The Good Girl: An addictively suspenseful and gripping thriller

“I have to use the bathroom,” she mumbles, afraid.

I pull into the gravel parking lot of some run-down truck stop outside Eau Claire. The sun is beginning to rise over a dairy farm to the east. A herd of Holsteins grazes along the road. It’s gonna be a sunny day, but it’s damn cold. October. The trees are changing.

In the parking lot I hesitate. It’s all but empty, only one car, a rusty old station wagon with political bumper stickers plastered across the back, the rear headlight held to the car with packaging tape. My heart races. I stick the gun in the seat of my pants. It’s not like I haven’t been thinking about this since we left. I knew this was something I’d have to do. By now the girl was supposed to be with Dalmar, and I figured I’d be trying hard to forget what I’d done. I didn’t plan for this. But if this is going to work, there are things we need, like money. I have some money on me but not enough for this. I emptied the girl’s wallet before we left. Credit cards are out of the question. I pull a knife from the glove box. Before I cut the girl’s restraints I say, “You stay with me. Don’t try anything stupid.” I tell her she can use the bathroom when I say so, only when I say it’s okay. I cut her rope. Then I cut two feet of spare rope and stuff it in a coat pocket.

The girl looks ridiculous as she steps from the truck in the wrinkled shirt that doesn’t even reach all the way to her wrists. She crosses her arms across herself and ties them into a knot. She shudders from the cold. Her hair falls down into her face. She keeps her head bent, eyes on the gravel. Her forearms are bruised, right across some stupid Chinese tattoo on her inner arm.

There’s only one lady working, not a single customer. Just as I thought. I wrap my arm around the girl and pull her toward me, try to make it seem like we’re close. Her feet hesitate and fall out of sync with mine. She trips but I stop her before she can fall. My eyes threaten her to behave. My hands on her are not a sign of intimacy. They’re a show of force. She knows it, but the lady behind the register does not.

We walk up and down the aisles, make sure as hell we’re the only ones in the place. I grab a box of envelopes. I check the bathroom to make sure it’s empty. I make sure there isn’t a window the girl could jump out of, and then I tell her to pee. The woman at the register gives me a strange look. I roll my eyes and tell her the girl’s had too much to drink. Apparently she buys it. It seems to take forever for the girl to pee and when I peek inside again, she’s standing before the mirror, splashing water on her face. She stares at her reflection for a long time. “Let’s go,” I say after a minute.

And then we head to the register to pay for the envelopes. But we don’t pay for the envelopes. The lady’s distracted, watching old 1970s reruns on a twelve-inch TV. I look around, make sure there’s no cameras in the place.

And then I come up behind her, pull the gun from the seat of my pants and tell her to empty the fucking register.

I don’t know who panics more. The girl freezes, her face filled with fear. Here I am, with the barrel of the gun pressed against some middle-aged lady’s gray hair, and she’s a witness. An accomplice. The girl starts asking what I’m doing. Over and over again. “What are you doing?” she cries.

I tell her to shut up.

The lady is begging for her life. “Please don’t hurt me. Please just let me go.” I shove her forward, tell her again to empty the register. She opens it, and starts jamming stacks of cash into a plastic shopping bag with a big smiley face and the words Have a nice day. I tell the girl to look out the window. Tell me if anyone’s coming. She nods, submissively, like a child. “No,” she chokes between tears. “No one.” And then she asks, “What are you doing?”

I press the gun harder, tell the lady to hurry up.

“Please. Please don’t hurt me.”

“The quarters, too,” I say. There are rolls of them. “You got any stamps?” I ask. Her hands start to move to a drawer and I bark out, “Don’t touch a damn thing. Tell me. You got any stamps?” Because for all I know, there’s a semiautomatic in that drawer.

She whimpers at the sound of my voice. “In the drawer,” she cries. “Please don’t hurt me,” she begs. She tells me about her grandchildren. Two of them, a boy and a girl. The only name I catch is Zelda. What kind of stupid name is Zelda anyway? I reach into the drawer and find a book of stamps and toss them into the shopping bag, which I yank from her hands and give to the girl.

“Hold that,” I say. “Just stand there and hold it.” I let the gun point at her for a split second, just so she knows I’m not screwing around. She lets out a cry and ducks as if maybe—just maybe—I actually shot her.

