Chapter 13
When I leave for home, there’s someone waiting at my car.
I squint in the dark at the silent figure leaning against the bonnet. I reach for Jessie’s collar, and she surprises me. She steps in front and growls at the figure. Heath is still in the water, his back to me. Even if I called out, my voice would be lost in the crashing waves.
“Minnow?”
I peer through the dark. “Colleen?”
She takes a small step forward, bundles her hands deep into her coat like she’s trying to disappear inside herself. “Can you call her off?”
Colleen nods nervously at Jessie, and I realize that she hasn’t stopped growling. Dazed, I reach for Jess, tucking my fingers under her white collar. “It’s okay,” I tell her. “It’s all right.”
I think.
I hang on to her collar, and the cold burns my knuckles.
There are no other cars in the parking lot.
No people. Just us. Colleen stands nervously in front of my car, silvery hair tucked into a black beanie, the wind brushing wisps of loose hair into her face.
Jessie’s hot breath steams in the darkness.
“Cold night for a walk,” I say flatly.
“I heard the news…” she finally says. “About your poor mum. I’m so sorry, Min.”
My poor mum. God, is that what she’s reduced to now? My poor dead, murdered mum.
“I worked with her, remember?”
“Yeah, I remember.”
She continues as if I hadn’t spoken. “At the general store, on the weekends,” she says more to herself. “I was the one reported her missing. It’s funny but…” She tilts her head up, a faraway look in her eyes. “For years after, I thought she’d come walking back in.”
“So did I.”
“I’m so sorry, love.”
I don’t know what to say. Instinctively I look over my shoulder to where my brother stands knee-deep in the waves.
“Were you the one who found her?” Colleen’s voice pulls me back to the present.
“What makes you ask that?”
“Just strange that the week you’re back in town is the week she’s finally found.”
The article did not mention who discovered the body. Chris wasn’t happy about it, but then, it wasn’t his mother.
The storm’s coming again. I’m so glad Mum doesn’t have to spend another night outside in the cold.
Colleen shuffles closer. “They said it was blunt-force trauma to the…skull?”
I wince. Blunt-force trauma. Such a clinical way to say that someone out there struck my mum with enough force to cave in the left side of her head. My mum with her soft hands and smiles who never hurt anybody.
“Did they find the…” She hesitates. “The murder weapon?”
I wince again, holding a palm up as if to fend her off. “The police said they didn’t.”
And it’s true, because we looked for it. Found nothing.
“I didn’t know she was…dead. Didn’t wanna believe that. She’d left before…” She lowers her head. “Lots of women ’round here do.”
I see my young self, snot-nosed at the door. Waiting for Mum to come home again. “Yeah,” I mutter. “I remember.”
“She was with me,” Colleen says. “You know that, right?”
“…What?”
“She stayed with me, when…” She hesitates again, mouth grim.
My chest tightens. “When he hit her?”
“That’s where she went, to my house.” She bites her lip. “Most of the time, anyway.” I turn away, shielding my face. She reaches for me, placing a gentle hand on my shoulder, and I throw it off. “She didn’t want you and Heath to see her like that.”
I hold up a hand, warding her off. My throat is tight and painful. “Someone should have told us.”
“Minnow.” She digs in her jacket for tissues, dabs clumsily at my chin.
The jacket is far too big for her small body; it swallows her.
She stuffs the tissue back in her pocket and holds me by my shoulders.
“She was always watching over you, you know that? Sometimes she’d walk to your school during lunchtime. Make sure you and Heath were safe.”
She releases me, arms hanging loose at her sides.
That’s where she went, most of the time…
“Where did she go the other times?”
Colleen stares at the waves with a slack expression, eyes distant and empty. “Violence does something to women. Makes them…not them anymore. Turns ’em into somethin’ else.”
“Ghosts.”
She rubs the heel of her palm against her chest. “Yes.”
We fall silent, watching the waves roll in, dissolving into foam on the sand. “She made it to Pine Bay a few times,” she says. “Don’t even know how she got there, to be honest. Local cops found her wandering the street, brought her home.”
My mum didn’t have a car. She walked to work, and to pick us up from school. Though, in those last few months, she’d skip days dropping us off. Heath would walk me to school while Mum retreated further and further into someone small and silent and…
Ghosts.
