"Jason...I feel it coming..."
"Diana?"
But she was gone.
She was in the clearing...
...where she saw the trees and the large area of ground where nothing grew. Just the black rich earth and the moonlight shining off the rocks, giving them a frosted glow. The wind picked up, carrying a chill that caused Diana's arms to break out in gooseflesh. And the breeze also carried a scent, something sweetly rotten and decaying. Diana stared at the rocks and at the ground, as though something there would reveal itself to her. And in a moment, it did.
At first, the movement was subtle. Something wiggled in the dark earth, something small and black, its body also reflecting the moonlight. Then she saw another and another. They writhed and squirmed in the black night, their bodies climbing over each other, their movements becoming more frenzied the longer Diana stared. Bugs. Squirming, black beetles.
And then the earth itself started to churn. The ground buckled and bubbled, shifting as though something larger were just below the surface trying to break free. Diana watched, unable to look away. Something thin and pale broke through the dark ground. It wriggled like one of the bugs, and soon two or three more just like it surfaced. It took a moment for Diana to recognize the squirming, clawing objects. They were human fingers, a handful of them, struggling to break free of the earth that imprisoned them.
Diana knew then. It was Rachel.
She dropped to her knees and plunged her hands into the earth, digging and churning the ground with her hands and fingers, trying to free her sister.
"Rachel," she said. "I'm coming."
But the faster and harder Diana dug, the deeper her hands sank into the dirt. The bugs crawled over her hands and up her arms. Diana reached out and tried to grab hold of the fingers in the dirt, but when she tried to get a grip, they slipped away like wet soap.
So she dug more, furiously displacing the earth with her hands, moving great fistfuls like a dog looking for a lost and precious object. Sweat rolled down her forehead and into her eyes. She felt its wetness creep down her back beneath her shirt. She dug and dug and then...
...her hand bumped against something hard and solid, something thin. She closed her hand around it and pulled. There was resistance, like the object was anchored into the dirt, or perhaps held there by some force she couldn't see. But Diana kept tugging and pulling, using all of her strength, and eventually the object came free, sending Diana backward with the force of her exertion.
She held the object up in the moonlight. It was a human arm bone, gray and dirty and weathered by years in the ground. She knew it belonged to Rachel.
"No!"
She threw the bone aside and dug again. She dug even faster, the dirt flying off to the side in great spouts.
"I'm coming, Rachel. I won't let you go. I'm coming."
And she dug and dug until...
...arms grabbed her from behind. Strong arms.
Diana struggled against them, thrashing and pulling.
"No," she said. "No!"
"Diana..."
"No."
She freed herself from the hold and fell back to the ground. She started digging again.
Except she wasn't digging in the same dark earth.
She wasn't in the clearing anymore. The grass was green and lush. There were lights ahead, bright lights.
She tried to orient herself.
"Diana," the voice said again. She knew the voice, knew it well, and the realization slowly dawned. She wasn't in the clearing. She had never been in the clearing.
She stopped digging and tearing at the grass. She turned and looked behind her.
"Oh, shit," she said. "Dan."
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Diana protested while Dan helped her into the house.
"I'm fine," she said. "I'll just go..."
"You're not fine," he said.
She knew he was right. She could barely stay on her feet as he guided her through the living room, the TV playing something masculine, something from the History Channel about World War II, and then down the hallway on the right to the bathroom. He brought her in there and let her sit on the edge of the tub. Diana looked at her hands. She was covered with dirt up to her elbows, and several of her fingernails were broken or cracked. The bright fluorescents burned her eyes, but not as much as the shame she felt at being caught outside her ex-lover's house, digging in the yard and muttering like a lunatic.
"Clean yourself up," Dan said. It was more of an order. He still wore his uniform, which meant he couldn't have been home for long.
"Just let me collect my thoughts for a minute," Diana said. "Then I'll go."
"What were you doing out there? What's going on?"
Diana couldn't find the words. There weren't any. How did she explain this to anyone, let alone Dan?
"I came to talk to you about the Foley case," she said.
Dan started to say something, but before the words came out, Janine appeared in the bathroom doorway. Her eyes were wide with disbelief as she stared at Diana, like she had just found a giant insect crawling through her kitchen.
"What is she doing here?"
Dan looked confused, then nervous. His lips twitched, and he looked from Janine to Diana and then back to Janine. Diana thought she might have to step in and answer for him, but he finally found his tongue.
"It's about work," he said.
"Work? She's filthy."
"Janine just..." Dan looked at Diana again. "Can we just talk in the hall for a minute while she gets cleaned up?"
"What?"
But Dan, thankfully, managed to shuffle Janine out into the hallway and close the bathroom door behind him. But it didn't block out all of the noise. Diana heard the raised voices spoken through gritted teeth. She couldn't make out the words, but she didn't have to. She knew that Janine was telling Dan to get his mistress the hell out of her house or else.
