Free The Girls She Left Behind by Sarah Graves

go, Lizzie realized. “Listen, Emily, if she wakes up, no matter how late it is…”
    “You bet,” Emily replied, hurrying toward the gurney. “I’ll call you if anything interesting happens.” But the young doctor’s attention was already on her new patient, whose face was covered with a clear plastic oxygen mask and whose chest was even now being exposed for an EKG reading.
    Twenty minutes later, Lizzie was back on her own front step with the long-postponed glass of wine finally in her hand, waiting for Rascal to finish mooching around among the shadows on the lawn. The moon had set, darkening the night to soft black velvet, and the only sound was an owl in a tree nearby, hoo-ing softly as if confiding a secret.
    “Come on, buddy,” she urged, and the massive dog appeared at once from the gloom. She’d tried walking him, but the usually calm canine had startled at every faint sound and tugged persistently at the leash, turning back toward home.
    So she’d given in. Maybe he was picking up on the anxiety she felt over Tara Wylie, or more likely the smell of smoke, still drifting faintly from the Hoverly fires earlier, had spooked him.
    Whatever you say, boss,
he seemed to reply now as he followed her inside. There, once the porch light was out and she’d gone around checking windows and doors as was her nightly habit, she debated a refill on her drink and decided against.
    There was, after all, no sense in getting morose, even if she was all alone in a tiny house in the middle of nowhere
.
Back in the city on a weeknight she’d probably be home by this hour, too, but the windows of her spacious condo overlooking the river there had been a glittering display of moving headlights, brightly lit buildings, and spangled bridges arcing across the sky.
    Here the kitchen window was pitch black.
    She rinsed her glass and set it in the sink, aware of Rascal’s slow, even breathing and glad for his presence as he settled in his dog bed to sleep. On the wall, the black cat-shaped clock that had been here when she moved in ticked through the moments mercilessly, its ceramic tail switching stiffly, wide eyes jerking back and forth.
    Too dark, too quiet,
she decided.
I should at least put on some music.
She moved toward the radio, which at this late hour on a Tuesday night would be playing cool jazz from a French station in Montreal.
    But then she stopped short as the questions that were really bugging her came clear suddenly:
    Why the hell is Jane Crimmins, the mysterious caretaker of one of the victims in New England’s most notorious recent kidnapping case, asleep in a hospital in Bearkill, Maine? Why did she want to talk to me?
    And why’d her heart rate jump when I mentioned Tara Wylie?
    Her cell phone trilled, startling her. “Snow here,” she snapped into it.
    “I’ll be at your office in town in five minutes,” blurted Tara’s mother, Peg Wylie, shakily. “I’m on my way in now, I’m—”
    “Peg? What happened? Have you had some kind of news? Or…did Tara come home?”
    “Just be there,” Peg Wylie half sobbed into the phone, then hung up, leaving Lizzie to wonder if maybe she should’ve had that second drink, after all.
    Peg sure sounded like she’d had a few. That, in fact, might be all that this visit was about, Lizzie thought irritably as she headed out into the night and climbed into the Blazer again.
    But a few minutes later when Peg’s decrepit little Honda sedan roared up to the curb in front of Lizzie’s office and the driver tumbled out, it was easy to see that the problem was more than a few too many Budweisers.
    At the door Lizzie put a steadying hand on Peg’s trembling shoulder, clad in a high school athletic jacket.
    Tara’s jacket. The girl had been—
still is,
Lizzie corrected herself—a cheerleader. Peg thrust a clenched fist with something in it at Lizzie.
    “Take it. Take it, I can’t even—”
    “Okay, Peg, calm down now.” Lizzie led her inside. “Talk to me.