Free The Girls She Left Behind by Sarah Graves Page A

What’s happened?”
    Only a few hours ago, Peg Wylie had worn the anxious but resigned look of a woman whose last nerve was worn to a bleeding nub, but who still believed her missing daughter was probably alive and well.
    She did not look that way now. “Please,” Peg said, weeping. “I really thought she was okay, but…”
    Lizzie took Peg’s hand, peeled the clenched fingers gently open, and plucked a cell phone from it.
    “I tried calling her back but it wouldn’t even ring, there’s something wrong,
please…
”
    “Okay. This is your phone, right?” Lizzie asked. Peg nodded numbly as Lizzie turned the phone so the text message displayed on the small screen was visible.
    “Okay,” she murmured again. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t okay at all.
    The time-and-date stamp on the cell phone’s text message read TUESDAY, 9:24 P.M., just half an hour ago. Below that, the message itself consisted of two words, all caps, no punctuation. Centered on the black screen the white letters stood out stark as a scream:
HELP ME
    —
    W
e didn’t want to wake you,
the note lying in Tara’s lap had said, in the dome house of the hippies way out in the woods where she’d fallen asleep.
    Outside, bright daylight meant it was at least midmorning on Tuesday. She’d jumped up and looked around dazedly, but no one was there, not even the cat. The music had stopped and the dome house, so busy and friendly the night before, shimmered with silence. Panic rushed through her as she realized what had happened. Then she saw the kitchen clock and realized it was nearly noon, even later than she’d feared.
    Stay as long as you like,
the note said. Which meant they’d gone without her. She’d already missed half a day of school, and she hadn’t called home. Fumbling in her bag, she’d found her phone, but no bars showed in the display screen. There were dead areas for cell reception in Maine, and this must be one of them.
    She’d hurried through the kitchen, where the sink was piled with dishes. By daylight the dome house’s interior looked shabby and careless, the chair coverings threadbare and the floor, made of rough, unvarnished planks, unswept. She’d stopped to fill the animals’ water bowls from the hand pump on her way out.
    The outhouse was disgusting. She’d crouched quickly among the trees, then jogged down the long dirt driveway to the road. How could they just leave her like that, without a word?
    But when a car finally pulled over and picked her up, she’d decided not to worry about it; she would explain when she got home, she’d told herself, which she would very soon because the car was full of more college boys. They were going to help fight the wildfires in Aroostook County, they said.
    Tara had thought they looked too soft for it, in their early twenties but already with pouches of fat beneath their chins and the poochy beginnings of beer guts. Of course she hadn’t said so, though; they were just boys, after all, goofy and clueless as if fighting wildfires was some kind of an adventure.
    And they’d taken her right to Bearkill, or almost. But that’s when her next mistake had happened, a big one, and very fast.
    So fast, she’d never even had time to scream.
One half mile,
she thought bitterly now, reliving her errors and mocking herself for them as she trudged on through the smoke-reeking night.
They offered to take me all the way but like an idiot I said no.
    Her mother always said if you do something, own it. Don’t try to hide it or weasel out of the responsibility later. But she’d also said don’t hitchhike. Said it like she meant it, with a look in her eye that had told Tara it truly wasn’t negotiable.
    So she’d chickened out. She didn’t want her mother to know that she’d been hitchhiking, so she told the boys she’d walk the rest of the way home, even though winter’s early nightfall had already arrived.
    And it hadn’t been bad at first; nice night, and her own driveway wasn’t far