The Daughter They Abandoned Twice novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Vigil

Twenty years later Hallie stands at the back of the Devaney family vigil in front of cameras, hears Levi say the child who helped should speak now, and walks up to the microphone.

Every October, a hundred people stand on the courthouse lawn in Ponca City, Oklahoma, and hold candles for a girl who has been gone twenty years.

This was my ninth year at the back of the crowd.

I always came straight off the night shift at the 911 center, still wearing my headset lanyard, and I always stood behind the oak tree.

Nobody knew my face.

I was just one more tired woman holding a paper cup of the free cider.

The barrette was in my purse, in the inside pocket, where it had been since I was six.

I carried it everywhere.

Tonight there were three news vans parked along the curb, because it was the twentieth anniversary.

A woman in a blue coat was setting up a tripod right beside me.

"Are you family?" she asked me.

"No," I said. "I just come every year."

"That's nice of you," she said, and she turned her camera toward the steps.

A man walked up to the courthouse steps and took the microphone off the stand.

He was tall, in a deputy's brown uniform, with a scar through his left eyebrow and a face that had not slept.

Levi Devaney.

He had been twelve when his little sister was taken, and he had run this vigil every year since.

Today he held the mic with both hands.

"Twenty years ago tonight, my sister Cassidy was five years old," he said.

"She was wearing a pink dress, and she was standing at an ice machine, and she was gone in under two minutes."

The crowd was very quiet.

"The state police told my mother there was a woman and a man," Levi said. "They told us there was a child with them."

I felt sick.

"A little girl, about six, with braids. A clerk saw her hold Cassidy's hand and walk her around the side of the building."

He stopped, and looked out over the candles.

"I've thought about that child for twenty years," he said. "I used to hate her."

My chest went cold and still.

"I don't anymore," Levi said. "She was six. Somebody put her up to it, and somebody taught her to do it."

He swallowed.

"But six turns into twenty-six, and a child who helped hurt my sister has been keeping quiet for twenty years. If you are out there, and you know where they took her, please speak now."

He lowered the microphone.

The candles shook in people's hands.

The woman in the blue coat murmured the words into her own recorder and whispered, "God, that poor man."

I looked down at the paper cup in my hand.

It was shaking too.

I had a speech I gave myself every October, on the drive home.

I was only a little girl, nobody would have believed me, and I told a social worker once and she told me to stop making up stories.

All of that was true.

It had also been twenty years, and I had not told it to one person since.

I had told no one at the foster home, none of my friends, and not the one boyfriend I almost let see the barrette.

I had a license plate in my head and a barrette in my purse.

And a man I had watched grow from a skinny boy in the old newspaper photos into a deputy with a ruined face had just asked me, to my face, to tell him where she was.

I did not know where Cassidy was.

But I knew the plate, the motel, and the name of the town where Marlene had once said she was going to get her teeth fixed.

I knew things that twenty years of detectives had never had.

I had never thought I would be brave enough to say them out loud.

I had also never been asked.

So I walked out from behind the oak tree.

The woman in the blue coat said "Hey," and the people around me turned, and I kept walking past them.

I went down the center aisle of the lawn between the folding chairs and the candles.

My shoes made a loud noise on the wet grass.

Levi was talking with an older woman near the steps, with her hand in his.

His mother, I thought.

She looked up first.

Levi saw me a second later, and stopped.

I climbed the three steps to the stand, and I took the microphone out of its cradle.

My hands were so cold that it almost slid out of my fingers.

A hundred faces turned toward me, and three cameras swung around.

I could hear my own breath in the speakers.

I looked at Levi.

He looked back at me, and there was no hate on his face, only the kind of hope you cannot stand to watch.

"My name is Hallie Shiflett," I said. "Twenty years ago my name was Hallie, and I was the little girl with the braids."

Nobody breathed.

"I took Cassidy's hand," I said. "I'm the one who walked her to the van."

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