Page 24

M egan McDonald worked at the county courthouse.

It was a filing job secured by her father to keep her busy after the abduction.

Sitting for long hours in her bedroom, Dr. Mattingly had warned, was unhealthy.

But Megan countered, in the quiet of her mind, that filing marriage certificates and lawsuits in a stuffy office for eight hours a day was equally unhealthy.

Again, though, like her book—and most things Megan did over the last year—the courthouse job was a way to calm her parents.

Placate them and comfort them and make them believe everything would be all right.

Her role as a daughter was ironic in this sense.

She should be on the receiving end of comfort and consolation.

But in this new, strange, post-abduction world, Megan found herself soothing her parents and making things workable so they could continue their lives.

She went to her sessions with Dr. Mattingly, she wrote her book, she did the interviews.

She spent her days at her nine-to-five at the courthouse.

At home, she listened to the only thing her mother was capable of offering—the whispered voice that gave updates on her book sales and relayed messages from readers who were touched by Megan’s words.

In reality, Megan knew, the main reason her mother periodically opened her door was to make sure Megan was there and safe and had not been taken again.

It was becoming an obsessive compulsion Megan wanted to speak to Dr. Mattingly about.

It was too embarrassing for her mother to allow Emerson Bay, and the people who worked under her father, to see that Megan had fallen from stardom, so the filing position at the courthouse was termed an internship.

To prepare her for what, exactly, was never clearly defined.

But it was the only sufficient way to explain why a nineteen-year-old girl who was supposed to be studying at Duke University, a girl who was the valedictorian of Emerson Bay High and who had created one of the most successful mentoring programs the state had ever seen, was now weaving through middle-aged women in the back office of the county courthouse stuffing hard-copied documents into filing drawers.

The cafeteria was packed from eleven thirty to two o’clock each workday with county employees, lawyers, reporters, clerks, and herds of citizens who needed to stuff their faces with fried food before their court appearance for speeding or littering or DUI.

The cafeteria was a noisy place with long picnic bench tables and orange cafeteria trays.

An “intern” for the past eight months and Megan had not once stepped foot in the place.

Instead, she spent her lunch hours in her car.

She had developed a routine, which so far hadn’t paid dividends.

She wasn’t sure yet, exactly, what she was looking for, but the alternative was to do nothing, which was no longer acceptable. Not when she believed she was so close.

It took twenty minutes to drive to West Bay, which after factoring in the return trip gave her twenty minutes to watch the sky.

Pulling into a new park, one she hadn’t visited before, Megan climbed from her car and leaned against the front bumper.

After a few minutes a plane passed overhead on a southwest bearing toward Raleigh-Durham.

She watched the image of the plane, the size of it in the sky and the direction it was moving.

She listened to its sound. In her mind’s eye, Megan superimposed this image with the ones she remembered from her two weeks in captivity.

In the dark cellar where he kept her, she had been able to peek through a splinter in the plywood that covered the window to see the planes as they passed overhead.

The small sliver of sky that was visible was usually vacant when Megan scanned it.

But occasionally she saw a plane. At night, that slit in the plywood offered stars from which Megan made out constellations.

During the day, she waited for those planes to make her feel not so alone.

Those planes held people, and when she spotted them she felt like she was still part of their world.

As she watched now, leaning against her car in the park, she thought she was close. She had little to help her triangulate, but the sound of those planes burned in her mind told her the flight pattern she was now watching was the same one she’d seen and heard during her two weeks in that cellar.

She waited twenty minutes, then five minutes more, knowing the extra time spent would make her late for work.

But still, she took the extra minutes hoping to hear it.

Finally, she climbed into her car. She’d try another spot tomorrow.

She was close. Here, the planes were at the correct altitude and bearing.

Their engines at the right pitch. All that was missing was the train whistle.