The Rust Maidens Read online

  “Hello,” he says. “Can I help you?”

  A new preacher. Young and bright-eyed and definitely not a local. Way too much hope in him for that.

  “You’re not from here?” I ask. It’s probably a rude way to start a conversation, but he only smiles and shakes his head.

  “I’m over from Indiana,” he says. “They sent me here to fix this place up. With everything going on in the world today, people need guidance right now.”

  “People always need guidance,” I say as I glance around. There are no giggles at the pulpit, no girls peeking out between the pews. I must have imagined them. I’ve been doing that a lot lately.

  “Is there something you’re looking for?” the preacher asks.

  I hesitate before regarding him. “Did they tell you about the neighborhood’s history?”

  “You mean those girls back in the eighties?” He stiffens on instinct. “They mentioned something about that. Did you know them?”

  Instantly, the question knocks the wind out of me.

  “Yes,” I say. One word. That’s all I can manage.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, and at first, I think he’s just being polite. But a sadness crosses his face, and I realize it’s not lip service. It’s honest-to-goodness empathy. I didn’t think they made that model in Cleveland anymore. But then again, he did say he was an out-of-towner.

  “You know, the lost are never really lost, not in the eyes of the Lord. They can always be found.” He sucks in a heavy breath, and a pigeon flutters overhead in the rafters. “The Gospel of Luke talks about this in chapter fifteen.”

  No, not a sermon. Not this sermon. I bite my bottom lip until I wince at the pain. He’s going to tell me the parable of the lost sheep. Is this guy for real? His solution to a cache of missing girls is to lecture me on some fucking biblical sheep?

  The corners of my mouth twitch, and I want to scream. I want to hear how loud my voice will echo in this place where there’s no congregation, no hope, no point in its miserable existence. Not that there was ever a compelling reason for this church to exist, not even thirty years ago when we all pretended to believe.

  But as the preacher keeps speaking, earnest as only a fool can be, I don’t scream. I just wait here as he recites the whole damn passage. No reason to be rude again. Besides, none of this is his fault.

  “Thank you,” I say when he’s done, and I almost mean it, because at least he was kind to me. It might be the first time a preacher stood inside this place and showed an ounce of genuine kindness to anybody.

  I start to walk away, my chest tightening. Why did the girls lead me here? What did they want me to find?

  Nothing. There’s nothing they want me to find. They want me to remember. I’ve been trying for so long to forget what happened here, and maybe now I need to stop running.

  I’m halfway to the door before I turn back to the preacher. “You know this neighborhood, right?”

  One eyebrow arches up curiously, and he nods. Of course he knows the neighborhood. He knows the worst places, too. How else is he going to recruit the sheep?

  “Any idea where the particularly lost hang out these days?’

  He inspects me, slowly deciphering my meaning. “There’s a place,” he says, “four blocks over. It’s called the Backdoor Bar.”

  I smile. “Thank you,” I say, and this time, I mean it.

  ***

  It doesn’t have a neon sign. It doesn’t have windows either. But the heap of cheap cigarettes piled outside the door and the stench of stale urine in the gutter make me sure this is where the preacher meant. I stand on the street, staring at the splintered white façade and the hand-scrawled letters on the awning. Now that I’m here, I realize this probably won’t help. But I have to do something.

  The door swings open, and a whiff of despair, heavier than all the heartache in the world, overwhelms me. I want to turn back. I won’t turn back. Inside, empty peanut shells crunch beneath my boots, and an old-timer in a dirty booth leers at me, his lips curled back, revealing a cavernous mouth that might as well go on forever.

  I shiver and keep walking, past a row of empty tables and a craggy bartender old enough to remember when this city was known for more than its failures. I see him now, who I came for, right where I expected him. In the corner, at the end of the counter, Clint sits on the barstool he calls home. I take the seat next to his, and he looks up lazily, his eyes filmed over.

  “Phoebe,” he says, as if he’s been expecting me to show up in this woebegone watering hole for years.

