Island of Lost Girls Read online

  Trudy had left the radio playing, the volume up loud enough that Rhonda could hear it from her own car. It was country music, which Rhonda never listened to, even as the radio stations that played it seemed to multiply, so she didn’t recognize the song. It was a love song maybe, a song about heartbreak—aren’t they all, Rhonda would later think.

  The music was distracting to Rhonda as she sat nervously going over what she might say in the interview, what questions they might ask. She had spent the past two days reading up on zebra mussels so she would sound smart, informed. She wanted the researchers to know she cared enough to do her homework. She was rolling over these facts in her mind, thinking about the sneaky destructiveness of the invasive species, about the photos she’d seen of larger native mollusks smothered by zebra mussels—when the third car pulled into the lot, right alongside Trudy’s Corsica.

  It was a gold-colored Volkswagen Beetle, and Rhonda’s first thought was Shit, Laura Lee Clark. Tock’s mother. Rhonda put her head down, pretending to study the dial on her radio. She was not in the mood to make chitchat with Laura Lee, who was sure to bring up Peter and Tock (such a happy couple, she was fond of saying), and little Suzy’s latest brilliant endeavor (a genius, Laura Lee insisted, my granddaughter’s a genius). Rhonda kept her head down, but glanced up just enough to see the driver open the door and climb out. That’s when she saw that the car was not driven by crazy old Laura Lee Clark at all, but by a large white rabbit.

  “You mean someone wearing a rabbit suit?” one of the state troopers would ask her later. “Like the Easter Bunny?”

  “Yes,” she would tell him. “Of course. A white rabbit suit. A costume. It was a man wearing a costume.”

  “How do you know it was a man, Miss Farr? With the costume?”

  “I don’t know, I guess. It just…it just seemed like it would be a man. And he was tall.”

  “Six feet tall,” the trooper repeated back to her, reading from his own notes.

  But the truth was, when the rabbit got out of the car, there in the Pat’s Mini Mart parking lot at quarter to three on a Monday afternoon, it didn’t occur to Rhonda that there might be a person inside. He hopped like a bunny, moved quickly, nervously, jerking his big white head one way, then the other. He turned toward Rhonda, and for an instant he seemed to stare at her with his blind plastic eyes. She imagined she could almost see his nose twitch as he gave a slight nod in her direction.

  Rhonda watched as the rabbit rapped on Ernie’s window with his big white fluffy paw. The little girl grinned up at him and pushed open her door. He leaned down and Ernie touched the bunny fondly on the head, right behind its ears, and unbuckled her seat belt.

  The rabbit held out its paw and Ernie took it in her own small hand, stepping from her mother’s car to the gold Volkswagen, getting in the passenger seat without a struggle, without any hesitation. The little girl smiled the whole time.

  THE GOLD VOLKSWAGEN had a dent in the rear bumper.

  That was all Rhonda could tell the troopers when describing the car. She told them how, at first, she thought it was Laura Lee, then it turned out not to be. She hadn’t thought to get the license plate number.

  “But it was a Vermont plate? Not out-of-state, Quebec, like that?” one of the troopers asked.

  “Yes, Vermont,” Rhonda said, hating herself for not even thinking to notice the plate and commit it to memory. “I think so anyway.”

  “Okay, was there anything else distinguishing about the car? Some rust? Was there anything in the backseat maybe?”

  “I didn’t see into the backseat. And no, it was just a gold bug. Nothing unusual except the driver.”

  “The rabbit,” the cop said, a trace of skepticism in his voice. He was the shorter of the two and Rhonda believed he couldn’t have been more than nineteen, barely over adolescence. The rash of pimples at his temples looked painful, more like boils, really, under the shadow of his wide-brimmed hat.

  “Yes, the rabbit.” Rhonda’s voice shook a little this time, from nerves and frustration, the frustration of having to explain herself again and again, of knowing what Trudy said was true—it was Rhonda’s own fault that Ernie was gone. She had taken no action. She watched the small girl in the red jumper be taken as easily as she had watched life unfold beneath the lens of her microscope: as a passive observer slightly in awe of the sight before her.

  This was not who she was. She was a doer, someone who made lists. Someone who was methodical and looked at things with a keen, scientific eye. She always knew the next logical step in any situation. But for some reason, that afternoon, she sat staring, paralyzed, dumbfounded. Hypnotized by a white rabbit.

