Prologue
The last time I saw Lauren Ballard, she was scraping a key along the side of a new cherry-red Chevy Silverado.
The newspapers and media reports never showed this side of her. They liked to use the photo of Lauren leaning against a stone wall in a gown encrusted with a thousand hand-sewn crystals, or the one where she posed in a field in a long white dress with her train rippling behind her and a butterfly perched on her wrist. The problem was that the pictures were fakes, relics of the summer she spent modeling for the wedding boutique downtown back in high school. Her own wedding had been small and not particularly joyous, the swags of white tulle decorating the pews hanging limply in the August heat.
It was a familiar small-town story; the girl whom everyone expected to move away and make something of herself had been caught instead, locked down by the familiar forces of inertia and an unplanned pregnancy. The guests seemed puzzled by how things had turned out, and I guessed that no one knew what I knew: that Lauren had gotten knocked up on purpose, having flushed her birth control pills down the toilet in her senior year of college.
What followed was so predictable that I could have written it myself. Lauren and her new husband bought a starter home on Blue Ridge Road, and he went to work for his father’s realty company. After their daughter, Mabry, was born, Lauren got her real estate license and worked part-time. From the outside, they looked like a family in an ad for cereal or stackable washer-dryers. After Lauren disappeared, the police and the media saw what they wanted to see: a young, beautiful wife and mother who had married her high school sweetheart and settled in their hometown. She should have been cable news catnip, the pretty white girl from a good family whom viewers could ogle and pity at the same time.
But this is what I’ve learned: the dead or missing girl is never the subject of the story. Sometimes she’s not even the object. She is the circumstance, the accident, the nexus through which vectors cross. No one really knows her, not even the people who were closest to her in life. She becomes a stranger when you realize that her last moments were incomprehensible, an abyss you can’t fathom.
This is not a story about a murder. It’s not the story of what happened to Lauren Ballard in the early-morning hours of August 10, 2001. I can’t tell that story, because even all these years later, I still don’t really understand the events of that night. All I know is what was left behind: broken glass, a trace of blood on a wet washcloth, tire tracks in the grass.
These details are what matters, whether they’re in photos on a true-crime blog or lying neglected in a police evidence locker. I’ve arranged them every way I can think of, but it’s like trying to play a board game with pieces missing. It’s like a dream when you’re walking down a familiar street and suddenly you’re in a different city, staring at your reflection in a plate-glass window, trying to remember what brought you here.
THE HEAT THAT MORNING WAS THICK AND DAMP, THE KIND THAT MAKES you sweat in the crease of your neck and behind your knees. After breakfast, I dragged the two dusty gray inner tubes out of the shed, loaded them into the bed of my truck, and met Lauren at the outfitters by Horseshoe Bend, where we paid a guy ten bucks to take us upstream to the boat launch, packed in with half a dozen out-of-towners who oohed and aahed at every mountain vista like they’d never seen a tree before. Lauren’s husband had taken the baby to visit his parents for the weekend, and we’d decided to spend it like deadbeats, floating the river with a cooler of beer. We waited until the tourists had paddled downstream, busily plying their oars to one side and then the other, before we waded the tubes out to the middle of the current
There’s no good way to get into an inner tube in moving water. I tried to slide carefully into the doughnut hole while Lauren flopped into hers butt-first. Six months after the birth of her daughter, she was running four miles a day and her body was back to its usual sinewy thinness. Today she wore tiny pink shorts over an old blue racerback suit that she wouldn’t have been caught dead in if there were guys around, her hair swept up in an untidy dancer’s bun that allowed a few curls to escape and trail down the side of her neck. Even early in the morning, we were already sweaty, and the keloid scar on her arm from a childhood bout of chicken pox gleamed, tight and shiny as balloon skin.
We held hands and lifted our feet, and I let my head fall back against the smooth side of the tube. The river was flat and wide enough that I was pretty sure we could float halfway to the county line without bothering to steer. “Nachos,” I said.
Lauren turned her head to the side, giving me a deadpan look. “That’s not even a name.”
“It’s a great name,” I insisted. “Then every time you went outside and called him, people would think you were just hungry. It’s a conversation piece.”
“I swear we didn’t have this much trouble naming the baby,” she said, her foot brushing mine as the tubes bumped. “Warren wants Lucky.”
