Blink

by Sasha Dawn

  It hits me like a dagger in the gut: she isn’t going to invite me in.

  There could be plenty of reasons why she wouldn’t. She could be embarrassed to be living in this dump, for one (and I can say it is a dump because Rosie and I stayed here for a week once after the-boyfriend-before-Herron started showing his true colors). Her parents could not want visitors, or she could not want me to meet them. But she could at least say something instead of standing here in this hallway. Someone’s television is on too loud, and some baby down the hall is wailing.

  “You really think it was Savannah?”

  “Maybe. I mean, I’d like to see a picture of her. All I’m going on is the shamrock you drew in the sand that day.”

  “I’ll bring one up on my phone on the way. I just want to change.”

  “Should I wait for you outside?”

  It’s at this moment, I know, we’re at a crossroads, practically daring each other to either turn down the same avenue, or run in opposite directions.

  “Joshua,” she finally says. “It’s just . . .”

  I lift my chin. It’s just . . . what?

  She sighs, studies me, as if in silent debate with her own thoughts. After a second, she leans a shoulder against the door to 2E, inserts her key, and opens the door. “Come in.”

  One foot in the door, and it’s like everything I thought I knew about this girl—which, granted, isn’t much—was smoke and mirrors.

  “Joshua.” She reaches for me.

  I hold tight to her hand.

  S h a t t e r e d

  If I were a fragile guy, I might be in a thousand pieces when the truth bowls into me.

  This place is one of the smaller units at the Churchill, about ten by fifteen feet. Just a bedroom. No kitchen or private bath. Directly across from me is an alcove without doors. A rod spans the width of it, like it’s meant to be a closet, but nothing hangs from it.

  There’s a shelf-like surface jammed into the alcove, too, at table-height, and a rusty folding chair tucked under it.

  Next to the window Chatham recently climbed out of—the night she kissed me on the cheek on the fire escape—there’s a twin bed nestled in the corner; a yellow-and-green quilt is tossed over it, but there’s no pillow to be seen, and I wonder if there are any sheets on the mattress.

  She’s sketched a mural over the wall opposite the door, and she’s started to paint it. Four tubes of paint are lined up in the corner, and there are a few brushes poking out of an old mason jar.

  I know there’s a shared bathroom beyond the only other door in the room, and I know she shares it with the woman in 2F—the one Damien’s banging.

  And that alone gives me a start. I don’t want him anywhere near my mother and sisters, and I don’t want him anywhere close to Chatham. If he knew how I felt about her . . . how I think I feel about her . . . he might hone in on her just to hurt us both.

  When I drop her hand, she drops her backpack to the bed. I guess she carries everything she owns around in that bag.

  “Chatham?”

  I don’t even have to ask the obvious questions: Where are her parents? Why did she lead me to believe she was with them, if she’s obviously living here alone? And frankly, it looks more like she’s the one who ran away.

  Why would she deliberately lie to me? About losing boxes, about being here with her parents in search of her sister? Is she even looking for her sister, or is that a lie too?

  She looks exhausted. Any other girl, and I might have just interrogated her until she explained, or maybe I would’ve just walked out and let her stew in her own disasters, but it’s Chatham, for Godsakes. I want her to talk to me. I want to understand.

  “You live here alone.”

  “I never told you I didn’t.”

  I guess that’s true, even though she’d more than once mentioned a we. “You led me to believe—”

  “You just assumed,” she says, “and I didn’t know you, and how did I know I could trust you? You don’t just go around broadcasting the fact that you’re alone in a place like this.”

  “Well, you did say . . . about the boxes . . .” I shut up. Keep it in perspective. I try again: “Are you really here looking for your sister?”

  “Why would I lie about that?”

  “Did you run away, too?”

  “Look, I told you Savannah kept saying she wanted to come here. I told you she wanted me to come with her.”

  “You also said you thought it was a crazy idea.”

