Page 47 of What Happened to Lucy Vale

Three

Rachel

T here was, according to Lucy, only one place to buy a dress for the Winters Dance: Angela’s Formal, an emporium-size outfitter of tuxes and formal wear that had been in Granger “forever, like since the eighties.” In fact, the day Rachel accompanied Lucy and her friends Bailey and Savannah to the store, she saw a pack of boys she immediately identified as swimmers looking over rental tuxes.

With some amusement, she observed the odd, coded way the boys and girls acknowledged each other—lots of shorthand and arch glances, a studious attempt to appear disinterested.

The boys turned their eyes on Rachel next with a curious, flat kind of detachment that she did, in fact, find vaguely sharklike. But maybe that was just in her head.

“That’s Jeremiah Greene,” Bailey informed her.

Bailey was growing on Rachel. She was bright and bold and energetic.

A little bit wild, Rachel suspected, but she took her schoolwork and the dance team very seriously.

And she seemed loyal to Lucy. “He just made the club team this year. He’s not half as good as he thinks he is. ”

“And Mia’s obsessed with him,” Savannah said, giggling.

“And Mia’s obsessed with him,” Bailey confirmed.

They moved into a thicket of dresses: floor-length prom gowns with ruffles and trains, skintight minidresses with plunging necklines, lots of sequins.

“No,” Rachel said firmly when Lucy reached for a scrap of cloth so sheer and insubstantial, it hardly counted as clothing.

“Mom, I was just kidding .” She rolled her eyes and turned to Bailey. “See what I mean about her? She’s so easy .”

“Don’t worry, Ms. Vale.” Bailey put her arms around Lucy and gave her a kiss on the cheek. “Lucy’s one of the good ones.”

Savannah laughed. Lucy blushed. She shot Rachel a pleading look, as if Rachel might otherwise be tempted to blurt out the truth: Actually, Lucy almost failed eighth grade.

Actually, she was buying off-script antianxiety meds from some loser she met online who called himself her boyfriend.

Oh, yeah. And she sent him naked pictures on her thirteenth birthday . ..

While the girls loaded up a shared dressing room, Rachel wandered through the racks.

She found herself wondering whether Nina had shopped here and what kind of dress she might have chosen.

Something modest probably, to appease her mother.

But with a small hint of rebellion—a slit up to the thigh or a plunging back.

Something she could easily conceal with a shawl or a safety pin before she was out of the house.

A normal teenage girl, pinioned like a butterfly between childhood and adulthood, doing her best to appease both worlds.

She thought again of Nina’s two final texts, sent within minutes of each other. To her mother: I’m on my way home now.

To Tommy: I know you want me out of your life. I’m leaving for a while. Don’t look for me.

Had Nina sent one? Both? Neither?

Why had she lingered at school so late? Where had she been for the hours before Woody Topornycky saw her in the parking lot? Who was she with?

Rachel felt certain that if she could just reconstruct Nina’s final afternoon, she would know what had happened to her.

“Mom.” Lucy’s voice carried over the Byzantine arrangement of clothing racks from the dressing room. “Mom, come look.”

Rachel returned to see Lucy showing off in a hot-pink dress with beaded straps.

“Option number one,” Lucy said, doing a twirl. “What do you think?”

Before Rachel could answer, a voice at her elbow said, “Very pretty.”

Rachel turned, expecting a salesperson, and instead got a shock: next to her was Tommy Swift’s mother.

Lucy must have recognized her too. The smile fell from her face. She glanced at her mother uncertainly.

“It’s cute,” Rachel said, keeping her voice light. Her heart was beating very fast. “Let’s see the next one.”

Lucy withdrew behind the curtain. Tommy’s mother didn’t move. She just kept standing there, smiling blandly at Rachel. Rachel reached for her first name. Nancy.

“Your daughter’s very pretty,” Nancy said. She had a soft, slightly raspy voice that was inflected with a deep southern drawl. “I’m Nancy Swift. You’re new to the area, aren’t you?”

They shook hands. Nancy’s grip was soft, practically limp. Her hands were tiny like the rest of her. Rachel remembered that an article in the Rockland County Register had remarked upon that fact. Somehow this five foot three woman had given birth to a boy who grew to be six foot five.

“Newish,” Rachel said. “We’ve been here since the start of the school year.” She didn’t mention that she had relatives in Willard County, had been visiting southern Indiana since she was a baby. She never did.

