"The flowers were a nice gesture, though," Maria said.
Diana stopped. "The what?"
Maria nodded toward a bouquet that sat on the radiator beneath her mother's window. "The flowers. I thought you sent them."
"No, I didn't."
Diana had been so intent on studying her mother's condition that she hadn't noticed the flowers on the other side of the room. And it wasn't unusual for flowers to occasionally appear there. No one ever sent them to her mother, but from time to time, funeral homes and churches donated their extras to Vienna Woods, and the nurses and orderlies distributed them to the patients' rooms as a way to manufacture a little cheer.
"Aren't they a donation?" Diana said.
Maria frowned. "No. I saw the duty nurse sign for them when they came in. They had your mother's name on them."
Diana felt uneasy as she walked across the room to the bouquet and dug around in the stems until she found a small white envelope with the name "Janet Greene" written on it in an unfamiliar hand. She cupped the envelope in her hand and carried it with her past Maria and out into the hall. Maria followed close behind and said, "Well, who are they from?"
"I'm sure it's just a friend," Diana said.
"But don't you want her to know who they're from?" Maria said. "Diana?"
But Diana had moved far ahead of Maria, and was almost to the stairwell when she turned back and said, "She isn't going to know or care anyway? Right?"
Diana didn't wait for a response. She went down the stairs and out to the parking lot where the rain had stopped and the night was cool, the scent of ozone in the evening air. Diana didn't look at the envelope until she was settled in the driver's seat of the car, and even then she thought about just throwing it away and ignoring it.
She must know someone or have a friend, right? There had to be a reason for those flowers to arrive with her mother's name on them.
But Diana knew. Her mother wasn't in touch with anybody. She couldn't be in touch with anybody. Her relationships and friendships had faded away along with her memory, and moving from Westwood to Leesburg meant that no one came to visit. And no one sent her flowers. Not even Diana.
Her hand trembled as she tore at the envelope. She almost ripped the card, and when she got it out, she wished she had.
Diana—Make your mother happy—find the girl in the woods.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
It had to be Kay Todd. It was the only explanation that made sense.
Diana drove toward home, the note on the passenger seat next to Kay's accordion folder. The handwriting looked masculine, but that only meant that a man took the order in the flower shop. Diana reached over and picked up the card again.
Hurst Florists. 1112 Main St. New Cambridge, OH.
She could call them tomorrow, ask who sent the flowers, clear the whole thing up easy as anything.
But what if they weren't from Kay?
She felt a tickle of fear at the base of her neck. Kay wanted her to think that way, wanted to keep her nervous and edgy. On the run.
Diana wouldn't give her the satisfaction.
She studied the highway ahead of her, the familiar open road between New Cambridge and Vienna Woods that took so much of her time. The moon was nearly full, a white spotlight in the inky black sky. The rain had passed and the clouds were mostly gone. It looked familiar enough, like those half-remembered scenes she saw in her mind. It could be...
She guided the car to the side of the road, easing to a stop and throwing up pebbles and dirt against the undercarriage. She didn't turn the engine off right away, but sat with the headlights illuminating the surrounding area. She saw a rusted and tilted barbed wire fence, and beyond that rows and rows of trees, the trunks dark, the leaves still clinging in advance of fall. The car hummed softly, the engine in neutral.
She turned the ignition off, darkening the lights.
Her heart thumped. She heard the sound in her own ears, a steady, rhythmic beat. A fifty-fifty chance. Maybe she didn't have much time. She believed the place was out there, the moonlit glade...its buried secrets.
She pushed the car door open.
They found her once, doing the same thing. A year after Rachel disappeared, during a time when the visions were at their most intense, Diana had driven a few miles out of town, out to a wooded area near the small regional airport that served the surrounding county. She didn't remember the drive there, nor did she clearly remember the impulse that sent her. She only knew that a surveying crew, three men who were measuring the land for a potential subdivision, found her on all fours in a clearing, digging into the soil and muttering about Rachel.
They called an ambulance, assuming that she was on drugs or had escaped from a local mental hospital, and Diana only remembered coming to in the emergency room, her mother by the side of the bed. Her fingernails were broken and bleeding, her clothes so dirty they had to be thrown away.
And since then, she had repeated this act on several occasions, and always while conscious and in full control of her faculties. If she had done it other times, wandered around in the apartment or even outside of it looking for Rachel, she didn't know.
Didn't really want to know.
The breeze picked up, shivering the leaves. They rustled like dry parchment, a sandpaper whisper. Diana didn't bother zipping up her jacket. She stepped past the front of her car, down the slight embankment into the berm and then up the other side where she gingerly, carefully, slipped through an opening in the barbed wire that was just big enough for her body. She smelled the rich scent of earth, and the dust of the fallen leaves filled her nostrils with a sneeze. But she held it in.