  “That was before.”

  “Before what?”

  “Before I read her journal. Before she said she’d be waiting for me.” She has the journal out of the bag again, and she’s got it open to a page. She points to the scribbling. “See this?”

  It’s a note, scrawled on an angle. The words take up most of the page:

  I look up at her. “This is the day I met you.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Last day of summer, on Northgate Beach. She wanted you to meet her. That’s why you were on the beach that day.”

  She’s nodding.

  “Did you tell anyone you were coming? Your parents? I mean, arguably, if they’re worried about Savannah, they’d want to know—”

  “Wayne was already gone.”

  “Your mom too?”

  “No. No way. I started adding things up. I started to understand what might have happened to Savannah, and—”

  “What might’ve happened to Savannah?”

  She doesn’t answer me, but almost talks over me. “And there was no way. I couldn’t tell my mother I was coming here.”

  “What might have happened to her?”

  She looks at me for what feels like an eternity, and I’ve come to recognize this stare. She’s trying to decide if she wants to let me into whatever she’s pondering.

  I reach for her hand and give it a squeeze.

  “I can’t lie to you anymore.” She plops down onto the mattress.

  I sink down next to her.

  “We can go see this girl with the tattoo,” she says, “but I don’t think my sister is here.”

  “We’ll find her.”

  “No.” She lies across my lap. “It’s been too long. She would’ve been there the last day of summer if she’d made it here at all.”

  Her hair is a silky spill of waves over my legs. Instinctually, I wade through it with my fingers. “You also said she occasionally dabbles in drugs. What if she hooked up with someone and just lost track of the days? It’s possible, isn’t it?”

  “I guess. But let me put it to you this way.” She shifts, so she’s looking up at me now. “Is there anything you think Damien wouldn’t do?”

  I wouldn’t put anything past him, and Chatham already knows that.

  “I feel that way about Wayne. Because I keep going over what I remember, what Savannah wrote about, what she told me.” She knots her fingers. “Don’t think I’m crazy.”

  “I don’t.”

  “No, promise me you won’t think I’m crazy.”

  “I do.”

  “Promise me.”

  “Chatham, I promise.”

  Her hands move to her shorts. One by one, she releases the buttons at the fly of her jean shorts, and inches her shorts down her hips. I try not to stare, but she’s wearing these great panties—pink plaid in some shiny material like satin—and, God . . .

  Then she shifts again, and I’m staring full-on at the scar on her hip, the tip of which had peeked at me over denim at least a dozen times. But now I’m looking at all of it. It’s two inches wide, maybe an inch-and-a-half long, and shaped like an X with the top left extension cut a little short. A little too perfectly like an X, the center of which is a tinge darker than the rest of her.

  I touch the mark. Deliberately. Trace the outline of the X.

  “The story goes that it was an accident,” she says. “I was little, three or four, Loretta says. And I’d walked into the brand when Wayne was marking the new calves.”

&nb
sp; “Awful.”

  “But that’s not how my sister remembers it.”

  I flatten my hand over the scar. No. I don’t want her to say it.

  “They never took me to the hospital. If it was an accident, you’d think they’d take me to the emergency room, right? Only what you said before—Rosie didn’t take you after Damien cut you because she was worried it would get her into trouble.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It makes sense, based on what Savannah remembers. She says Loretta held me down and Wayne branded me. Like, some sort of punishment. She saw it, she says.”

  I nod as her words of the past haunt me now: mothers don’t always make the best decisions.

  She’s up now, pulling her shorts back on, and leafing through the pages of the journal.

  It falls open to a page with a snapshot of a small girl, blonde, tucked into the binding. “This isn’t me,” she says. “And this isn’t Savannah. According to what Savannah told me, she found it under the floorboards in the stables.”

  Under the floorboards.

  “It was with some clothes.”