  I order a whiskey sour and try not to stare too hard at him. I hate to see what he’s become. When I finally look close, it’s what I figured. His face is yellowed from drink and lined with regret, gaze distant and swirling with all the things he could have done differently but didn’t bother to. Every ugly thing about him has seeped out through his pores. He’s a walking portrait of Dorian Gray.

  “Your daughter needs you,” I say and take a sip of my drink.

  He grunts. “I don’t have a daughter,” he says. “That way it’s better for me. Better for her, too.”

  Of course this is his answer. I grit my teeth and hate him a little bit more. I hate myself too—for caring about him once, for blaming Dawn, for thinking that if I ran, it would make a difference. This place is in me, the same as it’s in him. I can’t free myself by hiding or fleeing or pretending it didn’t happen.

  Bob Seger crackles on the worn-out jukebox behind me, and I swallow a breath of rank air.

  “Eleanor isn’t doing well,” I say. “She needs a parent, Clint.”

  Another grunt. “She’s probably too old now to go the way her mother did, right? Because that’d be my advice: get out any way you can. Do better than me. Better than you, too.”

  He turns to inspect me, and I squirm under the weight of his stare. His head tips slowly up and down, gaze sliding over my body as he surveys me like I’m a prime piece of real estate. As if there’s any of that left in the whole city of Cleveland.

  “You’re looking good.” He takes a swig of his beer and grimaces at the skunk flavor. Then he looks harder at me, remembering something. Or someone. “But then you were always the better choice.”

  Choice. Something Clint always got. Something the Rust Maidens never did.

  “There was nothing wrong with Dawn,” I say. “At least not until you got hold of her.”

  This hits him dead-center, and even harder than I expect. Maybe because he knows I’m right: he ruined her. All her dreams were crushed to ash the moment he climbed on top of her in the dark.

  As always, Clint’s pain wears off quickly and his lips curl into a grin. “You always did have a mouth on you,” he says. “Learn how to do anything new with it lately?”

  My whiskey sour is dripping down his face before I can stop myself. A pity, too. The booze was worth a hundred times what he is.

  This is, as I should have known, a complete waste of time, and time is the one thing I’ve wasted enough of. A five tossed on the bar and I’m out the door, the chill of December wrapping around me, reminding me I’m alive. It’s nice to remember that sometimes.

  Why did I come here? Why did I ever bother with Clint?

  My breath seizes up in my chest. It’s because after all these years, I want to tell someone. Someone who knew them. I want to confess the truth.

  That I know what happened to the Rust Maidens.

  But it shouldn’t be Clint. If I finally say it aloud, it should never be to him.

  My head spun, I shortcut down an alley that’s overflowing with discarded beer bottles and wadded-up fast food wrappers. I want to get back to the house, to be anywhere except right here.

  But a hand’s suddenly on my elbow, and I’m wheezing too hard to cry out.

  Clint whirls me around to face him. “You can’t run,” he says. “You have to see.”

  Still gripping me close, he kneels to the asphalt and picks up a discarded beer bottle. His eyes wild, he tosses it aga
inst the building. The glass splinters in the air, and I scream, shielding my face with my free hand.

  “Clint, stop,” I say, breathless with fear, but he won’t listen. His grasp tightens on my arm, but he seems more desperate than cruel. One bottle after another against the wall, some half filled with flat beer, some filled with old urine, all the liquid running down the building and onto our shoes.

  Then he stops. I glare at him, ready to break his jaw or holler again or call the police. But he just points to the ground.

  “Look,” he says. “It’s for you, Phoebe. It’s from her.”

  I follow his accusing hand. The shattered glass has formed a pattern. Over and over, repeating up and down the alley. All the same shape.

  A triple moon.

  I inch away, but Clint pulls me into him.

  “They’re still here.” His breath is wet and hot in my ear. “It doesn’t matter what we do now, Phoebe. They’ll never leave.”

  I wrench myself free and run. Faster than I knew I could. Away from the bar and Clint and the message that can’t be from her.

