The Lost Girls

by Jessica Chiarella

Genres: Women's Fiction; Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

One of PopSugar's Best Books of 2021
 
When her true-crime podcast becomes an overnight sensation, a young woman is pulled into the web of a case that may offer a surprising connection to her own sister's disappearance years earlier.

It's been more than twenty years since Marti Reese's sister, Maggie, disappeared. Only eight-years-old at the time, Marti can't remember what happened, just that Maggie got into a car and never returned. After years of grief and countless false leads, Marti is coping as best she can: abandoning her marriage, drinking to forget, and documenting her never-ending search via a true-crime podcast. But when the podcast becomes an unexpected hit and Marti thinks she's finally ready to put it all behind her, a mysterious woman calls with new information that could lead her down a dangerous path.

For years, Ava Vreeland has been fighting to overturn her brother's murder conviction. After finding strange similarities between the two cases, Ava is certain there's a connection between the murder and Maggie's disappearance, one that could prove her brother's innocence. Together, Marti and Ava embark on a quest for the truth, but the more Marti digs, the more she's shaken by the answers she might find, and what it is she's even searching for...

Release date: July 6, 2021

Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons

Print pages: 336

Sample

Chapter 1
 
The world is full of lost girls. Scores of them. Girls who disappear into the night, who inject heroin and fall off the map, who love other girls and come home to find their parents have changed the locks. Girls who run away, girls who are taken. Girls full of sin, ones who like boys more than they love Jesus. Girls who are locked in basements and held until they give birth to more girls. The weight of them could drag a fleet of ships to the ocean floor. I know all about them. I've made it my business, to know.
 
The recording plays over the sound system of the crowded theater in mid-town Manhattan. The house lights are momentarily down, and onstage a logo of a retro radio mic, lit up in purple neon light, hangs above the proceedings. The crucifix in this particular church.
 
People look for some of them. Sometimes there are police investigations, sometimes candlelight vigils, volunteer phone banks, pleading parents on local news. No one bothers to look for others. If they were rotten, or ruined, or from the wrong place or have skin of another color, they are allowed to slip away. For others still, no one even knows they are gone. Because no one cared for them to begin with. My sister was lucky in that way, at least — she was loved. We looked for her. I don't think I will ever stop looking.
 
I'm standing at the bar to the left of the audience when a man sidles up to me. I can feel it without having to look, like a little static pulse at the hairs on my arm. The kind of sixth sense you develop when you've had a life like mine. It's my talent, the one my friends would tease me about in college, saying I was a little bit psychic beneath it all. I'm not, of course. I just pay attention.
 
By my count, my sister was the sixteenth girl lost in the hundred-year history of Sutcliffe Heights, Illinois. One of two kidnappings, though the other was a six-year-old, taken across the Wisconsin border by her father during a custody dispute in 1973. That girl was returned — unharmed — two days later, as soon as the police put out an APB. Most of the others are runaways. Factory girls, who worked in Chicago's nearby industrial yards in the early 40s. Bright teenagers sucked westward by the promise of California in the 60s. Nothing like Maggie.
 
He orders a drink, a SoCo and Coke, and it clings to the ice in his glass with the stickiness of syrup. I know who he'll be without looking at him. If he'd ordered an IPA, he'd be one of the young producers, with a tweed blazer and an encyclopedic knowledge of audio equipment. Whiskey, and he'd be talent, an investigative journalist with a voice for radio, a bit better at talking than he is at writing. But Southern Comfort and Coke? He's an investor, the sort of guy who puts up the funds for a production company because he read that podcasts are becoming increasingly lucrative, and he doesn't have the head to navigate the tech industry.
 
Maggie was lost on October 16, 1998. She got into a car with a man. Perhaps she knew him. Perhaps he had simply spotted her walking home, that day. These are the things we don't know. Even the car was a mystery, a sedan that might have been blue, or gray, or silver. It was twilight, and difficult to tell, especially for an eight-year-old. Especially a scared one. I took off as soon as Maggie let go of my hand. She stayed where she was, and I ran for home. I ran, because she told me to. It was the last thing my sister ever told me to do.
 
Applause begins as the audio fades, and onstage, the words JANE DOE, Nominee, Best Debut Series appear on the screen. Above it, gold lettering reads APA Annual Awards Gala in a thin, looping script. It would all be elegant if the floors by the bar weren’t still tacky from the rock concert held here at the venue last night.

