The Lost Girls Read Online Free Page B

and settle things in person,” he said, “if there are things in the house you want to keep. Or you can contact a lawyer where you are, and we’ll handle the probate by fax. Then I can recommend a realtor to sell the house for you.”
    He paused. Justine knew she was supposed to say something, but her head felt as if it would float straight up and away if she didn’t hold on to it. There was $150,000 in an investment portfolio somewhere in Minnesota. She and Patrick had $1,328 in their account at the Wells Fargo. The lake house had been the color of butter in the sun.
    â€œCan I call you back?” she asked. Of course, he said.
    When she hung up she took Patrick’s coffee cup to the sink. She washed it and dried it and put it in the cupboard. Then, from the storage unit in the basement, she pulled the faded blue duffel she’d kept from when she was her mother’s daughter. In it she put her jeans and the three sweatshirts she owned. Two pairs of shoes that weren’t sandals. Bras, underwear, socks, pajamas. Toothbrush, shampoo, hairbrush. She zipped up the bag and put it by the front door.
    From beneath the sink she took a stack of brown grocery bags. In them she put the photo albums she’d made when the girls werebabies and the more recent snapshots magneted to the refrigerator. From inside the refrigerator she took bread, peanut butter, and jelly. From the pantry, crackers, chips, and cereal. At two thirty Patrick called on her cell. She stood motionless in the apartment as he crowed about his day: two fax machines and a printer sold before his lunch break. When he asked what was for dinner, she told him they had leftover spaghetti. He asked her to pick up that garlic bread he liked on her way home. She said she would.
    After they hung up she called the lawyer. “We’re coming,” she said. He sounded pleased. He gave her directions and told her Lucy’s neighbor, Matthew Miller, would have a key to the house.
    Her daughters didn’t have suitcases, so Justine took the pillowcases from their beds and filled them with their warmest clothes and shoes. Then she used more brown bags to hold their jewelry boxes with tiny ballerinas inside, stuffed animals, plastic horses, dolls with tangles in their hair. Barrettes and scrunchies, drawing paper and markers. She put the bags by the front door with the rest. It didn’t look like much, but it filled the back of the Tercel.
    When she finished loading the car it was four thirty. She was supposed to pick up her daughters at the aftercare at five. At five thirty, Patrick would be home.
    She put her apartment key on the kitchen counter and her cell phone beside it. She pulled a Post-it off the stack. The clock inched forward another minute while she debated what to write. Francis’s note had said he was sorry. She didn’t know if she was sorry. She didn’t know what she felt, other than a buzzing anxiety pegged to the sweep of the second hand around the clock face. In the waning November afternoon the living room furniture she and Francis had bought on layaway looked dark and strange, as though it had never belonged to her at all. A shiver ran across her shoulder blades. She’d forgotten how easy it was, to slip out of a life.
    Dear Patrick , she wrote, the spaghetti is thawing in the refrigerator . She laid the note on the counter, smoothed it once, and walked out.Her feet on the steps were light. When she reached the bottom she heard her cell phone ring, faintly.
    Later she wouldn’t remember driving to the school. But she would remember that her face felt like dried icing as she walked her daughters to a picnic table on the playground and told them they’d inherited a house on a lake that had a porch and a swing, and that it was in Minnesota, but that was okay, because they’d get to see things along the way, like the Rocky Mountains and Las Vegas, and it would be an adventure.
    The girls stayed