The Silent Girls (3 page)

Chapter 5

R
ATH DROVE TOWARD
Mandy’s mother’s house, trying not to think of Sonja’s ass. With Rachel’s absence, he felt long-dormant urges of his awakening. He didn’t like them. They worried and upset him. Ghosts from a past life he wished would remain dead.

His cell phone vibrated. Laroche. Rath let it go, thinking of Sonja’s ass. Women. His failing. The old man’s.

The day of Laura’s murder, Rath had been at the height of his promising detective career, working under Barrons on the Connecticut River Valley Killer case. From May 1994 to July 1995, the CRVK had raped and strangled five female victims in the region, then dumped their bodies in the woods. The case had thrust Barrons and Rath into the national spotlight, the crimes being the only serial-murder investigation known to Vermont, then or since. It could have made Rath’s career.

Rath had also been at the apex of his bachelorhood: broad-shouldered, muscled, arrogant, his lightning blue eyes, the old man’s eyes, not yet dimmed by the vulgarities to come. Women had been drawn to him in or out of uniform though the gun and cuffs at his hips hadn’t hurt. He’d made no qualms about wanting zero ties with the women. We’re adults. No harm done.

Except that while Laura was being raped and stabbed, her neck broken, Rath had been with a waitress who’d been wild in bed in a way Rath pegged then as an animal sexuality but knew now was born of loneliness. The same way he knew now his behavior then had been anything but adult. His callousness and lack of perspective then startled him now when he thought of it, something he tried not to do.

By the time he’d pulled into Laura’s drive an hour late, buzzing from his conquest, he’d crafted a lie about having to work on the CRVK case. Who could fault him? Besides, it had been his birthday. He was entitled. Wasn’t he?

After he’d found Laura, he’d vowed he’d never lie again.

He’d discover soon enough just how impossible that was.

Rath hated this part.

He got out of the Scout and let the autumn sun bathe his face with warmth that betrayed the brisk mountain air. Lately, when he came in from the cold, lines that had once gone away as his skin warmed now remained.

Mandy’s mother’s house was a fifties ranch with faded, beige, vinyl siding that hung just off level, likely from being slapped up by a guy who eked a living out of the same van in which he trucked his kids to Little League. A birdbath was wedged out in the lawn, dried up and crusted with moss.

Rath knew this house. It was the same house he’d grown up in; the same house as a million others from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon. Common. What troubled Rath was that inside the house nothing was any longer common. And nothing ever would be again, whether Mandy came home after crashing on a friend’s couch or her desecrated body was found in the dank reek of a rapist’s cellar.

Rath told himself to remain hopeful. Maybe Mandy
had
run off with a boy for a romp in a Montreal hotel, where the two could drink legally and play adults and enjoy more of life than what these back roads offered. And once they got their ya-yas out, they’d come back. Safe.

Except Mandy’s tips were left on the Monte Carlo’s floor, the keys in the ignition. No. Hope was a luxury. And Rath had to knock on the door and ask the missing girl’s mother painful, intrusive questions, yank scabs off tender wounds and gouge old sores, let the blood run fresh.

He craved a cigarette.

A shade pulled back from the living-room window, then settled again.

Rath knocked on a metal storm door caved in from being slammed against the porch rail, perhaps by the savage mountains winds up here, perhaps by a savage temper.

Faint footsteps came from inside, and a bony woman with hair heaped in the unkempt tangle of the sleepless opened the main door. She wore a sweat suit the color of mold and stared with eyes whose only glint was that of pain. She pushed the storm door open. “Yeah?” she said.

“Mrs. Wilks?”

“I suppose.”

“Sorry?”

“I use the name, but we’re divorced. They charge a ransom for a woman to get her own name back. Didn’t have it in me to suffer one more humiliation.”

“I understand.”

“I doubt it.”

“My mom was married to a lout,” Rath said, giving louts everywhere a bad name.

The corner of the woman’s mouth twitched, as close to a smile as he’d get, he supposed.

