The Nowhere Child: A Novel
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About this ebook
“A nervy, soulful, genuinely surprising it-could-happen-to-you thriller — a book to make you peer over your shoulder for days afterwards.”—A.J. Finn, New York Times bestselling author of The Woman in the Window
Winner of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, The Nowhere Child is screenwriter Christian White’s internationally bestselling debut thriller of psychological suspense about a woman uncovering devastating secrets about her family—and her very identity…
Kimberly Leamy is a photography teacher in Melbourne, Australia. Twenty-six years earlier, Sammy Went, a two-year old girl vanished from her home in Manson, Kentucky. An American accountant who contacts Kim is convinced she was that child, kidnapped just after her birthday. She cannot believe the woman who raised her, a loving social worker who died of cancer four years ago, crossed international lines to steal a toddler.
On April 3rd, 1990, Jack and Molly Went’s daughter Sammy disappeared from the inside their Kentucky home. Already estranged since the girl’s birth, the couple drifted further apart as time passed. Jack did his best to raise and protect his other daughter and son while Molly found solace in her faith. The Church of the Light Within, a Pentecostal fundamentalist group who handle poisonous snakes as part of their worship, provided that faith. Without Sammy, the Wents eventually fell apart.
Now, with proof that she and Sammy are in fact the same person, Kim travels to America to reunite with a family she never knew she had. And to solve the mystery of her abduction—a mystery that will take her deep into the dark heart of religious fanaticism where she must fight for her life against those determined to save her soul…
Christian White
Christian White is an internationally bestselling and award-winning Australian author and screenwriter. His debut novel, The Nowhere Child, won the 2017 Victorian Premier's Literary Award and screen rights were quickly acquired by Anonymous Content (US) and Carver Films (Australia). He also co-wrote Relic, a feature film starring Emily Mortimer. Christian lives in Melbourne with his wife and their adopted greyhound.
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Reviews for The Nowhere Child
120 ratings13 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Sad to say this is relegated to my “meh” pile. Promoted as a thrilling, gripping “exhilarating ride,” this was certainly not my reading experience. I was keen to find out more about Pentecostal fundamentalist cults who handled deadly snakes, but this element wasn’t detailed enough for me. This novel only became a page turner for me towards the very end of the story. Perhaps my expectations were too high as there has been much hype about this book. Even the name “Sammy Went” annoyed me.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Just plain TERRIFIC!!! I read The Wife and the Widow so I had missed this debut novel. The twists and turns were wonderful---definitely a page turner!
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Wow! That was a pretty awesome debut novel. I never would have guessed it was a debut. All the characters seemed well thought out and could understand their actions ... given the topic. My only issue is that I felt like the ending was rushed. I feel like we were in the middle of the story on one page, then suddenly everything was over. I think an ending a bit more detailed and involved would have totally made the book.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I thought I was really going to enjoy this book. The beginning did set the stage for what I hoped would be a story that would keep me on the edge of my seat. The more that Kimberly dug into her past the more secrets that she uncovered. There were many tangled webs.What suffered for me with this book are the characters. None of them including Kimberly drew mw into the story. Additionally, the emotional connection towards Kimberly was not as strong as I would have liked. Thus; my interest in the overall story was mild at best. I kept reading because I did want to know the truth. The truth was sad but a good ending to the story. At least the ending is a bonus as there is nothing worse than to read a whole book only to end with an unsatisfying ending.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5On 3 April 1990 two-year-old Sammy Went is taken from her home in small town Manson, Kentucky, USA. After suffering what is likely postnatal depression, her mother did not bond well with her third child, Sammy, and became deeply entrenched in the world of a snake-handling religious cult, a world Sammy’s father was raised in, but is distancing himself from. A Pentecostal fundamentalist group, the Church of the Light Within handle poisonous snakes as part of their cult. 26 years later, Kimberly Leamy is happily living in Melbourne, Australia, but her world is about to be turned upside down. An American man approaches her and explains that after a searching for her his entire life, and due to the results of a DNA test, he is certain she is Sammy Went, and that he is her older brother. Needing answers, Kimberly travels to America to find her birth family and figure out why she was taken. She may find those answers, but the cost may be her death due to rattlesnake bite if her small hometown’s snake-handling fanatic preacher has his way. A well-crafted suspense story and an interesting insight into the weird world of a snake-handling religious cult.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Full of twists and turns, this book has the perfect mix of suspense and drama. While it followed the typical plotline of a great psychological work, it had its own unique aspects. I don’t want to give any spoilers away, but I will say that this book will keep you guessing. Just when you think you know who the bad guy is, you’ll have the rug yanked out from underneath your feet. The author was inspired by Gillian Flynn to write this piece and it shows.
