by Mira Gibson
“Where do you want it?” Hannah asked with it firm in her grasp.
Mary shot her a crooked smile. “Where do you think?”
Hannah laid the board over the hole, made sure it aligned with the weathered grain of its elderly neighbors, and held it in place, while Mary assessed Hannah’s contribution for errors then took to hammering one nail after another.
“You make it to school?”
Mary snorted a laugh then hit at the nail harder. It took three thwacks to put it flush then she angled the next one in and thwacked it hard as hell.
Hannah supposed that had been her answer.
As the girl worked nails into the board’s perimeter with the kind of savvy Hannah couldn’t pay a contractor to employ over in Gilford, Hannah watched her closely, got a bit lost in the youth of her complexion, the arch of her brow, the softened lines of her nose, mouth, jawline. She could finally see through the makeup to the girl beneath. Mary was beautiful.
“That ought to do it,” she said, straightening up and marveling at a job well done. Mary shot her a crooked grin that struck her as playful and told her she’d done good by helping. Hannah, honest to God, felt praised, and it stirred her slumbering self-esteem just a bit.
“You do all the handy work around here, don’t you?”
Mary shrugged humble with the kind of self-awareness that boasted she didn’t mind wearing the pants.
“Best man for the job, you could say. Whenever I catch Daddy going at it, I’ll put a stop to it right quick. He can fix the sink a hundred times,” a laugh interrupted her point. “I’d rather do it once.”
Mary started off around the house, while Hannah took a beat to recover from how impressed she was. Then she caught up. It was clear they were headed for the dock. Candice was seated at the edge just like she had been the other day.
“So pretty it hurts,” said Mary, taking in the sight before them.
The lake was so still it looked like glass and the trees surrounding it would’ve been silhouettes except the sun lingered low on the horizon turning the sky calming shades of red and rose and lavender that bled so smoothly into the darkness Hannah thought faith just might be possible.
“Candice, schooch,” Mary ordered, as she sat next to her sister and tucked her legs sideways like a mermaid so that she was leaning into the younger one.
Hannah saw how she’d fit on the other side of Candice, as she ventured down the rickety dock, sending ripples through the water with each step. Before she lowered down, Hannah wriggled her coat off, feeling a sudden urge for the cold air to hit her.
“Nice top.” Mary had a grin on her face like she’d just painted a masterpiece. “Fits loose, suggestive,” she observed. “Works well with your jeggins there.”
“Jeggins?”
“Your tight, skinny jeans. That’s what they’re called. Kill me before I get old.”
If that had been a burn against her age, Hannah didn’t feel it.
“Grabbed a belt, too.” She lifted her hem to prove it. The way Mary smiled at her reminded her of when Kendra would hang a terrible piece of Hannah's artwork on the fridge, curled corners folding in on crayon scribbles she’d explained was meant to be a cat and Kendra had beamed at her like she was Picasso incarnate. “What do you have in mind for dinner?”
“Daddy insisted,” she said with an eye roll.
“Dale’s home?”
“Yeah.” Mary chucked something at the water and Candice didn’t even flinch. “Heard you were coming and wanted to do something I guess.”
Out of nowhere, Candice began humming a singular note and sustained it. To Hannah it sounded like a death toll and the feeling was impacted when Candice grew louder, opened her mouth, and let her breath run out on it. It was a long twenty seconds before she was quiet.
“She’s been doing that,” Mary explained. “No sense in asking her to shut it. Close as she’s come to talking so I let it slide.”
Jesus fucking Christ.
“He’s the reason you took off, isn’t he?”
Taken aback, Hannah searched for words that wouldn’t come.
“That horseshit you asked me the other night,” she went on, jumping topics so easily Hannah felt suddenly afraid of her. “I don’t know what that was, but I know my mother. I know her in a way that maybe you don’t.” Mary locked eyes with her. “She didn’t write that.”
The conviction in her gaze was saturated with a child’s need for safety.
