It’s quiet for a long time then. Only Rebecca’s sniffles punctuate the silence. The red face has gone into hiding now that she wants desperately to see it. Rebecca’s got a million questions, but the only one she really wants to ask is, “Are you all right?”
She thinks of calling Bret, but what would he say? That she needs to get back to therapy yesterday. And that’s not what this is. This is a chance to put things right.
A chance for the Daniels Family to be whole again.
Rebecca sobs into her hands. Two years’ worth of pent up tears slicking her palms. For the first time in what feels to her like forever, there’s nothing to be sad about.
These are tears of joy.
21
“JAIME,” REBECCA SAYS INTO THE air.
She sits on the bed calling for her daughter the way you summon the family dog. She slaps her thigh over and over and gets only silence.
It’s still 68 in here, but she’s cooking.
Rebecca goes to the shower, hopping from bed-to-bed in order to keep away from the mirror.
In the bathroom she cranks the knob all the way hot and hugs the far wall to distance herself from the medicine cabinet glass. The sweatshirt she’s got fastened to it is holding up well so far.
The piping stream reddens her skin like a boiled lobster, but the need to scrub mud and grime from her body supersedes the civil war raging in her mind.
“Jaime,” she repeats. “Please come back. Don’t be afraid that I know it’s you.”
Jaime has nothing to say.
“Why didn’t you ask for help?” Rebecca says. “I’m going to find him, you know. I’m going to find Paul and, well . . .” It still feels weird to say it out loud—another habit from the old world. Her oath to protect and to serve feels laughably antiquated now.
The girl is still here, though. Still inside. The way her heart pumps hard. The presence of those swirling memory fragments. Jaime’s memories. And there’s the way her body chemistry surges on promises of murder.
“Is that what you want?” Rebecca asks. She shuts her eyes and buries her head against her forearm, trying to will the red face from hiding. “It’s the only thing I’ve wanted since . . .”
Jaime is there. In the darkness, bloodstained fingers reach out.
And as soon as they do, the tapping resumes on the other side of the drawn shower curtain. Muffled clinks underneath that sweatshirt. Slow at first, but ramping up fast. Growing more restless with every passing moment.
Rebecca flings the curtain aside to keep an eye on it.
Jaime is agitated by these sounds. Don’t let them get me, she pleads. Rebecca finds familiarity in this. Recollections of the helpless child she raised.
The knocks grow louder. Rebecca returns to the dark beneath her eyelids because it’s the only way she can see her skittish daughter.
“You’re hiding from . . . whatever’s beyond the glass,” Rebecca says. This revelation brings more tears. It’s the first clear breath Rebecca’s had since the murder. Validation that follows two long years where the scariest possibility at the time had been that she’d lost her mind.
Jaime has nothing to add and Rebecca can’t allow that anymore.
“Answer me,” she says. Through squeezed eyes, Rebecca slams her head against the bathroom tile. Has to reach for the soap tray to steady her balance as her thoughts turn inward to the influx of pain.
Her daughter resists.
“Jaime,” Rebecca screams. Her head rams tile again, knocks Jaime loose this time. She’s there in the dark, shrieking, because her mother has somehow found the void. Jaime’s blank white eyes and distended mouth are an inhuman sight. Not the little girl Rebecca raised, not even the corpse she’d been forced to identify, but a mockery of her.
Rebecca jumps. The ceramic tub is slick with water and pinkish swirls of blood rushing from Rebecca’s forehead. She stumbles into a net of mildewed shower plastic. It traps her, sends her spiraling into a cocoon that goes spinning across freezing linoleum.
Rebecca wiggles free and crawls for the carpet, her head cracked and bleeding. Eyelids heavy as she reaches tattered Berber and then keeps going. The air in here is different now. It’s grease. Heavy grease that gets her stomach rumbling.
When the hell was the last time she ate?
Tacos.
Tacos while in the jail cell. That’s what it smells like in here.
“Oh shit.” Her words are mush. She uses the bed to get up on wobbly legs.
The door to her room rests just above the jamb, propped open on the lock bar. A greasy tray of takeout tacos sits on the corner of the bed. Directly across from the mirror. On the ground there’s a crumpled sheriff’s jacket. The old comforter in a pile beside it.
The glass stands silent. Sated. Even the bathroom hammering has ceased.
Rebecca reaches for her clothes, slides back into them.
She climbs onto the bed. It’s safer there than on the floor. Closes her eyes and tries to square her thoughts. Jaime’s gone again and for the first time Rebecca realizes why. The girl is using Rebecca’s body and mind to hide from whatever’s behind those goddamn mirrors.
The reason Rebecca knew to come to Bright Fork at all is because she fished it from Jaime’s subconscious.
Rebecca looks at the mirrors like at last she understands. A humorless smile forms and feels good. She’s getting somewhere and understanding is everything in her line of work.
Rebecca leaps the small chasm between beds. The tacos go bouncing, spilling beautiful grease and pork into the rug. Somehow, she’s still thinking about the manager and how he’s going to be enraged by that.
Her feet touch down on the floor. It’s going to have to be a quick sprint to the door.
