Page 15 of Another Girl Lost

“And you went along.”

“I didn’t go through with it.”

“You took it right up to the edge.”

“I was desperate. And if you really were at the crash that day, you know I was in bad shape.”

“I’m not denying you didn’t suffer.” His discomfort gave me some pleasure.

“But desperation doesn’t warrant what I almost did, right?”

He was silent for a moment. “And Della, the woman who lured you into Tanner’s trap, vanished just like that. And the house where he’d kept you both burned to the ground.”

“Yes.”

“Ever wonder what happened to Della after your rescue and the fire?”

When I’d heard about the fire, I thought she’d died in it. I’d no doubt the house and anyone in it had been obliterated, given how many gasoline bombs had been planted. I’d wept bitterly. Only later, when the arson investigators had sifted through the rubble, did I learn the police had found no bodies in the ruins. “I have.”

How many times had I had Della sightings? How many times had I run after or screamed at women who’d borne a vague resemblance to Della?

“You filed six police reports over the last ten years, swearing you saw this Della.”

The initial two reports were met with keen interest. After that, the officers took me less seriously. “The cops proved I was wrong every time.”

“Would you say you were fixated on Della?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.” I swelled with a sudden hollowness. One psychologist suggested I was shifting blame to the fictitious Della to help me deal with the guilt.

“Do you dream about Tanner?”

“No, not really.”

“Why not? He’s the stuff of nightmares.”

Get off me! Get off me!I still woke up screaming those words. “Easier for me to put him out of my mind.”

“But not Della.”

Before Della, I’d been a moody teenager who worried about homework and parties. After Della lured me into the van, I was distant and distrustful. I might have physically survived, but the girl I’d been had died.

A tension crept up my back and coiled around my neck. “I’m not sure what you’re fishing for, but I can’t help you.” My head spun. “I’ve got an appointment in a half hour. I need to leave.”

He hesitated. “I’ll be back if I find out more about Sandra Taylor. And I’m sure there’ll be more questions.”

“And I still won’t be able to help you.”

He left, and as soon as the security door closed, I locked it and slammed the security door behind it. All locks were secure in under ten seconds, a drill I practiced often.

Detective Dawson walked to the curb to his unmarked dark-blue car and got behind the wheel. He sat staring at my building for a long moment before he started his car and drove off.

Della was real. I knew it. She wasn’t a figment of a traumatized mind.

But the cops had never found her, and the more I’d told Della’s story, the more they questioned my mental stability. So I stopped talking about Della after the last failed sighting three years ago.

After ten years, there was still no sign of Della.

But the cops were circling again.

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