The Never List

off with him when he left. She came back two years later with her tail between her legs. Never talks about those days. She says it’s none of anyone’s business. Later she married Roy Watson, who became the pastor at that church about ten years ago. People say she pushed him to go to seminary school. She always wanted to be a preacher’s wife, I guess. Now she thinks she rules the roost of this town.”
    Not seeing how the town gossip was getting me any further, I tried to redirect the conversation back to Sylvia.
    “I went by Sylvia’s house today. There was no one there—doesn’t look like anyone has been home for some time.” I didn’t want to admit I’d riffled through her mailbox, and felt a blush of shame creeping up my neck.
    “Come to think of it,” he said, “I can’t remember when I last saw her. She keeps to herself, but usually comes in to the diner just about now, when I’m picking Val up. Maybe comes in once or twice a week.”
    “Does she have a job? Anyone else I could check in with?” I felt I was hitting a dead end.
    “Not that I know of. Not around here anyway. Guess I’m not as helpful as I thought I’d be.”
    “What about her family? Did she ever talk about them?” I wasn’t used to asking all these questions. The last thing I ever wanted to do was engage people more; usually I wanted interactions to end as quickly as possible. Even my voice sounded strange to me, foreign, remote, like a bad recording of the way I imagined it in my head. I noticed I almost couldn’t formulate the right lilt at the end of a question.
    “No, that was the strange part too. If I had to guess, I’d say she was running away from something down there, but she never really talked about it. She was from somewhere around Selma, Alabama. Town with a history. Maybe she just wanted out of there.”
    It was on the drive back under the darkening sky that it hit me. I nearly veered off the road. New Orleans. Where Val’s friend had moved. It reminded me of something in Jack’s letter. Ignoring the fact that the sun was fading over the horizon, I pulled over onto the shoulder and hit my hazards.
    My heart pounding, I pulled the letter out of my bag. The lake. The lake was Lake Pontchartrain. I reread the line. It still made no sense to me, but I knew now it had to be that lake, and if so, then it meant only one thing: this was part of Tracy’s story.
    I went through the whole letter again. I needed Tracy. I needed her to tell me how this fit in with her past, to tell me what it meant. Somehow I would have to make her talk to me, maybe even meet me face to face, to think with me to see if there was meaning in this madman’s words. To figure out if he was leading us somewhere, and whether he meant to or not.

CHAPTER 7
    Tracy’s story had come out slowly over the years, a little here, a little there. I pieced it together out of small details that slipped out, mostly when she was feeling particularly low, desperate and hopeless down there in the cellar. For the most part, she tried to keep her life locked away from us. Her head was a private area where she could escape from him and from us too, I suppose. She was paranoid about each delicate shred of information she told us being used by Jack to manipulate her mind. That was their battle.
    He always had Jennifer to use against me, so he didn’t need to rely on my memories, at least not while she was alive. I suppose that was why at the time I didn’t understand how high the stakes were for Tracy, how critical it was for her to keep her previous life as a sacred place. It was a mistake that would cost me dearly inthose later months of captivity. Nevertheless, we spent so many countless hours together, it was impossible not to get a pretty vivid picture of her life on the outside.
    Tracy was born to an eighteen-year-old high school dropout in New Orleans. Her mother was a heroin addict, with all the pain and suffering and horror that comes along with it. Men wandered in and out of their filthy apartment on the first floor of a Creole townhouse on Elysian Fields, one that looked like a crumbling cake that had hardened with age on somebody’s countertop.
    When Tracy was five her little brother, Ben, was born right in the apartment. Tracy watched his birth from the corner and saw her mother take a massive hit of heroin during labor, an anesthetic so powerful that she barely moved as Ben’s head emerged. It was a miracle the child survived, and an even