The Quarry Girls

by Jess Lourey

I pulled my T-shirt over my head, glancing down at my chest. The front of each white cup was puckered. Mom had said I’d grow into the bra, that it would save money if we bought the bigger size. Tears were streaming down my face. “Take your dang picture.” He removed the first photo and snapped a second, the sound crisp in the small room. The moment that second photo ejected, he grabbed it and started waving it in the air to dry it.

“What happened last night?” I jumped away from the fridge. I hadn’t heard Mom step into the kitchen, didn’t even know she was awake. Oh my god, does she know? Does she know I let Ant take a picture of me in my bra? The biting odor of campfire in my hair suddenly made me woozy. “What do you mean?”

“That’s the story you told your parents?” My skin twitched remembering how aggressive Ricky had been to her last night. “Bren, who hit you?” She shook her head and looked me square in the eyes. “No, for real. I walked into a tree. That big oak closest to the firepit? I think I was going to take a leak behind it but ended up smacking my face against a branch. But it’s only a matter of time until I get roughed up for real if I stick with Ricky. I’m done with him, Heather. I don’t even know what got into me last night.” I opened my mouth to tell her about me and Ant, it was on the tip of my tongue, but I felt too ashamed. I hadn’t wanted him to take that photo, but I hadn’t stopped him, either. My stomach got all wormy thinking of who he’d show it to. I swallowed and squinted at the house. “Should we wake up Maureen?”

“She’s not going to be at the show tonight,” Brenda said under her breath. “I know it in my bones.” I felt the same thing. It made me jittery. When I closed my eyes, the image of her on her knees overwhelmed me. Had those men hurt Maureen? “Should we tell him . . . tell him what we saw the other night? What we saw Maureen doing?” She spun on me, and at first I thought she was going to yell at me for bringing up the thing we’d promised to forget. But she didn’t look mad. She looked surprised, and then scared. “Heather, Sheriff Nillson was there. I thought you knew.”

The county sheriff hosting a BJ party in his basement. It made my scalp prickle. “What was she doing there?” Brenda rubbed the back of her neck. “I don’t know, Heather, I honestly don’t. She never told me a thing about it. You know Maureen. She likes attention, and she likes money. Maybe she was getting both.”

I shook my head. Sheriff Nillson worked with my dad. He’d visited our house. He was an officer of the law. “Whatever was happening down there was gross, for sure, but I don’t think he’d kidnap Maureen over it, especially since she was keeping their secret. If she didn’t tell us, she didn’t tell anyone. Besides, what would he do with her?”

I passed Mr. Pitt mowing his lawn, his ball cap shading his face. He waved, and the sun glinted off something shiny on his wrist. Acid flooded my stomach. When he dropped his arm, I saw it was just a wristwatch.

They also presented as regular Pantown bungalows, not dens of depravity where teenage girls were lured in for a BJ train.

She needed to keep herself together, to imagine escaping, to see a life after this. How could she be a teacher if she didn’t fight? She would break free of this prison. She had things to do with her life. She mattered.

warm from the oven. “I saw Maureen when I was eating the cake,” she said. I could hear her looking at me. “I thought she’d go to that party with you, but she didn’t. She stayed at the fair.” The brownie tasted like dust in my mouth. “What’d you see her doing?” “She went to the ring toss booth, too. She disappeared in the back, just like Brenda did.” I tried swallowing the chalky brownie, but I didn’t have enough spit. “Junie, what did the ring toss guy look like?” “Like Abe Lincoln, but not as old.”

Maureen could have run away, but she hadn’t. She wouldn’t have, not without telling me and Brenda. I wanted to believe that, to hang on to that thought, and so I fought back the doubts whispering that there was so much Maureen and Brenda had been hiding from me, and if I pushed too hard, if I dug too deep, I’d discover that what was really happening was that they’d grown up without me. That was a secret I didn’t want to learn.

My scalp grew tight at the mention of the party. I’d probably see Anton today for the first time since. I was scrubbed head to toe, hair brushed clean and thick over my ears, wearing my best eyelet sundress, but I suddenly felt dirty. What would Claude think of me if he found out what I’d done? I couldn’t believe I’d thought he’d laugh about it.

