Over the Falls

by Rebecca Hodge

  I swallowed my impulse to spout some sort of lecture about honesty. This wasn’t my kid.

  “This is really everything?” I wouldn’t have expected a boy Josh’s age to know this level of detail about home finances, but that appeared to be the case.

  “Yeah. Sometimes Grandma will send a check if Mom gets on the phone and cries, but usually that’s when both the credit cards are maxed, and the money goes to pay down the balances.”

  “It looks like Del uses a card for everything—I’m seeing charges for less than a dollar. But the checking account also shows regular ATM cash withdrawals of two or three hundred dollars at a time. Usually right after the Social Security payments come in.”

  Josh looked away. I waited. He got up, went to the pile of mail I’d assembled, and flipped through it. He pulled out a credit card bill and brought it back. “We’ll need to pay this.”

  Nice try. “Josh. Come on. I’m putting my life on hold to help you. Meet me halfway.” I thought I knew where the cash was going. After hearing about the forged prescriptions, I’d looked up the street price of OxyContin—about ten dollars a tablet for the low dose, and seventy or eighty for each eighty-milligram whopper. Home-grown drugs weren’t any cheaper. I hated to put Josh on the spot, but if we were going to find Del, I needed to know for sure.

  He kicked the heel of one tennis shoe against the floor like he was trying to drive a decision into place. Finally, he sighed. “I’ll show you.”

  I followed him into the kitchen. He opened the freezer and pulled out the four half gallons of ice cream—chocolate, vanilla, fudge ripple, and Moose Tracks. Del always used to reach for ice cream and a cigarette when she was upset. Another thing that hadn’t changed.

  Tucked in the back corner of the freezer was a pint-sized container of rocky road. Josh pulled it out and handed it to me. “She took most of it but left one behind. Probably by mistake.”

  The container had been washed out, and a plastic bag inside held a single tablet. I couldn’t identify it just by looking at it—it had an irregular shape and no identifying code number. Probably counterfeit, cooked up in somebody’s garage. But even without a label, the fact it had been hidden in the freezer told me all I needed. This was probably some sort of opiate.

  I’d expected it. Sought out confirmation. But the full recognition was a hard kick to the diaphragm. Del was still taking illegal drugs even after her probation. She was my sister, and despite everything, I couldn’t look at the situation as if she were a stranger.

  This might explain Carl’s involvement—his fury, his determination to track her down. It might even explain Del’s disappearance. It unquestionably made Josh’s future look even bleaker than I’d feared.

  He picked at a loose edge of the Formica countertop with his thumbnail. “She used to take them on the weekends, mainly when she went out with friends. Then when she dated Carl, it got worse. Lately—” He stopped. Busied himself putting the real ice cream containers back in the freezer.

  “Lately, she’s been taking more?”

  He nodded, not looking my way.

  I reached out and touched his arm, not sure how such contact would be received, and Josh propelled himself toward me. He buried his head in my shoulder, and I gave him the strongest hug possible, hoping it would message all the right things. I’m here. I’m solid. You can count on me. I wished I knew whether I meant it.

  It had been a very long time since I’d held another human being close this way, and a tangled knot in my chest unraveled a little, easing a tension I didn’t know I carried. “It will work out. We’ll find her. And when we do, we’ll see what we can do to get her some help.”

  I felt his nod against my shoulder, but he made no effort to pull away.

  If Del stopped spending so much on drugs, their financials would not be all that bad. There were lots of easy cuts she could make on the spending side, and the Social Security payments were enough of a boost on top of Del’s salary that she’d be able to whittle down the credit card debt. Once those balances were paid down …

  I jerked my thoughts to a screeching halt.

  What the hell was I doing? Instead of trying to escape the spider’s web, I was weaving its strands into a stronger chain. If I could find my sister, great. If I could help Josh, wonderful. But I couldn’t fix the world. I couldn’t fix Carl. And no one, no matter how well intentioned, could ever fix Del.