“I’m Frank Rath. Harland Grout’s friend. What do you prefer I call you?”

“Doris. Come in. I don’t need to be heating the outdoors.”

Rath stepped inside. Doris Wilks shut the door, and the living room fell as dark and silent as a confessional, the room’s velour shades drawn and not a single bulb burning. A chemical pine scent made Rath’s nose itch. In the quiet shadows sat a sectional sofa of the sort found at a Rent-A-Center: purple velveteen marshmallow cushions that suggested sumptuous comfort but swallowed you whole with all the support of overcooked pasta. On the wall above it, crooked shelves displayed dusty Beanie Babies.

Doris pulled the chain on a floor lamp to shed a funereal glow on the room. A dog, if that’s what you’d call the lint ball perched on the ottoman, yapped.

“
Shut
it,” Doris croaked. Lint Ball curled on itself like a pill bug.

“Sit.” Doris nodded at the couch. Rath knew he’d sink into the atrocity and look even less official than he already was, so he said, “Bad back. I’d better stand.”

“In the kitchen,” Doris said, swinging her head toward a doorway. “The chairs are sturdier. Couch is a black hole.”

Doris flipped a switch on the kitchen wall, and a naked fluorescent ceiling light spit to life. The Z-Brick linoleum was tacky beneath Rath’s boots, reminding him of the meat markets on 25¢-Draft Nite during his BU days. He and Doris sat across from each other at a chipped Formica table.

“Mind I smoke?” She brought a Salem Light to her lips, lit it with a paper match.

“Mind if I do?” Rath said, figuring their common vice might gain him an edge.

“Have at it.”

Rath lit up, getting nothing for his effort but a faint headache.

“Tell me about your daughter,” he said.

Doris drew a deep drag and exhaled.

Mandy was her only child. Doris had been pregnant twice, “a million years ago.” After that, she and the ex had given up on a family and pretty much everything else. Then she got pregnant at thirty-five. “It took,” she said. “There was something wrong with the others.” She waved smoke from her face. “I had to, you know.”

Rath didn’t need this information, but he let her tell it because she needed to tell it. And it would loosen her up.

“Mandy was a miracle,” she said. “The ex didn’t see it that way. Wanted to terminate her, too. Not because anything was wrong. Argued he was too old for tantrums. This from a man who still has tantrums.”

“Is he why Mandy sought emancipation? Because—”

“—He’s an asshole? Pretty much.” Doris’s face sagged as she tapped cigarette ash in a foil TV-dinner tray puddled with congealed gravy.

“When was the last time you saw Mandy?”

“Five days ago.”

“What happened?”

“I had taken her to a job interview at the Lost Mountain Inn. She got the job, and they wanted her to start that night. I wanted to celebrate for once, take her to lunch or something. But she was too nervous to eat. So we went to the Dress Shoppe. They have a good clearance going on.”

Doris made a squeaky sound with her lips, and Lint Ball leapt in her lap and bared its rat teeth at Rath. “Idiot,” she said, scratching the dog’s ear. “Mandy found her as a pup, in a box on the side of the road. A whole litter. The others were dead. Mandy nursed her from a bottle. But her new roomie has mean cats, so. Who does such a thing? Leaves puppies to die?”

Rath wondered if she was trying to distract him. “Why’d you drive her to her interview?” He flicked ashes in the TV-dinner tray, seeing no other place to do so.

“She has the Monte Carlo.”

“I’m her mother.”

“But she sought emancipation.”

“Because of Asshole. I ain’t a saint. I make mistakes. But she was right. I shoulda divorced him long ago. Shoulda never taken it.”

“He abuse you?”

She shrugged. Rath made a note. Underlined it.

“He abuse her?” Rath said.

“Phh. He couldn’t be bothered.”

Rath didn’t believe her.

“You sure?” he said.

“Of course I’m sure. He’s too lazy. Besides, he’d so much as touched her, she’d have cut his nuts off.” She laughed. “She’s stronger than me that way. And smart. Not test smart maybe. But commonsense smart.”

