Page 49 of Forget Me Not

There’s no sound at all but my own breath, rough and ragged as I try to stay calm.

The doors are shut and it’s pitch-black in here. The blackest black I’ve ever seen. Then I hear Liam locking the handles and I attempt to yank my arms out again, though nothing moves as I jerk my full weight against the leg of the bench.

It’s bolted to the floor, there’s no way I’m getting myself free, and I feel my body start to deflate. The bleakness of it all beginning to take hold.

I close my eyes, open them again. No difference at all in the cavernous black.

Now my adrenaline from before is starting to seep out, a slow leak that leaves me grim and alone, and I force myself to take a deep breath.

Hands shaking as I decide that if Liam isn’t going to give me these final few answers, then at least I can try to piece it together myself.

I lean my head back, trying to concentrate as I imagine my sister sneaking into those very same woods, finding Marcia’s diary and that picture of our parents.

The roll of old film she never had the chance to develop.

Then she had brought them back to our house, tucked them into a box she hid in her room—and now my neck snaps up as I take in the silence around me, the same smothering silence as my bedroom back home, as I think about how I used to lie in the dark, just like this, listening to Natalie’s noises from the other side of the wall.

The scrape of her window on the nights she snuck out, the flipping of pages on the nights she stayed in.

Natalie was reading the diary, too.

I picture her body curled up in a blanket, the very same diary as the one I’ve been reading propped up by two angular knees.

Marcia’s quaint cursive working its way through her brain like a fever dream that I know so well.

Liam said she had gotten obsessed, that she wanted to know everything there was to know about Mitchell, and my body perks up further as I remember that acronym scrawled in the corner, the handwriting so different than every other page.

It was written in silver, just like those gel pens Natalie kept in her desk, and now I realize it was a license plate number.

She must have jotted it down when she noticed the California plates, decided to search for it later in her quest to learn more.

I imagine her booting up our family computer, typing in the number before coming across the article about Katherine Ann Prichard. The picture of her standing in front of the camper, the BOLO issued for that exact car.

I lean my head back again, trying to wrap my mind around the fact that, twenty-two years apart, Natalie and I have been doing the exact same thing.

We’ve been investigating the same man, coming to all the same sickening conclusions, and despite the fact that I grew up thinking my sister and I were so different, that our appearance was the only true thing that we shared, a wet sob escapes from the depths of my throat as I realize we might be more alike than I thought.

I sigh, my body slumped against the legs of the bench as the warm wet of a tear trails down my cheek. Then I close my eyes, everything about that summer suddenly looking so different. My entire family cast in this strange new light.

All of them had been in on the same, sick secret as I stood on the outside, just trying to peer in.

I think of them now, the irony that my parents are about to lose their second daughter in the exact same place they lost their first…

though I know my body won’t be found, either.

Whatever happened to Natalie, the exact same thing is about to happen to me.

Mitchell will hide me in the same place he hid her, a fifty-acre grave that will stay eternally lost. Chief DiNello will visit my mother again, ease himself down at that very same table as he breaks the news that another daughter is dead.

I should have stayed with her. I should have talked to her.

I should have demanded we both purge ourselves of our secrets instead of leaving her in that house all alone…

and then I open my eyes, picturing my mother standing in the living room, that big black cast wrapped around her leg.

I reach down now, dragging my hands across the floor beneath me as I remember the hole in the porch from where she fell through, the boards buckling after years of neglect.

I curl my fingers into a fist, knocking as I hear the faintest echo below. The sound is hollow like there’s some kind of open space beneath and I think about the shed’s proximity to the marsh, the fact that it must be raised up a few feet.

I knock again, realizing, with a little shudder of excitement, that if the shed is elevated like I think it is, then there should be space beneath the floor and the ground.

I had to climb a step to get in here. The water out back floods at high tide.

It’s probably not much, maybe a foot or two, but if I can rip up the board the leg of this bench is resting on top of, then there should be a gap underneath it for me to slip the chain through.

My heartbeat starts to pick up its pace as my fingers grope around in the dark.

All the boards are firmly nailed down but the wood is in such terrible shape, there has to be a crack wide enough for me to get a good grip.

Finally, I find a spot that’s warped just enough for me to wedge the tips of my fingers through, and I curl them down, trying to pry the board loose, when I feel my nails rip straight from the skin.

“Fuck,” I mutter, yanking my hands out as I feel the sharp sting of torn flesh. There’s fresh blood dripping down my wrists now, my heartbeat starting to throb in my hands, but I know I have to keep trying.

I know if Liam comes back and I’m still stuck to this bench, there’s no way I’m getting out alive.

I stick my fingers into the gap again, curling them around the same edge as before as my nerves scream in pain—but then I stop, realizing that instead of trying to pry the boards up, maybe I should try knocking them down .

I release my grip, instead flexing my fingers into a fist and slamming it down as hard as I can.

It barely does a thing, considering my arms are chained so low… and then I look down at my feet.

My feet that aren’t chained to anything at all.

I lean back, angling my body so my legs are hovering high in the air. Then I bend my knees, slamming both heels as hard as I can.

