Chapter 15 Flight Risk #3
As the night wore on, the wildlife disappeared.
Shadowy figures moved at the edges of the camera’s sight.
I couldn’t tell how many people there were, or who they were, only that there were more than three.
A fire blazed in the sand, and they flickered before it.
I had no sound on the trail cam, so I couldn’t tell what they were saying.
I strained to make out faces, but the footage was blurry, as if someone had put Vaseline over the camera lens.
They stayed for more than an hour, circling the fire, lifting hands to the sky. When the fire guttered out, they moved away…
…walking into the water. I froze the video and stared. Maybe they had a boat out there? There had to be one, just out of sight.
Maybe that was the way the tweakers chasing me were getting in and out of the area, by boat. This area of the river was too shallow for a speedboat, but maybe there was a rowboat.
I stared at the dark screen, at the frozen shadows. I didn’t know what the hell to make of it.
I closed the laptop and dozed. Part of my mind was reluctant to sleep deeply enough to dream, but another part of me sensed that I was on the cusp of something important. There was something I needed to remember now, and I struggled with how to access it safely.
Keys scraped in the lock, and the front door opened. Nick kicked off his shoes, and Gibby lunged out of bed to greet him. Nick put down his bag and came to the bedroom to sit beside me.
“Hey.” He bent down to kiss the top of my head. “How are you doing?”
“Mm…it’s been an eventful day. I’ll tell you later.” I was deliberately not wanting to deal with Sims’s death tonight. Lately, I had been distracted when I was dealing with Nick, and he deserved a bit of normalcy, my full attention. “And you?”
He looked tired. “Feeling a little at odds.”
“Tell me. Is it Dr. Floyd again?” I was ready to deal with more mundane workplace drama.
He slid his hand over his eyes. “Mandatory overtime for everyone through the July Fourth weekend. We’re down three nurses and one ER physician, and Dr. Floyd won’t fill the positions. He straight up told us that he thinks we’re overstaffed, but we’re not. It’s just not sustainable.”
“Damn. I’m sorry.” I squeezed his other hand.
“A friend from med school told me about an opening in the city, with the university. It’s primary care.” It came out in a rush. “It would be less money, but it would be regular hours. Less time on call. Weekends free.”
I kept still and listened, though my heart pounded.
“I could sell the condo and get a place in town. I’ve got enough saved up, and I could keep paying my student loans. Might be a little tight for a while, but the numbers could work…”
I let him trail off. When he lapsed into silence, I asked: “Is this what you want?”
“It is.” He sighed. “But it’s not the only thing I want.” He reached across for my other hand.
I squeezed his hands. “You should apply.”
“Will you come with me?”
My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. I wanted to. I really did.
He shook his head. “You don’t have to decide now. We could do long distance for a while and see how it goes. I—”
“I don’t want to lose you.”
“You won’t.” His eyes were sincere. So sincere.
But we both knew things could change. We knew that lives could be violently torn apart in an instant.
Or dissolve quietly in a few months, with distance and good intentions.
—
Mom and I went hunting for the source of the pollution that summer.
A green flash washed over me, and I was a girl again, sitting in a low tree branch. Mom was hunting. She’d called the authorities about the poisoned water several times, left messages in hopes that something would be done.
But no one ever called back. So she hunted.
She didn’t hunt the way my dad did. Dad would’ve followed the tracks of men in the woods, their feet and their tires. He would’ve been able to determine the ages of the prints in the dust and what kinds of men made them.
Mom hunted with sticks. She tracked water with her dowsing rods, searching for the root of the pollution.
Her sticks led us deeper into the woods, pulled by the magnetic veins of water.
I soon began to distinguish fresh from poisoned; fresh water hummed and flowed evenly, while polluted water seemed to crackle in my ears, like static.
My mom and I spoke little, but the silences weren’t hostile, like before.
My shoulders relaxed from being hunched around my ears, and I soaked in every bit of instruction she gave me.
Now, she seemed focused on analyzing a stand of dying cattails beside the river.
The cattails had yellowed, and dead fish had washed up on the beach.
We buried the fish so that hungry herons wouldn’t eat them.
There were tire tracks here, and footprints, but little else.
The day was brutally hot, and the tracks vanished near the road. Mom scooped river water into a black coffee mug, staring into it wordlessly without drinking. I thought at first that she was staring at her reflection, but her unfocused gaze seemed too slack, staring beyond the bottom of the cup.
It reminded me of the way she looked into the mirrors in the house. She hung mirrors she collected from garage sales, reflecting light back and forth into the shadows. I used to think she was vain, looking at her reflection, but maybe she saw something more there.
She often invited me to look over her shoulder at the mug, telling me to sit and soften my gaze. I saw clouds in the water sometimes. Sometimes, a coin-sized moon. I concentrated very hard now, wanting to see my dad, but all I saw were flower petals drifting near the bottom of the mug.
The trail of my mother’s quarry had gone cold. I sat with my back to the tree, paging through a library book of fairy tales.
