Page 36 of What Happened to Lucy Vale

One

Rachel

L ucy did persuade her mother, at last, to make an online dating profile.

“You know, we had an agreement,” Rachel said.

“We said no boys .” Rachel still couldn’t think about the high school boy who’d roped Lucy into a monthslong nightmare— sexploitation , they called it—without the urge to explode something.

She still felt they should have pressed charges. Lucy was still a child .

“You don’t need a boy, Mom. You need a man .

” Lucy dropped her voice dramatically and then giggled.

They were sitting side by side at the kitchen table.

Lucy was stringing together Halloween lanterns—little paper pumpkins with devilish grins.

Rachel was drinking her third coffee of the day and scrolling through an assortment of available men in the area.

“Besides, not all boys are bad. Some of them are nice.”

Rachel heard a lilt to her daughter’s voice and looked up, suspicious. “Like who?” she asked.

Lucy kept her head down. Her hair, loose, concealed the half arc of her smile.

Rachel went back to scrolling. She wasn’t seriously looking for a boyfriend—she still couldn’t imagine having sex with anyone but Alan, and she was even beginning to forget what that had been like—but she thought a little flirtation, a little attention, wouldn’t hurt.

The past few years had been so serious .

First her relationship with Alan, withering like a plant from being poorly tended, leaving him moody, remote, and secretive.

She hadn’t noticed—or maybe she hadn’t cared?

Not until it was too late. And then the problems with Lucy: all that bullying, the disordered eating, the self-harm.

She was still young, as Rachel’s mother was always reminding her, somehow marking the words as tacit criticism.

It wasn’t normal for her to be holed up in the middle of nowhere, letting her career languish just as it was exploding, isolating herself as some of her best years were slipping by.

To Rachel’s mother, southern Indiana might as well have been Siberia.

“Here’s a man who owns three Papa Johns franchises,” she said, pretending to be impressed.

“You like pizza,” Lucy said with a smirk.

“Wait. Forget it. He has an Ayn Rand quote in his bio.”

“Picky, picky.” Lucy held up the miniature lanterns, evaluating them intently for a moment, and then put them aside and reached for her mother’s laptop. “Here. Let me see.”

Rachel got up and dumped the rest of her coffee in the sink, startling a sparrow from the windowsill.

“Ooooh, look. This one’s a cop.” Lucy began to read, “’Twenty-two years with the Willard County Sheriff’s Department. Actually, scrap that. Willard County is enemy territory.”

“Willard County is where your great-aunt and uncle live. Let me see that.” Rachel leaned over Lucy’s shoulder, contemplating the broad, flat face of Danny Wilkes, forty-seven.

Immediately she wondered what he thought about the Faraday case and the Rockland County investigation, such as it was, into Nina’s disappearance.

This was her problem. Her interests ran her, again and again, back to work.

It wasn’t all her fault; the Faraday case was inescapable in Granger.

There were threads, connections back to Nina Faraday and her mother, everywhere she looked.

In the surnames of Lucy’s friends, which raveled her back to the names of former witnesses and classmates.

In the Steelers themselves, of course—a sprawling clan, linked to politics and real estate, the sheriff’s department and the school board.

In the Granger Club Team, now training under Jack Vernon, a man who’d actually swum with Tommy Swift.

Rachel imagined a gigantic web, or a root network, extending through much of the county, anchoring everyone back to the same mystery.

“They don’t know better. You do.” Lucy nudged her mother away with an elbow and hunched over the laptop again. A second later, she made a noise somewhere between a cough and a snort. “Oh my God. No way. That’s Topornycky’s uncle.”

“Topornycky?” Rachel recognized the unusual name immediately. Her heart rate spiked.

“Nick Topornycky’s uncle, Woody. I can’t believe he’s actually trolling for a girlfriend.” This time when Rachel reached for the laptop, Lucy actively fended her off. “No, Mom. You cannot go out with him. He’s literally insane.”

“Relax. I just want to see what he looks like.” Lucy finally relented, yielding her chair to Rachel. Woody Topornycky looked older than his thirty-eight years. Still, he was handsome in a weather-beaten way, at least in his profile picture.

Lucy was now agitating around the kitchen, going nowhere in particular like a moth caught in a lamp.

“He’s a total alcoholic. He dated Bailey’s mom for, like, one minute and completely destroyed their Christmas.

Bailey said he was so hungover in church, he literally threw up into the nativity scene. ”

“He was also the last person to see Nina Faraday alive,” Rachel said.

Immediately Lucy stopped pacing. “Really?” she said. “Where?”

“At school. She was crossing the parking lot. According to Woody, it looked as if she were heading to the Aquatics Center.” Woody Topornycky had a Substack and, from what Rachel could tell, a devoted community of readers who liked their local history dashed with conspiracy theory.

