May Beth gives me blueberries sometimes, but she also collects expired license plates, displaying them proudly inside the shed behind her double-wide. All different colors and states, sometimes countries. May Beth has so many license plates, I don’t think she’ll miss two. The registration stickers are courtesy of old Mrs. Warner, three trailers down from mine. She’s too frail to drive and doesn’t need them anymore.
I muddy the plates up and wipe my dirty palms on my shorts as I round the car and get in the driver’s side. The seats are soft and low and a cigarette burn marks the space between my legs. I slip the key into the ignition and the motor growls. I push my foot against the gas and the car rolls over the uneven terrain, following the same path out Becki took, until I reach the highway and then I go in the opposite direction.
I lick my lips; the taste of blueberries long since left them but not so long I can’t still imagine their puckered sweetness enough to miss it. May Beth will be so disappointed when she knocks on my door and finds me gone, but I don’t think she’ll be surprised. Last thing she said to me, my face cupped firmly in her hands, was, Whatever you’re thinking, you get it out of that damned foolish head of yours right now. Except it’s not in my head, it’s in my heart, and she’s the same woman who told me if you’re going to follow anything, it might as well be that.
Even if it is a mess.
THE GIRLS
S1E1
WEST McCRAY:
Girls go missing all the time.
My boss, Danny Gilchrist, had been talking for a while about me hosting my own podcast, and when I told him about May Beth’s call, and about Mattie and Sadie, he urged me to look into it. It seemed a little kismet, he thought, that I was in the area when Mattie died. Still, those were the first words out of my mouth:
Girls go missing all the time.
Restless teenage girls, reckless teenage girls. Teenage girls and their inevitable drama. Sadie had survived a terrible loss, and with very little effort on my part, I dismissed it. Her. I wanted a story that felt fresh, new and exciting and what about a missing teenage girl was that?
We’ve heard this story before.
Danny immediately reminded me of why I was working for him, and not the other way around.
DANNY GILCHRIST [PHONE]:
You owe it to yourself to dig a little deeper. Don’t decide what you don’t have before you know what you do. You’re better than that. Get down there, see what you find.
WEST McCRAY:
I left for Cold Creek the same week.
MAY BETH FOSTER:
It broke Sadie, Mattie’s murder. She was never the same after, and rightfully so, but that the police never found the monster who did it, well. That had to have been the final straw.
WEST McCRAY:
Is that what Sadie said?
MAY BETH FOSTER:
No, but she didn’t have to. You could tell just by lookin’ at her.
WEST McCRAY [STUDIO]:
There’s been no justice for Mattie Southern.
It’s impossible for residents of Cold Creek to accept that a crime so heinously and chaotically executed would go unsolved. Television has provided their point of reference; after all, on shows like CSI, they’d catch the murderer within the hour, often working with less than what was discovered in that apple orchard.
Detective George Alfonso of the Abernathy Police Department, who headed the investigation, looks like a movie star past his prime. He’s a six-foot-tall black man in his early sixties with short, graying hair. He expresses dismay over the lack of leads, but given the circumstances, he’s not necessarily surprised there are so few.
DETECTIVE ALFONSO:
We didn’t realize we were dealing with a murder, initially. We got a call about a fire and unfortunately, much of the crime scene was compromised by the fire department’s efforts to put it out.
WEST McCRAY:
The DNA evidence they’ve recovered has been inconclusive and in need of a match. So far, there’s no real suspect pool to pull from.
DETECTIVE ALFONSO:
We’ve filled in the gap between Mattie’s disappearance and death as best we can. As soon as we got the call she was missing, we put out an AMBER Alert. We searched the local area and looked into several POIs—people Mattie had been in contact with in the hours before she vanished. They were cleared. We have a single witness who says they saw Mattie get into a pickup truck the night she went missing. It was the last time anyone ever saw her alive.
