The Silent Girls by Eric Rickstad Read Free Book Online

world. This was inalterable and absolute. This was violence’s reach, and he’d wanted to spare Rachel its alienating pain.
    Her parents had been killed seventy miles south, nearly seventeen years ago, and none of her friends or friends’ parents knew. When he’d adopted her, he’d changed her surname to his, so there was no connection with her mother’s married name. The only people who knew were in the criminal-justice profession, and they knew better than to mention it to Rath. The past year, she’d asked about her mother more, and he’d lived in fear that her curiosity would lead her to the truth. At any moment, she could discover something online. What would it do to her, to them, to find out the truth, learn he’d lied? Was that why she wasn’t calling him back? She’d found out?
    This was the trouble with lying: it bred paranoia.

 
    Chapter 9
    A S R ATH DROVE up into Aver’s Gore, the Scout shuddering so hard on the dirt road that his molars ached, his back pain was ludicrous.
    His cell phone vibrated on the dash. PRI VATE. Rachel? Calling from a friend’s?
    He answered.
    “A girl’s body was found, near St. J.,” Sonja Test said.
    “Where?”
    “Victory.”
    Victory was situated twenty-five miles south of Canaan and ten minutes outside St. J. It had once been a booming logging town, but only a few folks still carved a living for Northern Dynasty Mills. A quiet town of fewer than a thousand souls, it had a Main Street of local establishments like Northwoods Outfitters and The Wilderness Restaurant alongside McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts.
    Sonja lived in Victory.
    Rath pulled over onto an old logging road. “Is it Mandy?”
    “I’m waiting to hear more from Lou. I gave him our girl’s description.”
    Rath leaned back and stared out the windshield. The sky was a blinding blue. It was one of those days that looked balmy from inside, but bitch-slapped you with its cold hand when you stepped into it.
    “I hope it’s not her,” he said. “I’m about to visit her roommate. Then her father. I can’t inform them of a death officially. That needs to come from a cop.”
    “Nothing’s official. I have squat except it’s a dead girl.”
    Why is she calling me and not Grout? Rath wondered.
    “Listen,” she said. “Not a word to Grout. Not until we have something. OK.” It wasn’t a request. It was a demand. And it answered Rath’s question. She was playing a dangerous game, keeping information from her superior.
    “OK,” Rath said, and ended the call.
    He dialed Rachel. Got her voice mail. “Hey it’s Dad. Call me.”
    It wasn’t a request.
    Rath drove by mailboxes crammed into rusted milk cans and boasting French names, the progeny of drunken fur traders whose feral stock lived on in a legion of loggers and roofers, masons and dairy farmers: LaSalle, Lepage, Leduc, LaValle, Lavec. The names made Rath thirst for a Laphroaig as he came upon a dented mailbox with the name Duffy scribbled on it with black marker. Which one of these names doesn’t belong?
    A crummy split-level house sat atop a steep, gravel drive, the gravel washed to the side in fans by runoff. Rath pulled the Scout up the drive and parked on a patch of dead grass next to a nineties Corolla with a faded FREE TIBET bumper sticker. He walked past the Corolla, black beads dangling from the car’s rearview, the rear floor littered with candy wrappers and spent Diet Coke cans. A child’s car seat polluted with pet hair. The house’s cheap T-111 panel siding was diseased with lichen, skirt chewed ragged by porcupines seeking salt in the glue.
    Rath glanced at the Monadnock River Valley. The river cleaved through the open farmland, its surface mirroring the afternoon sun, so it shone like a skein of molten silver. The hardwoods’ autumn colors luminescent in the golden afternoon light, a beauty discordant with the shambled house before him. The door opened, and a woman in her early twenties stood behind the torn screen, and