Since I listened to the audiobook, I also got to hear Katherine Littrell’s smooth narration.
Fantastic story. Recommended to all Gillian Flynn, Ruth Ware, and Mary Kubica fans. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The opening chapters were excellent, with Australian Kim being confronted with the fact that she is almost certainly really Sammy Went, who went missing in the US at the age of two. Then the plot splits between Kim travelling to Kentucky and meeting her birth family, and chapters set around the time of Sammy's disappearance. After a while these got increasingly dramatic and I started to skim them. The descriptions of the church where worship involved handling snakes were interesting in an appalling way. Then things got very over-dramatic and I was rolling my eyes, but the very final twist was great and I really didn't see it coming.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A very good first novel. The pace was a tad slow to begin with but it soon picked up and the story grabbed my attention...specially when Kimberly went to America to meet the family she hadn't had any contact with in 28 years. It's difficult to say very much about the story without giving away a lot of spoilers...but I will say that I never saw the plot line coming that tied it all together. I'd recommend it to anyone who likes mystery...suspense...and a little crime.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I've done pretty darn well not requesting psychological thrillers, and can't say I'm much missing them. This is one I had before I made this decision. A two year old child is taken, a young woman now in her twenties is found by her possible brother and told she might be the child. A church, a cult? A leader with strange ideas that he seems to exert at will over his followers and snakes, Rattlers to be specific and I find snakes cringeworthy, and this religion has many.Ended up liking this more than I thought I would when I began reading. It started out rather weakly, but thankfully both the plot became more interesting and the writing stronger. So many themes in this book, which was part of the problem with my perception of what was happening. All these different threads, all in one family, one town, one book? Stretches credibility. The pace after the initial slowness at the start picks up, and by books end, again my opinion, too many things are thrown into the mix. Though if you like a faster paced thriller, with a few likable characters, this one will do.ARC from Netgalley.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I've had this book sitting on my Kindle for some months now, courtesy NetGalley, and now it has been chosen by our book group for our monthly read.Kim Leamy is approached by someone who has been searching for his lost sister for years. He has scanned thousands of online images looking for similarities to an artist's impression of what his sister would look like nearly three decades after her disappearance. But he is American and Kim has a hard job thinking that the woman who brought her up would have been a kidnapper.However he tells her that a DNA test he has had taken by a Melbourne lab says there is a 98.5% probability that she is is sister. When she approaches her father it is obvious to Kim that there is some truth in what the American is telling her, that her father knows, and she decides to go to America to find out the truth for herself.A well constructed interesting story, with good mystery elements.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is a classic good read for when you want a book you can't put down. The plot is very clever and well-sequenced, and keeps you turning pages. I devoured it. If you need a good distraction and have hours at hand, you'll find that Christian White has given you the perfect gift.
I have to say that I don't read as widely in this genre - thriller/mystery/detective - as in other genres, so my comparisons are limited. I liked the pace of this story, but I did feel it gave me less in the way of character development/reveal, less atmosphere, and less real tension than i have recently struck in other books (notably Jane Harper's 'The Dry').
I found the people and the places rather bland - I couldn't tell the difference between scenes set in Australia and scenes set in Kentucky. They all speak the same language - there's no sense of idiomatic inconsistencies. Although many characters mention that they like Kim's accent, she never notices theirs - or much else that is different about America. Kim's accent appears to be the only point of differentiation. Driving on the other side of the road? Not worth a mention. 'larger serving sizes' - yes, but most Australian who've been there would spell this out as in OMG they gave me a steak the size of the plate and massed eight potatoes on top. Anyway, small quibbles.
