Chapter 10 Salt
Salt
I didn’t want to dream again.
I meant to stay awake as late as I could.
The supernatural was trying to creep into my head again. That madness. I didn’t want it. I didn’t want to go back to that place again, where I couldn’t distinguish reality from fantasy. I needed to stay on this side of the line, grounded. In control.
I hobbled into my house, where I was immediately bowled over by Gibby, who was in a rush to fall all over Monica. She knelt to receive the full magnitude of dog slobber that Gibby had been saving up for her.
“Who’s a good boy?” she cooed at him. “Does my good boy want a piece of jerky?”
He grinned in adoration and slapped his tail on the floor.
“How about I walk him and give him a treat?” she suggested.
“Thanks.” I wasn’t relishing stomping around in the dark while Gibby sniffed every tree stump and toadstool from here to the creek.
She headed out, Gibby bounding behind her.
“Watch out for skunks!” I called. Gibby, God bless him, didn’t have the sense to leave other animals alone.
He truly believed every animal he met was either a friend or potential lunch.
He’d gotten sprayed earlier this spring, and Nick had had a miserable time washing him in vinegar and tomato sauce.
I changed into yoga pants and a T-shirt. I stared at my angry red leg. I’d had worse injuries before—much worse. It would heal, and it was better the less I thought about it. I poured myself some water and took my first dose of antibiotics, with ibuprofen.
Monica returned with Gibby and threw an empty bag of beef jerky into the kitchen trash. She was holding her phone. “He peed four times, and pooped at the edge of the woods.”
“Awesome. Thanks.”
“Also got a background check back on Drema’s college stalker.” She put her phone into her pocket.
I sucked in my breath. “Maybe he’s our guy?”
“Michael Allan Renfelter went to the local college twenty years ago, which was about the right time for Drema and Jeff to be there. Never graduated. He worked in information technology for a handful of years, then wound up in federal prison on RICO charges.”
“Interesting. What did he do?”
“Looks like electronic money laundering for some drug lords. He’s been cooling his heels at Edgefield, South Carolina, this whole time. No furloughs, either.”
“Damn. I was so hoping for a slam dunk. Writing him off the list of suspects means that the Sumners have more enemies than we thought.”
Monica shook her head. “More money, more problems, I guess. Do you need me to take the trash up to the road or anything?”
“No. I really appreciate you doing this for me.” I had a lump in my throat. Monica had always been a good friend and mentor to me. I could really count on her in a pinch.
“No worries, girl.” She cracked her gum and gave me a hug. “Let’s touch base in the morning.”
I watched from the window as she drove up the driveway out onto the main road.
I locked the door. I’d installed double-keyed dead bolts at every place I’d lived in that had glass in the front doors.
I’d seen too many cases where burglars just broke the windows in the doors, flipped the dead bolt latch, and let themselves in.
When I was home, I normally left the key in the inside face of the lock in case I needed to get out quickly.
But I didn’t tonight. If I went sleepwalking again, I wanted to stay home. Walking barefoot in the dirt sounded like an excellent way to get an infection in my leg, and I was not wanting to tempt fate…or whatever the hell might be out there.
No, I told myself. This was just my own mind churning, wobbling out of orbit once more. I had to get control.
After I locked the door, I put the key on top of the fridge.
I opened a can of dog food for Gibby, who devoured it in two bites. He launched himself onto Nick’s side of the bed and glanced over his shoulder at me with a come-hither look.
I hauled the case file for the Dana Carson disappearance to my nightstand and began reading.
I flipped to the picture of Dana from her yearbook.
It was always strange for me that someone tangible enough to appear in a photograph could disappear without a trace.
I hoped to gain some insight into who she was, who she might be if she was still alive.
I got the impression that she was outgoing and confident, searching for something.
My gaze fell on her necklace, the crescent moon resting on her collarbone. I squinted at it. That necklace looked as if it had a stone in it. A pearl.
I looked at the river pearl on my nightstand, compared it to Dana’s. Dana’s pearl and the pearl from the pond were different shapes, but they looked pretty similar in sheen and color.
Coincidence, right? Maybe Dana was wearing some kind of freshwater pearl she’d bought on a vacation.
Maybe.
I stayed up reading the file. The original investigators’ frustration was palpable.
They had a witness who’d seen Dana with three boys at the gas station on the Fourth of July.
The witness was an upperclassman working a summer job as a clerk, and she recognized them.
Before Dana’s arrival, the boys were trying to convince the clerk to close early and go watch fireworks with them, but she refused.
When Dana arrived to buy a Coke, the boys invited Dana to go with them.
Dana declined; she was supposed to meet her sister.
The boys said they would go with her, and crowded her out the door.
Dana’s older sister, Vivian, reported that she was waiting for Dana to meet her at the burger joint down the street.
I knew that place well; it overlooked the river and had an ancient burial mound in the parking lot.
The parking lot had been entirely paved except for the mound, on which was planted a tulip tree with a picnic bench perched beneath it.
Vivian waited at the picnic bench until the sun went down, and Dana never showed.
As the fireworks started, she went into the restaurant to call their mother, who hadn’t seen Dana, either.
Records showed that the girls’ mother contacted the sheriff’s office. The office sent a car, but didn’t have any luck finding her that night. The hope was that Dana would return of her own accord in the morning.
But she never did.
An APB was put out, and Dana’s face was televised on the news channels for weeks afterward. No trace of her was ever found.
Detectives did the rounds, eyeballing the three boys who had seen her last. The boys’ wealthy parents refused to allow their sons to be interrogated, and lawyered up.
The statements given through lawyers all corroborated one another: the boys had walked Dana down to the beach, where a crowd was assembled to watch the fireworks.