Of course he did, I thought; Warren Ballard was the luckiest person I knew. Back in the day, he and Lauren had been the king and queen of Tyndall County, their cutesy rhyming names a guarantee of their rightness for each other even if their looks hadn’t matched them as high school royalty: Warren a dead ringer for Rob Lowe in The Outsiders; Lauren with blond hair and perfect posture that made up for the fact that her features weren’t entirely regular, the nose and mouth a little too big, the eyes too far apart. Senior year, she’d had the second-highest GPA in her class, a fraction of a point behind a boy who would go on to study robotics at MIT.
If she’d been notable only for being pretty and smart, she might have been despised, but she was likable too, at least some of the time. Instead of trying to minimize her accent, as another ambitious girl might have done, she had leaned into it, and her drawl was loud enough to carry from one end of the hall to the other. She had a catalog of expressions that sounded as if she’d picked them up from a chain-smoking beautician or a charming one-eyed hustler in a biker bar, and if I hung around her long enough, I’d find myself talking like her, dropping my g’s and calling everybody sugar.
Our fingers loosened as the tubes spun away from each other. “Do you want to spend the night at our place?” she asked. “Warren won’t be back until lunchtime tomorrow.”
I shook my head. I’d spent the week rotating between my mom’s and Lauren’s, but I’d told my mom I’d stay in tonight. “I could come over in the morning,” I said. “We could do breakfast.”
She shrugged, tugging me toward her again. “Maybe, but not before ten. I want to sleep.” Our feet tangled, and Lauren ran a toe up the side of my leg before they broke apart. “We should have a party before you go back to Fletcher.”
“I hate parties.”
With my head back against the side of the tube, I could sense but not see her rolling her eyes. “Sean is down in North Carolina, you know.”
“I’m not afraid of Sean Ballard.”
That was a lie, and Lauren probably knew it. The last time I’d seen Warren’s younger brother had been at the wedding last summer, and the meeting had been so awkward, with both of us nearly breaking our necks to avoid eye contact, that I was sure everyone had noticed. “Then why don’t you talk anymore?” she countered. “Is it because you don’t want him to know that you’re a lesbo now? Nicola likes giiiii-irls,” she sang out across the water.
“Fuck you,” I snapped, and let go of her hand at the same time I kicked her tube away with my heel. We spun out in different directions, and when I raised my head, I saw that she was looking back at me across half the span of the river, eyes wide. Lauren loved to get a reaction; she couldn’t help herself, even with people she supposedly cared about, like me.
She didn’t apologize, and I sulked all the way down the river as the sun climbed higher and I trailed my fingers in a loose V, the contrast between the cool water and the heat on my legs just stimulating enough to keep me awake. The bottle between my thighs stuck to my skin, and I took a last sip before swapping it out for a fresh one. Arching branches of tulip poplars and sycamores slid overhead in a shifting screen. When I heard shouts, I raised my head just as we passed a trio of sunburned rednecks drinking on the beach below a mudbank. Hooting, they raised their beers and mimed hip thrusts. One waded into the shallows and made a grab for my tube, but Lauren pulled me away in time.
In the end we overshot the path to the parking lot and had to bushwhack through a quarter mile of undergrowth, the tube banging awkwardly against my body while I cinched the handle of the nearly empty cooler in the crook of my elbow. Cicadas droned in the thicket, and mosquitoes nipped at my shoulders and the backs of my knees. I was still mad at myself for not calling Lauren out. Telling her to fuck off wasn’t strong enough, but if I brought it up now, she’d tell me that I was being too sensitive and lesbo was a term of endearment, like bitch.
Lauren was ten feet ahead when we got to the parking lot, and I heard her groan, “Well, damn it all the way to hell” before I saw the problem. A brand-new red truck had parked kiss-close to her BMW, the back end angled out so far that she’d need to drive over the berm and execute a three-pointer to get out.
“Maybe it was more crowded when he pulled in,” I replied, but I couldn’t convince even myself that this was a plausible explanation. The angle of the truck seemed malicious, as if the driver had seen Lauren's
7 Series and decided to make a point.
She circled the truck with her hands on her hips. The look in her eyes made me nervous. “Someone ought to teach him a lesson.”
“You can pull out. Don’t be psycho about it.” Sweat slid into my eyes and I flicked it away with the back of my wrist.
Lauren was still staring at the pickup. “Can you give me back my key? If you’re staying at your mom’s, you won’t need it.”
I slid it off my keychain and turned to walk to my car, but I saw in the corner of my eye that Lauren wasn’t moving. She was holding the key between her thumb and forefinger, and suddenly I knew what was on her mind. “You’re going to get your ass arrested,” I said. I thought of the rednecks we’d passed upriver and glanced over my shoulder, half afraid they might be sneaking up behind us.
