by CJ Lyons
A short time after Hal left, Sarah hoisted her pack on her shoulder and let the backdoor slam shut behind her. No need to lock it—she had nothing left for anyone to steal.
She craned her neck to look up at the mountain towering above her. The summit wasn't visible, not from here. A crowd of trees, just coming into their foliage, waved in the wind as if inviting her to join them. Two hawks spiraled overhead, high enough to appear as small black dots against the afternoon sun.
She shrugged her pack into place and began hiking up the trail. It would be a longer trip up, but this felt better than driving. As if she truly was following the footsteps her heart heard every night—at least on the nights when she could sleep.
The trail curved along the side of Snakehead, coming to a clearing where the Lower Falls could be seen in the distance. Sarah forced herself to stop even though she'd come less than a mile from her house. She looked out over the edge of the gorge down to the dam, the reservoir, up river to the falls. Then she turned to stare downstream at Hopewell: a hodgepodge of whitewashed siding, asphalt shingles, and brick poking through the trees. The only distinct landmark was St. Andrew's bell tower reaching heavenward.
Her heart sped up as the clearing closed around her. Trees and brush crowded together as if preparing for an ambush. This was it. This was where Wright had caught up with them.
Silence reigned here. The buzz of gnats and mosquitoes vanished, soft evergreen needles muffled her footsteps and filled the air with the damp, sweet scent of pine. All she could hear was the sound of her own breathing; even the roar of the distant waterfall was subdued. As if this was a holy place, a sacred place.
She turned in a full circle, her mind filling in physical details two years had erased. The clump of mountain laurel that had been splattered by Sam's blood, the dirt beneath the red oak that had turned into a small lake of crimson after he fell, the churned up leaves where he'd tried to fight Wright, spilling a small amount of the killer's blood, the hemlock tree where the camera card had been found....
She blinked and the sun-dappled clearing transformed into crime scene photos. Blinked again and reality returned. Sarah swallowed hard, found herself breathing through her mouth as if trying to avoid the scent of death.
Her hands gripped her pack straps so tightly the nylon webbing bit into her skin. Many times, swaddled in the mountain's mist, she'd fled here in the middle of the night, trying her best to cross over, commune with the shadows. One night last year, she'd almost made it. The night she'd given up, when she'd decided to break with this world and surrender to the next.
Sarah waved her hand in front of her face as if chasing cobwebs away. She hitched her pack, settling it into a comfortable position, and marched through the clearing without looking back.
August 30, 2006
This will probably be my last entry—who needs words when we'll be together soon? Sorry if it's hard to read, I'm sitting under an oak in the clearing above the dam. You know the place. You died here.
At least that's what the experts finally decided. The rain came too soon for them to do a complete analysis, but based on the photos Hal and his men took, they figured you tried to save Josh, fought Damian Wright, managed to hurt him a little before he killed you. They found a few tracks from a man moving slowly, possibly carrying a heavy object and decided that, for whatever reason, Wright carried you away before returning to take Josh.
Hal doesn't know that I've read the forensic reports. He keeps his copies locked up, refuses to let me see them. But Alan was finally able to get a copy of the FBI report—Freedom of Information Act, they call it.
It sure as hell freed me. Even if Damian won't talk to me, won't look me in the eyes or give you and Josh back to me, even so....now I know.
One year today. 365 days—and nights, god, how I've come to despise those wretched lonely nights, crawling between cold sheets, my feet sliding across to your side of the bed, searching for warmth and never finding any.
Nights that stretch out to infinity, too long and too empty for any human heart to bear. Nights that too soon give way to a new day, to waking up with my stomach tight and the house too silent, too quiet, knowing that I have to face one more day pretending to be alive when really I feel already dead.
It was easier when school was in session. I stayed late, volunteered to advise any extracurricular activity I could, avoided the hallway where the kindergarten and preschool classrooms are at all costs. And this summer has been spent in and out of hot cars, too-cold courtrooms, moldy motel rooms. For awhile I thought I might find you down there in that Texas heat, I spent every moment searching for the courage to face Damian.
