Good as Gone: A dark and gripping thriller with a shocking twist

“Good morning,” I say from the doorway.

“You slept forever,” Jane says, but Julie is already getting up and in three long strides she has embraced me. It takes me aback. How long has it been since a daughter of mine came rushing into my arms from across the room? Just as I am starting to notice the scent of her hair, she pulls back and looks at me, her hands sliding down my arms to grasp my hands. “Hi, Mom,” she says, a little awkwardly, and for a moment we are looking straight into each other’s eyes.

I have become accustomed to looking at Jane, who shares my distinctive features, my sharp nose and deep-set eyes. As I stare into Julie’s woman’s face, I realize there are no moles, no bumps or blemishes or wrinkles.

She’s perfect.

She breaks away, embarrassed, and I realize I have been staring.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I haven’t seen your face in so long.”

“I know,” Tom says.

“Sit down, I’m just getting some coffee,” I say. “Did you sleep okay?” There’s a big pan on the stove with some scrambled eggs left in it, and I put some on a plate, suddenly ravenous.

“I slept very well,” she says, like a polite guest. “The air mattress was comfortable.”

“She’s only been up for a few minutes,” Tom says. “I’ve been fielding phone calls from the police department all morning. Come in whenever you want apparently means ‘If you’re not here by nine you’ll be hearing from us.’ ” His face darkens. “I suppose it makes sense. They’re worried about the press. I’m sure that’ll be starting anytime now.”

Julie’s smile fades. “I guess we should probably go, now that Mom’s awake.”

Tom puts a hand over hers on the table. “You take as much time as you need.”

“The sooner we go, the sooner it’ll be over,” I say.

Tom’s eyes tear up, and I realize he doesn’t want to know what she went through. At the same time, it occurs to me that I do.

Julie is studying my face with an almost grateful expression. “Yes,” she says. “I want to get it over with.” I can tell by the way she’s looking at me that Julie needs me there, and no one else. I can’t keep Tom away from the police station, but I decide I’m going to persuade him to stay out in the hall, which means Jane will have to come too, to give him someone to look after.

“Come on, Julie,” I say. “I’ll find you something in my closet to wear.” A skirt, I think, looking at her dwindled frame. And I’ll need some safety pins.

“He said he would kill me if I struggled. Kill my family.”

“You believed him?” says Overbey.

We are sitting in the police station — me, Julie, Overbey, and a younger female detective, Detective Harris — in a private room with frosted-glass windows and a single table. Tom is outside waiting in the lobby with Jane, per Julie’s request. Overbey wanted to question Julie alone, but she looked from his face to my face and then back, and he sighed and invited me in. I’m holding but not drinking a cup of black coffee so weak you can see air bubbles clinging to the inside of the Styrofoam, read the imprint of the serial number on the bottom. It was brought to me by Detective Harris — Typical, I think — while Overbey asked the questions.

“Of course I believed him,” Julie says now. “He had a knife at my throat.”

“A kitchen knife,” Overbey says, consulting his notes, as if he doesn’t already know everything in the case file. “Taken from the household. Any other weapons?”

“She was thirteen,” I break in, but Overbey holds up his hand and nods for Julie to go on, and it’s true she doesn’t seem upset.

“Not that I saw. But I believed him. And if it was happening to me again now, knowing what I know about him, I would still believe him.” She takes a breath. “Once we were out of the house, we got on a bus just by the CVS, there on Memorial Drive, and went to the bus station downtown.”

“Did anyone see you?”

“The bus driver, maybe, but I was too scared to say anything. At the bus station he bought two tickets. We got off in El Paso.” She pauses, and her eyes go dead. “That’s where he raped me for the first time.”

“Do you remember where you were?”

“Some motel. I don’t remember which one.”

“Motel Six? Econo Lodge?”

She glares at him icily. “Sorry. We stayed there for only a couple days and then we were gone again. We moved all the time. He stole a car in El Paso” — Overbey makes a subtle gesture without looking at Harris, who writes something down — “and for a while we drove that, but he sold it somehow, I guess. He just came back without it one day.”

“He left you alone?”

“Yes. He left me tied up and gagged when he had to go out. We were in Mexico when he sold the car, I think, but I’m not sure because I was blindfolded, and then I was in the back of a van for a long time.” The duct-taped-in-a-van dream floats before my eyes. “It took me a while to find out he’d sold me.”

“He what?” Overbey looks up sharply.

“He sold me,” she says. “Five men, maybe six.”

Harris nods and returns to writing.

“Did those men —”

“Oh yes.” She gives a cold, brittle smile. “Yes, they did.”

My eyes close.

“Mrs. Whitaker, are you all right?” It’s Harris’s voice. I am sinking, eyes shut, into a cold black vapor that prickles at my extremities. I hear Overbey correct his partner — “Mrs. Davalos goes by her maiden name” — and snap my eyes back open, but the black dots take a moment to clear.

“I’m fine,” I whisper. I want to reach for Julie’s hand, but her arms are folded tightly across her chest.

“Could you identify any of the men?”

“I was blindfolded,” she repeats patiently.

“Any accents?”

She thinks. “Some of them spoke Spanish to each other, but none of them talked very much. Anyway, that was a couple of days — I think? I can’t remember it very well. Then they sold me again. To someone important this time.”

The detectives look meaningfully at each other. “Who?”

“I never knew his name. The other men called him El Jefe when they were talking about him, señor to his face.”

“Go on,” Overbey says calmly while Harris scribbles furiously. “How did you know he was important?”

“He had a giant house, like a compound, with bodyguards and a household staff and a lot of men with big guns coming to him for orders.” She stops and takes a breath. “Please don’t ask me where, I don’t know. I didn’t go outside.”

“For how long?”

“For eight years.”

Later, I tell Tom as little as I can get away with, enough to explain the pages of thumbnail photos Julie looked through at the station, pictures of Mexican men in their fifties with high foreheads and thick chins. I narrate the various stages of her captivity, but not the cigarette burns she got when she tried to escape; the years of rape, but not the way she spoke of them, as if describing the plot of a not particularly interesting television show. I tell him that her captor tired of her, but not that she was too old for him once out of her teens; I tell him that she was blindfolded and taken in a helicopter to a rooftop in Juárez, but not that the guard was most likely supposed to kill her rather than let her go. I tell him that she hid in the back of a truck to get across the border, but not that she was afraid of the U.S. Border Patrol because she wasn’t sure she could still speak English, or anything at all, after so long; that she jumped out of the truck at a stoplight and ran, but not that she dragged herself foot after foot along the I-10 feeder road for miles, invisible from the freeway, like the people you learn not to see stumbling through gas-station parking lots, clutching their possessions in plastic bags.