Lauren shot me a wink and drew the key along the length of the Silverado, the sound of metal on metal flushing a flock of birds from the oak at the edge of the lot. “What the fuck!” I shouted, pressing my hands to my ears. “Please stop. How many people around here have a navy-blue Beamer? Either he’ll come after you or the cops will.”
“Like I give a shit,” Lauren said, moving to the other side.
“I’m leaving.” I waited a minute. I hoped that my disapproval would give her pause, but she kept going, scoring in another line below the first one. “Do you know how much it’s going to cost to get that painted over?”
She didn’t answer. I circled the back of my truck, deciding that I would pull onto the shoulder on Route 131 and wait until I saw her car safely exit the parking lot. I wanted her to know that I disapproved, but I also wanted to make sure she didn’t get stuck between the damaged vehicle and some half-drunk hillbilly who probably owned special microfiber towels to wipe down the polish without scratching the paint.
I looked back one last time. One strap of her bathing suit had fallen down her shoulder, but she ignored it, just as she ignored the mosquito that had landed between her shoulder blades. That was Lauren, I thought; when she set her mind on something, she really committed. She would do as much damage as she possibly could.
THE RAIN STARTED AS SOON AS I GOT BACK TO MY MOM’S HOUSE—SLOW AT first, spattering the concrete patio outside the back door, and then harder, hammering the tin roof with so much force that we had to shout to hear each other. Until late yesterday evening, the forecasters had predicted that Hurricane Gayle would turn after landfall and take the usual route up the East Coast, but instead the storm had rolled up the spine of the Appalachians, conserving the five to ten inches of rain she was projected to drop on the valley overnight. My mom had ordered pizza, and we ate in front of the TV, watching an old miniseries about a college kid who murdered his stepdad while Mom made grim projections about power outages and flooded roads.
I woke at ten the next morning, sweaty and disoriented, the sun shining straight through the living room window into my eyes. Sometime during the night, Mom had thrown a yellow afghan over me, snugging it up under my chin.
It must have rained all night. The backyard was flooded, the brown water that rose over the tops of the grass wobbling like a mousse. On the way to Lauren’s, I saw that River Road was blocked off by barricades. Early on a Saturday morning, the streets were all but deserted, and the world had that uninhabited look that used to make me wonder if the Rapture had come while I was sleeping.
On Blue Ridge Road, a For Sale sign marked the fence where I turned from the main road onto the long gravel driveway. Lauren had told me that she and Warren had just put a down payment on a house on Lovell Avenue, in the nicest neighborhood in town. “You know how it goes,” she’d said. “Wedding, small house, baby, bigger house. I don’t know what comes after that. Divorce, maybe.” I didn’t know if that was a joke.
When there was no answer to my knock on the kitchen door, I hesitated and then knocked again. She was home, I knew that much; her BMW was in its usual place, the back left tire mired in a puddle that was nearly two feet wide. I rattled the door and then knocked a third time, but there was no response. “Lauren,” I yelled, cupping my hands to the glass. No lights were on in the kitchen or the living room. Maybe she was still asleep.
Finally I tried the knob, and to my surprise, it turned. I stepped over the welcome mat into the kitchen. There was an odor in the air, a faint must that reminded me of sweaty college house parties. Broken glass was scattered over the living room floor. Later the police would ask why a detail like this hadn’t made me suspicious, and all I could say was that it wasn’t impossible to imagine Lauren dropping a glass on her way to bed and then deciding she’d clean it up in the morning. Like a lot of beautiful people, she was a secret slob.
A framed picture of the two of us from the time she’d visited me at college sat on the end table, and I stopped for a closer look. People sometimes said we looked like sisters, both blond and passably pretty, though I always wore my hair long, almost down to my waist, while Lauren never let hers grow past her shoulders. My eyes were hazel, hers blue; I wore glasses and she didn’t; but the real difference was in our expressions. As a child, I’d gotten in the habit of smiling at strangers to compensate for my mother, whose moods ran the spectrum from brusque to ornery. By the time I got to grade school, I smiled so often and so readily that teachers regularly complimented me on my pleasant disposition. Last year a friend of Erika’s had told me that I smiled too much to be a lesbian—meaning, I think, that I smiled to placate men, though that wasn’t necessarily true. I smiled to placate everyone.
Lauren rarely smiled. She didn’t have to, since people gravitated toward her
without her doing a thing to draw them in. She was a firecracker, Sean said once, and it was more than just an expression. She could light up the night, or you could end up with singed eyebrows and the taste of gunpowder in your mouth.
