The Girls She Left Behind (6 page)

This was a commune, Tara realized, feeling excited to witness such an exotic phenomenon. She'd been aware that some people got together this way, sharing everything and living in peace and harmony. But she had never seen it, and being here made her life seem bigger, suddenly—more colorful and adult.

She sipped the bitter tea proudly, glad these odd people had decided to allow her into their world. Strange music came from speakers perched on the rough wooden bookshelves, which were full of books she had heard of but never seen:
Our Bodies, Ourselves, Moosewood Cookbook, The Joy of Sex.
The music was droning, atonal, with weird drum thumping and string plucking; gazing about in wonder, Tara supposed that you had to get used to it before you could like it.

She decided to try. Then a woman in a flowing, geometric-print tunic came in, carrying a tray with a pottery bowl of soup, a large piece of black bread, thickly buttered, and a spoon.

“Welcome,” the woman said gently, offering Tara the tray.

The soup smelled delicious, and Tara was ravenous. Thanking the woman, she ate every bit of the soup—the broth and vegetables and the tasty bits of green stuff floating in it—and sopped up the last of it with the thick dark bread, which she also devoured.

When she finished and set the tray aside, it was nearly dark out. The man on the deck was gone, as was the boy from the swing. Faint whiffs of marijuana drifted from somewhere.

Then the red-haired woman returned. “I'm sorry, it's taking us a little longer than we thought but we'll just be another half hour or so. Is that all right?”

Tara thought apologizing to a hitchhiker for a delay was not the way things usually worked. But she was content to stay for a while longer, especially if a ride all the way home was at the end of the wait.

Settling back in the big, soft chair that smelled of some kind of herbal infusion, letting the weird, droning music wash over her while the sounds of the communal residents preparing a meal clattered pleasantly from the kitchen, she let one of the cats hop into her lap and curl up there, purring loudly.

Soon she'd be seeing her own little rescued kitten. Poor little Phoenix. She hoped her mother wasn't too mad about having to take care of him while she was gone.

Then she thought of calling home. She always did call when she took off like this. Her cell phone was in her bag, which she'd tucked in beside her in the chair. But if she used it now, she'd have to explain where she was and how she got there, and it would spoil the pleasant atmosphere she was enjoying.

Better to explain once she got home, she decided, which would be in only a few hours anyway.

Thinking this, Tara felt her eyelids drooping. She'd been up very early getting ready to go with Aaron, and riding on the back of a motorcycle was exhausting. Not to mention all the walking afterward. So with the evening shadows deepening to night, she'd let her eyes drift shut.

And when she opened them again it was morning.

“O
ver there,” said Emily Ektari. Dressed in a scrub suit, white sneakers, and a white lab jacket, the dark-haired young ER physician pointed to a curtained cubicle in the Aroostook County Medical Center ER's small but spotless patient-care area.

The rest of the cubicles, each with its sheeted gurney, shiny metal IV pole, and wall-mounted cardiac monitor, were at the moment unoccupied. In its silence and serene orderliness, the unit was a far cry from the controlled bedlam of a Boston emergency room, Lizzie thought.

“Quiet,” she remarked into the fluorescent-lit calm.

Emily looked up from the nursing desk where she was studying a Spanish-language text. “What, you were looking for the Tuesday Night Knife and Gun Club?”

She was repaying a portion of her school loans by working in underserved areas like northern Maine. But her last post had been in Chicago and her next, she'd just learned, would be in the desert Southwest, where a large immigrant population also had few healthcare options; thus the Spanish textbook.

“I doubt she'll wake up anytime soon,” Emily added as Lizzie turned toward the occupied cubicle. “I think maybe she was on some kind of stimulant. The tox screen I sent off to the lab will tell for sure. But for whatever reason, she was so agitated that I had to sedate her.”

Lizzie grimaced, disappointed. No wonder Dylan hadn't gotten anything useful out of the woman. “Did she give you any idea what upset her?”

If she wasn't just reacting to whatever crap she swallowed,
Lizzie thought.

Emily shook her head. “Dylan said she'd been trying to tell him something when she just all of a sudden got hysterical. That's all I know. I couldn't get much out of her, myself.”

The EKG monitors linked to the bedside units displayed five unlit screens and a bright-emerald one with a jagged up-and-down glowing line marching across it.
CRIMMINS,
read the inked strip of adhesive tape stuck to the lit screen's console.

Lizzie blinked at the name, recognizing it.
Oh, come on,
she thought.
Could it be…because if it is her, then I'll be damned.

“And he said the more he tried to coax it out of her,” Emily went on, “the more she lost her shit.”

The curtains around the patient were partly closed. Inside them on the sheeted gurney, a dark-haired woman lay with a white woven hospital blanket pulled over her shoulders, her chest rising and falling with the slow regularity of sleep.

“She wouldn't even let me touch her, other than drawing blood for a tox screen and so on, and starting an IV so I could get some fluids into her. She was pretty dehydrated.”