I hear a sharp crack, the familiar sound of splintering wood, and I twist around in the dark, feeling a pang of panic at how much noise I’m making as I frantically feel around for the board I just broke.

At last, I find it, that small seed of hope starting to grow as I position my body again, bringing my feet down in the exact same spot.

I hear another crack, even louder this time, and I know I made a sizable hole as my heels plunge past the wood.

Then I spin around, my fingers shredding away at the floor as fast as they possibly can.

The shards are like razors tearing at my arms, their jagged edges slitting the skin of my wrists, but I do my best to ignore the pain because the wood is disintegrating faster now as I continue to grope around in the dark.

I pry up a large chunk, finally, and I can tell the leg of the bench is just barely hovering in the air, the wood beneath it pulled completely away.

I guide my hands where they need to go, feeling the chain slip into the gap before, at last, I pull my arms free.

I exhale, adrenaline and fear coursing through my veins as I stand up, my hands blindly searching the workbench for something I can arm myself with.

There are plenty of options, this place is chock-full of tools, but with the doors shut, I can’t even see my hands in front of my face.

Still, I glide my fingers across the surface, trying to find anything with some kind of point.

Then I come across something metal and hard, my hands recognizing the shape of the shears I used to work in the garden. The ones with the sharp, serrated edge.

I grab the handle, palms stinging as I run toward the doors before I remember they’re padlocked shut. I’m still trapped until Liam comes back—but now that I’m standing here, so close to the wall, I can hear the shuffle of footsteps on the other side.

Someone is out there, walking closer.

I freeze, trying to decide what to do next. If Liam still has that gun, I’d be better off hiding the fact that I’m armed, so I make my way back to the bench, sitting on top of the hole I just made.

Then I twist my arms behind my back, clutching the shears with sweat-soaked palms.

The padlock unhooks, cold sweat coating my skin as the door slowly swings open. Liam is already back from wherever he went… but then I blink, the glow of the moon backlighting the body before me making me realize it isn’t Liam at all. It isn’t even the body of a man.

Instead, it’s Marcia, standing in the opening between the two doors.

“Marcia.” I exhale, instinctively starting to reach out toward her. I completely forgot that I swapped her drink, had hinted at trying to help her escape. It must have worked. She must have understood me, slipping outside after Mitchell fell asleep, creeping to my car to find my tires were slit.

Then she must have turned to the side, heard all my noises coming from the shed like a panicked animal trapped in a snare.

“Marcia, thank God,” I say, a new hope bubbling from the depths of my chest. “We have to go—”

But then I watch as Mitchell steps in from behind her, Liam standing quietly off to the side.

They’re all here, all three of them, and I feel the air rush from my lungs as I realize that my attempt to help her escape must have been the thing that gave me away.

“You told him,” I mutter, thinking back to how I had grabbed Marcia’s mug, slowly swapping it out for my own.

The fact that Liam had known to come into my cabin the very moment I was out in those woods.

“Why?” I ask, the initial sting of betrayal quickly replaced by rage as I realize that none of this would have happened had I just been willing to leave her here.

That I would have been in my car right now, speeding to safety, if I didn’t care enough to help her escape.

“Why would you do that?” I yell. “I was trying to help you.”

I stare straight ahead as Marcia stands in the moonlight, this puppet stuffed in a box for the last forty-one years. Her tarnish chipping, color fading. Her will to live stripping away.

“You don’t have to do this,” I plead, thinking about how deeply she must be damaged, how completely she must be controlled. Mitchell pulling her strings for so many years that she’s forgotten how to do anything on her own. “I know this isn’t the life you wanted. You deserve so much more than this.”

She stays silent, a cloud from outside moving away from the moon suddenly amplifying the small sliver of light. Then I watch as her eye catches the beam, that liquid gray staring straight back.

I look over at Liam, envisioning the cerulean hue of his own as comprehension hits me like a punch to the gut.

I think of that picture I just got developed, the one of Marcia gaping into the lens.

It hadn’t registered before, but I realize now that that’s the only picture I’ve ever seen of her in color.

The ones from the paper had been in black-and-white, scanned and archived and grainy on my screen, but now I think of the unease that settled into my stomach when I first took in that image, stared into her eyes.

Something felt off, something felt different, and now I finally know what it is.

In that picture, Marcia’s eyes had been blue. Not their current, lifeless gray.

“You’re not Marcia,” I say, everything making a sick kind of sense.

I think about finding that article before studying the woman on the porch before me, noting how different she looked after all the years that had passed. Bethany back in that diner, her hair dyed black and that sleeve of tattoos. Her eyes the only reason I recognized her at all.

The only thing on a person that time can’t change.

I reflect back on the diary again, my head rushing as I recall the first entry Marcia had made. Mitchell finding her in the back of that alley, licking his lips as he washed her in praise.

You’re very pretty, Marcia. Especially those eyes.

The very first day she arrived at the Farm, smiling at the girl with bare feet in the grass. Marcia had described her irises as the same color as a summer storm, some curious quality to them she couldn’t explain—but other than that, the two girls had looked so much the same.

“You’re Lily,” I finish, watching as the woman before me blinks like she hasn’t heard her own name in a long, long time.