Find Me Gone Read online

  Dedication

  For LJ

  Epigraph

  I am not one and simple, but complex and many.

  —Virginia Woolf, The Waves

  In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was going to get out again.

  —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  I: Agatha Gone Baby Gone

  Once Upon a Time in Belgium

  Little White Dress

  If I Were a Boy

  Losing My Religion

  A Flying Start

  Damned Editors

  Visiting Agatha

  A Belgian Dungeon

  Killjoy

  I Won’t Bite

  SH

  The Speed of Light

  100% Love, 0% Calories

  Freedom

  Ghost

  Now You See Me

  Baby of Mine

  One More Thing

  Take On Me

  The Tender Trap

  It’s Oh So Quiet

  Blue Monday

  There She Goes

  Eternal Flame

  Handicap

  The Lady Vanishes

  II: Barbara Don’t Look Back

  The White March

  Brief Encounter

  Visiting Barbara

  Sinners All

  Walk the Line

  Damned Publishers

  Raft

  Sign Your Name

  Boom Boom Room

  Uninvited

  In the Name of the Father

  The Hurt Locker

  Mad River

  A Convenient Truth

  Mockingbird

  It Takes Two

  Square One

  Wonderwall

  Home

  III: Virginia Happy Birthday, William!

  Spotless Mind

  Visiting Virginia

  I Don’t Know What I Can Save You From

  Memory Foam

  Stowaway

  Let Us Pray

  Blood Feast

  Swimmer

  One Trick Pony

  The Accidental Tourist

  Frozen

  Magnificent

  Just a Jacket

  Secrets and Lies

  Suicide Is Painless

  Oh Boy

  Great Expectations

  Ever After

  This Was My Body

  Brambler

  Kick

  Like a VirgiN

  Morning After

  There

  IV: Sophie Bachte-Maria-Leerne, 2015

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  Nobody knows.

  The woods are deep and dark. I run between the trees, stumble over roots, twigs snapping underfoot. Faster, faster still. The air is cold, the silent water flashes past.

  I should have held her tight and never let go. As she slept beside me, her breath on my skin, I should have told her nothing means more than the scent hidden in the hollow of her neck, the scent of close as can be. And then that other, even sweeter, forbidden scent.

  A rustling behind me. I glance back. I cannot see him but I can almost feel his hands on me. He must be somewhere among the tree trunks, every one the same. Where is the house? Shouldn’t there be a house somewhere with a door that swings open, a friendly face, someone who can help? I don’t know which way to turn.

  Branches clutch at my party dress, claw at tattered lace. Shreds heavy with dirt, water, blood. I think of warm rooms, beds piled with cushions, the pink blanket we snuggled under. Our little nest, safe from all the others. Far from any danger. A trickle of blood on her delicate skin.

  I trip and slam facedown in the dirt. A throbbing cheek, a bloody tooth. Footsteps thud closer. Keep still, stay small, don’t breathe. If only I could disappear. Dive beneath the leaves and never come up. Climb the highest tree and never come down. Sink into the waves and never come back.

  Her face, so beautiful, so brittle. The taste of bitter earth. Footsteps closing in on me, I know I can’t escape. My feet are slow, my mind is tired. I think about her safe embrace as my voice urges soundless, helpless: “Come find me. I need you. Soon it will be too late.”

  I

  Agatha

  Gone Baby Gone

  New York, 2014

  This is the way. More a lurch sideways than a bold step forward, but it’s a start. Hannah trudges up the stairs of the run-down New York warehouse, halter top clingy with sweat, cutoff jeans sticking to her thighs. Every step of the climb, her feet sink into the soft, stringy wood. It’s like the whole place is melting. Now and then she stops and leans against a wall before cursing the stale air and hauling another box up to the fourth floor.

  Get away. That was the whole idea. Away from the It girls and their perfect parties, the terminally smug players, the barflies and wallflowers, the DJs with their loved-up teen groupies. A brand-new start, no frills. The glamorous life has had its day. This is now, Hannah thinks: an empty room, twelve feet by twenty on the wrong side of the river. So real.

