Fragile

15

She wouldn’t write that, Mom.”

“Then who did?”

“I don’t know. But think about it. ‘Charlene is large and in charge’? She would never use such clichéd language.”

But Charlene was a cliché, a living cliché, though Ricky and Charlene herself were both too young to realize it. Maggie didn’t say as much, of course. And he was right; it didn’t really sound like Charlene. She didn’t say that, either. The day was starting to take its toll. She had a low-grade ache behind her eyes, a fatigue-induced nausea.

“Ricky,” she said, sitting down at the kitchen table. It was a small banquette, tucked into a window seat. Behind them outside, leaves fell in streamers of red, orange, gold, and brown. They’d sat together at this table since he was a baby, first in a high chair, then in a booster seat, then beside her. She remembered all the milled vegetables she used to make-peas, carrots, squash. Then it was grilled cheese, peanut butter and jelly, macaroni and cheese-the happy, clean, innocent foods of childhood.

Now he sat across from her, watching her with the same intensity he’d had since he was a child. When he wanted something from her, he was relentless. Right now, he wanted her to tell him that Charlene had not broken up with him and run away to some imaginary life in New York City without so much as a backward glance. At the moment, he wanted to believe that something had happened to take her away. Even though Maggie was certain he didn’t understand the ramifications of wishing such a thing. He didn’t really know what that would mean.

“The best thing we can do right now is avoid jumping to conclusions. We need to keep the lines of communication open for Charlene so when she does reach out-and I believe she will-we’re here for her.” With her thumbnail, she chipped away at some dried piece of food on the wood surface of the table. It was only the three of them. Why was it so hard to keep things clean?

“But what if she can’t reach out? I mean, everyone has assumed that she ran away, but what if something else happened to her?”

He seemed to have forgotten altogether about the message she’d written him. Maggie thought about reminding him, but then decided against it. She reached across the table and put her hand on his. Her eyes drifted to the tattoo. It still looked red and inflamed. She looked away and tried to catch his eye.

“Your father and the rest of the department are looking for her. They’re not just blowing her off as a runaway. They’re investigating the disappearance. We have to trust them to do their jobs well.” She stopped short, too, of telling him about Graham’s being missing as well, about the credit card on Charlene’s cell phone account. It wasn’t yet public knowledge anyway, and it would only hurt or frighten him further.

He started kicking the bottom of the banquette with his heel. It made a hollow knocking noise. He’d always done this absently, when he was reading or thinking. It drove Jones crazy.

“He hates her,” he said.

She felt a flash of something; her cheeks went hot. “No, he doesn’t. Of course he doesn’t.”

“You know he does.”

“You don’t understand your father,” she said. She released a tired breath. “Sometimes he doesn’t know how to show fear or concern. It just comes off like anger or judgment. He cares about people. He helps them. That’s who he is.”

Her son turned angry, dark eyes on her. “Maybe you’re the one who doesn’t understand him.”

He got up from the table before she had a chance to respond.

“He’s probably glad Charlene’s gone,” he said, his voice cracking.

“Stop it,” she said. She reached for him as he moved toward the door. He slipped out of her grasp. In the turned-up corners of his eyebrows she saw the depth of his sadness. It wasn’t just about Charlene. She felt her heart clenching.

“He doesn’t care about people,” Ricky said, his voice coming up an octave. “He doesn’t care about Charlene. He doesn’t even care about me.”

“Your father loves you.” It sounded lame, and she hated having to say it. She shouldn’t have to convince him; he should know it. Why didn’t he?

He turned in the doorway. “I know you believe that, Mom. I guess the problem is that I don’t.”

“Ricky,” she said. But he was already heading fast down the hallway. By the time she reached the front door, he was getting in his car. She walked out after him, bracing herself against the cold air. The sky was a flat, dead gray. The air tingled with the promise of snow, though just yesterday they’d all been wilting, wondering if fall would ever come.