I did pull up short, though, at the American woman S&R diver who used the phrase 'like trying to find a hymen in a whorehouse' in 1990. Really? That's just horrible. What, was she trying to be one of the 'boys'? Or is that the way women in 1990 Kentucky spoke? Whatever happened to 'needle in a haystack'. Still, that might be a genre thing - this quick thriller style seems to revel in short, sharp, shock-effect language.
White is a writer of great talent and promise. I will definitely read his next, which I understand is in the pipeline. - Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Stuart Went, masquerading as American accountant James Finn, travels to Melbourne where he seeks out Australian photography teacher Kimberly Leamy and tells her that she’s actually a girl who vanished from her home in Manson, Kentucky in 1990 when she was just two years old. Stunned, Kim is unable to believe her loving mother was a heartless kidnapper but Stuart soon convinces her that she is actually his sister, Sammy.Kim travels from Australia to America to meet the family she never knew she had. But the mystery of that kidnapping may put her in unexpected danger.This quick-read story offers an interesting premise as it ponders the consequences of learning that your entire life has been a lie. How could the loving parent who raised you actually be responsible for kidnapping you, for stealing you away from your real family? And how do you reconcile the life and family you know with the family you’ve just discovered?Aside from some unnecessary coarse language and a few bewildering, overly-violent scenes, the story unfolds without any real surprises. The characters, excepting one or two stereotypes, are reasonably well-crafted, but readers may find it difficult to establish empathy with them. Long before its reveal in a last-minute plot twist, astute readers will easily solve the kidnapping mystery, but the straightforward story plays out fairly well. However, an awkward de rigueur subplot involving a homosexual affair adds nothing to the narrative and detracts from the telling of the larger story. And, from the beginning, the cult subplot [definitely not for the faint of heart] seems to serve only as a thinly-disguised target for the vilification of religion. Alternating between the present day and the time of Sammy’s kidnapping, the story unfolds as expected but the predictable narrative fails to build suspense, leaving the reader feeling as if it’s all rather pedestrian.I received an e-copy of this book from St. Martin’s Press/Minotaur Books and NetGalley.#TheNowhereChild #NetGalley
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Kimberly Leamy was between classes at Northampton Community in Melbourne, Australia where she taught photography classes three times a week when she was approached by an American stranger. He then proceeds to show her a picture of two year old Sammy Went who was abducted from Manson, Kentucky right after that picture was taken. James Finn, the American accountant, thinks that Kimberly is Sammy Went. Kim believes this is a case of mistaken identity because she was raised by an incredible mother, recently deceased, who would never have stolen a child.However, as she starts to investigate her family, there are too many unanswered questions, so she travels to Kentucky to find answers. This is an exciting novel with lots of twists and unexpected turns until you arrive, breathless, at an incredible climax!This is Christian White’s debut novel. He says in the author’s notes (I love the author’s notes!) that that he had no real idea of how to write a novel. He had tried and failed before. So, he turned to Stephen King and read his book, On Writing, which is part memoir part how-to-guide which gives you a clear roadmap to turning your idea into a manuscript. It worked extremely well in this case! Looking forward to his next book.
Book preview
The Nowhere Child - Christian White
MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA
Now
‘Mind if I join you?’ the stranger asked. He was somewhere in his forties, with shy good looks and an American accent. He wore a slick wet parka and bright yellow sneakers. The shoes must have been new because they squeaked when he moved his feet. He sat down at my table before waiting for an answer and said, ‘You’re Kimberly Leamy, right?’
I was between classes at Northampton Community TAFE, where I taught photography three nights a week. The cafeteria was usually bustling with students, but tonight it had taken on an eerie, post-apocalyptic emptiness. It had been raining nearly six days straight but the double-glazed glass kept the noise out.
‘Just Kim,’ I said, feeling mildly frustrated. I didn’t have long left on my break and had been enjoying my solitude. Earlier that week I’d found a worn old copy of Stephen King’s Pet Sematary propping up the leg of a table in the staffroom, and since then I’d been busily consuming it. I’ve always been a big reader, and horror is a particular favourite of mine. My younger sister, Amy, would often watch in frustration as I finished three books in the same time it took her to read one. The key to fast reading is to have a boring life, I once told her. Amy had a fiancé and a three-year-old daughter; I had Stephen King.
