17 & Gone (16 page)

Burke had been hurt, from falling down a

set of steep stairs, maybe—or on

purpose, by hanging herself off the end

of a rope.

Things must have happened after that

involving my mom trying to reach the

Burkes at the hotel where they were

staying in Baltimore, and the police

being called, and Fiona Burke’s school

picture—with the pearl earrings and the

carefully clasped hands—showing up all

over the news.

Mr. and Mrs. Burke may have at first

wanted to believe she’d been abducted,

that she’d never leave home by choice—

but the police saw the truth without

needing to do any digging. She’d taken

her things from her room. Even without a

good-bye note, they could see she’d run

away.

The last words Fiona Burke had said

to me were
Stay quiet, okay?
And I

think I took that command too literally,

as if something would happen if I spoke

up or even uttered her name.

Keeping my mouth shut all those years

meant swallowing information like little

kids swallow LEGO pieces, which can

have a way of growing like plastic teeth

into your organs and never making their

way back out. I would let the Burkes

search for their daughter for years,

blindly, having no idea what she said

about them. Or about the two men and

what they looked like. Or how I thought I

knew where Fiona was headed—she’d

said she was getting a ride to LA.

I choked it all down. When I heard her

name on the car radio, I told no one.

When the policewoman asked me, and

when Mrs. Burke herself asked me, even

when my mom asked me—which

happened more than once—my mouth

stayed wired shut. I revealed none of it.

—
21
—

THERE
is one last piece that isn’t

technically a part of Fiona Burke’s story,

though at the time, in the way one

memory can latch itself on to another

memory and then forever after trail the

first one, it felt that way to me. In my

mind, the two events were connected.

This would have been weeks after

Fiona Burke had run away, months even,

though no more than a year. She hadn’t

tried to contact her parents, and we

didn’t yet know that she’d never reach

out to them. She would never place a

collect call from a pay phone and ask

them to accept the charges. She would

never open a free e-mail account to send

an anonymous assurance that she was

fine. There would be no blank postcard

dropped in a mailbox in a city she was

only

passing

through.

No

communication. No word.

Until the fire.

I woke in the middle of the night to the

piercing scream of the smoke detector,

which somehow had been set off by the

smoke coming off the house next door.

My mom and I were afraid at first that

the smoke was from inside our own

house, and we looked for candles and

ran to check the stove, but then we

looked out the windows. Out there the

smoke was thicker, a visible charge in

the night, its source a ferocious spot of

light over the dividing hedge between

the Burkes’ main house and ours.

The fire truck would arrive within

minutes and the flames would be doused,

damaging only their laundry room and

the hallway between that and their

kitchen. An electrical fire due to faulty

wiring, it was said, not arson.

I knew different.

We watched for some minutes from

the windows, my mom and me. Two

firemen had forced themselves into the

Burkes’ house and pulled them out the

door and off their grand front porch. The

firemen wrapped the two hunched

figures in wool blankets and made them

stand at a distance from the smoking

house, on the lawn.

Mrs. Burke was wearing slippers, but

Mr. Burke’s feet were bare. His pajama

pants were too short, and I noticed his

hairless, spindly legs and how he

favored the left one. We watched them

as they watched the east end of their

house burn.

We were watching as the fireman

went to talk to them.His words washed

over Mrs. Burke, and we could see it in

her face, how what he said took a very

long time to settle, as if she were

translating to herself so she could

understand, and once she did she let out

the cry. We heard it across the hedge that

divided their paved driveway from our

gravel one. The sound of it made me

think of Fiona Burke, wondering if that’s

how Mrs. Burke sounded in Baltimore

when she got the news that her daughter

had gone missing.

We didn’t hear a thing from Mr.

Burke, but we watched him wobble on

his bum leg, thin and pale as a sucked-

clean toothpick. We were watching as

the smoke thinned and no more flames

could be made out and as the hoses left

the whole side of the house sopping.

And we were watching as Mrs. Burke’s

eyes traveled over the hedge to our

house,

perhaps

involuntarily,

remembering one disaster that had been

connected with us and now connecting

us to another.

“Should we go get them?” I said.

“Ask if they want to come inside?”

But my mom had never forgiven them

for the way their daughter had treated me

that night, locking me in the coat closet.

She hadn’t known how to confront them,

seeing as Fiona had disappeared, but she

held it in, and didn’t forget it.

“They’ll be fine,” she said. “The

fire’s out. You should go back to bed.”

But she didn’t move toward her

bedroom, and I didn’t move for mine. It

had come true, what Fiona had

threatened with her wet mouth shoved up

against my ear. The fire she’d joked

about setting in her parents’ house? It

had been set.