“No, I know,” she started, mouth dry. “I'm sure it was some sick... ploy. I’m sorry.”
Mary’s brows lifted and she angled her eyes on her.
“You know something. You found something out?”
Hannah conjured her poker face, though it was a bad one, and reminded herself of how important it was to withhold information. Mary was too Goddamn smart to let her get away with half-truths, and by the same measure she’d be damned if she told her younger sister they’d found Kendra’s severed hand in a box.
“Christ, you have to tell me,” she demanded, talking over Candice, who was the last person who should hear.
“I found some things out about Mom earlier today.” Thinking fast, Hannah deflected and plucked a tidbit Cody had mentioned. “She was getting aloof? Wandering off a lot?”
“Not a lot.”
Tables turned.
“But you noticed her personality changed? She was less in the house and more outside staring off, turning into someone you didn’t recognize?”
“I never said that.” Mary sighed, letting go of her defenses. “All I thought was she was finally off my back. She was always watching me, questioning where I went and what I did.”
It sounded familiar.
“And then one day she wasn’t.” Mary stared off at the water. “Look, you’re here to help not blame me.”
“I’m not blaming you.”
She let out a disgruntled moan. “I don’t care what you have to do or how you have to do it.” She went on, but her tone was resigned. “Just find her.”
“I will.”
“And if you think I can’t handle knowing what’s really going on. You’re wrong. I want to hear it. From you.” She rose, ordering, "Bring her in with you when you come."
Mary was on her feet padding down the dock and across the yard before Hannah could assure her further.
It was then Candice turned, looked at her, met her gaze and really saw her in a way Hannah hadn’t thought her capable.
Hannah waited on baited breath, eyes widening though she reeled it in not to alarm her younger sister. Every part of her was poised should Candice speak.
When she didn’t Hannah encouraged her with, “I’m listening.”
Her lips parted, revealing teeth too big for her head. She sucked in a clipped breath. Hannah waited, eager, as if her hope was an invisible force that could pull it out of her, the words she was readying to utter.
Then Candice let out that tone again. That awful tone that pierced her ears, and the way she bore her gaze through Hannah had the hairs pricking up on the back of her neck.
“Shhh, honey,” she said, not a shred of Mary’s patience, strength, fearlessness. The tone was slicing through her, threatening nightmares to come, but Candice kept on, belting out that shrill tone at her as if to drive her off the dock.
So she fled.
Brisk pace and her feet hit the soggy yard. She quickened and crossed the fifteen yards to the porch. Mary would have something to say to her about leaving their baby sister out there, but Hannah had to escape. And she hated herself for it.
Chapter Six
His work boots cracked into a thin crust of frost and sank into the mud with every step. Feeble suction fought him each time he pulled his foot loose. The marsh smelled like shit and death, leaves and animal carcasses decomposing alongside one another. Where nature came to die was how he thought of this place, the bad side of the lake. He checked for snappers when the vegetation got particularly gnarly, but for the most part he kept
his eyes peeled looking for tracks no matter how faint, anything that would tell him just what in the hell had gone wrong with Dalton. Kid got blasted so often no wonder he’d fucked it up. But shit, how hard could it be fetching some grinders and two cases of beer?
When he came to a cluster of birches Blake realized he’d already covered this stretch of marsh. Man, it was dark as fuck out here, nothing but moonlight bouncing off the water and a hazy glow from the shack up the way. Not that it did him a damn bit of good. The floods dangling off their tin roof like bats barely lit up their withering yard. The dock was a mere tracing.
He’d be a fool to keep on. He’d gotten too close as it was. Yet something kept him there, squinting through the darkness at their windows. Curiosity, he supposed.
He shoved off before he could sink so deep into mud that lake water would seep through his laces, then doubled back, trekking hard until the earth leveled off solid. Quickening his pace once it did, he stalked through the underbrush, burs grabbing hold of his jeans, cattails waving at him as he past. It was minutes before he came to the site.
