Now, as she neared the double doors of the bus station, she slowed. Help wanted ads, business cards, and what seemed like a hundred missing-kid flyers covered a bulletin board next to the door—row after row of innocent, smiling faces lined up like faded yearbook photos. She’d always hated those flyers: the word MISSING in all caps knocking you between the eyes, the grainy photos taken on happier days before the kids were abducted, when everyone was still blissfully unaware that they’d be stolen from their families someday. The flyers were plastered all over Staten Island, inside the grocery stores and post offices, outside the bowling alleys and movie theaters, on the mailboxes and telephone poles. Something cold and hard tightened in her chest. Would her twin sister’s face be on one of those damn flyers too? And where were all those poor, innocent kids? What horrible things had they endured? Were they dead? Still suffering? Crying and terrified, wondering why their parents, the people who’d promised to love and protect them forever, hadn’t saved them yet? She couldn’t imagine a worse fate.
Everyone said it was no surprise that so many kids went missing on Staten Island. After all, it was New York City’s dumping ground; it’d be easy for someone like Cropsey to hide the bodies there. The “dumping,” as they called it, had started back in the 1800s, when the city abandoned people with contagious diseases on the island—thousands of poor souls with yellow fever, typhus, cholera, and smallpox. Later, the city dumped tuberculosis patients at the Seaview Hospital; the destitute, blind, deaf, crippled, and senile at the Farm Colony; and the mentally retarded at Willowbrook State School. The mob dumped bodies in the forests and wetlands. The city dumped tons of garbage at Fresh Kills, which had once been a tidal marsh full of plants and frogs and fish, but now teemed with rats and feral dogs. Maybe the cops should look there for the missing kids.
Just then a woman in a plaid coat came into the station, bringing with her a blast of cold air that swept through the waiting area and stirred the “MISSING” flyers like the hands of ghosts. The woman hurried into the room, bumped into Sage’s shoulder, and, without a word of apology, kept going.
Jarred back to the here and now, Sage turned away from the flyers, pushed the station door open with more force than necessary, and went outside into the colorless light of winter. She lit a cigarette and took a long drag. Heather and Dawn had been right about Noah. What if they were right about Cropsey too? What if he really had kidnapped Rosemary? She took another hard drag of her cigarette and started along the sidewalk, telling herself to stop being ridiculous. An escaped mental patient with a hook for a hand or a razor-sharp ax was not hunting children and dragging them back to the tunnels beneath the ruins of the old tuberculosis hospital to sacrifice them for Satan. It was just easier to believe in the boogeyman than to acknowledge that there were so many evil people in the world.
But if Alan was telling the truth about Rosemary being safe and cared for in Willowbrook for the past six years, why was she missing? How had she gotten away from the doctors and nurses who were supposed to be watching over her? Had Sage discovered Rosemary was still alive only to lose her all over again? She’d already lost enough people she loved.
Digging in her jacket pocket for the bus token, she clasped it tight in one hand and walked toward gate number eight, where the bus to Willowbrook was scheduled to arrive any minute. If she could just stop the hammering in her head and the roiling in her stomach, maybe she could think straight. The most important thing right now was figuring out the best way to find Rosemary. Not being mad at her friends and her boyfriend—make that ex-boyfriend—not feeling sorry for herself, not worrying about a mass murderer who didn’t exist. She needed her wits about her so she could focus on what to do when she got to Willowbrook. Hopefully the search party would let her help in some way. It might have been six years since she’d seen Rosemary, but she still knew her sister better than anyone. Silly things and vague ideas that no one else could see or understand terrified Rosemary; it was perfectly possible that someone or something at Willowbrook had frightened her and she’d gone into hiding. Maybe if she saw Sage looking for her or heard her calling her name, she’d come out. If she was hiding. All Sage knew for sure was that she would call her sister’s name until her voice grew hoarse, until those three syllables came out cracked in despair, until the last nook and cranny had been searched and the last rock overturned.
Near the corner of the station, a homeless man in a frayed army jacket sat huddled beneath a blanket on the trash-littered sidewalk, his long, greasy hair hanging from beneath a worn Yankees cap. A cardboard sign beside him read: DISABLED VIETNAM VET, PLEASE HELP. He looked up at Sage with sad brown eyes, like wet marbles sunken in his bearded face, and held up an empty soup can.
“Spare some coins for a wounded veteran?” he said.
She could hear Alan’s voice in her head, warning her not to give money to the homeless because they’d just use it to buy drugs and booze, especially those “baby killers” who’d fought in Vietnam. But she figured the homeless had to eat too, and it was unfair for all the veterans to be judged by the actions of a few, so she chose to imagine them using what she could spare to buy a McDonald’s cheeseburger or an apple pie. She put her cigarette in her mouth, searched her jacket pocket for the change from her bus tokens, and dropped it in the veteran’s can. It wasn’t much, but it would help.
“Bless you, miss,” he said, smiling to reveal a line of crooked teeth.
She nodded once and moved on, her shoulders hunched against the cold. Along with everything else, it had started to snow, and she was wearing a short suede jacket and a corduroy miniskirt with bare legs and wooden clogs. Not the wisest choice for today, but she hadn’t been thinking about the weather. Plus, she’d told Alan she was going to the mall with her friends. Of course, if he’d actually been paying attention, he would have realized she hadn’t put on makeup or showered. Everyone knew she wouldn’t be caught dead in public without clean hair and mascara. Everyone who cared, at least. She supposed she should have been thankful he hadn’t noticed—if he’d had any inkling of where she was going, he might have tried to stop her. Or maybe not. It was hard to tell. If it didn’t involve hunting, a bottle of whiskey, or watching sports, he didn’t care much about anything, especially not her. She could stay out all night as long as the cops didn’t bring her home. Alan only cared when her life inconvenienced him directly—like last October, when the school principal caught her smoking in the girls’ room and he had to leave his job at the Fresh Kills landfill to come get her. Then he’d screamed and yelled and threatened to lock her in her bedroom for a week—or a month, or however long it took her to learn her lesson. It was only a threat, of course. Following through would have taken too much effort.
Sometimes it was hard to tell which one of them was more miserable, her or Alan. She never understood what her mother saw in him. She’d dated other men after her boss had dumped her—men with good jobs and decent personalities—but maybe Alan had been the only one willing to marry someone with two kids. Except the joke was on him. The mother and her daughters had been a package deal, but now the prize was gone, and he was stuck with the part of the package he never wanted. Sage had learned a long time ago, even before her mother died in that drunken car crash, that she’d never please Alan. Running away had entered her mind so many times she’d lost count. But where would she go? No close relatives lived nearby. No friends had room to spare. Heather shared a bedroom with four sisters in a two-bedroom apartment; Dawn’s parents weren’t any better than Alan, drinking their money away and leaving Dawn and her little brother to fend for themselves. Not that any of them would have taken in another mouth to feed, anyway. Her maternal grandparents had passed away years ago, and her mother had stopped speaking to her only sister after that. And Sage had no idea whether her aunt was even alive, let alone where she lived. When she and Noah were still together, she might have been able to go to his house, except that his mom thought her little boy was a perfect angel who helped old ladies across the road and was saving himself for marriage. Hell would freeze over before she’d let his girlfriend sleep under the same roof. Make that ex-girlfriend.