder and one day Mel came to me in tears ’cause she had never heard her voice on tape and thought she sounded ugly. She came to me because I knew she wanted to be a singer. Nobody knew it but me. We had a lot of secrets like that.’

The FBI agent nodded, urging her along in that quiet, confident way he had.

‘She loved Froot Loops but hated the lemon ones and always picked them out. She was always this real picky eater – she couldn’t have her food touching, thought it was gross. She had this really great sense of humor. She was really quiet, but she could – there were all these times when she’d say something, and it would get me laughing so hard my stomach would hurt. She was… Mel was just a really great person.’

Darby wanted to keep talking, wanted to find a way to use her words to build a bridge that would take Special Agent Manning back through time and show him how Melanie was more than chunks of newsprint and two-minute sound bites. She wanted to keep talking until Melanie’s name carried the same weight in the air as it did in her heart.

‘I shouldn’t have left her there all alone,’ Darby said, and the tears came again, harder this time, and she wished her father was standing here with her right now – wished he hadn’t stopped to help that driver, a schizophrenic man who was on early probation after serving a three-year jail sentence for trying to kill a cop. She wished she could have her father back with her for one minute, just one lousy minute, so she could say how much she still missed him and loved him. If her father were here, Darby could tell him everything she was thinking and feeling. Her father would understand. And maybe, just maybe, he would carry her words back with him and share them with Stacey and Melanie, wherever they were now.

II Little Girl Lost (2007)

Chapter 6

Carol Cranmore lay back on her bed, panting, as Tony collapsed on top of her.

‘Jesus,’ he said.

‘I know.’

She ran her hands up and down the small of his back. His sweat smelled of cologne and beer and the faint but sweet and pleasant odor of the marijuana they had smoked out on the back porch. Tony was right. Making love when you were high was unbelievable. She started giggling.

Tony popped his head up. ‘What?’

‘Nothing. I love you.’

He kissed her cheek, about to push himself up when she wrapped her legs around the small of the back. ‘No, not yet,’ she said. ‘I just want to lie like this for awhile, okay?’

‘Okay.’

Tony kissed her again, harder this time, and lay back on top of her. Carol’s mind ran to those ridiculously sappy love songs she heard on American Idol. Maybe those lame-o songs were about this feeling she had with Tony, this perfect feeling of coming together and forming one person that could take on the world. Maybe all the crap and disappointment you went through on a daily basis – especially if you lived here, in the armpit of the universe –