Chapter Seventeen. Cat
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CAT
That interaction with Abel Sherman today has put me on edge.
I keep twisting the locks, checking that the security system is armed, peering between the blinds by the front door. Parked at the curb just outside the model home, a white Chevy Silverado idles in the dark. It’s been there twenty minutes now.
The old Cat would march right out there, knock on the window, and ask them what the hell they were doing. Instead, I take out my phone and call Sheriff Ryan.
“Everything all right, darling?” he asks.
I pause, watching the truck, wondering if I was too quick to call him. There are a million innocent reasons that truck might be there. It could be a mom driving her infant around because it’s the only way she can get her to sleep. Could be teenagers making out.
“It’s probably nothing,” I say.
Then the Silverado’s headlights come on and it begins to pull away. I watch its taillights fade off into the night.
On the phone, I can hear the sheriff’s turn signal. I drop the blinds back into place and make my voice as cheery as possible. “I was just wondering if we were going to see you at the Miss Lone Star orientation tomorrow.” I make my way into the living room.
“Is everything all right there at the model home?” he asks.
“Of course. Nothing stirring but the breeze.”
The click-click-click of his signal stops, and I drop my shoulders down my back.
When I hang up, I let out a long sigh and toss my phone onto the sofa.
My pulse is still up. I need to center myself, so I push aside the coffee table in the living room and roll out my yoga mat, pull up a YouTube video and settle into child’s pose. I focus on my breath.
During the worst of my addiction, I couldn’t trust my senses.
I was a seismograph, picking up tremors no one else could feel.
Every whisper in public was about me. Every sideways glance held a hidden meaning.
A man on the street looking at his phone was actually taking photos of me.
The hum of the refrigerator sounded like voices.
There was so much noise inside my head. I felt an incessant itch at my neck. Sometimes, I’d scratch it bloody.
Drug-induced psychosis, a doctor diagnosed once when the cops brought me to the hospital after I’d been found wandering an apartment complex, knocking on doors, trying to warn others about the man who was following me.
With sobriety, the mind snaps back. Almost. My mind is something like a Slinky stretched out just a little too far. Sure, it coils back, still looks like a Slinky—if you hold it together. AA meetings, sponsor check-ins, routines, yoga—I’m doing my best to hold it together.
I move through the vinyasa flow, from warrior one to warrior two, paying attention to the minute adjustments of my muscles when I hear a sound from outside.
I keep my feet in position as I reach for the remote, pause the TV.
The instructor’s gentle drone stops. So does the ambient soundtrack beneath. The house is silent, and I listen.
Another sound. A voice, maybe. An animal?
I pick up my phone from the couch and return to the window. The street is empty. The trees shiver in the wind.
I can’t call the sheriff again. Not with another false alarm.
I’ll sound paranoid. Delusional? He’ll worry.
He’ll ask Melanie how I’m doing. He’ll tell Mark to keep an eye on me.
Everyone, all these people who love me, will be put on alert.
And Olivia will feel it, even if no one says anything to her directly.
She’ll pick up on the vibrations, the collective concern, and whatever guard she dropped, she’ll zip right back up, the way you zip a jacket up to your chin to keep out the cold, to protect yourself.
I grab a long cardigan from the office and slide my feet into rubber-soled slippers, unlock the door, and step out into the night.
I stop where the walkway meets the sidewalk.
The street is scattered with gravel and the cut-off end of a PVC pipe, litter from today’s construction.
Leaves rustle. A barred owl’s hoot reverberates through the trees—a low, stuttering sound like an engine that won’t turn over.
And beneath it all, I hear the murmur of voices.
I look back to the house, the windows warm with light, and then down the road, the construction site in shadows, a still and silent backhoe-turned-silhouette, the shape of something with claws.
I check my phone. It’s not even 10 PM. I shake off the silly edge of fear and start walking toward the sounds, past the single lamppost outside the model home, leaving the safety of its circle of light.
Beyond it, the night opens wide, pale with moonlight and thin clouds drifting past. I pull my sweater tight.
The paved road devolves into dirt, and as I get closer, I catch words disembodied from their sentences, “over here,” “a long time.”
But because of the open space, the nooks between clusters of trees, the way echoes bounce off limestone, and the rushing water of the river, I keep stopping, keep turning my head to determine which direction I should be going.
The voices sound like they are coming from far away but also somehow just over my shoulder.
The corner lot up ahead has already been sold, and construction started on the grand house that will soon overlook The Hollow.
That’s where the sounds are coming from, I realize, down by the water, near the mouth of the cave.
I pause, scratch absently at that irritated spot on my neck, just under my jawline, where my heartbeat pulses below my ear.
The wind opens and closes the thin plastic door of the port-a-potty by the construction trailer with an uneasy clank, clank, clank.
I pick my way onto the property, past a bulldozer, a pallet of wood. The ground is soft, overturned soil mixed with chunks of stone, chewed-up clumps of grass, giving way to woods that slope down to the river.
I can hear them now more clearly as I enter the shadows, and from my vantage on the hill, I spot them through breaks in the trees.
Three teenage boys in the water, their inner tubes pulled up on the bank.
One, lanky with a mop of loose curls, sits on the rocky ledge, legs dangling in the water.
Another, shirtless and leanly muscled, stretches out in his tube, the brim of his ball cap hiding his face.
The third, husky and broad shouldered, treads water.
It’s been twenty-five years since anyone floated this part of the river. Since Isabelle Whitmore vanished.
The slope down to the river is steep, and dry dirt slides over the rocky earth beneath. I grab hold of the large trunk of a cypress to catch my balance.
The boy with the curls is sitting beside a cooler in its own inner tube. He reaches over to a large speaker and starts up the music, something with thudding bass and a guy singing about hoes.