But I failed. Now here I am. Buried in the nighttime mist Snakehead is famous for, fog so thick you need a machete to cut through it—that's what you used to say. Now I embrace the fog. If I can't see clearly what's moving beyond it, who's to say it can't bring me you and Josh?
That's the wine talking. You know me—one glass and I'm whistling Dixie. Tonight I've almost finished an entire bottle, saving just enough to take my medicine with.
One year. That's how long mourning is meant to last. One year is all they give you. I seemed to have squandered my year with little to show for it. Instead of completing my journey via Kubler-Ross, I seemed to have taken a detour into despair. It hurts just as much today as it did that first night—maybe more. Then I was numb, in denial, shock. Now I'm awake, aware, alone.
Even Alan seems to think I'm over losing you and Josh. I feel like a secret addict, hiding my drug of choice. Melancholia they called it when the great writers, Poe, Joyce, Hemingway, Browning, Faulkner, suffered it. They used their despair to create art. What have I created?
Worse, if I give it up, if I give you up, allow myself to "move on"—what do I have left?
You wouldn't believe how popular I was today. Everyone in town asking me how I was doing, did I have plans for tonight? Even the Colonel's wife invited me over to dinner, her face all screwed up in a fake smile filled with pity. I told them all that I had plans with Alan. Told Alan I had plans with the Colonel.
When really, I have plans with you and Josh.
That's the last of the pills. See you soon, my loves....
CHAPTER 9
Wednesday, June 19, 2007: Snakehead Mountain
Brilliant shafts of sunlight lanced through the trees, dancing on the path before her. Sarah allowed them to lull her into a mindless rhythm. This area had already been searched multiple times, she knew she wouldn't find anything new around here.
The last time she'd been up here, she had awoken in the back of an ambulance, shivering, her clothes cut open, wet with vomit, an oxygen mask smelling like an old rubber tire secured around her face, a needle pinching her as the EMT started an IV. Alan sat beside her, holding her hand. Flashing lights filled the rear of the ambulance from the GMC that carried Hal and the Colonel, following close behind.
Alan had squeezed her hand, his face tight with pain, skin pale in the bright lights. He told her how he'd called the Colonel and they drove to her house, found it empty and got Hal out of bed to help them search. That when he'd found her she'd been cold, barely breathing but had apparently had thrown up most of the pills she'd taken.
His words passed through her like the mountain mist, without her comprehending anything except she wasn't with Sam and Josh. She had failed.
The next two days were a blur of IV's, charcoal being forced down her only to be thrown up in a black slurry all over her hospital sheets; social workers and counselors and the Colonel—but not the Colonel's wife, thank God for small favors—and Dr. Hedeger, Hal, Alan, and more people poking and prodding her body and her psyche.
The third day she'd been transferred to the psych ward. The psychiatrist who met with her seemed too young to know anything about the secrets of the human soul. He sat back, fingers absently stroking his fashionably narrow stripe of hair on his chin, and smiled at her.
"You won't be here long," he said with confi
dence, before she said a word to him. "I've read your file. This wasn't really a suicide attempt at all, was it Sarah? It was what we call a gesture. A symbolic cry for help. For attention."
She curled herself up tighter in her chair, her knees drawn up under her chin, and stared at him. He was in his late twenties, only a few years younger than her, yet she felt ancient in comparison. He must have been fresh out of residency, still full of book learning and the unique form of paternalism fostered by the medical training system.
The room was small, silent, all noise deadened by the soundproofing tile that covered the walls and ceiling. He sat in a tweed chair meant to be comfortable yet too heavy to use as a weapon—a twin to the one she was curled up in, her hand stroking the scratchy upholstery as she tried to remember why she was still alive and why it mattered at all.
She breathed in re-conditioned air scrubbed clean of anything living and artificially flavored with vanilla and stared at the man who was so eager to heal her, to send her back out into the world. He knew nothing of her, nothing of the real world.