Nancy nodded. “You’re in Lydia’s old place, aren’t you?” Rachel was surprised by the easy way she said Lydia’s name. As if Lydia Faraday were an old friend, a mutual acquaintance, someone who’d simply moved away. “I hear you’re a book writer.”

Rachel shouldn’t have been annoyed, or even surprised.

She’d tried as hard as possible to steer away from the term journalist , a word that startled and set people on edge even under the best of circumstances.

And she’d been careful about using a pen name for her first book and making sure there were few identifying details about her online.

Still, the truth had a way of getting out, especially when it was inconvenient. She was at least partially to blame; there was no way to assemble research about Nina Faraday’s disappearance and her mother’s death without poking around, stirring up questions, chasing down people like Danny Wilkes.

“I’ve written one book,” she said simply.

She searched Nancy’s face for judgment or suspicion and found nothing.

Nothing but a benign, slightly dazed expression, as if her soul had been drained of all opinion before it could touch her eyes.

It gave her the innocent look of a deer in headlights, and Rachel didn’t trust it.

Lucy flounced out of the changing room again, this time wearing a dark-blue dress with a twinkling pattern of silver threads that looked like stars. She seemed surprised to find Nancy Swift still standing there.

“Number two,” she announced and did a slow twirl. Rachel gave her the thumbs-up. Lucy frowned briefly and withdrew again, swishing the curtains closed on an efflorescence of whispers.

“If you ever want to talk to someone ...” Nancy let the words trail off just before they became an invitation. “I know it can be hard to get settled in a new place. Especially a place like this. So many of us have been here since before the cows.”

Rachel’s spine stiffened. Was this, she wondered, Nancy’s subtle way of reminding Rachel that she and Lucy were outsiders? She had a sudden paranoid suspicion that Nancy knew about the anonymous notes that had shown up in her mailbox. Maybe, she thought viciously, Nancy had even put them there.

Maybe she was worried about what Rachel, the book writer, would uncover.

Either way, she realized, Nancy Swift had given her an opening.

“Actually, I’d love to talk,” Rachel said, keeping her voice bright and friendly. It was true. She’d love to hear what Nancy Swift had to say about Nina Faraday and her son’s erratic behavior after her disappearance. “We can have lunch.”

Nancy looked taken aback but obediently provided her cell phone number and email. Afterward she briefly took Rachel’s hand between hers. Her palms felt like paper, brittle and fragile with age even though she couldn’t be seventy yet.

“Tell your daughter I like number two better,” Nancy said with a little smile.

She gave Rachel’s hand a final pat and moved off, engulfed by the next canyon of taffeta and silk.

Rachel felt confused and slightly guilty.

Had she imagined the threat inside Nancy’s remark?

Was it possible that Nancy Swift was simply being friendly—that it was she who, as usual, was hunting for hidden motives?

Either way, Nancy Swift had given her an opening.

“What was that all about?” Lucy reemerged from the dressing room, this time wearing pale blue. Bailey and Savannah trailed after her, all ruffles and whispers of fabric. All three girls were barefoot, wide-eyed, conspiratorial.

“She was just saying hi,” Rachel said. She spun Lucy around in a circle. “This one’s cute,” she said.

“Mom, are you serious? This one’s a joke.”

“Do you know who that was?” Bailey asked Rachel. “That was Tommy Swift’s mom.”

“What did she say to you?” asked Savannah.

“She said she thought you should hurry up and pick a dress,” Rachel said pointedly. “Come on. I don’t want to be here all day.”

Lucy settled on a sweet pink dress with slender straps and a flouncy hemline. Bailey and Savannah assured her it was “iconic.” They’d both selected their dresses weeks ago. The Winters Dance, Bailey explained, was “like, basically bigger than prom.”

The boys were still goofing around by the register, checking out cuff links and waiting for the last of them to get fitted.

What’d you get, Luce? Show us the dress. Did you enter the raffle? Come on. Admit it. The group agitated around Lucy as Rachel paid. She heard Bailey reprimanding them, telling them not to be so “hungry.”

It was a funny bit of slang, Rachel thought.

Eventually Rachel herded the girls back out into the frigid grin of winter sunshine. Pale-blue bunting dangled plastic snowflakes at intervals down the street. Every store had a holiday wreath. The air smelled like woodsmoke.

She wondered idly how the Swifts would celebrate Christmas.