"That one's going to win," the man beside me says, sipping from the little cocktail straw floating in his drink. He's wearing a blazer with a v-neck t-shirt underneath it. His hair, cut in a high fade, shines a bit too much in the light from the stage, slick with expensive pomade. The soft pudge at his waist rests on the buckle of his belt. I guess the gym can't quite keep up with all those sugary drinks.

"What makes you so sure?" I ask as he slides his forearm along the bar so it's almost brushing my elbow. It seems he has no intention of getting back to his seat any time soon.

It's the fucking dress that's the problem. Andrea's dress, the one she convinced me to wear, insisting that someone should still enjoy her pre-pregnancy clothes. The dress I took without even considering that I'm already three inches taller than my co-creator in flats, and I'm not wearing flats tonight. It's short in a way that implies intention, like I'm in a 90's legal drama, trying to make a point about fashion and empowerment.  I've resolved to try and stand as much as possible through this interminable event, which leaves me hovering by the bar, ordering refills at a pace that's ambitious, even for me. And apparently looking as if I've been waiting all night for the attentions of a man whose chest hair is poking through his organic cotton t-shirt.

"Everyone loves a dead girl," the man says. "People eat that shit up."

"Missing. Missing girl," I reply, and the man gives a surprisingly high-pitched giggle, licking some errant So-Co from the webbing between his thumb and forefinger.

"She's totally dead. There's no way she's not dead." He takes a long pull on his drink. "And it sucks, because the show my company produces is so much better."

"Oh yeah? Which show is that?" I ask, my voice flat, sipping my dirty martini. Here I am, a girl in a short dress with cropped hair, playing her part as much as everyone else. Wearer of smudged eye makeup. Drinker of astringent drinks. Cool and sly as a Warhol superstar.

"The Chuck Hoffman Show," he replies. I've heard of it. Chuck Hoffman tries to be Ben Shapiro, but falls more into the Alex Jones tier.

"This is the award for Best Debut," I reply. "I'm pretty sure your show is in a different category."

"Whatever," the guy says. "It's still better. No dead girls."

"Maybe you guys just aren't trying hard enough," I reply, and the guy bursts into another round of tipsy giggles.

"That's cute," he says, as if it's a delightful surprise, my wit. He takes his forefinger and traces it, almost experimentally, down my arm. "You're funny."

 I indulge momentarily in the fantasy of smashing my glass into the bridge of his nose. I wonder what would break more easily, the stem of the martini glass or the soft tissue of his face. It would be bad timing, though. Onstage, a woman in a sequined dress approaches the podium. Words materialize on the dark screen above her as she reads off the names into the microphone:
 
BEST DEBUT SERIES
THEATER OF THE ABSURD
CHAMPIONS UNSCRIPTED
JANE DOE
TELL ME LIES
 
"What's your name?" the guy asks.

"Marti," I reply, because I can't use my go-to alias here and there's nothing else to do but to go with the truth. A ripple of applause breaks out in the theater.

"See, what did I tell you?" the guy says.

"What?" I ask. He motions to the stage. On its screen, JANE DOE, Winner, Best Debut Series is written in that same gold script.

"So what do I get for being right?" He seems awfully proud of himself. I fish the olives out of my martini glass and down the rest of it, fast and hot in the back of my throat. Just for fun, I drop my skewer of olives, still dripping with brine, into his drink and give it a little stir.

"The fuck?" he says, his lips curling.

"Congratulations," I reply, as I head for the stage to collect my award.

*
The truth is, despite what I told Mr. So-Co and Coke, all of this actually did start with a dead girl. Jane Doe #4568, who arrived at the Cook County Medical Examiner's Office on April 17, 2018. Jane had been left on the street outside of Illinois Masonic Hospital during an early-season thunderstorm, her veins full of heroin and mono ethylene glycol — more commonly known as antifreeze — according to the Medical Examiner's report. She was between the ages of thirty and thirty-five years old. She'd had her tonsils removed, and she was slightly anemic, a condition that was likely the result of the fact that she'd recently given birth. She had a large tattoo of a lizard on her right thigh. And her hair was blonde.

My friend Andrea and I were out to lunch when I got the call. If Detective Richards had still been with the CPD, he probably would have reached out himself. But he was already in his forties when my sister went missing, and had retired from the force in 2017. The detective who'd replaced him – some kid who'd just been promoted from an undercover gig in Vice – apparently didn't see fit to pick up the phone when the body turned up, even out of courtesy. Luckily, I'd bought the receptionist at the Medical Examiner's office breakfast every six months for the past decade, so when the file came across her desk, she remembered Maggie well enough to reach out.