‘My name is James Finn,’ the man said. He placed a manila folder on the table between us and closed his eyes for a moment, like an Olympic diver mentally preparing to leap.
‘Are you a teacher or a student?’ I asked.
‘Neither, actually.’
He opened the folder, removed an eight-by-ten-inch photo and slid it across the table. There was something mechanical about the way he moved. Every gesture was measured and confident.
The eight-by-ten showed a young girl sitting on a lush green lawn, with deep blue eyes and a mop of shaggy dark hair. She was smiling but it was perfunctory, like she was sick of having her picture taken.
‘Does she look familiar to you?’ he asked.
‘No, I don’t think so. Should she?’
‘Would you mind looking again?’
He leaned back in his chair, closely gauging my response. Indulging him, I looked at the photo again. The blue eyes, the over-exposed face, the smile that wasn’t really a smile. Perhaps she did look familiar now. ‘I don’t know. I’m sorry. Who is she?’
‘Her name is Sammy Went. This photo was taken on her second birthday. Three days later she was gone.’
‘Gone?’
‘Taken from her home in Manson, Kentucky. Right out of her second-floor bedroom. Police found no evidence of an intruder. There were no witnesses, no ransom note. She just vanished.’
‘I think you’re looking for Edna,’ I said. ‘She teaches Crime and Justice Studies. I’m just a photography teacher but Edna lives for all this true crime stuff.’
‘I’m here to see you,’ he said, then cleared his throat before continuing. ‘Some people thought she wandered into the woods, got taken by a coyote or mountain lion, but how far could a two-year-old wander? The most likely scenario is Sammy was abducted.’
‘… Okay. So, are you an investigator?’
‘Actually, I’m an accountant.’ He exhaled deeply and I caught the smell of spearmint on his breath. ‘But I grew up in Manson and know the Went family pretty well.’
My class was set to start in five minutes so I made a point of checking my watch. ‘I’m very sorry to hear about this girl, but I’m afraid I have a class to teach. Of course I’m happy to help. What kind of donation did you have in mind?’
‘Donation?’
‘Aren’t you raising money for the family? Isn’t that what this is about?’
‘I don’t need your money,’ he said with a chilly tone. He stared at me with a pinched, curious expression. ‘I’m here because I believe you’re … connected to all this.’
‘Connected to the abduction of a two-year-old girl?’ I laughed. ‘Don’t tell me you came all the way from the States to accuse me of kidnap?’
‘You misunderstand,’ he said. ‘This little girl disappeared on April 3rd, 1990. She’s been missing for twenty-eight years. I don’t think you kidnapped Sammy Went. I think you are Sammy Went.’
There were seventeen students in my photography class, a mix of age, race and gender. On one end of the spectrum was Lucy Cho, so fresh out of high school she still wore a hoodie with Mornington Secondary emblazoned on the back. On the other end was Murray Palfrey, a 74-year-old retiree who had a habit of cracking his knuckles before he raised his hand.
It was folio presentation night, when students stood before the class to display and discuss the photos they’d taken that semester. Most of the presentations were unremarkable. The majority were technically sound, which meant I was doing something right, but the subject matter was largely the same as the folios in the previous semester, and the one before that. I saw the same graffiti on the same dilapidated brick wall; the same vine-strangled cabin in Carlton Gardens; the same dark and spooky storm drain dribbling dirty brown water into Egan River.
I spent most of the class on autopilot.
My encounter with the American accountant had left me rattled, but not because I believed what he said. My mother, Carol Leamy, was a lot of things – four years dead among them – but an abductor of children she was not. To spend one minute with my mother was to know she wasn’t capable of maintaining a lie, much less international child abduction.
James Finn was wrong about me and I was fairly certain he’d never find that little girl, but he had reminded me of an uncomfortable truth: control is an illusion. Sammy Went’s parents had learned that the hard way, with the loss of a child. I had learned it the hard way too, through the death of my mother. She went suddenly, relatively speaking: I was twenty-four when she was diagnosed with cancer and twenty-six when it killed her.
