She won’t be there to defend herself, of course. Won’t be there to tell them that when evil like this comes for you, you never see it coming until it feels like the ground underneath you has suddenly thrown you upward. You will be too busy ending a relationship, coping with the pain of speaking up for yourself for the first time, or maybe just unloading the groceries or sliding into your car in a lonely, empty parking lot. The point is, you will be too busy living life to notice the approach of someone who only wants to take it, and only those whose lives have been taken know this.

Rachel would have known, she thinks, Rachel would have seen him coming.

Just like her big sister realized something was wrong with that security guard who approached them outside the mall when they were little girls. She’d been six, Rachel ten. They’d been standing outside the mall waiting for their mother when he’d approached, all gentle and solicitous, bent over and whispering, like there was something he had to say that might embarrass them and he was trying to be kind about it because they were so fragile and young. He told them their mother had had a problem trying to pay for something and they needed to come with him so there wouldn’t be any more problems. Later, Rachel would tell everyone that it was the patch that did it. This guy’s shirt was the same color, but the patch was in the wrong place. She’d seen some mall security guards earlier, and their patches had been on their shoulders, not their lapels.

That’s why Rachel responded to the man’s strange whispered story with a single question. “Who are you?”

And the man had said back, “I’m security, young lady, and your mother’s in trouble and I’m sorry but you need to come with me right now or she’s going to be very upset with you.”

Again, Rachel had said, “Yeah, but who are you?”

Later she would realize it wasn’t just her sister’s defiance that angered the man. It was her confidence. He reached out and grabbed Rachel’s wrist, and Zoey’s eyes filled with tears in that moment because it was all so confusing. It was confusing because Zoey, too, could sense there was something very wrong with the man, but she thought it didn’t matter. She thought they had no choice but to go with him and by being sassy Rachel would only make the man’s wrongness turn more wrong.

And the man gave voice to these thoughts when he said, “Now, listen here, missy, I’m a grown-up, and that means you have to do what I say.” His tense jaw revealed a roil of darker emotions beneath his words. He wanted something and he wanted it now, the same way Zoey sometimes wanted her mother’s chocolate chip cookies before they were done cooling on the tray.

“Liar!” Rachel screamed. And when Zoey felt a firm grip on her wrist, she realized the man hadn’t grabbed her. Her sister had. She was dragging Zoey back toward the mall and screaming, “Run, run, run!” And then they were inside again where there was music and frosty air-conditioning and people staring at them because they were running so fast and then suddenly they crashed into their mother, whose arms were full of bags, and the story came rushing out of Rachel so fast she started crying, too. And the dawning fear on their mother’s face, the way she dropped her bags and hit her knees and took Rachel’s face in her hands as if she needed to touch her daughter to absorb the impact of her words—all of it made Zoey feel better because her mother’s reaction meant that another grown-up knew something was very wrong with the man who’d tried to make them go somewhere. Blinking back tears, Zoey looked behind them and saw the man hadn’t followed them, and that’s when she knew for sure, Rachel was right, the man was a liar.

The cops came and asked them to tell the story again and again, and everyone searched the mall looking for the man, and all of this made Zoey feel better because the world of grown-ups was doing things around her that felt right and normal again. They even ran a sketch of the guy on the local news, but they never found him. And Rachel was praised as a hero, a young woman with good instincts, who knew the number one rule of growing up—never go anywhere with strangers.

Meanwhile, Zoey lived with the dreaded knowledge that she would have gone. That she would have never thought to question the man’s authority.

“You were six, Zoey,” Rachel said the last time she brought it up. True, she’d had too much wine and they’d been tearfully sharing memories of their mother, gone several years now, but still. The memory of what had passed through her mind that day had stuck with Zoey in ways she didn’t want to recognize when she was sober. But Rachel was steadfast as always; there was, she insisted, a massive gulf in experience and wisdom between the ages of six and ten, and so it had been her responsibility to rescue them both from who knows what fate that wolf in security guard’s clothing would have delivered unto them both.

But Zoey’s still haunted by the fact that she can’t be sure how things would have gone if their roles had been reversed.

Look at how silent she’s been since this nightmare began.

The truck creaks. She hears the cargo door opening. She could scream, but it would be a pathetic, muffled, phlegmy thing thanks to the gag sitting against the back of her throat. He’s standing over her now, the man with the big broken-looking nose and the knife slashes for eyes.

“I spoke to Mother,” he says. “She’s excited to meet you, Zoey Long.”

He likes whatever he sees in her eyes. Maybe it’s brokenness, or despair. She feels too exhausted for fear. And he seems to take pleasure in saying her full name, a reminder that he rooted through her personal belongings and probably left none of them behind. So that when her absence is finally noticed, people will think she willingly got into someone’s car, carrying her own purse.

How can I be this exhausted, she thinks, when I’ve barely made a sound?

When he starts unlatching the mask’s straps, she realizes he’s probably going to put the tube back in, which means she’ll have only a few seconds to be someone other than that terrified six-year-old who was too afraid to say no to an adult even as he radiated malice.

Maybe the truck’s soundproof, or at the least, he stopped somewhere no one would hear a struggle.

Either way, the time to decide is now.

Gently, he pulls the mask free from her head, starts slowly sliding the gag free from her throat. When its rubber passes her lips, he gives her a small smile, as if he’s done her a kindness.

That’s when Zoey spits in his face.

22

Lubbock, Texas

1970

In the end, justice—real justice, not the kind trumpeted by braggart cops and disingenuous newspaper reporters—comes from the heavens above on a late spring evening almost a year to the day after her father’s accident. But the weeks and months between contain a series of degradations so constant and severe Marjorie Payne can endure them with only silence and her teeth clenched so tightly she’ll end up suffering persistent jaw aches well into adulthood.

In the beginning, no one can believe an injured animal brought down the Plains Rapist. The cops are sure Beatty Payne’s undoing has to be the work of a potential victim who managed to escape into the night and was still too afraid to come forward.

But when they search for evidence of her, all they find is a dead pronghorn antelope a few yards from where her father claimed he’d struck one and, stuck to its forehooves, tufts of fabric matching the blue-and-white plaid shirt he’d worn that night. One of the cops later tells a reporter that if they’d actually paused to consider the extent of the injuries that had left the Plains Rapist handcuffed to his hospital bed—two broken ribs, a bruised lung, and a broken collarbone—they’d have realized no woman could have done it. No ordinary woman anyway. Unless she’d had a shovel.