“Are you helping with the investigation? Looking into what happened to Lauren? Trying to find her?”
He sighed, ran a hand over his close-cropped hair. “Look, Lauren Schumacher is a troubled kid who ran away. Happens every day.”
“You’re sure about that?”
He nodded. “According to her parents, this is a regular thing with her—she stays gone a couple of days, crashes with friends, but always comes home. She had a big fight with her dad the day she left. She’s just blowing off steam somewhere.”
“Is anyone even out looking for her?” I asked.
“It’s not really my jurisdiction, but I understand a missing persons report was filed with the state police. But I’ll bet you just about anything that she’s turned up back at home in Worcester already, tail between her legs.”
That told me all I needed to know.
No one was looking all that hard for Lauren.
Just like all the other girls.
Girls everyone expected would disappear.
No one was surprised, and no one looked very hard, and when the girls never came back, people made up stories, said things like Must have hitchhiked out to California like she always talked about. Or, Must have run off with some guy who promised to get her out of this shithole town, her shithole life.
“I hope you’re right,” I said, and climbed into my van, shutting the door a little too hard.
Vi
July 19, 1978
I’M TELLING YOU,” Patty said, voice low, “there’s nothing there. I’ve looked through chart after chart in that file room, and there’s not a single mention of B West or any Mayflower Project.”
Vi pushed a shovel into the dirt. Old Mac was dumping a load of rocks at the edge of the garden for lining the flower beds. Some of the patients were gathered around, waiting to help move them. Tom the werewolf was hopping from foot to foot and rubbing at his arms, which were covered in scabs.
Miss Ev, wearing a large straw gardening hat over her wig, was supervising, directing the tractor with the bucket loader full of rocks: “Closer, Mr. MacDermot. That’s it. No, too far to the right. Can you back up and come a little to the left?”
Poor Old Mac was going back and forth, back and forth in the old Ford tractor, trying to comply.
“Miss Evelyn,” said Tom, “I’m telling you, I could do it. I worked trucking for years. I can drive anything: an eighteen-wheeler, a forklift, even a piece-of-crap old tractor.”
“Absolutely not, Tom,” she said. “Mr. MacDermot, now you’re too far to the left!”
“The records must be somewhere else then,” Vi said in a loud whisper. “Down in the basement, maybe.”
Working in the garden was the only time Vi could really talk to Patty, and even then there were usually other people around: patients digging and taking in the sun and fresh air, Old Mac laying water lines or delivering piles of mulch and rock with the tractor, Miss Ev in her big hat bossing everyone around.
Patty looked over her shoulder to make sure there were no patients close by. “Maybe there’s nothing to find,” she said, shaking her head.
“Oh, come on,” Vi said. “You don’t really believe that, do you?”
Patty scrunched up her face, thinking. “Not really,” she said. “But still, I can’t help but think we’d be better off leaving it alone.”
“Is that what you want to do?” Vi whispered. “Leave it alone?”
Patty hacked at the ground with a hoe. “You know, I used to have this dog, Oscar. There was a spot in our backyard, and Oscar would go out there and dig and dig. The soil there was all rocky, full of shale—it would splinter into sharp edges. Oscar would keep at it in this one spot, getting his feet all cut up. We tried everything: tying Oscar up, fencing that area off, even laying boards over it. But he always found a way back to it. Poor dog. I remember it so well—how he’d be all cut up and bleeding, but he’d keep digging.”