The Lost Girls Read Online Free

scrawl on the back: “Mesa is wonderful!” “Gotta love Austin!” Justine threw them away immediately. Now she rubbed her left eyebrow, where the headache a call from her mother always awoke opened its tiny eyes.
    At first Maurie chatted on in her usual way about Phil-the-boyfriend, the RV park, and how she was learning to play golf, and Justine’s attention wandered to the stack of patient files on her desk. She wasn’t supposed to read them, but she liked the small, ordinary stories they told, so she opened the top one. Edna Burbank, 84. Arthritis, bursitis, a prescription for Xanax.
    Then Maurie said, “Do you remember my aunt Lucy? Up at the lake?”
    Justine closed Edna’s file and sat forward in her chair. She hadn’t thought about Lucy for years, but at the mention of her name a riot of memories broke out in the front of her brain. When she was nine, Maurie had driven them to a lake in northern Minnesota where there were green trees, clear water, and blue nights filled with the sound of crickets. They’d lived in a yellow house with a screened-in porch with three women: Aunt Lucy, Grandma Lilith, and their mother, Justine’s own great-grandmother. “Yes. Yes, I remember her.”
    â€œWell, she died. I just got the notice. Thank God I set up the forwarding this time.” Ice clinked in Maurie’s glass. “She nevershould have stayed in that house by herself. After Mother died I told her she should move to the retirement home over in Bemidji, but she wouldn’t. God knows how she made it through those winters.”
    Justine had loved that lake. Not only because it was beautiful, but also because Maurie laughed differently there. Instead of the brittle laughs Justine had heard in the diners and cheap cafés that crowded her memory, Maurie’s lake laugh let you see all the way to the back of her mouth. She’d seemed different in other ways, too. Relaxed. Not looking ahead to the next big adventure. For a while Justine even thought they might stay, that they might live there longer than the few months they spent in most places. But in September they piled their things in the rusty Fairmont and drove away. Off to Iowa City, or maybe Omaha. She couldn’t remember. Another apartment, another job, another boyfriend, another school.
    Still, all that next year, Justine hoped they’d go back. Maybe it would become a tradition that they went to the lake every summer. Other people had traditions like that, she knew. But she never brought it up, and when summer came and went with no mention of the lake she wasn’t surprised. After all, Maurie never went back anywhere. When they left a town she wouldn’t even let Justine look back at it. “Shake the dust off,” she’d say. “Shake the dust of that town off your feet.” She’d take her foot off the gas and shake both feet and Justine would, too, even though she never wanted to leave, no matter where they were.
    She wondered what Maurie had done when her mother died. Had she gone back then? Would she have broken her rule to see her mother buried? “When did Grandma Lilith die? You never told me.”
    Maurie ignored her. “The letter was from some lawyer. Turns out Lucy had some jewelry of Mother’s she wanted me to have. And he wanted your number.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œWell. Apparently she left you that house.”
    â€œShe what ?” Justine had to tighten her fingers to keep from dropping the phone.
    â€œNot that it’s worth much, stuck up there in the middle of nowhere.” The ice clinked again. “She always wanted me to come back. Your mother misses you, she’d say. But my God, it was awful growing up in that place. Nobody lived there, just the summer people who didn’t give a crap about some local girl. I got out as soon as I got my driver’s license.”
    It had never occurred to Justine that the lake house was