I turned to see Jerome Nillson entering. He wore a tan suit with a gray tie. It appeared tight at the shoulders. I realized how little I knew about him. He lived in Pantown, and he was the law. That had been enough. I hadn’t ever noticed a wedding ring on his hand, and I’d never had a reason to think about his personal life. It wouldn’t have occurred to me in a million years that it would involve one of my closest friends. Had she thought she was dating Sheriff Nillson? That’s when I got the idea to sneak into Maureen’s room. I would read her diary.

Since Claude was an only child, he pretty much owned the second floor. His bedroom door was cracked open, the bathroom door closed. Might as well wait in his room. I’d spent a good part of my childhood in there, relaxing on his nubby blue quilt hand-sewn by Mrs. Ziegler, staring at his movie posters—Carrie, Rocky, Jaws, Monty Python and the Holy Grail—so many times I could see them with my eyes shut. I had his door halfway open before I’d realized I’d made a mistake, that he wasn’t in the bathroom but was in fact sitting on his bed, his back to me. He looked over, made a gargling sound when he saw me, and quickly stuffed what he’d been holding under his pillow, but not before I spotted the flash of a copper chain.

What she wouldn’t give for a pen, or a nail clipper, or even a barrette, all the tiny conveniences she’d taken for granted. But she would persevere with nothing but her hands and her single-minded focus, and when she was free, she’d tell this story to her students.

I’d been so callous when Brenda told me she’d disappeared, so gratified when Dad confirmed my hunch that it was no biggie. It felt like a very big deal now that it was happening to someone I knew. Then I remembered something else.

I had my cassette recorder right next to the clock radio, all ready to go, but I’d missed the whole show. I reached for a pencil and paper to write myself a reminder note for next time when I realized what I was doing. I was putting off entering the tunnels. Despite what I’d told Claude, I was terrified at what I’d find, especially since I’d made up my mind between his house and mine that I wouldn’t just listen, that I’d bring the Pantown skeleton key and break into Ant’s house and then the one I believed to be Sheriff Nillson’s. My heart lurched sideways just thinking about it. But if Maureen was locked up in one of those places, I had to free her.

She pointed at the door to the tunnels. “The noises are coming from there. Scratching. A woman crying. Men yelling. I’m going to have your father put a lock on that door. It’s time. It’s past time. Why, anyone could sneak through and hurt us while we slept. Can you hear it?”

She suddenly grabbed my hand and yanked me on the sofa next to her, wrapping me in an embrace. She was cold and trembling. “I’d die for you, Heather. That’s why I had to do it. I’m so sorry, baby. I couldn’t let you hear the voices. I didn’t want them to live in your brain like they do mine. You understand, don’t you?” I nodded in her arms, my heart a bird beating against the cage of my chest. Her hand found my nub, cupped it. The first time she’d touched it since the accident.

This smoothing over of reality, especially when it was something ugly, didn’t happen in only my home. It was that way in all of Pantown, maybe all of the Midwest. If we didn’t like something, we simply didn’t see it.

our neighborhood, the problem wasn’t the person who made the mistake; it was the person who acknowledged the truth.

on to anything. I was grateful she’d

“They don’t seem to care,” she said, shaking her head. “The police. This whole damn neighborhood . . . no one here cares about the girls, not the ones who speak out. I bet Beth McCain was another one they couldn’t keep quiet, like Maureen. Strong girls, both of them. I hear the whispers. Can you believe people are saying she ran away from me?”

“You think she took them?” I asked. That sigh again. “Maybe. Jerome can be very persuasive. He almost talked me into believing that phone call wasn’t important.” My eyes flew to hers. “Which phone call?” “The night Maureen disappeared, the phone rang around midnight. Our ring, I’m sure of it, but it stopped almost immediately. I didn’t think much of it at the time. Fell right back to sleep. It wasn’t one of you kids, was it?” I shook my head. “No, I don’t think so. Claude or Brenda wouldn’t have called that late, and I sure didn’t.”

I rocked back on my heels. “They work together.” She shook her head. “Before that. All you kids think your parents didn’t exist until you were born, but Jerome, your mom and dad, me, we all went to high school together.” Her expression grew distant. “I knew Jerome was going to be a police officer or a principal one day. Even back then, he got off on telling people what to do.”