  The other trooper was with Trudy on the other side of the store. Jim had pulled the folding chair with the ripped padding from behind the counter and set it up beside the candy rack, next to the Hershey bars and Good & Plentys. Together, he and the policeman had guided the nearly hysterical Trudy to the chair and were doing their best to calm her. Only moments before, when it finally sunk in that Rhonda had seen the abduction and done nothing, Trudy dove at her and tried to put her eyes out with her freshly manicured nails. Trudy’s nails were no joke. They were two inches long, filed to points, and showed off a fresh coat of a reddish orange that reminded Rhonda of a bleeding Creamsicle. The taller state trooper, the one who seemed to be taking the lead role in the investigation, pulled Trudy off and led her across the store to the chair Jim was setting up. Rhonda stayed with her back against the beer cooler, her head bowed.

  “You did nothing!” Trudy called back. “You sat on your fucking fat ass and watched my little girl get taken away!”

  Rhonda did not consider her ass fat but, compared to Trudy’s size six figure, Rhonda was a big girl—a chunky, five-foot-five-inch size fourteen who carried most of her weight in her torso. Rhonda’s face was round too, and she was forever trying to find a haircut that might help make it seem less so.

  Once the taller trooper had settled Trudy into her chair, he resumed his questioning.

  “Is there anyone you know who might have taken your daughter? A family member? An ex-boyfriend, maybe?”

  “I’m a fucking widow! I don’t have any boyfriends. I have Ernie and my sister and that’s all.” She began to cry, mascara running black streams down her pale face, cutting tracks through her foundation.

  “Please, ma’am. I’m sorry. I know this is hard. But has Ernie told you about anyone? The parent of a friend, maybe? A stranger watching her play?”

  “It was the rabbit!” Trudy cried. “Fucking Peter Rabbit! Oh, God!” She was sobbing and fumbling in the pocket of her denim jacket for the new pack of cigarettes and her lighter. Lottery tickets fluttered to the floor. The tall state trooper leaned down and picked them up, held them in his hand while she lit her cigarette, studied them like they were evidence.

  “She’s been telling me for over a month now about Peter Rabbit visiting her. Taking her to Rabbit Island in his submarine. She even drew pictures of it. Christ! I thought it was all made up!”

  Jim sauntered over and put a reassuring hand on Trudy’s arm, giving it a squeeze with grease-stained fingertips. “I called over to the beauty shop. Pat’s on her way. Don’t you worry, Trudy. Ernie’ll show up. Just like that girl down in Virginia. They found her safe and sound, now didn’t they?”

  Rhonda thought of eight-year-old Ella Starkee, the little girl kidnapped in rural Virginia last month and found in a hole ten days later. She survived by catching rain in a rusty tin can and eating earthworms. Rhonda shivered. Trudy glared at her, eyes glazed with fury.

  “The fat girl knows more than she’s saying,” Trudy spat. “I mean, why the fuck else did she just sit there? She probably knew the guy. They were working as a team. She was the lookout. Don’t kidnappers do that?”

  “We’ll investigate her thoroughly, ma’am,” said the cop.

  The shorter trooper with the bad skin led Rhonda outside, where they stood talking on the oil-stained pavement.
/>   Rhonda watched Trudy stare out at her through the glass window with its collage of beer and cigarette signs. WEDNESDAY SPECIAL: 5 CENTS OFF EACH GALLON OF GAS ALL DAY!!! MECHANIC ON DUTY, promised another. But where was Peter?

  Trudy continued glaring out at Rhonda like she expected to suddenly notice a white fluffy tail peeking from beneath her blazer.

  WHEN DETECTIVE SERGEANT Joe Crowley arrived at Pat’s Mini Mart, he called in a team to come and search the area. More state police arrived along with a white forensics van. They took pictures. They searched the parking lot for tire tracks and other evidence. They dusted the passenger side of Trudy’s car for fingerprints, even though Rhonda had made it clear that the culprit’s hands were well covered. After all, the bunny had furry white paws.

  Crowley put out an APB for the gold Volkswagen, for Ernie Florucci. He issued an AMBER alert. He sent the taller trooper home with Trudy, instructing him to pick up the girl’s rabbit drawings and a recent photo of Ernestine. The trooper helped Trudy up out of the tattered chair and gently handed her the lottery tickets he’d been holding.

