As Deborah pulls into the motel parking lot, a girl with red hair runs out, tears in her eyes, begs to use her phone. She is too numb, too exhausted, to ask the girl how else she can help, to find out what exactly is wrong. She hands the girl her cell and wonders, vaguely, if she’ll ever see it again, decides she doesn’t care.
Later, when she talks to the police she won’t be able to explain it, what made her leave the room, walk behind the motel. She won’t tell them about the man who pointed, how his gestures must have solidified into instruction. She will tell them that she noticed where the grass bent in the wrong direction, where it was flattened. She will tell them about the smell. She squints into the reeds, steps from the asphalt to the edge of the marsh. Insects buzz in her ears, land on her arms, her face. The mud sticks to the bottoms of her shoes, and with each step she needs to break the suction. She has the feeling she is walking toward her own death, that she will be swallowed up, sucked in, and the prospect is more peaceful than scary: At least she won’t have to worry about Gee anymore. She hears the scurry of an animal running through the grass. Her toe grazes something, and she bends to look—a disposable camera. Picking it up, she runs her thumb over the wheel, cranks it, and hits the button on top: a flash blooms in the dark. That bright light will be her last clear memory for days.
The first thing she sees when she pushes through the reeds into the clearing is her daughter’s feet, the soles bare and pale, the toes she used to wash with such awe when she bathed her in the sink. Their perfection and their vulnerability. The way they curled and flexed, the delicate weight of them in her palm. But looking at these feet, these limbs, these palms upturned like they are asking for something, she does not recognize the body as Georgia’s. She wonders, with what will strike her later as the dumb insistence of a record player’s needle stuck in a groove, where this woman with the peach tattooed on her chest got her daughter’s face. She stumbles back through the grass, into the parking lot, into the open door of a room, not caring whose it is. Her knees are about to give out, so she sits on the end of bed.
The scream starts as a pain in her gut that buckles her in two. It roars up through her lungs, rips through the air, horribleand animal. She couldn’t keep Georgia happy, couldn’t keep her home, couldn’t keep her safe. The only thing Deborahcando is force sound from her mouth. She vows she won’t stop screaming until everyone else feels inside of it, inside her voice, inside her pain. She pictures it like thick black smoke coming out of her, filling first this motel room, and then the parking lot, and then the entire city, making it all go dark.
LILY
I WAS SURE I’D WOKENup in the spa: the same sharp, invasive quality to the light, the same insistent white walls. But there were noises I couldn’t explain. Voices I didn’t know. And my mother, in the corner, asleep in a chair, her head cranked at an uncomfortable angle. I’d never felt so tired. A dull pain erupted when I turned my head, a throbbing above my eye.
And then I remembered. The bar, the man, the way he propped me against him, carried me to the motel, the sign blinking weakly above us. Then I wondered if maybe I was dead—the room had an otherworldly quality, and I couldn’t get the proportions right. Everything was shifting; distances and shapes felt impossible to resolve. The walls looked too close, and then very far away. An IV full of mysterious liquid dripped into my bloodstream, and I closed my eyes again and slept.
I FOUNDout later that my mother kept the TV off, kept newspapers out of the room. But when I woke up I asked about both of them: Clara and Emily. Clara had been missing, and the flash of silver under the mat of the man’s car: Emily’s cross. My mother pointed to a bouquet of flowers on the bedside table. Clara hadbrought them while I was asleep—she tucked a little card in among the tulips.
“And Emily?” I asked. My mother’s mouth gaped a little, as though she was surprised I’d asked. She shook her head, and I felt the tears seep from my eyes, down my face, hit the pillow until I fell asleep again.
ONCE Iwas really awake, a detective came to talk to me about what I remembered, what I could tell him. I described the man for the police, who produced a sketch based on what I said. It had the flat, lifeless quality that all police sketches have—I didn’t know how to tell them the things that made him distinct. The pale blue eyes, the elegant fingers, the shape of his jaw. Those were correct, but without the anger I had seen in him, they didn’t matter. I described the car, too, and eventually they found one like it, submerged in a pond in the Pine Barrens forty miles west. They searched it, but Emily’s cross necklace was nowhere to be found. They couldn’t recover any DNA, and the car was registered to an eighty-eight-year-old woman from Delaware who had died in 2008. I told him, too, about the paintings. How the man had been in the bar that night, how he approached me at the library, too.
