by Sasha Dawn
A knock on the back door startles me. Who could it be? Gram wouldn’t knock. Any members of the press would come only to the front door, as would Lieutenant Eschermann or his police force.
“Sami? You home?”
I recognize Ryan’s voice—the drawl.
“Ryan! Come in.” I rush to the mudroom and let him in. He smells of Irish Spring and nondescript hair product. “Hi.”
Brooke and Cassidy are behind me now, obnoxious onlookers over my shoulder. “Hunky farm boy!” Brooke says instead of hello.
He half smiles at her, half shakes his head. “Sorry to barge in on you, but I found this in the yard when I was raking. Is it yours?”
Something dangles from his hand. He holds it out for me.
“You’re the only person besides me walking through the yard lately—well, you and your friends. I found it alongside my barn while I was raking the leaves out of the flower bed.”
Where the sunflowers used to grow.
The object snakes into my hand.
It’s my locket! I run my thumb over the heart shape, find comfort in the sunflower shape engraved into its surface.
I can’t believe I almost lost this locket! It’s unspeakably precious to me, and I allowed it to come loose from my ankle.
“Thanks.” My gratitude slips out ineptly, in a half-voice.
“No problem.”
He lingers there for a few breaths before tapping his fist against the doorjamb. “Well, I have a lot of work to do, so . . .”
“Yeah,” I say. “Thanks.”
“Later.”
“Hey. Ryan.”
“Yeah.”
I look over my shoulder at my best friends, who wait intently to see what I’m about to say. A silly smile is plastered to Brooke’s face.
“Let’s just . . .” I follow him out the door and close it behind me. “Listen, I’m sorry about what I said earlier.”
“When?” He squints through the late-morning sunlight and wets his lips. “What’d you say?”
“On the front porch of your uncle’s house. I said—”
“Oh, that.” His gaze travels to something behind me. “Listen, I get it. The thing about my uncle—he’s Socratic, you know? Doesn’t take information for granted. He’d respect that you’re considering every option. You’re wrong, from my point of view, but if I were in your situation, I might risk being wrong too, just to put the theory out there.”
“So . . . we’re good?”
He touches my arm. “Of course. I’ll see you later.”
He gives me one last glance before he makes his way through the yard toward his uncle’s place. The locket practically burns in my hand.
I return to the family room, where Cassidy is pulling her jacket over her shoulders. “I have to run to the Nun.”
“I’ll be by later,” I say.
Brooke is straightening piles of paper. “Cass, I said if you want to catch the game, we’ll cover.”
Cassidy hugs Brooke. “Thank you, thank you, thank you! But you have to go now, okay? Mom was very adamant about my being there before she left.”
“You don’t trust us?” Brooke asks.
“You and Miss Serially-Ten-Minutes-Late?” Cassidy shakes her head. “No.”
As Cassidy is on her way out the door, I prop my foot atop the coffee table to loop the chain of the locket around my ankle. I push my sock down and out of the way.
The locket is still on my ankle. This one . . . it must be my mother’s.
My fingers close around my mother’s locket, which is still dusted with dirt around the clasp. Maybe it had been in Schmidt’s flower bed since she took off ten years ago, but it seems rather coincidental Ryan would come across it today, of all days. Could it mean she lost it recently? Wouldn’t it make more sense that it slipped off her neck yesterday or today?
I open the clasp with some difficulty, parting the two halves of the locket. The left side is empty, but on the right, a picture of a young man and a newborn baby—Dad and me—fills the concave space.
The photograph mesmerizes me for a second. There aren’t many pictures of Dad and me, and I wish I had this one enlarged to poster size because it depicts adoration. We’re in profile; he’s kissing my cheek, and I’m wearing a frilly little cap. This picture proves my mother did love my father once upon a time. Why else would she have put this picture in her special locket?
And now that the locket has turned up . . .
I just want to see her again. To feel safe in her embrace. To tell her I’ve never forgotten her. I’ll forgive her, no matter why she left. We’ll get through it.
“We have to call Eschermann.” I reach for my phone. “I have to tell him about this locket. It has to mean Mom’s been here, right? I mean, how else would it get here?”
“Sami, wait.” Brooke grabs my arm.
But Brooke doesn’t understand because she doesn’t know about the passport application, and I can’t tell her!
“If she came all this way, if she was in your backyard, she wouldn’t have left without seeing you.”
“Then how do you explain this?” The locket is warm in my hand. “Ryan just found it. Today. Are you telling me it’s been in that flower bed for ten years, and it just now turned up?”
“Maybe. Or maybe it was in the box Ryan found, and it fell out of the box when he brought it inside.”
“You don’t understand.” I’m near tears. I feel them building in my eyes, in my nose, in my throat and lungs. “My mother never took this off. She wore it every day, and she was wearing it the last time I saw her. I haven’t seen it since.”
“Think about that, Sami. Think about that.” Brooke’s got me by both shoulders now. She squeezes a little, forcing me to catch my breath. “She loved you.”
I stare at her.
“Is it more likely,” she says in an even tone, “that your mom came home recently and didn’t see you? Or that this locket recently fell out of a box?”