  “You can’t forget these,” he told her with a wink. “I’ve got a feeling they’re real lucky.” Trudy gave a half smile and stuffed the tickets into the pocket of her denim jacket, then walked to the car, leaning into the cop as he guided her, his arm around her waist.

  Sergeant Crowley had an air of authority that made Rhonda relieved and hopeful. If anyone could find the little girl and the rabbit, Crowley could. He was in his mid-forties (her father’s age) and wore his salt-and-pepper hair very short. He had on dark trousers, a white shirt, and a dark green tie with a gold clip. He looked, to Rhonda, like a man who had been in great shape once, an ex-athlete who blew out a knee and had let himself fill out a little.

  “Miss Farr, is there anything else you can tell me about the rabbit? Anything at all?”

  “No,” said Rhonda, shaking her head. There was nothing else she could tell him. Not about this rabbit, but once, long ago, there had been another white rabbit and he too, in time, had somehow slipped away.

  APRIL 11, 1993

  THERE WAS SNOW in the woods. Her feet were slipping as she ran in her good yellow Easter shoes, ankles numb from cold. Lizzy was beside her. They were holding hands. Laughing each time they fell. Lizzy wore matching yellow shoes with pale satin bows: she had seen Rhonda’s and begged her mother to take her to the mall for an identical pair. It was like that with the girls: whatever one had, the other longed for.

  Lizzy and Rhonda told everyone at school they were twin sisters living as cousins, when the truth was they were not related at all. But still, the other kids believed the story about them being twins. It was an easy lie to believe, because they looked so much alike: two chunky girls with straight, dark, tousled hair, dirt under their nails, funny overbites from sucking thumbs too long. They were quiet girls with big brown eyes. Koala bear eyes, lemur eyes, eyes that seemed to take up their whole plain faces.

  They had been best friends since before they learned to talk—sharing a sandbox, being walked by their mothers in matching pink strollers down to the lake. And when words came to them, they seemed, the way their mothers described it, to develop their own secret language—a coded communication that no one else could understand, full of words such as daloor, ub, ta, and skoe. Their parents were worried that the girls would go on speaking this way to one another, would have no need for the rest of the world, for words like cat and swim and thank you.

  Sometimes Rhonda thought about this when she looked at Lizzy—how once upon a time, all they needed was each other.

  They had been born two days apart, this much was true, though they made up the lie about being from same mother—how Rhonda stayed in after Lizzy came out and their mother didn’t know about the other one until she went to the bathroom a couple of days later and out popped Rhonda.

  “Into the toilet!” the girls would holler in their singsong voices, identical in pitch and tone. “Rhonda fell into the toilet!” Which didn’t seem like a bad beginning, just a funny one.

  PETER WAS RUNNING ahead of them, closest to the rabbit. He had his father’s red wool hunting cap on over his blond curls but he hadn’t worn a jacket. He was thirteen and Rhonda knew that as a general rule, thirteen-year-old boys didn’t believe in jackets unless it was way below freezing. He had announced that this was the last year he’d do the egg hunt: Easter baskets were kids’ stuff.

  Rhonda and Lizzy rounded a bend in the path, and Lizzy hit a tree root and tripped, falling, pulling Rhonda down on top of her, both girls cackling, their good Easter dresses ruined already.

  “Eew!” Rhonda complained, pushing herself up. “What have you been eating?”

  “Sardines,” Lizzy said, smiling.

  “Gross! For breakfast?”

  “My dad says they’re full of calcium. You know, ’cause of the bones and stuff in them. They’re the latest part of the Rockette regime.”

  “Your breath smells like cat food.” Rhonda took off down the path, toward Peter and the rabbit, Lizzy right behind her.

  Rhonda thought the entire, ever-changing Rockette regime was stupid, even the name. She thought the dumbest part of all was that Lizzy had never even seen the Rockettes except on television. How can you decide from some five-minute routine on a twenty-inch television that that’s what you want to do with your life? But Lizzy was determined. And to be a Rockette, she kept reminding Rhonda, you had to be at least five foot six.

  “I’m way too short, Rhonda.”

  “You’re ten! You’re totally average for ten.”

  “Neither of my parents are tall. I’ve got short genes. It’s a curse.”

