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.

‘I shouldn’t have left her there all alone,’ Darby said, and the tears came again, harder this time, and she wished her father was standing here with her right now – wished he hadn’t stopped to help that driver, a schizophrenic man who was on early probation after serving a three-year jail sentence for trying to kill a cop. She wished she could have her father back with her for one minute, just one lousy minute, so she could say how much she still missed him and loved him. If her father were here, Darby could tell him everything she was thinking and feeling. Her father would understand. And maybe, just maybe, he would carry her words back with him and share them with Stacey and Melanie, wherever they were now.

II Little Girl Lost (2007)

Chapter 6

Carol Cranmore lay back on her bed, panting, as Tony collapsed on top of her.

‘Jesus,’ he said.

‘I know.’

She ran her hands up and down the small of his back. His sweat smelled of cologne and beer and the faint but sweet and pleasant odor of the marijuana they had smoked out on the back porch. Tony was right. Making love when you were high was unbelievable. She started giggling.

Tony popped his head up. ‘What?’

‘Nothing. I love you.’

He kissed her cheek, about to push himself up when she wrapped her legs around the small of the back. ‘No, not yet,’ she said. ‘I just want to lie like this for awhile, okay?’

‘Okay.’

Tony kissed her again, harder this time, and lay back on top of her. Carol’s mind ran to those ridiculously sappy love songs she heard on American Idol. Maybe those lame-o songs were about this feeling she had with Tony, this perfect feeling of coming together and forming one person that could take on the world. Maybe all the crap and disappointment you went through on a daily basis – especially if you lived here, in the armpit of the universe – Belham, Massachusetts – maybe it made moments like she had just shared with Tony all the more special.

Smiling, she listened to the rain drumming against the roof and drifted off to sleep.

Carol Cranmore woke up from a dream where she had been named prom queen – totally ridiculous because she had no interest in proms. Both she and Tony had boycotted this year’s junior prom and went to dinner and the movies instead.

Still, there was one aspect of the dream she liked, the part where she felt accepted by everyone gathered around the front stage, clapping for her. And she might have stayed there, wrapped in that warm memory if it wasn’t for the noise that sounded like a car backfiring. She reached across the dark for Tony.

The other side of the bed was warm but empty. Had he gone home?

Carol had told him he could stay over. Her mother was heading over to her new boyfriend’s house in Walpole after her shift at the paper factory. Walpole was a closer ride to her job in Needham, so that meant Carol had the house to herself to do whatever she wanted, and what she wanted was for Tony to spend the night. He had called his mother and told her he was crashing at a friend’s house.

The candles were still burning on her nightstand. Carol sat up. It was almost two a.m.

Tony’s clothes were still on the floor. He was probably using the bathroom.

Carol had a case of the munchies from the pot. A bag of Fritos and a Mountain Dew would hit the spot.

She pulled back the sheet and stood naked, a tall girl for her age, her body long and lean, developing curves in the right places. She didn’t put any clothes on, didn’t mind being naked around Tony, who kept telling her how beautiful she was. He couldn’t keep his hands off her. She opened the bedroom door, the night-light from the bathroom cutting the darkness in the hallway.

‘Tony, you mind making a run to the 7-Eleven?’

He didn’t answer. She peeked inside the bathroom and saw that he wasn’t in there.

Maybe he was using the downstairs bathroom for some privacy.

There were some Ritz crackers in the kitchen cabinet. She could snack on those until Tony was done in the bathroom.

A cold draft was coming from the hallway. She put on her underwear and Tony’s white shirt. Walking made her feel dizzy. Several times she had to reach out and touch the wall.

The kitchen door was wide open, as was the door leading to the back porch. Tony hadn’t left; his car keys and wallet were inside his Red Sox baseball hat sitting on top of the counter. Probably went outside for a smoke, she thought. Her mother didn’t have many rules, but she was dead set against smoking in the house, hated the way it stunk up the furniture.

Carol poked her head out into the small hallway and saw the rain pounding the street, the sound hard and unrelenting, a steady throbbing hum in her ears. Parked in front of Tony’s car was a black van that had seen better days. One of the van’s back doors was wide open, swinging in the driving wind that was blowing curtains of rain across the street. She thought she heard the creak of the door’s hinges, knowing she was imagining it. Good Lord, she was high.

The van probably belonged to her next-door neighbor’s son, Peter Lombardo, who had a habit of disappearing for months at a stretch only to return home, miserable and broke, then staying long enough to save up enough money to disappear again. Peter must have forgotten to lock up, probably in a rush to get inside, out of the rain.

Carol was thinking about going outside and shutting the doors – there was a raincoat in the front door closet – when she heard Tony step up behind her. He grabbed her hard around the waist and lifted her up. Carol giggled as she turned to kiss him.