  Josh seemed to suddenly realize he was still curled against me, and he lurched away, his face a brilliant red. Tellico flopped at our feet, and Josh dropped to one knee to pet him, avoiding my eyes.

  I cleared my throat, a little sad that his reaction to my hug was embarrassment and an impulse to flee. “Come take a look at these credit charges. Nothing jumps out at me, but you may see something I don’t.”

  He leaped up at once, acting relieved to move on from talk of drugs, and he followed me back to the laptop. I had gone backward through the charges Del had made, and he now started scrolling forward. He hit an entry dated a few days before she disappeared and stopped. “This one is weird. That was on a Saturday night, wasn’t it?”

  Martin’s Bar and Grill. Forty-two dollars and twenty cents.

  I checked the calendar on my phone. “Yeah, it was Saturday. What’s weird about it?”

  “Mom went out on a date that night. I mean, I thought it was a date—she was all dressed up, and she acted excited. She went out most Saturdays. That’s why I didn’t mention it. But she wouldn’t have paid if it was really a date.”

  “It was the next Monday when she left?”

  “Yeah. She had me take my stuff over to Jill and Francie’s before the school bus picked me up in the morning, and I went to their place after school.”

  Josh was right. There could be a connection. The Del I knew would never have picked up the tab, or even part of the tab, if she was out on an actual date. “Do you know who she went out with? His name? Or what he looked like?”

  Josh’s eyes closed, his brow furrowed, his head dropped forward. I waited, and after half a minute his head snapped up. “I never saw him—she drove there. But she had me do a search online to find his phone number.”

  “She didn’t know his number?”

  “Nope. She said she’d seen him at the Kroger. Knew him in high school or something.”

  He thought again, and I wondered how his memory worked. Did he flip through pages in his head? Or jump straight to an image like a keyword search?

  Regardless of how it worked, it only took a few seconds. “Got it. His name was Dave Bradford. Here’s his number.” He scribbled a phone number on the back of an envelope and gave me a look of triumph.

  I couldn’t recall anyone with that name from high school, but if he was in Del’s class, two years behind mine, that wasn’t too surprising.

  Finding Dave Bradford might not be the answer to our problems, but it was a logical first step. And at the moment, it was the only step we had.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Josh

  Mrs. Peterson, my language arts teacher, said one time that wishing for something is sometimes better than getting it. When Bryn and I got to Memphis, I started thinking she could be right.

  I was home, and maybe that was good. But I kept expecting the door to open and for Mom to walk in, a six-pack in each hand, laughing and giving me shit for being worried. Without her, it was too quiet. Too calm. When I thought about Mom maybe never coming back, the apartment was way too empty.

  Bryn didn’t say much, but I could tell right off the whole place bothered her. She tried to get the air conditioner working, but it had been dead for ages. The window fans rumbled to life when she turned them on, but they just rearranged the dust. She piled the dirty laundry all in one heap, but I told her how far the laundromat was, and she sighed and didn’t try to take it there.

  She tossed out the junk mail and emptied ashtrays and scrubbed the stove, all of this going on while she tried again and again to get Dave Bradford to answer his phone. She
left a whole bunch of messages, but he didn’t call back.

  When she thought I wasn’t looking, she picked up those pictures Mom kept by the sofa and stared at them for a while, her face so sad it made me wish I knew what to do. Mom said she kept them out because I needed to remember I’d had a father, but Bryn looked at them like there was plenty she wanted to forget.

  She left another call me message for Grandma, and her voice sounded as sad as the look on her face.

  She didn’t say anything more about Carl, but she checked out every car that drove down the street. When I took some of the leftover lo mein noodles out to the porch for Patsy, Bryn came with me and watched every minute. If Tellico growled at a noise, or the Doberman’s bark got faster across the street, she got up and peered out the windows.

  It made me jumpy, but I was glad she was taking Carl seriously. I double-checked that the doors were locked and made sure Tellico stayed close. Those movies where the bad guy is hiding in a dark corner and the people in the house don’t know it were pretty fake, but I kept all the lights on anyway.