The foundation protruded through a tangle of bushes that tried to swallow it. Corroded cinder blocks and rotten wood, a pipe or two, rusted out and bent, shot up from the brush. In the moonlight it looked like the opening scene to a horror flick. Goddamn that they couldn’t get a TV down there. This shit-storm was interrupting his whole rhythm of life.
His eyes locked on a hunched shape that shouldn’t have been there. Reflexively, he reached for his knife, popped the sheath like second nature, but a billow of smoke told him this was no wild animal, well, not the kind he’d thought.
“I told you keep in the cellar. The fuck’s the matter with you?”
“Can’t take the smell.”
Travis sucked on his cigarette then hooked his hands together, angling his elbows around each knee where he sat, hunching like a vulture - huge shoulders that made the rest of his body look like the punch line to a bad joke. His beak nose and spindly neck were so long it was like he was begging to get throttled. His ears stuck out comically. But his eyes, man. Travis’ eyes were a warning not to mess with him. Black as sin. You could see your own reflection in them and that’s how you knew God had forgotten to give him a soul.
He should’ve never brought his cousin in on this, but trouble had a way of finding Travis and he was apt to get quick seduced when it did. Better he be wrapped up in Blake’s kind of trouble than his own, or so he’d thought. That was before Dalton had failed to return.
Travis got to his feet, towering over Blake like the grim reaper, and used his boot to crush his cigarette into the soft earth. “Where the fuck is he?”
“Not out here.”
“This is some dark shit, man, and now a brother’s gone missing?”
Blake snarled a grin at him, because the irony was too good to ignore. Deep down in the pit of his stomach his ulcer stung him. His body’s way of telling him what his one-track mind wouldn’t. Dalton’s disappearance was the beginning of the end.
“Go on down.” He ordered.
His cousin glared at him with those black, bird eyes, soulless. Then he caved, muscled the steel door off the foundation and flung it back. It bounced off cinder blocks with a few clatters and he lumbered down the stairs.
Blake scanned the marsh and listened out then pivoted towards the tree line and swept his gaze across it, straining to see the dirt path beyond. It was quiet except for crickets, the occasional belch of a bullfrog, but the coast was clear, hiding in plain sight as they were.
He stepped heavily down the stairs, holding onto the cellar door, cold metal against his flat palm, as it arched downward until it met with the foundation. Then he continued on down, momentum thrusting him until he stomped a landing on the concrete floor.
The cellar, which Blake figured was meant to be a bomb shelter or so its architect had fancied back in the forties when the house was constructed - he imagined the genius eventually realizing ain’t nothing about the world wars would ever hit the country much less this forgotten corner of New Hampshire; was divided into two rooms. The front room, which was where he and Travis were holed up, was a cramped twelve by ten foot square in Blake’s estimation. Nothing but concrete beneath his feet and bricks on all sides, though metal shelves flanked the walls. Canned corn and other canned goods lined those rusted, dusty shelves. Their dates were old enough to make them eligible for showcase at the Goddamn Smithsonian. That’d been at least the twelfth time he’d joked that to himself and every time it made him smirk. He was fucking smart. Too bad he couldn’t share his humor with Travis. His cousin was everything wrong with the state, not enough ambition, too much free time, a tendency towards blazing chemical drugs to help the years go by faster.
Again Travis hunched like a vulture, sitting on his sleeping bag where it lain over an air mattress that wouldn’t keep its shape.
“So what the fuck do we do?” Travis’ knee was bobbing and Blake couldn’t decide if it was nerves or withdrawal.
“Nothing we can do.”
Travis snorted his disgust.
Ordinarily, an attitude like that would warrant a smack to the side of his head, but Blake decided to go easy on him. Dalton should’ve been back. Concern was healthy. But until they got further instructions they were in no position to act now and ask for permission later.
“Getting low on rocks?” he asked Travis and the kid eased with a crooked smile.
“Thought you wanted me to stay straight for the night.”
Blake frowned, implying a change of heart. “Do your thing.”
