Page 9 of What Happened to Lucy Vale

Eight

Rachel

O n their third day in the new house, Lucy entered with a potted philodendron.

“Someone left this at the front gate,” she said.

Rachel immediately thought of the neighbor Lucy had described—Cash something or other. Sikh, according to Lucy. A nice guy. Cute too.

But not like that, Mom , she’d quickly clarified, reading her mother’s look.

They’d made a pact: no more secrets, and no boys.

No dating at least. When Lucy was in middle school, just as Rachel and Alan’s relationship was collapsing, caving in like some slow-moving sinkhole, Lucy’s various romantic obsessions—her desperation to be liked, or loved, or at least valuable to someone—had almost consumed her.

They’d agreed that here in Indiana, Lucy needed to focus on her schoolwork.

Develop her interests. Find her friends.

“Is there a card?” Rachel asked.

Balancing the philodendron in the crook of one arm, Lucy excavated a card from her back pocket and opened it one-handed.

A tumble of leaves cascaded down her forearm.

Lucy’s cheeks were splotchy from the sun, her hair swept behind a knotted bandanna.

She already looked healthier. More alive.

The previous year, Lucy’s life force had seemed to leach away into her phone, as if some digital parasite demanded constant feeding, tending, nutrition from its host. The Picture of Dorian Gray , with Bluetooth.

Lucy’s skin had taken on a gray tinge, as if the upward-casting light from her screen had left it stained.

A nightmare. It had been, in the end, a nightmare.

“A small gift to welcome you to the neighborhood,” Lucy recited. “Looking forward to meeting you soon. Signed, the Steeler-Coxes.” Lucy looked up. “Steeler,” she repeated. “We saw that name on the golf course.”

Rachel said nothing. She hadn’t told Lucy about the Steelers and their stranglehold on this corner of Indiana. She had been hoping that things had changed. But change, she thought, usually followed money, not the other way around.

“Great. Just what we need. One more plant to take care of,” Rachel said instead. She took the philodendron from Lucy. “I wish they’d gotten us a hacksaw instead.”

Lucy giggled. “Or a machete.”

“Or that,” Rachel agreed. She thought of dumping the plant in the trash but instead tucked it into a corner by one of the decorative stained glass windows in the dining room.

“I wonder why they didn’t ring the bell,” Lucy said.

“I doubt it’s working,” Rachel said. Wendy Adams, the house’s longtime owner, had prepared her for electrical problems, but they were worse than Rachel had anticipated.

Only a few outlets on the ground floor functioned.

The representative from Rockland Electric who’d been dispatched to examine them told Rachel that mice were the likely culprit.

They like to chew the wires, he’d said, casting his eyes around the walls uneasily, as if they were surrounded.

Best bet is to open the walls, rewire the place.

Rachel told him she would think about it.

For now they would make do with power strips, a jumble of sprouting extension cables that ran through the first floor like veins. “Besides, people are superstitious.”

“Maybe isn’t. She went all the way up to the attic today. It took me an hour to find her,” Lucy said. “And cats are very sensitive to things like that.”

“Things like what?” Rachel asked.

“Energies. Ghosts.” Lucy shrugged. “But I did hear footsteps last night. I swear I did. Up and down the hall, and to the top of the staircase. I got up because I was thirsty. The water from the tap tastes mossy, by the way. Still, I don’t think it’s going to hurt us.”

“The water?” Rachel asked.

“Whatever was making those footsteps,” Lucy corrected her. And then, tilting her head, she added, “Can’t you feel it?”

“The only thing I feel is about eighty,” Rachel said, neatly sidestepping the question.

She had little interest in the paranormal; she found plenty inexplicable about the way humans behaved, and what they did to one another.

Still, she couldn’t deny that the house where Nina Faraday and her mother had lived for nearly two decades had its own kind of pressure, or maybe a pull; from the time she had heard that the house was available for rent, she had almost felt a compulsion to experience it, to walk the mystery herself.

Nina had been only a handful of years younger than Rachel when she’d gone missing.

Her disappearance had rocked southern Indiana and left a permanent impression on Rachel’s early adulthood.

She remembered that her aunt and uncle began locking their doors after Nina went missing; in the brief, chaotic early days of the investigation, rumors swept lower Indiana about a serial killer preying on young women.

That was before people began to whisper about the swim team’s involvement.

Rachel and her cousin had followed the early news coverage obsessively.

In retrospect, Rachel thought that Nina’s disappearance, and the competing visions of the case presented in the press, were key drivers to her desire to become a crime journalist. Nina’s case had taught her an early and important lesson: there could be no crime without a victim.

Too often, the victim was eventually erased, obscured by judgments and finger-pointing.

And so, too, the crime got erased, slowly scrubbed of its significance and power. Uninvestigated. Unresolved.

But Rachel needed to be careful about what she said to her daughter—so quickly absorbed by fascinations and fantasies—about the Faradays. “My lower back is killing me. And I also feel like you haven’t set up the bookshelves yet. You promised to do it yesterday.”

Lucy rolled her eyes. “Okay, okay.” She started to pass into the living room but paused in the doorway, running a hand along the casing trim carved with ornate rosettes.

“It’s lonely,” she said abruptly. She glanced back at her mother, and for a second she looked like someone else.

Someone much older. “That’s what it feels like. ”

She went out, humming.