"After all," he continued when she didn't respond. "A smart young lady such as yourself would have researched the drugs she was taking—if she really wanted to kill herself. She would have known that drinking that much alcohol on an empty stomach would induce emesis before any of the medication could take effect. And she would realize that the clearing where her husband and son died would be the first place any would-be rescuers would look for her."
He smiled at her, smug and superior and satisfied he knew everything there was to know. That he had all the answers.
"Tell me what's really bothering you, what you want," he said, flipping a small notepad open and resting it expectantly on his knee. He seemed satisfied that he could already count her as a success, as if some unseen force was keeping score. "We'll work it through, get you out of here and back to your life."
Realizing it was her key to freedom, Sarah had answered his questions, fabricating and agreeing with his self-important theories when need be. Anything to get out of there.
But she learned three important lessons from the young Dr. Freud wannabe.
First: research, research, research.
Second: drugs first, alcohol last.
Finally: go deeper into the woods. Go where no one will find you until it's too late.
CHAPTER 10
Wednesday June 19, 2007: Manassas, Virginia
Even though it was almost dark by the time Caitlyn drove home to her apartment in Manassas, she kept her sunglasses on. The migraine pounded furiously, snarling like a beast that refused to be kept from its prey any longer.
She wrenched the steering wheel of her Subaru, parking it haphazardly in her space, grabbed her bag, and almost passed out at the noise of the car door slamming. Breathe, just breathe, she told herself as she doubled over, braced against the still warm and ticking engine compartment.
She pushed away from the car, refusing to fall apart out here where her landlady could see her, and stumbled to the steps leading up to her apartment on the second floor of the lovingly restored Victorian. Hauling herself up the twelve steps, her bag banging against her hip because she needed both hands on the railing, chips of paint splintering away in her grip, she finally made it to her door.
The key trembled in her hand. Her vision had almost completely gone black. The pounding in her head drove out any other sound, if she had screamed, she never would have heard it.
Finally the key turned and she shoved the door open. Rushing inside, dropping her bag, kicking the door shut, she ran to bathroom, barely made it before she vomited. Hugging the cool, smooth porcelain, she wretched her guts out. The stench of burning flesh overwhelmed her—a sure sign that this migraine was going to be a bad one. As if she needed more proof.
Her best laid plans ruined. After spending the afternoon reviewing the Hopewell case, she'd thought she could outsmart the headache by using some Imitrex at her office. The powerful, injected medicine never failed her. Never.
Until now. She slid to the floor, her cheek resting on the tiles beside the foot of the toilet, one arm still draped over the seat, and surrendered. The pain overtook her like HRT storming a building: shok-rounds powerful enough to blow steel doors apart, stun grenades with blinding explosions of light so intense they shook your body, the thunder of shotgun fire.
Unlike a quick-response raid, the migraine continued its close-quarter combat, taking its time as it stampeded through her brain, her body, her mind.
Caitlyn lay there, her body shuddering, twitching, out of her control. Nausea twisted in her gut, acid burned her throat. She opened her mouth, certain she would vomit again, but nothing came. The arm resting on the toilet screamed with pins and needles. She let it slip to the ground. That small movement was like pulling the pin from a grenade, setting off another explosion of pain.
Her Imitrex and Fiorcet were in the medicine cabinet above the sink. Light years away. Alongside it was the Phenergan the doctor prescribed for when the nausea got really bad—too late for that as well.
Her arsenal. All out of reach and useless to her now.
She cried out, the sound echoing from the tile walls, reverberating through her mind. In the darkness, she inched her hand forward along the floor. She closed her eyes against the pain and the vision of her hand holding her Glock, squeezing the trigger, the bullet spiraling in slow motion towards her head.
Not even the migraine from hell would survive a forty-caliber round at point blank range, she thought with satisfaction, glad to have devised a strategy to outwit her opponent. Like father, like daughter.
