Chapter 51 Audrey
Audrey
They haven’t found her. Stranger and Meghan have both -vanished without a trace. They haven’t uncovered any more bodies in days, but we know there are more to be found. Too many names, not enough bones.
Janie could still be buried out there.
You’ll be okay, Audrey.
You’ll be okay, Oddity.
I still can’t remember which one I heard. It’s like I have two memories, interposed over each other.
“I wish I could be sure,” I say. Dev sits at the edge of the chair across from my spot on Len’s couch, his elbows propped on his knees.
Barry sleeps next to me, head on my lap, as he has for the last several days basically 24/7.
We haven’t been home much. I haven’t been up for being alone, and Len and Kenny wouldn’t have let me anyway.
I have a splint on one wrist and the tail end of a prescription for some decent painkillers, as does Barry for his bruised shoulder, but otherwise my encounter with the Hills left more emotional damage than physical.
Dev showed up the first day. He came with flowers—-for Barry, he insisted, the true hero of the hour—-and didn’t ask me for details. I wasn’t ready to share them. Not yet. Not until now, nearly a week later.
“Could it be her?” Dev asks when I’ve told him all the parts of it I can bear to. “Wouldn’t you have recognized her? Wouldn’t they?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen her since she was a teenager, and she had surgery,” I say.
“Andrew and the others . . . They didn’t know her as well as I did.
It was years between when she left Franklin and when they found Stranger down there.
She was in bad shape.” Half starved, hardened, beastly—-the diary said as much.
“And maybe they did know,” I add. I shake my head. There’s no one left to ask.
But could Janie even have done what Stranger did? Lasted that long, pressing herself into the small shape that was required of her?
She was in that bunker. I’m certain of that much. I’m sure it was Janie who carved those words in the wood, but I don’t know what happened to her after that—-if she emerged, or if she died and left her chosen name as a talisman for the next girl to find.
I play with Barry’s soft ear. He grumbles and snuggles nearer. He’s been such a baby since we got home, begging for treats and sympathy and praise for his bravery. All of them have been in ready supply.
“I just have this feeling,” I say at last. “Or, not a feeling. More like—-quiet.”
“What kind of quiet?”
“Like I’m done. Like I found her,” I say. Like a small voice that has been whispering to me since the night Janie knocked on my window has finally fallen silent.
Like wherever Janie is, she’s finally found some kind of peace.