Page 20 of What Happened to Lucy Vale

Four

Rachel

R achel hated being a liar. But it was part of her identity, an aspect of her career—of her history, even, and of Lucy’s. So she’d found ways to skirt the truth, to skim past it in conversation, to refract her words slightly around their real intention.

“Oh.” The librarian, whose name tag identified him as Ted, looked immediately nervous. “What sort of history?”

“I understand there have been deaths in the house,” Rachel said, and he flinched.

Quickly enough, however, he recovered. “The main house was built in the late 1880s,” he said and began keystroking at his computer.

“The Adamses were major landowners. Pioneers of the area’s early agribusiness.

At one point, all the land in that area belonged to the family.

Generations of them lived and died in that house.

I can see what we have, but you might have better luck with the historical society . ..”

“I meant more recently,” Rachel said. “I understand that everyone refers to it as the Faraday House ...?”

Ted the librarian stiffened, cleared his throat.

“Yes, well, its most recent history ...” He trailed off.

“Well, you can read about it in the old Rockland County Register . The paper folded a few years back. But we’ve got almost every copy loaded up in our archives.

I’ll show you how to search it. But it makes for grim reading. ”

“That’s okay,” Rachel said. “I’m a grim person.”

Ted the librarian didn’t seem to appreciate the joke.

But he agitated out from behind the desk and gestured for Rachel to follow him.

They passed through careful displays of popular fiction titles and carved a left to the library’s multimedia center.

Rachel noted that it had been gifted by the Steeler family.

The Steelers were inescapable in this county.

Their money and influence were everywhere, like the invisible pressure of a bad smell.

It had been a mistake—childish, really—to alienate the Steeler-Coxes.

She’d meant to send a thank-you note for the philodendron.

She’d at least thought about it. But she’d never been good at that kind of thing: social pleasantries, mannered niceties, the back-and-forth social rituals that preserved a kind of suburban equanimity.

Her mother, an academic and former punk rock musician who boasted of doing heroin with Gregg Allman, had often told her that manners were invented by Louis XIV for the purpose of keeping the aristocracy too preoccupied to rebel.

Rachel hadn’t even learned to properly hold a fork until she was in college.

So she hadn’t sent a thank-you note. Then she’d discovered that Ann Steeler-Cox, Jay Steeler’s only niece, was the administrator of something called the Student Leadership Department, which seemed to have some obscure role in both student academics and the athletics department.

There had been an unpleasant incident regarding Lucy’s enrollment paperwork and Rachel’s refusal to list her daughter’s religious affiliation.

Eventually, losing patience with Ann Steeler-Cox’s repeated insistence, Rachel resubmitted the paperwork with the family’s religion listed as “pagan.”

After that: silence.

The multimedia center was large, windowless, and faintly antiseptic. Rachel selected a computer far from a small cluster of teenagers who appeared to be mostly playing with their phones. Ted showed her how to navigate the library’s digital archives and then left her alone.

There were, she discovered, 123 references to Faraday in the Rockland County Register from the time that Nina was first reported missing to the date of the newspaper’s last edition.

By contrast, the Sharks had gobbled up more than a thousand references; the Steelers, another four hundred.

Tommy Swift alone had found his way to print more than sixty-seven times.

She opened a few articles at random, starting from the older headlines.

Tommy Swift Flies into State History. Tommy Swift—the Next Indiana Olympian?

There was Tommy Swift doing service work with his church youth group, and Tommy Swift dressed in a tux with his teammates ahead of something called the Winters Dance.

Balladeer Auction for Tommy Swift Fetches $1000 , the caption read.

A short twelve months later, the coverage took a turn.

Tommy Swift Issues Statement Regarding Disappearance of Ex-Girlfriend .

Tommy Swift Defends Against Doping Allegations.

Tommy Swift Disappoints at States . Almost unconsciously, she slotted each article into a growing mental timeline, a reverse hero’s arc.

Next she loaded up results for Faraday and performed the same desultory review, this time moving backward from the most recent articles. Family and Friends Gather for Vigil, Ten Years After Nina Faraday’s Disappearance .

Backward: Coroner Pronounces Lydia Faraday’s Death Suicide .

Backward: Lydia Faraday Brings Simultaneous Charges Against Woodward High School and Rockland County Sheriff’s Department .

And again: Where Did Nina Go? Swim Team Rocked by Suspicions .

“The Sharks will eat their faces .”

Rachel startled at voices across the room. Two high school girls were sitting elbow to elbow at the same computer terminal, scrolling a social media site and lobbing their conversation cavalierly through the otherwise silent space.

“No, but literally. How stupid can you be?”

“Alec Nye is literally going to kill someone. Like, he might actually commit homicide.”

“He actually should.”

A memory pulled at her: a long-ago Halloween party on an unseasonably warm October day at the off-campus residence of a group of College of Southern-Indiana fraternity brothers.

Her cousin had begged her to go. She already felt old among the crowd of undergraduates.

Old and sad. She’d just broken up with Dan.

Or was it Max? She’d been drinking too much that first year out of college. Drinking and smoking too much weed.

She drank too much that night.

She remembered a massive unfurnished basement pulsating with bodies, and music so loud it blew out one of the speakers.

She remembered squatting in the woods to pee after both bathrooms backed up onto the floor, taking sips from a full Solo cup even as the urine ran between her sneakers.

She had cat whiskers painted on her cheeks with mascara.

Her cousin was dressed as Artemis and carrying her father’s longbow.

She remembered the crowd agitating around a surge of new arrivals and a single syllable rising, repeated all through the yard like wind passing through an undulation of grass. Sharks. Sharks. Sharks . High school kids. At the time, she hadn’t known what it meant.

She closed out of the archives. She wasn’t ready to go back there yet. She wasn’t ready for the research, for the agonizing crawl across the past. She wasn’t ready for the Faradays, and what had happened to them here.

Somehow Nina had dropped out of the world—swallowed up, vanished, inhaled without a trace. Collapsed into dead typeface, an endless march of stories about who she was and whether she was worth looking for.

But it was Lydia Faraday that Rachel felt for the most. She had tried so hard to get justice for her daughter. She had tried to hold the right people accountable.

The problem was, they were the wrong people to cross.

Stupid woman.

She hadn’t had a chance.