Page 10 of What Happened to Lucy Vale

Nine

We

W e all knew someone who claimed to know something about what really happened to Nina Faraday. Rumors grew fast in our corner of Indiana, and in the sixteen years since Nina Faraday had disappeared, we’d had an infestation.

Back then, everyone had an opinion. We had cousins who’d been in school with Nina.

Aunts who’d babysat Nina when she was only a few years old, when Lydia Faraday was still working periodic night shifts at the hospital in Clarion.

Neighbors who’d worked the night shift with Lydia remembered mostly that she was a good RN, but tough and someone who kept to herself.

Nate Stern’s cousin had done gymnastics with Nina.

Alyssa Hobbes’s mom had sung in church choir with Lydia.

It was a known thing that Mr. Rowe, who taught us social studies and coached the girls’ JV soccer team, had dated Nina Faraday back in middle school.

The tragic association, we imagined, clung heavily to him even now; we often speculated that regret for his early love kept him single and living with his mom, allegedly in the basement of her house.

Over the years, we’d heard murmurs that the Faradays had been deep into drugs.

That Lydia Faraday had trafficked narcotics for an ex-boyfriend and was entangled with Mexican cartels.

We’d heard that Nina Faraday had a history of making up stories and had, as a little girl, claimed variously that her father was a spy, a military pilot, and a member of the Italian Mafia.

We knew that she’d been well liked. Popular. Too popular, some people said. According to rumors, Nina had been cheating on her boyfriend, Tommy Swift, in the months before she vanished, possibly with a much older man, possibly with a handful of them—any one of whom could have abducted her.

Then there were the whispers—insidious, peripheral, like the hissing of a snake camouflaged inside the green—that Tommy Swift might have known more than he’d said.

The facts of the case were few and unstable.

Even the facts deteriorated over time, molting like radioactive particles into new uncertainties.

Nina Faraday had stayed at school late the day she disappeared.

She was seen walking to her car, which was parked just outside Aquatics, at around seven o’clock.

Woody Topornycky, Nick’s uncle, had actually been the one to spot her.

We’d long speculated that this last encounter, the burden of it, was part of why he was always in and out of jail, sometimes for using, sometimes for brawling or selling or driving drunk.

Granted, he was already pretty tapped when he was in high school, and his memories of that evening were colored by an OxyContin and marijuana haze.

In the past, he’d insisted that the coyotes in the woods were microchipped by the government and spying for a capitalist cabal of unnamed powers.

By the time we were old enough to cross the street when we saw him, Woody was telling anyone who listened that he’d been abducted by aliens, not once but twice, as punishment for his knowledge that they were behind Nina’s disappearance.

For years he claimed to have seen strange flashing lights descending behind the building not long after Nina arrived.

Whatever he’d seen or imagined that night, it had scared him enough to run his first solid mile since getting booted from the football team.

At around seven thirty, Nina had texted her mother that she was heading home.

Lydia Faraday returned to the house just after eight o’clock and found her daughter missing.

Sometime in that half hour, Nina had presumably packed her gym bag and stepped outside again—to meet someone, go somewhere, do something—and never returned.

The final cryptic text from her cell phone, sent to Tommy Swift, came from somewhere out near the entrance to the state park.

It read simply: I know you want me out of your life.

I’m leaving for a while. Don’t look for me.

Over the years, there had been sporadic sightings of Nina Faraday. Once, when we were still in elementary school, a girl turned up in an Oregon police station claiming to be Nina, and we remembered the news sweeping like a current across our awareness. For days, no one talked about anything else.

But in the end, it turned out she was just another runaway, a heroin addict trying to escape an abusive boyfriend, start over with a new identity. Why not Nina’s? After all, everyone was looking for her. Everyone wanted Nina to come home.

But she had not, not so far.

Woody Topornycky wasn’t the only one with a crazy theory about what had happened to Nina the night she disappeared.

Over the years, there had been as many theories as there were idle nights to cook them up, and dozens of investigative leads pursued and then unraveled.

A rival swimmer from Jalliscoe was briefly suspected in her disappearance.

A drifter who’d settled on the creepy commune where Olivia Howard and her parents lived was brought in for questioning after he claimed to have seen Nina hitchhiking on State Road 44.

But in the end, the police decided he was just lonely or looking for attention.

Some people thought Nina had been taken by a cartel.

Nina’s friends suggested that she’d been involved with a married man who was never identified.

Others thought that Nina Faraday had been murdered by her overprotective mother.

They figured that guilt was enough to explain Lydia’s suicide.

A little more than a year after Nina’s disappearance, Lydia’s body was pulled down from an apple tree in the front yard.

It had been discovered hanging by one of her neighbors.

Lydia had left no note. Only clues. Deteriorating mental health.

Wild accusations against Tommy Swift, and Coach Steeler, and the rest of the swim team.

A lawsuit that would never be filed. Bottles of liquor under the sink.

Overflowing trash cans in the kitchen. Nina’s room pristine, untouched.

After that, the doors of the Faraday House had been permanently locked, festooned with No Trespassing signs.

For as long as we’d been alive, the Faraday House had been uninhabited.

Off limits, except to squatters and the occasional ghost hunter, arriving to scale the gates and try to record proof of malevolence for their YouTube channel.

For as long as we’d been alive, no one in their right mind would dream of stepping foot in the Faraday House.

For as long as we’d been alive, the gates to the Faraday House had been padlocked shut, its rooms empty, lifeless, a dark and hollow space in our imaginations.

We’d packed up the mystery, and all its lingering, troublesome questions with it.

We’d left it to molder in the dusty dark of our childhood terrors.

Nina, Nina, where did you go? Lydia, Lydia, what do you know?

Then the Vales moved to town and turned on the lights.