Vi flipped to another profile page, another woman. Jessica Blankenship, thirty-six, a nurse midwife in Akron, Ohio. Single.
“What is this?” I asked. “Some kind of dating app?”
“Look at the bottom of the pages,” Vi said. She flipped back to Claire Michaels. I leaned closer. There, in little letters at the bottom of the page: FKA Jennifer Rothchild.
The name pinged in my brain. I looked at the photo again of the woman in the white collared shirt and blazer, frosted hair, full makeup.
Jennifer Rothchild had been the monster’s first victim. She’d disappeared in the summer of 1988 after claiming to have met a bigfoot-type creature in the woods of her little town in Washington State. She was never heard from again.
“Look,” Vi said, clicking to another page, showing a photo of Jennifer Rothchild at thirteen. The one they’d circulated to the media and put on posters when she went missing. Vi tapped again so that the photo of thirteen-year-old Jennifer Rothchild was next to forty-four-year-old Claire Michaels. Same heart-shaped face, same blue eyes, same little dimple in the left cheek. The same person.
I put the gun back in the holster, dropped down to my knees on the floor beside Vi, took hold of the laptop with both hands, using the track pad to click through one profile after another. All the adult versions of girls who’d been taken. Each profile had the FKA name and photograph: Vanessa Morales, Sandra Novotny, Anna Larson. I knew those names, those photos so well—those ten missing girls. I had a whole folder stuffed full of information on them—cataloging my desperate attempts to find out what had happened to them. But there they were, all found. All living good lives with new names: an executive, a doctor, a marine biology professor, a filmmaker. And there were more than ten, girls I didn’t even know about. Girls who’d wandered away from their teenage lives and shown up as successful adults with new names.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“It’s what I do,” Vi said. “What we do. Take girls in bad situations: girls who are being abused by family members or boyfriends, girls with drug problems, girls who’ve made terrible mistakes, even girls who’ve killed people. The girls other people call monsters,” she said, emphasizing the last word, then pausing to let it mingle with our own shadows in the flickering light. “We give them a second chance. We transform them. Teach them that the anger they feel inside, the thing that makes them different, can be a source of strength and power. We show them how to slip away from who they once were and start again.”
I blinked at her, still not believing what I was hearing. “Who’s we?”
“I have benefactors, collaborators. Mostly women I’ve helped who’ve reached out to me, who want to do what they can for other girls. Claire Michaels, for instance. She sends money every month and has a carriage house behind her home where she can host girls who are starting over. Nearly all of the women I’ve transformed contribute what they can. The money goes to getting the girls set up in new lives. New schools. College, even. It’s a network—a monster club, sort of.”
I thought of what Gran had done, the lives she’d ruined trying to wipe people’s old selves away. Vi was giving these lost girls, girls like we had once been, second chances.
“You’re not killing them. You’re not hurting them. You’re saving them?”
Vi tilted her head. “We’re showing them how to save themselves,” she said.
I was quiet, taking it all in.
“And now I need your help,” Vi said.
“My help?”
“I need you to walk away from all of this. To not draw attention to the monsters and the girls.”
“So you’re asking me to stop hunting monsters?”
She laughed. “No. Not all monsters. Just me.”