“Where’s your ex-husband live?”

“Some shit hole with his new wife—139 Pine Street.”

“When did you divorce?”

“Nine months ago.”

“And he’s married again already?”

“Like I said. Asshole.”

“What’s his name?”

“Larry.”

Rath made a note. “And you’re on good terms now, with Mandy?”

“Pretty good. She’s sixteen. I hated my mother when I was sixteen.”

“Why’s that?”

“I was
sixteen.
”

“Did you and Mandy argue recently?”

“She’d never let me drive her if she were pissed. She don’t compromise. Not Mandy.”

“And you haven’t heard from her since?”

“She said she’d call and let me know how her first night went. She never did. I figured she got busy.
Teenagers.
Then I found out about the car.” She sighed heavily and collapsed on herself like a punctured tire. “She’s a good girl. Smile that’d break your heart. Ask anyone.”

“I will.” Rath snubbed his cigarette as Doris tamped her pack and knocked one free. Lit a match.

“Did anything strange happen that day?” Rath said.

“Strange?” The match burned down toward her fingers as she stared beyond it, her eyes emptying. The flame reached her fingertips, and Rath was about to snuff it out when Doris finally shook the match, a tendril of smoke spinning in the air between them, leaving the bite of sulfur in Rath’s nostrils.

Doris reflected, her eyes clouding.

Rath let Doris untangle her cat’s cradle of thoughts.

“We were in the Dress Shoppe.” Clarity returned to her eyes. “I asked Mandy about a dress. But she was distracted.” Doris paused and closed her eyes. She opened her eyes and resumed. “Then she said, ‘Hold on’ and went out. I was going to spy.
Nosey mom.
But the salesgirl came up and started going on about how gorgeous Mandy is and hauled me off to show me just the
perfect
full-price dress. Before I knew it, Mandy was back. I figured she’d seen a friend, or wanted to sneak a cigarette. She smokes and thinks I don’t know it.”

“How long was she gone?”

“Five minutes. Tops.”

“How was she after that? If you could use just one word to describe it.”

“One word?”

“One.”

Memory was a devil that wore many disguises. Wrong in detail and fact. In court, a prosecutor or DA shot more holes in testimony based on eyewitness recollection than a redneck shooting a road sign with a .12 gauge. Witnesses seldom stopped to actually
remember.
To get them to focus, Rath asked them to use one word to describe a detail, a person’s height or the color of a car driving from a crime scene.

“Close your eyes,” Rath said. “See her face.”

Doris closed her eyes, eyeballs spasming beneath their lids.

She opened her eyes. “Done,” she said. “Exhausted. She wanted to get home. She didn’t seem excited anymore. About the new job or the clothes.”

“Did you ask her about it?”

“She thinks I pry. So, no.” She blew out a breath.

“You can’t beat yourself up over these things.”

“Yes you can,” she said.

Yes, Rath thought, you can. Forever. Without it ever changing a thing. “You know anyone who might want to hurt your daughter?” Rath said.

She nodded without hesitation.

He leaned forward, surprised. “Who?”

“No one in particular.”

Rath frowned, confused.

“You haven’t seen her, have you?” Doris said.

“I have a snapshot Grout had from a family thing.” The photo wasn’t great, a candid taken at a cookout, a bit at a distance with people around her, but it did show a clearly pretty girl with red hair, a heart-shaped face, and caramel eyes that locked on you.

“You’ve never
seen her,
” Doris said. “In person. When I told you the salesgirl was prattling about Mandy being gorgeous, she wasn’t
just
trying to sell a dress. Mandy’s a jaw-dropper. She
radiates.
A smile like sunshine’s pouring from her. Her eyes, that red hair. But, she don’t photograph that way. In photos, she looks pretty. But in
life.
She
stops
people.”

