Chapter 8 Memory of Darkness #2
I felt a little self-conscious wearing a swimsuit in public.
I hadn’t worn one since I’d been shot last year.
My black tankini covered the scars on my chest but did nothing to hide the hundreds of tiny bird-shot scars peppering my arms and right leg.
They’d faded a lot, but as I tanned they remained stubbornly white.
The girls stared, and asked about them. I told them I’d gotten hurt at work but was all healed up now.
One of the other den moms distracted the girls with snacks, which I was thankful for.
I wasn’t sure how much to tell them. These girls were inquisitive, but they weren’t as close to life and death as I had been at their age.
Four, five, six…
I was lucky to be alive. I kept coming back to Bayern County. I wasn’t sure why. Maybe Nick was right. Maybe it meant to chew me up and eat me alive. Maybe I’d just gotten lucky those times I’d brushed up against death.
Seven, eight, nine…
At what point should I move forward, create a life with Nick?
I’d discovered my father’s secret grave, and I’d put his copycat in prison.
I had redeemed myself. Maybe I’d done all I was supposed to do here, and it was time to move on.
I mean, maybe I could move on…I wasn’t feeling the heartbreak Nick had felt with his mother being taken from him.
I just felt a low, simmering rage without an outlet.
Ten, eleven, twelve…
If I was honest, I wasn’t sure who I would be without this place.
My adoptive parents had created a life for me far away from here.
I just hadn’t fully taken on that identity the way I could’ve.
Maybe it wasn’t too late to do that. Maybe I could choose to wake up from the spell that held me fascinated here.
…Where the fuck is thirteen?
I rocketed to my feet. Thirteen was Charlotte. Charlotte was a strong swimmer, but that didn’t mean much against water hazards.
I rushed toward the river, calling her name and blowing my whistle.
In my peripheral vision, Charlotte’s head popped above the surface. She grinned under her goggles. I exhaled shakily. She’d just been underwater for a moment.
“Miss Koray!” a girl shrieked.
I spun to my left. Tisha, Monica’s niece, was screaming and waving her arms, rushing out of the river, toward me.
“What’s wrong?” I demanded.
She pointed behind her. “That boy…he’s drowning.”
I saw no boy, only turbulence and bubbles in the brown water.
I blew my whistle again and bellowed for everyone to get out of the water. I plunged into the murky depths, pulling myself toward the thrashing. Hands flailed, and the head of a teenage boy struggled to rise above the waterline.
I grabbed the boy’s arm and slung it over my shoulders. But he turned and struggled in the river, and something else stirred. Something sharp sliced into my calf, dragged the two of us under.
I couldn’t see anything underwater but bubbles and gritty sediment. The boy screamed, muffled by the water. I kept my grip on his arm, kicking with all the force I could muster at whatever it was that grabbed me from below. I struck once, twice, three times with the ball of my foot.
Suddenly, the grip slackened, and I kicked away. I cast about for the boy.
He was windmilling yards from me, and a man shouted: “Stop fighting, and lie still!”
At that familiar voice, a sense of calm settled over me. Fred Jasper was here. Jasper was rescuing him. He immediately towed the boy to shore, and I followed.
Jasper placed the boy on the beach. His chest was bleeding. He was pale, and twitching like a fish caught on a line and flung up onshore. A good sign, I thought distantly. He turned over on his stomach to throw up water. Jasper rolled him onto his side to make sure he wouldn’t choke.
“Miss Koray!” A Girl Scout grabbed me by the hand. “You’re bleeding!”
I looked down at my leg. Blood dripped from my calf into a puddle in the sand.
Tisha wrapped a towel tightly around my leg and ordered me to sit down. She elevated my leg on a cooler.
“Aunt Monica called an ambulance,” she said, very seriously, offering me bottled water.
I put my hand on her shoulder. A kid who could keep it together in an emergency was going to be a helluva doctor or soldier someday. “You just earned your first aid merit badge, kiddo.”