  I can’t go back the way I came, the way in front of the bar, so I have to take a different route. Past the place I already visited my first night back. It rises up over me, a hulking behemoth that will never set us free. I blink up at the stacks and the rusted-out ladders and the spout where the flame used to be.

  Nobody ever dismantled the old steel mill. They didn’t bother to remove the coke oven or the pig-casting machine or the empty blast furnace. And outside, they never took down the chain-link fence. They left it to rot and remind us of everything we’d lost.

  A real estate development company came in about fifteen years ago and surveyed the land and made all the preparations to dismantle the place. For a strip mall, my mother told me. But something happened—bankruptcy, or cold feet over ghosts, or maybe just plain old apathy—and the project went into limbo. Now the whole property is a specter of its own.

  I edge past the red graffiti on the asphalt to get a better look at the mill. The only way in from this side of the factory is through a hole in the fence. I shouldn’t do this, but I already know that I will.

  This gap isn’t very big, and it takes me a moment to contort my body to fit. I’m sure I’ll make it through, but halfway in, my jacket gets caught. I twist my shoulders before starting to writhe and thrash, but it doesn’t help. I can’t break free, and I can’t slip out either. I’m trapped here, in this place where I shouldn’t be. Where no one will even know to look for me.

  I turn my face to the fence, still trying to pry myself free. A piece of jagged metal from the chain-link passes across my cheek. Its touch like a single fingertip, cold but familiar. I close my eyes and tell myself I’m wrong. The rust didn’t reach out for me. The rust isn’t alive. There’s no one else here.

  When I look again, the metal is lifeless before me, and my jacket is unsnagged from the fence. Maybe I was never caught at all. Or maybe someone helped to set me free.

  I won’t linger here in the cold and try to figure out which it was. My chest tight, I pull myself inside the fence, and I don’t look back. Instead, I turn to what’s left of the mill. Rust drapes over every corner, coating all the stacks like luxurious velvet. This should be jarring somehow, seeing my past withered and peeling before me, but it almost looks like the decay has always belonged here. It’s certainly more comfortable in Cleveland than I am. I inhale a sharp breath and catch a whiff of earth, but nothing else that we once expected in this place. No smoke from the never-ending fires that used to burn here, and no sweat of men at the end of their shifts, walking across this same crumbled asphalt, their tin lunchboxes in hand.

  I move into the mill through a back door, hanging limply from its hinges. With the walls corroded around me, I wander through the tall, echoing space. Dust lilts in the air, and a vague smell of sulfur clogs my nose. Everything in here creaks accusingly at me as I pass, and I feel crowded, even though I’m alone.

  This was never the biggest factory in the region, and time has made it smaller still. I walk across the entire mill in less than five minutes, and then I circle back and try again, ducking beneath sagging conveyor belts and creeping past a pair of air heaters that long ago went cold. Searching for anything. Searching for them.

  This is foolish. I don’t belong here. There’s nothing I can do with these dead things from the past. I don’t know who I am, thinking I can rescue Quinn and Eleanor somehow. I couldn’t save the girls before. I can’t even save myself.

  But I keep trying anyhow.

  In the center of the plant, there’s a blast furnace, its immense steel body at the heart of everything, towering over the rest of the equipment. When my dad took me on a tour of this place when I was a kid, I couldn’t stop staring at it from across the mill.

  “It looks like a giant lava lamp,” I said, almost breathless.

  He slapped his thigh and laughed. “You’re not wrong,” he said.

  I place one palm on the chilled metal, rusted with time and neglect. I expect to find the girls in the decay, but all of them are long gone.

  But they were here once. They were real. I have to remind myself of that sometimes. In my worst moments, I almost believe that I dreamed it all. I don’t know if that would be better or worse.

  From behind me, a shadow passes across the wall, and my heart quickens. Are they here? Have I finally found them?

  I turn around and start to say her name, but it’s all for nothing.

  Bundled in a heavy jacket, Adrian nods at me. “Sorry to disappoint,” he says.

