The Disappearance of Lacey Mae

Five years ago, her daughter Lacey Mae Jenkins disappeared. It was something that could have happened to anyone, but it happened to her. It was the middle of summer, an oppressively hot day, at a church festival. One minute Lacey was there, and the next, she was gone. 

At first, everyone had been hopeful. They lived in a good neighborhood, in the kind of suburb where nothing bad ever happens, and the police were confident that it had been some kind of mistake or misunderstanding. Someone had ushered the wrong kid into the minivan, thinking Lacey was part of the carpool, or Lacey had simply wandered away, losing her bearings or following a friend. But she was eleven, and more than capable of finding her way back within a few hours if anything like that had happened. After twenty-four hours had passed, Lacey’s parents had begun to panic.

Since then, there had been a few leads that turned out to be dead-ends, but mostly it was a lot of nothing. An image of the last time she had seen Lacey, turning away with a flip of her strawberry-blond hair, $20 in her pocket and a promise to meet her mother at the dunking booth at 8pm, was burned into her mind. 

Lacey’s mother was obsessed with finding her, knocking on doors all over the neighborhood, then extending her search to the adjacent streets and finally all the way across town, just in case. She interrogated Lacey’s piano teacher, her camp counselor, her friends, and her friends’ parents. She scoured chat boards and entertained phone calls from true crime fanatics claiming to have information that would point to a suspect. She kept thinking she saw Lacey everywhere; on the swings in the park, or in the grocery store, only to blink and see an unfamiliar pre-teen with the same bored look her daughter had also perfected. She even confronted a former soccer coach Lacey had adored at a memorial service one year after she had gone missing. She was convinced he was acting suspicious, and that he had attended the festival where Lacey had gone missing. Even after several people confirmed that he had been with his girlfriend all night, nowhere near Lacey, she refused to apologize. Her husband begged her to stop after a few years of this, but it was like talking to a brick wall. They separated after that, and Lacey’s little brother chose to live with his father. 

And then, on a morning in June almost five years to the day since Lacey disappeared, a knock on the door. Lacey’s mother opened it to find the lead detective on her daughter’s case standing there on the front porch.

“It’s been a while,” Lacey’s mother said in greeting. Detective Lawrence had spent almost every day with Lacey’s parents right after her disappearance, but since then the case had turned cold. There had been no new leads in almost four years. 

“She’s alive,” Detective Gabrielle Lawrence said, a rare smile crossing her face. “She walked right into the station about an hour ago. A little dazed, a few cuts and bruises, but she’s okay. An officer took her to the hospital, just in case.”

Lacey’s mother was speechless. She gripped the doorframe as a wave of dizziness passed through her, and she asked the detective to repeat what she said. She started running towards her car, but Detective Lawrence stopped her and offered to drive. 

As they made their way to the hospital, Lacey’s mother couldn’t help but wonder why her daughter went to the police station instead of to her own house. But ultimately she didn’t care; her daughter was alive, and that was all that mattered. The detective kept glancing sideways at Lacey’s mother, and finally she said, “We don’t know where she was. She wouldn’t say a word about that, only that she wasn’t hurt.” Lacey’s mother swallowed and nodded. She looked out her window and tried not to think about where her daughter might have been, and what had happened to her. Her imagination had already conjured up too many horrifying possibilities over the past five years, and she was determined not to make that the focus of the day she was finally about to reunite with her daughter.

“Room 216,” Detective Lawrence said when they pulled up to the main entrance of the hospital, and let Lacey’s mother jump out of the passenger seat and sprint to her daughter. When she reached the room, she launched herself into the bed where her daughter was propped up against some pillows. Lacey looked different, but also the same. Lacey’s mother had to remind herself that five years had passed, and that her daughter wasn’t frozen in time as she had imagined. Lacey was sixteen now, which seemed impossible. She had disappeared as a child, and then had come back to life as almost a full grown woman. 

Lacey’s father arrived minutes later, and Lacey’s mother was shocked when he broke down, sobbing in his daughter’s arms. They had never seen him cry before. It must be the guilt, Lacey’s mother couldn’t help thinking. He gave up on her, but I didn’t. I knew she would come back to us, it was only a matter of time.

Lacey moved back in with her mother, where her room was relatively untouched. Her mother had left the posters on the wall, the clothes in the closet, even the July 2022 calendar on the wall. The book report Lacey was meant to finish before starting sixth grade was on her desk, never to be finished. She would be expected to start her junior year of high school in two months.

Over the next few weeks, Lacey’s mother tiptoed around her daughter, catering to her every need. But Lacey seemed oddly fine; her disposition seemed slightly altered, it was true, but she didn’t show any signs of trauma or depression. Her mother expected nightmares, anxiety, even a regression to childhood. But Lacey adjusted to her old life smoothly, as if she had simply been attending a boarding school or summer camp for five years. The only wrinkle was the family dog they had adopted from an animal shelter when Lacey was nine; a golden retriever that loved every living being it had ever come into contact with, but especially Lacey. They were inseparable before she went missing; he would follow her around the house and she was the one who took him on a walk most days. Now, he would bark and growl at her whenever they were in a room alone together, and could only be soothed when Lacey’s mother was there to calm him down.

