Chapters (61)
- Cover
- Dedication
- Imagine a girl
- Prologue
- The Foreigner
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- The Skeptic
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-One
- Twenty-Two
- Twenty-Three
- The Spectator
- Twenty-Four
- Twenty-Five
- Twenty-Six
- Twenty-Seven
- Twenty-Eight
- Twenty-Nine
- The Assassin
- Thirty
- Thirty-One
- Thirty-Two
- Thirty-Three
- Thirty-Four
- Thirty-Five
- Thirty-Six
- Thirty-Seven
- Thirty-Eight
- Thirty-Nine
- Forty
- Forty-One
- The Hunter
- Forty-Two
- Forty-Three
- Forty-Four
- Forty-Five
- Forty-Six
- Forty-Seven
- Imagine a girl
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- Also by Ben McPherson
- About the Publisher
“Eyes on the screen, Vee.”
Elsa took Vee’s right hand; I took her left.
There was the girl who matched Licia’s description, down at the cliff’s edge on Garden Island.
Vee leaned in to me. “Strange, once you know it’s not her.”
“Very.”
It wasn’t Licia, and didn’t feel like Licia now. Hard to believe we could have thought it was.
I looked across at Elsa. She nodded. She was thinking the same thing. And so we emptied our faces of expression and kept our eyes on the screen. All the while I felt the eyes of the Andersen brothers boring into ours, trying to take pleasure in a pain that we no longer felt, because the girl on-screen was another family’s missing daughter. You could feel the hope in this girl, in the way she stood, could feel through the screen the certainty that she was being rescued, that she was saved.
A terrifying cosmic joke. There would be no rescue.
You saw it as the camera drew away. You felt the melting away of certainty, as if the breath were gone from the girl’s body. You saw beside her the other children who were to die with her, and the boy Arno who would survive but would never speak of it, and you saw in those children that same lack of hope as you saw in the girl. You saw the grown man in a torn T-shirt pushing through the children, deciding they were lost, but that he might yet be saved.
I felt Vee gripping my hand.
“Vee, are you okay?” I said as quietly as I could.
“The picture is wrong.”
The blue of the dress was off. Too bright, too saturated. The rock beside the girl was too red. The grass beyond too green. Everything felt miscalibrated, over-intense.
“It’s the colors, Vee.”
“No. It’s something else.”
She looked about her. “Vee, eyes on the screen.” But the brothers were no longer trying to lock eyes with her. They were staring at the screen, that same hungry look on their faces. The man in the T-shirt dropped out of shot as the camera outpaced him, racing along the path that led toward the cabins. They were curious, I guessed, to see the moment of their victim’s death.
The helicopter stopped, abruptly, staring down. An empty frame. Nothing but yellowed grass, cut diagonally by the path. Then Paul Andersen stepped into the shot at the right of the frame, moving toward the steps in the rock. He looked up at the helicopter. This time he did not raise his weapon. Instead he stopped; he looked left across the frame, down the path toward the steps.