Page 79 of What Happened to Lucy Vale

Eight

The news came from Evie Grant, who’d found out about it on TikTok even before we’d tracked down the official sheriff’s bulletin.

According to Evie, Jeremiah Morrow Bridge was one of Ohio’s most popular suicide spots.

@badprincess: I’m just telling you what I read online

@lululemonaide: was there a note in her car or anything?

@geminirising: what about her wallet? Rachel Vale says she left home with her wallet

@pawsandclaws: why would you bring your wallet to commit suicide?

@nononycky: tolls? Snacks?

@pawsandclaws: this isn’t funny

@badprincess: why would you leave your cell phone behind to run away?

@geminirising: maybe she just wanted to ... disappear for a while

@lululemonaide: if she’d decided to kill herself, she would have left a note

@lululemonaide: she would have told somebody

@lululemonaide: right?

We didn’t know. It was possible that Lucy had ditched her car and jumped.

But she’d emptied her checking account at an ATM in Cincinnati the day before her car was abandoned.

And a long-haul trucker had reported seeing a girl who matched Lucy’s description at a rest stop outside Columbus two days later.

We held on to hope that Lucy Vale would soon be found, would soon return, would soon show up online, make contact, make things right again. We prayed that the story wasn’t over.

But after that, the leads dried up.

The rain came at last just before Memorial Day.

Indiana sucked it up in sheets and spit back violent explosions of green.

For days heavy winds took down the missing posters that Rachel Vale had distributed patiently over weeks, covering miles of open farmland with a shock of red flyers.

Heavy rain bled most of them into a pulp.

Over the long weekend, Mr. Mole, the adoptive cat who lived in the Student Leadership Department Tutoring Center, died.

Reese Cox told us her mother had discovered him stiff-legged and staring blankly outside the computer center where the Investigative Committee had convened earlier in the semester.

He was at least eighteen years old; still, we batted around theories of foul play.

It was a sign of the times that our minds went immediately to poison.

@sunshineandhugs: Reese thinks Mr. Mole was poisoned

@sunshineandhugs: it’s gotta be retaliation

@mememeup: why? What did he do?

@sunshineandhugs: not retaliation against Mr. Mole

@sunshineandhugs: it was a message to Reese’s mom

@sunshineandhugs: because she refuses to back down about this dumb Steeler Pavilion

@gustagusta: “where Sharks are born, and girls go missing”

@sunshineandhugs: she loved that fucking cat

@highasakyle: really?

@highasakyle: huh

@highasakyle: is that a thing?

As it turned out, it was.

Mr. Mole’s death sent the whole school into a brief and inexplicable period of mourning.

Grieving Student Council members tied black ribbons to their ponytails and painted whiskers on their cheeks.

The school chapter of PETA agitated about what Administration had done with the body; there was some rumor that he’d simply been tossed out in one of the dumpsters.

Another rumor suggested that Old McVeigh had buried Mr. Mole down by the construction pit, not far from where he’d first been discovered wandering the drainage pipes shortly before Nina Faraday disappeared.

Jackson Skye reminded us of the rumor that we’d heard growing up that Lydia Faraday’s body had been buried beneath Aquatics—a final torment for her troubled soul and punishment for the claims she’d made about Tommy Swift. Punishment because Lydia Faraday had tried to hold the swim team accountable.

For the first time, we wondered whether there was some truth to the story after all.

Maybe, we thought, we simply had the wrong Faraday.