Anticipation making him jumpy, Travis shoved his fingers down his pocket, stretching and shaking his leg to jostle the bag loose. He pinched a pebble of meth from inside the plastic then dropped it in a glass pipe.
As his cousin got high, Blake relished the sweet sound of silence coming from the back room, and turned his thoughts to the skinny woman who’d been showing up at the shack.
She was all cheekbones and collarbones, jawbones and wrists so thin they looked as if you could snap them like a twig. Her flat chest and flat ass were a shame of a combination, the kind of woman Blake wouldn’t touch unless she felt like being all mouth and had sturdy knees. It riled him up a hair to think about - the insult of these women. Didn’t knockouts come from all over? He took it personally that ain’t no piece of tail around these parts fit the bill. Blake was embarking on the best years of his life and already knew they were wasted.
But it wasn’t her off putting looks that had his anxiety ratcheting up. It was the fact that she’d shown up. She was there. He didn’t like it. He had a sixth sense for these things and knew the bitch was going to fuck things up.
Travis yanked him from deep consideration when he asked, “When’s the green coming through?”
Blake watched him push smoke through his teeth and regretted allowing this. Smoke was filling Travis’ side of the room, wafting over at him and smelling like burnt bleach with a hint of day old dog shit.
“When the job’s done.”
“Why’d you think on it so hard?”
“You distracted me.”
Travis turned stiff. His lips thinned out, itching for confrontation.
“You want me high so I don’t know what the fuck’s going on, is that it?”
Blake challenged him by laughing, though he had to admit it sounded contrived.
“What’s so funny?”
“You wouldn’t know what the fuck was going on if you were stone cold sober and it was broad daylight.”
Travis let it go to hit his pipe then held it in his lungs, chest puffed out before he released slowly.
“I didn’t sign up for this shit with the hand, man.”
“I didn’t either.”
Holding gazes, the memory of who they used to be as kids struck him. White trash, but too young to realize, swinging off tires on a hot, humid day, their world no bigger than Hermit Lake. Blake had been tubby, teased for it. Travis had been all
limbs, gangly. Clothes hadn’t fit either of them right until Blake grew into his weight, evened out, and the girls started noticing him, the women, even when he’d been fourteen. Travis hadn’t been so lucky, but Blake was sure to throw him scraps. He was kind like that even if the girl was tired or too drunk to understand, but mostly they’d been happy to give favors - Blake sitting back on his heels, thumbs hooked on his jeans, big hands angling over his bulge, drawing the poor girl's gaze downward, her catching an eyeful of his promise as Trav fucked her, Travis so thrilled he didn’t care his cousin was watching, didn't care the girl was lost in the happy place between Blake's legs. That’s what real love looked like, and Blake had given and given.
“Why do you keep drifting off like that?”
“I’m not drifting off.” But he had. He’d been doing it more and more. It was the hand. Ever since, he couldn’t seem to keep anchored to his immediate surroundings.
“If there’s anymore bullshit like that, Blake, I’m telling you, I got to be out.”
Blake nodded, but a pang of knowing they were trapped hit his heart. He didn’t have the stomach to tell Travis, though. So he got to his feet instead, headed for the stairs.
“Where are you going?”
“Ain’t you starving?”
Travis confirmed with a cock of his head, chin jutting out, eyes blinking slow like the meth was sweeping through him.
“I won’t be long.”
“I don’t like being alone with her, man. She moans. It gets under my skin.”
Reiterating, he affirmed, “I won’t be long, Trav.”
But Blake already knew it’d take him longer than getting two grinders at the 7-Eleven. He emerged through the trap door, gaze locked in the direction of the shack and the skinny bitch who shouldn’t be there.
Chapter Seven
Cody angled the nose of his pickup next to Hannah’s silver Taurus in front of the Cole house.
Jesus fucking Christ, look at that thing, he thought.
It’d been well over ten years since he’d seen the house and Christ was it worse for the wear. Not to mention it hadn't exactly been in peak physical condition to start with. It was hard to believe a family could survive inside unless it was a family of raccoons.