Lucy sighed. “He kind of is, though. He’s never done anything wrong. He’s never even gotten atardy. Ask anyone.”
“Sounds pretty boring,” Rachel said, earning her a wisp of a smile. “Besides, I don’t believe it. Noah’s only human. And humans make mistakes.”
“Yeah.” Lucy sighed. “But some of us make more mistakes than others.” Lucy turned to the window, and for some reason Rachel found herself thinking of Jay Steeler and the way his hands looked touching her naked body. She remembered seeing the skin pouch around his wedding ring and feeling a vague sense of horror. Not because he was married—because he was old.
And yet she still met him again and then called his number over and over after he stopped returning her texts. Desperate to see him again. Desperate to know that it wasn’t amistake. She had even found his address months later and made the drive once all the way from Chicago just to sit paralyzed across the street from his house, debating whether or not to ring the doorbell and confront him.
And all these years later, she still remembered his cell phone number.
Rachel understood now that Noah and Lucy’s brief and intense love was collapsing, that the center of their relationship had caved and they were now spiraling around an inevitable breakup. She ached for her daughter and at the same time felt unaccountably relieved. She couldn’t say why. She’d never seen Noah mistreat Lucy. Still, she suspected that he picked at her, criticized her outfits, her friendship with Akash, the things she posted on social media. And there was something almost disconcerting about his talent and its effects on everyone around him. Even Noah’s parents behaved as if he were a rare plant, an extraordinary natural phenomenon that needed constant placation. Dating him, Lucy had become simply Noah Landry’s girlfriend, her identity reconfigured around its most “important” component.
She wondered if that’s how it had been for Nina Faraday too—and whether she, like Lucy, had been so obviously lonely.
So she waited, she simply waited, for Lucy and Noah to fall apart. In the meantime, she traveled an imaginative line to the past, sifting through volumes of court records related to the Faradays. The county sheriff’s department had applied for two separate search warrants for 88 Lily Lane. They’d searched Woody Topornycky’s vehicle and his father’s farm. They’d presented AT&T with a search warrant for information on Nina’s missing phone. They’d briefly arrested two people, neither of whom Rachel had ever heard of: a local sex offender indicted on charges of statutory rape after lying to a high school field hockey player about his age and a poacher who was spotted with a shovel and a rifle in the state park the morning after Nina Faraday vanished, then bolted when a park employee tried to speak to him. At one point the police evenpetitioned to wiretap the phones of two known drug dealers, all because one of them was spotted on Lily Lane not long before Nina disappeared.
As she traveled through a tide of warrants, Rachel had the distinct sense of a police investigation curiously missing its center, concealing via a storm of activity the silent, obvious question within. It was as if the Rockland County Sheriff’s Department had desperately stretched for something, anything, that would thread Nina’s disappearance to a palatable storyline—a secret affiliation with dangerous criminals, a maniacal drifter, a stranger with a fetish and a fixation. It was a torrent of paper, a dizzying switchback of suspects and investigative maneuvers, exhausting to even read about. It wasn’t true, she thought, that the sheriff’s department hadn’t tried to look for Nina. If anything, they had done too much—and possibly all the wrong things.
Most stories were so simple in the end. Plain, and sad, and simple.
Again and again she returned to what her agent had told her after eighth-grade Lucy had been persuaded by a high school sophomore to send nearly naked pictures.
It’s always the same story with a few modern updates. It always comes down to a boy.
Rachel was sure, in her gut, that Nina’s story began and ended with Tommy Swift.
The question was: How?
Three
We
In October, Woodward announced a Casino Night fundraiser in honor of Mr. Cross, a beloved math teacher who’d been found dead over the summer with a needle in his arm.
We all pitched in to make Casino Night a success, temporarily making peace with the Student Council Mafia and the rest of the Student Leadership shills, and signed up for various committees. We designed graphics and drummed up new raffle items. Made cold calls to local businesses and wrangled donations of food, soda, and prizes.
Event attendance was open to Woodward students and their families. But our volunteers drew from all over. Big Lou, the cashier at the 7-Eleven off Route 12; Mrs. Harbor; and Hunchback Fred, who wasn’t actually a hunchback but did have bad posture, suited up in formal wear to deal cards at the game tables. The new sheriff, Horne, with her hair slicked neatly into a bun, mixed drinks for half the night.
We dared each other to ask her about Lydia Faraday’s case, whether she really thought Lydia might have been murdered.
The cafeteria was dazzlingly remade into a Vegas casino, glowing with green felt and sophomores in shimmering dresses who circulated with plastic martini glasses full of lukewarm pop. Poker tables dotted the hall, with crowds jostling to get into the games or heckle the playersfor bad bets. Mrs. Santiago’s health classroom, STD poster and all, played host to several roulette wheels and even a craps table. The nurse’s office across the hall, guarded strictly by both Vice Principal Edwards and Old McVeigh, was repurposed as a bar. Attendees who’d been properly ID’d and stamped at ticketing could find plastic tables draped with tablecloths, cluttered with donated Jim Beam, Gordon’s gin, and Stoli vodka. We wasted a large portion of the night observing the entrance and trying fruitlessly to plot a way inside. Nick Topornycky and Will Friske, meanwhile, were being coy about whether or not they had beer in the car.
Most of the boys’ swim team had rented tuxes from Angela’s Formal in Housataunick, like they did for the Winters. It didn’t matter that Angela’s Formal hadn’t been properly stocked this early in the season so that many of their jackets were too small, the cummerbunds held together with safety pins or abandoned altogether. We thought they looked amazing.
The girls wore sequins and high heels and showed off legs luminescent and pale from fall hibernation. They wore smoky eye shadow they’d applied in tandem, squinting over YouTube tutorials. Their hair was straight and a little frizzy and smelled of hair dryer static, and they were beautiful. The Strut Girls, including Lucy, dressed up like glamour girls from the 1920s. We side-eyed Lucy, checking her for evidence of embarrassment. A slick of whisper trailed behind her wherever she went. She kept her head high, a smile spackled to her face. We were impressed that she’d come.
It had been only two weeks since we’d all seen her photographs. The scandal had practically exploded county cell phone towers; for at least three days it had swallowed the whole school like a whale taking down a goldfish with hardly a burp. Lucy Vale,perfectLucy Vale, had been keeping secrets from all of us. She’d beenlyingabout what kind of girl she really was—or, at the very least, letting us believe something that wasn’t true, which was almost the same thing.
We noticed she hemmed close to Bailey and that she and Noah were avoiding each other. We thumbed sly jokes about trouble in paradise and felt vaguely vindicated.
Apparently Lucy Vale was not so perfect after all.
The only bummer was the weather. The day before the event, the temperature plummeted, and a queasy mix of rain and sleet presaged the early arrival of winter. Frozen mud skid-marked across the hallway linoleum. The parking lot was sheeted with patchy ice.
This is important.
Because it is very, very possible that Lucy Vale only slipped.
It was nine o’clock and we’d lost most of our money before we saw the SOS from Evie Grant on Discord.
