And she couldn’t stop feeling it was her fault. If she’d only asked her stupid stepmother if Lindsay could come with her — or better yet, not asked at all and just brought Lindsay with her on Sunday night — then Lindsay would be fine, and everything would be good again, and none of them would have to be sitting here talking about her.
“I heard she ran away,” Becka Saunders said.
“I heard her parents were taking her to the city and putting her in a private school,” Heather Blaine offered.
Grant’s eyes swept over the group. “Anybody hear anything else?” Dawn sat silently as every rumor that had swept through the school was repeated, each of them with new embellishments. She sat with her arms crossed, and with every new theory that was aired, the dull ache in her belly grew worse.
And it would continue to get worse until she saw her best friend’s face again.
“Did Lindsay have a boyfriend?” Sergeant Grant asked. “Maybe somebody who didn’t go to school here? Somebody older? Somebody she didn’t talk about too much?” All the girls shook their heads.
“She was kind of hot on Zack Sorenson,” Tina McCormick said, “but I don’t think he even knew about it.” “They never went out?”
Tina shrugged, but Dawn rolled her eyes. “Zack is going with somebody,” she said, wishing Tina would shut up, since she barely even knew Lindsay.
“No boyfriends?” Sergeant Grant pressed. “Don’t you all have boyfriends?” The girls all nodded except Dawn. “Lindsay didn’t have a boyfriend,” she said firmly.
“At least not one you knew about,” Tina McCormick taunted.
“Is she gay?” Sergeant Grant asked, making a note of what the McCormick girl had said.
Dawn rolled her eyes. The other girls only giggled.
“What about drugs?” Grant went on.
The girls glanced at each other, and Dawn could see three of them blushing. “Not Lindsay,” she finally said. “Lindsay was as squeaky clean as you can get.” “Not as squeaky as you!” Tina McCormick threw in, and Grant began to wonder if Dawn D'Angelo knew Lindsay Marshall as well as she claimed she did. But when he looked at Sharon Spandler, the coach shrugged.
“I never heard any talk about Lindsay using,” she said.
Grant raised his brows noncommittally. In his experience, most of the teachers were as ignorant about kids’ drug use as their parents were. “So the thing that was upsetting her was that her folks wanted to move her to the city?” he asked, his eyes once more sweeping the group.
And once more it was Dawn D'Angelo who responded. “She was really upset about that. She didn’t want to go — she wanted to spend her senior year here, and be head cheerleader and then graduate with all the rest of us.” She glanced around at the other girls, who were nodding in agreement. “I mean, we all grew up together — she hated the idea of going someplace she didn’t know with a bunch of kids she didn’t know.” “How unhappy was she about that?” Grant asked.
“Very,” Dawn said. “Very, very, extremely.”
The other girls nodded again, and so did Sharon Spandler.
“Unhappy enough to run away?” the policeman went on.
A long silence fell over the group gathered around the cafeteria table — a silence that told Grant as much as anything the girls had actually said out loud.
They didn’t know.
They didn’t know anything at all.
Sergeant Grant took business cards from his shirt pocket and handed them around the table. “If you can think of anything, no matter how small, or if you hear something, call me, okay?” “Do you think she’s all right?” someone asked.
“I hope so,” he said, standing up and closing his notebook. The girls watched in silence as he turned away from the table and walked out of the cafeteria.
Sergeant Grant sat quietly for a moment in his warm car with his eyes closed. There were no red flags in this case.
No sign of forced entry to the home.
No hint of anyone who Lindsay might have gotten on the wrong side of — no boyfriends, no drug dealers.
Apparently no enemies at all.
But unhappy.
Very unhappy, and probably very angry at her parents.
He sighed, picked up his notebook, made a few notes about his interview with Lindsay’s friends, then radioed his office.
“I still think she’s a runaway,” he said. “We’ll keep our eyes open and keep talking to people, but I’m thinking she’ll show up by the end of the week. Give her some time to cool off.” Still, as he started his car and pulled away from the curb in front of Camden Green High, he wondered once more about that real estate agent. What was his name?
Mancuso — that was it. Rick Mancuso.
Something in his voice just hadn’t sounded right.
Chapter Twenty-six
Lindsay’s eyes opened slowly.
She was still bound to the chair, still surrounded by darkness. Darkness hiding terrors she could feel, even if she couldn’t see them. But even closer than the terrors concealed in the darkness were the ones inside her.
Pain.
Numbness.
Exhaustion.
And thirst.
A thirst so terrible it threatened to consume her. Her lips were swollen and cracked, her tongue dry. She ached for water. Visions began to dance in the darkness around her — brief glimpses of the water her body craved: herself, swimming in the school pool; birds, flitting in water fountains; cold ocean spray breaking over rocks; glasses of chilled soda; lawn sprinklers soaking cool green grass. She wanted to reach for the visions, touch them, feel the water. But her body had long ago gone from mild discomfort to aching and twitching, and now it felt coldly numb. And the thirst was so overwhelming that even her eyelids felt like sandpaper as they moved across eyeballs gone dry from lack of moisture.
If she cried, she knew she would shed no tears — the thirst made her feel as if every drop of water had been leached from her body.
She tried to whisper to Shannon but no sound came from her parched throat. And was Shannon even there anymore? She strained to listen, searching in the silence for the sound of the other girl’s breathing, but heard nothing.
She let her eyelids close, and silently prayed for unconsciousness.
A sound.
A scraping sound. Then bright light — a light so dazzling she reflexively twisted her head away. Then she slowly opened her eyes, and her heart pounded as she felt whatever evil that had locked her in this dungeon come closer.
Steeling herself, she twisted her head around to face the evil looming over her, but all she saw was a black silhouette in the blinding light.
Then she heard a voice — Shannon’s voice — moan a single word: “No.”
Now, in the glow filling the chamber, Lindsay could see her crouched on a mattress on the floor of what seemed to be a long, narrow, unfinished basement. Shannon’s back was pressed to the wall and her knees pressed against her chest, as if they could somehow protect her from the evil presence that hung against the bright light. Her long, dark hair was matted, and the deathly pallor of her face made her look far older than Lindsay, though her voice sounded much younger.
As the dark silhouette took form and became the figure of a man, Shannon moaned again and hid her face against her knees.