“Paintings?” the detective said, sounding bemused when I told him how I had ended up in the car. I could tell he thought I was a fool.
I wished I could talk to Clara. I had no idea how to broach what we had been doing, what she had seen. I decided, in the meantime, not to mention anything about the two of us looking for the missing women, the visions, or the signs. Even now that all of Clara’s hunches had proved to be true, the situation felt even more absurd. Intuition was delicate, intimate. It didn’t stand up to getting passed around, submitted to scrutiny. It just was what it was. Inexplicable, beautiful. Scary and strange.
“So, do you have any idea where he went? Or who he is? There must be DNA on some of the women.” I was afraid of being afraid. Of having to live the rest of my life thinking he might show up and find me. A nameless figure always lurking in the shadows.
“We’re treating each woman as her own separate case. What happened to you is its own case as well.”
“What does that mean?”
“Each one is being investigated independently of the others, with its own team of detectives. I’ll be working on your case.” The set of his mouth made me realize that he thought solving “my case” was a lost cause.
“Why? Even I know that doesn’t make sense. What about what he said to me? That I wasn’t like the others? Doesn’t that prove he knew about them … and that he did it?”
He cleared his throat. “I know. But we have orders from … well, from higher up. No one wants to start a panic. No one wants the wordsserial killerapplied to this case before we have proof.”
“Proof? But they were all there, together. Isn’t that proof enough?” He only shook his head in a way that seemed to sayYou’re right, but it doesn’t matter. Maybe they would find something that would force them to change their tack. It was too illogical, too cruel. But that night I watched a video of a press conference with the prosecutors, who rebuffed a reporter’s suggestion that there was a single person behind it all. I ended the video before I could hear any more.
Later I would read articles about the women online, about the lives they came from, the places they called home, the people who mourned them. There were pictures of Emily’s family, making their way from their driveway to the front door. A tall, fair-haired woman who must have been her mother. Two broad, blond boys with ramrod-straight posture, just like Emily’s.
I never went back to the spa. They closed to deal with the fire damage—the fires had stopped, but that was yet another crime no one could, or would, figure out. The company issued a clichéd statement that Emily would have laughed at, about the way she helped bring more beauty into the world. I pictured her throwing her head back, her teeth gleaming with wicked delight.Gonewas the word I used to myself for the first few days. I wasn’t ready for the finality of the real word. Emily. Dead.
I WASout of the hospital for a week before I heard from Clara. She texted me, apologizing. Said she had no cash so it had been a little while before she could add minutes to her phone, and now that I wasn’t at work, she didn’t know where to find me anymore. We agreed to meet in Margate, and I picked her up from the bus stop near Marvin Gardens. I jumped when she reached for the door handle: She had dyed her hair dark brown. I hadn’t recognized her at all.
“Wow, I like it,” I said.
“Yeah, it was time to go back. Plus, I was a little nervous with the red … it just makes you stick out a lot, and with everything going on …”
She didn’t need to finish her sentence. We didn’t need to talk about how afraid we both were. How I looked over my shoulder every time I heard a piece of trash rustling in the breeze. How I double-, triple-checked the locks on the door before I went to sleep. I imagined that Clara probably still felt the same way.
“Did the cops talk to you, too?”
“No,” she said. “As soon as the ambulance pulled into the parking lot, I ducked behind a car. Peaches’s—I mean Georgia’s— mom was still there. She’s the one who found them, you know. I’m sorry, Lily. I didn’t want to have to talk to the cops, to tell them how I knew to get there. It would have been too weird.”
“Yeah,” I said. “And I read about that, with Georgia’s mom.” It felt strange, to use a different name for her after all that time. And then I remembered what Des had said, when I came looking for Clara at the shop.What’s her name, then?Even after everything we had been through, I felt shy bringing it up. But if I didn’t ask, then she would be one more part of this summer that felt unbelievable, unreal.
“I’m sorry I didn’t ask this before. But what’s, you know, your real name?”
“It’s Ava,” she said. “Same as my mom.”
