Page 76 of What Happened to Lucy Vale

Five

R achel Vale held a press conference. She appeared on CNN. We watched the clip on YouTube. The chyron identified her as journalist and true crime author R.C. Barnes . We felt stupid, like the last people to have gotten a joke.

On-screen Rachel Vale looked like a different person. Composed. Almost clinical. She was wearing a suit jacket with her hair slicked back in a bun. She spoke in the voice of a reporter, leaning heavily into her words for emphasis.

She begged us all to remember her daughter, Lucy.

She talked about Lucy’s smile and her devotion to her cat, Maybe.

About the sticky notes she left for her mother all over the house with smiley faces and inside jokes written on them.

She showed pictures—of Lucy at Halloween, vamping as Marie Antoinette; of Lucy cuddling with Maybe on the sofa.

She talked about Lucy’s problems in Michigan. How she’d started acting out. How they’d hoped to find a new start in Indiana. How excited Lucy was to be making friends, to be finding her place, to have a boyfriend everyone admired. A boyfriend who said he loved her.

But nowadays, she’d said, bullies aren’t bound by geographical constraint. They find you online. They found Lucy online.

She teared up, speaking about topless photos of thirteen-year-old Lucy that had circulated back in Michigan and then again at her new school.

She mentioned nightmares Lucy had been having shortly before her disappearance.

That Lucy was convinced her life was over.

That she was convinced she would never escape those photographs or the mistakes she’d been trying to outgrow.

We were leaden, paralyzed with terror. Discord was silent. There was nothing to say.

It had occurred to us too late: we were not the heroes of this story.