“He’s a jerk.”
“Watch your language.”
“Well, he is.”
“I’m sort of the new guy in this area. Best not to ruffle his feathers. You been in a place as long as he has, you start to feel entitled.”
“Entitled.”
“Like everything is yours. Your river, your grass, your business.”
“Since when are we staying forever?”
Lamb sat down beside her, his feet in the grass and his arms stretched out behind him. “We’re not. Four days to go. Then we turn around and deliver you back to your mother. All red cheeked and your hair full of wind and nineteen thousand new freckles on your neck and face.”
“What if I want to stay longer?”
“Too bad.”
“No fair.”
“A minute ago you wanted to go home right away.”
“I changed my mind.”
“Boy.” He whistled. “You’re keeping me on my toes.”
“Do I have to be Emily?”
“Don’t you want to be Emily?” The flowers on the hem of her nightgown were dark blue, wet with river water.
“What is she like?”
“Well for one, she’s extraordinarily beautiful. The wind and the river and open space did wonders for her complexion.” Tommie rolled her eyes. “No, seriously. And the more she ran around outside barefoot and washed her face in the cold spigot water and rubbed dirt into her hair, the more beautiful she became.”
“What else?”
“She also became really, really smart during her time out west. I mean wonderfully bright. Want to know why?”
“Why?”
“She had such brilliant company.”
Slow to get the joke, she smiled. “I’m hungry.”
“I know. I’ve been sitting here wondering how I’m going to feed you. Shall we explore the grounds?”
It was the most natural thing in the world. Days growing shorter, autumn on its way. Pretty soon breakfasts by the fire, rinsing out the mess kit in the river water. There’d be hot chocolate in the evenings. Hauling dead wood in off the riverbank and splitting it for the woodstove. He wishing they could fix her a whole Thanksgiving dinner by campfire.
“You could do that?”
“Of course I could do that.”
“With a turkey?”
“A sharp-tailed grouse. And trout from the river. And chokecherry wine.”
“Wine for us both?”
“Just a taste for you.”
And we should probably pause here to imagine too how things were going in Illinois. How Tommie’s mother would first think Tommie was at the mall or at a neighbor’s house. How then Tommie’s mother would realize she had not taken a breath for days. And she would start smoking, right away, to make every breath until she died a chore and a countdown until she could be with Tom again.
And how they would interview Jenny and Sid. Investigators, social workers, their parents all in a green-carpeted room with dry-erase boards, a coffeepot, chairs arranged in a circle. How one at a time the girls are questioned, how they cry after the same question. Was it a dare? How they’re apologetic and how when they’re flanked by their parents they seem like a couple of kids. How a social worker would ask if they understand how much danger their friend is in. How the girls will tell them every detail they can recalclass="underline" how they made fake tube tops and stapled them and dotted their arms with blue-ink freckles. How they whispered their conversations about menstruating, explaining that they were talking about things Tommie wouldn’t understand. How they went bra shopping on the weekends, carried their gym clothes to and from school in Victoria’s Secret bags. Telling Tommie maybe one day she’d have a reason to go in the store too. How Jenny wrote a fake love letter from Tommie to her stepdad, Jessie, and read it out loud on the bus. How they pushed her in Sid’s basement closet with Luke Miller, then nicknamed her Prudie and told everyone she’d cried and covered her head with her hands and hid behind Sid’s dad’s raincoat. How that first day she was taken into that old guy’s car it had seemed, yes, unwillingly. The color of the Ford. The height of the man. His hair color. Who he looked like on TV. That Tommie wasn’t taking the bus anymore after that. That Jenny saw her trace the letter G on the floor with her shoe, over and over and over again, straight through a history class. How they would be looking for Geralds, Grants, Garys, Genes, Glens with registered navy blue Ford Explorers. How the social worker—with a long flat mane of strawberry blond hair graying at the temples—didn’t believe any of it. A handsome man who looks like some TV star befriends this unremarkable girl and takes her away? A man like that isn’t missed by his family? His boss? His wife, say? The whole thing told like a story made up by a child.
And let’s say Jessie stepped up to the plate, really started leading the team. Really found he missed her, really expressed how fond he was of the child, how he missed her affection. That’s what he would call it: affection. How when investigators talked to him they would be thinking he himself could have done it, he could have taken her and hidden her away somewhere, he could be that guy. How vividly he could imagine it all. How he could be a suspect. How he was glad she wasn’t his real daughter because how would he have felt, being a man himself and knowing what was likely happening to her? He could never have held that up.
And we could say too that it was all the kids talked about at school for three days, a week, even two weeks, but how—true to a promise David Lamb would make her—Tommie would become a ghost, and everyone would forget her. All but one boy, say, a friendless scrawny kid with a perpetually runny nose and zealous parents, and who’d had a secret crush on Tommie for years, sat next to her in math and always hid his pencils before class so he could ask her for one. Say Tommie never would have mentioned this to Jenny or Sid, but she always packed an extra for him. Say she even let him borrow Lamb’s little silver pencil sharpener and square-danced with him in gym class—pretending, when Jenny and Sid called for it—to be repulsed by his skinny damp hands. His life would be touched by Tommie’s disappearance, how he would come to understand that this was how the universe worked. Maybe his parents would move to Nashville or Buffalo or Dallas before he could find out what happened to Tommie in the end. He’d keep his adult life empty, steeled against perpetuating the shock and horror of finding she’d been abducted. Say that was the word they were using: abducted.
The cabin was a single large room—a tiny kitchen sink and square foot of countertop, a fold-out couch, a cot, a propane heater and a propane stove. It smelled like dust and vaguely of urine and natural gas. Mouse shit seeded the floor.
“If I come back here to stay,” Lamb told the girl, who held her hand over her nose, “there’ll be some cleaning.”
There was a tiny bathroom: sink and toilet. The water in the toilet was rust-orange, the bowl was lined with rust rings.
“Can you flush it?” She made a face.
“Wait’ll I get the water turned on.”
“I could clean.”
“That would take years.”
She shrugged. “I don’t care. Are we sleeping in the bunk beds?”
“Unless you want a cot. Or a couch.”
“Bunk beds duh.”
For the most part the place was empty of the inventory of daily life. Some tin plates and cups and plastic dishes in the single kitchen cabinet. A split yellow sheet of paper taped to the inside door: handwritten instructions for turning on the water. Lamb tried the light switch behind the tiny porcelain sink. “Think we need electricity? We could leave the lights off.”