  It’s late August and New York is simmering. The apartment has no air-conditioning and tepid smog drifts in through the open window. She lugs the last box through the door of her humble abode and wanders over to the kitchen or what passes for one: a sink, a fridge, and a microwave. She fills a tumbler with cold water and gulps it down. Once-in-a-lifetime deal, the broker had said. A steal compared to the upgraded properties down the street. Properties without leaky faucets, cracked floors, and weeping walls, she now understands. But Hannah was sold as soon as she saw the windows. Typical Bushwick windows: a mosaic of little square panes set in black iron frames overlooking the factories, sheds, and workshops that make up much of the neighborhood.

  The grit and grime of Bushwick, a district on the edge of Brooklyn. Up-and-coming, so they said, a mere twelve minutes on the L train from the spiffy streets of Greenwich Village and the life she has left behind. Hannah crouches in a corner, elbows on thighs, toes spread on sweating concrete. Compact, a girl of almost thirty with a mess of blond hair and a faceful of freckles. From this angle it looks pretty spacious, she thinks to herself. Who’s she trying to kid? It’s not a fraction of the airy apartment she called home only two weeks ago. Everything’s different now. Empty.

  Not voguishly empty like her old lounge on Cornelia Street, the sleek brand of minimalism the glossies fall over themselves to feature. A room so understated it screamed Quality, Luxury, Style. No, she has taken it into her head to inhabit this tragic void, to crouch on a concrete floor with cracks that skitter away in every direction.

  I need a sofa, Hannah thinks. A sofa, a table, and a chair or two. She catches sight of herself in the mirror propped against the wall: wrists clamped under her chin, alert, a rabbit in a hole, safe for now but so far removed from everything that once felt good. The phone rings and she jumps.

  “Hannah?” It’s Bee, of course. “Hannah, are you there?” A tense voice from her recent past, the Manhattan life she gave up or, as her friends say, chucked away. Hannah knows exactly what’s coming: pressure sweetly but insistently applied. Just leave me the fuck alone, she wants to say. But that’s not who she is.

  “Hear me out, Hannah. I don’t know what’s gotten into you but I want you to come this evening. It’s the best party I’ve been working on in years: high profile, huge sponsors, A-listers. I need you to be there. I invited the friends and everyone’s coming. They are dying to see you, Hannah, to see how you are. We m
iss you terribly.”

  It’s classic Bee: always on the brink of catharsis, tending her little flock. But Hannah knows: Bee needs the flock more than it needs her. She’s constantly rubbing layers of varnish on her perfect family. Hannah moving to Brooklyn is an unfortunate scratch that must be repaired—but it never will. Hannah stares in silence till the cracks in the concrete morph into a herd of elephants, trunks clumsily strung together.

  “Hannah, he just doesn’t get it. He’s in shock.”

  “I’m not in the mood for talking, Bee. This is how it is. I’m here, he wants me back. Point taken.”

  “Hannah doll, I’m the last person to leap to Boy’s defense, but he’s going mad. You took your things and didn’t say a word, what is the guy to think? He wants to see you. He cares about you, we all do. You needed a change, I get that, but do you really have to chuck it all away? You can’t just wall yourself in like some crackpot recluse and forget about your friends. For God’s sake, Hannah, what’s the plan?”

  The plan, there always needs to be a plan. The thought of defending her plan for the hundredth time makes her sick.

  “Are you listening, Hannah? Okay, so you’re going through a rough time. We all know about the horrible thing that happened. But babe, I care about you and I need you to think what’s truly best for you. Think of yourself, Hannah.”

  Isn’t that what she is doing? Thinking of herself for once? The gray herd in the floor dissolves into elephant gunk. She squeezes her eyes shut and hears her voice say: “Okay, Bee, you win. I’ll be there.”

  “Attagirl! It will be spectacular. Fantastic. See you soonest.”

