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

      “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.

      “My God,” he says under his breath. We are at the kitchen table and the girls are upstairs in bed, a peculiar throwback to the quiet discussions we used to have long ago, about topics so trivial I can’t imagine why we bothered hiding them. “So she was sold to a human-trafficking ring, then to some drug lord?”

      It’s strange how hearing him say those phrases out loud makes it into a story more than the jumbled words in the interview room did. “That’s what it sounds like, yes.”

      Tom is leaning forward on his elbows on the kitchen table, holding on to himself, every muscle tensed. “Well, is that what the detectives say?”

      “They didn’t say much at all, really. They were just taking her statement, asking questions.”

      “Right. They don’t want to say anything that might upset us, like, you know, human trafficking or forced prostitution. That might imply they know about it and can’t do anything to stop it!” Tom’s voice breaks on this last exclamation. He’s not bothering to lower his voice anymore.

      “I think they may know something. Harris mentioned a task force —”

      “Yes, there’s a statewide task force on human trafficking,” Tom surprises me by saying. I am reminded of how much work he has done, how many search organizations he’s joined, the support group for parents of missing children, the Facebook pages, and wonder what else he knows that I don’t. “They formed it a couple of years ago, after a big report came out. Obviously it came too late to help Julie. But I guess we should be thrilled that she can help them.” He sighs heavily. “How was she in there?”

      “She seemed — fine,” I say. “All things considered. One of the detectives told me she’s in shock and needs to see a therapist.”

      “Of course,” Tom says. “I’ll find someone. I’ll call tonight.”

3

      To get through the first week, I take her shopping. What else am I going to do with this twenty-one-year-old woman who has shown up to replace my missing thirteen-year-old daughter? Besides, she doesn’t have any clothes. The first few days, I lend her things of mine to wear — she’s closer to my size than Jane’s — but it gives me the strangest feeling to see her draped in one of my severe black tunics, her blond hair swallowed up in its oversize cowl, like a paper doll dressed for a funeral.

      “I have some errands to run at Target,” I lie. “Want to come? We can get you some clothes.”

      Julie used to love back-to-school shopping with me, especially picking out all the notebooks and pens and pencils in purple and pink and glittery green. On top of buying her the usual jeans and T-shirts and underwear, I always got her one completely new first-day-of-school outfit, and she would keep it hanging on her doorknob for weeks, counting down the days. I still go to the same Target, which has, of course, barely changed at all in eight years, and I wonder whether the memories it brings back of one of our few mother-daughter activities are as pleasant to her as they are to me.

      But once we’re there, the red walls seem too aggressive somehow, the fluorescent lights glaring on the white linoleum walkways headache-inducing. Julie follows me obediently around the store as if it’s her first time in there, or indeed in any store, and I can’t help but wince at the racks of neon bikinis all tangled up on their hangers, the viscose minidresses lying on the floor under the sale rack, the red-and-white bull’s-eye logo suspended over bins of brightly colored underwear. If the clothes in my closet seem too dour for a twenty-one-year-old, everything here seems too flimsy and disposable for someone with a face like Julie’s. Hurrying us past the clothing department, I grab a cheese grater at random from the kitchen section and we stand, a little absurdly, in the express lane, waiting to check out.

      Julie stares fixedly at the rows of candy bars in their bright boxes, and I am struck by how much this is like standing at the baggage carousel with Jane, the silence of two people trying to pretend it’s ordinary how little they’re talking. Except with Jane, I know she doesn’t want to talk, not to me anyway. With Julie — who knows. But whatever conversation I am waiting to have with her, we are not going to have it in the express lane of Target, not even with the extra two minutes gained from the woman in front of us arguing over a sale price. I’ve heard the story, but who really knows what she’s been through or how she feels about it? Look at her now, I think, staring at nothing.

      But she’s not. Once we get through the line and out into the car, she says, “I used to love that movie.”

      “What movie?”

      “A Little Princess.”

      Now I recall seeing it on the display stand near the register. I don’t remember much about the movie aside from its exceptionally lurid color palette. It’s one of those boarding-school stories, I know, where they’re mean to the orphan girl. They keep her up in the attic. I feel a hint of panic.

      “You should have said something. We could have bought it.”

      “It’s okay, I don’t want it.”

      “We can go back.”

      “Mom. I was just remembering.”

      But I’m almost crying in the silence that follows. She turns her head toward the window and says, “The Indian Gentleman searches everywhere for her so he can pass on her father’s fortune, but it turns out she’s been next door to him the whole time.”

      I try to speak, but nothing comes out.

      “I used to think about that sometimes,” she says shortly, by way of explanation, turning her head back to me. The veil of kindness has dropped back over her eyes. Outside, it starts to rain.

      We