And though I didn’t know how she’d

done it from far away, I was convinced,

then and all the more now, that she had.

She’d tried to burn down their house,

and she’d failed.

Years passed. Eight years. No more

fires, and no letters, and no phone calls.

My mom and I stayed put in the carriage

house because the Burkes never once

raised our rent. They didn’t adopt

another kid. I grew too old to need a

babysitter. I entered my junior year in

the same high school Fiona Burke had

once attended, and I dyed my hair black,

the color hers would have been if she

hadn’t dyed it flame-red. I turned 17.

And that’s when a missing girl named

Abby Sinclair would lure the ghost of

Fiona Burke back here to Pinecliff.

When the noise would wake the others.

And it’s when I’d feel the first crack

inside me, the fracture that started small,

with one name, and then broke off into

more names, and more names still, and

left me gaping.

If I counted all the girls who ran away

at the age of 17, starting with girls who

lived close to me and then casting my net

wider, spreading out along the East

Coast in ever-growing circles, then

adding girls who may have met more

sinister fates, who didn’t go by choice,

whose bodies still had not been found,

I’d be nowhere. There’d simply be too

many.

Which terrified me.

To know a girl was one, I had to

sense it. Something would compel me to

stop over a certain page online or in the

newspaper microfiche in the library.

There’d be a humming in my ears, a

chorus strengthened by a new, added

voice. Then the warmth, below my heart,

gaining heat until I had to take off the

pendant or else it would burn me and

leave a lopsided almost-circle of a

mark. The edges of the room would

swim with shadows, and those shadows

had arms and legs and mouths that

opened. They had shoulder blades and

they had elbows and they had knees.

They came out when I discovered

another, to crane their shadowy necks

around corners, to see who it might be.

This was how I found Natalie

Montesano, 17, of Edgehaven, Vermont,

missing for the last seven years. Or, I

should say, this was how she found me.

ICE STORM

WREAKS

HAVOC ON

MOUNTAIN

ROADS;

LOCAL

GIRL,

17,

MISSING

Jan. 3, 2006—EDGEHAVEN—

Friday’s heavy snow turned to ice

on Saturday and left treacherous

driving conditions throughout the

high-elevation mountain roads.

There were reports of power

outages across the county. In

addition, in connection to a car

accident on Plateau Road late

Saturday, a female Edgehaven

Central High School senior, 17,

was reported missing.

Witnesses say the girl had

been a passenger in a car that

collided with the guardrail, but she

could not be located in the

wreckage. “We can’t help but

hope someone came along and

pulled her from the car. But she

hasn’t been checked into any local

hospital and her family hasn’t

heard a word,” Sheriff Arnold F.

Wymes said in a statement to the

public on Monday. “If she

wandered out on her own . . . it’s

not likely she’d have survived the

elements.” A search is still under

way.

The public is asked to report

any information to the Edgehaven

Police Department. The northern

pass of Plateau Road is closed to

nonemergency traffic until further

notice.

—
22
—

THE
new girl, Natalie, had inherited

the eyes. The ones on her mother’s side,

paler than a pair of eyes should be. They

looked to be coated in a thick layer of

ice, and only if you chipped through

would you find the person they belonged

to, the girl shivering beneath.

These eyes were exactly like her

mother’s,

who

was

serving

two

consecutive life sentences at a women’s

correctional facility four hours away,

and would never get out, not in her

lifetime.

Natalie had not once gone to visit the

prison to look into the frigid eyes of the

woman responsible for bringing her into

the world. Even if those eyes would be

held back behind a wall of clouded glass

lathered on both sides by the links of the

metal cage that encased it. Natalie was

afraid it would be like looking off into

the far distance, into a future she didn’t

want to see. Like mother like daughter,

people always said. They assumed, but

they should have asked, because looks

are deceiving sometimes. Eyes can be.

I first saw Natalie’s eyes for myself

on a cold January morning while I was

combing out the rat’s nest of my hair.

That was the first day of the new

semester, and I had to get to school.

I was looking in the mirror, trying to

get the comb in and the knots out, but the

knots had caught themselves on the teeth

of the comb, getting more tangled the

more I tried to pull it through.

I’d had the dream again in the night.

Fiona Burke hadn’t been there. I didn’t

see Abby, either. But there’d been

someone in the smoky house with me, up

a set of stairs, around a corner, a

shadow that leaked out from the other

shadows, reaching out one beckoning,

outstretched hand.

I’d woken in my bed as if I’d spent the

night clawing my way up a riverbank—

drenched through my clothes, muscles

sore, hair tangled in sweat—though the

dream had been very dry. Dry and hot,

as if somewhere the fire was still

burning.

I took one last look at my tangled head

in the mirror and decided to do

something about it. With the comb still