“I’m telling you, man, she’s buried out here somewhere. They’re going to find her,” the curly-haired boy says.
“Everyone knows her boyfriend did it.”
“She was cheating on him,” the boy in the ballcap says. “That’s what that new podcast said.”
“My dad told me that. He used to be friends with Ben Sherman. And, honestly, I get it,” the stocky kid in the water says.
“You get it?”
“Yeah, bro, you’ve seen her picture in that trophy case. She was fucking hot. If I had a piece of ass like that, and she cheated on me? I’d cut her head off.”
An eruption of laughter. The kind of dark humor that feels safe in a private group chat, where the goal is to shock each other, push the line, get a reaction. That’s what teenage boys do. Still, it doesn’t sit well with me. I push off from the tree and march toward them.
“Fuck!”
The word cracks the air before I even register that it came from me.
There is a throbbing pain in my foot, and I lift it to see a black drywall screw lodged into the thin sole of my slipper.
I peel the shoe off slowly. As the screw backs out, I feel its spiraling ridges tugging at my skin.
In the moonlight, I can see blood trickling down the arch of my foot.
I look back to the boys, who are quiet now, staring straight at me, and I imagine how I must look to them, a figure in the trees, face drained of color, cardigan rustling in the breeze like a white robe.
The ghost of Isabelle Whitmore back from the grave to make them shit their pants.
I twist the screw out of my slipper, put it in the pocket of my cardigan, and place my slipper back on my foot.
I’m careful not to put too much weight on it as I continue toward them. The ground changes closer to the water, and I feel the mud begin to suck the slippers away from my feet. “Hey, y’all can’t be down here,” I call out over the music.
When I clear the trees, the curly-haired kid turns to ask his buddies, still in the water, “Who the fuck is that?”
“I’m the property manager,” I call to them again, still making my way over. “I’m—” I hesitate. “I’m staying there.” I stop and gesture back up the bank, toward the model home.
“Oh, you’re Olivia’s mom, right?” The boy in the ball cap replies, pulling himself onto a limestone rock in one swift motion up and out of the water.
“That’s me.” I give them all a little wave.
“Oh, yeah. Cool to meet you,” the boy with the curls says. He sees me eyeing the beer in the cooler and shuts it.
“Listen, you boys know you shouldn’t be drinking, you need to chuck that, clean all this mess up, and move along.”
“What’s going on?” The husky boy has migrated over to the same rock the kid in the ball cap just pulled himself onto.
Curly turns to break the bad news to him. “Party’s over, Teddy. We got to bounce.” Then he moves to the speaker, still in its float pulled up on the bank, and cuts off the music.
“That’s some bullshit.” Teddy hoists himself from the water, using a knee as leverage, his wet T-shirt suctioning to his belly. “You can’t own the river, man.” He turns the music back on. And then twists the volume knob all the way up, obnoxiously.
“I know there’s new owners.” I reach down to the speaker to kill the music myself. “But this is still private property. Someone has already purchased this lot.”
“Lady, my dad paid three hundred bucks for this speaker. Hands off.” Teddy bends down, cutting it right back on.
He’s a stubborn kid, and a sturdy one, that’s for sure.
Once he’s gathered himself, he’s a full head taller than me.
He’s close enough now that the water dripping off him is splashing onto the tops of my feet.
“This is one of them fancy waterproof speakers, right?” I ask. Bending over to turn it back off.
“Yeah,” Teddy confirms, hitting the power button back on.
“Well then…” I say. Faster than Teddy can react, I grab the plastic speaker by the handle and toss it out into the middle of the river. “Better go fetch it.”
Teddy spins around just in time to watch it splash and start to float away. “What the fuck, lady? Are you fucking serious?” He runs his hands through his buzzed hair, sending water misting off it.
“Listen, I don’t care how big you are, none of you are old enough to be drinking.” I gesture to the cooler. “Chuck the beer.” I point to the roll-off dumpster up the bank in the driveway of the unfinished home.
Teddy spins around back to me. “Why? So you can go and dig it out?”
The words sting worse than the pain pulsing through my foot. I wonder if he heard that from his parents or if he heard it from Olivia.
Teddy must sense me diminish, because he leers over me now with a chuckle. “Yeah, we heard you partied quite a bit.”
Then, suddenly the boy in the ball cap stops spectating and is behind his friend, slapping a hand on his shoulder.
“Teddy, come on, man. It’s no big deal. Let’s just go.
We got to grab the speaker or your dad’s going to kill us.
” I expect Teddy to put up more of a fight, but he deflates, shoulders slumping forward.
“That’s some bullshit, man,” he says again, then turns away and starts to drag his tube back into the water, the music slowly fading away.
The curly-headed kid follows suit, scurrying to clean up what he can as he tugs the cooler with beer and the now-empty tube that held the speaker into the water with them.
“Thanks,” I say to the ball cap boy, who’s standing with his hand on his hips. I breathe out a sigh of relief, unclench my fists. He smiles. He’s the kind of handsome that makes a boy prom king or class president.
“No problem, ma’am,” he says and turns to hop effortlessly into his tube.
I watch from the bank as they drift away. When he meets up with the group, there’s more grumbling from Teddy. “We’re just going to let some drunk tell us what to do?”
“Relax, Teddy, she’s not just some drunk,” the boy in the ball cap says, then loudly, like he wants to make sure I hear him, wants to make sure his words strike my breastbone: “She’s also a cunt!”
They erupt into laughter that’s amplified off the limestone wall across the river and back at me before they disappear around the bend. And I am left alone in The Hollow, foot throbbing, neck burning, emotions shredded bare and raw, surrounded by the deep, dark blackness of echoes.