  “Clothes?” I study the image, an old-looking photo that looks like it was captured with one of those instant-film types of cameras. It’s of a little girl with ghostly eyes (not quite gray, not quite green), wearing purple shorts and a white hoodie.

  “Savannah said there was also a pink T-shirt there, dirty, like it had been there a while. Little girl’s size.”

  “Under the floorboards?”

  “Mmmhmm.”

  “In the stables?” Where Savannah used to say their dad put a little girl to scare Chatham into being good.

  “Yeah. And a pair of underwear. All this time, I thought she made it up to scare me, but what if there was another little girl at that farm?” She points to the picture again. “What if that little girl is Rachel Bachton?”

  I consider. “Rachel did have light blonde hair.”

  “Right.”

  “But she was wearing blue-jean leggings and a white T-shirt with a kitten on it and a pink sweatshirt when she disappeared. Not purple shorts.”

  “It’s possible she wore our clothes when she was with us. Or that Wayne and Loretta bought her something else to wear. Isn’t it?”

  “She would’ve been there with you . . . but you don’t remember seeing her.” I think, but don’t say aloud, that maybe, if she was there, she wasn’t there too long.

  “I have no recollection of her being there, but obviously, I have this mark, so there are things I don’t remember. And if Wayne could do this to a little girl”—she indicates toward her scar—“don’t you think it’s possible?”

  “And Savannah remembers being at a farmers’ market. Savannah remembers talking to another little girl there.”

  “Right.”

  “But you didn’t remember Northgate Park when I took you there.”

  “I don’t remember much of anything about my childhood.”

  I chew on my lower lip while I sort through it all. “You think Rachel Bachton was at your farm.”

  “The little girl under the floorboards . . . what if Savannah was telling the truth? And what if Wayne kept her body there until he had time to drive her out to the rivers and bury her?”

  Rachel’s parents’ faces flash in my mind, and my heart aches for them.

  “Whether Wayne took Rachel or not . . . he’s been gone since just after they found the bones,” Chatham says. “Since just after Savannah left. He knows something. Even Loretta thinks so.”

  “What does Loretta think?”

  “I overheard her talking to him the night he left. She begged him to tell her where he was going, what he was up to, but he wouldn’t say. And she kept saying don’t let it happen again, don’t let it happen again. And that’s why I came here. Because if he had something to do with Rachel Bachton, there’s no telling what he might have done to Savannah. And this . . . this is the place Savannah wanted to meet, if she managed to go anywhere at all.”

  “If she managed to go? You said Savannah ran away.”

  “Yeah, I did. Because that’s what she told me. She was preparing for it. She’d been stealing some of their money. A little here, a little there. She emptied her savings account. And she put her journal under my pillow. She wanted me to read it. Like she knew there was a chance she wouldn’t make it off the farm. And the stuff about the clothes under the floorboards? I checked the stables. I went out there and looked.”

  I wait a second, then probe when she doesn’t get there fast enough. “What’d you find?”

  “No clothes. Nothing like what Savannah said she saw. But I found this.” She gives the backpack a shove in my direction.

  “Your backpack?”

  “Her backpack. If Savannah really ran away this time, she would’ve taken this.” She yanks on the zipper of the ever-present backpack so it opens even more, and exposes its contents.

  When she yanks out the sweater she just purchased at the Northgate Park bazaar last week, bundles of cash emerge from beneath it.

  “If she ran away, wouldn’t she have taken her money? And her license is in here. So where’d she go without her license? And this shamrock brooch . . .”

  I run my thumb over the pin, which is gold, with a red stone, like a heart, in the middle of three heart-shaped leaves in a shamrock formation.

  “I found it in the front pocket.”

  “Where did she get it?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never seen it before.”

  “You don’t think . . .” I shut up until I wrap my head around what I’m about to suggest. “Rachel Bachton’s mother has mentioned a couple times . . . Rachel had a charm with a heart-shaped stone on her necklace the day she disappeared. Something her grandmother gave her. This pin has a heart-shaped stone. What if this pin is that charm?”