In my experience most people come out of something like that saying one of two things: ‘everything happens for a reason’ or ‘chaos reigns’. There are variations, of course: ‘God works in mysterious ways’ and ‘life’s a bitch’. For me, it was the latter. My mother didn’t smoke or spend her working life in a textiles factory. She ate well and exercised, and in the end it made exactly zero difference.
See, control is an illusion.
I realised I was daydreaming my way through the folio presentations so I downed a cup of cold coffee and tried to focus.
It was Simon Daumier-Smith’s turn to show his work. Simon was a shy kid in his early twenties who spent most of his time staring at his feet when he talked. When he did look up, his lazy eye bobbed around behind his reading glasses like a fish.
He spent a few minutes awkwardly setting up a series of photos on the display easels at the front of the class. The other students were starting to get restless, so I asked Simon to talk us through the series as he set up.
‘Uh, yeah, sure, okay,’ he said, struggling with one of the prints. It escaped from his hand and he chased it across the floor. ‘So, I know that we were meant to look for, uh, juxtaposition and, uh, well, I’m not exactly sure I have, you know, a grasp of what that is or whatever.’ He placed the last photo on the easel and stepped back to let the class see. ‘I guess you could say this series shows the juxtaposition of ugliness and beauty.’
To my complete surprise, Simon Daumier-Smith’s photo series was … breathtaking.
There were six photos in total, each framed in the exact same way. He must have locked the camera off with a tripod and taken a photo every few hours. The composition was stark and simple: a bed, a woman and her child. The woman was Simon’s age, with a pockmarked but pretty face. The child was around three, with unnaturally red cheeks and a sick, furrowed brow.
‘I took them all over one night,’ Simon explained. ‘The woman is my wife, Joanie, and that’s our little girl, Simone. We didn’t name her after me, by the way. A lot of people think we named her after me, but Joanie had a grandma called Simone.’
‘Tell us more about the series, Simon,’ I said.
‘Right, uh, so Simone was up all night with whooping cough and I guess she was pretty fussy, so Joanie spent the night in bed with her.’
The first photo showed mother spooning child. In the second the little girl was awake and crying, pushing away from her mother. The third looked as though Simon’s wife was getting fed up with her photo being taken. The series went on like that until the sixth photo, which showed both mother and child fast asleep.
‘Where’s the ugliness?’ I asked.
‘Well, uh, see in this one, little Simone, ah, the younger subject, is drooling. And obviously you can’t tell from the photo, but in this one my wife was snoring like crazy.’
‘I don’t see ugliness,’ I said. ‘I see something … ordinary. But beautiful.’
Simon Daumier-Smith would never go on to become a professional photographer. I was almost certain of that. But with his plainly named series, Sick Girl, he had created something true and real.
‘Are you alright, Miss Leamy?’ he asked.
‘It’s Kim,’ I reminded him. ‘And I’m fine. Why do you ask?’
‘Well, you’re, uh. You’re crying.’
It was after ten when I drove home through the gloomy landscape of Coburg. Rain fell in fat, drenching sheets against the roof of the Subaru. Ten minutes later I was home, parked, and dashing through the rain toward my apartment building, holding my bag over my head instead of an umbrella.
The third-floor landing was thick with the smell of garlic and spice; the oddly comforting scent of neighbours I’d never actually met. As I headed for my door, Georgia Evvie from across the hall poked her head out.
‘Kimberly, I thought that was you.’ She was a rotund woman in her early sixties with bloodshot, bleary eyes – ‘Heavy Evvie’, I once heard a neighbour call her behind her back. ‘I heard the elevator ding and looked at my watch and thought, who else would be coming home this close to midnight?’
It was ten-thirty.
‘Sorry, Mrs Evvie. Did I wake you?’
‘No, no. I’m a night owl. Of course, Bill’s in bed by nine so he might have stirred but he didn’t complain.’ She waved a dismissive hand. ‘And if he did I’d have reminded him you’re young. Young people come home late nowadays, even on weeknights apparently.’
‘Uh huh.’