  Landon Facetimed her late in the evening, and I muted the TV so she could hear.

  “I moved the goats over this morning. They’ve settled in well.” He made it sound like loading up four goats and hauling them around was no big deal, but I bet Python and Java were scared in his truck.

  “Thanks so much. I owe you big-time for all this.” At least Bryn didn’t sound so sad when she talked to Landon. “I’ve been checking the security system app, and it seems to be working. It showed your truck going in and coming out again.”

  “Good. I’m more worried about you and Josh in Memphis than I am about things here. Everything okay? You haven’t heard anything more from Carl, have you?”

  Bryn opened her mouth to say something, glanced at me, and changed her mind. Had something else happened with Carl that I didn’t know about? She looked around the apartment real slow and sidestepped the question. “I’m feeling a bit claustrophobic but hanging in there. We’re trying to track down a guy who saw Del a few days before she left. Otherwise, not much to go on. Hopefully, I’ll be back home soon.”

  “Do what you need to do. I’ve got things here.”

  They talked for a while about other stuff, and I quit listening. Bryn said goodbye and then sat there, holding the phone and running one finger around the edge of a cigarette burn in the arm of the couch.

  “He likes you.” Landon might as well tattoo it on his forehead. “Why aren’t you two together?”

  Bryn frowned and didn’t look my way. “It’s complicated.”

  Yeah, right. If Mom had a nice guy like him that interested, she would have been all over it. If Bryn kept on like she was, Landon would find somebody else for sure. But at least his call seemed to cut down on Bryn’s worry a little.

  * * *

  The next morning, Bryn was up early. I came into the kitchen, and she was pacing back and forth, as restless as Mom when she needed a buy. “Let’s pick up some lunch stuff and go out to a park for the day. Tellico deserves a run, and I’m going stir-crazy. I can’t just hang around in this apartment all day waiting for Dave Bradford to call. If he ever does. Have you ever been to Meeman-Shelby State Park?”

  “Never heard of it.” What I wanted to do was find Mom, but since we had to wait, I was planning to get back to Starfleet Command. I would rather combat the Romulan plague and fight the Klingons while I sat on the couch with a Coke than get dragged out to some park in the middle of nowhere. “And we’re probably safer here.”

  I thought Bryn would get the hint, but she barreled right on.

  “Don’t worry. You’ll like it. I haven’t been there for a long time, but it can’t have changed much.” She’d made up her mind. I don’t know why she even bothered to ask me. “Come on. Help me get things together. Dave can call us there as easily as here.”

  So we went. And, okay, I was wrong—it was nice out there. The park stretched right along the Mississippi River, way bigger than the city park with the rusty playground I passed on my way to school. Here, there was a lake and woods and lots of room for Tellico to run.

  We took a hike, following a trail marked with yellow triangles nailed to the trees. Bryn kept rattling off the names of birds and trees and mushrooms and stuff, like she thought I was taking notes or something, but I just liked walking and listening to the breeze. It talked in quiet sounds through the leaves, friendly in a different way than the wind in town. I couldn’t see a single building anywhere, just trees, which was neat like that game The Forest I played a few times over at Marcus’s house, but without the cannibalistic mutants.

  At the lake, there was a boat rental place. “We should have kept your kayak on the truck.”

  Bryn looked at me curiously. “You want to go out on the lake? We can rent a canoe, and that way Tellico can come with us.”

  I’d expected her to ignore me—did she really mean we could do it? I guess the look on my face was answer enough, because she grinned, went inside, and made the arrangement.

  We loaded the sandwiches and drinks into the boat and headed out. I was in front. I always thought you just sort of dragged the paddle through the water, but no. Bryn taught me forward, draw, cross-draw, stern pry, J-stroke—who knew canoeing was so complicated? She said I was a natural. Tellico sat in the middle of the canoe and looked around like he thought he was in charge.