Tisha beamed, and I grinned back at her.
Maybe it was moments like this that kept me in Bayern County.
—
The paramedics insisted on taking the boy and me to the hospital.
I refused initially, but Tisha insisted that I go in the ambulance, so I did.
Trying to be a good example and all. The other troop volunteers told me they had all the girls accounted for and would call their parents.
Monica barked orders for the sheriff’s office and the Department of Natural Resources to gain control of the scene and make sure no one was allowed back in the water.
“It’s a good thing you were here,” I told Jasper. “You saved that boy’s life.”
Jasper sat next to me on the beach. He was unnerved by the near drowning; his hand shook a bit. “Just lucky timing. I was checking the buoys cordoning off the swimming area. Got to make sure everything’s ready for the Fourth.”
I nodded. “What happened out there?”
“I don’t know. I just saw him splashing, saw his head going under. I knew it wasn’t horseplay. We need to mark off where the deep water begins better, to keep things like this from happening.” His gaze fell on my bleeding leg. “And we need to do a sweep for debris. That looks nasty.”
I frowned. “It didn’t feel like debris. It felt like an animal of some kind—sharp…”
“Let me see that leg.”
I showed it to him, still oozing blood.
“Yeah, that looks like a tooth or something. Maybe a snapping turtle? Water snakes don’t attack like that.”
“I can’t help but think about the wounds on that other kid who almost drowned, Mason.”
Jasper nodded. “I see it, too. I think we should broaden our horizons. I’ll talk to DNR and see if they have any reports of invasive species going on here. I mean, Maryland has found snakehead fish, and those buggers have teeth.”
I made a face. “There’s something creepy about fish with teeth.”
“Right? If I’m honest, I gotta say I’m creeped out, too.” He stared out at the water. “I know what’s usually down there, but if there’s something new, we need to know, to protect the public. Especially with the Fourth coming up.”
“Let me know what you find out,” I told him. Maybe the monsters here were invasive fish, an ecological disaster. There was something about a fish invasion that made it more comforting than the alternatives.
When the ambulance arrived, the paramedics strapped the boy down on a backboard and carried him up to the road.
A group of teen boys followed him, carrying his personal effects, muttering quietly among themselves.
I was last, limping along. I didn’t like to admit it, but that cut began to smart once the adrenaline wore off.
I sat in the ambulance, propping my foot up on the gurney while the paramedics got an IV line started on the kid and a medic stared at his eyeballs with a flashlight.
“What’s your name?” the medic with the flashlight asked.
“Boba,” the boy said distantly. “Boba Fett.”
“Your name is Boba Fett?”
“Yeah.” He sounded very unsteady.
“How many fingers am I holding up?” the paramedic asked.
“Three, I think.”
The paramedic put his index finger in front of Boba Fett’s face. “I want you to follow my finger with your eyes…Good.”
I scooched closer to Fett as the paramedics applied pressure to the wounds on his chest. Nothing looked life-threatening, but even small amounts of blood could be serious.
“Am I gonna die?” he squeaked, staring down at the blood.
“No. Just look at the ceiling,” the paramedic ordered.
I seized the opportunity to ask questions. “What happened out there?”
He gazed at me with glassy eyes. “There was a girl.”
“What girl?” I hoped to hell someone hadn’t drowned without my noticing.
“I heard a girl singing. She sounded hot,” he mumbled. “So I swam over there.”
“Did you see this girl?”
“Yeah. She was smokin’…Goth girl.”
“What did she look like?”
“Pretty.”
I figured I wasn’t going to get a better description. “Was she in trouble?”
“Nuh-uh. She was singing, calling me…I thought I might get her number…”
“Then what happened?”
Fett glared up at the ambulance ceiling. “She…she grabbed me. At first, I thought she was playing. She grabbed me by the shoulders and pushed me down.”
I inhaled sharply. “And then…?”
“That’s…that’s all I remember…her pulling me down.”