26. Lilah
26
LILAH
We sat on the threadbare sofa while Hateya Adakai— she’d actually told us to call her Hattie — brought out iced tea. The living room was small, the furnishings worn, but the house was neat as a pin and I caught the scent of lemon-scented cleaner in the air.
Framed pictures rested on every surface, most of them of two girls, close enough in age and looking similar enough that they might have been twins.
“Is that your other daughter?” I asked Hattie when she’d settled on the love seat next to the sofa.
She followed my gaze to a photograph of Rain with another girl, both smiling into the camera, a body of water glimmering in the sun behind them. Rain was younger in the picture, her face clear of the worry and fear that had been etched on her face when I’d seen her behind the Dive.
“Yes. That’s Lily, Rain’s younger sister,” Hattie said. “She’s just started school at the community college.”
“It must be so hard for her — for both of you — with Rain missing,” I said.
Hattie nodded. “I feel… sick. I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. I know she’s in trouble but the police say she probably just decided to leave. They don’t listen when I say she wouldn’t do that… that she wouldn’t leave us to worry.”
“Has she ever been out of touch for so long?” I knew from the date of birth on the flyer that Rain was twenty-two, too old to be considered a runaway.
“No.” Hattie’s brown eyes flashed. “The police asked if she’d ever run away when I filed the missing-person’s report.”
“How long had she been working at Pink?” I knew Rain had been a dancer at the adult club from the one and only article I’d been able to find about her disappearance, written by a reporter named Daniel Longhat at The Blackwell Tribune .
“About a year.” Hattie looked at her hands. “I know how it looks.”
“How what looks?”
“A young woman working at a club like that,” she said softly. “But Rain was a good girl. She lived here with her sister and me, worked and went to school, helped with the bills and tried to save money so she could transfer into a four-year school.”
“She sounds smart,” I said. “Ambitious.”
Hattie looked up and met my eyes. “Yes. She’s both of those things and more.”
I thought about Mr. Suit, about the car behind the Dive. “Had she mentioned any trouble? Anyone who was scaring her or following her? Anything unusual going on at work?”
Hattie hesitated and my nerves went on full alert. There was something, something that had her on alert too.
“Please,” I said. “Even if it seems like nothing, it might be something.”
She studied my face. “Why are you doing this?”
The question wasn’t accusatory. She was genuinely curious. I’d told her on the phone that I was looking into her daughter’s disappearance, but I hadn’t gone any deeper than that. Honestly, she’d just seemed happy someone was asking questions.
I drew in a breath. “I worked at the Dive. It’s a bar not far from Pink.”
Hattie nodded. “I know of it.”
“I thought I saw your daughter being pushed into a car behind the bar a couple months ago. I had a feeling I was seeing something I shouldn’t, and I was right, because a few nights later some men chased me through the woods because of what I saw.”
“Now I really don’t understand,” Hattie said. “You shouldn’t be asking about this. It’ll draw attention to you, put you in danger again. All for someone you don’t even know.”
I bit my lip. “I’m already in danger. And the truth is, I just can’t stop thinking about your daughter. I feel like…” She frowned while I searched for the right words. “I feel like I should have done more that night. Like I should have… I don’t know, yelled at the men to stop or pulled her away from the car or something.”
It was the first time I’d articulated the guilt I’d been carrying around since I’d found the flyer at Cassie’s Cuppa. It was entirely possible I’d been the last person to see Rain before she’d been abducted and I’d just stood there with my mouth hanging open in shock while Mr. Suit had whisked her away.
“Then you both might be gone.” She met my gaze. “Then you wouldn’t be here to ask these questions about her. And the truth is, no one else is asking them.”
I thought about my conversation with Jude, how I’d told him that in my own life at least, it had seemed like even the bad stuff had been planned, that it was all leading me to a destination I couldn’t quite see but one that might not be all bad.
I nodded.
“She liked working at the club for the first few months,” Hattie said, picking up the thread of our conversation. “The girls were nice, the money was good. There were flexible hours, hours that worked with her school schedule. I worried about her — what mother wouldn’t? — but she seemed happy there.”
“What about after that?” Nolan spoke for the first time, his voice soft and respectful. “What about after the first few months?”
She studied him, like she was making a snap character judgement, deciding whether he could be trusted. “She stopped talking about it.”
“About work?” Nolan asked.
Hattie nodded. “She used to tell us things, about the girls who worked there, the customers… Funny stories, things like that.”
“But after the first few months she didn’t?” I asked.
Hattie frowned. “It sounds silly. Maybe she just got bored of it. But it felt like something more.”
“How so?” Nolan asked.
“Lily and I would ask her about people she’d told us about, trying to get her to talk, and she just… clammed up. Wouldn’t talk about work, wouldn’t talk about the people, got frustrated when we asked until eventually we stopped asking. Now…” Hattie hesitated. “Now I think I should have kept asking.”
“Do you think her disappearance could have something to do with Pink? With someone else who works there or a customer or something?” I asked.
Hattie shook her head. “I just don’t know. I don’t know how much of what I think is real anymore. I miss her. I…” Her eyes brimmed with tears and she cleared her throat. “I want her to come home. The police don’t seem to care. No one does. Maybe I’m seeing clues where there aren’t any.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
“Thank you,” she said. “Even just coming here to ask about her, it helps.”
“Is there anything else you can think of?” Nolan asked. “Anything unusual about the days and weeks before she went missing?”
She shook her head. “Not that I can think of. She was a young woman. She had her own life, and I tried not to pry just because she still lived under my roof. Everyone is entitled to privacy.”
I thought of my own mom: the way she had to know everything Matt and I did, everything we talked about, everything we listened to, everything we watched. It would have been one thing if it had been out of curiosity, if she’d just wanted to know us, but it had never been about that.
It had been about judgement. About fear. About control.
“You’re a good mom,” I said. “I’m sure Rain loves you and appreciates you.”
She inhaled deeply, like she was trying to stifle a sob. “Thank you.”
I stood and Nolan followed suit. “Thank you so much for talking to us. I’ll let you know if we find out anything else, and you have my number, so please let me know if you think of anything that might be helpful.”
She walked us to the door and let us out. We were standing on the porch when she looked at me quizzically.
“Aren’t you going to ask?”
I tipped my head. “Ask what?”
“If my daughter was using drugs. If she was a prostitute. The police asked enough times.”
I shook my head. “No.”
“Why?”
“Because it doesn’t matter.” There was so much more I wanted to say. I wanted to promise Hattie we’d find out what had happened to her daughter. I wanted to promise that the world would change, that it would start to give a shit about girls like Rain. About girls like me. But I wasn’t in the habit of making promises I couldn’t keep, so I just said the only thing I could say, the thing that was true. “I’ll keep in touch. I promise."