“Where are you going?” He was sitting in the car Jones had helped him buy for his birthday, a restored Pontiac GTO. Ricky bought the gas, paid the insurance. She couldn’t keep him from leaving. She felt small, weak, unable to control anything in her life, including her own child.

“I have to work,” he said.

That was a relief, at least, a sign that he was not going off the rails. He’d been working at the same music store since he was fifteen. Sound Design sold CDs, books, high-quality instruments; it had been there since she was a kid, sitting in a strip mall off the main highway that ran through town. She still thought of it as a record shop, which made Ricky laugh. He was helping them to design a website to keep the store more current, to keep it from going the way of all small businesses being dwarfed by Internet giants. She’d gone to school with the owner, Larry Schwartz, who’d inherited the store from his father.

For a second she’d thought Ricky was headed out to find Charlene. And there would have been nothing she could do to stop him. That was exactly what they’d feared, that chasing Charlene would lead him off the path, into the woods. She put a hand on his arm.

“I know how hard this is. I’m afraid for her, too,” she said. “Just try to stay calm. Don’t do anything crazy,” she said.

“Like what?”

“Just stay put, Ricky. She’ll come back when she’s ready. She’ll call you.”

Warm air drifted from the car. She heard a mournful strain of music she didn’t recognize from the radio.

“And what if she can’t? What if something has happened to her?”

She shook her head, took a deep breath. “They’re looking for her. If something’s happened, they’ll find out.”

He nodded uncertainly, then shifted the car into reverse. She stepped back, stuck her hands into the pockets of her jeans. She hadn’t changed her clothes since she got dressed last night. She’d canceled all her patients today, trying to do what she could for Melody and for Jones.

“I love her, Mom.” In the split second before he completed the sentence, she thought he was going to say I love you, Mom. She felt that familiar rise of happiness, and then the fall of disappointment. It seemed like forever since he’d said that. I love you sooo much, Mommy, he used to say, offering exuberant embraces, unembarrassed kisses.

“I know you do, sweetie. I know. It’s going to be okay. You’ll see.”

It was a false assurance, and they both knew it. But he smiled at her just the same. She watched him drive off until his taillights disappeared around the corner. She felt the urge to cry, but she fought it back. No time for that.

Back in her office, she sorted through voice messages and e-mails, many of them asking about or related to Charlene. News had spread like a cold virus. There was an e-mail notice about a town meeting at eight, at the school, organized by Henry Ivy-to brainstorm about Charlene, where she might have gone, and organize information to help the police. Anyone who knows Charlene is urged to attend. That’s what she loved about Henry, he was always the first responder, getting people together to help when there was a crisis.

The local women’s club, too, had organized a search party; neighbors were walking the area around Charlene’s house, others were making calls. Any help is welcome, even just the forwarding of this e-mail message. The message contained the most recent school picture of Charlene.

Maggie remembered this about The Hollows, now that it was happening again. How those who had lived here generation after generation rallied in a crisis. Meetings were called, food was made, people reported for any task that might help. There was an invisible net that could be seen only when tears were shed.

It had been the same when Sarah was missing, years ago. Initially, she, too, was suspected to have run away, trying to punish her mother. But Maggie also remembered a strange energy, a dark current of knowing that something awful had happened. Even the next day, when the air was buzzing with a kind of excited, gossipy fear, much like today, there was something ugly hovering. Even Maggie and the other kids seem to sense that Sarah wasn’t just going to turn up, sheepish for having caused so much trouble.

They found Sarah’s body hours after the first snow of the season started to fall. The school was called to assembly, and Travis Crosby Sr., the Hollows police chief at the time, delivered the news in a soft, wobbling voice. Maggie remembered the heavy silence that fell, a collective hush of disbelief, and then the wailing started, first low and singular. Then a cacophony of weeping sounds, a chorus of pain.