Dana voluntarily left with a man none of them knew.
A sketch of the man was included: a generic-looking guy in his twenties, with brown hair and blue eyes.
He was reported to be five feet eleven inches, wearing shorts and a white T-shirt.
The case stalled. The sketch was circulated, and a number of men who met that description attended the fireworks.
The boys pointed the finger at a college guy who was back home, visiting his girlfriend.
But the girlfriend and her family gave him an alibi—he was seen grilling for an extended family of fourteen people—and that went nowhere.
The detectives had shaken the tree of people in Dana’s life who might’ve had motive.
Her estranged dad was in prison for forgery; her mom wasn’t dating anyone currently.
Dana had an ex-boyfriend, though, a Rick Smitz.
They’d broken up three weeks before she went missing, but he was a hundred miles away at the time of the disappearance.
Smitz had a bulletproof alibi: he’d gotten a speeding ticket on the way to a concert.
Dana had dated several guys. If she were a boy, she would’ve been called “popular”; the lawyers for the Kings of Warsaw Creek called her a slut.
In addition to Rick Smitz’s, there were three boyfriends’ names in the file: Jason Williams, Luke Peterson, and Wally Westerville.
Jason had been grounded for bad grades and was home with his parents.
Luke was out riding motorcycles with some other boys.
And Wally claimed to have been at the library. A librarian vouched for him.
I exhaled.
Nothing.
It was a whole lot of nothing that I had to find something in.
—
A green flash moved slowly over my vision, from left to right, like headlights washing across my face.
My mom liked to sleep in. Today was no exception.
I stared at my mom’s closed bedroom door for many minutes. I put a T-shirt on over my Underoos, found my sneakers, and then slipped outside.
I plunged into the cool shade of the forest. Confusion roiled in my head.
I was at home in the woods; my dad had called me his heir, a princess of the forest. I adored him and shadowed his footsteps, looking upon my mom as the villain, the one who made me put on shoes and comb my hair and go to school.
Mom was boring, all about limits and telling me what to do.
Dad was about freedom and following tracks in the forest. My dad had magic, showing me where salamanders slept beneath rocks and which fiddleheads were edible.
But he was gone, and Mom had surprised me.
Without my dad’s presence, I felt hers, serious and watchful.
And it wasn’t as awful as it had been in the past. My mom had her own way of doing things, her own magic unfolding in the dark.
And despite all her coldness toward me over time, I still wanted to please her.
Some hope that she could love me had been ignited in me.
But it felt like I was betraying Dad. He’d been gone only a few days. He was coming back. And how would he react if he saw me closer to my mom? Would he cast me aside, too?
I never knew what brought the two of them together. I knew only that they hated each other. And I didn’t want both of them to hate me.
Wading among the cattails, I descended to the muddy river. I bent and sniffed the water. It smelled all right.
I walked in, then let the cool water soothe my sunburned skin.
I floated on my back, looking up at the sun.
Suspended between water and sky, I felt the river moving at my back, a great vein of energy unfurling below me.
It was different than when I was on land, listening to birds and observing deer.
Water swished over me, slowing my pulse and supporting me as if I weighed nothing.
I drifted downstream in the river’s intangible grip, my eyes closed, until I became aware of something sliding against me. I thought it might be a log or some other kind of debris. I opened my eyes and saw something brown floating beside me.
It turned in the river’s current, and I screamed.
I stared a deer in the face, his antlers reaching out like claws and his eyes white and milky, his disintegrating tongue trailing in the river.
I scrambled out of the water. Mom had been right—it was poisoned, all of it. I jammed my feet into my shoes and ran home.
I let myself into the bathroom and turned on the shower, hoping to rinse the poisoned water away. But the sickly sweet smell hit me, and I knew it was still poisoned, too.
I backed away from it, bumping into Mom.
She looked down at me, wet and disheveled. I was certain she was going to scream at me. My shoulders went up around my ears.
Instead of screaming, she went to the shower and turned it off. She put the stopper in the tub and turned the faucet on.
She left me staring at the tub, then returned with a glass mason jar. She poured its contents into the bathwater, then ordered me to strip.
“What’s that?” I asked meekly.
“Salt. Baking soda. Epsom salt.” She tugged my T-shirt over my head and herded me into the bath. The sweet smell of the water had faded.
I pulled my knees up to my chin, feeling weird about being nude in front of my mom. As the tub filled, she poured shampoo on my hair and began to wash it. Not roughly, like that time a kid had put gum in my hair. She was gentle.
I’d begun to wonder if this was what it would be like if Dad stayed gone. Part of me wanted it to be like this with her.
“Do you think Dad is coming back?” I asked her quietly, and then immediately regretted spitting out the question.
“Do you want him to come back?” She paused in lathering my scalp. “He left us, you know.”
I swallowed the lump in my throat that rose at that abandonment.
Mom could be mean, but she was always there.
She always was. If I got sick, she was the one to pick me up at school.
She signed all my notes for my teachers.
She paid the bills neatly every month. She was boring to my mind.
But maybe she was something else, too, something steady.
Did I want him to come back?
I shook my head, knowing this was the answer she wanted, and not trusting that my voice would hold steady if I spoke. Maybe he’d left because of me. Maybe it had been my fault.
“Good girl. We’ll be fine, just the two of us. You’ll see.”
“Did he leave because of me?” I whispered.
“No. Not because of you. Lie back in the water.”
I lay back to rinse my hair, looking up at the tiled ceiling. I had never feared my dad, not in the way I feared my mom.
But I didn’t fear her at all in that moment, as she wiped soap from my eyes and I slid under the surface of the water.