Island of Lost Girls - Jennifer McMahon [23]
Rhonda nodded, slipping the retainer back into her mouth, smiling. She and Peter had a secret. A secret that made her feel all tingly and strange, like a walking lightning rod.
JUNE 7, 2006
SO ARE YOUgonna tell me about this Daniel guy, or what? Warren asked. Hed quizzed her about Daniel when they left Laura Lees the day before, but shed put him off, saying she needed time to think. Now here it was the next morning and they were working the phones at Pats. He was sucking down a large hot chocolate and Rhonda had a cup of French roast. Warren had shaved around his goatee and his hair was still damp from a shower.
Not much to tell. Hes Peters father.
So is he the kind of guy who would take a little girl? He cocked his head to the side, waiting for her answer.
No. Its impossible.
Whys that?
He disappeared twelve years ago.
Disappeared?
Yeah. One night he was there, with all of us, and the next morning, he was gone. We all thought hed show up eventually. That hed gone off on a bender or left town to avoid paying back a gambling debt or something, but no one ever heard from him again.
Spooky.
His daughter Lizzy was my best friend. Peters sister. And, um, she disappeared three years later when we were freshmen in high school. Lizzy left for school one morning with just her book bag and was never seen again.
Wait a sec, Warren said. Peters sister disappeared?
Rhonda nodded. Her dad came back for her.
If it was Daniel, why didnt he take Peter too? Warren asked.
No one knows, Rhonda said. She picked up her cup of coffee and drained the last lukewarm sip. Everyone wondered, but no one knows. The police looked but couldnt find either of them. Lizzy was one of those faces you see on milk cartons and in Wal-Marts; one of those parental abductions. Her mom pretty much lost her mind after that.
Rhonda thought of Aggies steady decline: the drinking, the increasingly strange behavior. How she started to play with her hair, pulling out one strand at a time, working at it for hours until she looked like a dog with mange. She got paranoid, accused Clem and Justine of knowing where Daniel was and not telling her. She drank to excess, drove her car into Clem and Justines house, and bit the earlobe off a police officer who was sent to investigate a report of a woman dressed in only her underwear trying to steal avocados at Price Chopper.
Aggie eventually ended up in the state hospital for six months, then went off to her sisters in Maryland. When her sister got burned out, she had Aggie moved into a sort of residential hotel for the mentally ill.
And youre sure it was Lizzys dad who took her? Warren leaned toward Rhonda. His breath smelled sweet and chocolaty and she let herself wonder, for exactly one second, what it might be like to kiss him.
Rhonda nodded.
Positive. Two weeks after she left, we got a postcard. There were a few more, all saying she was doing fine and telling about adventures she was having with Daniel. The last one was from San Francisco. I was a junior in high school then. The card just said she was taking singing lessons, which was really weird. Rhonda closed her eyes, tried to remember the sound of Lizzys voice and couldnt. What she remembered instead was her friends habit of singing the wrong words on purpose, trying to get a laugh.
Weird?
Lizzy gave up speaking after her dad left. Wouldnt talk to anybody. Three years without a single word. Then she writes that shes taking singing lessons. Rhonda laughed weakly, and began peeling the lip off of the now empty paper cup in her hand.
Warren nodded. Freaky.
Yeah, Rhonda agreed. We were close, then the summer Daniel left, everything just kind of fell apart. Things were never the same.
That must have been really hard. Your best friend just disappearing like that.
There it was. The thing shed longed for from Peter over the years. Just a simple acknowledgment of how hard it was on Rhonda, on all of them. How hard and wrong and terrible the whole mess was. Instead, she heard it from Warren, practically