“Of course, you could say the same thing about most everyone in Pantown.” She laughed, a hollow sound, a winter wind through clawed branches. “That’s how I know someone out there knows what happened to Maureen. Nothing happens in Pantown that someone doesn’t know about. Tongues wagged when my husband left me, you better damn well believe it, but I suppose I deserved that. Maureen certainly never forgave me.” I frowned. Maureen never talked about why her dad had left.

There was so little space left. She was burying herself alive. Maureen’s room, as messy as it was, felt like the only place I could breathe in the whole house.

I ran my hands over the image. I didn’t know Maureen could draw. What else hadn’t I known about Maureen? I opened to the first page. It contained two bleak sentences, scribbled so heavily that they scratched through to the next page. If I disappear, I’ve been murdered. Don’t let him get away with it.

Beth hadn’t thought much of him when he visited the diner. He was just a man she recognized from the background of her life. Sure, he’d sometimes wait for a table in her section rather than take an open one. Her skin had prickled, the way he always kept one eye on her even when he was talking to other people, when he thought she wouldn’t notice.

He’d even asked her about college later, after the rush slowed. Feeling generous, her apron pocket fat with tips, she’d told him she was heading to Berkeley in three short weeks. He’d seemed delighted at that. Nice, even.

Her dad and Mark had grown up with the same messages as this guy and whoever he had with him, and they’d managed to become decent human beings, to not treat women like they were subhuman, to not lurk or peep or overstay welcomes or force themselves on anyone. You know why? Because her dad and Mark weren’t broken bastards.

She was going to kill whatever walked through that door or she was going to die trying. Either way, she was done with this misery.

I’d brought Maureen’s diary home, where I’d paged through the rest of it. It contained only four more entries, all of them dated from this summer, each of them listing what she’d worn (pink velvet shorts, softball T-shirt with pink sleeves, lucky #7), what she’d done and the number of men she’d done it to (two tonight. bjs only!!! he promised), and what she’d been paid ($75—easier than waitressing. men are dumb.). Reading it made me positive that Sheriff Nillson knew what had happened to her.

Mom waited for Dad to come around to her side of the car and offer his arm. Junie and I followed them up the walk. With every step, I became more certain that this was the house, the one that had swallowed Maureen and made her do terrible things. The location was right, the feel, the way there wasn’t anything feminine about it, no flowers out front, not even shrubs, just grass and sidewalk and house. Nothing soft in the home’s lines, either, no welcoming touches like on most Pantown bungalows. Just a big, bleak square.

I felt as hollow as Easter chocolate by the time we reached the front door. Sheriff Nillson probably had had something on Maureen, caught her hitching or with her mom’s pills. Told her if she helped out at a party, he’d erase the stain. And then he’d offered to pay her, exactly like her diary said. Maybe he even bought her jewelry. That would explain her Black Hills gold ring and those new earrings, those pretty bobbing gold balls, just expensive enough that no high school girl would buy them for herself.

Maureen wasn’t the only missing girl in Saint Cloud. Beth McCain still hadn’t returned. I felt guilty for how desperately I hoped it was Maureen, whole and healthy, that they’d discovered in the quarries.

Please bring a living girl out of there. The rumble of voices signaled people were returning down the path, but slowly. Much slower than the ambulance driver and his partner had rushed down. There was no longer a need to hurry, that’s what their footsteps said. My heart dropped as they emerged, carrying the stretcher, a white sheet covering the form, obscene wet patches soaking the cloth over the still body. The man at the front stumbled. The corpse’s hand dropped over the side, pulling the sheet off her face, what was once beautiful gone gray and bloated.

When we entered Maureen’s room, I was shocked to see every drawer open, piles of clothes on the floor, the bed stripped. “Mrs. Hansen, did you do this?” She shook her head dumbly. “Jerome sent one of his deputies here to search for a note.” She made a wet noise. “A suicide note.”

I was afraid to do this alone, but I also didn’t want to put them in jeopardy. If Maureen had been murdered for what she’d done in that basement, her bedroom ransacked looking for evidence of it (evidence that I now sort of possessed, in the form of her diary), then what I was going to do was dangerous. That’s when I realized there was one person I could tell, someone who could protect me. My dad. Now that Maureen was dead, I didn’t have to guard her reputation. I could share what I’d seen.

