I remember how his eyes locked intently on mine, unflinching and focused. Mine, then Cooper’s.
“Be good,” he said.
Then they dragged him through the door and out into the damp evening air, slamming his head against the cruiser, his thick glasses cracking in protest, the flashing lights turning his skin a sickening shade of crimson. They ducked him inside and shut the door.
I watched him sit there, quietly, staring ahead at the mesh metal divider, his body completely still, the only decipherable movement the trickle of blood creeping down the bridge of his nose that he didn’t bother to wipe away. I watched him, and I thought of Bert Rhodes. I wondered if knowing the identity of the man who took his daughter would make things better or worse for him. Easier or harder. It’s an impossible choice to be faced with, but if he had to choose, would he rather his child be murdered by a complete stranger—an intruder in his town, in his life—or a familiar face, one he had welcomed into his home? His neighbor, his friend?
In the following months, the only time I got to see my dad was on television, his framed glasses, now fractured, always cast down to the ground below him, his hands cuffed tightly behind his back, the skin on his wrists pinched and pink. I pressed my nose to the screen and watched as people would line the street that led to the courthouse with homemade signs scribbled with horrible, nasty words, hissing as he walked past.
Murderer. Pervert.
Monster.
Some of the signs featured the faces of the girls—the girls who had been on the news in a sad, steady stream over the course of that summer. Girls who weren’t much older than me. I recognized all of them; I had memorized their features. I had seen their smiles, looked into their eyes, once promising and alive.
Lena, Robin, Margaret, Carrie, Susan, Jill.
Those faces were the reason I had a curfew at night. They were the reason I was never allowed to walk alone in the dark. My father had been the one to enact that rule, spanking me until my skin was raw when I stumbled home past dusk or forgot to close my window at night. He had injected pure fear into my heart—a debilitating dread of that unseen person who was the cause of their disappearances. That person who was the reason why those girls had been reduced to black-and-white pictures glued to old cardboard. That person who knew where they were when they took their last breaths; what their eyes looked like when death finally took them.
I knew it when he was arrested, of course. I knew it from the moment the police barged into our home, the moment my father looked into our eyes and whispered: Be good. I had known it before then, really, when I finally allowed the pieces to fall into place. When I forced myself to turn around and face the figure I could feel lurking behind me. But it was in that moment—alone in my living room, my face pressed against the television screen, my mother unraveling slowly in her bedroom, and Cooper shriveling into nothing out back—it was that moment, listening to my father’s ankle chains rattle, watching his blank expression as he was moved from cop cars to prisons to courtrooms and back. It was that moment when the weight of it all came crashing down, burying me alive in the debris.
That person was him.
CHAPTER NINE
All at once, my house seems both too big and too small. It’s claustrophobic, sitting here, these four walls confining me inside, trapping me with this recycled, stale air. But it’s also impossibly lonely; too large to be filled with only the silent thoughts of a single soul. I have the sudden urge to move.
I get up from the couch and walk into my bedroom, exchanging my oversized robe for a pair of jeans and a gray T-shirt, pulling my hair into a topknot and forgoing all makeup that takes more effort than swiping my lips with a stick of Blistex. I’m out the door within five minutes, my hammering heart slowing considerably once my flats hit the pavement.
I get in the car and crank the engine, driving mechanically through my neighborhood and into town. I reach for the radio but my hand pauses in midair, instead recoiling back to the steering wheel.
“It’s okay, Chloe,” I say out loud, my voice painfully shrill in the otherwise silence of my car. “What’s bothering you? Verbalize it.”
I drum my fingers against the steering wheel, push down my turn signal, and decide to take a left. I’m talking to myself the way I talk to my clients.
“A girl is missing,” I say. “A local girl has gone missing, and it’s upsetting me.”
If this were an appointment, next I would ask: Why? Why is this upsetting you?
The reasons are obvious, I know. A young girl is missing. Fifteen years old. Last seen within jogging distance from my house, my office, my life.