She stepped between the closest trunks, finding more trees and still more behind them, so that it felt like moving through a crowd of people, all of them taller and stronger and more imposing.
Her foot came down on a large rock, turning her ankle a bit, and even though she knew she needed to stop, that to be out there made no sense whatsoever, she continued to go on. She had to look. She couldn't go back.
She titled her head up. The canopy of trees blocked the moonlight and the stars. The ground was cast in darkness, and everything around her became shadowy and indistinct. She watched where she stepped, but there was little she could see. Large objects she could avoid, but small ones might trip her up.
Up ahead, she saw a break in the trees. The moonlight silvered across the forest floor, whitening the rocks, making them shine like polished bone.
It looked just like the visions.
She moved forward, more quickly now, disregarding the danger of falling or tripping.
Or getting lost. Losing her bearings or a sense of where the car was.
She couldn't stop. She had to move forward.
Diana paused at the edge of the clearing, resting her hand against the rough bark of a tree trunk. Her eyes had adjusted to the dark, and coupled with the moonlight, she was able to see the entire open area. There was nothing there. No people. No animals.
No bones.
"Rachel," she whispered.
The wind had slowed, leaving everything still.
She said the name again, like an incantation or prayer.
"Rachel."
On the far side of the clearing, a twig snapped. Diana jerked her head in that direction. She saw movement, heard the rustling of brush. But just as quickly, it stopped. Whatever had been there scurried away, off into the night. An animal. Nothing more, nothing less.
What am I doing here?
"Rachel."
She said the name again, but by that point, reality had set in. She was a woman, alone and unarmed, off the side of the highway in the woods that she didn't know very well.
She needed to leave. There was nothing for her there. It wasn't the place she so desperately sought.
She retraced her steps, moving quickly, and in a few minutes, she was relieved to see her car again. She climbed back to the road, arriving just as a semi went by, leaving a rush of wind in its wak
e, enough to nearly shake Diana off her feet.
She welcomed the roar, the buffeting of the air, the sharp sting of reality.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Diana waited in an alley just off High Street. It was after midnight, but the alley glowed with artificial light. There were two bars down there, holes-in-the-wall that attracted students from Fields. Some of them came out, but not the one she was looking for, so she waited. At times like these, she wished she smoked, if only for something to do with her hands. Rainwater stood in pools, and Diana paced a while before leaning against the wall and kicking at loose pebbles with her shoe. She didn't feel like going in among the smoke and the crowds and the noise.
Around 12:30, Jason emerged from Uncle Nick's. Alone. He started in the other direction, away from Diana, so she called out to him. At first, he didn't hear her.
"Hey," she said, raising her voice.
He stopped, looked back, squinting. "Diana?"
"It's me."
"This is a surprise." Jason wore a leather jacket and a black T-shirt. His head was newly shaved. He came toward her but didn't extend his arms for a hug. He wasn't that kind of guy.
"I wanted to see you," Diana said.
"I have all night."
"Not that way," she said. "I wanted to talk to you."
"Oh." He sounded disappointed, then caught himself. "Is something wrong? Do you want to get coffee?"
"I don't want to be in a public place," she said.
"We can go to your place," he said.
"How about yours? I'd feel...it would be better there."
* * *
Jason offered coffee. Diana asked for a beer.
"Suit yourself," he said.
He opened two and brought them to the small table in his kitchen. Diana took a long drink and looked around. She saw his police department uniform shirt, the pile of criminal justice textbooks from school. She admired the sense of casualness that pervaded Jason's life, the way everything ran off him like rain through a gutter. No scars, no injuries. Take it as it comes.
"I was wondering when I'd hear from you again," he said. "I heard you were in the station today."
"I had to talk to Dan."
"Interesting."
"It wasn't like that. It was professional."
"You want your job back?" he said.
Diana shook her head. "Never."
"It's not a bad job, really. I can afford to go to school, get some good experience. I always thought you'd go to school, get a degree in something."
"Maybe. Someday."
Jason nodded. "Sure."
Diana knew he wasn't going to ask her what was wrong again. He would be content to sit there all night, talking and drinking until the sun came up, but he wouldn't press her or push her. She liked that—most of the time. She liked him. But sometimes she wondered if she needed people to push and press her more, to draw her out into the world.
Was Kay Todd doing that for her?
"I've had a crazy couple of days. I just wanted your input on a few things."
"I've got all night. If I show up late for work tomorrow, I'll tell the Captain I was with you."
"Nice."
"I try to be," he said.