Doris smiled, sadly. Then in a hushed, confessional tone, said: “She attracts men, Mr. Rath. All kinds. All ages. They get this
glaze.
Like they want to
own
her, bring her home, and put her in a glass cage, keep her
safe
from the bad men, which, of course,
they’re
not. They’re the only one who can save her.”

Doris shivered. She seemed caught in the whirlwind of speaking about Mandy, as if doing so might conjure her up here and now, and they could be done with the mystery of her whereabouts and go on with life.

“Mandy makes boys crazy, Mr. Rath, and middle-aged men insane for their lost youth. They say such
desperate
things to her.”

“Does anyone in particular get this ‘glaze?’ ”

“
Everyone.
You would.”

“I doubt—”

“You would. Even women get it. Some people like to hurt a girl like that. Just because she exists. You need to find her.”

“We’ll find her,” Rath said, meaning it.

“Alive?”

“Yes,” Rath said, lying.

Chapter 6

E
NDORPHIN
S SLAMMED THROUGH
Sonja as she ran up Gamble Hill, a sublime ache in her calves and thighs, body sheathed in sweat, the deep, steady rhythm of her breathing accompanying the metronomic pace of her Asics striking the dirt road as she gained the top of the hill at the same speed she’d started with a quarter mile back at the bottom. There was no better rush than being awash in her chemical high. Marijuana in high school had left her lobotomized, and her one-time dalliance with coke at Dartmouth had left her nerve endings feeling raked raw and dipped in kerosene. Not even sex with Claude got her blood surging like running did, not that they’d found the time of late.

She wiped stinging sweat from her eyes with the hem of her running shirt, tipped on her toes to flex her calves, then jogged lightly in place, her mind clearing.

Her house sat far below in the valley, a cottage that had been added onto three times since a Civil War veteran had built the original home in 1867. She could just make it out from here. It squatted in a small field that had once been an apple orchard, of which only a few fruitless trees remained. The golden autumn sunlight glanced off the slate-shingle roof whose weight caused the roofline to sag like the spine of an old mare. She loved the old house. Did not want to restore or remodel it. She loved it for what it was. Old. And a long way from Chicago and her parents. It was home, where she would spend the rest of her life. Where she would die. Knowing this filled her with the peace of mind that came with certainty.

She touched her toes, cracked her back. The road ahead traversed Gamble Ridge for 2.8 miles then took a steep descent into the river valley, where she’d take River Road north four miles back to home.

She popped in her iPod’s earbuds and cranked R.E.M.’s “E-Bow The Letter,” set it to loop, preferring its melancholic throb to music that assailed, like the System of a Down or AC/DC that inspired Claude. His clients would be aghast to know their pastoral paintings were created to such
tasteless
music.

As Stipe’s voice incanted
Look up, what do you see? All of you, and all of me,
Sonja set out leisurely to get her blood flowing again, pacing herself.

Up ahead, a woman with a lovely black mane of hair was at her mailbox. As Sonja approached, she saw that the woman was a man. His bare feet were grimed, his faded jeans torn, and his blousy tunic stained with what looked like strawberries. Or blood. Back in the day, he’d probably followed The Dead until Jerry had croaked, then toured with Phish; a UNH or UVM English major who’d retreated to where land was still cheap, and he could be left alone with his LSD flashbacks.

But Sonja thought he’d been a woman. Her radar was off, and it bothered her.

She settled into a languid stride, working up to a refreshing six-minute pace. A heart-attack pace, Claude would say. They used to jog together, before the kids. After jogging, they’d make love, shower together, then sit out on the back porch in the dark, drink a sixer of Long Trail as they listened to the tree frogs sing.

When Sonja hadn’t been able to jog the last few months of carrying George, Claude had given it up. After George had arrived, Sonja had grown depressed by her inactivity, felt like a dirty gym sock filled with custard.

When she’d finally been cleared to jog, and was able to squeeze in time for it, a trigger had been pulled, and she found she’d needed the rush to start her day right and to think straight. She’d morphed from jogging casually in whatever shorts and T she threw on, into a gearhead runner seeking the perfect two-hundred-dollar running shoe, synthetic sweat-wicking garb, and heart-rate wristband, fanatical about improving time. She’d run every weekend 5k race within a hundred miles, May through October.