WEST McCRAY:
That witness was Norah Stackett, who owns Stackett Groceries, the only grocery store in Cold Creek. Norah is fifty-eight, a white, redheaded mother of three grown children, all of whom she’s employed at her store.
NORAH STACKETT:
I was closing for the night when I saw her. I’d just turned the lights off and there was Mattie Southern at the corner, getting into some pickup. It was dark enough I couldn’t tell if it were blue or black, but I think black. I didn’t get a look at the plate or driver either, but I’ve never seen that truck before and I haven’t seen it since. Bet I’d know it if I saw it again, though. Next day, I hear there’s cops all over Sparkling River and I’ll just say I figured she was dead. I just knew. That’s weird, isn’t it—that I just knew? [LAUGHS] Givin’ myself the creeps.
WEST McCRAY:
The girls lived in Sparkling River Estates. It’s a small park, no more than ten trailers to it, some better kept than others. Cute little lawn ornaments and flower beds adorn one, while a rotting couch surrounded by garbage accents another. There’s no sparkling river nearby, but if you follow the highway out of town, you might come across one.
As I mentioned earlier, it’s managed by May Beth Foster, the girls’ surrogate grandmother. She shows me the girls’ trailer, a double-wide, exactly as Sadie left it. May Beth has found herself in a suspended state of grief where she can’t bring herself to clean it out, even though she also can’t afford not to rent it.
I don’t know what I’m expecting when I step inside, but the place is spare and clean. For the last four years of their lives, Sadie raised Mattie here on her own, but still—she was a teenager and when I think of teenagers, I think of some sort of natural disaster; a tornado moving from room to room, leaving carnage in its wake.
It was nothing like that in the place they called home. There are still cups in the kitchen sink and on the coffee table in front of the old television in the living room. A calendar on the fridge that hasn’t been flipped since June, when Sadie disappeared.
Things get downright eerie in their bedrooms. Mattie’s room looks like it’s waiting for her to come back. There are clothes on the floor, the bed is unmade. There’s an empty glass with water stains coating its inside on the nightstand.
MAY BETH FOSTER:
Sadie wouldn’t let anyone touch it.
WEST McCRAY:
It’s a direct contrast to Sadie’s room, which looks like it knows she’s never coming back. In her room, the bed has been neatly made, but aside from that, every available surface is bare. It appears to have been stripped clean.
WEST McCRAY [TO MAY BETH]:
There’s nothing here.
MAY BETH FOSTER:
I found all her things in the Dumpster back of the lot, the day I realized she was gone.
WEST McCRAY:
What kinds of things?
MAY BETH FOSTER:
She got rid of her books, movies, clothes … just everything.
It makes me sick to think about her throwing her life in the garbage like that because that’s what it amounts to. Every little bit that made her, everything, was all in the trash and when I found it, I just started to cry because she’d … it wasn’t worth anything to her anymore.
WEST McCRAY:
Did you see this coming at all? Did she give you any kind of indication she was planning on leaving?
MAY BETH FOSTER:
That week before she left, Sadie got really quiet, like she was thinking
about doing something stupid and I told her whatever she was thinking … don’t. I said to her, “Don’t you do it.” But by that point, I couldn’t reach her about much of anything.
Still, I never imagined this …
I have to tell you, it’s killing me to be in here. I just, I’d really like not to be.
WEST McCRAY:
We continue talking in her trailer, a cozy double-wide at the front of the lot. She has me sit on her plastic-covered couch which squeaks very loudly every time I move. When I tell her that’s not so great for an interview, we end up in her small kitchen, at the kitchen table, where she serves me a glass of iced tea and shows me the photo album she’s kept of the girls over the years.
WEST McCRAY:
You did this?
MAY BETH FOSTER:
I did.
WEST McCRAY:
Seems like something a mother would do.
MAY BETH FOSTER:
Yeah, well. A mother should.