She’d just felt gutted, numb. She hadn’t really known Sarah well, wasn’t sure how to feel other than afraid. She saw her mother up onstage and, unthinking, went to join her. Her mother took her in her arms, and they stood like that while Elizabeth told students to return to their homerooms, said that parents would be called and the counselors would organize in the cafeteria for anyone who needed to talk and to run a study hall for children whose parents couldn’t get away from work.

• • •

Maggie listened to her voice mail: her neurotic was calling to cancel his appointment for tomorrow because he was afraid it might rain (he didn’t think he was going to get away with that, did he?); a lawyer she knew needed a consult; her mother, who often confused her office number with her cell phone, was calling to find out what was happening with Charlene. Three more messages were hang-ups, something that always made her uneasy. During her residency at Columbia, a young woman she’d been seeing ended her life with a bottle of painkillers. When Maggie got to her office that morning, her machine was filled with messages, each just the sound of soft, measured breathing and then a sudden hang-up. Later that day, she learned about her patient’s suicide from the detective who was called to the scene. That breathing stayed with her; she thought of it as the sound of despair, of reaching out to find no one there. She heard it sometimes in her dreams.

Of course, that was in the days before everyone had a cell phone and caller ID. Her patients could reach her now if they needed her in the night. She could see who was calling and hanging up on her, make a proactive phone call in return. She scrolled through the numbers on the phone’s digital display. Unknown caller. A low agitation was setting in, that feeling she had when something, someone, she cared about was in crisis and she was powerless to help. Then, the phone in her hand started to ring. Unknown caller. She picked up quickly.

“Dr. Cooper,” she answered.

There was just silence on the line, a distant crackle. She took a wild guess. “Marshall? Is that you?”

“How did you know?” he asked, sounding young, frightened.

“I was hoping, Marshall. I’ve been concerned about you. How are you? Let’s talk.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “For the way I acted yesterday.” She felt a wash of relief. He had come back; he still wanted help. She knew what to do here.

“I understand,” she said. “You’re under stress. There are better ways to cope, and we can work on that.”

“I just want to know something.”

“What’s that?”

“How do you know if you’re a good person? I mean, how do you know if you’re not?”

She’d had this kind of existential conversation with him before. She answered him the way she always did.

“I don’t think anyone is only good or only bad, Marshall. People are multilayered with qualities and flaws.”

“Right,” he said quickly, almost sounding annoyed. “But some people are bad. They do bad things to other people. They hurt people.”

There was a lump of dread in her center. Who was he talking about?

“True,” she said carefully. “But even those people often have something that redeems them.” A silence followed, went on too long. She thought maybe he’d hung up. Then, “I’m not sure I believe in redemption.”

“Then what? We’re defined by our mistakes, our bad qualities? One false move and there’s no forgiveness?”

“It depends on what we’ve done, doesn’t it?”

“What are we talking about here, Marshall? Have you done something?”

His breathing came ragged, as though he was crying.

“Whatever it is, we can talk about it, work through it.”

“I have to go,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

And the line went dead.

“Marshall,” she said pointlessly. She quickly moved to her desk, looked up his number and called back, but the line was busy. She hung up and tried again. This time the line just rang and rang until she gave up.

She felt that familiar wash of anxiety again and thought of her mother. When she’d told Elizabeth that she wanted to be a psychologist, that she wanted to go on to graduate school for her doctorate in psychology and go into private practice, she hadn’t gotten the reaction she’d expected. Elizabeth had looked more worried than excited or proud. Maggie never forgot what she’d said, so surprised and disappointed had she been at the words.

“You can’t save the world, Magpie. You’ve been trying all your life, bringing home every stray and broken thing. Some things can’t be fixed.”

Maggie couldn’t remember now where they’d been. Maybe Telephone Bar on Second Avenue, her parents in for one of their frequent visits. Someplace in the city, she knew that. She remembered the smell of vinegar, the lightness she felt drinking red wine with her parents.

