Safe and sound, p.1
Safe and Sound, page 1
Safe and Sound is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2024 by Laura McHugh
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Random House and the House colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: McHugh, Laura, author.
Title: Safe and sound: a novel / Laura McHugh.
Description: First edition. | New York: Random House, [2024]
Identifiers: LCCN 2023017580 (print) | LCCN 2023017581 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593448854 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593448861 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Sisters—Fiction. | Missing persons—Fiction. | Small cities—Fiction. | City and town life—Fiction. | LCGFT: Detective and mystery fiction. | Thrillers (Fiction) | Novels.
Classification: LCC PS3613.C5334 S24 2024 (print) | LCC PS3613.C5334 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23/eng/20230414
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023017580
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023017581
Ebook ISBN 9780593448861
randomhousebooks.com
Book design by Jo Anne Metsch, adapted for ebook
Cover design: Ella Laytham
Cover images: David Ryle/Gallery Stock (trees), Getty Images (handprint)
ep_prh_6.3_146746586_c0_r0
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Amelia & Kylee
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Grace
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Amelia & Kylee
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Grace
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Amelia & Kylee
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Grace
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-one
Chapter Forty-two
Chapter Forty-three
Chapter Forty-four
Chapter Forty-five
Chapter Forty-six
Amelia & Kylee
Chapter Forty-seven
Chapter Forty-eight
Chapter Forty-nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-one
Grace
Chapter Fifty-two
Chapter Fifty-three
Chapter Fifty-four
Amelia & Kylee
Chapter Fifty-five
Chapter Fifty-six
Dedication
Acknowledgments
By Laura McHugh
About the Author
_146746586_
AMELIA
&
KYLEE
ONE
Aunt Elsie sat on her mobility scooter in the laundromat parking lot amid piles of dirty snow, wearing white sandals and her good Easter dress despite the bitter wind that swept down Main Street. She pushed her glasses up as she eyed the gathering crowd, adjusted the wilted red carnation pinned at her breast. Her boyfriend, Jimmy, slumped against a tree behind her, looking like a misshapen fungus growing out of the trunk. He held a posterboard sign with Still Missing neatly lettered at the top in blood-red marker, a blown-up photocopy of Grace’s senior picture pasted below. Jimmy was more than twenty years younger than Aunt Elsie and might have been mistaken for her son if most folks in Beaumont didn’t already know every twig on every branch of everyone else’s family tree.
Days ago, Kylee and I’d stretched across the hood of my car in tank tops, gazing up at the budding trees. My face still stung with sunburn. It had been a fool’s spring, typical of Missouri in March, and now everything was dead again, the tender buds frozen, blossoms shriveled and brown. Every living thing that had sprung forth in hope had been taught a brutal lesson. As daylight faded, the wind picked up, rattling crumpled beer cans along the gutter. At the front of the crowd, Aunt Elsie began to speak, her voice brittle to the point of cracking.
“Six years ago tonight, my daughter was taken from me, snatched away in the dark. Grace was my whole world, and you have no idea how much I miss her every single day. Six years on, and we’ve still got nothing but questions, but I will never give up hope that we’ll find her. One way or another, we’ll bring her home.”
Aunt Elsie held the vigil every year, and every year, she said we’d bring Grace home, but the ironic part was that what Grace had wanted most was to get away from here. She was always telling me and Kylee that we had to get out before we got stuck, that there was no life for us in Beaumont. There was no choice but to leave and not look back. Otherwise, we’d be married and pregnant and working at the meatpacking plant before we were old enough to buy beer. We didn’t really get it back then—we were only ten, eleven years old when she disappeared—but I did now. Cutting Road circled around town, from the hospital to the meatpacking plant to the graveyard, and that was life in Beaumont from start to finish. You were born at Beaumont General, worked at Savor Meats, and then ended up in Beaumont Memorial Cemetery. It was like the kiddie-car ride at the county fair, where you’ve got your own steering wheel and you can turn it all you want, but there’s only one way to go, the track laid out before you got there. Not much changed from one generation to the next, except the spring Grace vanished, the hospital had been shuttered, the building abandoned. Kids broke in to get high and have sex. If they got pregnant, they’d have to go to Springfield to give birth. The only babies born in Beaumont now were born at home.
