Page 84 of My Child is Missing

“We know that your parents never even considered that you had written it. They took Felicia’s side from the beginning,” Gretchen said. “Did they even ask you if you’d written it?”

The knife had lowered almost to Kayleigh’s waist. Her eyes were wide with shock. “No,” she said quietly. “They didn’t ask.”

“No one believed you. Only Asher, and he wasn’t willing to come clean about your relationship in order to prove to everyone that you’d written the story,” Josie said.

“Everyone failed you, didn’t they?” Gretchen said, leaning into the psychological profile of Kayleigh that she and Josie had come up with earlier. “Your teachers, your peers, your boyfriend, and your parents. Don’t even get me started on your parents.”

Kayleigh’s brows lifted slightly at this. She was interested in this particular bit.

Josie said, “They wouldn’t let you quit softball no matter how many times you told them you didn’t want to play. They were obsessive about you being involved in sports and yet, they barely even noticed you because all of their attention was and always is on Savannah.”

Kayleigh nodded along with Josie’s words.

“What we’re saying,” Gretchen said, “is that we know that no one saw you. It must have seemed like no one even cared about you.”

The knife hung at her side now.

Josie said, “Until you met Henry. He saw you, didn’t he?”

Even at the mention of his name, Henry remained silent. His hands were still in the air in a gesture of surrender. In the back of her mind, Josie was trying to figure out his angle. He wasn’t fighting. He wasn’t speaking. He wasn’t engaging at all. From a legal standpoint, this was probably his smartest move. He’d been caught red-handed with Kayleigh in his cabin. Why make it worse on himself by doing or saying something that might lead to more time in prison than he’d already be serving?

Gretchen said, “Henry finally made you feel like someone cared about the real you, didn’t he?”

Kayleigh glanced at him.

Josie said, “He made you feel special, didn’t he? Showered you with attention. The kind you’d never gotten before.”

Kayleigh’s lips twisted in a look of consternation.

Gretchen said, “It must have felt great to have that finally. Then he wanted you to do things.”

Kayleigh raised the knife again. “That’s enough.”

Josie said, “We know that you and Henry trapped and killed kids here and in Montour and Lenore Counties.”

“But Kayleigh,” said Gretchen. “If that’s the cost of his attention, is it really worth it?”

“What?”

“He groomed you, Kayleigh,” Gretchen replied. “Manipulated you.”

“No,” she said. She looked at Thomas again, but he kept his eyes on Josie, unreadable. “That’s not how it went. He didn’t groom me.” With her free hand, she pounded a fist against her chest. Eyes still on Thomas, as if she was talking only to him, she said, “I earned this. I did this. This is my masterpiece.”

For one brief second, Thomas’s eyes darted toward Kayleigh, and in them, Josie saw a sick sort of satisfaction. In her head, she recalibrated, pulling the pieces of her theory apart and trying to fit them together into a new order, one that fit the narrative that Henry Thomas had not actively groomed Kayleigh Patchett but that she had worked to impress him until she had his attention. What could she have done to impress a man like Thomas? It wasn’t sex, Josie thought. Or it wasn’tjustsex. Henry Thomas had fantasies. Dark, violent fantasies. But Josie was sure that Kayleigh had not killed anyone before she took up with him.

What had she done that would impress him? What was the one thing that Kayleigh had at her disposal? The one thing she was good at? The one thing that everyone overlooked? What had she told Asher after Felicia took her story, when she was bent on revenge?

What if I wrote a story so good and so big that it went viral? Then she couldn’t steal it from me.

The final piece of the puzzle tumbled into place. “It was you,” Josie breathed, her mind still grappling with the depth and breadth of what Kayleigh had done, what she’d created. “Kayleigh, it’s you.”

She thrust her chin forward, the image of pride.

“You’re the Woodsman,” Josie said. “No, no. You’re the author of the story of the Woodsman. The legend. You created the myth. You spread it and made sure that it kept going until it became viral around here. Viral enough for kids to do Woodsman challenges, for schoolchildren to be scared of him, for there to be a hashtag on social media.”

Gretchen gave a low whistle. “Then you made him real.”

A smile spread across Kayleigh’s face. The knife clattered to the floor. With a strange kind of grace, she stepped over the mess of silverware at her feet and offered them her wrists. “Now you’ve seen me.”

---