Page 42 of The Girl Who Was Taken

Art shook his head. “Nope. Just took my statement, asked a few questions. Said they’d get back to me. After three months, I told them I was renting the apartment and moving his stuff. Never heard from them again.”

“I’m still working with the detectives on this. Just making sure we don’t miss anything.” Livia handed him a business card. “If you remember anything else that feels important about Mr. Delevan, give me a call.”

“Will do. I thought he jumped off Points Bridge. Something else going on with him?”

Livia shrugged. “That’s it. We’re just crossing t’s and dotting i’s. Part of the bureaucratic process.”

Art held up Livia’s card as she climbed into her car. “You find out he left any money behind, he still owes me a month.”

Livia started the car. “If I find anything, I’ll make sure you get a check. Thanks for your help.”

CHAPTER 19

Megan McDonald worked at the county courthouse. It was a filing job secured by her father to keep her busy after the abduction. Sitting for long hours in her bedroom, Dr. Mattingly had warned, was unhealthy. But Megan countered, in the quiet of her mind, that filing marriage certificates and lawsuits in a stuffy office for eight hours a day was equally unhealthy. Again, though, like her book—and most things Megan did over the last year—the courthouse job was a way to calm her parents. Placate them and comfort them and make them believe everything would be all right. Her role as a daughter was ironic in this sense. She should be on the receiving end of comfort and consolation. But in this new, strange, post-abduction world, Megan found herself soothing her parents and making things workable so they could continue their lives.

She went to her sessions with Dr. Mattingly, she wrote her book, she did the interviews. She spent her days at her nine-to-five at the courthouse. At home, she listened to the only thing her mother was capable of offering—the whispered voice that gave updates on herbook sales and relayed messages from readers who were touched by Megan’s words. In reality, Megan knew, the main reason her mother periodically opened her door was to make sure Megan was there and safe and had not been taken again. It was becoming an obsessive compulsion Megan wanted to speak to Dr. Mattingly about.

It was too embarrassing for her mother to allow Emerson Bay, and the people who worked under her father, to see that Megan had fallen from stardom, so the filing position at the courthouse was termed aninternship.To prepare her for what, exactly, was never clearly defined. But it was the only sufficient way to explain why a nineteen-year-old girl who was supposed to be studying at Duke University, a girl who was the valedictorian of Emerson Bay High and who had created one of the most successful mentoring programs the state had ever seen, was now weaving through middle-aged women in the back office of the county courthouse stuffing hard-copied documents into filing drawers.

The cafeteria was packed from eleven thirty to two o’clock each workday with county employees, lawyers, reporters, clerks, and herds of citizens who needed to stuff their faces with fried food before their court appearance for speeding or littering or DUI. The cafeteria was a noisy place with long picnic bench tables and orange cafeteria trays. An “intern” for the past eight months and Megan had not once stepped foot in the place. Instead, she spent her lunch hours in her car. She had developed a routine, which so far hadn’t paid dividends. She wasn’t sure yet, exactly, what she was looking for, but the alternative was to do nothing, whichwas no longer acceptable. Not when she believed she was so close.

It took twenty minutes to drive to West Bay, which after factoring in the return trip gave her twenty minutes to watch the sky. Pulling into a new park, one she hadn’t visited before, Megan climbed from her car and leaned against the front bumper. After a few minutes a plane passed overhead on a southwest bearing toward Raleigh-Durham. She watched the image of the plane, the size of it in the sky and the direction it was moving. She listened to its sound. In her mind’s eye, Megan superimposed this image with the ones she remembered from her two weeks in captivity. In the dark cellar where he kept her, she had been able to peek through a splinter in the plywood that covered the window to see the planes as they passed overhead. The small sliver of sky that was visible was usually vacant when Megan scanned it. But occasionally she saw a plane. At night, that slit in the plywood offered stars from which Megan made out constellations. During the day, she waited for those planes to make her feel not so alone. Those planes held people, and when she spotted them she felt like she was still part of their world.