I tie the lady to a chair with the rope from my pocket. Then I shoot the phone for good measure. Both of the women scream.

I can’t have her calling the cops too soon.

There’s a pile of sweatshirts beside the front door. I grab one and tell the girl to put it on. I’m sick and tired of watching her shiver. She slips it over her head and static takes control of her hair. It’s about the ugliest shirt I’ve ever seen. L’étoile du Nord. Whatever the hell that means.

I grab a couple extra sweatshirts, a few pairs of pants—long johns—and some socks. And a couple stale donuts for the ride.

And then we go.

In the truck, I bind the girl’s hands once again. She’s still crying. I tell her to either figure out a way to shut up or I’ll figure it out for her. Her eyes drop to the roll of duct tape on the dashboard and she goes quiet. She knows I’m not screwing around.

I grab an envelope and fill out the address. I stuff as much money as I can in there and stick a stamp in the corner. I jam the rest of the money in my pocket. We drive around until I find a big blue mailbox and drop the envelope inside. The girl’s watching me, wondering what the hell I’m doing, but she doesn’t ask and I don’t say. When I catch her eye, I say, “Don’t worry about it,” and then I think, It’s none of your fucking business.

It’s not perfect. It’s nowhere perfect. But for now it will have to do.

Eve

After

I’ve gotten used to the sight of police cars stalled outside my home. There are two of them there, day and night, four uniformed guards keeping an eye on Mia. They sit in the front seat of the police cruisers, drinking coffee and eating sandwiches that they take turns picking up from the deli. I stare from the bedroom windows, peering between the plantation blinds that I’ve split apart with a hand. They look like schoolboys to me, younger than my own children, but they carry guns and nightsticks and peer up at me with binoculars and just stare. I convince myself that they can’t see me when, night after night, I dim the lights to change into a pair of flannel pajamas, but the truth is that I don’t know.

Mia sits on the front porch every day, seemingly indifferent to the bitter cold. She stares at the snow that surrounds our home like the moat of a castle. She watches the dormant trees lurch back and forth in the wind. But she doesn’t notice the police cars, the four men who study her all hours of the day. I’ve begged her not to leave the porch and she’s agreed, though sometimes she makes her way across the snow and onto the sidewalk, where she strolls by the homes of Mr. and Mrs. Pewter and the Donaldson family. While one of the cars crawls along behind her, the other sends an officer to get me, and I come running out the door with bare feet to snatch up my wandering daughter. “Mia, honey, where are you going?” I’ve heard myself ask countless times, gathering her by the shirtsleeves and reeling her in. She never wears a coat and her hands are ice-cold. She never knows where she’s going but she always follows me home and I thank the officers as we pass by, on our way into the kitchen for a cup of warm milk. She shivers as she drinks it and when she’s through she says she’s going to bed. She’s felt unwell for the past week, always longing to be in bed.

But today for some reason she sees the police cars. I pull out of the garage and onto the street, en route to Dr. Rhodes’s office for Mia’s first round of hypnosis. It’s a moment of lucidity that passes by as she gazes out the window and asks, “What are they doing here?” as if they had arrived right then and there in that single lucid moment.

“Keeping us safe,” I say diplomatically. What I mean to say is keeping you safe, but I don’t want her to fear the reasons she’s not.

“From what?” she asks, turning her head to watch the policemen through the back window. One starts his car and follows us down the road. The other lingers behind to keep an eye on the house while we’re gone.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” I respond in lieu of an answer to her question, and she gratefully accepts it, turning around to watch out the front window and forgetting altogether that we’re being trailed.

We drive down the neighborhood street. It’s quiet. The kids have returned to school after two weeks of winter break and no longer loiter in their front lawns building snowmen and tossing snowballs at one another with high, shrieking laughter, sounds that are foreign in our uncommunicative home. Christmas lights remain on homes, those inflatable Santas unplugged and lying dead in mounds of snow. James didn’t take the time to decorate the exterior of the house this year, though I went all out on the inside just in case. Just in case Mia came home and there was cause to celebrate.

She’s agreed to hypnosis. It didn’t take much coaxing. These days Mia agrees to most everything. James is against the idea; he thinks hypnosis is a bogus science, equivalent to reading palms and astrology. I don’t know what I believe, though I’ll be damned if I don’t give it a try. If it helps Mia remember one split second of those missing months, it’s worth the exorbitant cost and the time spent in the waiting room of Dr. Avery Rhodes.