Diana pushed herself to her feet. She felt exhausted, the typical response to one of her episodes, what she liked to think of as the "vision hangover." Her head ached like she'd tied one on, and she leaned against the sink for support with one hand while she turned the tap on with the other. She let the water run until it grew comfortably warm, then started scrubbing her arms and hands clean using liquid soap from a dispenser that matched the bathroom tile. While she scrubbed and watched the dirt from Dan's front yard swirl down the drain, she tried to make sense of what had happened that evening.
The visions were back.
She had hoped to have left them far behind, in Westwood along with everything else from her childhood and adolescence, but that plan had never worked. Things always followed along, so why should the visions be any different? They were a part of her apparently, a part that wasn't going to go away. When Mrs. Platcher, her mother's former roommate, finally died or caught the bus she was always looking for, they could clear her bed for Diana, and she could climb right in and join her mom in Looneyville, a mother-daughter crazy act the likes of which the world had never seen.
As always, she remembered the vision well, better than she remembered the dreams she had at night. Unlike her dreams, the visions had no vagueness, no sense of something glimpsed out of the corner of the eye. The visions came at her head on, leaving no doubt about what she had seen and felt. But there was something new this time, something more disturbing than any of the other times she had visited the clearing searching for her sister.
This was the first time she sensed, and truly felt, that Rachel was dead.
In the past, even as she saw the clearing and sometimes even dug in the ground, she always felt a sense of hope, a feeling that she was moving toward something. An answer. A clue. A hint of some kind. But tonight, discovering the bone, holding it in her hand, it felt for the first time that hope might have vanished, and she understood exactly what Kay had been talking about that first day in the diner when she asked Diana if she could still feel Rachel.
Diana wasn't sure she could
anymore.
Maybe Rachel was gone. Truly gone.
Diana hadn't known it before, but the visions clarified it for her—she really wasn't ready to admit it yet.
Tears burned at the back of her eyes, and her chin quivered. She tried to hold it in, but a sob slipped out through her lips, a gasping hiccup that she hoped the running water covered.
"No," she whispered to herself. "Not here. Not now."
She closed her eyes and pressed her hands against the lids, trying to hold it in. She took three deep breaths in succession and shook her head.
"No."
She switched the water to cold and splashed handfuls into her face, hoping to counteract any blotches or redness. The water felt good and helped her calm down. When she shut the tap off, she listened and heard no other words coming from the hallway. Diana couldn't decide if that was a good sign or not. She took a towel from the rack and patted her face and arms dry, then made sure there was no dirt left in the sink, nothing that could inflame Janine any more than she already was. As Diana hung the towel back up, she realized she couldn't blame Janine. Diana was the invader here, the one who had upset everything. If the roles were reversed, she'd feel the same way.
Before Diana could open the door and stick her head out, a tentative knock sounded. She pulled it open and saw Dan standing there, his face red, his eyes tired. He'd had a hellaciously long day at work and then came home to all of this. Diana thought she should have felt worse for him, but she didn't.
"Diana? Are you okay?"
"I'm just going to go."
"No," he said. "Let's talk. But we have to do it on your way to the car."
* * *
They were halfway across the lawn, approaching the spot where Diana had been digging, before anything was said, and then it was just Diana mumbling an apology she didn't think she owed but felt obligated to deliver. She was more sorry for herself, she knew, sorry to have been exposed as fragile and shaken in front of both Dan and Janine.
Dan ignored the apology.
"What did you want to talk to me about?" he said.
Diana shook her head. "You're not going to like it," she said.
"If you want some inside dope on the Foley case, I don't know anything more than what they're saying in the papers. I really don't. And you should let it go—"
"I've heard that before. Let it go." They were down by the street. Diana looked back at Dan's house and saw the curtains move in a bedroom window. Janine watching them, no doubt making sure Diana left without planting a wet goodbye kiss on her husband's face. If only it were that simple. "It's not about the Foley girl. Not directly anyway."
"Then what?"
"Margie Todd."
Dan's face changed. The anger and tension drained away in favor of something else, something that almost resembled fear.
"What about her?"
"I read an old newspaper article about her, written right after she disappeared. In the article you said that it looked like she was taken, that there was nothing to indicate she ran away. You sounded so certain. But in your office you told me that she ran away. Why the change?"
"You've never changed your mind?" he said, but he didn't sound convinced.
"Tell me what's really going on, Dan. Somebody took that girl, Margie Todd. She didn't run away. She was having an affair with her boss, John Bolton, and then she disappeared. What do you think happened?"
"We investigated Bolton, and we cleared him. He had an alibi. Solid as rock. You know, not every girl who has an affair with her boss is an innocent victim."
