My stomach flipped. The same had occurred to me, but there was something horrible about hearing it spoken out loud. Now that we were talking about it, we were going to talk about it. “But they were grown men, weren’t they? Wasn’t what they were doing illegal?”
“I think so,” Brenda said, glancing over her shoulder in the direction of Maureen’s. “I was hoping they wouldn’t send out Nillson. What if he did something to Maureen, something to keep her quiet, and that’s why she’s not home?”
I shook my head. Sheriff Nillson worked with my dad. He’d visited our house. He was an officer of the law. “Whatever was happening down there was gross, for sure, but I don’t think he’d kidnap Maureen over it, especially since she was keeping their secret. If she didn’t tell us, she didn’t tell anyone. Besides, what would he do with her?”
“Tie her up somewhere,” Brenda said. “Because he couldn’t know that she was keeping his secret.”
I gripped her arm. “Are you serious?”
She shrugged me off. “No. I don’t know. I’m just worried.”
“Did Maureen say anything to you on the drive over to the quarries last night?”
Brenda’s eyes grew wide. “I thought she rode with you.”
Brenda left to get ready for her shift at the nursing home. I was too antsy to sit in my house, so I took a bike ride. I didn’t have a destination at first. I pedaled aimlessly, searching for Maureen and for copper-colored ID bracelets in equal measure. The sun beat down on my nose and cheeks, crisping them, not caring that I was already hurting.
Eventually, I found myself drawn to Twenty-Third Street. Most people were at work or drinking iced tea in the shade of their porches, but on my way to the haunted end of Pantown, I passed Mr. Pitt mowing his lawn, his ball cap shading his face. He waved, and the sun glinted off something shiny on his wrist. Acid flooded my stomach.
When he dropped his arm, I saw it was just a wristwatch.
I took a quick right down Twenty-Third. This was the area of Pantown I wasn’t as familiar with, but I guessed the basement I’d seen Maureen in could be in one of five houses. All five looked like their owners were gone. They also presented as regular Pantown bungalows, not dens of depravity where teenage girls were lured in for a BJ train.
“Watch where you’re going!”
I’d almost biked right into someone on the sidewalk. He glared at me and then turned away. I’d caught only a glimpse of him—about Ricky’s age, sunken, shifting eyes, no mustache but a bristly chin curtain of a beard, like a mean Abe Lincoln—but knew I’d seen him somewhere. A customer at Zayre?
“Sorry!” I called to his back.
He loped away, swearing under his breath.
I biked home.
BETH
Beth woke to noises overhead. It sounded like creaking steps and then a male voice and a female one, but she’d lost track of time, of sound, of care. Her clothes were stiff and rank, her hair greasy, her teeth coated in thick fur. She was going to be here forever. There was no escape. Nothing mattered.
She smacked her forehead, ground her palm into her skull, trying to dislodge that dangerous thought. She couldn’t let that track wear a groove. She needed to keep herself together, to imagine escaping, to see a life after this. How could she be a teacher if she didn’t fight? She would break free of this prison. She had things to do with her life.
She mattered.
Plus, there was hope.
The thinnest sliver of it.
She’d discovered something.
A shape in the dirt, an edge of a thing, a rough ridge.
Her bare foot had caught on it on one of her many revolutions in the dank room, a whisper she would have missed if not for the dark amplifying her other senses. She’d dropped to her knees and dug until her fingernails were peeled back and raw, until she was as exhausted as a starved dog.
She’d fallen asleep slumped against the wall, but she was ready to get back to the digging. It meant something.
Down here, everything meant something.
CHAPTER 19
It took until after supper that evening to recall where I knew the man from, the scrungy Abe Lincoln with the mustache-less beard who I’d almost biked over in the haunted section of town.
I’d seen him at the county fair.
He’d been working one of the midway booths, his facial hair hooking him to my memory.
He shouldn’t have been in Pantown, this far from the fairgrounds.
By the time I remembered all this, we’d already canceled tonight’s show. Brenda’s parents wanted to keep her home until Maureen turned up. Brenda’s dad was at the fair right now searching for Maureen. I was glad some adult seemed worried that she was missing. My dad wasn’t home from work yet even though it was a Saturday. Mom was in her room sleeping.