Chris Mooney - The Missing

'He just wants to talk.' Black tears from Melanie's mascara ran down her cheeks. 'Come down here and talk to him and he won't hurt me.'

Darby didn't move, couldn't move.

The man from the woods cut Mel's cheek. She screamed. Darby moved down the steps.

Drops of blood, bright and red, ran down the wall near the kitchen. Darby froze.

Melanie screamed, 'He's cutting me!'

Darby took another step, her eyes on the wall, and saw Stacey Stephens lying on the kitchen floor, blood spurting between the fingers clutched against her throat.

Darby ran back up the stairs. Melanie screamed again as the man from the woods cut her.

Darby slammed the bedroom door shut and opened the window facing the driveway. The branches from the hedges tore up her bare legs and the soles of her feet something awful. She limped her way to her next-door neighbor's house. When Mrs Oberman finally answered the door, she took one look at Darby and immediately ran to her kitchen to call the police.

Darby had overheard two things: the phone lines to the house had been cut, and the spare key her mother kept under the rock in the garden was missing. The key had been there a little over two weeks ago. She had last used it after locking herself out of the house and definitely remembered putting it back.

To know about the hidden key, the man from the woods must have been casing the house for some time. Nobody would come right out and say it, but Darby knew it was true.

She sat in the back of the ambulance parked in Mrs Oberman's driveway. The back doors were open, and she could see the shocked and curious faces of her neighbors in the revolving blue and white lights from the police cruisers. Policemen armed with flashlights were searching her backyard and the wooded area separating Richardson Road from the nicer homes on Boynton Avenue.

All the lights in her house were on. Through the downstairs windows Darby could see part of the foyer, the blood on the pale yellow walls. Stacey's blood. Stacey was still lying inside the house because she was dead. Police were taking pictures of her body. Stacey Stephens was dead and Melanie was missing.

'Don't worry, Darbs, your mom will be here any minute.' The deep but calming voice belonged to the patrolman standing next to the ambulance door. This huge intimidating bear of a man was a close friend of her father's named George Dazkevich. Everyone called him Buster. Buster had helped out around the house after her father died, taking her to movies and to the mall. His presence helped calm her.

'Have you found Mel yet?'

'We're working on it, kiddo. Now try to relax, okay? Can I bring you something? Some water? A Coke?'

Darby shook her head and looked at the car parked against the curb, a beat-up Plymouth Valiant. Melanie's car.

Melanie's going to be okay. The man from the woods was in a lot of pain. I'm pretty sure I broke his hand. Melanie would have figured that out and would have fought back and escaped. She's probably hiding someplace in the woods. They're going to find her.

Sheila arrived just as the EMT finished stitching up a particularly nasty gash on the inside of Darby's thigh. The blood drained from her mother's face as she stared down at the Frankenstein mess of stitches on Darby's legs and feet.

'Tell me what happened.'

Darby fought the urge to cry. She needed to say strong. Brave. She sucked in air and then broke down in tears, hating herself for it, for being small and scared and weak.

The next morning, Melanie was still missing.

With the house now a crime scene, the police moved Darby and Sheila to the Sunset Motel on Route 1 in Saugus. The room Darby shared with her mother had shag carpeting and a hard mattress with coarse sheets. Everything smelled of cigarette smoke and desperation.

For the next week, Darby looked through binders packed with mug shots. The police were hoping a face might spark something. It never did. They tried hypnosis more than once and finally gave up when detectives were told she wasn't a 'willing subject.'

Darby went to bed each night with her head stuffed with mug-shot faces and unanswered questions. The police wouldn't tell her anything beyond variations of 'everyone's working real hard.'

Both the newspapers and TV had talked about the vicious stabbing of Stacey Stephens and the frantic search efforts for Melanie Cruz, who had been abducted from the house of a friend. The friend was a minor and her name couldn't be released, but an 'unnamed source close to the investigation' stated this 'friend' was believed to be the intended target. The only piece of evidence ever mentioned was a chloroform-soaked rag the police found in the woods behind the house.

By the end of the week, with no new information coming in on the case, reporters started focusing on Stacey's and Melanie's parents. Darby found she couldn't read their tearful pleas, couldn't face the anguished looks captured in the pictures and video footage.

One evening, after Sheila had left for work, the FBI agent, Evan Manning, stopped by with a pizza and two cans of Coke. They ate on a rickety table near the pool. They had a lovely view of the liquor store and trailer park.

'How are you holding up?' he asked.

Darby shrugged. The droning sound of traffic and the smell of exhaust filled the warm air.

'If you don't want to talk, that's fine,' Manning said. 'I'm not here to pump you with questions.'

Darby thought about telling him about school, how everyone, including most of her teachers, stared at her as though she had stepped off a UFO. Even her friends were treating her differently, talking to her in cautious tones, the way you'd speak to someone afflicted with some rare, terminal disease. Suddenly, she was interesting.

Only she didn't want to be interesting. She wanted to go back to being her old boring self, back to being a normal teenager looking forward to a long summer of reading books and pool parties and hanging out with Mel down at the Cape.

'I want to help find Mel,' Darby said. The way she figured it, if she helped find Melanie, then all would be forgiven, and people would stop staring at her as though what had happened to Mel and Stacey were her fault.

Manning placed a hand on her arm, squeezing it. 'I'll do everything in my power to help find Melanie. And I'm going to find the man who did this to you. That's a promise.'

After Manning left, Darby headed to the vending machine for another Coke. She saw the pay phone outside the office door. The words she had practiced saying over and over again this past week were now burning to get out.

She dropped a quarter into the pay phone.

'Hello?' Mrs Cruz said.

I'm sorry for everything that's happened. I'm sorry for Mel and I'm sorry for what you're going through I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry.

As hard as she tried, Darby couldn't get the words out. They were stuck in her throat, lodged in there like hot stones.

'Mel, is that you?' Mrs Cruz said. 'Are you okay? Tell me you're okay.'

Mrs Cruz's hope, bright and so alive, made Darby hang up and want to run someplace far away, someplace where nobody, not even her own mother, would ever find her.

Sheila couldn't afford the motel anymore. The house still hadn't been released by the police, and when it was, there would be cleanup and repairs. Darby was going to spend the summer at her aunt and uncle's beach house in Maine. Sheila was going to stay in town with a coworker. She would drive to Maine on her days off.

Darby went with her mother to a grocery store in Saugus to stock up on food for the long drive. Taped inside the grocery store window, right near the front door so no one would miss it, was a poster board holding a blown-up picture of Melanie. It was yellowed from the sun. The word missing was written in big, bold red letters above her smiling face. A reward for $25,000 was listed, along with a toll-free phone number.