Why not? The doctors had told her if the headaches grew worse it meant one of two things. Rarely, it meant the brain was healing, the headaches escalating before burning themselves out. But more commonly it meant the scar tissue in her brain was causing more destruction, permanent damage, and things would only get worse. If the scarring weakened a blood vessel and it burst, she could die.
No. She wasn't giving up. It was only one headache. One did not a pattern make. Another strangled cry forced its way past her clenched jaws as her fingers found their target.
Not her Glock—that was in the living room in her bag, thankfully out of reach. Instead her fingers closed on the still damp washcloth she'd left on the tub's edge. Greedily she raked it in, mopping her face, inhaling the scent of lavender—anything was better than the acid stench of her vomit.
The headache pulled back, momentarily, then hit again with a sucker punch of pain. Caitlyn wadded the cloth in her mouth and bit down against her scream.
She was helpless, at its mercy, nothing to fight back with except her own stubborn will. Caitlyn concentrated on her breathing, forced herself to block out everything.
Think, focus, concentrate. Drive it back.
A woman's face appeared in her mind. Sarah Durandt, an expression of outraged disbelief twisting her features. Denial, anger that no one was searching for her lost boy and husband, and finally whimpers of pain when they showed her the proof that Wright had taken her son, killed her husband. She had crumbled, leaning heavily on the local police chief's arm, but Sarah Durandt had not fallen.
Instead, she had raised her head, eyes blazing out at Caitlyn, and said, "You find my son. You find Josh and Sam. I will not let that monster keep them. I don't care what it takes, you find them."
At the time, Caitlyn had both admired and pitied the mother for her fortitude. She knew from experience that the grief following an act of violence often destroyed the loved ones left behind. The strongest seemed most prone to snap under the burden of their emotions.
Although Sarah had spoken to her, her words weren't for Caitlyn. They were for herself. Caitlyn couldn't have done anything to help the lady anyway. Her job was to catch a killer before he struck again, not body recovery. In any case, events had quickly swept her away from Snakehead Mountain, the town of Hopewell, and Sarah Durandt's public tragedy.
Now, somehow, they had brought her
back.
The migraine's grip slipped a bit. She kept her thoughts focused on the new puzzles Clemens had delivered her today. A missing US Marshal, a missing man and his missing son, a helluva lot of blood from both men at a crime scene. What did it add up to?
To find the answer, she'd gone to Durandt's previous identity, Stanley Diamontes. His records, like Durandt's, had been totally erased from the system. It was only through doing a Lexis/Nexis search that she'd been able to find enough to piece together a scenario. Thank God for the Internet.
Seemed Stan was involved in a money-laundering scheme for a Russian named Korsakov. Stan, seeing the errors of his ways—or more likely to cover his ass and avoid prison—had come to the FBI with enough information to convict Korsakov. Then Stan had promptly vanished.
Which translated to witness protection. And where better to stash a Malibu surfer boy than the mountains of the Adirondacks? That would explain Richland's involvement. Maybe.
If not for the fact that Richland had never worked WITSEC. His short, undistinguished career with the Marshals had been limited to fugitive apprehension and security details.
Her fingers and toes finally unclenched as feeling returned. She spit out her makeshift gag.
If Durandt was in the witness protection program, someone had concealed all record of it. Caitlyn had been unable to find any record of Stan Diamontes except for the single DNA sample. Collected fifteen years ago during a Stanford bone marrow donor drive, it hadn't shown up in CODIS or any of the evidence files. It was only luck Clemens had found it at all. Every other trace of Diamontes had been erased. Even the guy's prints had been removed from AFIS.
She rolled over on her back, able to breathe, the headache now a mere pounding. As she opened her eyes and stared into the darkness, she thought about the men who would have the power and ability to erase classified DOJ records.
Could be some kind of intelligence thing. NSA, CIA, somewhere in alphabet land? Nah, they wouldn't have any need for a second rate bean counter like Diamontes. And why would Richland be involved?