Page 57 of What Happened to Lucy Vale

Seven

We

L ucy Vale refused an invitation to appear on our podcast, even though Skyler Matthews approached her directly.

That summer Lucy took on shifts at the Granger Dairy Queen after senior Rory Adams got caught trying to manufacture CBD oil in the deep fryer.

The Dairy Queen was always staffed with Echelon girls, possibly because it was a short walk from Byron Lake, where so many of the Sharks served as lifeguards.

All summer long we gave our orders to an indifferent Savannah Savage, eagerly fed Bailey Lawrence our tips, and accepted coils of pillowy soft serve from Lucy Vale, thrilling when we grazed fingers over the counter.

According to Skyler, Lucy was trying to distance herself from the drama around the Faraday mystery. We were, in a word, unimpressed.

@stopandfriske: if they wanted to stay out of it

@stopandfriske: maybe they shouldn’t have moved Into it

To be fair, Lucy and her mom probably hadn’t anticipated a groundswell of national attention around the case or veiled threats forked into their mailbox.

They couldn’t have known that an aggressive DA would shoehorn in a new sheriff to galvanize resources into the investigation of Nina’s disappearance or reopen an inquiry into Lydia Faraday’s death.

On the other hand, we couldn’t help but feel that the Vales were in large part responsible for all the ruckus.

Before they’d arrived in Indiana, the Faraday House had been an old monument to mystery, a rotting relic that was firmly and visibly rooted in the past. By reinhabiting the house, they’d given new life to its stories.

Then there was the fact that Lucy had agreed to sit down with the producers of Blood in the Water —even after they’d dug up her lawn.

Jackson Skye snipped that maybe if we asked her at shovelpoint in the middle of the night, Lucy would reconsider the offer.

Either way, she’d had plenty to say about police incompetence and shoddy investigative procedure back in the fall.

But now, when we needed her, she wanted to “let the sheriff’s department do its job” and avoid “turning this whole thing into entertainment.”

@badprincess: are you kidding??

@badprincess: she actually said that?

It was hypocrisy at best coming from the girl whose mom had parlayed an old tragedy into an actual Netflix deal, at least according to Wikipedia.

Besides, it was obviously too late. Hundreds of YouTube videos, scores of podcast episodes, and whole Reddit threads had already done the job.

Alex Spinnaker saw Lucy’s refusal as typical of bleeding-heart liberals. We should have expected it from a family that drove a hybrid. No spine, no morals, and no loyalty.

That led to a skirmish about climate change and the government’s response to COVID and a fretful and dissatisfied few hours of escalating tension on the server. In the end, we settled on one point of consensus: obviously we couldn’t count on Lucy Vale to take our side.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, our feelings about Lucy began to curdle, morphing into resentment and suspicion.

It had been a year since the Vales had arrived in Indiana.

One year since we’d first gone on a digital crawl for information about the new girl.

And even though Lucy had become a fixture, an icon, a burning star in the universe of those we followed, liked, imitated, and talked about, in some ways her mystery had only deepened.

We returned again to the photographs captured at the Shady Glen cemetery and the names etched in stone above a row of sleeping bones.

We found a decades-old memorial from the Rockland County Register , a newspaper that no longer existed, announcing the death of Lucinda Vale Ellis.

According to the announcement, she was survived by her children and grandchildren, as well as two beloved nieces—one of them named Rachel.

This should have satisfied us—Lucy had told Akash that she had family in the area and that her mother spent her teenage summers with a favorite aunt and cousin in Indiana—but we suspected a deeper significance to the Vales’ connections to the neighboring county.

Our uneasiness deepened when Emma Howard reported seeing Lucy Vale and her mother eating lunch with the aging Mr. and Mrs. Swift at the Red Barn off State Road 16, a rambling nineteenth-century eatery in the nebulous stretch of unincorporated farmland between Clarion and Housataunick.

First of all, nobody went to the Red Barn—at least no one who valued their arteries.

Emma Howard had only popped in to wheedle a commitment to buy a half-page advertisement in the community theater’s summer playbill from the owner.

She reminded us, not so subtly, that tickets went on sale in a week.

None of us were about to suffer through a two-hour musical devoted to chess , of all things.

But we didn’t tell her that. Instead we gently reoriented conversation to the Vales: What in the good name of Jay Steeler had they been doing breaking bread with Tommy Swift’s parents?

What could they have been talking about?

What could they possibly have to say to one another?

@frenchkissesry: omg

@frenchkissesry: hold on hold on hold on

@frenchkissesry: I just thought of something

@badprincess: what?

@frenchkissesry: Just Hold on

We held on. We were fretful and impatient. We developed heat rashes, and texts from our parents went unread. We didn’t make our beds or load our dishwashers. In August we idled in the soporific heat and the dense pressure of rain that never fell.

Riley was back, this time with an old picture of Tommy, Nina, and Jack Vernon at a Halloween party, the one where Tommy had put his hands around Nina’s throat.

The picture had caused a litany of online static after Coach Vernon was appointed to the Granger Club Team.

We didn’t understand why Riley reposted it to the server until a second version appeared, this one maximized and cropped to zoom in on the background crowd.

@frenchkissesry: do you see it???

None of us were sure exactly what she meant. The resolution was terrible, a wash of distorted faces barely visible behind young Jack Vernon. But Riley was insistent.

@frenchkissesry: The girl in the red tank top

@frenchkissesry: with the black hair

@frenchkissesry: I think it’s her

@frenchkissesry: I think it’s Rachel Vale

@frenchkissesry: it looks exactly like her

Exactly may have been a stretch. Still, we all dutifully zoomed in and squinted until our eyeballs itched. We agreed it was very possibly Rachel Vale holding a Solo cup that matched her tank top.

But we didn’t understand what it meant.

Peyton Neely wondered whether Noah Landry knew that Lucy Vale had gotten friendly with the Swifts and what he would think about it.

Akash replied that he must know; Noah Landry had Lucy Vale on a leash.

In fact, he was surprised Noah hadn’t been there, lurking under the table.

He hardly let Lucy out of his sight. She wasn’t even allowed to come over and play video games anymore.

We’d heard these complaints from Akash before and didn’t think much of them or bother pointing out that Lucy might just have been using Noah as an excuse to avoid him. She’d moved beyond us. She’d ascended.

She’d kept her secrets for herself.

All afternoon we heard thunder. The sky was a low-belly gray, roiling with frustrated currents. Our dogs whined at the doors. Our air conditioners growled their exhaustion.

Still, the weather held.