I take a few steps backward on trembling legs.
“And if she always wore the locket,” she continues, “that means one of two things.”
“Either she left it behind when she left me,” I say quietly.
“Or it wasn’t her choice to take it off,” Brooke concludes. But she doesn’t say what I know she’s thinking, either: that maybe my mom no longer has a neck around which to string it.
Lose-lose.
The dogs alerted behind the barn.
“So the question is . . .” Brooke begins to stack books. “Why is this locket here, when your mother isn’t?”
I pull my hair back into a ponytail and secure it with the hair tie currently restricting circulation around my wrist. “Brooke?”
She raises a brow.
“My dad admitted to me that Heather’s the reason he and my mom split.”
She nods slowly, and I can already tell the wheels in her head are turning.
“So are you thinking it means your dad’s lying about other things?” Brooke asks. “Or are you worried he has motive?”
Both.
But I play it safe: “I’m starting to think Heather might know something. She was my dad’s alibi ten years ago. And . . .” But I refrain from mentioning the jacket.
“You have to talk to her.”
“Just come right out and ask her if she thinks my dad had something to do with my mom’s disappearance?”
“Let’s go to the Nun now—get her talking, see what she volunteers without your asking a direct question.”
It’s as good a plan as any.
////
The twin lockets strung around my ankle rub against each other and against my ankle, as if symbolizing Mom and me, together again after all these years.
I look more closely at the photograph we found in Tolstoy: Sunflower stalks in the background tell me this picture might have been taken in my backyard, within view of Schmidt’s house. And the woman looks like Heather, although her face is only partially visible.
&
nbsp; Slipping the photo in my jeans pocket, I approach the Funky Nun. The scent of incense overwhelms me before I even step inside. Heather has made a new sign with brightly-colored tempera paints and a scrap of wood and propped it in the window:
Open for Fashion Consultation. Not Open for Questioning
I wonder if she’d been bombarded with reporters this morning. Or maybe Eschermann paid her a visit.
When we enter, Heather looks up from behind the counter, where she’s hand-sewing a screen-printed, custom tag into a garment. “Where’s Cass?”
“She’s at Zack’s soccer game,” I say.
“We switched shifts,” Brooke explains. “And Sam’s here to help.”
Two customers, both girls I recognize from school, browse the racks. One of them is perusing the bottles of holy water, and the other is glued to the crystals.
Heather’s dark hair is gathered atop her head in a ball, and tiny, octagonal-framed glasses are perched on the bridge of her nose. “What do you think?” She holds up a black shirt with bright pink, gauzy ruffles on the sleeves. “I made matching bell-bottoms too.”
“Are flares still in?” I busy myself with straightening a rack of tie-dyed scarves.
“Not flares.” Heather bats away the word with a hand, as if it were hanging in the air. “Full-out bell-bottoms. Isn’t it fun?” She’s holding up another item, made of the same black and pink fabrics. “Try this on.” She stands up and tosses the ensemble at us. One piece lands on me, the other on Brooke.
“Mine!” Brooke claims both the top and the bottom, which is just as well. I’m not here to acquire more quirky prototypes from Heather’s stash.
Heather pulls the glasses from her face and fixes her gaze on me. “How you holding up, Sami?”
Brooke slides behind the counter and gives me the go-sign.
The girls at the back corner of the showroom are whispering. When I look at them, they avert their eyes.
“Actually . . .” I lower my voice. “Can I talk to you for a few minutes?”
“Brooke, you’re on duty?” It isn’t really a question as much as a command. Heather picks up her ever-present cup of Madelaine Café’s iced tea, leaving a circle of sweat on the fabric square she was using as a coaster, and leads me to the office at the back of the shop, which stores all sorts of fabric, from tweeds to chintz. It’s grossly disorganized. A sewing machine sits on a table on the far end of the room. It’s the only item in here without a thin layer of dust.
The scent of incense is stronger in here. Heather sits first on a secondhand chair, and I follow her lead, choosing the chair that used to be in our living room.
“Lots going on, huh?” She pulls the clip from her hair—“This business with Trina Jordan . . .”—and shakes her curls free.
“Did you know my dad had been married before he married my mom?”
“Married?”
I wait it out.
She fingers a worn spot in the arm of the chair. “I always suspected he’d married her, but I didn’t know for certain until I read the article yesterday morning. It was annulled, you know, which means, technically, that it never happened.”
“Except that it did. And he never told either one of us.” I decide to strike now. No need to beat around the bush. “Did you know he was married to my mom?”
“Of course I knew—”
“When you started sleeping with him, I mean.”
She averts her eyes.
“He told me,” I say, before she considers denying it. I take out the photograph I recently found. “And today, I found proof of it.”
She takes the picture with trembling fingers, studies it, flips it over to see the date Mom scrawled on the back. “Where did you find this?”
“With some of my mother’s things.”
“Oh, God.”
“I guess I’m wondering,” I continue, “if you were involved with him during his relationship with Trina, too, and maybe he didn’t want you to know he was married to her, so that’s why he never told you about her.”
Heather takes a deep breath. “I knew he’d been engaged in college to a girl who’d died in an accident, but Trina . . .” Heather trails off, still staring at the photo.