Kylee stood next to me, scanning the crowd. A few of Grace’s old classmates had come, folks from Elsie’s church, kids from our high school who hadn’t known Grace but knew the stories. She served as a cautionary tale, one inevitably brought up after dark at sleepovers and drunken bonfires. While fool’s spring kept us from being too optimistic, Grace’s disappearance warned the young girls of Beaumont not to get too big for their britches. You think you’re better than this? You want out? Be careful what you wish for. They didn’t have to say the last part out loud: Look what happened to Grace Crow. The vigil had been shrinking each year, but there were more people than usual tonight.
“I told you the bones’d bring people out,” Kylee said. “They think it’s her.”
It happened every time human remains were found somewhere in Missouri and it made the news. The rumor mill roared back to life, certain it must be Grace. It never was. This time, though, the bones were found uncomfortably close to home. Two weeks back, a skeleton had been discovered on an old farmstead near the county line where one of the Savor plant managers was building a new house. A long-abandoned farmhouse and barn and other outbuildings were razed to make way for construction, so it was possible the bones were from a family grave. Or they might belong to a missing person who hadn’t been missed. The farm wasn’t far from the interstate—it could be a runaway or transient or addict whose vanishing went unnoticed, ungrieved, the bones left without a name. Still, there was a flicker of possibility that it might be her, that we would finally know. A pilot light sparking and shuddering in my heart.
“Please join me in prayer,” Elsie said, raising her bare arms, pale flesh billowing.
Some of the kids whispered and snickered as Elsie began to pray, but most everyone else dutifully closed their eyes, making it easier for me to look them over, take stock of them. I always wondered, at these gatherings, whether the person who took Grace stood among us. As a kid, I’d imagined a stranger with blood under his nails that would never wash away. Elsie thought it must’ve been one of Grace’s customers at the Waffle House, a man passing through
There were no strangers among us tonight, though some familiar faces were missing. Mama hadn’t shown up, even though she knew how much it would hurt Elsie. It was no surprise. She didn’t care for memorials, vigils, whatever you wanted to call them. Prayers made her antsy. Even getting her to church for a funeral was like trying to force a feral cat into a cage. She’d practically spread-eagle her body against the doorframe to avoid going inside. I didn’t see Mrs. Mummer either—Grace’s favorite teacher, and mine and Kylee’s, too. And for the second year in a row, Levi hadn’t come. We couldn’t expect him to mourn his high school sweetheart forever, even if we wanted him to. Still, it felt as though Grace deserved at least that much, for everyone who loved her to mark her absence, to remember what we had lost.
Aunt Elsie began to tell her favorite stories about Grace: how she would pretend to read an encyclopedia while sitting on her training potty; how she had saved me, her cousin Amelia, from drowning when I was four years old. Kylee pulled away from my side and drifted into the crowd, her black jacket and dark hair ceding to the shadows. Smoke leaked from the cracked window of one of the parked cars, someone inside sucking a cigarette, maybe waiting on their laundry, maybe here for the vigil but not willing to brave the cold. It was one of those ridiculously long cars from the seventies that was probably impressive when it was new, and now looked like something an aging backwoods pimp would drive. That was probably a fair description of half the vehicles in Beaumont, though.
A movement caught my eye, someone waving from the curb. Ketch, his head freshly shaved. I’d been staring right past him without realizing. He had to work, so I hadn’t expected him to come, but he must’ve stopped on his way. He’d be leaving for boot camp soon, something he’d been waiting to do for as long as I’d known him. For kindergarten graduation, our teacher had asked each of us what we wanted to be when we grew up, and our responses had been printed in the program, which I had recently unearthed while cleaning out a drawer. The girls had wanted to be princesses and singers, except for me and Carly Greer. Carly said trucker, probably because her dad was a trucker, and I said dancer, because I thought that was what my mom did on the stage at Sweet Jane’s. Mama had snort-laughed when she saw the program, and it took me years to realize what was funny. Most of the boys wanted to be football players or NASCAR drivers. Ketch said soldier. With graduation looming, none of our classmates had a chance in hell of appearing on American Idol or winning a football scholarship. Even the most modest aspirations had escaped our reach. Carly Greer wouldn’t be driving a semi anytime soon; she’d lost her license and was on house arrest at the Happy Trails mobile home park, her teeth rotting out of her mouth. I’d graduated a semester early so I could go full-time waitressing at Waffle House. Ketch was the only one who’d managed to follow through on his dream, the only one on his way out of town.
