Page 45 of What Happened to Lucy Vale
Over the years we’d seen the kinds of people who gravitated to the Faraday House. Ghost chasers and horror junkies. YouTubers who’d scaled the gates. Goths and druggies, people who identified as vampires, at least on their social channels.
Dark people. Fringe people. Outsider types.
People with demons, and shadows, of their own.
Sure, maybe the Vales were a little bit city; maybe their hands were a little soft.
Maybe they weren’t like us. But they weren’t like that either.
They weren’tcrazy. They weren’t even that interesting.
That’s what we thought anyway.
And even after we knew we were wrong about the Vales—even when Lucy Vale became a kind of obsession—it never occurred to us to wonder about her demons.
Or ours.
Part 4
One
Rachel
Lucy did persuade her mother, at last, to make an online dating profile.
“You know, we had an agreement,” Rachel said. “We saidno boys.” Rachel still couldn’t think about the high school boy who’d roped Lucy into a monthslong nightmare—sexploitation, they called it—without the urge to explode something. She still felt they should have pressed charges. Lucy was still achild.
“You don’t need a boy, Mom. You need aman.” Lucy dropped her voice dramatically and then giggled. They were sitting side by side at the kitchen table. Lucy was stringing together Halloween lanterns—little paper pumpkins with devilish grins. Rachel was drinking her third coffee of the day and scrolling through an assortment of available men in the area. “Besides, not all boys are bad. Some of them are nice.”
Rachel heard a lilt to her daughter’s voice and looked up, suspicious. “Like who?” she asked.
Lucy kept her head down. Her hair, loose, concealed the half arc of her smile.
Rachel went back to scrolling. She wasn’t seriously looking for a boyfriend—she still couldn’t imagine having sex with anyone but Alan, and she was even beginning to forget whatthathad been like—but shethought a little flirtation, a little attention, wouldn’t hurt. The past few years had been soserious. First her relationship with Alan, withering like a plant from being poorly tended, leaving him moody, remote, and secretive. She hadn’t noticed—or maybe she hadn’t cared? Not until it was too late. And then the problems with Lucy: all that bullying, the disordered eating, the self-harm.
She was still young,as Rachel’s mother was always reminding her, somehow marking the words as tacit criticism. It wasn’t normal for her to be holed up in the middle of nowhere, letting her career languish just as it was exploding, isolating herself as some of her best years were slipping by. To Rachel’s mother, southern Indiana might as well have been Siberia. “Here’s a man who owns three Papa Johns franchises,” she said, pretending to be impressed.
“You like pizza,” Lucy said with a smirk.
“Wait. Forget it. He has an Ayn Rand quote in his bio.”
“Picky, picky.” Lucy held up the miniature lanterns, evaluating them intently for a moment, and then put them aside and reached for her mother’s laptop. “Here. Let me see.”
Rachel got up and dumped the rest of her coffee in the sink, startling a sparrow from the windowsill.
“Ooooh, look. This one’s a cop.” Lucy began to read, “’Twenty-two years with the Willard County Sheriff’s Department. Actually, scrap that. Willard County is enemy territory.”
“Willard County is where your great-aunt and uncle live. Let me see that.” Rachel leaned over Lucy’s shoulder, contemplating the broad, flat face of Danny Wilkes, forty-seven. Immediately she wondered what he thought about the Faraday case and the Rockland County investigation, such as it was, into Nina’s disappearance.
This was her problem. Her interests ran her, again and again, back to work. It wasn’t all her fault; the Faraday case was inescapable in Granger. There were threads, connections back to Nina Faraday and her mother, everywhere she looked. In the surnames of Lucy’s friends, which raveled her back to the names of former witnesses and classmates.In the Steelers themselves, of course—a sprawling clan, linked to politics and real estate, the sheriff’s department and the school board. In the Granger Club Team, now training under Jack Vernon, a man who’d actually swum with Tommy Swift. Rachel imagined a gigantic web, or a root network, extending through much of the county, anchoring everyone back to the same mystery.
“They don’t know better. You do.” Lucy nudged her mother away with an elbow and hunched over the laptop again. A second later, she made a noise somewhere between a cough and a snort. “Oh my God. No way. That’s Topornycky’s uncle.”
“Topornycky?” Rachel recognized the unusual name immediately. Her heart rate spiked.
“Nick Topornycky’s uncle, Woody. I can’t believe he’s actually trolling for a girlfriend.” This time when Rachel reached for the laptop, Lucy actively fended her off. “No, Mom. You cannot go out with him. He’s literally insane.”
“Relax. I just want to see what he looks like.” Lucy finally relented, yielding her chair to Rachel. Woody Topornycky looked older than his thirty-eight years. Still, he was handsome in a weather-beaten way, at least in his profile picture.