“But some can,” she’d said quietly. “And how do you know the difference unless you try?”

“But why do you have to be the one to try?”

“Elizabeth,” her father had admonished. “It’s wonderful, Maggie. It’s a wonderful choice.” He’d put a comforting hand on her arm.

She hadn’t argued further with her mother. She knew it was pointless to try to bring Elizabeth around to her way of thinking. Dinner had continued with discussions about money, what there was for graduate school, what Maggie would have to earn, what loans and grants they should try to acquire. On the surface, it was all very calm, practical, optimistic. But Maggie hadn’t eaten another bite, her insides a brew of sadness and disappointment, anger at her mother for her-what was the word?-her distance, her know-it-all attitude about everything, even what Maggie chose to do with her life.

Later, after becoming a parent herself, Maggie understood her mother’s worry better. She saw it in Ricky, this desire to shelter the fragile things he found, like Charlene, and his willingness to sacrifice himself for others. He didn’t know how vulnerable he made himself. She remembered the baby squirrel he’d found in their backyard. He’d built a bed out of washcloths and tried to feed it milk from a dropper; it had died the next day. He was six at the time, and sometimes she still remembered how he’d cried, with the tragic hopelessness of the young. It had caused her a physical pain to see him so sad, because she knew how much it hurt to try to save something that could not be saved.

Now she walked over to her desk, called Henry Ivy on his cell phone, and got his voice mail.

“I had a strange call from Marshall,” she said. “Call right away. I’m really worried.”

Then she dialed Leila, Marshall’s aunt, and also got voice mail. She left a similar message. She didn’t expect to hear back, but maybe Leila would relent and send one of the boys over there. As a last resort, she looked up Angie’s number and called her, was surprised when she answered.

“This is Dr. Cooper,” Maggie said.

“I’ve been expecting your call.” Why did everyone keep saying that?

“You have?”

“I should have called you when Marshall went back to Travis. But I…,” she said, letting the sentence trail.

“I’m worried about him,” Maggie said when the other woman didn’t go on. “He seems in a very dark place.”

“He’s vile, Dr. Cooper,” she said sharply. “He’s cruel, he’s abusive. He’s Travis times one hundred. Just like Travis is worse than his father is, none of the old man’s code. Every generation, the gene gets stronger.”

Maggie was surprised into silence by the venom in her voice.

“At least the old man never hit a woman,” Angie went on. “He’d beat the crap out of Travis, but he never hit Travis’s mother or sister.”

Police Chief Crosby still lived in The Hollows, getting more cantankerous and meaner as he got older. Maggie would expect to see him at the town meeting tonight. He was always right on the spot when there was trouble, his role as town cop dying hard.

“Angie-”

“It’s our fault. I know that. Marshall saw violence-terrible, awful violence-before he was old enough to even talk. There was never a warm minute in our house. Never. And I’m sorry for that.”

It occurred to Maggie then that maybe Angie had been drinking, her words tumbling, her tone wavering between angry and maudlin.

“Has something happened between you and Marshall?”

She heard Angie start to cry.

“Has he been violent with you, Angie? We need to address it if he has, because up until now, he hasn’t been violent. And a sudden change in his behavior could suggest a crisis point.”

“I don’t want to get him in trouble, Dr. Cooper. I just want him to stay away from me. Tell him that, will you? Just tell him to stay away?”

The line went dead, and Maggie really wished people would stop hanging up on her. The whole family had a serious problem with abruptly ending unpleasant conversations. Looking at the phone still in her hand, Maggie felt her frustration reach its peak, and she started to internally back away. She was worried about Marshall, but she was equally worried about Charlene, and her own son. She thought about calling Jones, alerting him to the problems with Marshall, but everyone was so focused on Charlene at the moment that she doubted her call would amount to much. She could almost hear Jones. What do you want me to do, Mags? Bring the kid in because you had a worrying phone call? I’ve got a missing girl here.

