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ASHFORD: I’ve seen some of her photographs.
Ashford opens a folder on the table and spreads out several glossy photos. The top photo shows six preteens. A printed label has been affixed to the front, identifying each of the children. Becca and Sara stand at the center, arms around each other, Becca’s outline slightly blurred as if she’s barely managed to dash back into the frame. Despite their different ethnicities—Sara white, Becca Asian—there is something about their stances that marks them as obviously related. Anthony Beck and Nick Dessen, both white, stand to the left of the sisters, Anthony with his chin tilted up in a too-cool pose he hasn’t grown into and Nick, a skinny kid in an oversize windbreaker, mimicking him. On the right, Trina Jeffries breaks the mood with a smile, her hand lifted to tuck her hair behind her ear, and Melanie Whittaker, a black girl in a denim jacket covered in iron-on patches, curls the corner of her mouth like she can’t quite take herself seriously.
Ashford slides this photograph to the side, baring another. Sara frowns, a faint line of confusion between her brows. He taps the new photo, an image of a young man with his face in blankshadow. The light is odd at his shoulders, as if his outline is fracturing.
ASHFORD: What do you know about this photograph?
SARA: I haven’t seen that one before.
ASHFORD: What can you tell me about Nick Dessen?
SARA: Aren’t you going to ask about the other photo?
ASHFORD: Which one? This one?
He moves aside the photo of Nick Dessen and places another on the center of the table. It shows Sara, her hair damp and hanging limply around her face, standing next to a young woman wearing a white dress with a slash of blue ribbon across her waist. The girl has extended her hand; Sara has begun to lift her own, as if to take it.
ASHFORD: You find this photo remarkable?
SARA: Don’t you?
ASHFORD: Not particularly. Two girls. About to hold hands.
SARA: But she’s...
ASHFORD: She’s Lucy Callow? She does bear a resemblance to the photos we have, but existing photos of Lucy Callow aren’t high quality. This could be anyone. [Pause] But it isn’t, is it? It is Lucy. You found her.
Sara meets Ashford’s eyes. She’s silent for a moment. Then she lets out a quick, choked-off laugh.
SARA: No. We didn’t find Lucy.
ASHFORD: Then—
SARA: She found us.
2
BECCA TOOK PHOTOSfor the yearbook every year, and you could always tell which ones were hers. Most of the other photos were posed or awkward, the lighting flat, the students interchangeable. Becca’s photos were different. She captured the longing of unrequited love in the way a girl stared across the classroom, her chin resting on her fist as she slumped over her desk. In the long, lean line of Anthony’s body, stretched out along the ground, the arc of the soccer ball unmistakable even in the still frame as he dove to meet it, she captured exultation and concentration. Becca had a way of making everyone feel seen.
It was remarkable, then, how little time anyone spent looking for her.
The official story is that she ran off with a boy. Zachary Kent. Bad news, according to my parents. He was older than her. My parents tried to forbid her from dating him—hated his pierced lip and dyed hair, the music he played, the car he drove. I only met him once, when I nearly ran into him and Becca coming out of the Half Moon Diner, his arm slung over Becca’s shoulders. Becca introduced him, but all he said to me was “Hey” before they got into his car and drove away. I saw the way she looked at him, andI saw the photo she took of him. One ankle over his knee, a notebook propped on his leg, his eyes squinting off into the distance.
It was the kind of photograph Becca loved the most. Peeling back the layers of a person bit by bit. Making a study of them. There was curiosity in that photo, but not love. No wild abandon. She might have left home, but it wouldn’t have been for him.
Yet they disappeared, and they disappeared together, and there had been all the fights with Mom and Dad—months of them, Becca alternating between giving them the silent treatment and screaming at them for being too controlling, while they managed to find fault in everything she did: hang out with Zachary, drop out of choir, steal away on her mysterious late-night trips she would never explain to any of us. So when she vanished, they looked for her, but not too hard; they didn’t think she wanted to be found.
I tried to tell them about the conversation I’d heard, and what Becca had said about the road—Lucy Gallows road, I thought, though I couldn’t be sure. And my mother told one of her friends, and her friend’s daughter overheard, and suddenly the whole school seemed to know. That was how the rumor started—half rumor, half joke. The kind of nervous cruelty that kids spit out without thinking, to cover up their own uneasiness.
Lucy Gallows took Becca Donoghue into the woods, and never let her out again.
No one believed it, of course. It was all just a morbid joke. But Becca wasn’t the sort for jokes or urban legends. She believed. And that meant that either my sister was losing it, or I had to believe, too.
And so I started searching. For the road. For Lucy. For my sister. It never got me anywhere.
Until now.
—