Nobody had ever actually seen Georgia’s husband and there was little to no evidence he truly existed. Of course, he might have just been buried under all of Georgia’s crap. From the glimpses I caught of her apartment when she came to her door, I knew that 3E was lined with swaying towers of junk: books, bills, files and over-stuffed boxes. The only window I could see from the hall was covered with newspaper, and although I never actually saw one, I’m sure there were one or two tinfoil hats floating around in all that chaos.
‘Well, seeing as how you’re already awake …’ she started. Georgia was about to invite herself in for a nightcap. All I wanted was to turn the heat up, lounge on the sofa with Stephen King and listen to the soothing, predictable sounds of my apartment – the hum of the refrigerator, the whisper of ducted heating, the quiet buzz of my laptop charger. ‘… how about a nightcap?’
With a sigh I said, ‘Sure.’ Ever since my mother’s death I’ve found it near impossible to say no to a lonely woman.
My one-bedroom apartment was sparsely furnished, giving the impression that the place was huge. Even Heavy Evvie looked small sitting in the green armchair by the rain-streaked window of the living room, picking lint from her tracksuit pants and dropping it onto my hardwood floor.
I fetched a bottle of wine from the kitchen and fixed us both a glass. The one good thing about having Georgia over was I didn’t have to drink alone.
‘What do you think they’re cooking up over there, Kim?’ she asked.
‘Who?’
‘Who do you think? 3C. I hear them chattering all day in Iraqian or whatever.’
‘Oh, 3C. Smells like some kind of curry.’ My stomach growled. I had searched the kitchen for something to eat but all I could find were condiments. Wine would have to suffice.
‘I’m not talking about their supper.’ She lowered her voice to a whisper: ‘I’m talking about their plan.’
Georgia was convinced the occupants of 3C were terrorists based on two things: they were from the Middle East, and the name on their mailbox was Mohamed. On a number of occasions I’d explained to her that not all people with light-brown skin were terrorists and, regardless, I doubted Coburg, Australia would rate high on anyone’s list of targets. But every time, Georgia just shook her head gravely and said, ‘You’ll see.’
‘So what brings you home so late, Kim? I suppose you’ve been out clubbing.’
‘I work nights, Mrs Evvie. You know this.’
She sipped her wine and screwed her nose up at the taste. ‘I don’t know how you kids do it. Out all hours doing God knows what.’
I finished my wine fast and poured another one, reminding myself to take slower, more contemplative sips this time around. I was only after a warm, foggy buzz that would make it easier to sleep.
‘So something weird happened to me tonight, Mrs Evvie,’ I said. ‘A man approached me at work.’
‘Finally,’ she said, helping herself to more wine. ‘It’s about time, Kim. A woman only has a small window to bag a man. Between fifteen and twenty-five. That’s all you get. I was seventeen when I met Bill, eighteen when I married him.’
Georgia found a remote control stuffed between the green cushions of the armchair and turned on the television. Tinfoil hat and casual racism aside, all she really wanted was some company.
I curled up on the sofa nearby and opened up my laptop while she flicked through the stations at full volume.
I had intended to casually browse the internet, maybe stalk a high-school friend or purge my email inbox, but my curiosity soon grew too strong. When I opened a new tab and searched Sammy Went + Manson, Kentucky, it was as if my fingers were acting independently. It reminded me of the mechanical way James Finn had moved his manila folder about.
The first link took me to an archived newspaper article from 7 April 1990. The article had been electronically scanned in, complete with creases and inkblots. The words bled together in places, making me feel like an old-timey researcher poring through microfilm.
POLICE SEARCH FOR MISSING GIRL
The search for a two-year-old girl missing in the Manson area resumed on Friday with volunteers and law enforcement officers.
Sammy Went of Manson disappeared from her home Tuesday afternoon and has not been found despite a search of the town and its vicinity.
‘We have faith we’re going to find Sammy and bring her home safe,’ Manson Sheriff Chester Ellis said. ‘We’re currently working under the assumption this is a search and rescue operation.’
Police do not believe the girl’s disappearance was the result of foul play, but refused to rule anything out.
Hundreds of Manson residents searched the extensive wooded areas surrounding the Went residence on Friday.
