Page 12 of What Happened to Lucy Vale
“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 Ifeelis 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 andfinger-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 alsofeellike 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.
Nine
We
We all knew someone who claimed to know something about what really happened to Nina Faraday. Rumors grew fast in our corner of Indiana, and in the sixteen years since Nina Faraday had disappeared, we’d had an infestation.
Back then, everyone had an opinion. We had cousins who’d been in school with Nina. Aunts who’d babysat Nina when she was only a few years old, when Lydia Faraday was still working periodic night shifts at the hospital in Clarion. Neighbors who’d worked the night shift with Lydia remembered mostly that she was a good RN, but tough and someone who kept to herself. Nate Stern’s cousin had done gymnastics with Nina. Alyssa Hobbes’s mom had sung in church choir with Lydia. It was a known thing that Mr. Rowe, who taught us social studies and coached the girls’ JV soccer team, had dated Nina Faraday back in middle school. The tragic association, we imagined, clung heavily to him even now; we often speculated that regret for his early love kept him single and living with his mom, allegedly in the basement of her house.
Over the years, we’d heard murmurs that the Faradays had been deep into drugs. That Lydia Faraday had trafficked narcotics for an ex-boyfriend and was entangled with Mexican cartels. We’d heard that Nina Faraday had a history of making up stories and had, as a littlegirl, claimed variously that her father was a spy, a military pilot, and a member of the Italian Mafia.
We knew that she’d been well liked. Popular. Too popular, some people said. According to rumors, Nina had been cheating on her boyfriend, Tommy Swift, in the months before she vanished, possibly with a much older man, possibly with a handful of them—any one of whom could have abducted her.
Then there were the whispers—insidious, peripheral, like the hissing of a snake camouflaged inside the green—that Tommy Swift might have known more than he’d said.
The facts of the case were few and unstable. Even the facts deteriorated over time, molting like radioactive particles into new uncertainties. Nina Faraday had stayed at school late the day she disappeared. She was seen walking to her car, which was parked just outside Aquatics, at around seven o’clock.
Woody Topornycky, Nick’s uncle, had actually been the one to spot her. We’d long speculated that this last encounter, the burden of it, was part of why he was always in and out of jail, sometimes for using, sometimes for brawling or selling or driving drunk. Granted, he was already pretty tapped when he was in high school, and his memories of that evening were colored by an OxyContin and marijuana haze. In the past, he’d insisted that the coyotes in the woods were microchipped by the government and spying for a capitalist cabal of unnamed powers. By the time we were old enough to cross the street when we saw him, Woody was telling anyone who listened that he’d been abducted by aliens, not once but twice, as punishment for his knowledge that they were behind Nina’s disappearance. For years he claimed to have seen strange flashing lights descending behind the building not long after Nina arrived. Whatever he’d seen or imagined that night, it had scared him enough to run his first solid mile since getting booted from the football team.
At around seven thirty, Nina had texted her mother that she was heading home. Lydia Faraday returned to the house just after eighto’clock and found her daughter missing. Sometime in that half hour, Nina had presumably packed her gym bag and stepped outside again—to meet someone, go somewhere, do something—and never returned. The final cryptic text from her cell phone, sent to Tommy Swift, came from somewhere out near the entrance to the state park. It read simply:I know you want me out of your life. I’m leaving for a while. Don’t look for me.
Over the years, there had been sporadic sightings of Nina Faraday. Once, when we were still in elementary school, a girl turned up in an Oregon police station claiming to be Nina, and we remembered the news sweeping like a current across our awareness. For days, no one talked about anything else.
But in the end, it turned out she was just another runaway, a heroin addict trying to escape an abusive boyfriend, start over with a new identity. Why not Nina’s? After all, everyone was looking for her. Everyone wanted Nina to come home.
But she had not, not so far.
Woody Topornycky wasn’t the only one with a crazy theory about what had happened to Nina the night she disappeared. Over the years, there had been as many theories as there were idle nights to cook them up, and dozens of investigative leads pursued and then unraveled. A rival swimmer from Jalliscoe was briefly suspected in her disappearance. A drifter who’d settled on the creepy commune where Olivia Howard and her parents lived was brought in for questioning after he claimed to have seen Nina hitchhiking on State Road 44. But in the end, the police decided he was just lonely or looking for attention. Some people thought Nina had been taken by a cartel. Nina’s friends suggested that she’d been involved with a married man who was never identified. Others thought that Nina Faraday had been murdered by her overprotective mother.
They figured thatguiltwas enough to explain Lydia’s suicide.
A little more than a year after Nina’s disappearance, Lydia’s body was pulled down from an apple tree in the front yard. It had been discoveredhanging by one of her neighbors. Lydia had left no note. Only clues. Deteriorating mental health. Wild accusations against Tommy Swift, and Coach Steeler, and the rest of the swim team. A lawsuit that would never be filed. Bottles of liquor under the sink. Overflowing trash cans in the kitchen. Nina’s room pristine, untouched.
After that, the doors of the Faraday House had been permanently locked, festooned withNo Trespassingsigns. For as long as we’d been alive, the Faraday House had been uninhabited. Off limits, except to squatters and the occasional ghost hunter, arriving to scale the gates and try to record proof of malevolence for their YouTube channel.