There was a soiled washcloth lying at the bottom of the stairs, and I picked it up and threw it in the laundry room before I started up the stairs to the bedrooms. The door to the master was ajar. I knocked gently before pushing it open with my fingertips.
The bed was empty.
I snapped the switch, the light confirming what I thought I’d seen in the dark. The California king bed was vacant, the sheets and duvet folded neatly as a hotel turndown. Could she have fallen asleep in the baby’s room? It seemed unlikely, since Mabry was with Warren at his parents’ house, but I told myself I ought to check just to make sure.
I nudged the door across the hall with my foot. The walls had been painted shell-pink, white letters spelling out MABRY hung on the wall by the crib. The rocker swayed gently, displaced by the breeze from the open door. In the interest of thoroughness, I checked the closet and then the bathroom across the hall.
My heart was pounding now, and my throat stayed dry no matter how many times I swallowed. I went back outside, half hoping that I might recognize someone driving by and flag them down. This time I noticed the tire tracks in the grass. Another car had been here, and it had driven halfway up in the yard, as if the driver were either distracted or drunk. It must have happened overnight; the tracks were deep and muddy, grass lying in clumps like wet confetti.
I walked down the driveway to the main road and looked back. From this distance, the house could have been abandoned. The porch sagged, the rain gutter hanging at an odd angle. The paint was peeling, and trumpet vine had grown through the latticework that hid the crawl space. No wonder they wanted to sell.
I stood still, breathing in the scent of last night’s rain. I should call the police, I thought. No, I should call Warren first, and then Lauren’s mother. Surely there was some explanation, some innocuous reason for her absence, that I simply hadn’t thought of yet.
I heard gravel crunch behind me, and relief surged through my body before I realized that it was Warren driving the Range Rover his parents had bought him when he graduated from UVA. Mabry was sleeping in her carseat in the back, her thick brown hair mussed into a baby Mohawk. “Hey there,” Warren called through the open window as he rolled to a stop.
Though it almost certainly wasn’t the right moment, I felt the familiar shiver up my spine. Before Lauren locked him down, Warren Ballard had been the catch of Tyndall County. In high school he’d played football, sung in the choir, even acted in the school plays. Junior year, he’d given an uninspired but diligent performance as
Henry II in a performance of Becket, egged on by an ambitious drama teacher who would decamp to a school in northern Virginia with higher property taxes and a budget for the arts. Lauren played Eleanor of Aquitaine, and when they came out for the curtain call, Warren kept his arm slung over her shoulder, meat jewelry.
I’d wondered then if he’d fallen for Lauren because she was the only girl who didn’t get flustered at the sight of his cheekbones and Tiger Beat grin, instead looking him straight in the eye, secure in her belief that she had a God-given right to his regard. Back then he’d looked at her as if she were the last beer in the cooler, but since I’d come home this summer, I’d noticed that something was off. It had long been my habit to stare at Warren Ballard when he wasn’t looking, and my experience with the gradations of his expressions told me that the easy charm had dimmed a bit. When he talked or smiled, it seemed to cost him an effort, like a man trying to walk through water up to his knees. It seemed likely that the tension between them had to do with what had happened back in June, when Lauren was almost arrested for child endangerment after leaving their daughter in a parked car in ninety-degree heat. My mom had told me the family managed to hush it up and keep the details out of the papers, but if Warren was still mad, I wouldn’t have blamed him.
I didn’t speak, but something in my face must have alerted him. “Are you okay?” he said, bracing his elbow on the car window’s ledge. “Nicola. Hey. What’s going on?”
WARREN’S FAMILY HAD PLENTY OF FAVORS TO CALL IN, AND NEWS VANS from Charlottesville and Roanoke showed up that same night. Police began the search, combing the mountains and valleys of Tyndall County. Volunteers in orange vests knocked on the door of every home within a square mile of Blue Ridge Road. Though the police told me to get some sleep, I made sure that I was one of those volunteers, a tote bag stuffed with flyers slung over my shoulder. We searched for three days, but there was no trace of her, not in the woods or in the river, which they dragged with a dive team before the week was out.
Rumors spread: Lauren had committed suicide; she’d run away to Florida with a secret boyfriend; she’d been murdered by drug dealers who buried her under the new tennis courts at the city park. At the daily news conferences, I waited for the police to debunk these stories, but they never did. Every lead would be investigated, they said. Tips from the public were welcome and would be followed up on. They sounded as baffled as the rest of us. Tyndall County hadn’t seen a murder in five years, and no one had ever disappeared as far as anyone could recall.