Search volunteer Karen Peady, a long-time resident of Manson, expressed her fears: ‘The nights are cold and there are a lot of wild animals in the area, but the idea she was taken by a man is what scares me the most. It’s tempting to think the evils of modern America haven’t reached us out here in Manson yet, but there are plenty of sick people in this world, even in a town as small as this.’
Sammy was last seen wearing a long-sleeved yellow T-shirt and blue pyjama shorts. Police are asking for any information that may assist their investigation.
The article was accompanied by the same photo that James Finn had shown me, only this version was in black and white. Sammy’s deep blue eyes appeared black, and her over-exposed face was stark white and mostly featureless.
A little more internet research took me to a photo of Jack and Molly Went, Sammy’s parents. The picture had been taken in the days directly following Sammy’s disappearance, and showed them standing on the steps outside the Manson Sheriff’s Station.
They looked desperately tired, faces tense, fear etched in their eyes. Molly Went in particular looked permanently damaged, as if her spirit had left the body to run on autopilot. Her mouth was twisted into a frown so severe it made her look deranged.
Tracing her features on the screen, I compared Molly Went’s face to my own. We shared the same long, angular nose and droopy eyelids. She seemed much shorter than me, but Jack Went looked well over six foot. The harder I looked the more I could see myself in both of them: Jack Went’s small, pale ears, Molly Went’s posture, Jack’s broad shoulders, Molly’s pointed chin. A little DNA from column A, a little from column B.
Of course, that didn’t mean anything. I feel the same way when I read horoscopes – they’re designed to allow the reader to see what they want.
Do I want to see myself in Jack and Molly Went? I wondered. The question came to me by surprise and soon my mind was buzzing with more. Hadn’t Sammy’s eyes been the same deep blue as mine, and couldn’t those chubby legs of hers have transformed into long skinny pegs like my own, and if Sammy were alive today, wouldn’t we be roughly the same age?
Were Jack and Molly Went still waiting for answers? Did every phone call or knock at the door fill them with hope or dread or some bitter mixture of both? Did they see Sammy’s face in every woman they passed on the street, or had they found a way to move on?
The biggest question of all came like a shard of glass to my consciousness: could Carol Leamy, a woman with a background in social work who spent most of her working life as an HR rep for a company that sold and manufactured picture hooks, really, honestly, ever be capable of—
I stopped myself from going any further. The implications were too great and, frankly, too absurd.
The sound of heavy snoring pulled me from my laptop. Georgia had fallen fast asleep in the green armchair, her glass of wine balanced precariously between thumb and forefinger. I took the wine, switched off the television and covered her legs with a fluffy red throw rug. If history was any guide she’d be asleep for a few hours. She’d then wake around three am to use the toilet before waddling back across the hall.
Leaving Georgia where she was, I crept into my bedroom and climbed into bed. When I fell asleep, I dreamed about a tall man made entirely of shadows. The shadow man appeared outside my bedroom window and reached in with impossibly long arms. He carried me away, down a long, narrow dirt path lined with tall trees.
MANSON, KENTUCKY
Then
On Tuesday 3 April 1990, Jack Went emptied his bladder in the upstairs bathroom. His wife was in the shower a few feet away. There was something fitting about watching her through frosted glass. The vague shape of the woman he once knew. That sounded about right.
Molly shut the water off but stayed behind the screen. ‘You about done, Jack?’
‘Just about.’ He washed his hands. ‘You don’t have to hide in there. You don’t have anything I haven’t quite literally seen before.’
‘That’s alright. I’ll wait.’ She stood behind the screen with her shoulders hunched forward. Her posture reminded Jack of something from his World War Two books – a Holocaust survivor with a broken spirit, or a simple village girl standing in a field of bodies.
Her clothes for the day were hanging on the back of the bathroom door: a pastel-pink sweater with long sleeves and a heavy denim skirt that fell an inch above her ankles. Pentecostal chic.
Once upon a time, before Sammy was born, Molly had been warm-blooded and tangible, but lately she seemed watered down. Haunting the halls of their home instead of living in them. She was a remarkable woman in that way: even with the family drugstore doing well enough that she didn’t have to work, three beautiful children and the support of her faith, she could still find something to be sad about.
Molly opened the shower screen an inch to peer out. Her shoulders were pinched with gooseflesh. ‘Come on, hun. I’m freezing here.’