Maggie decided to turn her focus back to the immediate crisis. She walked over to her computer and opened up Facebook, entered the log-in and password Ricky had left for her on a yellow sticky note on her computer screen. He’d wanted her to look at Charlene’s page, see the status bar update that had him so worked up.

The page loaded slowly, Maggie’s computer being old and cluttered with too many files and applications that she had neither the know-how nor the inclination to manage. Eventually, her screen filled with Charlene’s image and a list of comments from friends, all of them on-screen from that day. Where are you, girl? We’re all so worried! Hope you’re livin’ it up in NYC! You rock! I always knew you’d get out of here! Each message was accompanied by a thumbnail image of the sender, most of whom Maggie recognized, all of them vamping or clowning around for the camera. She scrolled through until she found Ricky’s image, where he was doing his best to look arty and haunted. But to Maggie, he just looked like her baby dressed up for Halloween, a little silly and self-conscious. She supposed that was why teenagers never wanted their parents around; parents only saw the children they knew, not the adults they were trying to become. Come home, Char. This is uncool, read Ricky’s message. Please.

Something caught her eye in the left-hand corner of the screen, an area labeled “Mutual Friends.” Charlene and Ricky had nineteen friends in common; Maggie clicked on the “see all” link, feeling very proud of her technical prowess. She expected to see familiar faces, and she did-Britney, Tiffany, Amber. Cursory glances at their pages showed the usual-messages from friends, favorite books and music, pictures from parties and school events. No indications of the drugs, or alcohol abuse, or teenage sexual depravity that the media would have everyone believe was going on, no seedy underbelly to Hollows High.

But many of the people listed she didn’t recognize. They looked older, though they shared Charlene and Ricky’s gothic chic. She started clicking on pictures and found musicians, nightclubbers, an East Village bar owner, the owner of a seedy-looking recording studio. She knew Ricky and Charlene had been sneaking into the city for a while now, going to shows and clubs-his guilty admission to Chuck was not exactly news to her. She’d done it herself as a kid. Were these the people they were hanging out with? They looked hard-edged and strange, too old for the scene but still hanging on. One young woman had a tattoo on her face, a trail of tears. One pale, too-thin man brooded with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, dark circles under his eyes.

Maggie leaned her head back against the leather of her chair, the brightness of the screen bothering her because of her fatigue and the headache that was increasing behind her eyes. Ricky had given her access to his account. Had he, on some level, wanted her to see these people? He couldn’t have thought she’d just look at Charlene’s page and not explore his. Hadn’t he told her that he didn’t know Char’s friends in the city? That he thought she’d been lying?

Maggie found herself somewhat guiltily scrolling through her son’s in-box, reading messages from friends and acquaintances. There was nothing that caused her concern. All the messages were from friends she knew well, concerning homework or band gigs, gossip, plans for the weekends. Even the notes between Ricky and Charlene were pretty PG-rated, almost, she thought, pointedly so. She’d always warned him against considering his online activities private. He’d obviously taken her advice to heart. Or, knowing that he’d given away his password, he’d cleaned up his in-box.

At the bottom of the list of mutual friends, she saw an image she didn’t expect: Marshall Crosby. She clicked on the picture, a dark photo, obviously taken in poor lighting by his computer camera. He looked slouched, and ghoulish around the eyes; the room behind him was a mess of books and tossed clothes, stacks of video games, soda cans in a line along a dresser, rock posters covering the wall. As his page loaded, she saw that most of the fields, like favorite books and films, were blank. Even the profile area glowed white, empty of the details she expected to see. The only area where he had seen fit to enter information was the status bar, and what he’d written there, thirteen minutes earlier, caused a cold finger to trace Maggie’s spine: Marshall thinks bad people should be punished.