It was plenty, after all. The age, the hair, the tonsils. The receptionist didn't even know that Maggie's favorite stuffed animal was a blue iguana our father bought her at the Lincoln Park Zoo when she was seven. The other details were enough already to raise the possibility that Jane Doe could have been Maggie.

It was Andrea's idea to record what happened. She and I had worked together before, when she'd interviewed me for an episode of a Cold Cases podcast she'd produced for a few years. And we'd been friends since college, where she'd studied journalism and I dabbled first in criminology, then sociology, then finally landed on English literature. We were sitting at a French bistro in Lakeview when my phone chimed, because Andrea claimed that all she could keep down in her first trimester were croissants with lots of unsalted butter. She must have sensed it was about Maggie when I got up from the table to answer the call, must have seen it in my posture as I hovered near the bistro's sunny entrance, leaning against the whitewashed brick. Maybe I looked stricken. Maybe I pressed my hand to the door, unsteady, maybe it left a crescent of white fingerprints on the glass. I can't remember anything from that moment. Still, Andrea must have known, because she already had her recorder running, set on the table between us, when I returned.

"What's going on?" she asked, and then held up a silver-ringed hand to stop me from answering right away, ever the journalist. "I'm taping this. Just so you know."

"Yeah," I replied, feeling the blood begin to drop from my head, the prick of nerve pain in my fingers. As if I'd slept wrong, and just awoken. "So, I guess there's a Jane Doe at the morgue."

I picked up my fork and speared a couple of overdressed leaves of lettuce, before I realized that there was no way that I could bring them to my mouth, chew, or swallow. Andrea's dark lipstick disappeared as her mouth tightened.

"They think it's Maggie?" she finally asked. Straight to the heart of it, in a way that reminded me of the affinity between us. She knew that I would bristle at being coddled. That I was never more vicious than when I felt pitiable.

I listed off Jane's vitals. Andrea was familiar enough with Maggie's case to understand, to draw her own conclusions.

"So this is the first new development her case has had in... what?" Andrea asked.
"About eight years," I replied, thinking back to the last sighting, the last Girl Who Might Have Been Maggie. It used to happen more often, back when her disappearance was fresh. But after twenty years, nobody else was looking for her anymore. Nobody knew what to look for. "She's got a tattoo on her thigh. A blue lizard, according to the coroner's assistant."

I remember Andrea's hands flew to her face, pinkies meeting against her lips, the rest of her fingers splayed along her cheeks. Peering at me over her fingertips, lines appearing in her high forehead.

I knew what she was thinking. That I also had a tattoo of a blue iguana, a tribute to my missing sister's favorite toy, across the ribs of my right side. That surely, the world could not manufacture such a stunning coincidence. That it had to be her.
Finally, my sister.

*

We recorded the six episodes that became our podcast in the week that followed, starting with the muffled recording of our conversation in the bistro. First, with the intention of pitching it as a follow up to the Cold Cases episode we'd recorded about Maggie’s case, and then under our own steam, when the hours of material proved to be more than one episode could contain. We went through every detail of my sister's case and gleaned what we could from Jane's autopsy report. I spent hours on true crime forums online, sharing details and soliciting advice from the other obsessed amateur detectives and retired policemen and bored college students who were all trying to solve unsolved cases. Andrea tracked down the hospital orderly who found the body and peppered him with questions while he ate his lunch at a little bakery across from Masonic. And I talked, just talked, for hours at a time. Speculated about why Maggie might have been lost for so long. About what it would mean if Jane Doe was really my sister. And what it would mean if she wasn't.

A lot of reviewers pointed to those discussions as the greatest strength of the podcast, after we released it. Listeners loved that it was my story as much as my sister's, an honest portrait of lingering childhood trauma, a detailed rendering of survivor's guilt. I talked about the death of my father, my fractured relationship with my mother, my lingering nightmares. The years it had been since I'd allowed myself to hope for an answer to my sister's disappearance, because hope could be a terrible thing, apt to turn leaden inside you and drag you down if you let it. When I listened to the podcast, after Andrea cut together our conversations into a coherent narrative, I couldn't even remember saying some of it. I couldn't imagine being willing to put into words the things that had been roiling inside of me. I could hear it in my own voice, how desperate I was for an answer. Grappling for anything. I was still drowning, then.