and off-brand. Her father talked forever with the mechanic who was apparently a fan of her father’s work. They talked and talked in the other room, endlessly, like grown-ups do, about nothing.
“Dad, can Mom pick me up?”
“Just a minute, LAH-raine, darling.”
She felt his eyes on her before she saw him. He lingered in the shadows, watching through the window that separated the waiting room from the garage. He lifted a hand, looked at her with a strange blankness. She ran to be with her father, hung on him until he couldn’t ignore her anymore. But it was just a moment. She forgot him as soon as she was back in front of the television at Tess’s.
“Where was this?” Harper asked her father.
He looked stunned, confused, uttered the name of the garage.
“Good work, girl,” said Detective Harper. “You did it.”
The detective ran from the room. Her mother held her. Her father dipped his head into his hand. She remembered the flickering fluorescent lights, the scratch of the gurney sheets, the pain.
“Will they find them?” she asked. “Is that enough to find them?”
Her mother tried for a smile, but it burst into a thousand little pieces and she started to cry again.
“Let’s hope so, darling,” her father said, coming up behind her mother.
She heard accusation in his voice, she thought, a vague disappointment. He later said that no of course not, that he was stunned by the events, absent, mind reeling. She believed him. But then, that’s how it felt. They wheeled her away, voices soothing. A mask came down over her face, and she was gone.
Hank came home. Not Tess.
Eugene Kreskey was arrested.
The things he did. Even now, even when it had all been laid bare in articles and books, documentaries, crime blogs. She didn’t allow herself to think of it. She couldn’t. When she remembered her friend Tess, it was just as she always was—laughing, always ahead of Rain, pigtails swinging.
Rain wasn’t well enough to go to the funeral.
Tess was dead. Her body buried. She’d found the news impossible to process. How could she grasp that a girl who’d been her best friend all her life was simply—gone? Not on the phone. Not sending goofy pictures of herself via email. She wouldn’t sleep in the creaky trundle bed or sit in front of her in math class. Her funny pigtails. Her big glasses. She was a ghost.
And Rain was shattered—physically weak, psychologically battered, her jaw reconstructed and wired shut. A plastic surgeon had stitched her leg and there was more surgery ahead, but that scar would be there forever. A twisting, textured relief map of her horror. Years later, her hand would find it under desks and tables, in bed. Sometimes when she was bare-legged, she’d catch someone’s eyes fall on it. And she would remember.
Days passed, one gray day after another. Her parents took her home. Everything seemed different, the house, her room, all her dolls and toys. She felt like it belonged to someone else. There were visits from the police, a seemingly endless string of questions.
It’s my fault, she thought. He was there for me. He followed me. I ran away. He took them instead.
She wanted to see Hank. She begged, day after day until finally she and her mother climbed in the car. No one came to the door when they rang at his house. She stood there, kept ringing. The red door. The slow, deep chimes of the bell. The rustle of leaves and the whistle of the chickadee. She left the card she brought. Inside it simply read: “I’m sorry.”
When they were back in the car, she saw him. He stood in his window, a slim and nebulous form behind the gauze of the curtain.
She waved to him and he didn’t wave back, just moved back from view, let the curtains close.
“Is he alone in there?” worried his mother. “Did they leave him alone? Surely not.”
He knows it’s my fault, she thought. He hates me.
Because they were minors and had been so traumatized by events, their testimonies were taken in chambers with the judge and the lawyers, shown on video to the jury. They weren’t asked to testify sitting feet away from Kreskey. Hank’s family moved away before school started the next fall. She didn’t see him again, not for a long, long time.
“It’s the stuff of nightmares,” said the doctor who helped her survive the trauma of her experience, Dr. Maggie Cooper. “You were trapped in a nightmare.”