Page 59 of What Happened to Lucy Vale

Two

Rachel

I n late September, Rachel had a startling realization: something was wrong with Lucy.

She was almost always in a bad mood. She complained that her antianxiety medication wasn’t working. One night Rachel woke up to muffled sobs coming from the attic. The next she found wads of hair in Lucy’s shower—clumps that looked as if they’d been removed by force.

It was Noah. She was sure it had to do with Noah. Lucy’s frenzied texts, the whispered nighttime conversations. The way Lucy skulked off to school with barely a word and retreated to her room as soon as she came home.

For days Rachel felt as if she’d been jettisoned out of the nucleus of Lucy’s life, landing back in a nightmare of confusion and helplessness.

She skulked around the house like a foreign agent, looking for clues in Lucy’s bedroom about what might have happened, scouring her daughter’s Instagram account for indicators of trouble.

She left two panicked messages with Lucy’s old therapist. She considered driving to Noah’s house to confront him about—what, exactly? She wasn’t sure.

And then, abruptly, Lucy announced that she would need a ride to school that one day, and the day after that. Without a word or explanation, Noah stopped picking up Lucy before practice.

When Rachel asked whether something had happened, Lucy snapped at her.

“Noah’s fine. We’re fine. Things are just complicated.

” But Rachel took it as a positive sign when Lucy began to leak little complaints about her relationship, when she expressed irritation as opposed to simple despair.

Noah was obsessed with body hair. He was even thinking of shaving his eyelashes.

Who shaved their eyelashes? Or, Noah had terrible taste in music.

Then Sunday rolled around, and Lucy skipped church.

“What’s the point?” she told Rachel, yawning. “I’m going to hell anyway.”

“Is that what the pastor said?”

Lucy shrugged and looked away. After a pause she said, “Do you think I’m a bad person?”

Rachel’s heart lurched. “Lucy, no. Of course not.” She reached out and stroked her daughter’s cheek. For once Lucy didn’t pull away. “What gave you that idea?”

Lucy shrugged. She mashed the tines of her fork into her pancake. “When I came here, everyone thought I was so perfect. Noah thought I was perfect. He thought I was just as good as him.”

“Noah is definitely not perfect,” Rachel said.

Lucy sighed. “He kind of is, though. He’s never done anything wrong. He’s never even gotten a tardy . Ask anyone.”

“Sounds pretty boring,” Rachel said, earning her a wisp of a smile. “Besides, I don’t believe it. Noah’s only human. And humans make mistakes.”

“Yeah.” Lucy sighed. “But some of us make more mistakes than others.” Lucy turned to the window, and for some reason Rachel found herself thinking of Jay Steeler and the way his hands looked touching her naked body.

She remembered seeing the skin pouch around his wedding ring and feeling a vague sense of horror.

Not because he was married—because he was old.

And yet she still met him again and then called his number over and over after he stopped returning her texts.

Desperate to see him again. Desperate to know that it wasn’t a mistake .

She had even found his address months later and made the drive once all the way from Chicago just to sit paralyzed across the street from his house, debating whether or not to ring the doorbell and confront him.

And all these years later, she still remembered his cell phone number.

Rachel understood now that Noah and Lucy’s brief and intense love was collapsing, that the center of their relationship had caved and they were now spiraling around an inevitable breakup.

She ached for her daughter and at the same time felt unaccountably relieved.

She couldn’t say why. She’d never seen Noah mistreat Lucy.

Still, she suspected that he picked at her, criticized her outfits, her friendship with Akash, the things she posted on social media.

And there was something almost disconcerting about his talent and its effects on everyone around him.

Even Noah’s parents behaved as if he were a rare plant, an extraordinary natural phenomenon that needed constant placation.

Dating him, Lucy had become simply Noah Landry’s girlfriend, her identity reconfigured around its most “important” component.

She wondered if that’s how it had been for Nina Faraday too—and whether she, like Lucy, had been so obviously lonely.

So she waited, she simply waited, for Lucy and Noah to fall apart.

In the meantime, she traveled an imaginative line to the past, sifting through volumes of court records related to the Faradays.

The county sheriff’s department had applied for two separate search warrants for 88 Lily Lane.

They’d searched Woody Topornycky’s vehicle and his father’s farm.

They’d presented AT&T with a search warrant for information on Nina’s missing phone.

They’d briefly arrested two people, neither of whom Rachel had ever heard of: a local sex offender indicted on charges of statutory rape after lying to a high school field hockey player about his age and a poacher who was spotted with a shovel and a rifle in the state park the morning after Nina Faraday vanished, then bolted when a park employee tried to speak to him.

At one point the police even petitioned to wiretap the phones of two known drug dealers, all because one of them was spotted on Lily Lane not long before Nina disappeared.

As she traveled through a tide of warrants, Rachel had the distinct sense of a police investigation curiously missing its center, concealing via a storm of activity the silent, obvious question within.

It was as if the Rockland County Sheriff’s Department had desperately stretched for something, anything, that would thread Nina’s disappearance to a palatable storyline—a secret affiliation with dangerous criminals, a maniacal drifter, a stranger with a fetish and a fixation.

It was a torrent of paper, a dizzying switchback of suspects and investigative maneuvers, exhausting to even read about.

It wasn’t true, she thought, that the sheriff’s department hadn’t tried to look for Nina.

If anything, they had done too much—and possibly all the wrong things.

Most stories were so simple in the end. Plain, and sad, and simple.

Again and again she returned to what her agent had told her after eighth-grade Lucy had been persuaded by a high school sophomore to send nearly naked pictures.

It’s always the same story with a few modern updates. It always comes down to a boy.

Rachel was sure, in her gut, that Nina’s story began and ended with Tommy Swift.

The question was: How?