  The knot in Hannah’s stomach tightens.

  Once Upon a Time in Belgium

  Bachte-Maria-Leerne, 1996

  They have never seen the cave before, though they often come to the woods to play. It burrows into the hillside, hidden away among the undergrowth.

  “No! Me first! We agreed!”

  Cheeks flushed from running, Sophie fixes Hannah with an indignant glare. A sulky girl in a red T-shirt and dungarees, her hair scraped into pigtails. Hannah has told her so many times she’s lost count: Those pigtails have got to go. Not that it makes any difference. Sophie does whatever she wants and now she is stamping her foot on the ground.

  Hannah shrugs. “Okay then, you first. See if I care.”

  Sophie marches over and peers into the black mouth of the cave. Feeling her way along the damp rock with one hand, she edges inside. Chin up, back to the wall, a miniature special agent Dana Scully caught up in her very own X-File. Hannah can’t help laughing. All this fuss about a hole in the rock. Alien life-forms have better places to hang out than a Belgian wood. Sophie looks back: Shhh! Then she disappears into the dark and everything goes quiet.

  Hannah leans her tall slender frame against a tree and ruffles her hair, bleached almost white by the summer sun. She looks much older than Sophie, but there is only a year between them. Hannah is twelve and Sophie still eleven, though the wild and willful way she acts sometimes you’d swear she was only nine.

  Cradling their penknife in her hand, Hannah opens the blade and clicks it shut, as her eyes find the bark where they carved their initials. Last summer, Sophie brought the penknife to Hannah’s house as a token of their friendship. At first, Hannah had been shocked, then Sophie explained how all the boys cherish their knives, how she had read about it in her books, so why shouldn’t girls as well?

  The penknife was in fact a pretty thing: shiny with a gracious black antelope painted on the handle. As Hannah folded her hand around it she suddenly sensed a mysterious sort of power; as she clicked the blade out of its sheath she felt a spark, a strength, right there, within her reach.

  From then on the knife switched from Hannah’s pocket to Sophie’s and back again: a knife to share, their secret weapon. Carrying it around felt exciting and adventurous and although they never talked about it, they each knew the other felt exactly the same way.

  Now Hannah hardly ever thinks about the knife anymore. The whole idea seems silly, awkward even. And who knows what Sophie feels these days? She pushes it back in her pocket, zips her brand-new jacket up to her chin, and looks around. The sun has gone and a chill is descending. She’d rather not be here at all. There was a party at The Sloop, the last before the end of the school holidays, but Sophie insisted they come to the woods. What’s keeping her? Dark clouds close in above the treetops. Oh great, now her new jacket will get wet. She picks her way through the bushes to the entrance of the cave.

  “Come on, Sophie,” she yells. “It’s going to rain.”

  The first drops tap her on the shoulder. A sudden gust of wind sends the sorriest leaves spinning from their branches.

  “Sophie? It’s raining. Get a move on.” Not a sound. Only the wind.

  “That’s it! I’m coming to get you.”

  Reluctantly, Hannah ventures into the shadows, trips over a stone, and steadies herself against the slick wall. The cave is deeper than she thought, growing darker with every step. No sign of Sophie. Up ahead she spots another opening, smaller but just wide enough for a young girl. She hesitates, glances back toward the mouth of the cave, a fading patch of light. Reaching the opening, she wriggles out of her brand-new jacket and squeezes through the gap, brushing the brown streaks from her top before putting her jacket back on.

  “Sophie?”

  No answer, only more trees. The rain is falling steadily now. At the edge of her vision a shadow flits beneath the branches.

  “Sophie!”

  Hannah hears rustling and walks toward the sound, feels her anger rising. Her new jacket is already wet. Much more of this and she won’t be able to show it off at school; the fabric will wrinkle and it will barely be recognizable as the prized possession she saved up for months to buy.

  “For God’s sake, Sophie!”