The cardiac line went on moving evenly across the bedside monitor. “You really think she was disturbed enough to—”

“To keep here?” Emily nodded. “Oh, absolutely. She's classic for a moderate amphetamine overdose, actually, and she had herself all wound up. The shot of Valium I finally gave her took care of that, though.”

Emily checked the patient's IV, then made a brief note on the clipboard at the foot of the gurney. “I wasn't sure at first that it would and it was more than I thought she'd need, but it took hold in the end. Good old Vitamin V. She'll probably sleep until morning.”

Lizzie eyed the figure again.
Crimmins…
The name rang a bell, all right; an alarm bell.

“Is her first name Jane, by any chance?”

Emily glanced back, surprised. The printing on the clipboard was too small for Lizzie to have read it from a distance. “How'd you know that?”

“Just a lucky guess.” Her unease over the missing Tara Wylie suddenly increased. “Name's familiar from a case that I'd been watching when I was back in Boston.”

The heart rate on the monitor increased slightly. “Meanwhile I've got a teenage girl missing,” she began, meaning to ask Emily to keep an eye out.

But before she could go on, the heart rate on Jane Crimmins's monitor shot up, the high beep-beeping shrill in the ER's silence and the jagged radium-green line on the monitor's screen zigzagging wildly.

Huh,
Lizzie thought. “Tara Wylie,” she said experimentally. The monitor's activity revved once more, this time shooting high enough to briefly trigger a jangling alarm.

Emily scowled at the monitor. “Weird. Guess she's not quite as asleep as I thought.”

She turned to Lizzie. “Tell you what, though, when she wakes up for real I'll let her know that you were here. If she wants to talk to you, I'll call you, stat.”

An upped heart rate could've meant that the woman on the hospital gurney knew something about Tara Wylie's disappearance. But it also could have represented a bad dream or a painful gas bubble, Lizzie supposed.

“All right,” she conceded reluctantly. “Or even if she doesn't want to talk, call me anyway. Maybe I can persuade her.”

“Dylan gets better looking every time I see him,” Emily remarked suddenly as they walked back to the nursing station. Lizzie felt her own heart rate rev up.

“You're
sure
you wouldn't care if I were to start going out with him?” Emily went on.

They'd had this discussion before.
Yes,
thought Lizzie.
I do care, very much.
But:

“No,” she said. “Seriously, Em, you want to go out with him, it's fine with me. Be my guest.”

But Emily must have seen something in her face. “It was much busier in here a little earlier,” she remarked, tactfully changing the subject.

Now Lizzie noticed the large wheeled trash bins awaiting emptying. Stuffed full of paper gowns, latex gloves pulled inside out, emptied plastic IV bags, and other medical-equipment disposables including plenty of stained gauze, the bins testified to some fairly wild ER activity not long ago.

“A compound fracture, couple of soft-tissue injuries, some acute dehydrations, and a third-degree burn,” confirmed the ER doc, “from the fire over at Hoverly.”

Two miles north of Bearkill, Hoverly was a tiny settlement of wood-frame houses, postcard-pretty antique barns, and the neat-as-a-pin workshops of custom furniture manufacturers interspersed with small dairy farms and vegetable gardens. Inhabited by members of a small, strictly old-fashioned religious group, the town mostly took care of its own needs.

But when several big brush fires had broken out there earlier in the day, horse-drawn wagons and hand-pumped water hadn't been enough; from her office, Lizzie had heard sirens and dispatches on the scanner, and later seen the ambulances speeding out.

“It's bad news out there,” said Emily now. “The way things are going in general around here, it's only a matter of time before someone gets really badly injured, or even killed.”

She sat behind the desk. “The weather, the forest fires…I mean, this is my second winter up here and after the last one I never thought I'd be wishing for snow again.”

Lizzie hadn't been here the previous winter, but she'd heard the tales: four feet of snow, blizzards well into April, and cold so fierce that even the old-timers around Bearkill were in awe.

And now this: summer in winter. “It's strange, all right,” she agreed. “Like things are going haywire, weather-wise.”

Back in Boston it wasn't so obvious; in the city, you heard about global warming and somehow you thought it was only a bad deal for polar bears. You didn't think so much about the fact that what happened to the bears could also happen to you.

Until it started to. Lizzie's turn to change the subject: “So listen, Emily. After you got here, how long did it take you to get acclimated? I mean, to feel at home even a little bit?”

The young MD was from Baltimore, originally; not Boston, but still plenty urban. And she'd worked in other big-city hospitals.

“You mean like I'm not living on the far side of the moon?” Emily pulled a wry face. “I'll let you know if and when. No music clubs, no public transportation. I swear right now I'd kill for a pizza with meatballs that hadn't been poured onto it from a ten-pound bag of frozen ones.”

Her expression turned sympathetic. “Why, you having a bumpy ride?”