  I think about it. Would a kidnapper let her keep something like that? Probably not. But what if Wayne—despite his airtight alibi—did have something to do with Rachel’s kidnapping? What if he kept the charm and had it made into this brooch for some reason? What if Savannah knew about it? What if Wayne decided Savannah knew too much?

  “Savannah thinks she saw something,” I recap aloud, “and she wanted to come to Northgate Beach . . . and when you didn’t want to go with her, she left you that note, asking you to meet her. And she didn’t show.”

  “And she didn’t take her money,” Chatham says. “And Wayne left, and Loretta was upset, so maybe Savannah didn’t even make it off the farm.”

  She might be onto something.

  And not that I have much faith in law enforcement these days, but . . .

  “We should call the police,” I say.

  “I already did. I called the Rachel Bachton hotline. Right before I left.”

  “What happened?”

  “I told them about what I overheard, about Loretta begging Wayne not to let it happen again. I told them about Savannah’s plan to run away, and that I found her backpack with all her money. I told them my name, and I hung up. I left about an hour later. I was just too scared to stay.”

  “Why . . .” I’m not sure I want to know the answer to this question. “Why were you scared?”

  “I didn’t know when Wayne was coming home, but I knew I didn’t want to be there when the police came to investigate what I told them.”

  “You’re safe now.”

  “I don’t know about that. Ever since I got here, this guy . . . I’m not going to say he’s following me, because that would be ridiculous. But it’s like he turns up everywhere I go. That first day I met you . . . on the beach . . . he was there.”

  I think of the way she was looking at something behind me that day, the way she abruptly left. “He’s following you?”

  “No, it’s different. If he were following me, I think he’d actually follow. But sometimes, he’s at places I go before I even get there, and he leaves before I do. Like at the diner. He’s there before my shift starts sometimes, but it’s not lik
e he stays until it’s over. I just keep seeing him. It’s just . . . bizarre.”

  “When you live in a town with only four thousand people, you’re bound to run into people on a repeat basis. But it’s still weird.” I stare into her eyes, travel into them, really, as if I could follow back on the paths of her memories and see what she may have seen. I want to wrap her in my arms and keep her safe. “We should call the cops. They need to know about this guy, and they definitely need to know about this shamrock pin. If this stone doesn’t match the one on Rachel’s necklace? Okay, fine. But what if it does?”

  “If it does, then Wayne had something to do with Rachel Bachton. And that means Savannah was right.” Her eyes well with tears. “And if she was right, and Wayne found out about her plan to come here . . . Joshua, whatever he did to my sister is bad.”

  “If Wayne had something to do with Rachel Bachton,” I say, “it’s probably too late to save her now. But what if it’s not too late to save Savannah? We need to go see the girl with the tattoo. We need to know if Savannah made it out of Georgia.”

  R a v e

  Seven thousand dollars and change.

  Chatham Claiborne dropped seven grand in a backpack at my feet at the beach when she didn’t even know my name.

  Since she arrived here, she’s been carrying it around with her . . . at school, at work . . . because she says she doesn’t have anything else to do with it, nowhere safe to keep it.

  It’s not only an issue of the cash . . . it’s also that the stone in the brooch is red and heart-shaped—just like the charm on Rachel’s necklace—and the fact that some guy keeps showing up wherever Chatham is heading. If there’s a chance that the stone in that pin belongs to Rachel, it’s evidence.

  I called the Rachel Bachton hotline, just in case, and told them about the pin. I suppose we’ll know if it’s a piece of the puzzle if someone calls me to follow up on it.

  And now, the backpack is stashed under the backseat of my SUV as we head toward Northgate. On the way, I plan to swing past the house on Sheridan before searching for the mysterious brick building with the beer sign painted on it.

  “Maybe you could keep it at your house?” Chatham’s brainstorming things to do with the cash.