Today I read a story called “The White Snake.” It was about a servant boy who tasted the king’s supper—a cooked white snake—which gave him the power to speak to animals.
The boy found the queen’s missing ring, which had been swallowed by a goose, and he was turned out into the world with a little money.
While on his travels, he helped animals, and found his way to a kingdom with a princess whose father would sell her hand in marriage to the man who could complete a series of tasks, including retrieving a ring from the bottom of the sea, collecting spilled grain, and stealing an apple from the Tree of Life.
The boy completed all the tasks and was awarded the princess. Everyone lived happily ever after.
I slammed the book shut and scowled. I jammed it back into my pack.
“What’s wrong?” Mom asked, finally noticing my rage.
I rolled my eyes. “The boys always get to do the cool stuff in fairy tales. The girls are just furniture. They don’t get to pick their husbands. They don’t get to go anywhere. They’re like dolls. They do what they’re told.”
Mom laughed and sat beside me on the tree branch. Her laugh was pretty when she used it. “How about I tell you the story of some women who don’t do what they’re told?”
I crossed my arms over my chest, but leaned forward. I wanted to hear the story.
“In a part of the world covered by dark forests, there was once a peasant girl who caught fish for her family.
She would sit by the river and whisper to the fish, and they would fling themselves onto the bank.
She kept her family fed in lean times and was content in the deep woods, singing to the birds and the deer. She had a beautiful singing voice.
“One day, a boat came down the river. It belonged to a local prince who had gotten lost on the many rivers that spider-webbed over the land.
He heard the girl singing and followed her voice.
When the girl saw him, she was instantly lovestruck.
And so was he. The girl directed the prince back to the main river, and he would sneak away to see her over that long summer.
They planned to get married, envisioning a shining future together.
“When the prince told his parents, they disapproved. They forbade him to marry the peasant girl. He was meant to marry a girl of his station, a proper princess. The prince told the girl what had happened, that they must break it off.
“But the girl was steadfast. She wanted to run away to get married. The prince agreed, and told her he would meet her at midnight by the spot in the river where they first met. She waited at that spot at the appointed time and date…and he didn’t arrive.
“In the morning, the girl’s parents found her drowned among the cattails. They were furious, but had no recourse. Did the boy kill her? Did his parents? Did she drown herself in grief after he failed to show up? No one knew.”
I made a face. This was starting to sound like another one of those fairy tales where the girl got the short end of the stick.
“But what they did know was that the place became haunted, haunted by the spirit of the girl who drowned. People would hear her singing or see a dark shape swimming in the river. If they had sense, they ran away. The spirit never harmed women or children, who usually had the sense to flee. It was the men who would be ensorcelled by her song, who would be invited to come into the water, where she drowned them.”
I leaned forward. This sounded more like my kind of story. “What happened to the prince?”
“The prince went on to marry a respectable princess, and they had a son. One day, the prince was on a hunting trip with his son, when they heard singing. They were beckoned into the water by the spirit of the girl, who gleefully drowned them both.”
I nodded. This was more satisfactory, though I felt a little sorry for the boy, who was blameless.
“This happens often in that part of the world. When a woman is murdered, or commits suicide, she can haunt the rivers and streams. She stays there for all time, seeking revenge. There are hundreds such spirits, and they are all called by the same name: Rusalka.”
“Rusalka.” I repeated the word, rolling it around in my mouth. It tasted exotic and powerful, so much more so than the word “princess.”
She gave a sly smile. “I think you’ve just been reading the wrong kind of fairy story.”
The sound of an engine rattled through the woods, and our heads turned. Mom’s eyes narrowed, and she took off at a run.
I sprinted after her, listening to the whistle of breath in the back of my throat.
I didn’t know my mom could run, and definitely not so fast. I struggled to keep up with her, my backpack bouncing uncomfortably against my shoulder blades.
We followed the sound to another bend in the river, where I stopped short.
An iridescent sheen of oil was spreading over the water, with a sickly sweet smell that caused me to gag.
Mom’s gaze was murderous. She turned and followed tire tracks through the grass. A beat-up Jeep was making a retreat, speeding up a hill. Metal drums clanked noisily in the back.
I tried to memorize the license plate number, repeating it to myself like a mantra: ADP 1123, ADP 1123…
Mom shouted at the Jeep, but the driver floored it and lurched up onto the road. Within seconds, it was gone from sight.
I stayed by the riverbank, helpless, watching that iridescent oil spread. It would’ve been pretty under other circumstances, if I could tell myself that it was some kind of fairy spell. But it wasn’t. It was a thing that brought death to whatever it touched.
Just downstream, a blue heron turned its head toward me. I shooed it away, and it took off in a silent flutter of wings.
“Don’t come back!” I yelled tearfully, hoping it didn’t have a nest nearby.
Mom returned to the bank, her gaze black, furious. That was the look of the mother I knew—stiff and scowling.
“I memorized the license plate number,” I told her.
She shook her head. “It won’t do any good.”
I sighed in frustration, scrubbing at my red face with the back of my filthy arm.
“This is something we will take care of ourselves,” she said quietly, with unfathomable malice.