The Longings of Wayward Girls Read online

  Advance Praise for

  The Longings of Wayward Girls

  “Brown tells a wonderfully suspenseful and eerie story as she goes back and forth between Sadie’s childhood and her adult life, and the result is a novel full of mysteries, surprises, and the best kinds of psychological revelations.”

  —Margot Livesey, New York Times bestselling author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy

  “Nothing is as it seems in this psychologically complex story of girls gone missing and mothers who stray. Karen Brown deftly alternates between two generations of parallel drama in a neighborhood of facades and gentle menace. I stayed awake far too late with the rich tension of wondering whether she’d bring her characters in for a safe landing.”

  —Nichole Bernier, author of The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D.

  “A heart-stopping novel of suspense that’s as intelligent as it is compelling, as beautiful as it is disturbing. Brown’s skill, empathy and sensitivity make this debut stand apart, and stand out. The astute observations, evocative atmosphere and bone-chilling scenes make for a moving, provocative read. A star is born.”

  —M.J. Rose, internationally bestselling author

  “Brown intricately weaves together past and present, demonstrating how casual acts of childhood cruelty can linger well into a seemingly stable adult life. But Brown is also a uniquely talented writer, capable of teasing out poignant commonalities between her protagonist’s teen and middle-aged selves. A beautifully written, unbearably tense debut novel.”

  —Holly Goddard Jones, author of The Next Time You See Me

  “An absorbing novel about the misgivings and shortcomings of domestic life, about the confusing intersection of glamour, lust, and self-destruction, and about a woman haunted by a long-ago act of girlhood cruelty.”

  —Susanna Daniel, author of Stiltsville and Sea Creatures

  “Through pitch-perfect details and an eloquent voice, Karen Brown delivers a suspenseful and memorable debut. Moving effortlessly between the late 1970s and the present-day, Brown explores what harm may come should we choose to follow the path laid down by those who came before us.”

  —Lori Roy, author of Bent Road

  “In the time between playing with Barbies and puffing on stolen cigarettes, girls’ games can turn dangerous—and sometimes fall far over the line. In The Longings of Wayward Girls, the past returns to plague the present with a vengeance that can cost a woman her husband and children. Brown’s haunting prose sets the mood for the heartbreaking choices made by mothers and daughters.”

  —Randy Susan Meyers, international bestselling author of The Murderer’s Daughters and The Comfort of Lies

  “Delicate and beautiful, but with the spark and charge of a psychological thriller . . . Brown writes like an angel, but the shadows of past ghosts linger on every page. I could not put this compelling novel down.”

  —Jennifer Gilmore, author of The Mothers

  “Lost and missing children haunt the pages of The Longings of Wayward Girls, a story rich with astute and poignant detail. This is compelling, read-all-day drama.”

  —Maryanne O’Hara, author of Cascade

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  For Valerie and Dianne, and for our parents.

  . . . it was summer

  as long as I could remember,

  I lay on the lawn at night,

  clover wrinkling under me,

  the wise stars bedding over me,

  my mother’s window a funnel

  of yellow heat running out, . . .

  —Anne Sexton, “Young”

  PART ONE

  THE SEARCH CONTINUES FOR MISSING NINE-YEAR-OLD

  Wintonbury—June 14, 1974

  Nine-year-old Laura Loomis, missing now since late Thursday, never went into the woods surrounding her house alone, according to her mother. The afternoon of her disappearance Mrs. Loomis had taken Laura and a friend to the Wampanoag club pool. They’d gotten ice cream at the concession stand. Mrs. Loomis said she dropped Laura at a friend’s house down the street from theirs, and she was to return home by dinnertime. Laura was last seen walking toward her home on Hickory Lane at 4:30 P.M. She is described by her mother as 4 feet, 8 inches, blond with blue eyes, and wearing a shirt with a rainbow, blue shorts, and blue sneakers. The search continued today, with firefighters from Bloomfield and Windsor sweeping the wooded and often swampy area surrounding the neighborhood. No clues have been found, and police are not ruling out the possibility that foul play may have been involved in the child’s disappearance.

