Chapter 1 Handfishing for Monsters #2
My mom told many lies.
She had to, I think. She was married to a serial killer, the legendary Forest Strangler, who left a trail of deceit and bodies throughout Bayern County. While he lied about his whereabouts, who he’d seen, what he’d been doing. Pretty much everything.
But she’d lied to herself about what kind of evil slept under our roof, and she’d lied to the police about wanting to take care of me. She’d given me up for adoption as soon as my father had been charged and had disappeared into the night.
I’d worshipped my father when I was a little girl.
I always thought of myself as my father’s daughter in so many ways, even after I learned who he was and what he’d done.
The forest spoke to me the way it spoke to him, and I felt its pull, that beckoning darkness.
He’d lied to me the whole time. And I hated that.
And I was slowly beginning to hate him, for both what he did and the lies he told me.
I didn’t know if my mom lied to me about the green flash. There was nothing in it for her to lie to me about it…so why would she?
As an adult, I saw a television meteorologist talk about how the green flash was a rare phenomenon that occurred when a clear sky acted as a prism under just the right conditions.
The meteorologist showed some grainy cell phone footage of such a flash.
When I was a child, the flash had been magic.
As an adult, I was relieved to know that it was just a freak meteorological event, perfectly scientific and perfectly safe.
I supposed my mom was a liar about that, too.
Swallowing the lump of a memory, I turned to Monica, now fifty yards distant, to see if she saw, but her back was turned.
I inhaled, a whispering breeze stirring the grass in a circular pattern. It felt like something was on the move, like on those full-moon fall nights when the deer traveled miles.
At my side, Gibby whined.
I lowered my hand to his head. “We should go back.” Some things in the world were not to be fucked with. This was probably one of them.
A woman screamed in the distance.
Instinct overrode my hesitation, and I burst into a sprint toward the scream. Grasses made zip-zip slashes against my jeans, and Gibby panted beside me. We raced across the field toward the distant cry.
“Help!”
The land was darkening by the time we burst out onto freshly mown grass, a full yellow moon rising in the east. A grand two-story brick house with a slate roof stood in the center of the lawn.
Old money, not new money. The slate was streaked from decades of acid rain, and wavy glass windows gazed down with black eyes.
A young woman, no more than sixteen, raced toward us. A brunette braid flopped over the shoulder of her T-shirt. She was wearing sandals and a long denim skirt.
“Are you the police?” Her fingers were knotted around her cell phone. “I just called 911.”
I held up my badge. “I’m Anna. What’s going on?”
“I’m Leah. The babysitter. I was watching Mason, and I…I can’t find him. I…” Her face crumpled.
I took her by the shoulders. “It’s okay. We’ll find him. How old is he?”
“He’s four. He’s got blond hair, brown eyes. He’s wearing a blue T-shirt with the Superman logo, and red shorts. Oh my God.”
“Where did you last see him?”
“He was in the living room when…when I went to the bathroom. When I got out, he was just…gone.”
“Show me.” As we approached the house, I scanned the scene. I saw no cars whose drivers might have abducted him, heard no engines.
I spoke into the radio microphone pinned to my shoulder. “This is L4 at County Road 12. Report of a missing child.”
“Roger that,” Dispatch answered. “More units en route.”
Leah covered her mouth with her hand. “My dad’s gonna kill me.”
Gibby gazed up at her sympathetically, doggie eyebrows working up and down.
As we reached the house, I saw that the back patio door was open.
“Leah, did you come out the front door or the back door?”
“The front door.”
My gaze swept the manicured grass, punctured by severely pruned arborvitae and hydrangeas. Fireflies seeped up from the ground, casting fairy light over the scene. Bullfrogs twanged. Bullfrogs…
I froze. “Leah, is there water near here?”
“Um. Yeah. There’s a stock pond.” She pointed to the west.
Dread and intuition bubbled up in me. I sprinted toward the frog song, down an artificial slope to a pond reflecting the first stars prickling out of the night sky. Bullfrogs plopped into the water at my approach.
Something was floating on the surface. I could barely make it out underneath a sheen of algae.
Unthinking, I dived into the pond.
Cold water closed over me, shocking in the summer heat.
I’d dived some in college, but I’d long forgotten the shock of cold water in an emergency.
I pulled myself forward in the water, toward the middle of the pond.
As I moved, algae covered me like a cloak, heavy on my shoulders, sliding through my fingers.
It dragged at me, and I struggled to move.
I reached for a doll-like figure dressed in a blue T-shirt…
…but it was sucked beneath the water with a slurping splash, splattering my face with algae.
I kicked below the skin of algae, into the cold depths.
My pulse beat like a drum in my ears. The sky above was a lighter darkness than the blackness below me.
I flailed, searching for the child. I swept my arms before me, stirring up soft silt.
I could see nothing, but I searched, hoping to hell that the child was close.
My fingers brushed against something fleshy, a limb. I wrapped my hand around it…a child’s arm. It was heavy in my grip, and I pulled, swimming toward the surface.
But I couldn’t pull the boy with me. It was as if he were caught in a steel trap. I pulled with all my might, lungs burning. My heel landed in the silt at the bottom of the pond, and I braced myself to tug him free of whatever held him fast.
I would not let this child go, I vowed.
I wasn’t gentle. I ripped with all I had, heedless of dislocating or breaking limbs—those could be repaired; oxygen deprivation could be fatal.
Someone was laughing…but no sound could carry like that down here. Hypoxia must be causing me to dissociate.
Suddenly, the child’s body was released, tumbling back on me. I reached for the dimness above and launched myself skyward.
My head broke the water’s surface. I gasped, sucking in lungfuls of air, lifting the child with me. His body was limp and his eyes were closed, mouth slack. I shoved him into the crook of my arm, face up, and swam to the nearest shore.
Gibby barked frantically. He plunged into the pond and grabbed the sleeve of my shirt in his jaws, trying to drag me to safety.
I hauled the boy’s heavy body through cattails to the bank. In the background, Leah screamed. I placed him face up on the grass and pressed my ear to his mouth, his chest. Nothing. He was cold and slack and unmoving.
But I did what I was trained to do. I laced my hands over his chest and pressed. Water poured from his mouth. I did it until the water stopped. I listened again. Nothing.
I continued chest compressions, knowing I could break ribs.
Chest compressions, done correctly on an adult, let alone a child, could cause fractures, but I forced myself not to be squeamish.
I counted, getting as close to a hundred beats per minute as I could.
My CPR instructor had told me to compress to the beat of the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive,” and I hummed as I exhaled.
The boy lay there. Algae dripped from his lip, and his eyes were closed and his fingers slack. Nothing. Nothing.
I don’t know how long I did chest compressions. I worked until paramedics arrived to take over. I sat back on my ass in the grass, blinking stupidly.
Monica sat down beside me. “What happened?”
“I saw him…in the pond…His name is Mason.” I looked back to where deputies were questioning Leah on the hill. She sat with her head on her knees.
The paramedics fitted a mask and bag over Mason’s mouth to start breathing for him, then scooped him onto a stretcher. Mason looked incredibly tiny on the adult-sized stretcher as they ran him up the hill toward a parked ambulance.
I gazed at the pond, now still as a mirror. My skin crawled, and I shivered violently.
That child was in a bad way, and I needed to know why.