Splinter (Fiction — Young Adult)

by Sasha Dawn

  “Well, maybe love is making him do irrational things. How many women are we talking about now, Sam? How many times does this have to happen before—”

  “Stop!” It’s more of a hiss than a word. “Do you think it’s coincidental that my mother wrote about a mistress plotting to get rid of a wife—when Dad admitted to me that he and Heather were together before my mom filed for divorce? And before she finished the book, to tell us how it all turned out, she disappeared?”

  “Are you blaming my mother for whatever happened to yours?” She’s shaking her head at me, a look of disdain crossed with disbelief on her face.

  “I’m not blaming anyone. I’m saying Heather knows something.”

  “And he’s trying to shut her up. And you can’t even acknowledge—”

  “Cass, you’re right, okay?” I pause. “If I had to blame anyone . . .” I reach for her across the cocktail table—she has to listen—but she pulls away when my fingers graze her elbow. “Cass, if I had to point my finger at anyone right now, it’d have to be Dad.”

  I match Cassidy’s stare, second-for-second. See me, I pray. See me instead of Dad. We’re sisters. Divorce or no divorce. Sisters, no matter what.

  “I don’t want to believe it, but I do see, Cassidy. I do see that there’s a lot of evidence now. A lot to suggest I’ve been living a lie—that he’s been living a lie—and that, postcards notwithstanding, my mother is never coming back. Heather’s the only mother I have now. I’m going to do whatever I can to help find her. But it won’t help to jump to conclusions.”

  I take the next photo book off the table and start to look through that one.

  Wait.

  I look more closely at a photo. It’s Dad, holding a newborn baby.

  But the date at the top of the page . . . I wasn’t born for another four months.

  That baby isn’t me, but her hat is familiar.

  I open the second locket strung about my ankle and compare the pictures. The same frilly hat appears in both.

  I peel the picture from the page and look at the back of it. C & C is written on the back. Chris and Cassidy?

  “Cass?”

  Just as she looks up, Eschermann and Neilla come in from the back porch, where they’d been talking. I can tell by the way he’s looking at me: he has bad news to share.

  My throat constricts, and my gut tumbles.

  Gram sees the cops from the kitchen doorway and rushes into the living room to hear what they have to say. I glance at Cassidy, and for an instant, it feels as if we’re on the same team again.

  “We found Chris’s car down Cuba Road,” Eschermann says without preamble. “Way past Route 12. He’s been in an accident.”

  “Dear Jesus.” Gram brings her hands immediately to her heart. “What happened?”

  “No witnesses to speak of, so we can’t be sure. But it looks like he lost control and ran off the road.”

  Ran off the road. I just read those words in the article Brooke found about Lizzie Dawson.

  “Is he all right?” Gram demands.

  “He wasn’t at the scene, ma’am. We’re combing the records of area hospitals to see if he might’ve been brought in.”

  “But he wasn’t in the car.” My relief at knowing he probably walked away from the accident is quickly replaced with fear that once he’s found, he’s going to be facing some difficult accusations and hard-to-ignore evidence. I wonder if he’s coming home at all, in that case, or if he’ll go straight from the hospital to a jail cell.

  Eschermann turns to my sister. “Cassidy?”

  She looks up when the lieutenant says her name.

  “Can you identify this item?” Eschermann is walking toward her, holding out his phone, which she takes.

  As soon as she looks at the image on the screen, she starts sobbing. “My mom’s keys.”

  I perk up. This is good news. A clue to finding Heather!

  “Where did you find them?” Cassidy asks. “Did you find them in Dad’s car?”

  “Thank you, Cassidy,” Neilla says.

  “Did you find them in Dad’s car?” Cassidy screams again.

  Eschermann presses his lips together and sort of looks away before he answers with a staccato nod and a clipped “Yes.”

  Dad and Heather are definitely together. Normally, this might comfort the daughters of a missing couple, but it only fills me with dread.

  “But she wasn’t there?” Cassidy asks. “The car was wrecked, but she wasn’t there either?”

  “The responding officers found her purse in the brush not far from the wreck. It must have been thrown from the car. Her cell phone was in the purse.”

  Neilla says, “The last call of record from Ms. Solomon’s phone was to 911 around twenty after two. The call disconnected before the dispatcher could get the nature of the emergency.”

  So she could’ve been calling to report the accident, but she also could’ve been calling because she realized my father was taking her out of town.

  I imagine Heather’s walking up the steps at the police station. Dad calls her over to talk. She’s there early; she has time. She makes the mistake of sitting in the car. Dad suggests they drive around the block. Then he takes her away, on the road. He wants her to refuse to tell Ken Eschermann what she knows. She refuses and wants to go back to the station. But he’s in the driver’s seat and won’t stop the car. She calls for help, but Dad terminates the call. They struggle over the phone, causing the accident.

  Is that something my father could’ve done?

  Eschermann lifts his chin, beckoning me.

  I go over, look at his phone. I nod to confirm that Cassidy is right. Those are Heather’s keys. But I see something in the periphery of the frame my stepsister did not. A bottle cap, labeled with a brand of vodka. When I look up at him, Eschermann gives me a knowing glance. He saw it too.