What I understood of hypnosis a week ago was negligible. After awakening at night to research hypnosis on the internet, I became enlightened. Hypnosis, as I’ve come to understand it, is a very relaxed trancelike state similar to daydreaming. This will allow Mia to become less inhibited and tune out the rest of the world to allow herself, with the doctor’s help, to arouse the memories she’s lost. Under hypnosis, the subject becomes highly suggestible, and can recall information that the mind has locked in a vault. By hypnotizing Mia, Dr. Rhodes will be dealing directly with the subconscious, that part of the brain that’s hidden Mia’s memories from her. The goal is to put Mia into a state of deep relaxation so her conscious mind, more or less, goes to sleep and Dr. Rhodes can deal with the subconscious. For Mia’s sake, the goal is to regain all or some part—some minute details even—of her time in the cabin so that, through therapy, she can come to terms with her abduction and heal. For the investigation’s sake, however, Detective Hoffman is desperate for information, for any details or clues that Colin Thatcher might have aired in the cabin that would help police find the man who did this to Mia.

When we arrive at Dr. Rhodes’s office, I, at James’s insistence, am allowed inside. He wants me to keep an eye on the nutcase, what he calls Dr. Rhodes, in case she tries to screw with Mia’s head. I sit in an armchair out of the way while Mia, squeamishly, sprawls out on the couch. Textbooks line floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on the southernmost wall. There is a window that faces the parking lot. Dr. Rhodes keeps the blinds closed, allowing in only a scant amount of light, so there’s an abundance of privacy. The room is dark and discreet, the secrets revealed inside the walls absorbed by the burgundy paint and oak wainscoting. The room is drafty; I pull my sweater tightly around my body and hug myself as Mia’s conscious mind begins to get drowsy. The doctor says, “We’ll start with off with the simple things, with what we know to be true, and see where that leads.”

It doesn’t come back chronologically. It doesn’t even come back sensibly and, to me, long after we escape into the piercing winter day, it’s a puzzle. I had imagined that hypnosis would be able to unlock the vault and there, in that very instant, all the memories would topple onto the faux Persian rug so that Mia, the doctor and I could hover over and dissect them. But that’s not the way it happens at all. For the limited time Mia is under hypnosis—maybe twenty minutes but no more—the door is open and Dr. Rhodes, with a kind, harmonious voice, is trying to pry away the cookie’s layers to get at the cream filling. They come off in crumbs: the rustic feel of the cabin with the knotty pine paneling and exposed beams, static on a car radio, the sound of Beethoven’s Für Elise, spotting a moose.

“Who’s in the car, Mia?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Are you there?”

“Yes.”

“Are you driving the car?”

“No.”

“Who’s driving the car?”

“I don’t know. It’s dark.”

“What time of day is it?”

“Early morning. The sun is just beginning to rise.”

“You can see out the window?”

“Yes.”

“Do you see stars?”

“Yes.”

“And the moon?”

“Yes.”

“A full moon?”

“No.” She shakes her head. “A half moon.”

“Do you know where you are?”

“On a highway. It’s a small, two-lane highway, surrounded by woods.”

“Are there other cars?”

“No.”

“Do you see street signs?”

“No.”

“Do you hear anything?”

“Static. From the radio. There’s a man speaking, but his voice...there’s static.” Mia is lying on the couch with her legs crossed at the ankles. It’s the first time I’ve seen her relax in the last two weeks. Her arms are folded against a bare midriff—her chunky cream sweater having hiked up an inch or two when she laid down—as if she’s been placed in a casket.

“Can you hear what the man is saying?” Dr. Rhodes asks from where she sits on a maroon armchair beside Mia. The woman is the epitome of together: not a wrinkle in her clothing, not a hair out of place. The sound of her voice is monotonous; it could lull me to sleep.

“Temperatures in the forties, plenty of sun...”

“The weather forecast?”

“It’s a disc jockey—the sound is coming from the radio. But the static... The front speakers don’t work. The voice comes from the backseat.”

“Is there someone in the backseat, Mia?”

“No. It’s just us.”

“Us?”

“I can see his hands in the darkness. He drives with two hands, holding the steering wheel so tightly.”

“What else can you tell me about him?” Mia shakes her head. “Can you see what he’s wearing?”