‘I’m going, I’m going,’ he said, stepping out into the hall and closing the door behind him.
He found two of his children downstairs in front of the television, engrossed in an episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Neither said good morning. Stu, the lumpy nine-year-old, was getting over a cold. He sat under a woollen blanket with a box of Kleenex, staring at the screen with eyes wide and mouth slack.
‘Feeling any better, buddy?’ Jack asked, placing the back of his hand against Stu’s forehead. He didn’t reply. The Turtles had him transfixed.
Sammy, the two-year-old cherub, was also watching, but she seemed just as interested in her big brother. Her eyes darted from the cartoon to Stu’s face. When Michelangelo made a wisecrack and Stu laughed, she copied him, parroting not just the volume of the laugh, but the rhythm too. When Shredder put some sinister plan into action and Stu gasped, Sammy gasped with him.
Not wanting to disturb the scene of domestic bliss he’d stumbled into, Jack backed quietly out of the room.
His eldest daughter, Emma, was eating cornflakes at the kitchen counter, one arm forming a wall around her bowl, the way he imagined prison inmates would eat.
Is that how she sees this house? He wondered. A sentence she needs to wait out. Sometimes it felt that way for Jack too.
‘Good morning, sweetheart,’ he said, making coffee. ‘Coach Harris came by the drugstore yesterday. He says you had PMS again so you couldn’t participate in gym. Need me to bring you home some naproxen?’
Emma grunted. ‘I don’t know why two grown men think it’s okay to talk about my period.’
‘Isn’t using your period to get out of gym sort of cliché?’
‘It’s not cliché, Dad – it’s a classic. Besides, Coach Harris is a creep. He always makes us climb the gym ropes so he can spot
us. That reminds me, I need you to sign this.’
She dug deep into her backpack, pulled out a permission slip and handed it to Jack.
‘For permission to participate in the study of science and evolution?’ he read. ‘You need a parent’s permission to take a class nowadays?’
‘You do when half the kids are fucking fundies.’
He lowered his voice. ‘Has your mother seen this?’
‘No.’
He took a pen from his breast pocket and signed the permission slip quickly. ‘Let’s keep it that way. And don’t let her catch you saying the F-word.’
‘Fucking?’
‘Fundie.’
Emma folded the slip and tucked it safely back into her backpack.
While both Jack and Molly were technically members of the Church of the Light Within – Molly through conversion and Jack through blood – Molly took it far more seriously than he did. She attended all three weekly services. That was common for members who found the faith later in life: usually they already had a hole that needed filling.
Jack had started drifting from the Light Within as a teenager and had stopped attending services altogether when Emma was born. He’d justified it by calling it a safety issue: like many Pentecostal fundamentalists, the Light Within handled venomous snakes and ingested different kinds of poison as part of their worship – not exactly a healthy environment for children. So he had stayed home to babysit and let Molly do her thing. He still called himself a Light Withiner to keep Molly from leaving him and his parents from disowning him – although at times neither of those possibilities sounded too bad – but in truth he had long ago lost his faith.
Molly came downstairs, pulling on her pastel-pink sweater. ‘Morning, Em.’
Emma grunted a reply.
‘Coach Harris told your father you’re using PMS to get out of gym. Is this true?’
‘Dad’s already given me the lecture, so you can cool it.’
‘Well, I hope he told you that lying is a sin and your studies are the most important thing in your life right now.’
‘Jesus, here we go.’
‘Em.’ Molly drummed her fist on the kitchen counter. ‘Each tree is recognised by its own fruit. The mouth speaks what the heart is full of. When you say His name in vain—’
‘—you dishonour the faith,’ Emma finished in a tired monotone. ‘Words testify to our devotion to God and words are the truth of what we are. I got it. Thanks.’ She put her bowl in the sink. ‘I have to go. I’m meeting Shelley.’
She picked up her backpack, clomped across the kitchen in her dirty Chuck Taylors and disappeared out the door.
‘Some back-up would have been nice,’ Molly said to Jack.
‘I thought you handled it pretty well.’ He put an arm around her shoulders and tried to ignore the way she stiffened under his