And don’t look at the mirror, she thinks. Whatever the hell you do, do not look at it.
She makes a run for it.
Catches Jaime’s reflection in her peripheral as Rebecca’s wet hands clasp the knob, struggling for a grip.
The glass parts again like water, a stream of dark liquid comes flushing for Rebecca as she flings the door and rushes headlong into the night.
Her body slams against the second story deck rail. Her torso bends over it. The sheriff’s squad car sits in the parking lot beneath, orphaned.
Rebecca whirls back around. In the split second remaining before the door clicks shut, in the collapsing space between the jamb and the door, one flickering eye widens with delight as it sees her.
Then it’s gone. Or at least blocked off.
Rebecca goes running, shrieking, and panicking. Rushes to her car and dives behind the seat. She cannot get away fast enough. Fueled by urgency, she flicks the ignition and stomps the gas.
Speeds off remembering something else.
Cassie’s house has a mirror problem, too.
22
The phone rings on her way out to the Pennington place. Rebecca’s skin feels loose and the muscles beneath it are tight.
She’s so desperate for familiarity, she figures Bret can fill that vacuum as good as anyone. Clicks the green answer button and puts the device to her ear.
“What the hell did you do?” Bret says. It’s not a tone she wishes to hear.
“Bret—”
“The police were just here.”
A deep, regretful sigh. “I’m sorry.”
“Christ, there’s no way back. Not from this.”
“I know that. I’m so sorry.”
“Why? Tell me why you did it.”
“. . . I had to.”
“You’re a murderer now, Becks. I mean . . . his parents?”
“They knew.”
“Knew what?”
“What he did. And they had the gall to beg forgiveness on his behalf.”
Bret sounds like he’s hyperventilating. A crashing sound on the other end of the line—glass smashing across the floor. Nobody’s ever wielded impotent rage quite like him. “How could you do this?”
“Someone needs to.”
>
“God, you’ve really lost your fucking mind. You’re nuts.”
“Any port in a storm.” Bret’s father had used that saying when he was a child. Rebecca would get no points for throwing it back in his face tonight, of all nights, but the statement had never been truer. She had needed to kill Paul’s parents, and the worst of it was how little it bothered her after it was done.
“Tell me what that means,” Bret says. “Like, you’ll kill anyone just as long as they’re connected to him?”
“No,” she says. She says that, but thinks, Maybe. “But they knew.”
“The hell did they know?”
“He’s killed three people here. That I know about. They knew he was fixing to do that. I think he might’ve killed more.”
“What did they say to convince you of that? Specifically.”
“It’s what they didn’t say.”
“So you guessed. And for that, you killed them? That’s why you had to escape? Kill the only chance the cops would ever have of finding the boy who—”
“It’s been years. If they wanted to find him, they would’ve put some effort into it.”
“This guy. He didn’t just take Jaime from us. He took you, too. I lost everything because of him.”
Then why aren’t you out here moving heaven and earth to find him? Rebecca isn’t going to ask that, though. She no longer respects Bret enough to bother. A better person might envy his tepid Christian sensibilities. But the truth is Rebecca just thinks him a weakling. Nothing admirable about turning the other cheek against those who punch for a living.
You’ve got to catch that fist and break every bone inside it. That’s the only way to stop it from striking again. Men like Bret have made this terrible world. A world where evil is empowered to prey on children. Collectively, the world tsks its tongue while reading about tragedies over morning corn flakes, only to forget before the day’s out. Distracted by bread and circus.
Emotion is naiveté. Better to kill that part of you before it bites like a dog.
Rebecca wants to say all of this. Instead she closes her eyes and feels the wind rushing through the cracked window. The only thing she does say, and at barely a whisper, is, “It’s better like this. Believe me.”
“The cops are on their way.”
“I don’t think they’ll find me.”
“Bright Fork? They already know where you are.”
“I don’t know where I am.”
“Jesus, girl, you need help. Why won’t you take it?”
“We tried it your way, remember?”
“You barely tried.”
“I was forgetting the best things, not the worst ones.”
“You didn’t give it enough time.”
“How dare you say that to me.”
“Well—”
“No. I’m done. You don’t know what I went through in there.”
“They’ll find you.” The way he speaks, it sounds like he’s hoping for it.
The highway sign hanging down off the overpass seems to be written in old relic and just looking at it makes Rebecca’s eyes heavy. “We’ll see.”
“My God, you’re never going to get out.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It did to me, you know. Once upon a time . . . it really did.”
“Not to me,” Rebecca says. “Not since she died.”
“I loved her, too. You know that, right?”
She ends the call and tosses the phone to the seat.
Pulls over to the side of the road and begs to see Jaime’s bloody face once more as tears fill her eyes. She feels broken and alone and the only thing she needs is a little more time with her baby girl.
“Please,” Rebecca says, voice wracked with sobs. “Honey . . . please.”
Jaime’s there. In the dark, begging her mother to cross over and hug her.
23
NOBODY ANSWERS THE DOOR.
For some reason, Rebecca stands and knocks like manners even matter any more. Her knuckles get tired of inquiring, but the knob refuses to give.
