The Silent Girl

Arthur were going to Chinatown.”
    “I’m sure he did. But it was only at the funeral that I finally put it all together. My father and Mark, working together. Without the pendant, I couldn’t prove anything. My dad held all the power, and I knew how easy it would be for him to make me disappear.”
    “So you made yourself disappear.”
    “I didn’t plan it ahead of time. But there I was with my class, walking Boston’s Freedom Trail.” She gave a sad laugh. “And suddenly I thought,
I
want to be free, too! And now is the time to do it. So I slipped away from the teachers. A few blocks later, I started thinking about how to throw everyone off track. I dropped my backpack and ID in an alley. I had enough cash to buy a bus ticket north. I wasn’t sure where I was going, I just knew I had to get away from my father. When I got to Maine, and I stepped off the bus, I suddenly felt like …” She sighed. “Like I’d arrived home.”
    “And you stayed.”
    “I got a job cleaning cabins for tourists. I met my husband, Joe. And that was the biggest gift of my life, finding a man who loves me. Who stands by me, no matter what.” She breathed in deeply and lifted her head. Sat up straight. “Here, I remade my life. Had my children. Together, Joe and I built these cabins. Built the business. I thought I’d be happy, just hiding away here forever.”
    The sound of laughter drifted from the lake where Will and his sister, now dressed in bathing suits, were racing down the pier. They leaped off and their laughter turned to squeals as they plunged into the cold water. Susan rose from her chair and stared at her children, happily splashing in the lake.
    “Samantha’s nine years old. The same age I was when it started. When my father first came into my bedroom.” Susan kept her back turned to Jane, as if she could not bear to let her see her face. “You think you can put the abuse behind you, but you never can. The past is always there, waiting to meet you in your nightmares. It pops up when you least expect it. When you smell gin and cigars. Or hear your bedroom door creak open at night. Even after all these years, he’s still tormenting me. And when Samantha turned nine, the nightmares gotworse, because I saw myself at her age. So innocent, still untouched. I thought of what he did to me, and what he might have done to Laura. And I wondered if there were other girls, other victims I didn’t even know about. But I didn’t know how to bring him down, not all by myself. I didn’t have the courage.”
    Outside, Will and Samantha climbed back onto the pier and stood drying off, laughing. Susan pressed her hand to the screen, as if drawing courage from her children.
    “Then on March thirtieth,” said Susan, “I opened
The Boston Globe.
”
    “You saw Iris Fang’s ad. About the Red Phoenix massacre.”
    “The truth has never been told,”
Susan whispered. “That’s what the ad said. And suddenly I knew I wasn’t alone. That someone else was searching for answers. For justice.” She turned to face Jane. “That’s when I finally got the nerve to call Detective Ingersoll. I knew him because he’d investigated the Red Phoenix massacre. I told him about Laura’s pendant. About my dad and Mark. I told him there might be other missing girls.”
    “So that’s why he started asking questions about the girls,” said Jane. Questions that had put him in danger, because word got back to Patrick that Ingersoll was gathering evidence, linking him not only to vanished girls but also to the Red Phoenix. He would have assumed that Iris Fang was behind it, because she’d placed the ad in the
Globe
. She’d lost both a daughter and a husband. Killing Iris and Ingersoll would eradicate the problem, so Patrick had hired professionals. But the killers had underestimated what they were up against.
    “I was terrified that my father might find me,” said Susan. “I told Detective Ingersoll not to say
anything
that could be traced back to me. He promised that even his own daughter wouldn’t know what he was working on.”
    “He kept his word. We had no inkling that you were the one who hired him. We assumed it was Mrs. Fang.”
    “A few weeks later, he called me. He said we had to meet, and he drove up here. Told me he’d found a pattern. He’d come up with thenames of three girls who might have met me before they vanished. Girls who’d attended the same tennis meet or the same music camp. It turned out
I
was