She waited for the stuffing inside the pillow to finally bring her head to rest, but she continued to sink and sink and sink, farther and farther until she was beyond the pillow, and the bed beneath her. She was drifting down into a place below it all.
Below the floor.
Below the house.
Below the ground.
Into a place of ancient rock and primordial darkness, where pristine water flowed up through slits in the earth’s crust that looked like the petrified gills of some long-extinct sea creature.
The voice behind the door was down there with her. It had never sounded so close.
She was in its realm. Behind the door.
But if you never married Jonah, you never would have had Sadie.
She felt her body settle against a ridge of stone.
Maybe that would have been okay.
Maybe …
Kris never remembered finishing the thought.
In the days that followed, she liked to think that it was not sleep that had stopped her. She had purposely cut that thought short. She knew that what she was thinking was wrong. Because in the light of day, without a pill numbing her mind, she would never even entertain such thoughts.
Not her.
A mother could never think of abandoning her child.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
KRIS SAT STRAIGHT up in bed, her lips attempting to drag air down into her lungs. She sucked in breath after breath, her mind trying to twist itself around the irrational fear that the room was running out of oxygen.
She had been dreaming that she was at the bottom of the lake.
Wait, that wasn’t quite right. She had been deeper than that. She had been below the bottom of the lake, staring up through a jagged hole in its bed to the faint shimmer of the surface far above. But she had been able to breathe down there, or perhaps it just hadn’t been necessary. And then, suddenly, her chest was heaving, her lungs were collapsing. She needed air.
But it was just a dream, and not the first in this house to send her lashing wildly into consciousness, panting and drenched in sweat.
After a minute, the panic dissipated like fog. Kris pulled her damp hair away from her face and leaned back against the headboard. The bedroom was dark save for a shaft of pale moonlight falling in through the window. Outside, the rain appeared to have stopped.
Snatching up her phone from the nightstand, she tapped the screen, waking it. A photo of Kris and Sadie was set as the wallpaper, Sadie on her lap, smiling, Kris hugging her daughter tightly as they rode a gondola to the top of a mountain in Breckenridge. It was from two summers before, and somehow those two years made them both look impossibly young. Hovering over this picture was the time: 11:35 p.m.
“Shit.” Kris hopped off the bed and rushed out of the bedroom.
The walls of the great room were stained with swaths of shadow cast by the lamp on the end table. She must have left it on when she went into the bedroom. Up ahead, to her left, Sadie’s door was open just a crack. The light was off.
Kris tiptoed to the door and gently nudged it open a few more inches. In the faint glow of the night-light, she could see Sadie in her bed, the comforter pulled up to her neck. One hand was outside of the covers and hung limply over the side of the mattress. Her chest rose and fell with steady, peaceful breaths.
Guilt stabbed Kris in the chest like a knife. Rather than wake her mother, Sadie had put herself to bed. She had come downstairs to find Kris passed out in the master bedroom and had brushed her teeth and washed her face and changed into her pajamas before finally crawling into her bed without so much as a kiss on the forehead.
And you fell asleep thinking about what your life would be like if you’d never even had her …
Kris pulled Sadie’s door almost all the way shut. She quietly crept down the hall and into the great room. Through the rain-specked windows, she watched as the last of the storm clouds floated silently by. Their bellies were still an angry gray, but at the edges, the clouds thinned to wisps of moonlit white.
She clicked on the standing lamp beside the fireplace. The two illuminated lamps created intertwining globes of warm light that floated like colliding stars in the shadowy room. She sat down on the hearth and felt the cold stones through the butt of the jeans she had worn to bed.
The house was quiet. Not even the usual creaks and pops of the contracting wood broke the stillness.
This was all she had wanted—peace from the incessant racket of Sadie’s games—but the hush that had fallen over her now felt more like a punishment than a reward. It was not the sound of life at rest. There was a tension to it, a deliberateness, as if something were biding its time, waiting patiently for the perfect moment to shatter the silence.
She wished the rain were still falling or the thunder were rumbling or even that Sadie were up so that this stillness could be broken by the thumping of her footsteps upstairs.
You wished she were gone, the chiding voice continued. Your own daughter. In this town, of all places.
This town. Where girls as equally loved as Sadie vanished.
Kris slipped her phone from her pocket, unlocked the screen, and opened the browser. She paused, unsure of what to type into the search window. Finally she typed: missing girl pacington kansas
Her thumb tapped Go.
The first two search results were a lost and found post about a missing German Shepherd puppy named Gracie, and a tweet from a local high school boy missing his out-of-town girlfriend. But the third result was exactly what Kris both hoped and feared she would find.
Missing Girls–Does Anyone Care?!
It was a post on a local message board, wedged between the much more innocuous announcements of Hope Church Quilting Group Fundraiser and Pothole on 4th Street Needs Repair Now! The missing girls post was dated August 21, 2004. It was a single line:
“Why has no one found out what is happening to our girls?”
It was signed simply V.
There were no responses to V’s post.
Kris scrolled through a few more pages of results, but none of them had anything to do with missing girls in Pacington. She closed her eyes tight, trying to recall the names Hitch had mentioned to her.
Sarah. Sarah was one. What was the last name? It started with “B.”
Bell. Sarah Bell.
Kris typed the name into the search window, along with the name of the town.
She read the first result and her heart sank.
Pacington Girl Found Dead Near Lost Lake
She forced her thumb to tap the link. A page from The Eureka Herald began to load. It was a brief article from September 16, 1998, but as Kris read, she realized it was not about Sarah Bell.
Pacington, KS — The body of a nine-year-old Pacington girl was found Tuesday morning in the woods near Lost Lake. She has been identified as Megan Adamson, daughter of Tera Adamson, of Pacington, and Don Adamson, of Chanute. Local authorities had been searching for the girl since she disappeared from a downtown store around 1:00 on Sunday afternoon. According to Greenwood County Sheriff Jim Conners, it appears the girl wandered into a section of the forest known locally as Blanton’s Pass. “She must have gotten up on the cliffs there and fell onto the rocks below,” said Conners. “She was deceased when we found her.” Conners says there is no reason to suspect foul play. There is also no apparent connection to the disappearance of Sarah Bell in 1992 or that of Ruby Millan in 1989. Both girls lived in Pacington, and both were found dead near Lost Lake.
A search for “Megan Adamson” only resulted in information about her memorial service at Hope Church, and a search for “Ruby Millan” resulted in nothing except the article Kris had already read.