the way you'd speak to someone afflicted with some rare, terminal disease. Suddenly, she was interesting.
Only she didn't want to be interesting. She wanted to go back to being her old boring self, back to being a normal teenager looking forward to a long summer of reading books and pool parties and hanging out with Mel down at the Cape.
'I want to help find Mel,' Darby said. The way she figured it, if she helped find Melanie, then all would be forgiven, and people would stop staring at her as though what had happened to Mel and Stacey were her fault.
Manning placed a hand on her arm, squeezing it. 'I'll do everything in my power to help find Melanie. And I'm going to find the man who did this to you. That's a promise.'
After Manning left, Darby headed to the vending machine for another Coke. She saw the pay phone outside the office door. The words she had practiced saying over and over again this past week were now burning to get out.
She dropped a quarter into the pay phone.
'Hello?' Mrs Cruz said.
I'm sorry for everything that's happened. I'm sorry for Mel and I'm sorry for what you're going through I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry.
As hard as she tried, Darby couldn't get the words out. They were stuck in her throat, lodged in there like hot stones.
'Mel, is that you?' Mrs Cruz said. 'Are you okay? Tell me you're okay.'
Mrs Cruz's hope, bright and so alive, made Darby hang up and want to run someplace far away, someplace where nobody, not even her own mother, would ever find her.
Sheila couldn't afford the motel anymore. The house still hadn't been released by the police, and when it was, there would be cleanup and repairs. Darby was going to spend the summer at her aunt and uncle's beach house in Maine. Sheila was going to stay in town with a coworker. She would drive to Maine on her days off.
Darby went with her mother to a grocery store in Saugus to stock up on food for the long drive. Taped inside the grocery store window, right near the front door so no one would miss it, was a poster board holding a blown- up picture of Melanie. It was yellowed from the sun. The word missing was written in big, bold red letters above her smiling face. A reward for $25,000 was listed, along with a toll-free phone number.
Sheila was rummaging through her coupon folder when Darby turned the corner near the cash registers and spotted Mrs Cruz talking to the store owner. He took the rolled-up poster board from Melanie's mother and walked toward the front window.
Mrs Cruz saw her. Their eyes locked, and Darby felt the full weight of Helena Cruz's stare, only this stare carried something that made Darby want to duck and run: hatred, cold and hard and fixed on her. If given the chance, she was sure Mrs Cruz would, without a moment's hesitation, trade Darby's life for Melanie's.
Sheila slipped her hand around her daughter's shoulder, and Mrs Cruz's stare withered and died.
The store owner handed Mrs Cruz the old poster board with the sun-faded picture of her daughter. Melanie's mother walked away, taking small, deliberate steps as though the floor were a thin sheet of ice that might break. Darby recognized that walk. Her mother had moved the same way when she had walked to Big Red's casket that final time to say good-bye.
Maybe there was still time. Maybe Evan Manning would still find Melanie alive. Maybe he would find the man from the woods and kill him. At the end of the movie, the hero always killed the monster. If Special Agent Manning found Mel and brought her home, life would be okay – definitely not the way it was before the monster had arrived, and certainly not back to being normal, but okay.
On Saturday morning, the start of Labor Day weekend, Darby woke up early to help her uncle dig the fire pit for the annual lobster bake. By noon, they were sweating. Uncle Ron put his shovel in the sand and said he was heading up to the house to grab a couple of sodas.
Darby kept digging. As she breathed in the cool, salty air blowing off the water, she kept thinking of Melanie, wondering about the kind of air she was breathing right now, if she was still breathing at all.
Three more women had disappeared back home. Darby had found out two weeks ago when Uncle Ron and Aunt Barb had taken her to breakfast. While they were waiting for a table, Darby had spotted a copy of the Boston Globe lying on a table. The phrase 'Summer of Fear' was stretched across the top page above the smiling faces of five women and a teenage girl in braces.
Darby recognized Melanie's picture right away, along with the pictures of the first two women, Tara Hardy and Samantha Kent. Darby had held the exact same photographs in her own hands.
The information on Hardy and Kent was pretty much a rehash of everything she already knew. The article's main focus seemed to be on the three women who had disappeared after Melanie – Pamela Driscol, twenty-three, from Charlestown, going to school nights for her nursing degree and last seen walking through a campus parking lot; Lucinda Billingham, twenty-one, from Lynn, a single mother who went out for cigarettes and was never seen again; and Debbie Kessler, also twenty-one, a Boston secretary who went out for drinks one night after work and never made it home.
The police handling each of these investigations wouldn't comment on what evidence linked these women together, but they did confirm that a task force had been established headed up by a special agent who belonged to the FBI's newly formed unit called Behavioral Science. The agents who worked in this group, the article said, were specialists in studying the criminal mind, especially those who were serial murderers.
'Hello, Darby.'
Not Uncle Ron but Evan Manning, holding out a can of Coke. She caught the sad, almost empty look in his eyes and knew, right then, what he was here to say.
She dropped the shovel and ran.
'Darby.'
She kept running. If she didn't hear him say the words, then they couldn't come true.
Manning caught up with her near the water. The first time she broke free of him. The second time he grabbed her by the arm and spun her around, hard.
'We caught him, Darby. It's over. He can't hurt you.'
'Where's Melanie?'
'Let's go back to the house.'
'Tell me what happened!' Darby was shocked by the sudden anger in her voice. She tried to pull it back, but the fear was already humming through her limbs, telling her to go ahead and scream it out. 'I don't want to wait anymore, I'm sick of waiting.'
'The man's name was Victor Grady,' Manning said. 'He was an auto mechanic and he abducted women.'
'Why?'
'I don't know. Grady died before we got a chance to speak with him.'
'You killed him?'
'He killed himself. I don't know what happened to Mel or any of the other women. Chances are, we'll never know. I wish I had a better answer for you. I'm sorry.'
Darby opened her mouth to speak, but no sound came out.
'Come on,' Evan Manning said. 'Let's go back to the house.'
'She wanted to be a singer,' Darby said. 'For her birthday, her grandfather bought her a tape recorder and one day Mel came to me in tears 'cause she had never heard her voice on tape and thought she sounded ugly. She came to me because I knew she wanted to be a singer. Nobody knew it but me. We had a lot of secrets like that.'
The FBI agent nodded, urging her along in that quiet, confident way he had.
'She loved Froot Loops but hated the lemon ones and always picked them out. She was always this real picky eater – she couldn't have her food touching, thought it was gross. She had this really great sense of humor. She was really quiet, but she could – there were all these times when she'd say something, and it would get me laughing so hard my stomach would hurt. She was… Mel was just a really great person.'
Darby wanted to keep talking, wanted to find a way to use her words to build a bridge that would take Special Agent Manning back through time and show him how Melanie was more than chunks of newsprint and two-minute sound bites. She wanted to keep talking until Melanie's name carried the same weight in the air as it did in her heart.