  May 5, 1979

  SADIE WASN’T A BAD GIRL. When she was little she played church, flattening soft bread into disks, singing the hymns from stolen paper missals: Our Fathers chained in prisons dark, were still in heart and conscience free, how sweet would be their children’s fate, if they like them, could die for Thee. She set up carnivals and lemonade stands, collected pennies for UNICEF on Halloween. She bought a tree to be planted in her name in a forest purged by fire. She included everyone in her neighborhood games, even the irritating younger siblings, even the girl, Sally Frobel, who was clearly a boy, and the boy, Larry Schuster, who was clearly schizophrenic. They were cast in roles like the frog in her production of The Frog Prince or the dead boy in her Haunted Woods. She understood, perfectly, what was expected of her—and still, when it came to Francie Bingham, none of this applied. She was feral, unequivocally vicious, like a girl raised by the mountain lions that occasionally slunk out of the wilderness of Massacoe State Forest, between the swing sets and the lawn furniture, into the tended backyards of her neighborhood.

  It was May when it all started, and the seventeen-year cicada nymphs (genus Magicicada) emerged from the soil to shed their skins on window screens, in shrubs and trees, and unfold their new wings. The air was still sharp and the forsythia waved its long arms of bright flowers. The bluets opened on the pasture hillsides like white carpets. The apple blossoms dropped petals onto the dark ground like snow. Sadie Watkins was twelve, nearly thirteen, and she and her friend Betty Donahue had begun stealing their mothers’ Salems and Virginia Slims, hiding them in clever places in their bedrooms. Sadie had taken off one brass finial and slipped the cigarettes into her curtain rod. At prearranged times they’d retrieve them to smoke in the woods, but one day they put on the clothes from Sadie’s basement first: her mother’s pleated plaid boarding school skirt, a cocktail dress. They put on her old winter coats, alligator pumps, and black patent-leather sling-backs. They went out walking in the woods behind Sadie’s house, pretending they were someone else. They were too old for dress-up—this was their last fling. They put on the clothes and assumed other personalities with accents.

  “Blimey, this is a steep path, I say.”

  “Where are we headed? Isn’t that the clearing, darling?”

  Two years before, when Sadie had been ten, she’d devised the game of Old-Fashioned-Days House. They’d studied Connecticut history in school that spring, and she’d created a diorama in a shoe box—a scene from the Pequot War that dramatized the Pequot abduction of two girl colonists in a miniature canoe she made out of white birch bark. Her teacher’s mention of the girls’ kidnapping had been the one vivid thing among the names, dates, and details of the lesson, and Sadie knew it had to do with the shadow of Laura Loomis, who had been a year older than Sadie when she disappeared, a girl who resembled her so closely everyone t
hought they were sisters. In school, Sadie often imagined the empty seat in the sixth-grade classroom that would have been Laura’s. At home, she scrutinized the photo of their Brownie troop lined up on the school blacktop, she and Laura posing at either end like copies of each other—never destined to be friends. For her diorama she’d drawn the girls on the white cardboard that slipped out of her father’s new shirts, their faces etched with terror as they glanced back to their cabin on the shore, their blond hair blowing long and loose behind them. Her teacher had raised her eyebrows at the scene but couldn’t deny her the grade of E for “Excellent” she taped onto the back.

  Sadie had been intrigued by the strife of the colonists—cooking over an open fire, fetching water, growing corn in rocky soil, the threat of animals and untrustworthy Pequots and Narragansetts. She admired the women for accomplishing their daily tasks in long skirts. If they were going to play Old-Fashioned-Days House, she told Betty, they had to dress the part. Sadie’s mother, who had grown up a poor girl with a single mother in New York City, often returned there now to shop lavishly and had the best cast-off clothes—Chanel, Halston, Diane von Furstenberg, evening gowns in satin and chiffon, strapless, layered with tulle, brocaded and beaded, dresses they slipped on over their flowered panties. The gowns dragged the ground, and they had to diaper-pin them around the waist to get them to fit. They held the skirts in their hands and became Colonial women picking their way across Sadie’s muddy backyard.