A few details came out, either because of the cops or in spite of them. A cast-iron doorstop was missing from the living room. They’d found fingerprints on the light switches and door handles, but it was only whom you’d expect: Warren, Lauren, their mothers, a couple of his football friends and his brother, and me. When she saw me looking at the Missing flyer, a woman in line behind
me at the grocery store told me that the police were looking into the disappearance of a little girl from Ewald County, believing that the two cases might be connected, but that didn’t make sense to me. What kind of weirdo would take both a twenty-four-year-old woman and an eight-year-old girl?
I NEVER TOLD ANYONE ABOUT THE RECURRING DREAM IN WHICH I AGREE TO go home with Lauren that night. In the dream, I’m there when a man shows up at her door. He’s faceless, a hulking shadow in a black raincoat, standing just out of the glow of the porch light to hide his eyes.
At the heart of that nightmare was a question: would I have become another victim, or would my unexpected presence have thrown a wrench in her abductor’s plan? Perhaps he had only enough rope for one, and having to improvise would have caused some hesitation, a flash of self-doubt that we could have used to our advantage. In my dream, this is always how it goes: he’s thrown off his game, and in that moment of uncertainty, I manage to dial 911 or run down the road and call for help.
When Warren arrived that morning, I tried to tell him that it was my fault. “I should have been here,” I said, following him as he paced through the empty rooms with the sleeping baby pressed to his shoulder and the phone to his ear. “I should have protected her.” He patted my shoulder in a distracted way, and for a moment I wondered if I was being insensitive, taking on a role that was his by rights. Warren should have been the one breaking down, but he didn’t seem to need comforting—not yet, anyway. His wife was gone, and I could tell from his face that he couldn’t get his head around it. How could a person be here one minute and then vanish the next?
When the officers arrived, I showed them the broken glass I’d swept into a dustpan and the washcloth I’d picked up at the bottom of the stairs. They interviewed me twice in the days that followed, and for a time I wondered if I might be a suspect, but nothing ever came of it. I’d never been in trouble in my life, and I had an alibi. My mom and I had eaten dinner and watched a movie together, and she swore that she’d checked on me every hour during the night.
Before the police asked us to leave, I caught a glimpse of Warren staring out at the driveway, Mabry clasped to his chest, his expression unreadable. Like me, he’d probably never conceived of life without Lauren in it, and I wondered if he felt the same little jolt of excitement, stronger in that moment than either fear or grief. It was a shameful feeling, but I couldn’t repress it. It was as if a mountain on the horizon had vanished, and suddenly I could see the view.
1
My mother had taught me that the fangs of a decapitated copperhead could still bite. After I’d struck with the machete, I stepped back to what I thought was a safe distance, but my heel banged into the lawnmower and I fell hard, landing on my palms before scrabbling backward like a crab, as the snake gave one final hiss that made my chest constrict.
I scrambled to my feet and dusted off the seat of my jeans, looking around discreetly to make sure that no one had watched me fall on my ass. Though there were neighbors on both sides, neither house could be seen from this vantage point. The yard was empty, the scent of honeysuckle mingling with the sour reek of the trash can my mom had always kept on the back patio.
My heartbeat was just beginning to slow when Warren Ballard rounded the corner of the house. He saw the machete in my hand and stopped short. “Snake,” I said, moving the blade behind my back. “I got it, I think.”
Warren kept a cautious distance. He was wearing outdoorsy pants in some kind of wickable material and a green chambray shirt, which seemed weird for a weekday, though maybe you could get away with that sort of thing in real estate. “I was going to go in for a hug, but I think I’ll wait until you put that down,” he said, nodding at the machete. “Can I see?”
I swept my free arm in front of my body like an usher, and he moved closer, prodding the dead snake with his foot. “You’ll want to make sure there’s not a nest under the house,” he said. “I have a friend who does wildlife management. He books up months in advance, but I’ll text him and see when we can get him out here.”
This was worse than I’d thought. “I assumed it came from the woods,” I said, but Warren looked skeptical.
“You’ve got gaps in the foundation,” he said. “Probably lots of good things to eat under there, if you’re a snake. If you’re going to sell, I’d have somebody check it out.”
I was glad he was taking charge, since I worried that beheading the snake had made me look misleadingly competent. The truth was I knew nothing—about wildlife management, for starters, but also about selling houses. That was why I’d called Warren in the first place.
Though we hadn’t seen each other in sixteen years, I’d kept up with him online, in the way you do with high school friends who aren’t really friends anymore. In pictures he looked like an age-progressed version of the guy I’d known back then, with the broad frame of an ex-athlete and dark hair grown just long enough to fall on to his forehead in a boyish way. ...
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