After Detective Evans leaves, I manage to get a hold of Elliott, who’s been driving around town, searching for us, certain that after he left for coffee, someone broke into the motel room and took us.
“Jesus, Courtney,” he says. “There you are. I’ve been calling you. Where are you? Why didn’t you answer your phone?”
I tell him to come to the police station. I tell him I’ll fill him in on everything when he gets here, feeling guilty for thinking he could have done this. He left the cottage at five o’clock to go fishing, like he said. He didn’t kill Emily and Nolan. He didn’t take Reese.
Cass and Mae still sit on chairs beside Detective Evans’s desk. They’re playing tic-tac-toe on scraps of paper they find, because they’re bored and have nothing else to do, and I wonder how long it will take for them to come to terms with what they’ve done. There will be no punishment for them, nothing in the legal sense. Impersonating someone on Facebook can be a crime, but at their age I can’t imagine they’ll get anything more than a slap on the wrist (if anyone will take the blame, it will be Elliott and me, for not keeping a better eye on them). I wonder how long it will take for the weight of what they’ve done to sink in, if it will happen days from now or if it will be years before it happens, when they’re older and their prefrontal cortexes arefinally fully developed. Maybe then they’ll realize they’re culpable in two murders, if not three.
Reese.
I can’t stop thinking about her. I can’t stop wondering if she was in Sam and Joanna’s house when I was there.
I think of what Joanna said to me that night as she, Sam and I sat around their kitchen table talking, about how Kylie and Reese, with their similar hair and eyes, must be Daniel’s type. She looked me right in the eye that night and pleaded, her voice desperate,The police need to find him, Courtney. He needs to pay for what he did to our girls.
Our girls.
Except Daniel didn’t do anything to Reese, which she knew. She intentionally misled me.
I can’t stop wondering if, when I was there, Reese was in a closet or the basement somewhere. If she heard my voice and my footsteps, but if she was gagged and unable to scream.
Or maybe she was already dead.
Because it would have been a liability for Sam and Joanna to keep her alive, if and when they realized she wasn’t Kylie.
Reese
Now
It’s uncomfortable in the crawl space. It’s maybe two feet tall, which is not enough room to ever sit up. I lie on my back or sometimes on my side when my back gets numb. The ground is hard. There is a single exposed lightbulb that they leave on, the pull string within reach if I wanted to turn it off or on. I have options. A blessing. Something to do to pass the time, pulling the string, turning the light off and then on, off and then on, or wrapping the end of it around my little finger and watching the tip of my finger turn purple, wondering if the same would happen if I could tie it around my neck.
They bring food and water down for me to eat and drink, though all I can do is prop myself on an elbow to eat. They let me out sometimes to stretch my legs, to use the bathroom, one keeping an eye on me, the other on the front door. They put me back when I’m through, opening the door and watching me crawl back into my cave, and I don’t ever resist, because the memory of what the man did to Emily and Nolan is always there. Ever present.
And then one day when the little wall hatch opens, the face on the other side is not theirs. It’s someone else, a man with red hair.
“Reese?” he asks. “Are you Reese Crane?” I nod, my hair in my eyes. “We’ve been looking for you.”
Aunt Courtney is the one who tells me they’re dead, sort of.
She sits on the edge of the hospital bed, her face splotchy like she’s trying not to cry. She pats my leg over the blankets and sighs, having trouble finding the words.
I say, “They’re dead right?”
She nods, confirming it. And then we sit in silence, because neither of us knows what to say, until she says, “It will be okay. I know it doesn’t feel like it now, but we’ll get through this together.”
She didn’t have to tell me. I already knew, because if Emily and Nolan were alive, it wouldn’t have been Aunt Courtney to come into the hospital room to see me first. It would have been them, my mom and dad. But they couldn’t because they’re dead. Because that man killed them, because he thought I was his missing daughter, Kylie. Why he thought that, I don’t know, except I think it had something to do with the necklace Daniel gave me; I think that maybe it was hers. Still, I don’t know how or where Daniel got the necklace, and I don’t know how that man knew where to find me. I ask Aunt Courtney if she knows. Her eyes get all wet again, and then she takes my hand into hers and says, “We’ll talk through everything later. For now, rest. Let’s take care of you and get you all better so we can go home.”
Home.It’s a word that doesn’t make sense to me anymore, like when you say something so many times it loses meaning in your head. Home. I don’t even know what that is anymore.
I nod anyway. “I... I didn’t tell them.”
“Tell who what?”
“Those people,” I say. When I was locked in their basement, I had time to kill and nothing to do but think. I thought aboutdying. A lot. I thought about what it would be like to be dead and buried. I thought about the cemetery that Daniel took me to.
“The Matthewses?” I nod. “What did you want to tell them?”
“I think I know where their daughter is.”
The police officer is in the room with us now. He stands at the foot of the bed. He turns his head too fast when I say that. I have a startle reflex that I didn’t have before. When someone moves, I jump. When someone coughs, I jump. When someone breathes, I jump.