Then 5k had become 10k. Then half marathons. Now, finally, the Burlington City marathon. Her eating had become regimented. Food, which she’d always indulged in for the sheer pleasure of taste—from sushi or a bloody burger, to a chocolate shake or a Velveeta & Wonder Bread grilled cheese—had been reduced to fuel ingested solely for its grams of protein, fat, and complex carbs.

She was unclear on what compelled her to run with such mania. Exhilaration and competition played a part. But there was something else. She needed something of her own; though this notion had a Virginia Woolf smack to it that gagged her. Claude had his painting, which had many times taken him deep into the night in the carriage-house studio. It also fed a part of him she never could. She loved and resented him for it. But she understood. Her own career fed her similarly. It was purposeful and gratifying work that required intelligence and precision, cunning and nerve and study. It gave her satisfaction.

She ran, the dirt road testing her ankle strength as she thought about Mandy’s car. Against protocol, against Grout’s wishes, she’d had the Monte Carlo towed to the department’s evidence garage and put the Luminol to it. The car was clean, as Rath had supposed. He was good at his work. Remote, perhaps. But there was much to learn from him, and she kept alert, particularly with the rumors of new positions possible. If Rath hinted at an angle on this missing girl, she’d pursue it in a blink. As of now, they had zilch. Even the tip money could easily have fallen out of Mandy’s handbag. And Mandy was, legally, an adult. If alive, she had the freedom to do as she wished.

Running was Sonja’s freedom. Sixty minutes a day. She paid for even that. Last night in bed, Claude had rested his latest Jim Harrison novel on his softening stomach, peered over his Rite Aid reading glasses, and said, “You think you could eat what the rest of us eat just one night a week instead of gulping juiced broccoli and fish oil?”

No,
she’d said. She’d been clear about the sacrifice the marathon would demand. He shouldn’t act so wounded. Besides, once she ran Burlington, that’d be it. He said he’d heard that before. True. She was obsessed. She’d once mocked weekend-warrior athletes who never broke from their crazy diets. At George’s last birthday, she’d downed a protein shake instead of hot dogs; nibbled cake as if it were poison — a bakery cake at that. She’d always baked the kids’ cakes. But baking would have cut into her running time.

The worst was that her period had stopped and wouldn’t return until after the marathon, months from now. She and Claude had planned to have three children. An only child seemed too lonely an existence for the child. Two kids seemed like a census-bureau statistic. Three kids were ideal. She’d had a bad miscarriage between Elizabeth and George. And after the half marathon last year, she hadn’t gotten her cycle straight for six months. “What if it screws you up permanently?” Claude had said.

She’d been furious. And scared. She would be thirty-two in May, and while that was young, she was edging closer to being on the bubble with the risk of Downs Syndrome and other conditions. Conditions that, they agreed, would result in ending the pregnancy.

She was gambling her family’s future for a race. As much as she was capable at deciphering the motives of others, she was dreadful at doing the same for herself.

She ran hard now, her heart pounding like a madman’s fist at the asylum door, the air redolent with the metallic tang of minerals in the roadside ledge, wetted darkly with leaking groundwater.

The road began its descent toward the river as she fell more on her heels now, a pronounced strain on the body, the jamming of joints, the constant resistance to gravity’s wanting its way with her as she thought about the man at the mailbox. He’d looked so much like a woman. Fooled her until she was right upon him. It was perfectly reasonable to think such long hair had belonged to a woman. So why did it bother her so much?

Nearer, nearer,
Patti Smith intoned hauntingly, promising over and over to take Sonja there.

Sonja’s work cell phone buzzed in its Velcro hip pouch. She slowed and took the phone out. Lou Mcreary, medical examiner here in Victory County, just south of Canaan County, and Sonja’s neighbor. He could only be calling for one reason. A body.

Sonja stopped running.