A seagull circles above, soaring on an updraft, hunting. One swoops down, lands on my car bonnet, looks in my direction, cawing.
I hold the phone up to her face, showing her the photo of Donny Granger. “Have you seen this man before?”
She squints. “I don’t think so? Who is he?”
“He’s also well acquainted with the woods…”
“Dead?”
“Murdered.”
Her mouth is grim. “Your dad?”
I don’t answer.
“When did he go missing?”
“Not long before Mum.” I click my phone off, bury it in my pocket. “You sure you didn’t see him in town?”
“No, I’m not sure. This was nearly thirty years ago, Min.”
The seagull on my car bonnet inches closer.
“After Mum went missing…” I can’t keep the sharpness out of my voice. “Why didn’t you go to the police?”
“I did.”
I press my palm to my heart. “Thank God, and?”
“They filed the missing person report. But she had a history of leaving, Minnow. Lots of women shoot through in towns like ours.”
“But most of the times she’d left before, she went to your house,” I argue. “And she always came back.”
“And I told them that. They dragged your dad in, questioned him a few times, put the pressure on him, but he insisted he didn’t know where she was.”
“Heath thinks Dad killed her.”
“So did Terry in the end,” she admits, scraping at the dirt with her heel. “We all did.” Her spine straightens, her smile cold. “But your dad got what he deserved in the end. They usually don’t.”
“Do you think he’s still alive? Or do you think Terry killed him?”
“I think Terry killed him,” she says flatly. “Wish I could take credit for it, though.”
“Me too.” The seagull lifts off, wings outstretched, moon glinting off its feathers. “Some people think he’s still alive, you know? That he’s out there somewhere…that he’ll come back one day.”
“Even if he’s still alive, Min,” Colleen says softly, “he won’t come back.”
The tide recedes and I see a shape, low and shifting, where the water meets the sand. At first, I’m not sure if I’m really seeing it. But I blink and it’s still there.
“And if he does,” she says heatedly, “I’ll kill him myself.”
The thing is moving now. Slinking, shoulders low, limbs fluid, like it learned to walk from the water itself.
Dad.
I blink again and it’s gone.
“I’m sorry I didn’t do more, Min.” Her voice cracks. “For you…for Heath…”
I force myself to look away from the shore. “For your mum,” she says softly. And it breaks something in me.
“You did what you could,” I tell her.
“I didn’t do enough. None of us did. And I know it’s no excuse, but I had my own issues I was dealin’ with at the time.”
“Trav.”
She nods sadly. “He was startin’ to…act up. I’d seen it before. Felt like I was losing him.”
“To what?”
I know what. But I need to hear someone else say it.
“The darkness in this town.”
I stare at the vast black waves, stretching endlessly, the night wind brushing my face.
“There aren’t a lot of resources for battered women and kids.
They say there are, but they’re lying,” Colleen says hotly, and I know she’s thinking of her own marriage.
Trav’s dad passed away when we were in second or third grade.
Cancer, I think. Before that, Trav showed up to school with bruises blooming across his cheek.
“The coppers thought your dad did it. But there was no body, nothing. They couldn’t keep dragging him down to the station with no new evidence.” She clears her throat. “Plus, at the time, they were more interested in Hannah’s attack.”
Hannah Striker, the tourist attacked at beach 4. They found chunks of her flesh, bits of her torn wet suit. One piece had a tooth still wedged in it. Great white shark.
I straighten up. “When was the attack?”
“Early July, I think, 1998.”
“Did you ever meet Hannah?”
“No, never heard of her before that.”
“…Donny was killed around that time.”
“When?”
I try to remember. “Late July, I think. Same year.”
“And your mum went missing in August…”
“Not missing,” I say. “She was murdered in August.”
“But nobody knew that at the time,” she protests. “And nobody knows about Donny, either.”
“…And let’s keep it that way.”
“If you’re going to look into this, you need to be careful, Minnow.” She steps forward urgently. “You hear me?” She nods at the water. “That Heath down there?”
“Yeah,” I say unwillingly. “Why?”
But she’s already backing away, breath bursting in and out. I think that’s all she’s going to say, but her eyes flicker to mine. They’re eerily bright in the dark as she issues a final warning.
“Be careful.”