Kylee and I talked about leaving all the time, but it had begun to feel like something we only talked about instead of something we would actually do. Like how Aunt Elsie kept saying she was going to stop feeding the stray cat that came around, because she didn’t want it to get too comfortable and decide to stay, and now it had birthed two litters of kittens and they all lived under the porch, multiplying, while Elsie sewed little catnip toys for them and bought bulk cat food in huge bags from the feedstore. That was how things happened. We weren’t those people until we were. Years from now, Kylee and I’d probably be talking about leaving while we waited in line to buy scratcher tickets at the Kum & Go on our way home from the meatpacking plant to fix store-brand SpaghettiOs for our kids.
We weren’t like Grace. She had real plans. A scholarship to a school out of state, the first in our family to get into college. My only plan was to wait around for Kylee to graduate, because I couldn’t leave without her. That was another thing Grace had taught us: stick together. I was working to save up money so we could afford to start over someplace else, but I barely had the time or energy to dream about where that place might be or how a different life would look. It was hard to plot a path to some unknown destination, and all too easy to keep waking up in Beaumont every day, to stay on the ride and follow Cutting Road to its end.
Kylee reappeared, followed my line of sight. “G.I. Joe.” She let out a low whistle and I elbowed her. “Such a shame,” she said. “I’ll never get why you didn’t hit that.”
“It’s not like that with us, Ky, you know that.”
She rolled her eyes. “You’re both idiots.”
“It’s called being friends. You should try it sometime.”
Ketch and I had been friends since we were assigned to sit next to each other on the bus in kindergarten, alphabetical order by first name: Abel Ketchum, Amelia Crow. Most of the other kids had on brand-new, first-day-of-school outfits. My dress, same as everything else in my closet, was an old hand-me-down from Grace. Ketch’s shirt looked like it had been handed down from a long-dead cowboy, a threadbare Western style with snaps instead of buttons and a pointy collar. His jeans had dirt on the knees. A kid leaned over our seat, his nose pinched shut, and said, “Ew, what stinks?” Ketch looked down at his hands, which had slid forward to cover the stains on his jeans.
“You do,” I said to the kid. “ ’Cause you’re an asshole.” Mama might not have taught me how to tie my shoes or tell time, but I’d received an advanced education in insults and curse words. The kid punched the seat and the bus driver yelled at him to sit down.
After lunch that day, I saw Ketch in the office. I’d been ratted out by the boy on the bus, and the principal had tried to explain to me what kind of language was and wasn’t appropriate for school. Ketch was there, wearing a different outfit than the one he’d worn that morning, and we walked back to class together. The other kids said he peed his pants and that’s why he had to change, but he told me the truth: that the school nurse was washing his clothes for him, because his house had a dirt floor and no running water, so his mom couldn’t keep up with the laundry.
He was always honest with me. I trusted him as much as I trusted anyone aside from my sister. I was going to miss him.
Aunt Elsie wrapped up her sappy stories, most of which would have had Grace rolling her eyes or shrinking in embarrassment, and her tone shifted as she spoke of the night Grace was taken from us. “It rained that night,” Elsie said, pausing to compose herself. I remembered. It was a cold, ceaseless rain that flooded Cutting Road and washed away the low-water bridge, along with any evidence of Grace’s departure. We might have simply thought that she’d walked home that night, tried to cross the creek, and drowned, if not for the blood in the kitchen.
I remembered how the wind funneled under the eaves and filled the farmhouse with a damp chill. Grace was watching us that night while Mama worked late at Sweet Jane’s. She fed us dinner, and after we ate, she took us upstairs to get ready for bed, helped us pick nightshirts from a drawer of free promotional tees Mama had brought home from work, each one advertising a different beer or liquor, Bud Light or Milwaukee’s Best or Jose Cuervo tequila. She braided our hair, mine French and Kylee’s Dutch, because my little sister and I always wanted the same thing, but different. Grace tickled our backs and fluffed the quilts just right, snapping them out and then letting them drift down over us. After she left the room, I could still feel her fingernails gently tracing wings across my shoulder blades. Later, when the police officer carried Kylee and me out of the house, he told us to close our eyes, but I didn’t, and I could still see it. Grace’s blood. Pooled on the kitchen linoleum, spattered on a cabinet. One haunting red handprint on the doorframe. She had vanished while we slept, and neither of us heard a thing.