“No.”

“But you can see his hands?”

“Yes.”

“Is there anything on his hands—a ring, watch? Anything?”

“I don’t know.”

“What can you tell me about his hands?”

“They’re rough.”

“You can see that? You can see that his hands are rough?”

I scoot to the edge of my seat, hanging on to Mia’s every last muted word. I know that Mia—the old Mia, pre-Colin Thatcher—would have never wanted me to hear this conversation.

This question she doesn’t answer.

“Is he hurting you?” Mia twitches on the couch, pushing aside the question. Dr. Rhodes asks again, “Did he hurt you, Mia? There, in the car, or maybe before?” There’s no response.

The doctor moves on. “What else can you tell me about the car?”

But Mia states instead, “This wasn’t...this wasn’t supposed...to happen.”

“What wasn’t, Mia?” she asks. “What wasn’t supposed to happen?”

“It’s all wrong,” Mia replies. She’s disoriented, her visions cluttered, random memories running adrift in her mind.

“What is all wrong?” There’s no reply. “Mia, what is all wrong? The car? Something about the car?”

But Mia says nothing. Not at first anyway. But then she sucks her breath in violently, and claims, “It’s my fault. It’s all my fault,” and it takes every bit of willpower I have not to rush from my seat and embrace my child. I want to tell her that no, it’s not. It’s not her fault. I can see the way it grieves her, the way her facial features tense up, her flattened hands turn to fists. “I did this,” she says.

“This is not your fault, Mia,” Dr. Rhodes states. Her voice is pensive, soothing. I grip the arms of the chair in which I sit and force myself to remain calm. “It’s not your fault,” she repeats, and later, after the session is through, she explains to me in private that victims almost always blame themselves. She says that often this is the case with rape victims, the reason that nearly fifty percent of rapes go unreported because the victim feels certain it was her fault. If only she had never gone to such and such a bar; if only she had never talked to such and such a stranger; if only she hadn’t worn such suggestive attire. Mia, she explains, is experiencing a natural phenomenon that psychologists and sociologists have been studying for years: self-blame. “Self-blame can, of course, be destructive,” she says to me later as Mia waits in the waiting room for me to catch up, “when taken to the extreme, but it can also prevent victims from becoming vulnerable in the future.” As if this is supposed to make me feel relieved.

“Mia, what else do you see?” the doctor inquires when Mia has settled.

She’s taciturn, initially. The doctor asks again, “Mia, what else do you see?”

This time Mia responds, “A house.”

“Tell me about the house.”

“It’s small.”

“What else?”

“A deck. A small deck with steps that lead down into the woods. It’s a log cabin—dark wood. You can barely see it for all the trees. It’s old. Everything about it is old—the furniture, the appliances.”

“Tell me about the furniture.”

“It sags. The couch is plaid. Blue-and-white plaid. Nothing about the house is comfortable. There’s an old wooden rocking chair, lamps that barely light the room. A tiny table with wobbly legs and a plaid vinyl tablecloth that you’d bring to a picnic. The hardwood floors creak. It’s cold. It smells.”

“Like what?”

“Mothballs.”

Later that night, as we hover in the kitchen after dinner, James asks me what in the hell the smell of mothballs has to do with anything. I tell him that its progress, albeit slow progress. But it’s a start. Something that yesterday Mia couldn’t remember. I, too, had longed for something phenomenal: one session of hypnosis and Mia would be healed. Dr. Rhodes sensed my frustration when we were leaving her office and explained to me that we needed to be patient; these things take time and to rush Mia will do more harm than good. James doesn’t buy it; he’s certain it’s only a ploy for more money. I watch him yank a beer from the refrigerator and head into his office to work while I clean the dinner dishes, noticing, for the third time this week, that Mia’s plate has barely been touched. I stare at the spaghetti noodles hardening on the earthenware dishes and remember that spaghetti is Mia’s favorite meal.

I start a list and begin to archive things one by one: the rough hands, for example, or the weather forecast. I spend the night on the internet rummaging around for useful information. The last time the temperatures in northern Minnesota were in the forties was in the last week of November, though the temperatures toyed around in the thirties and forties from Mia’s disappearance until after Thanksgiving day. After that they plunged into the twenties and below and likely won’t creep up to forty for some time. There was a half moon on September 30th, October 14th and another on the 29th; there was one on November 12th and another on the 28th, though Mia couldn’t be certain that the moon was exactly at half and so the dates are only suggestions. Moose are common in Minnesota, especially in the winter. Beethoven wrote Für Elise around 1810, though Elise was actually supposed to be Therese, a woman he was to marry in the same year.