In Maggie’s memory, it had snowed for days. But it hadn’t really. In fact, there was just the initial light snowfall that coated Sarah’s newly dead body so that when Chief Crosby first saw her, he thought she was a fallen branch, so thin and still and dark was her form. The days that followed were characterized by freezing precipitation-sleet, a light rain-the tentative spring abandoning The Hollows as the shock of it all settled and everyone found themselves shuffling stunned and stricken from assembly to counseling, if they wanted it, then to the horrifying open-casket wake and grim burial.

Maggie found that she could hardly take it in; none of it seemed quite real. Even now, she remembered it only in snapshots-Sarah’s mother collapsing at her daughter’s grave, her own mother clinging to her in a way she never had before or since, maintaining a grip on wrist or shoulder or elbow for days, it seemed. She remembered Sarah stiff and bloated in her casket, a waxen image of herself, not a girl filled with music, not a girl at all. The mortician had filled in the cuts on her face with some thick kind of makeup, but still you could see them there, a faint spiderweb of lines, like the cracks in the face of a porcelain doll that had been broken and glued back together. Her face looked painted on, hideous, a death mask. Maggie could still hear Sarah’s mother wailing if she thought on it, could feel the sound of it reverberating in her own chest.

She’d been younger than Ricky was now, in her sophomore year at Hollows High. She’d been sheltered, her schedule strictly maintained by Elizabeth. Home right after school unless she had an extracurricular activity, have a snack and relax, homework, then play with friends or watch television. Dinner was always at 6:30, bedtime no later than 9:00. She’d railed against all the rules, felt smothered by her mother’s constant questions. Rebelled by doing things to her appearance, like dyeing her hair, getting multiple piercings in her ears. Elizabeth had reminded her of this, not without a tiny bit of glee, when Ricky started his descent into gothic punk. Maggie realized she was every bit as on top of Ricky as Elizabeth had been on top of her, constantly talking, asking questions, maintaining routine. Well, she thought, there it is. I’ve become my mother.

“Do you think you would have been able to walk out the door after a fight?” her mother was saying as they drove to the meeting. She looked as tiny as a child in the huge passenger seat of Maggie’s SUV. Again, the heat was cranking; Elizabeth had always hated the cold. “That I would just let you walk off and not go after you? Ridiculous.”

“I know.” Maggie had called her mother after she learned about the meeting, and Elizabeth wanted to attend. She’d phoned Ricky at the record shop, and his boss had agreed to let him go so that he could be there, too. He was planning to meet them at the school.

“That girl,” Elizabeth said. Maggie knew she was talking about Melody, not Charlene. “There was always something about her.”

“She’s not a girl anymore, Mom. She’s a mother whose daughter is missing. She needs our compassion and our help.”

Elizabeth snorted. “You’re such a shrink, Magpie,” she said, mock-crotchety.

“Mom,” Maggie chastised, but she felt a smile turning up the corners of her mouth.

Her mother took a tissue from her purse and blew her nose.

“What do you remember about that time?”

“What time?” her mother asked, not turning to look at her.

“You know what I’m talking about,” Maggie said, annoyed that her mother was being purposely obtuse. She always did that when she didn’t want to talk about something.

“I knew you’d bring that up.”

“How could it not come to mind?”

“I remember everything about it. Every detail. Every ugly minute. It was the worst thing that ever happened to this town.”

Maggie waited for her mother to go on. Then, “They say your memory fades when you get older. I wish it were true. You forget things like where you put your keys or your glasses, you space out on doctors’ appointments. But the bad stuff stays, Maggie. The old things you’d rather forget, those memories move closer, grow more vivid.”

“Like what? What do you remember?”

They were stopped at a light. It changed to green without Maggie noticing until someone behind them leaned on his horn. They both jumped a little, and Maggie lifted a hand in apology, moved forward.

“Everyone’s in a big rush,” said Elizabeth.

Maggie figured that her mother was just going to ignore her question, that she’d have to press. And she was prepared to press. She wanted to talk about Sarah, for some reason. Since Melody had brought it up, she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it. Does Jones ever talk about it? Melody had asked. Why had she wanted to know that? It was such a strange question.