Perspiration breaks on my palms, at my temples. “What girl in college?” I wonder why Lieutenant Eschermann never mentioned this third girl—or rather the first?—who met an untimely end. “What was her name?”
“Lizzie. Lizzie . . . Dawson, maybe? She died in a car accident, Sam. You don’t have to worry about her.”
Implying that I do have to worry about the others?
And if this girl died while she was dating my father . . .
It’s too much of a coincidence. If three women disappear-slash-die and my father is a common thread connecting them, it must mean something. No one’s luck is that bad.
Carefully, I say, “It’s just that—I’m realizing that there’s so much I don’t know about him. And if he even has secrets from you, when you’ve known each other most of your lives—does anyone really know him?”
I watch her profile. She’s staring out the window and bringing the straw to her lips for a slow sip of tea. “This picture was taken before your mother left.”
“Mm-hmm.”
She hands the photograph back, her face grim. “This isn’t me.”
“It looks like you.”
“Be that as it may, Samantha, it isn’t me.”
In a way, she’s confirming my worst fear: that Dad is a mystery to all of us. That he may have lied, not just about Trina, not just about when he started seeing Heather, but over and over again. And if he’s capable of that, what else is he capable of?
I call up pictures on my phone—selfies Brooke and I took before all the guests arrived at her house last night. Obnoxious poses of us pointing to oblivious Cassidy and Zack getting kissy in the background. “I borrowed a pair of pants from the samples last night.”
“The pom-pom fringe. Cass told me.”
“Did she tell you I borrowed a jacket too?”
“You’re welcome to anything in those bins. You know that.”
“I sort of think I shouldn’t have borrowed this one.” I hand over my phone and watch closely as her eyes widen.
“This jacket wasn’t in the samples boxes.” She’s flipping back and forth between the pictures. “Where did you find it?”
“In a box in the closet. Cass was rushing me, and Kismet drooled on some clean sheets—”
“You put them in the wash.”
I frown. It’s hardly the point I want to make. “Yes.”
“Thank you.”
I won’t let her sidetrack me. “Heather, where did you get this jacket?”
“I found it.”
“Where?”
She lets out an exasperated sigh. “In the passageway.”
The passageway between our carriage house and Schmidt’s house. The passageway my dad told me to stay away from. “When?”
She’s staring at me, as if weighing the possibility I’ll just forget all about it.
But I can’t back down. “Please.”
“A long time ago.”
“The last day anyone saw my mother?”
“Thereabouts.”
It feels as if the wind has been sucked from my lungs. It’s true, then. This jacket might have something to do with my mother’s—or Trina’s—case.
“I found this jacket,” Heather says, “lying across a box. One of your mother’s. She was packing her things, getting ready to head out of town.”
“So it is my mother’s jacket.”
“I assumed it was.” She wets her lips before continuing. “And your father assumed she’d left for good.”
“As it turns out, she did.”
“No, Sam. Left for good with you. She was taking the trip to find a place to stay in Atlanta—permanently—with you.”
My heart both aches and warms at the same time. I hadn’t known this—that she was going to take me with her. I
just thought she was moving down there on her own. “I was supposed to go.” She was going to take me with her, I think again. But something changed her mind.
“Not then. She was going to come back for you once she’d found a place. But when your father and I came back that day and Delilah was gone and most of her things were gone, her car was gone, and you were gone, we assumed the worst: that she’d taken you for good—she had sole custody of you, it was well within her rights—but we didn’t have a chance to say good-bye to you.”
“Why didn’t I know this?” I wonder aloud.
“Your father didn’t want you to know she’d changed her mind. He thought it best to let you grow up thinking this was the way things should be.”
If I were Dad, would I have done the same? Or would I have told my kid the truth?
Heather continues: “He was angry with her—really angry—when he thought she’d left with you.”
“And later, Schmidt brought me home.”
“And a few weeks after that, when she still hadn’t turned up, he was really angry with her for leaving you behind. We’ve told the police. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve told—”
“What about the babysitter?”
She eyes me for a second. “She was gone. We assumed Delilah had released her.”
“No, I mean, who was it?”
“I don’t know, Sam. The police have asked that too, but I wasn’t involved in decisions like that back then.”
“And the jacket?”
“We thought she’d be back. I washed it—it was filthy, covered in dirt, like she’d been rolling around in a flower bed—and set it aside for the day she came back. There was a box or two left behind . . . and you were still here . . . so I assumed it wouldn’t be long . . . but she never came. And some weeks later, the police started asking questions. They dragged the lake for her car—they didn’t find it, but given the nature of the first fiancée’s accident they thought they should—but by then, I’d already washed the jacket, and I was afraid it would look like I intentionally washed the jacket, but I was just trying to be nice. Call it a guilty conscience or over-compensation for my role in their divorce, but I was just trying to be nice.”
“So you hid it.”
“I knew the jacket wasn’t going to prove anything about where Delilah went, so I kept it packed away. I’d vouched for your dad. I’d washed the jacket. I was sure she’d be back. And Ken Eschermann—he was already hinting I’d been lying for your dad—”