Before I go to bed, I pass by the room in which Mia sleeps. I silently open the door and stand there, watching her, the way she is draped across the bed, the blanket thrust from her body at some point in the night where it lies in a puddle on the floor. The moon welcomes itself into the bedroom through the slats on the plantation blinds, streaking Mia with traces of light, across her face, down a set of knit eggplant pajamas, the right leg of which is hiked up to the knee and tossed across an extra pillow. It’s the only time these days when Mia is at peace. I move across the room to cover her and feel my body lower to the edge of the bed. Her face is serene, her soul calm, and though she’s a woman, I still envision my blissful little girl long before she was taken away from me. Mia’s being here feels too good to be true. I would sit here all night if I could, to convince myself that it isn’t a dream, that when I wake in the morning, Mia—or Chloe—will still be here.

As I climb into bed beside James’s blazing body, the bulk of the down comforter actually making him sweat, I wonder what good this information—the weather forecast and phases of the moon—actually does me, though I’ve stuck it in a folder beside the dozens of meanings for the name Chloe. Why, I don’t know for certain, but I tell myself that any details notable enough for Mia to recount under hypnosis are important to me, any scrap of information to explain to me what happened to my daughter inside the log walls of that rural, Minnesota cabin.

Colin

Before

There’s trees and a lot of them. Pine, spruce, fir. They hold on tight to their green needles. Around them, the leaves of oaks and elms wither and fall to the ground. It’s Wednesday. Night has come and gone. We exit the highway and speed along a two-lane road. She holds on to the seat with every turn. I could slow down but I don’t because I just want to get there. There’s hardly anyone on the road. Every now and then we pass another car, some tourist going below the speed limit to enjoy the view. There’s no gas stations. No 7-Elevens. Just your run-of-the-mill ma-and-pa shop. The girl stares out the window as we pass. I’m sure she thinks we’re in Timbuktu. She doesn’t bother to ask. Maybe she knows. Maybe she doesn’t care.

We continue north into the deepest, darkest corners of Minnesota. The traffic continues to thin beyond Two Harbors where the truck is nearly engulfed in needles and leaves. The road is full of potholes. They send us flying into the air and I curse every single one of them. Last thing we need is a flat tire.

I’ve been here before. I used to know the guy who owns the place, a crappy little cabin in the middle of nowhere. It’s lost in the trees, the ground covered in a crunchy layer of dead leaves. The trees are little more than barren branches.

I look at the cabin, and it’s just like I remember, just like when I was a kid. It’s a log home overlooking the lake. The lake looks cold. I’m sure it is. There’s plastic lawn chairs out on the deck and a tiny grill. The world is desolate, no one around for miles and miles.

Exactly what we need.

I glide the truck to a stop and we get out. Yanking a crowbar from the back, we make our way up a hill to the old home. The cabin looks abandoned, as I knew it would be, but I look for signs of life anyway: a car parked in back, dark shadows through the windows. There’s nothing.

She stands motionless beside the truck. “Let’s go,” I say. Finally she climbs up the dozen or so steps to the deck. She stops to catch her breath. “Hurry up,” I say. For all I know, we’re being watched. I knock on the door first, just to make sure that we’re alone. And then I tell the girl to shut up and I listen. It’s silent.

I use the crowbar to jimmy the door open. I break the door. I tell her I’ll fix it later. I slide an end table before the door to keep it closed. The girl stands with her back pressed to a wall made of red pine logs. She looks around. The room is small. There’s a saggy blue couch and ugly plastic red chair and a wood-burning stove in the corner that doesn’t give off an ounce of heat. There are photos of the cabin when it was being built, old black-and-whites shot with a box camera, and I remember being told by the guy about it when I was a kid, about how the people who built the home a hundred years ago picked this location not for the view, but for the row of pine trees just east of the cabin that shield it from the driving winds. As if he had any way of knowing what thoughts ran through their minds, those people, dead by now, who built the home. I remember, even back then, staring at his greasy receding hairline and pockmarked skin and thinking he’s full of crap.