The Girl from Widow Hills - Megan Miranda Page 0,42
crowd. But they still have to find a way to get her out.
DM: Can you fill us in a little on anything you’ve heard about the ongoing rescue operation?
EL: Of course. They’re being very careful. They don’t want to do anything to disturb her. The lid to the drainage pipe there is sealed pretty good. We hear the man who found her fastened a belt around her to hold her close. They’re reinforcing those safety measures right now, so that she remains safe, first of all. They’re going to have to stay like this for a while, until they figure it out—the best way forward. This access point is actually not one that’s mapped on the city system, but something older, from the original system, back when this area was a mining community. So there’s a bit of confusion over how best to reach her. They’re about to begin drilling through the surrounding earth, to see what they’re dealing with.
DM: Do they know who it is, Emma? The man who’s holding her up?
EL: We haven’t gotten official word, but several of the local folks we’ve been interviewing tell us he’s from the adjoining town. A thirty-two-year-old by the name of Sean Coleman.
CHAPTER 12
Saturday, 5 p.m.
THERE WAS A VISCERAL reaction to speaking about the past. Something I’d long gone out of the way to contain. A shaking that started in my fingers, a tremor that worked its way through my body, though no one seemed to notice but me. The precursor to panic; something that seized my mind and body alike. This biological desire to keep the past contained, in a different part of the world—a different person, with a different name.
I’d thought maybe the detective was too young to remember. That enough time had passed. It was our parents’ generation that really experienced the case so immediately, who felt that terror and relief deep in their bones. So I started at the beginning. Assuming she knew nothing.
“I was born Arden Olivia Maynor,” I said. “There was a terrible accident when I was little. I was lost, trapped, for days. And it felt like the entire country was watching my rescue. I changed my name before college, to escape the media attention. It was just . . . so much.”
As soon as I said that name, I could see recognition settling in, sharp and surprising.
“The girl who was swept away in a storm,” Detective Rigby said, something close to awe in her voice. “The girl who held on to a grate for three days.” She didn’t mention the sleepwalking, but she must’ve known it. That fact must’ve been there, lodged somewhere in the back of her mind.
“Well, no. Not exactly,” I said. That was the story my mother seemed to want to believe—something beyond miraculous. The story, hyperbolized in memoriam. “But yes, I was swept away in the flash flood and trapped somewhere in the pipes for three days before making my way to that grate. I was found clinging to it, three days later. Sean Coleman. He was the man who found me. That’s his name.”
The detective didn’t blink, didn’t even seem to be breathing, when I told her what the name Sean Coleman meant to me. I could sense everything shifting as I spoke. The investigation resettling from Rick’s house to right here.
Because it had to be about me.
He had to be heading for my property, my house.
Sean Coleman had to be coming here.
Or he was watching. At least that much was clear.
Detective Rigby said she’d be back, but I stood as she walked toward the door, trying desperately to convey something—twenty years’ worth of meaning—into a pointless request. “Is there any way—” I began.
She turned at the door, her mind already halfway across the yard, or on the phone, to the next person she would tell. A chain that had just kicked off, and here I was attempting to ask her if there was any way to stop it. To leave me to my life, when the man who saved me was dead. I knew it wasn’t fair. And yet I asked. “What if none of this is relevant?”
She did me the benefit of acting like I had a chance, even though we both knew that wasn’t a fair thing to ask. “I don’t know yet,” she said. “But what I can do is let you know first, okay? I’ll let you know what we find out. Sit tight, and don’t talk to the media.”