  I scowl at him, irritated at his very existence. “Why are you here?”

  “Because I thought you might be.” He takes a step closer to me. “What happened here, Phoebe?”

  I hesitate, my lips moving silently with the truth.

  “Nothing,” I whisper instead.

  Adrian sighs. He knew I’d say that. He knows I won’t talk to him—can’t talk to him—after everything that’s happened between us. This still doesn’t deter him. He offers me a ride home. I almost say no out of spite, but it’s a mile back, and I’m so cold and so tired.

  “Fine,” I whisper, and together we head out the opposite side of the mill. Adrian’s discovered a way in and out that doesn’t involve the chain-link fence. That means he’s probably been here before. He knows more than he lets on. That’s how he’s always been.

  I climb in the passenger seat of his car, and we don’t speak the whole trip back to Denton Street.

  ***

  At my house, with Adrian trudging up the porch steps behind me, I knock on the front door, and my mother answers.

  “Hello,” she says, more to him than me.

  He smiles. “I found her,” he says.

  I glance between the two of them. My mother must have sent him to look for me. To bring me home. Those phone calls about Adrian weren’t random updates. After I left, my parents must have kept in touch with him. I imagine the three of them over Sunday suppers, my chair conspicuously empty. Maybe he even worked side-by-side with my father in the garage, tinkering with the Impala, keeping it running, keeping the past intact. Like it would make any difference.

  My mother invites him inside. I get no welcome. She probably doesn’t think I need one.

  “Why are you here, Adrian?” I keep walking, past my crumpled-up sleeping bag and the musty old family Bible in the corner.

  “Because I didn’t like how we left things,” he says.

  I scoff and climb the steps. “It’s a little late to worry about that.”

  “I’m trying to fix things. I think you can understand.” He follows me upstairs and into my bedroom.

  The top dresser drawer is halfway open, and an image of Jacqueline with her sad, strange smile is waiting to greet us.

  Adrian stares at her. “What is all of this?”

  “Nothing,” I say, and stand in front of the dresser, blocking off as much of it as I can.

  Adrian sways back and f
orth, trying to see around me, to get a glimpse of the diaries and the photo negatives and the other secrets tucked away. He wants to know what I’ve got here, and what he can use for the museum.

  I roll my eyes. “You don’t change, do you?”

  He blushes at this, a caught child, and he starts to say something, an apology of sorts, but my mother’s voice carries up from the living room.

  “Get out. Now.”

  More words, furious ones that boil in your veins, and then heavy footsteps, two pairs. I hold my breath. Adrian does the same. Another holler, and Eleanor comes crashing through the door with my mother close behind her, swatting and cursing at the air.

  “I told you to get out,” my mother says, but Eleanor just ignores her, setting her sights on me instead.

  “Phoebe,” she says, a feral look in her eyes. “You’re leaving soon, aren’t you?”

  I nod, my head drooping with shame.

  “Then tell me,” she says. “Before it’s too late. Before Quinn goes the same way. What happened with the girls? What did you see?”

  The three of them are all staring at me now, and I’m sure they know everything. I’m sure I’m wearing the truth on my skin, a tapestry of the past, etched in wrinkles around my eyes and the hundreds of gray hairs I’ve earned.

  No one knows how the girls disappeared. No one except me.

  But I can’t remember. After all these years, I won’t remember. If I have to admit how I’ve failed them, I fear I’ll crumble to ash.

  “Please leave me alone,” I whisper before slipping through my bedroom door and heading outside.

  This is a coward’s move.

  It’s the only thing I can think to do.

  In the backyard, I climb up one last time to what’s left of the treehouse. This should be my chance for a proper goodbye, an overdue farewell to the specters of my insects, but I’m not alone. Quinn is already there, tucked against a limb where there used to be a corner.

  “Hello,” she says, and I do my best not to stare at her arm. The wound hasn’t festered any more since yesterday. No bandages. Nothing. Maybe I’m wrong, and Eleanor and I both imagined this. Maybe Quinn won’t be the same.