So it’s a slow lap around the house.
The grass is up to her thighs all the way around the perimeter. She’s thankful to be wearing pants for how many ticks are likely waiting to pounce off the ends of these bending blades. The house is pitch black inside and out.
She wonders if this place ever had electricity. Doesn’t seem to be an electric meter on the property, and no power lines come anywhere close.
She feels sick as she spots the slumped scarecrow wobbling against the dwindling dark blue sky in the distance.
The windows here have been hastily blotted in the time since her last visit. Her fingers brush glass and return with a stain that’s nearly dried.
She completes her pass around the house and finds a living shadow on the porch. It stands inside the opened doorway. Beyond it is a house somehow darker than the sky.
“Know what’s funny,” Cassie says. “Knew who you were the second you showed up. I ain’t talking ’bout now, either. I remember your car, sure, so I knew it was you coming back to see me tonight. But . . . the other day . . . when you showed up here? I knew who you were.”
“Hi, Cassie.” Rebecca rises from the tall grass, busted. For the first time, she can’t think of anything else to say.
The young girl laughs on sight, her suspicions confirmed. “Already told you . . . you won’t be the one.” Her voice rises into a tantrum. “I won’t let you.”
“Oh, but that’s not what he wants, is it?”
“I know what he wants,” she screams. Her boisterous thumb stabs her breastplate in an assertion of superiority. “Better than him, I know.”
Rebecca catches a glimpse of those empty eyes in the moon’s glow and realizes what she’s up against. Raging hormones hungry for the only boy her world has ever known.
Sometimes, older boys know this about younger girls. Some might say they use it to their advantage.
In Cassie’s mind, this was never about anything except competition.
Cassie hops down into the grass and storms across the moonlit yard, shoulders rising and falling, psyched up to do something terrible. Or maybe already has. Her naked body wears thick splotches of crimson red, gore that fits like a suit. A stubby, hook-shaped skinning knife drips steadily into the earth.
Rebecca braces for contact, certain she cannot diffuse a blade attack in her current condition. She used to carry pepper spray on the job, more effective than a firearm and without the lasting responsibility of bullets. If things got bad, you could actually spray and pray. What she wouldn’t give for that little canister clipped onto her keychain now. Because when it comes right down to it and you’re squaring off against an armed maniac, you’d rather they pull a gun than a knife.
“Hoped you’d come back,” Cassie says, high on the idea she’s holding all the cards. “Questions you asked . . . way you looked at me . . . some dirty momma wanting to lick the blood from my ass?” Her head tilts back and she roars hysterically. Points the dripping blade outward so Rebecca doesn’t get any ideas. Bitch is young and crazy. Doesn’t mean she’s stupid.
“What have you done, Cassie?”
The girl waves the knife at the door, orders Rebecca to get marching.
The two of them go, and Cassie shoves her along, steering clear of the parlor and the stairs, driving Rebecca instead toward the kitchen at the back of the house. The whole interior reeks of paint. Dark satin is brushed across each of the windows to keep the outside world way the hell out.
And as soon as Rebecca reaches the kitchen, she understands why.
The teenager drops into an old rusted patio chair and catches her lolling head on the inside of a blood-smeared palm. She rubs deep red streaks across her face like camouflage, realizes Rebecca has come no further than the jamb and kicks a seat out toward her.
“Stay a minute,” she says.
Rebecca isn’t interested in sitting. Isn’t paying attention to the girl at all anymore
because . . . what exactly has happened here?
“Hey,” Cassie says, bringing the situation back into orbit. “I told you to sit. Break bread with me, bitch.”
The ‘bread’ Cassie’s looking to break sits on the table, beneath a copse of agitated flies. Here’s a potluck of coiled innards and organs stewing inside a broken ceramic pot.
The smell hits like a punch in the gut, but the young girl doesn’t seem to notice. She’s too busy leaning over her plate of entrails, scooping a forkful into her mouth and scrunching her nose as she chews like a cow.
“What did you do?” Rebecca says.
Cassie’s throat bulges. A couple of harsh swallows choke it all down. Sits back and rubs her belly with a fake, contented sigh. “Wish I had a toothpick. Stomach lining’s the stringiest damn thing. Practically hides in your teeth.”
“Cassie—”
“Swear, I’m gonna have meat sweats if I ever finish this.”
Rebecca forces herself over to the chair but keeps it as far away from the table as she can. Buzzing flies continue to circle in excited patterns. The girl barely cares, seems delighted to have company—this particular company.
“I know you know about The First,” Cassie says.
“I know something about them.”
“Of course. You don’t ask the questions you were asking unless you planned to go all the way.”
“All the way where?”
The girl waves her off that track, uses her dripping fork like a pointer. “Here’s something you don’t know . . . something Paul said. Ima pass it along . . . guess that kinda makes me your history teacher.” She giggles again. “Ever hear of . . . shit, what do you call them?” The girl stares off until her eyes become the size of golf balls. Slaps the table as the answer lands in her brain. “Totems! Totem animals.”
“I think so,” Rebecca says, afraid to agree or disagree. “Sacred animals, right?”
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