  So, in addition to practicing eye-high kicks, Lizzy ate weird, allegedly tallness-enhancing food and avoided soda, which she swore rotted your bones and stunted your growth.

  “Besides,” she said, “soda’s full of sugar. And who’s ever heard of a fat Rockette?”

  PETER AND THE rabbit had reached the stage. The rabbit jumped into the driver’s seat of the old abandoned convertible and pretended to drive.

  “Over here!” Peter shouted. The girls raced to catch up.

  There, in a nest of snow tucked into the backseat, were the three plastic eggs that marked the true beginning of their hunt.

  “Oh!” Lizzy exclaimed, clapping her hands together, like the eggs were a strange surprise—not the very thing she’d been looking for.

  Rhonda bent down and picked her egg up out of the car. Tucked inside the orange egg, like a fortune in a cookie, was a message: Go to the top of the hill. Look next to the rock.

  She gazed up at the rabbit, who was standing on the hood now, hands on his hips, impatient and ominous with his huge paws and ears, the plastic cartoon-style eyes scratched from years of Easter rentals, the white fur dingy and smelling of dry cleaning chemicals.

  Rhonda took off to the top of the hill, leaving her two friends to their own quests.

  It went on like this for almost an hour. Zigzagging through the woods, finding an egg, following the clues inside to get to the next one. She’d run into Lizzy and Peter and they’d compare hiding places and messages, but always with the breathless urgency to hurry back to the hunt.

  Rhonda’s breath was smoke. She wheezed from exertion. The rabbit darted in and out of trees, taunting. Pointing in one direction, then another. Holding his head and belly as he doubled over in silent laughter when she slipped and fell, when she believed him and went the wrong way looking for her next egg. Trickster rabbit.

  When at last she grew tired of the game and was too cold to go on, the rabbit appeared, took her hand in his white fluffy paw, and led her to a small clearing. There, on top of a large, flat rock was her orange basket, shimmering with green plastic grass, stuffed full of chocolate bunnies, eggs, and jelly beans. He nodded down at her, and just for a minute, before she picked up the basket, he led her in a celebratory dance, their own little joyful bunny hop, one furry arm around her waist, the other cl
utching her cold fingers in his thick paw. There were none of the high, Rockette-style kicks Lizzy was famous for, just a clumsy little slippery-soled shoe shuffle. They stomped a little circle in the snow, then he let her go and, with a wave, turned and hopped back down the hill.

  Rhonda took her basket and raced through the woods to her house with its warm, familiar smells: coffee, cinnamon buns, bacon. The table was laid out for Easter brunch. Peter was already there, the contents of his own basket spilled out on the couch. Rhonda saw right away that he’d gotten comics and a pocketknife. She had Silly Putty and lip gloss. Peter was picking black jelly beans out of the mixed bag and throwing them up in the air to catch them in his mouth. He’d seen a guy do this with peanuts in a western and had been working on it ever since.

  Rhonda couldn’t remember ever not having Easter brunch with Peter and Lizzy. Her dad and Peter and Lizzy’s dad, Daniel, had grown up together and been best friends forever. They were practically brothers, Rhonda heard her dad say once. And the Shales lived next door—a quarter mile down Lake Street, a little closer if you cut through the woods.

  “Where’s Lizzy?” asked Aggie, Lizzy and Peter’s mom. She wore a lime green dress that showed her knees, shoes with heels, lipstick, and rouge. Her short, spiky hair was dyed magenta and stuck up like she’d just been struck by lightning. She had a highball glass in her hand even though it was only ten in the morning. Her hand trembled slightly, as if holding the glass took all her strength.

  “Still in the woods with the rabbit,” Rhonda said.

  “They’ll both end up with frostbite,” said Aggie.

  “It’s not that cold, Ma,” Peter said, opening his new knife and running his finger across the blade.

  Aggie fixed her eyes on Peter, drained what was left in her drink, and rattled the ice like dice in a cup. Rhonda could smell her perfume, which seemed both sweet and rotten—like a Venus flytrap, Rhonda imagined.

  “Coffee’s ready,” said Rhonda’s father as he held out a cup to Aggie. His dark hair was cut short, and he had on a white button-down shirt and tie, which made his face and hands look tan even though it was April; Clem had the kind of complexion that left him bronze year round.