  There were trees standing on tall roots like stilts along the shore, which Bryn said were cypress, and tall birds tiptoed along the edge of the water, looking for fish—great blue herons. I could hear other birds in the trees, but sometimes the only sound was the splash of our paddles. Out here there wasn’t even any traffic noise. Bryn claimed deer and coyotes lived here too, and I kept careful watch, thinking about her bobcat at home, but we didn’t see anything except squirrels.

  For lunch we pulled into shore at a sunny spot to eat, and Tellico went swimming and got me all wet when he shook himself dry. After, I stretched out on a big flat rock that was warm from the sun. I stayed still and watched a turtle crawl up on a log. Its neck was so long I couldn’t see how he could fit it back into its shell, but when I clapped my hands, he tucked himself all the way in. Must be nice to have a hiding spot right there on your back.

  Trees, sunshine, birds. A lake, a picnic, a dog. It was like one of those TV shows where there’s a big happy family. But my family wasn’t there, and a rocky feeling in my gut reminded me of it every minute. Maybe I shouldn’t be here having a good time when Mom could be in trouble. Maybe I shouldn’t have told Bryn about the pills. Maybe I shouldn’t have even gone to her for help.

  At least out here Bryn quit looking around for Carl all the time. “You’ve really never been here before?” she asked. We were getting ready to paddle again.

  “Mom doesn’t like mosquitoes.” That seemed to satisfy her, but the truth was, I couldn’t quite believe all this was so close to home and I’d never known a thing about it. Jackson Wallace was always bringing his Boy Scout stuff to school and talking nonstop about camping and hiking, but he was a jerk. Nobody I hung out with ever did stuff like this, but I bet Marcus would like it if he got the chance.

  Bryn let me paddle in the back—the stern—after lunch. We went in circles for a while, but then I got the hang of things, and I was in charge, no matter what Tellico believed. By the time we got to the dock, my hands were stiff from holding the paddle, and my arms were aching bad, but I was pretty much a pro.

  We turned in the paddles and life jackets and headed toward the truck. “Do you do stuff like this all the time?”

  Bryn laughed. “Not all the time. I have a job, you know, even though I work from home. You just happened to arrive when I had a break between projects. There’s the garden. And the orchard. And the rest of the homestead. But I go paddling when I can. There’s a couple of lakes near home.” We loaded Tellico into the back seat and got in front. “It’s calming, being outside like this. I get restless if I’m indoors too much.�
��

  Restless. That was Mom. Always moving, always lighting a cigarette, or flipping TV channels, or fidgeting while she talked on the phone. Maybe when she was back home, I could get her to bring me here. Maybe it would help her too.

  Bryn slid her key into the ignition but stopped and pulled out her phone when it chimed with a text. She opened the message and her eyes got real big. “What the hell?” She sounded scared and off-the-charts mad. Just that fast, the good feeling of the lake got erased.

  She banged her door open and stepped into the parking lot, walking this way and that, looking around in all directions, her hands in tight fists. There were a few other cars, but I couldn’t see any other people.

  She’d dropped her phone on her seat with the text still showing, so of course I looked. It was a picture of Bryn and me with paddles and life jackets in our hands. I was talking and she was smiling, and we were walking along the dock. This dock right here. Someone had to have taken it less than five minutes before.

  The message with the picture said: Quit fucking around. Five days left.

  Bryn came storming back to the truck. She looked startled and not too happy when she saw the phone in my hand, but whatever. I would have made her tell me anyway.

  “See anyone?”

  She shook her head, her face tense. “They must have left before they sent the message.”

  “Carl?”

  “Or someone working for him.” She hit the steering wheel with the palm of her hand, hard enough that the whole wheel shook. “Dammit, I blocked the number so he wouldn’t …” Her voice tapered off and she looked my way, but I guess she decided there was no point now in locking me out. “He sent a message yesterday, warning that we had six days. This one came from a different number.”

  So, someone was following us. All the way from Bryn’s place back to Memphis? Maybe. But it would have been easier to follow from the apartment. Bryn had kept checking the rearview mirror, but maybe it wasn’t as easy to spot a tail in real life as on the cop shows.