Lost Girls By Robert Kolker
Download Lost Girls By Robert Kolker
Groton, Connecticut, is an industrial port town of forty-five thousand on the Thames River and the northern reaches of the Long Island Sound, once known for manufacturing submarines and now better known for the nearby Indian casinos. Atlantic Security’s office of ten cubicles was housed away from the water, in a storefront in the middle of a shopping strip on what the locals called Hamburger Hill a spur of Route 95 with Burger King, Wendy’s, and McDonald’s. Sara had been working there for a few weeks when Maureen arrived, right before Christmas in 2006. After Maureen’s first few days making cold calls, chirping from a prepared script about protecting your family and safeguarding your property, Sara decided that she was different from the others. Maureen might not have been happy there, but at least she wasn’t actively hostile. She didn’t act like she was risking her soul on the outcome of her calls. She smiled.Groton, Connecticut, is an industrial port town of forty-five thousand on the Thames River and the northern reaches of the Long Island Sound, once known for manufacturing submarines and now better known for the nearby Indian casinos. Atlantic Security’s office of ten cubicles was housed away from the water, in a storefront in the middle of a shopping strip on what the locals called Hamburger Hill a spur of Route 95 with Burger King, Wendy’s, and McDonald’s. Sara had been working there for a few weeks when Maureen arrived, right before Christmas in 2006. After Maureen’s first few days making cold calls, chirping from a prepared script about protecting your family and safeguarding your property, Sara decided that she was different from the others. Maureen might not have been happy there, but at least she wasn’t actively hostile. She didn’t act like she was risking her soul on the outcome of her calls. She smiled.
The book as An Unsolved American Mystery
Sara soon learned that she and Maureen had a lot in common. They were the same age, twenty-four, and had gone to the same high school in Groton, Robert E. Fitch. They didn’t remember each other. Sara had gone there only briefly, transferred there after being expelled from a Catholic school for playing a minor prank. Maureen, only a little less wild, left when she was sixteen to have a baby and never went back. She had two children now, each with a different father. The job had come in the nick of time: Unable to afford a place of her own, Maureen had crashed at the home of her little sister for a few months, then moved into a place in Norwich paid for by her son’s father. Maureen told Sara she didn’t like being so dependent on her ex. She complained about her roommate, who Maureen assumed had been asked to keep an eye on her. In this respect, too, Sara saw something of herself in Maureen. Both women were a little irresponsible and unselfconscious and more than a little annoyed by those who would hold them down.
Before the mid-nineties, when Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun came to this part of Connecticut, Groton was a two-company town. There was the navy submarine base where, depending on the geopolitical situation of the moment, Tomahawk missiles would roll in and out after dark, for nights on end—and there was Pfizer. Scientists filled the wealthier suburbs like Mystic, home of the upper middle class, or “stuck-up rich people,” as Maureen’s family put it. They avoided Mystic much of the time, just as they avoided the town on the other side, New London, where the gangs lived. Groton was in the middle and in Groton, if you weren’t navy, you didn’t have anything.
Download Lost Girls By Robert Kolker
Maureen’s mother stopped cleaning motel rooms when she became one of the first employees of Mohegan Sun. A new job as a slot attendant helped her afford the down payment on a car, a tan Ford Taurus, which allowed her to drive to a second job cleaning offices. From that point on, she was almost never home. Maureen and her younger sister and brother, Missy and Will, would take care of one another. Each week their mother bought a new stack of frozen meals, Ellio’s pizza, and chicken cutlets that the children would heat up for dinner. They were left on their own to explore the woods behind the apartment complex, to pick berries and walk on railroad tracks when they weren’t supposed to, to run from the police when they were spotted. Some evenings, Maureen would sneak Missy and Will into American Billiards to shoot pool and drink, or they would play with an old football in the big field right next to the apartment building. In warmer weather, they would climb on top of the sheds filled with lawn-maintenance equipment and just sit there staring up at the sky.
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