  By that time their parents’ mandate that they stay out of the woods was heedlessly ignored, even though the tragedy of the Loomis girl—who’d lived on a street that did not connect to theirs—was fresh and the questions surrounding her fate still unanswered. The woods had always been a place of imaginative games, the source of legends passed down from their grandparents, who as children might have encountered the old Leatherman, a kindly beggar fed by townspeople who lived his entire life outdoors. The girls wandered the woods behind Sadie’s house in the long dresses, mindless of any threat. They hiked up to the old Latimer cemetery to place flowers on the children’s graves, adopting the names on the stones for themselves: Prudence, Electa, Rebekah, Abigail. They used paths the boys had begun to tame and trample riding their bikes, pulling wagons loaded with stolen plywood intended for forts. When fall arrived and it grew cold, they used Sadie’s basement as their house. Sadie had the little kids bring in large stones, and they stacked them against the wall into the semblance of a fireplace. They had tarnished sterling candelabra, and they stole candles from Sadie’s dining room buffet, matches from the kitchen drawer. They learned to knit, and they sat beside the pretend fire in their dresses, their needles clicking, the pipes rushing water overhead. They’d play out the story of Snow White and Rose Red. From upstairs would come the smell of a roast in the oven.

  The last time they’d played the game had been that winter when Sadie was ten, on a gray day threatening more snow, the old snow still on the ground. The game had begun to lose its allure, and the participants had dwindled to Sadie; her best friend, Betty; and that day, Francie Bingham, who’d come to Sadie’s front door to drop off her mother’s Avon brochures. In a rare move Sadie’s mother called Sadie up from the basement and told her to let Francie play. When Sadie widened her eyes and protested, her mother reminded her of how little she asked of her, of her comfortable house, her multitude of friends.

  “Some children aren’t as lucky,” her mother said. She wore a nearly floor-length red dress, a gold necklace. Her hair was long and blond, and once Sadie had overheard her teachers talking about her at school.

  They’d been in the cafeteria last year during the chaos of a rain-day pickup, and Sadie had missed her bus. Her mother had driven up to school to get her, had walked into the cafeteria and been spotted by the two teachers—one of them Sadie’s teacher, Mrs. Susskey, reviled by the students, and the other her young intern.

  “Oh, she’s like Julie Christie in Doctor Zhivago,” the intern said.

  Mrs. Susskey glanced over to where Sadie’s mother was making her way through the crowd of children, heading in their direction. Neither teacher knew she was there for Sadie.

  “More like Sharon Tate in Valley of the Dolls,” the older one said, her voice filled with resentment.

  By the time Sadie’s mother had reached them and taken Sadie by the hand the older woman’s face had reddened and become blotchy with her mistake. “You didn’t tell us this was your mother, Sadie,” she said, her voice falsely sweetened, and for the rest of that year, even though Sadie couldn’t really interpret the woman’s comment, she’d lived in fear of her retaliation.

  Standing in the dining room, with Francie Bingham waiting, hopeful, in the foyer, Sadie worried her mother would launch into the lesson of her own childhood—her forced attendance at St. John Villa Academy, a Catholic boarding school for girls, with its stern nuns and cold tile dormitory walls. But instead her mother glared at her and told her she would lose her television privilege if Francie wasn’t included. So, Francie, two years Sadie’s junior, was allowed to be the younger sister, a role that required she remove her glasses and attend to Sadie and Betty like a maid. They’d been knitting, but Sadie had grown tired of it. “Let’s pretend our husbands are out hunting.”

  Betty always followed Sadie’s lead. “Oh, I do hope they stick to the paths, Electa,” she said.

  Francie Bingham eyed them both. She wore a Halston gown—black sleeveless crepe bodice, chiffon skirt decorated with a spray of pale-colored leaves. Her chest was freckled, and she shivered and tugged her shawl in tighter. Earlier, she had argued and won the dress from Sadie, who’d chosen it first and given in when Francie said she would just go home.

