Chapter 6 One Slip #2
“Were any windows or doors habitually left open?”
“No.”
“Who else might have had your access code?”
He screwed up his face. “My wife, of course. The housekeeper, my in-laws, and the landscaper.”
“I’d like to have a list of their names, please.”
His brow furrowed. “I don’t get it. Why do you want to talk to the housekeeper?”
“When a child is hurt, we want to make sure all the i’s are dotted and the t’s are crossed.”
“Sure.” He wrote down a list of names on a legal pad. “But we’ve been using those services for years, and trust them totally.”
“We found something in your mailbox.” Monica showed Sumner the picture of the skull.
He leaned forward, staring intently. “What the hell is that?”
“We don’t know. Do you have any enemies? We’re aware that Drema reported a stalker in her past.”
His eyes narrowed, but they remained fixed on the picture. “No enemies that I know of. Other than that guy who followed Drema around in college. Um…what was his name?”
“Mike Renfelter.”
“Yeah. That guy. I haven’t seen him since college. I thought he’d fallen off the map. Do you think he might have had something to do with this?”
“We’re not sure, but it’s clear someone with hostile intent went by your house last night.”
I inhaled, knowing I’d have to probe delicately now. “Mr. Sumner, have you ever been around any kind of violent crime?”
He tore his gaze away from the photo to stare at me. “Are you saying that something violent happened to him?”
“There were some marks on Mason’s body that are troubling. We need to determine if this happened to him in the pond or—”
He froze behind his desk. “What are you getting at?”
Before I could continue, the door swung open.
A man in a suit and tie and carrying a briefcase swept into the room.
I knew this guy—Steve Cortland was the most expensive defense attorney in the county, one of the three sibling attorneys from Cortland, Cortland, and Cortland.
Their firm logo was a stylized Cerberus, Hades’s three-headed guard dog.
Cortland nodded to us. “There will be no further interrogation of my client. You’ve got my number.”
We certainly did. Monica and I climbed to our feet and left. I glanced at Miri, who studiously avoided my gaze. She must have had Cortland waiting in the wings, protecting her boss like any good right-hand woman would.
“I suppose we’ll show ourselves out.”
She nodded curtly.
Monica and I headed back down the hallway, and the security guard approached at a swift clip.
“I don’t think we’re going to get invited back,” I said. I was used to pissing people off, but this felt particularly gross.
“Well, we tend to let all the air out of the room,” Monica acknowledged.
—
I cruised down the two-lane road, chewing on that disastrous meeting with Sumner.
I had some sympathy for him, being exiled from the hospital by his wife.
He seemed truly upset about his son’s condition, but I couldn’t forget that he had been a suspect in the disappearance of a young woman many years ago.
I didn’t think people changed that much over time.
I slowed as I pulled up behind a car being driven erratically. The late-model Civic crossed the center line, then entered the shoulder. I couldn’t see more than the silhouette of the driver.
I frowned and radioed in the plates. They came back to meth-cooker Rod Matthews’s brother, Timmy.
The car lurched off the road and onto a gravel side road without warning.
I swept past, pulled a U-turn at the nearest stand of rural mailboxes, and crept down the gravel road.
This road led to an out-of-the-way state park, Flint Rock Park.
This place wasn’t friendly to newbie hikers, so it tended to be sparsely visited.
Might be a great place for drug deals, and if I could snag Timmy behaving badly, then Vice would be pleased, and they’d owe me a favor.
I wound up a hill to park in a small gravel parking lot at the trailhead. The car registered to Timmy was parked there, but there were no other cars.
I popped my door and advanced on the car. It was empty but locked. I saw no drug paraphernalia on the seats.
I frowned. Maybe he was here to meet someone. Rod and Timmy didn’t strike me as the kind of guys who went into the woods to find inner peace and marvel at nature.
I turned my attention to the trail. A dirt track descended, crowded by wild dog roses and trillium.
Mosquitoes were thick here. The temperature dropped by a good ten degrees as I wound my way to the bottom of a ravine.
Sandstone walls rose around me, worn smooth by centuries of rain and river water.
Layers of rock, like annual rings in a tree, were eroded and open to the air now.
By the time I reached the bowl-shaped depression in the bottom, I could hear water.
The Copperhead River took a detour here, one that curved around in an oxbow, leaving an island covered by cedar trees at its center.
In the distance, I could make out geese in their nests moving their black, snaky necks as one to watch me.
An outcropping of flint loomed above—a structure that geologists called a “geological anomaly.” If one gazed straight north, one saw a gray striated stone that resembled the profile of a woman. The locals called her the Hag Stone.
The local legend was that, long ago, a witch saved a young man from drowning here.
They fell in love, and made plans to run away and get married at this spot at midnight on Midsummer Eve.
But the man never showed up. The witch’s body was found drowned.
The rock took on her countenance, gazing out upon the land for her love, her murderer, or whoever else crossed her path.
Predictably, teenagers loved to sneak off to this place.
Bits of spray paint defaced the stone below the unreachable profile.
I scanned the graffiti, seeing the usual artistic expressions, initials, and vows of anarchy.
The witch seemed above it, glowering down.
Among the graffiti, I spied an old, faded mark that looked familiar—a black ouroboros.
It wasn’t fresh, buried beneath a declaration of love in green spray paint.
Maybe this place was sacred to someone else, someone connected to my case.
I gazed up at the Hag, feeling the coolness of her shadow.
—
Green light eroded my vision.
Mom was taking in the wash. She stood before the line, her hands on her hips. An hour before, she’d put the whites out to dry in the sunshine, but something had happened to them.
The sheets were strung up, streaked with rusty stains that looked like dried blood.