Maggie was about to push Elizabeth to answer, but her mother started talking.

“Of all the terrible feelings and awful memories from that time, you know what bothers me the most?” she said.

“What’s that?”

“I never believed that he killed her.”

Something about the way she said it gave Maggie a strange little jolt of dread.

“He confessed, Mom,” she said.

“I know he did,” Elizabeth answered, her voice flat. She cleared her throat and looked down at her lap. She smoothed out her skirt with two flat palms, a determined little sweep of her hands; it was a familiar gesture to Maggie, something her mother did when she wanted to avert her gaze.

“You never told me this.”

“What’s to tell? It’s just a feeling. I knew that boy. I just never did believe he had it in him. It’s always bothered me.”

“If not him, then who?”

Elizabeth released a breath. “Now, the answer to that might just be what kept me from asking the question in the first place.”

Maggie didn’t say anything, taking in her mother’s words.

There was never any doubt that Tommy Delano killed Sarah. There had always been something wrong with him. Everybody said so. Since he was a boy, he’d been unnaturally quiet, occasionally prone to blank but terrifying rages. As an adult, he had often been seen slinking about the garage where he worked, lurking in corners, watching in that quiet way he had. Or he might have been spotted walking aimlessly through town, or hanging around the arcade or the pizzeria where the younger kids gathered. When people mentioned him, they used words like “creepy,” or “odd.” They said he had a way with cars, though. That he was a talented mechanic, a tireless worker. They said all those things about him, and so they were all true.

They also said that he killed his mother. It was an accident; a terrible fall from a steep staircase into the basement. His father found them. The boy sitting mute at the top, his mother in a heap on the floor below, neck broken, blood pooling. What precisely happened or how long he’d been sitting there was not clear. But the incident followed him through grade school, middle school, high school, and beyond. The story was whispered behind his back over two generations. He became a kind of bogeyman to some. He walks the woods behind the school, watches the girls. Watch out. Tommy Delano’s waiting for you.

But when Maggie saw him, she just thought he was a sad man, fixing the buses that sat broken in the yard. He didn’t seem frightening, with his narrow shoulders and grease-stained coveralls, barely raising his eyes from the ground. He was in the woods behind the school sometimes, smoking cigarettes.

Sometimes the senior boys would gather around the bus yard fence and taunt him. Why’d you kill your mom, Tommy boy? How horrible, Maggie remembered thinking, the children of people he’d gone to school with taunting him over an accident that had killed his mother. As a girl, she just didn’t understand cruelty, didn’t understand why some people felt good about making other people feel bad. Even now, she didn’t understand it much better. Maggie never saw Tommy react. Sometimes he’d just go inside one of the buses until the boys went away on their own or were reprimanded by one of the teachers.

After the first twenty-four hours passed, and Sarah didn’t return home and it was clear she wasn’t hiding out at the homes of any of her friends, Maggie noticed a palpable shift in energy; the twittering nervousness waxed to cold fear. Maggie spent an entire English class distracted by the empty seat near the window that would have been occupied by Sarah. It struck her as so frightening and strange that someone was missing and that Miss Williams still stood at the head of the class, giving her lesson about metaphor, and Vicki and Michelle were passing notes, and Trevor was doodling in his notebook. Maybe it was just a trick of memory, but by the second day-when the squad cars were parked in front of the school and the students were dismissed early-she remembered knowing on some deep level that Sarah wasn’t coming back, and that everything else would move forward anyway.

Maggie couldn’t remember when suspicion turned to Tommy Delano, but it was at some point after the psychic arrived. Eloise Montgomery looked just like anyone’s mom, with a plaid shirt and high-waisted jeans, a brown faux-leather purse clutched to her side. By lunch, the popular girls had already gathered to make fun of her hair, a blunt, unflattering cut that looked like a helmet. There was nothing else notable about her, not a searing gaze or a glowing aura. On her way to biology class last period, Maggie saw the psychic sitting in the music room, talking to Sarah’s teacher. The woman listened intently to whatever it was that Mr. Landtz was telling her, nodding slowly.