As she watched now, leaning against her car in the park, she thought she was close. She had little to help her triangulate, but the sound of those planes burned in her mind told her the flight pattern she was now watching was the same one she’d seen and heard during her two weeks in that cellar.

She waited twenty minutes, then five minutes more, knowing the extra time spent would make her late for work. But still, she took the extra minutes hoping tohear it. Finally, she climbed into her car. She’d try another spot tomorrow. She was close. Here, the planes were at the correct altitude and bearing. Their engines at the right pitch. All that was missing was the train whistle.

CHAPTER 20

After her second day of ride-alongs, Livia made a quick stop home on Tuesday evening. Kent Chapple had so far dubbed Livia’s time on ride-alongs as “rot week” since her third transport was also of a decaying body that had met with death days before. Today, she and the scene investigators had gone to the home of Gertrude Wilkes, a ninety-year-old woman who police found dead under the covers of her bed. Her body sat for nearly two weeks, they guessed, before the mailman reported the address to authorities when he couldn’t stuff the mailbox any longer. With no family to check on her, the house was bubbling with the smell of death when police opened the door early that morning. By the time Livia arrived with Sanj and Kent, the odor had faded slightly, aided by the cops who had coffee fiercely boiling on the stove and every door and window open wide. Despite their efforts, when Livia entered the elderly woman’s house, she had immediately reached for the VapoRub. Kent simply inhaled deeply as he walked past her.

The autopsy would later prove Mrs. Wilkes had diedpeacefully in her sleep of congestive heart failure, and though no family members were still living to hear this, it comforted Livia that death had come so gently. It was also satisfying that no one besides the morgue crew and police would know this poor woman’s body sat rotting for two weeks simply because no one was left in this world who loved her.

As Livia entered the foyer of her home on Tuesday evening, she unclipped the bobby pin that held her hair in a tight bun and let it fall to her shoulders. She reached for a strand and smelled it.

“Damn,” she said.

Death had a way of permeating things—clothes and shoes were most common. But hair was the worst. Despite the tight bun Maggie Larson had taught her, some part of poor Mrs. Wilkes had come home with Livia. She checked her watch. There was time for a quick shower. As she turned on the water, she hoped Kent Chapple was wrong about the rest of the week. Death rot was getting old in a hurry.

Under the shower, Livia mentally reviewed what she had learned from her search the night before after returning home with Casey Delevan’s files. She read every article he had collected on Nancy Dee, who disappeared from a small Virginia town without a trace and turned up dead six months later. Unlike Gertrude Wilkes, Nancy Dee had not died peacefully in her sleep. And sadly, she had plenty of family around to hear the morbid details. Her body was buried in a shallow grave in the woods and discovered by a roaming dog and its owner.

Livia also read about Paula D’Amato, a Georgia Tech freshman who went missing eight months beforeNancy Dee, and whose whereabouts were still a mystery. Diana Wells, the third girl profiled in Casey Delevan’s drawer, was harder to figure. Some quick Google stalking Monday night told Livia that Diana Wells was a student at Elizabeth City State University. Livia had managed to track down a phone number and, earlier in the day while she was on the way to Gertrude Wilkes’s house, had reached Diana Wells.

Out of the shower and with the smell of death gone from her hair, Livia made the long drive back to Emerson Bay and entered the Starbucks in East Bay. For a place that sold coffee and pastries, it was packed at eight p.m. with kids on laptops plugged into tabletop outlets, students in various modes of study, and couples talking over cappuccinos.

Taking a seat at the bar, Livia gave three women expectant looks when they entered, offering eye contact and a small smile. They each ignored her. A fourth woman walked in with similar searching eyes, scanning the café until her gaze fell on Livia, who held up her hand in a gentle wave. The woman came over as Livia stood up.

“Diana?”

“Yeah. Are you Dr. Cutty?”

“Yes, thanks for meeting me.”

Diana Wells held a confused look on her face, a deep crease forming between her eyebrows. “I guess I was expecting someone older.”

“I just finished my residency. Can I get you a coffee?”

“Yeah, I’ll have a vanilla latte.”

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