She growled and ripped the laundry off the line.
“Get your shoes on,” she snapped.
“Where are we going?”
“To find out what’s going on with this water.”
Mom stuffed the laundry into the kitchen, collected her shoes, and led me from the house.
At first, I thought she meant to climb into the car to go to the grocery store for bleach, but she grabbed a shovel and stalked off toward the well.
I followed her to the low land behind it, where water sometimes accumulated during hard rains.
This summer was brittle with drought, and the clay earth was cracked.
She stalked away into the woods, following the lowest part of the land.
I scrambled in her wake. My mom hated the forest. She never ever went there. I had never seen her camp, hunt, or fish. I rarely saw her go barefoot. She preferred the olive-colored shag carpet of our living room to any grass.
But she cut sticks from a willow tree, stripped off the leaves, and broke them down into Y shapes. She showed me how to hold the ends of a Y with the stick’s main stem pointing ahead of me.
“Like that. If you relax and focus, you can find water.”
She said it like it was simple, like turning on a sink faucet. I bit my lip and closed my eyes, straining to comply.
In my mind’s eye, I saw the water behind me, this cool, shining vein like a river in Hades’s underworld.
It shimmered in the dark, far below my feet, then split away.
I chased it, imagining it writhing beneath me like a snake.
I traced the undulations in its spine as it moved in its sidewinder way through the cold clay, and deeper, past glittering sandstone and pale limestone.
The water snake in my mind came up, up, close to the surface. I knelt there, pressing my hand to the ground. I imagined that the snake licked my palm.
I opened my eyes. My mom was just behind me, leaning on her shovel. For once, she wasn’t scowling at me.
“There?” she said.
“I think so.” I sweated as Mom set her shovel to the ground.
She dug a hole, the sharp shovel chewing into thick yellow clay. As she did so, pieces of it sloughed away like snake scales lifting. I examined one of those pieces. It was a murkier brown on the inside, moist.
She dug until the ground shattered and pieces of clay fell down, down into the ground, rattling into the dark.
My mom and I crouched over the hole. About two feet below us, water blistered up.
My mom smiled at me…actually smiled at me. “You’re a natural.”
I beamed. I hadn’t imagined it.
“You’re like me. You can sense the water’s pull.” She looked at me as if she had never actually seen me before.
My heart lurched into my mouth.
“I’m proud of you.”
I blinked back tears. “What…what is this? A well?”
“It’s an underground aquifer.”
I stared down into that hole. It smelled green, though there was no way the sun could reach it to grow algae. The water was almost at the lip of the hole now, radiating cold.
Dead fish, white and as long as my hand, dozens of them, floated up on their sides.
Tears stung my eyes. “How are there fish here?”
“There are underground aquifers all around here. Every body of water here is interconnected underground—the river, the ponds, the creeks. They’re all interconnected in the limestone underneath, giant vaults and galleries.”
I reached out for a fish, but my mom caught my hand. “Don’t touch them.”
“Why not?”
“They’re poisoned. It’s not just our well.”
I leaned forward and inhaled. The water smelled sweet, artificial, like something I might smell in the detergent aisle at the grocery store. Like something that was made to smell sweet but would taste awful.
“What do we do?” I asked.
“We cover this up for now.”
“And then…?” It didn’t feel like enough.
“We look for the source.”
Mom and I followed dry creek beds and unseen veins of water. We walked for miles, from morning until dark, always in the lowest, most shaded parts of the forest. I drifted in my mom’s wake as she was guided by the twitching of a stick.
When night fell, we found ourselves at the river, at a spot where it curled in on itself beneath a stone with the profile of a woman.
I gawked up at it, exhausted, and feeling her chilly shadow permeating me. I took my shoes off and let my bloody blisters air. Blood trickled into the cool sand.
“That’s good,” my mom said. “She likes blood.”
“Who is she?”
“She’s a spirit who lives in the rivers and streams in this place. The water is special here, you see. It flows up from deep, deep underground, from places light has never seen.”
“Like the underworld?” I’d been reading Greek mythology.
“Like the underworld. She brings all that power up in the water. She rules the water. And it’s polluted now. It killed your sister. And now we have to stop this poison before anyone else gets hurt like your baby sister.”
I squished my toes into the sand. This was the first time I remembered my mom actually telling me a story. I wondered why my dad never took me here. This place was special. It felt sacred, in a way the forest didn’t. I could feel the water, swirling in its cauldron, around my mom and myself.
For that moment, I felt like her daughter.
—
Sand crunched behind me, farther back on the trail. I ducked behind the cattails.
More distant steps.
I stayed low, watching. I peered above the cattails, spying a figure above me.
Not a guy I recognized. He was wearing cargo shorts, a camo T-shirt, and hiking boots.
A ball cap was low on his brow, covering a scruffy ponytail.
He was skinny, too skinny, and his arms and face were speckled by sores he absently scratched.
He was a young man, but missing a few teeth.
Was this the guy Timmy was meeting? He must have arrived after me.
I dropped to my belly, feeling cool mud under my fingers and soaking through the knees of my pants. My heart slowed to a steady, reptilian beat as he drifted away from my sight.
I crept forward soundlessly. I slithered through the undergrowth, watching the edge of his camo T-shirt moving against the background.
I pursued him as he swept down the trail, casting right and left. He crept down the path, still making noise, looking clumsily for footprints in the dirt. Was he looking for Timmy, or…?
He was following me. He must’ve seen my car in the lot, maybe followed me from the plant…or even farther back.
I almost laughed aloud, and I clapped a muddy hand over my mouth. The thought was ridiculous. Here, in my element.
I decided to hunt him back. Just for fun.