  Raindrops fall thick and fast. Hannah runs past trees and under branches, pushes her way through the bushes. The woods seem vast now, the houses of the village more distant than ever. She could scream and no one would hear. Suddenly Hannah thinks of the missing children, the four young girls the whole country has been searching for all summer.

  She tries not to listen when her parents talk about the girls: It feels awkward, wrong, a horrible secret she’s not supposed to be in on. But what if it’s real? What if Sophie has been abducted or is lying somewhere among the fallen leaves, wounded and unconscious? What if she wants to cry for help but can’t? What if she never comes back? Hannah feels a stab of panic deep inside.

  “Sophie!”

  A crow caws in reply. Then a scream pierces the air and a shape shoots through the leaves. Before Hannah can spin around, a sudden force hits her from behind, sends her sprawling. A figure looms over her, face streaked with brown, hands caked in mud. A wild-eyed warrior who has been crawling through the dirt, who gives a triumphant laugh and yells, “Scared, eh? Ha ha! Boy were you ever scared!”

  “Damn it, Sophie!” Hannah gets up and shakes her clothes, brushing dirt and rotting leaves from her jacket with firm strokes. To Sophie, every stroke feels like a slap in the face. She sinks to the ground and squats motionless, a pose Hannah knows all too well: eyes blank, lips sealed, frozen. Wild and willful one moment, fragile the next. Hannah melts inside. “You really had me worried, Sophie,” she whispers, laying a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Don’t do that again, promise?”

  Sophie shakes her head so hard that her pigtails brush against her cheeks. She opens her arms and Hannah surrenders to her warmth, to the perfect fit of two small bodies. Softly, Sophie runs a finger down the bridge of Hannah’s nose.

  The rain begins to ease off. The woods have shrunk to normal size and the houses are peeping through the trees again. Hannah takes off her jacket and holds it above their heads. Untouched by the raindrops, the girls laugh and together they walk back through the drizzle, out of the sodden wilderness toward the broad lane lined with houses and the safe smell of freshly mown lawns.
r />   Little White Dress

  New York, 2014

  An extravagant embrace, as if she hasn’t seen Hannah in years.

  “Welcome, darling,” Bee coos, clearly high as a kite and channeling every society hostess since time began. Queen Bee to her friends and her professional coterie: thrower of parties, outré fashion icon, incidental dealer, peacekeeper, and patron saint of gay clubbers. Tonight she’s a flurry of feathers and pink chiffon, a plunging neckline and thigh-length split showcasing a brazen lack of lingerie. Bronzed skin oiled and shimmering, tacky tiara twinkling atop a jet-black wig. A flamingo, towering above the crowd on stilt-like legs and killer stilettos.

  Top heavy, thinks Hannah and pictures Bee taking one careless step, teetering on those impossible heels and then . . . boom. Just like the toy soldiers she used to play with. Pretty men all in a row, a shiver of delight as they fell at the flick of a finger . . . boom, boom, boom. But Bee never wavers. At least never in public.

  “I’m so-o-o glad you came!”

  I can still make a run for it, Hannah thinks but instead she stays put and does her best to smile, demure in her white cotton dress, narrow ribbon at the waist, hemline just above the knee. Salvaged from a Brooklyn thrift store, the kind of dress worn only by Bushwick hipster chicks and seven-year-olds on Sunday visits to Grandma’s. By far the most comfortable thing she’s worn in years but here, surrounded by fashionistas in spray-on designer outfits, she feels uneasy and out of place, a wayward communicant.

  Bee moves through the crowd toward her sporting a professional, almost violent smile. Hannah knows it all too well: the toothpaste selling in your face over the top aggressive upward jerk of the lips that seems mandatory in LaLaLand but only makes her think of angry monkeys and hissing cats. When Bee stands before her, the violent smile suddenly softens. She looks down at Hannah from her stilts, shakes her head in a mixture of bewilderment and relief, gently puts her soft manicured hands around Hannah’s shoulders, and observes her tenderly.