Page 26 of Trapper Road

“What’s her routine? Does she shower in the morning? Put on makeup? Pick out outfits?”

Patty’s lips twitch in something that might be the long-vanished ghost of a smile. “Lord, yes. Forty-five minutes in the shower, another thirty on her hair. She coordinates all those little things, you know? Hair ties and sunglasses and shoes and jewelry. Always looks like Vogue magazine is going to take her picture that day.”

I’ve seen the pictures, of course—thousands of selfies, alone and in groups. Juliette adores Instagram and WhatsApp and TikTok. There’s a whole box of files from the FBI of her social media postings. I’ve skimmed through it, but I plan on assigning both Vee and Connor to that job too. Connor will have one perspective, Vee a very different one.

“Did she have breakfast?”

“Just orange juice,” Patty says.

“Did she get calls or texts that morning?”

Patty rolls her eyes. “Texts, lord, all the time,” The sound she makes is a memory of a laugh. “Probably dozens before she left the house.”

“Who left first?”

Patty halts briefly, this is an unexpected question. “Well, Cliff did, for work. But Juliette left right after, probably five minutes or so later.”

“On foot? Bike? Did she have someone drive her?”

“Oh, on foot. She was just headed to the end of the street to meet up with her two friends.”

So far, none of this seems different from what I’d read in the file. A recording, playing on without glitches.

Then she says, “I was drying up the dishes. I walked over to the screen door. She was walking down the street, and she met up with Mandy and Willa. Don’t know why I went to look. I just did.”

“Did anything look wrong to you?” I ask her. “Were they looking at something? Was someone acting off?”

She shakes her head. “No. Just like every other day. They ran off around the corner. Everybody came home but Juliette.”

She’s misty-eyed for a moment, and I know she’s imagining that girl turning the corner at the end of the block, smiling, bouncing back into her life like she never left it. It’s the fantasy that keeps her going.

And I have to break it. “What time did you start to worry? What made you think you should check on her?”

“I sent her a text around four because I needed her to pick up my medications,” Patty says. “But she shoulda been home by seven at the latest, and she wasn’t, so I started calling her friends. Mandy and Willa both said the same thing — she’d ditched them and gone off with some guy she knew around 5:30. That’s the last they’d seen her.”

Just then, a tentative knock sounds on the front door, and I wince, worried it might be Connor or Vee. Cliff gets up to answer it and returns to the kitchen with a girl trailing behind him. She’s about fifteen or sixteen, white, with long, glossy black hair that hangs as flat as if she’d ironed it. The kind of hair I’d always envied growing up. She pulls her fingers anxiously through it as she takes in my presence. “Oh,” she says. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know y’all had company—”

“This is Ms. Proctor,” Patty says, and takes the girl’s hand to pull her to a seat at the table. “She’s here to help us find Juliette. Ms. Proctor, this is Mandy Strickland, one of Juliette’s best friends.”

I’ve read her interviews, of course, and I’d been planning on talking to her as soon as I could. It’s serendipitous that she’s arrived here now, exactly when we’d been talking about her. “Hello, Mandy. How are you doing?”

She shrugs, which only emphasizes how slumped her shoulders are. Whatever her personality was before, she seems faded now, even to her clothing — old grey shirt, worn cut-offs, scuffed leather sandals. No jewelry on her hands or wrists. There’s a single gold chain around her neck, but whatever it holds is hidden by the t-shirt’s neckline.

The only thing that stands out is the polish on her fingers and toes, a shimmering green that appears freshly applied. It makes me take a closer look, and I notice then the subtle shading of makeup around her eyes. Whatever look she’s going for, it’s clearly intentional.

Cliff offers the girl a glass of iced tea without asking, and she gulps it thirstily, both hands gripping the glass. “Mandy drops by now and again to check on us.” Patty nods. She rubs a hand on the girl’s shoulder. “Mandy, we were just talking about the day Juliette went missing. Do you mind going through it? What happened?”

Mandy’s finished her convulsive gulping, the ice rattles in the glass as she sets it down quickly and interlaces her fingers. “Well, Juliette met us at the corner just like normal, and we went on down to the skate park for a little while—”

“You, Juliette, and Willa?” I interject.

She nods.

“Do you all skate?” I ask. The skate park’s come up, but I hadn’t seen any references to boards.

“No, none of us do,” she says. “We just like to watch the boys. Mostly boys do it out here. Couple of girls who don’t mind getting bruises and cuts. You know. Sports types.”

“How long did you stay?”

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