Page 71 of What Happened to Lucy Vale

Twelve

Rachel

A t first everyone agreed that Nina Faraday was a good girl. Later they began to have doubts.

It’s possible that Nina Faraday was cheating on her boyfriend.

She may have used drugs. Or not. Memories are fickle, colored by the interpretations we assign them in any given present.

And points of view are just that: points.

Individual components of a puzzle that mistake themselves too often for the whole.

From the beginning, the investigation into Nina Faraday’s disappearance centered on a single question: What kind of girl was she really? Was she the kind who was likely to run away, to get in trouble, to pull off a stunt for attention?

Was she the kind of girl worth worrying about?

See, we often assume that the crime makes the victim. But causality is slippery, and often it’s the other way around. A good victim makes for a good crime, or at least an obvious one. But a bad victim, an unsympathetic victim, a victim who isn’t credible?

Well, with the wrong kind of victim, it’s hard to know whether a crime was committed at all.

So for now let’s forget about issues of identity. For now let’s stick to the facts.

For now let’s go back to that March morning eighteen years ago, in the southwest corner of Indiana where a seventeen-year-old Nina Faraday is running late for school.

It’s a Tuesday, only a few weeks before spring break.

Woodward High School is in the middle of a $20 million renovation to the pool facilities, all thanks to one of the most generous booster funds in the state.

Club team swimmer Tommy Swift has recently broken his third national record.

Possibly he has just broken Nina Faraday’s heart for the last time.

Just before 8:00 a.m., Nina receives a text from her best friend, Shannah Groves.

She wants to know why Nina hasn’t made it to homeroom.

Nina responds that she accidentally slept in.

She hasn’t been feeling well. But she assures Shannah that she’s on her way and hasn’t forgotten that they have a math test first period.

Shannah thinks little of it. Nina does indeed make it in time for their test. Later Shannah will insist that Nina seemed “normal.”

But Nina was anything but normal that morning. We can imagine that she might well have been nauseated. We can imagine that she might have been struggling with exhaustion, with new weight gain, with a body that felt suddenly foreign.

You see, the night before her disappearance, Nina made two calls to a hotline for pregnant teenagers—information that has been sitting with the Rockland County Sheriff’s Department since her phone records were subpoenaed six months after Nina vanished.

But perhaps it’s understandable that this information was never revealed.

Because Nina didn’t only call the hotline the night before her disappearance.

She also made four phone calls to a local number—the same number she dialed only an hour before she was last sighted at the high school the following day.

Likely the number she was calling was a disposable cell phone, commonly known as a burner. I came to that conclusion many years ago—around the same time as Nina’s disappearance actually, when the number I’d been calling for months was abruptly disabled.

As a journalist, I’m supposed to disappear behind the facts, to leave myself out of the story. But I can’t. Not this one.

You see, I know who that number belonged to.

I wonder. Is it possible that the police did too?