Pandora’s door. But that wasn’t fair. Pandora had released evils into the world. We hadn’t set anything free. We’d just accidentally witnessed what was already there. My hand went to my chest, patting where the patch reading TAFT had been. I could almost see the strobe lights cutting across it, spotlighting the name. But Sheriff Nillson hadn’t come for Brenda Taft.

When the door opened, a smell of a home washed over me. Liver and onions, coffee, acrid cigars, human musk. Everything inside me went still and my focus narrowed to a point. I stepped into the paneled basement. I closed the door behind me and leaned against it. My eyes adjusted to the gloom and objects came into focus: a sofa, a gun cabinet, a floor-model television crouching like a massive bulldog, a record player with a stack of albums next to it. The far wall, where the men had been lined up, held shelves that had been hidden by their bodies. My throat tightened. They’d used Maureen up. For the first time, I considered that it might have been suicide, but even if it was, the owner of this house bore some responsibility. Maureen had been a girl.

It was his official sheriff’s photo, the same one that hung inside the courthouse. Had it been displayed that night, or did he have the decency to put it away before he molested my friend? I shook with the shame and anger of it because that’s what it had been: molesting. Maureen was—was—only sixteen.

I blinked, my mouth dry around the flashlight. I took it from between my teeth, light quivering with my hands. The Polaroids were photos of naked girls, all of them young looking, some younger than Maureen, so young they didn’t have hair between their legs. Many of the photos were just of bodies, their heads cut off by the camera angle. I turned each Polaroid over. Dates, no names, some going back as far as 1971. My eyes blurred. I realized I was crying. These weren’t police photos, at least not all of them, not the ones with Sheriff Nillson’s apple-green shag carpeting visible in them. Those poor girls, three dozen Maureens, talked into—forced into?—doing something they didn’t want to do. Like me taking off my blouse for Ant because I didn’t have a choice, not really, not if I didn’t want to be left behind. I felt sick.

My neck tingled as I walked, buzzed like someone was watching me, but when I turned, no one was there. I wrote it off as a reaction to the blistering sun until I crossed the street just as a blue Chevelle steered onto our block, pulling up alongside me. Ed sat behind the wheel. I felt fear like a suffocating breath near my face. Dad had said they’d run Ed out of town. They’d apparently done a crap job. I kept walking, my sandals clogging on the sidewalk, but the Chevelle crept along beside me like a shark.

She grabbed my chin, startling me. “I’m sorry about that, about what it did to your mom, me sleeping with your father. Constance was never the same after she found out.”

“I know it wasn’t the only factor, that she had some bad genes from her own mother and got the baby blues after Junie was born, but my sleeping with her husband couldn’t have helped,” she continued, like she hadn’t just leveled my world, like we were talking about our favorite television shows or which restaurant we should choose for lunch and not my dad running around on my mom with Gloria Hansen, with Maureen’s mom.

I navigated the path to the bathroom, still in a daze. I sat on the closed toilet seat, trying to hold on to a thought, but it was like grabbing fish underwater. My dad and Mrs. Hansen had an affair.

Sheriff Nillson believes Maureen stole some of her mother’s heart medicine, her digoxin, to knock herself out so she didn’t fight the water. If it wasn’t the heart medicine, it was some of her downers. Before I could talk myself out of it, I opened all three bottles and dropped a bunch of tablets from each into my shorts pocket. I didn’t have a plan, just a desperate need to figure out Maureen, or to be like Maureen. Or maybe I wanted to escape everything for a moment, not forever, just long enough to stop feeling so sad, so lost, so sure things were going to get even worse. And soon. Help yourself to anything you see that you want, Mrs. Hansen had said.

I didn’t know if it was the first or the last time Dad had cheated on Mom or somewhere in between, but I had a hard time breathing, thinking about it, like the air had suddenly grown too thick. Dad had known Mom was hurting, and he’d still messed around with her very best friend. Mrs. Hansen had been a fixture in my childhood up until the accident, and then she never came over after. My dad did that. Mrs. Hansen, too, but I wasn’t mad at her like I was him. My dad was a cheater.

“You going to the party for Maureen?” Brenda asked. I turned to give her my attention. That’s when I noticed her earrings, gold balls dangling off chains, just expensive enough that a teenage girl wouldn’t buy them for herself. The same earrings Maureen had been wearing the night she disappeared.