"What does that mean?"
"Maybe Margie Todd pursued him. Maybe she broke it off and ran away. Lots of girls run when the going gets tough, Diana. It happens."
Diana felt the tears burning her eyes again, and again she fought them off. She wasn't going to let them out here, not in front of Dan. Not again.
"As I recall, you made the first move," she said. "And I'm sure John Bolton did the same. It's an old tradition."
A car turned the corner and came toward them, its headlights cutting through the night. Dan squinted against the glare, then turned to Diana again.
"You ask me what's going on here, Diana? I want to know what's going on with you. Showing up at my house. Digging in my front yard like a rat. And then accusing me of things, suggesting I know something about a crime but am choosing not to do anything about it." He gestured behind him. "My house is in order now, finally. Maybe you need to get yours in shape. Get a job or go to school. Or move on. It's a big world, and you can do a lot in it, but you won't do anything if you keep chasing after ghosts. The Foley girl was kidnapped. And we'll find who's responsible. Soon. Margaret Todd and your sister...they're long gone. You don't want to turn into a lonely old woman with nothing to keep yourself company except bitter feelings about the past like that Todd woman."
"Or my mother," Diana said, mostly to herself.
The car had stopped in the street, and the driver's door opened. Diana looked up. It was Jason. He looked confused and worried, and he took two quick steps toward them and stopped.
"Are you okay?" he said. "I've been looking all over."
"She's fine," Dan said. "Make sure she gets home okay."
"Sure thing, Captain," Jason said.
Dan turned and walked back to his house, and Jason draped his arm over Diana's shoulders. He started guiding her to the car like she was a child, but she wriggled out of his grip.
"I'm okay," she said. "Don't listen to what he says. I'm okay."
* * *
Diana drove herself home, with Jason following close behind. His headlights filled her rearview mirror like giant, watchful eyes, ones she couldn't escape. She simply wanted him gone. She wanted to be alone, to not think anymore about everything that swirled around her. Maybe Dan was right. She should focus on her own life and let the problems of others go. If not, she'd be Kay Todd in forty years, filling a broken-down trailer with cigarette butts and resentments.
After she pulled into the parking lot, she turned off the ignition and waited without getting out of the car, hoping that Jason would take the hint and drive off. No such luck. He took a spot near hers and climbed out of his car, which meant she had to deal with him at a time when she had no capacity to deal with anyone. She opened her door and stepped into the cool night.
Jason just stood there.
"I'm fine," she said. "You can go on."
"Are you really?" he said.
Diana could read the mixture of concern and confusion in his eyes. She understood but didn't have the patience for it.
"Yes, I am."
"What were you doing at the captain's house? I mean—" He stopped himself. "It's none of my business, but if you're starting something up with him again, I'd just as soon know now."
"So that's what you're really worried about, whether I'm shacking up with the Captain again? You're not really worried about me."
"I want to be prepared, you know, for when everything falls apart again." Jason shrugged, a helpless gesture. "Can we talk inside rather than out here?"
"No, I don't want to talk. I just want to be left alone."
Jason let a long breath out through his nose. He placed his hands on his hips.
"You know," he said, "I thought about you all day. I thought about how much you care about that girl who disappeared, Margie, and how much you want to find her."
"Jason."
"And I found myself wishing that I could care that much, that I could do for this Foley girl what you're trying to do for the Todd girl. You know? And it kept me going all day, through all the woods and all the fields and all the bullshit, it kept me going. And you know what else, Diana? They're wrong about the Foley girl. They're wrong. They're looking in the wrong place."
"What do you mean?" Diana said.
"They're looking east of town, far away from where she liked to ride. But it doesn't make any sense. Who would kidnap someone out in the middle of nowhere like that and then drive the person
they kidnapped so far away and just dump the bike like they were throwing away a paper cup? Would you do it that way?"
"I don't know what you mean."
"I mean that people are creatures of habit, right? They do the same things over and over again because it's easy or because it's safe or because they like it. Right?"
"Right."
"So the Foley girl rode her bike on the same route all the time, out there in the middle of nowhere on County Road 600. And that's where someone took her. But we're looking in the other direction just because we found her bike out there. But why would someone who lived east of town be driving around on County Road 600? Why? It doesn't make sense, does it?"
"You're saying that whoever took her probably lives out where the Foley girl likes to ride?"
"Of course. And the bike was dumped east of town to throw us off. It looks like it was planted, right there on the side of the road. Do you know that the woman who found the bike is eighty-five years old? A retired schoolteacher with cataracts and she can see the bike on the side of the road. Maybe it was meant to be found."
"I don't know," Diana said. "Think of all the stupid people and the stupid crimes they commit. Maybe it happened exactly the way they think it happened."
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