Even though it didn’t seem necessary, Lacey’s mother insisted that she see a therapist on a regular basis. Lacey protested at first, insisting she was fine, but finally relented. After a few weeks of sessions, Dr. Canter pulled Lacey’s mother aside.

“Despite her remarkable recovery, I think she has some serious repressed memories,” he said in a low voice. “She says she doesn’t remember where she was or what happened.” 

“But she seems to be doing fine, right?” Lacey’s mother asked. “So what’s the problem? She doesn’t need to remember, especially because they are probably not good memories if she is repressing them. Why don’t you just leave her alone?” 

Dr. Canter disagreed, so Lacey’s mother ended the sessions. Lacey started high school in August, and her teachers all praised her ability to slide right back into her life without missing a beat. Her grades were good, she had a group of friends she often hung out with on the weekends, and she seemed happy. 

One day, Lacey’s mother received an email from one of Lacey’s teachers asking her to come in for a conference. When she did, the teacher told Lacey’s mother that she had some concerns. 

“I thought Lacey was doing great,” her mother said, taken by surprise.

“Academically she is excelling, that is true,” Ms. Ferris said. “But I’m afraid I’ve witnessed some odd behavior I’d like to discuss with you.”

“What do you mean by ‘odd’?” Lacey’s mother asked, crossing her arms over her chest. 

“Well, as you may remember, I used to teach fifth grade at Lacey’s elementary school,” Ms. Ferris said. “And so I saw Lacey quite a bit, before.”

Lacey’s mother frowned, but didn’t comment. 

“I just couldn’t get over the fact that something seemed…off. When she started school this year.”

“Well of course,” Lacey’s mother said, exasperated. “She was kidnapped, and spent five years God knows where!”

“She just doesn't seem like the same person,” Ms. Ferris said carefully.

“She isn’t!” Lacey’s mother jumped to her feet. “Of course she isn't! What did you expect? “

“No, it’s more than that,” Ms. Ferris insisted. “It’s not just that she seems like she’s been through a lot, that I could understand. It’s that she doesn’t even seem like Lacey.”

“This is ridiculous,” Lacey’s mother said, gathering up her purse and coat. “I don’t have to sit here and listen to this nonsense any more. I’m her mother! I know my daughter!”

“She got her brother’s name wrong!” Ms. Ferris called desperately as Lacey’s mother was storming out. “She told me she was spending this weekend with her father and Liam.”

Lacey’s mother stopped, almost to the door of the classroom, and turned around slowly. “Who’s Liam?” she whispered. 

Ms. Ferris shook her head slowly. “That’s what I asked. She said it was her brother. I told her I thought his name was Owen, and she got flustered. ‘That’s what I said, Owen,’. That’s what she told me.”

Lacey’s mother swallowed hard. “That doesn’t mean anything,” she whispered. 

“And she used to love pepperoni on her pizza. I was in the cafeteria the other day and overheard her telling someone she hated pepperoni. And she used to be such good friends with the janitor at the elementary school, remember? I got him a job at the high school and Lacey looks at him like she doesn’t even know him.”

“I’ve done research, I know that trauma can mess with your memory,” Lacey’s mother said, but her voice shook. She couldn’t help thinking about the dog, and how he refused to be in the same room as Lacey.

That night, Lacey’s mother took a closer look at her daughter when they sat down to have dinner together at the kitchen table. Her hair was longer, though that didn’t mean a thing; her complexion was the same, and her eyes were the same dark brown they had always been. Suddenly she thought of the birthmark on Lacey’s right calf. She hadn’t thought to check for it when Lacey first appeared, of course she hadn’t, because she had been so sure. But now…

When Lacey got up from the table, her mother glanced at her leg only to see that it was covered by jeans. In fact, Lacey had been wearing pants a lot lately. But that wasn’t unusual, her mother decided, since it had been fall and was now nearing winter. As Lacey got ready for bed that night, her mother told herself firmly that she shouldn’t be suspecting her daughter of anything. She was being paranoid, that was all, and just because some teacher had “concerns”. Well, she trusted her daughter. 

Even so, Lacey’s mother found herself hovering outside the bathroom door while Lacey was brushing her teeth. When she didn’t hear anything unusual, she knocked softly and said goodnight to her daughter, then went to her bedroom and shut the door. Three hours later, tired of tossing and turning while her mind refused to shut down, Lacey’s mother finally got out of bed and crept into her daughter’s bathroom. She went through the drawers, only finding a toothbrush, floss, some hair clips, and a brush. She was ready to try going back to bed, scolding herself for snooping, when she opened the medicine cabinet and saw the contact lenses. Lacey had never needed glasses or contacts, so her mother felt her heart beating fast when she picked them up and saw that they were colored ones - a deep brown color.

Still clutching the contacts to her chest, Lacey’s mother tiptoed down the hall to her daughter’s bedroom. Pushing open the door, she saw Lacey’s sleeping form stretched out on her stomach. Silently, she crept into the room and slowly pulled back the comforter and then the right leg of the pajama pants Lacey was wearing. Where there should have been an oblong shaped birthmark on her calf was only an uninterrupted expanse of white skin.