Page 75 of What Happened to Lucy Vale
Four
I n a way, the days after Lucy Vale went missing were our Discord’s finest. We soon counted more than two hundred subscribers. Our server swelled to include members from every grade and social group, and even a handful of recent graduates.
We gave up on trying to verify identities, but we all agreed on one thing: no swimmers allowed.
Spinnaker, of course, was apoplectic. But the impact of his rants was attenuated by the sheer volume of conversation, which overwhelmed our phones, inundated us with new alerts, overflowed into our dreams and dinner conversations. We were consumed, obsessed.
We were convinced we would find Lucy Vale.
On Reese Steeler-Cox’s recommendation, Kaitlyn Courtland rearranged the server and its threads to make tracking tips and sightings easier.
We pinned the sheriff’s official APB, which included a description of Lucy’s outfit and aggregated photos from her social media.
We reached out to the Strut Girls. On a singularly memorable day, all three of them—Bailey, Savannah, and Mia—logged on.
Even in real life, we felt unusual solidarity, as if Lucy’s disappearance were a tidal pressure that gathered all of us on the same beach. We hadn’t felt such unity or purpose since Aiden Teller has been surprised by Jalliscoe Wolverines outside the Lucky Strike.
But this time—for the first time—the swim team was excluded.
We frantically swapped theories. We speculated that Lucy may have heard that the sheriff suspected her as the arsonist and fled town rather than face up to what she’d done.
We wondered if Rachel Vale was only feigning ignorance about her daughter’s whereabouts.
We hypothesized that Lucy had dipped off to Mexico and would soon reunite with her mother on the white sand beach of some tiny Central American town.
But one look at Rachel Vale—who wandered the Four Corners like a loosed spirit, distributing flyers, hunting for leads—put that theory to bed. It was obvious that Rachel had no idea where Lucy Vale was.
Unfortunately neither did we.
We combed through Lucy Vale’s social media for clues.
By that time, she hadn’t posted since December.
Still, we scoured for evidence. Items in the background of photos that might indicate where she’d gone, trinkets from her room.
A Grand Canyon postcard visible on a cluttered corkboard that briefly inspired us to look in Arizona.
A copy of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road , around which Olivia Howard claimed to see a dark aura that proved Lucy had planted it the previous August, a clue about her future intentions and unannounced road trip.
We clutched at straws. Someone had seen a van on Three Hills Road, only a quarter mile from Lily Lane, the same afternoon that Lucy Vale had vanished.
For a few hours we went wild with the idea that a kidnapper was on the loose—until Richie Dale confirmed that his neighbors were reshingling their house and the man who’d been skulking around the yard was only there to give an estimate.
As our server grew, blowing together hundreds of different perspectives and voices like so many errant leaves, we began to assemble a fuller picture of what Lucy’s life had been over the past few months. Since she’d walked into the sheriff’s department with her mother and reported rape.
Maria Gomez, a sophomore who worked part-time at the CVS in North Granger, reported that Lucy had come in several times just before closing.
Each time she’d spent nearly an hour wandering the bright fluorescence of the deserted aisles, sniffing shampoos and body lotions, spinning the revolving display case full of sunglasses and trying on different pairs, reading the greeting cards in the stationery aisle.
Maria’s impression was that Lucy was bored and simply looking for an escape.
As far as she could recall, Lucy never purchased anything but Advil and ChapStick.
Senior Ally Mack had been seated behind Lucy Vale and her mother at the Waffle House late on a Thursday when the restaurant was half-empty.
Rachel, she’d noticed, was doing most of the talking.
Lucy’s waffles remained largely untouched.
Ally had noticed and wondered whether Lucy was becoming anorexic.
Freshman Julia McGraw had intersected with Lucy and her mom in the waiting room of Bright Smiles Dentistry, the one in Camden Shopping Center.
Rachel Vale had been inquiring about getting her daughter Invisalign.
Something about that almost gutted us. The idea of Lucy and her mother discussing orthodontic options—the idea of Rachel Vale worrying about her daughter’s teeth—was so basic, so inconsequential, so indisputably true.
It scared us to imagine that Lucy Vale’s life had been playing out even when we weren’t there to look at it.
We were seized by sudden fits of dread. We were gripped out of nowhere with the impression that we had forgotten to do something—turn off our car engines, turn off the stove, lock our doors, do our homework.
We had to remind ourselves that no one knew the truth about what had really happened to Lucy Vale that night in January. Even the sheriff’s department hadn’t come to a conclusion. The case had simply unraveled, frayed, loosened into accusations and counteraccusations, story after story after story.
We sickened when we saw Noah Landry posting about his swim times, or his regimen, or his six thousand calories a day. We thought it was inappropriate, even disturbed.
We insisted on hanging Lucy’s missing person poster directly outside Administration and all over Aquatics. We discussed protesting the Jay Steeler Legacy Pavilion. We insisted we had to stop it.
We persuaded Skyler Matthews to release a final podcast episode, this time about Lucy’s disappearance.
It dropped like a stone down the empty cavern of the internet the same week Rachel Vale went public with her story about how she met Jay Steeler, the fabled former Olympian, at a party. She was just twenty-two years old.
We told ourselves that whatever had happened to Lucy Vale, it wasn’t our fault. We had done nothing wrong.
We were not bad people.
In April we stayed up late and found each other online at strange hours.
In April we had trouble sleeping.