Diana took another drink and told him about Kay Todd showing up at her apartment. She relayed Kay's story and her promise to supply information about Rachel provided Diana helped find out what happened to Margie. Jason listened to the whole thing, nodding along and drinking his beer, but not asking any questions. She liked that about him, too. He didn't ask a lot of questions, even when Diana ended with the details about "Rhinestone Cowboy" and the flowers sent to her mother. He raised his eyebrows a little, an almost comical gesture, but he didn't ask any questions.
"I've never heard of this girl," he said when Diana finished.
"Me either. And there's nothing about it on the internet. But the Captain knows about her. He was one of the first on the scene."
"That's why you went to see him." Jason whistled. "The old man must have been a rookie back then."
"He was."
"So this old lady finds you through your website, looks you up and presses you to help her out. She sends flowers to your mom to add more heat." He shrugged. "Maybe she does know something about your sister, but I doubt it's anything meaningful. I understand why you're freaked out by all of this, but it's easily explained. We can file a complaint, give her a talking to, and she'll stay away."
"How did she know that about the song, Jason?"
"Is it on the website or in the papers?"
"No." She shook her head. "I don't think so."
"But it could have been. Or maybe she met someone who knew Rachel. Westwood's only an hour away. It's not such a big world."
Diana started to doubt her own judgments. In a way, she felt grateful for the calm that Jason brought her. But there was still a part of her that didn't want to be calm, that wanted to be stirred up and agitated for a change.
"There's more," she said.
"Okay."
"Something started happening to me when Rachel disappeared. Something I can't quite explain." Diana picked at the label on her beer bottle. She had never told anyone about this. Not her mother, not a doctor. No one. She wasn't sure she liked what she was about to reveal, but she felt she needed to do it. "Not long after she was gone, I started seeing something. It was like a dream, except I was awake. Some sort of vision or hallucination would overtake me at certain moments, and I would see a place in my mind. But it was more than just seeing the place. I was there. It was real. As real as you are right now."
"What is this place? What do you see?"
"Woods. Dark, thick woods. At night. The moon is shining, and there's a clearing."
Diana had seen the images so many times, and she knew them so well, that describing them made her realize how inadequate words were for the task she had at hand. She felt like her words would fail, and the only way to truly convey the meaning of what she saw would be to take Jason there.
But she knew that was impossible. She couldn't find the place, didn't even know if it existed.
But it had to. If it didn't, if it were all in her head then...Vienna Woods, here I come.
"What happens there?" Jason said.
"I dig."
"Dig?"
Diana nodded. "I see something on the ground in the moonlight. Something white. It's a human bone, and I drop to my knees and I dig and I dig until I pull the bone out of the ground." She swallowed. "It's Rachel. It's Rachel's skull, and I pull it out of the ground."
"Jesus." Jason's eyes were wide, full of sympathy. "It sounds like a nightmare."
"But it's not. It only comes to me—or it used to come to me—when I was awake."
"Used to?"
"It mostly stopped a few years ago, before I moved here. It's only happened a few times since then. I can still remember it vividly, but it doesn't come upon me that way anymore."
"You want another one?" Jason said, pointing at the empty bottles. He didn't wait for Diana to answer before he went to the refrigerator and brought back two more. He sat down, took a drink from his, and let out a soft belch. "I guess you're lucky. You moved on, time passed, and these...visions...stopped. It's not surprising, really. Time heals, I suppose."
"It's supposed to," Diana said.
"If you believe fortune cookies and greeting cards."
"But seeing that woman yesterday, talking to her, that brought it all back again." Diana held the cold beer bottle between her two hands on the tabletop. "I used to go looking for that place, that clearing in the woods. I thought that if I could find it, if I could find that spot, I'd find out what happened to Rachel."
"You thought she was buried there."
"Yes. But it wasn't that simple. I just thought I would know something, that some part of the mystery would be put to rest."
Jason scratched the top of his head. "You know, Diana, you're telling me all of this stuff, and I get the feeling you think it all makes you
crazy or odd or different in some way. But I have to be honest, nothing you're telling me seems that unusual. You lost a member of your family, and you're trying to get over it. That could take a lifetime."
"You make it sound so logical, so...normal."
"I think it is."
"Except I didn't always go looking for that place by choice."
"What do you mean?" Jason said.
"Sometimes I'd go there...to the middle of the woods. But I wouldn't know how I got there. And a couple of times, I didn't wake up. People found me, digging in the woods with my bare hands, and they'd have to call an ambulance or bring me back to town, and I wouldn't remember any of it, and I wouldn't tell anyone why I was there. Except I knew what I was looking for. I always knew."
Jason nodded slowly. Diana could imagine the wheels turning in his brain, the reassessment of everything he thought about her.
"It's bad, isn't it?"
"It doesn't sound like a walk in the park on a sunny day."
Diana sighed. "There's more."
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
"I've never told you the full story of how Rachel disappeared, have I?" Diana said.
The Girl In The Woods Page 10