Lizzie sighed. “To put it mildly.” Her own chronic yen was for oysters, washed down with a craft beer from one of the many new artisan breweries flourishing in the Boston metro area. And that wasn't all she missed:

Lights and people, car horns and sirens, exhaust fumes and food smells and dust from the construction sites…

“Mostly I'm just treating it like a question on a cop exam,” she said. “Like, ‘You're working a new case with a newly assigned partner in an unfamiliar and potentially hostile environment, how do you proceed?' ”

Emily laughed. “Right, if the partner is an alien from some other planet and the atmosphere is methane. You know why Bearkill would be a good place to be at the end of the world?”

As she spoke, a red light over the automatic doors to the unit began blinking urgently.

“Because you won't even hear about it until a good ten years after it happens,” Emily answered herself as the doors swung open to admit a gurney with four nurses pushing it.

Time to go, Lizzie realized. “Listen, Emily, if she wakes up, no matter how late it is…”

“You bet,” Emily replied, hurrying toward the gurney. “I'll call you if anything interesting happens.” But the young doctor's attention was already on her new patient, whose face was covered with a clear plastic oxygen mask and whose chest was even now being exposed for an EKG reading.

Twenty minutes later, Lizzie was back on her own front step with the long-postponed glass of wine finally in her hand, waiting for Rascal to finish mooching around among the shadows on the lawn. The moon had set, darkening the night to soft black velvet, and the only sound was an owl in a tree nearby, hoo-ing softly as if confiding a secret.

“Come on, buddy,” she urged, and the massive dog appeared at once from the gloom. She'd tried walking him, but the usually calm canine had startled at every faint sound and tugged persistently at the leash, turning back toward home.

So she'd given in. Maybe he was picking up on the anxiety she felt over Tara Wylie, or more likely the smell of smoke, still drifting faintly from the Hoverly fires earlier, had spooked him.

Whatever you say, boss,
he seemed to reply now as he followed her inside. There, once the porch light was out and she'd gone around checking windows and doors as was her nightly habit, she debated a refill on her drink and decided against.

There was, after all, no sense in getting morose, even if she was all alone in a tiny house in the middle of nowhere
.
Back in the city on a weeknight she'd probably be home by this hour, too, but the windows of her spacious condo overlooking the river there had been a glittering display of moving headlights, brightly lit buildings, and spangled bridges arcing across the sky.

Here the kitchen window was pitch black.

She rinsed her glass and set it in the sink, aware of Rascal's slow, even breathing and glad for his presence as he settled in his dog bed to sleep. On the wall, the black cat-shaped clock that had been here when she moved in ticked through the moments mercilessly, its ceramic tail switching stiffly, wide eyes jerking back and forth.

Too dark, too quiet,
she decided.
I should at least put on some music.
She moved toward the radio, which at this late hour on a Tuesday night would be playing cool jazz from a French station in Montreal.

But then she stopped short as the questions that were really bugging her came clear suddenly:

Why the hell is Jane Crimmins, the mysterious caretaker of one of the victims in New England's most notorious recent kidnapping case, asleep in a hospital in Bearkill, Maine? Why did she want to talk to me?

And why'd her heart rate jump when I mentioned Tara Wylie?

Her cell phone trilled, startling her. “Snow here,” she snapped into it.

“I'll be at your office in town in five minutes,” blurted Tara's mother, Peg Wylie, shakily. “I'm on my way in now, I'm—”

“Peg? What happened? Have you had some kind of news? Or…did Tara come home?”

“Just be there,” Peg Wylie half sobbed into the phone, then hung up, leaving Lizzie to wonder if maybe she should've had that second drink, after all.

Peg sure sounded like she'd had a few. That, in fact, might be all that this visit was about, Lizzie thought irritably as she headed out into the night and climbed into the Blazer again.

But a few minutes later when Peg's decrepit little Honda sedan roared up to the curb in front of Lizzie's office and the driver tumbled out, it was easy to see that the problem was more than a few too many Budweisers.

At the door Lizzie put a steadying hand on Peg's trembling shoulder, clad in a high school athletic jacket.

Tara's jacket. The girl had been—
still is,
Lizzie corrected herself—a cheerleader. Peg thrust a clenched fist with something in it at Lizzie.

“Take it. Take it, I can't even—”

“Okay, Peg, calm down now.” Lizzie led her inside. “Talk to me. What's happened?”

Only a few hours ago, Peg Wylie had worn the anxious but resigned look of a woman whose last nerve was worn to a bleeding nub, but who still believed her missing daughter was probably alive and well.

She did not look that way now. “Please,” Peg said, weeping. “I really thought she was okay, but…”

Lizzie took Peg's hand, peeled the clenched fingers gently open, and plucked a cell phone from it.

“I tried calling her back but it wouldn't even ring, there's something wrong,
please…
”

“Okay. This is your phone, right?” Lizzie asked. Peg nodded numbly as Lizzie turned the phone so the text message displayed on the small screen was visible.