Maggie remembered dining alone that night with her father, who wasn’t much of a cook. They had fast-food hamburgers, eating them off the wrappers without plates. Since Sarah’s disappearance, her mother had come home late and left early-helping the police, consoling the family, and organizing volunteers. Maggie just wished Elizabeth would stay home.

“How are you doing with all of this?” her father wanted to know.

“I don’t know. It doesn’t seem real.”

“Hmm,” he said. “I know what you mean. Things like this never do, I guess.”

The next day Tommy Delano was taken into custody. The evidence against him was circumstantial. Sarah’s mother regularly brought her vehicle into the garage where he worked for service, often with Sarah in tow. Delano had been in the school office, collecting payment, and had had opportunity to hear Sarah’s phone call to her mother saying she’d missed the bus. They found a collection of newspaper clippings about Sarah in an envelope under his bed. Then, in the trunk of his car, they found a pair of underpants, which Mrs. Meyer identified as Sarah’s. By the evening, he’d confessed, just as that late spring snow began to fall. Then he told Chief Crosby where to find her body.

No, there was not a doubt in anyone’s mind that Tommy Delano killed Sarah. That he was waiting for her in the wooded area between Melody’s house and her own. We met in the woods. She was glad to see me. That he’d lured her into a vehicle and held her for more than twenty-four hours, hiding with her in an abandoned hunter’s cabin deep in the woods by Old Creek, confessed his love, repeatedly raped her. I made love to her. She wanted me to. He cut her face. I punished her for talking mean. And then, when her terror and rage started to feel like rejection, he killed her. She hit me, he reportedly told Chief Crosby with hurt and indignation in his voice. I only wanted to love her.

Tommy Delano was sentenced to life in prison, his time to be served without the possibility of parole. And The Hollows breathed a collective sigh: It’s over.

Maggie had waited to feel that sense of relief everyone else seemed to feel. But instead she just kept noticing, all year, that someone else came to fix the buses now. He was a big guy, with broad shoulders and close-cropped hair. The senior boys had nothing to say to him. And Sarah’s seat was empty and the world went on and on without her, as though she’d never been there all.

“You never said anything about this before,” Maggie said now to her mother.

Elizabeth didn’t answer, just kept looking out the window at the people moving slowly into the school.

“Mom?”

She waved a hand at Maggie. “Don’t listen to me. I’m just being silly and maudlin.”

But Elizabeth was not, nor had she ever been, silly or maudlin. Maggie’s mother wasn’t prone to drama, or to listing off regrets. But she did have a habit of forming cement judgments about people and never, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, changing her mind. And even if those judgments were rarely wrong, it was still not a quality Maggie appreciated in her mother. People changed. She knew this to be true, had witnessed it in others and even in herself. Still, something about what Elizabeth said bothered Maggie, caused an uncomfortable ache, made her remember something she couldn’t quite remember.

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” Elizabeth said. “They’re both gone now. At peace, I hope.”

“The evidence was clear.”

“Yes,” Elizabeth said. “Of course it was.”

They pulled into the high school parking lot and moved toward the entrance near the auditorium, where the meeting would be held. There were fewer cars than Maggie would have imagined. She’d expected the lot to be full, people milling about outside. But the doors were closed, though she could see people in the hallway through the small square window. She found a spot near Jones’s vehicle and parked.

“It’s snowing.” Maggie helped her mother out of the car. Elizabeth had railed at help until her last fall, which had fractured her hip and left her limping and relying on her cane. Now she grudgingly accepted the assisting hand, the proffered arm.

“So it is,” said Elizabeth. “So it is.”