“According to Woody, aliens have military bases under the poles. He’s a nutcase. You should see his YouTube channel.” Then Lucy added, “He didn’t see her after that?”

“If he did, he’s never admitted it,” Rachel said.

It was an odd thing. At the time, the new Aquatics Center was still under construction, the pool unfilled.

It seemed unlikely that Nina would have gone there looking for Tommy.

On the other hand, Woody Topornycky wasn’t, as Lucy pointed out, the most credible witness.

And he hadn’t actually seen Nina enter Aquatics.

Maybe he’d simply been wrong about where she was heading.

“Maybe he killed her,” Lucy said.

“Maybe,” Rachel said. “The police thought it was possible.”

“The simplest explanation is usually the correct one,” Lucy said sagely. “My bet? Tommy Swift killed Nina in a fit of rage, and Coach Steeler lied for him afterward.”

It was, from what Rachel could tell, the predominant opinion everywhere but Rockland County.

“Is that what Arianna thinks?” Rachel asked.

Arianna was the postgrad student who’d screamed so piercingly when Lucy rocketed out of the house brandishing her bike pump—thinking, Arianna later confessed, that they had triggered the old curse and reanimated the spirit of Nina Faraday to take her bloody revenge.

After the confusion abated—after Arianna and her friends accepted that Rachel and Lucy were neither ghosts nor trespassers—they had proven to be polite, thoughtful, and appropriately sheepish about their illegal entry.

Ever since the podcasters had broken through the gates, attempting their dig for proof of murder, Lucy had been emailing back and forth with the production team.

Rachel wasn’t sure it was a good idea; Lucy already seemed to be in Mrs. Steeler-Cox’s crosshairs, frequently reporting hallway demerits for things as minor as spitting her gum in the trash or lingering in the cafeteria after first bell.

Rachel blamed herself. She should have made more of an effort to fit in.

She should have joined the PTA, or the Woodward Moms’ Association, or one of the other acronyms that Mrs. Steeler-Cox chaired.

At the same time, she enjoyed being an outsider.

An uncategorizable element. Something, and someone, who Didn’t Quite Belong.

“Tommy’s the one with all the motive,” Lucy said, ignoring the question. “Nina dumped him, didn’t she? She had a new boyfriend.”

“No one knows that,” Rachel said. “That’s what people said after she disappeared. And besides, Tommy had an alibi.”

“Right. He was with Coach Steeler.”

“And the rest of the club team,” Rachel said.

“That doesn’t count,” Lucy said. “They could have lied too.” She took a handful of candy corn from the bowl on the table and began siphoning them one by one into her mouth. “You know, there’s a psychic online who says that Nina never ran away. She says Nina was killed and buried next to water.”

“That’s very helpful. Maybe we should drain the Ohio River and look there.”

“I’m just telling you what she says .”

“Don’t you have other things to think about? Halloween? Dance rehearsal? Your homework?”

Lucy gave her a look. “I’m just saying, if Coach Steeler really did cover up for Tommy Swift, I don’t think Woodward should build a whole big memorial to him. Not until we know for sure.”

Rachel’s scalp prickled. “What memorial?”

“I don’t know. It’s some pavilion named after him. There’s a message about it in the portal. We’re all supposed to vote.” Lucy yawned. “And just so you know, I’m done with all my homework.”

“Really? Even French?”

“Oui, oui, madame.”

Outside, someone honked. Lucy immediately pivoted for her jacket, sweeping her phone into her pocket. “That’s Bailey. I gotta go,” she said. She leaned over and kissed her mother’s cheek. She smelled like honey. “Love you.”

“Remember, you promised me a pumpkin!” Rachel called after her.

Lucy turned around and gave her a thumbs-up.

When the front door opened, Rachel caught a glimpse of her daughter’s friends: beautiful, smiling, dressed in shrunken T-shirts despite the October chill.

Cool, Rachel thought. Her daughter’s friends were cool.

“Bring a jacket!” she shouted. But the door was already closing, snuffing out the sound of laughter.

Moved by a sudden impulse, Rachel went to the living room windows and watched the four girls move in a giggling pack toward Mia’s brand-new BMW. A gift, Lucy had told her, from Mia’s father, once a swimmer himself.

She found herself thinking again about webs, about veins of money that ran from Aquatics to the sprawling Steeler clan and back again. She thought about connections, and pack animals, and Tommy Swift’s alibi. Twenty-two members of the swim team and their coach.

She wondered why Nina had lingered at school so long on that final day.

She’d had no practice. No tutoring session.

No after-school club. No one had seen her at all—not until Woody spotted her crossing toward the new Aquatics Center, still barely architected, ostensibly closed to students.

Only an hour later, she had texted her mother that she was on her way home, and Tommy that she was running away.

So what had happened in that hour? What had Nina Faraday seen, or done, or chosen that had upended her life, sent it leaping from its tracks?

And more importantly—who else had seen Nina Faraday?