  “They know the woods well enough, I daresay,” Sadie said.

  Their needles clicked. The basement was dim. The candles flickered.

  “You should set the table, sister,” Betty told Francie.

  “We don’t yet know what they’ll be bringing,” Francie said.

  “Methinks they will bring something,” Sadie said. “Unless they are lost!”

  Sadie dropped her knitting—a square of green wool that would never amount to anything—took the candelabra, and stood in front of the sliding glass doors that opened out onto the backyard. It was dusk, and the shadows thickened in the trees. The ground was white, pitted with footprints from the day before when they’d gone sledding and come in the sliding basement door to take off their boots. Brambles dotted with hard, bright berries edged the woods, their barklike stems gray and tangled. “We should go look for them, Rebekah,” Sadie said.

  Francie gasped. “Out? Into the wilderness?”

  Betty jumped up. “I’ll get our wraps.”

  These consisted of Sadie’s mother’s old coats, smelling of mothballs—camel’s hair, tweed, herringbone. They slid the door and the cold air hit their faces, filled with the scent of fires stoked with newspaper and kindling. Spires of smoke marked the sky. Sadie took the candelabra, and she and Betty stepped across the frozen yard, their dresses and coats dragging. Francie remained by the basement doors. Sadie turned to look at her.

  “Why aren’t you coming, sister?”

  Francie’s face was pinched. Her resolve to follow the parents’ rule made Sadie and Betty all the more aware of it. “We can’t,” she said.

  “Our husbands may need our help!” Betty said.

  Sadie knew that either prospect—going into the woods or staying in the dank basement alone—was terrifying to Francie, her hesitation a ploy to prevent them from going, and she turned to continue across the yard.

  “Never mind her,” Sadie said. “She can stay behind and tend the fire.”

  At this, Francie quickly relented, and the three girls headed into the woods, the main path leading up, the smaller paths heading off into an overgrowth of young saplings, and birch, and hemlocks shagged and heavy with snow. Their breath came out in clouds. They wore the pumps in patent leather, snakeskin, and pink satin, the toes stuffed with tissu
e. The incline proved difficult to manage. The candles flickered and went out. From this vantage spot the lights in the Hamlet Hill houses glowed yellow—desk lamps in bedrooms upstairs where kids did homework, sconces in carpeted stairwells, chandeliers in dining rooms, brass Stiffel lamps in living rooms and dens where fathers read the remaining bits of the Sunday paper and watched football on television, bathroom lights flicking on and then off after some child examined her pimple in the mirror, garage lights where mothers sought a screwdriver to fix a loose high chair. The houses were spacious, made with cedar shingles and painted clapboards and bricks, surrounded by landscaped beds of juniper and rhododendron. Their yards met each other in rolling hills and dips, occasionally marked by lines of shrubs or pine or forsythia. The kitchen windows were steamed up from cooking. The girls could see Mrs. Battinson opening cabinets, taking down plates. They saw the Schuster boys watching television on the couch. Sadie’s house was dark save the one dim bulb over the stove.

  “I think I see our husbands,” Betty said.

  “That is them, isn’t it?” Francie said. She cupped her hand to her mouth and called out into the woods. “Halloooo!”

  Sadie stifled a laugh and glanced at Betty. It wasn’t proper to break character. “Oh, be silent and still,” she chastised. “What if it’s a bear!”

  Francie squinted without her glasses. “Is something coming?”

  Sadie looked out into the woods, through the brambles, past the big hemlock. There was someone there, a shape, waiting, not moving forward. “It’s a stump,” she said. “Part of an old tree, likely that one hit by lightning a few summers nigh.” She kept her eyes on the shape. It wasn’t a bear. She felt something tense in her, a quickening she would feel only a few times later: when she lost control of the car she was driving at seventeen; when she felt the sharp stab, then the dull slip of her first miscarriage at twenty-six.