WEST McCRAY:
Claire Southern, Mattie and Sadie’s mother, is not a welcome topic of conversation, but she’s an unavoidable one because without Claire, there would be no girls.
MAY BETH FOSTER:
Less said about her, the better.
WEST McCRAY:
I’d still really like to hear it, May Beth. It could help. At the very least, it’ll give me a better understanding of Sadie and Mattie.
MAY BETH FOSTER:
Well, Claire was trouble and there was no reason for it. Some kids are just born … bad. She started drinking when she was twelve. At fifteen, she was into pot, cocaine. By eighteen, heroin. She’d been arrested for petty theft a few times, misdemeanors. Just a mess. I was best friends with her mama, Irene, since Irene started renting from me. That’s how I come into their lives. You never knew a soul as gentle as Irene. She could’ve had a firmer hand with Claire, but there’s no use in dwelling on that now.
WEST McCRAY:
Irene died of breast cancer when Claire was nineteen.
MAY BETH FOSTER:
Before Irene died, Claire got pregnant. Irene was trying so hard to hold on for her grandchild but it wasn’t … it wasn’t meant to be. Three months after we put Irene in the ground, Sadie was born. I’d promised Irene on her deathbed I’d look out for that little girl, and that’s what I did. That’s what I’ve always done because, well—you have any kids of your own?
WEST McCRAY:
Yeah, I do. A daughter.
MAY BETH FOSTER:
Then you know.
sadie
Three days later, I dye my hair.
I do it in some public bathroom along the way. The ammonia mingles with the stench inside the dirty stalls and makes me gag. I’ve never colored my hair before and the end result is a muddy blond. On the girl on the box, it was golden but that doesn’t matter because all it’s meant to look is different.
Mattie would’ve hated it. She would’ve told me so. You never let me dye my hair, she’d whine in her thin voice and by thin, I don’t mean papery or weak. It just never came completely into itself. When she laughed, it would go so shrill and hurt my ears but I’m not complaining because when Mattie laughed, it was like being on a plane at night, looking down on some city you’ve never been to and it’s all lit up. Or at least how I imagine that would be. I’ve never been on a plane before.
And it’s true too. I never let her dye her hair. When she was burning through every rule in my book (call if you go to a friend’s house, don’t text boys without telling me, put your phone away and do your goddamn homework already) that was the only one she chose to honor: no dying your hair until you’re fourteen. Just missed it.
I think the real reason Mattie never touched her hair was because she got the blond from Mom and couldn’t stand the thought of losing what little pieces of her she had left. It always made me crazy how much the two of them looked alike, with their matching hair, blue eyes and heart-shaped faces. Mattie and I didn’t share a father and we didn’t look like we were sisters, not unless you caught us mirroring each other’s expressions in those rare instances we felt the exact same way about something. Between her and Mom, I was the odd one out; my unruly brown curls and murky gray eyes set upon what May Beth always called a sparrow’s face. Mattie was scrawny in a way that was underdeveloped and awkward, but there’s a special kind of softness that goes along with that, something less visually cynical compared to my makings. I’m the result of baby bottles filled with Mountain Dew. I have a system that doesn’t quite know how to process the finer things in life. My body is sharp enough to cut glass and in desperate need of rounding out, but sometimes I don’t mind. A body might not always be beautiful, but a body can be a beautiful deception. I’m stronger than I look.
It’s dark when the sign comes up for Whittler’s Truck Stop.
A truck stop. Closest thing to a pause button for people living on fast-forward, only they don’t pause so much as dial themselves down to twice the speed the rest of us operate on. I used to work at a gas station just outside of Cold Creek and my boss, Marty, never let me work nights alone was how little he trusted truckers passing through. I don’t know if that was entirely fair of him, but it’s how he felt. Whittler’s is bigger than what I come from, but doesn’t seem as clean. Or maybe you get so used to the mess of home you convince yourself over time everything’s exactly where it belongs. Nothing here is really trying for its best. The neon lights of the gas station sign seem duller than they should be, like they’re choosing to slowly go out rather than ending themselves with that sudden pop into darkness.
