Vanishing Girls

“You’re driving?” Parker’s voice inches higher, disbelieving. “You need to pull over. Do me a favor and pull over, okay?”

“I need to find her, Parker.” My voice cracks. My phone beeps at me even more insistently. “I need to help her.”

“Where are you exactly?” he repeats, and his room unfolds in front of me: the old baseball lamp in the shape of a catcher’s mitt casting a warm cone of light on the navy-blue carpet; the rumpled sheets that always smell faintly like pine; the swivel desk chair and the clutter of books and video games and faded T-shirts. I imagine him wriggling into a shirt one-handed, rummaging under the bed for his Surf Siders.

“I’m heading toward Orphan’s Beach,” I say, because it’s the only thing I can think to do. Andre must have a second location, a private place where he brings girls to be photographed. The answer lies along the beach, close to Beamer’s, maybe even inside it. They might have a secondary basement; or maybe I missed a doorway somewhere, or a converted storage shed closer to the water. I need proof.

I have an ever-growing sense that this was all planned, at least initially, by Dara. She intended me to find her phone, and the pictures on it. She was leaving me clues so that I would be able to help her.

It was a cry for help.

“Orphan’s Beach?” On Parker’s end, a door opens and closes with a firm click. Now I see him moving down the hall, navigating by feel, keeping one hand on the wall (papered with faded patterns of ribbons and dried flowers, a design he despises). “Where we went last year on Dara’s birthday? Where we found the lighthouse?”

“Yeah,” I say. “There’s a bar just down the road called . . .” The words turn to dust in my mouth.

Suddenly I know. Images and words flash through my head—the neon Beamer’s sign, cocktail napkins imprinted with a logo of twin headlights, to beam, a sweep of light—and just like that I know exactly where Andre takes his girls, where he has his parties, where he photographed Dara and Sarah Snow, where something terrible happened to Madeline.

“A bar called what?” Parker’s voice sounds distant now, thinner. He’s outside. He’s hurrying across the grass, holding his cell phone to his shoulder with his chin, rifling through his jeans for his keys. “Nick, are you there?”

“Oh my God.” I’m clutching my phone so tightly, my knuckles ache.

Just then my phone cuts out, powering down completely.

“Shit.” Cursing out loud makes me feel better. “Shit, shit, shit.” Then I remember Dara’s phone and feel a surge of hope. Keeping one hand on the wheel, I feel around for it in the cup holder, but come up with nothing but an ancient mass of gum, papered together and stuck to the back of a quarter. I reach over to run a hand along the passenger seat, increasingly desperate. Nothing.

Just then an animal—a raccoon or a possum, it’s too dark to tell—shoots out from the underbrush and freezes, eyes glittering, directly in the path of my wheels. I jerk the wheel hard into the next lane without checking for cars, expecting to feel a hard thump. After a second, I regain control, correcting my steering before I can plunge past the guardrail and straight past the darkened beachfront houses and into the water. When I look in the rearview mirror, I see a dark shape bolt across the road. Safe, then.

Still, I can’t shake loose that spike of panic, the terror of being out of control, of heading over the brink. I must have left Dara’s phone at home when I went inside to look through her room. That means I really am alone. The answers are all there, down on that lonely stretch of beach between Beamer’s and the accident site, where the currents make it deadly to swim: the answers to what happened to Madeline Snow, and what happened to change my sister; the answers to what happened on that night four months ago, when we went sailing off the edge of the earth and into the darkness.

And a small, persistent voice in my head keeps speaking up, begging me to turn back, telling me I’m not ready for the truth.

But I ignore it, and keep going.

Dara

2:02 a.m.

From the outside, the lighthouse looks abandoned. It rises above the construction scaffolding like a finger pointing to the moon. The narrow windows are boarded up with wood bleached a dull gray, and signs declare the whole place off-limits. WARNING, one of them reads, HARD HAT AREA ONLY. But there has been no construction here, not for a long time; even this sign is streaked with salt and warped from weather, graffitied with somebody’s tag.

I should have brought a flashlight.

I don’t remember how to get in—only that there is a way in, a secret door, like a passage to another world.

I circle the beach, slipping a little on the rocks. In the distance, beyond the boulders, I can see Beamer’s lit up, squatting on the shore like a glistening insect, and every so often I hear a car go by on the highway, see a section of beach and stone get lit up by a fast sweep of headlights, though I’m concealed from view by the thick, gnarled hedges of beach grass and pigface that grow up near the divider.

The tide is up. Black mud bubbles up between the stones, and waves foam not four feet from where I stand, forming pools between the rocks whenever they recede. It’s a lonely place, a place no one would think to investigate—and yet, less than a thousand feet down the road the lights and chaos of East Norwalk begin.

I duck underneath the construction scaffolding, running a hand along the curve of the lighthouse, paint splintering under my fingers. The only door is boarded up, like all the windows. Still, I keep circling. I’ve been here before. There must be a way in. Unless . . .