I head for the diner, Ray’s written in cursive paint on a sign that’s too small for the building it rests atop, making everything appear dizzyingly askew. BEST APPLE PIE IN GARNET COUNTY! a sloppy cardboard sign boasts from the window. TRY A SLICE!
I push through the heavy glass door and fall into the fifties. Ray’s looks just how it was described to me, red vinyl and turquoise, the waitresses in dresses and aprons styled to match. Bobby Vinton plays on an honest-to-God jukebox in the corner and I stand there, absorbing the nostalgia, the gravy-and-potatoes smell of it all, before I make my way to the counter at the back. The serving station and the kitchen is just beyond it.
I perch on one of the stools and rest my hands on the cool Formica countertop. To my right, a girl. Girl. Woman. She’s hunched over a plate of half-eaten food, thumbs moving fast across her phone’s screen. She has frizzy brown hair and she’s got so much exposed pale skin, it makes me shiver to look at her. She’s wearing black pumps, short-shorts and a thin, tight tank top. I think she works the parking lot. Lot lizards. That’s what they call girls like her. My eyes travel up for a better look at her face and it’s the kind of face that’s younger than it looks, skin ravaged by circumstance, not passage of time. The lines at the corner of her eyes and the edges of her mouth remind me of cracks in armor.
I rest my elbows against the counter and bow my head. Now that I’ve stopped, the drive is catching up with me. I’m not used to that kind of push behind a wheel and I’m fucking tired. The muscles in my back have tied themselves into tight little knots. I focus on tunneling each individual ache into a single pain I can ignore.
After a minute, a man comes out of the kitchen. He has olive skin, a shaved head, and beautiful, full-color tattoo sleeves on both arms. Skulls and flowers. His black Ray’s T-shirt strains across the front of him, tight enough to show off the parts of his body he must’ve worked hard for. He wipes his hands on the greasy towel hooked in his belt and gives me a once-over.
“What’ll it be?”
His voice sounds like a knife that sharpens itself on other people, intimidating enough that I can’t even imagine what it would sound like if he yelled. Before I can ask if he’s Ray, I notice the name tag on his shirt says SAUL. He turns his ear toward me and asks me to repeat myself, like there were words here and he only just missed them.
Mostly, my stutter is a constant. I know it better than any oth
er part of myself, but when I’m tired, it can be as impossibly unpredictable as Mattie was when she was four and started playing hide-and-seek all over the neighborhood without ever telling anyone she’d begun the game. I have talking to do here but I don’t want to waste a possible spectacle on someone I’m not sure will give me what I need, so I clear my throat and grab the small, laminated menu next to a basket of napkins and skim it for something cheap. I give Saul a pointed look, gesture to my throat and mouth sorry like I’m fucking laryngitic. I tap the menu so he realizes this is me, communicating. His eyes follow my finger and its tap-tap-tap to COFFEE … $2.00.
A minute later, he’s sliding a mug under my nose, saying, “Just so we’re clear, you can’t be nursing that all night. Drink it while it’s hot or add a meal to it.”
I let the steam curl around my face before I take that first sip. The coffee scalds my tongue and my throat, waking me up faster than the caffeine ever would, but it tastes strong enough for me to be able to count on that too. I set the mug down and notice a woman at the service window. She’s wearing a black Ray’s shirt, like Saul, and she reminds me of a slightly younger May Beth, except this woman’s hair is dyed black. May Beth’s is all salt with a little pepper. They both have similarly peachy faces and pointed features, though, and everything after their necks is rounder and much less defined. Soft. May Beth used to wrap me in her arms and hold me close when there was no one else to do it—until I got too old for that sort of thing—and I loved that softness. I let the memory inspire a careful smile to play across my mouth. I give it to the woman. She gifts me with one of her own.