  Dad was drinking.

  Cassidy curls up on the sofa. She hasn’t stopped crying, and fittingly enough, Neilla is babysitting her. Maybe she’ll cry herself to sleep, which would save me the daggers she’s been shooting in my direction, but it’ll also leave me alone with my grandmother and the police to weather the storm that’s sure to rage on throughout the course of the night.

  Lieutenant Eschermann and I move downstairs to Dad’s office for one of our famous chats, which usually entails his trying to convince me of something, my denying it and calling it coincidence, and neither of us knowing anything more than we knew before the conversation began.

  Gram follows us into the office and stands in the doorway with her arms crossed, listening as Eschermann and I talk.

  “Henry Schmidt is right,” Eschermann says. “He had turned those pictures over to us. And the map. Just like he said. She’d planned her route at his place.”

  “But why did she leave it behind, then? She would have needed a map to get where she was going.”

  “There’s no way to know she didn’t pick one up during her travels. Or maybe she had a photographic memory and a good sense of direction.”

  These are the kinds of explanations I would’ve spun out if you’d presented me with the scenario a week ago. But now, I can’t take comfort in them. Too many variables. We can’t draw a conclusion.

  “So Schmidt wasn’t hiding anything,” I say.

  “No,” Eschermann says.

  “I don’t think we can be so sure,” Gram interjects. “Those pictures—they’re the mark of a man obsessed. And Samantha had been at his house the day her mother left.”

  “If we knew who Chris had hired to babysit her that day,” Eschermann says, “we might know why Sam was at Schmidt’s place, but it’s only coincidence until I can prove otherwise.”

  “And you think his explanation makes sense,” I say. “The photography course.”

  “It checked out ten years ago. He enrolled in a photography night class at the community college the semester before your mother left.”

  So he’s just a guy who liked to take pictures. And my mom
was his friend, so he took her picture.

  “You can keep the pictures,” Eschermann says. “Or return them to Mr. Schmidt.”

  “Actually . . . I know you have a lot to do, but maybe you could look through them one more time? Or maybe Neilla can? There are just so many . . .”

  “It would make you feel better?”

  I don’t know if I can feel better until all of this is over. “Just to make sure we’re not overlooking something. Like maybe we’ll find one of my mom in the yellow jacket.”

  “Sure, Sam.”

  After another pause and a glance at my grandmother, I say, “I want you to know that I understand the obvious conclusion here,” I say. “That in all likelihood, my father is somehow mixed up in all of this.”

  “Samantha!” Gram half-whispers, half-hisses my name.

  Eschermann looks almost sad to hear me say it. I thought he’d be relieved finally to have me on board.

  “You should be ashamed of yourself,” Gram says. “I’ve never seen such a show of disrespect, such—”

  “I don’t want to believe it either, Gram! But Heather’s gone, and considering what happened to all the other women Dad was involved with, we have to face the truth.”

  “You don’t know the truth.”

  “Nor does anyone,” Eschermann cuts us off. “Yet.” He takes a deep breath and looks at me, not at Gram. “But we’re getting closer, and that might mean dealing with some difficult realities. I’m here for you, Samantha. And Neilla is here for you. And the whole town is going to be here for you.”

  “My sister won’t be.” I glance up at the ceiling. I can still hear Cass crying in the living room above us. “If anything happens to Heather, I’ll have no one.”

  “You’ll have me,” Gram says.

  I snort. “I’ll have you whenever you inconvenience yourself long enough to stop in and try to take over our lives. Why are you even here? Why do you show up at these random times and make everything worse?”

  “I come when things are about to get ugly. I’m here to help, and in case you haven’t noticed, young lady, I’m the only one—”

  “You get wasted every night! How is that helping?”

  “I do not get—”

  “And you want me to do whatever you tell me to, you want me to forget my mother, you want me to excuse what Dad might have done! And I can’t do that anymore!”

  Eschermann cuts in: “Sam.”

  I turn to the lieutenant. “I defended him. I refused to believe what you were saying—what everyone said—and now it might be too late. Heather’s gone now, and—”

  “Samantha!” Gram shouts. “You shut your mouth!”

  “Okay, enough.” Eschermann is between us now, holding a pressed hand out to each of us, like a cop directing traffic. “Gramercy, can you give us a minute?”

  With a huff, Gram stomps up the stairs.

  Eschermann, once he’s certain she’s out of earshot, turns to me. “You do realize this isn’t your fault, right? Whatever your dad may have done—”

  “But I believed in him. And she’s not coming back,” I say. I don’t even know which mother I’m talking about: Delilah? Or Heather? Or both? “How can I forgive myself, if she never comes back?”

  “Sam. You’ve been doing what’s natural. A little girl is supposed to believe in her father. You need to let yourself off the hook.”

  The only way that’ll happen is if Heather’s okay. There’s nothing I can do about Mom, but if Heather doesn’t come home . . .

  “I’m going to find out what happened,” Eschermann tells me, “I promise you. And however it turns out, we’ll get you through it.”

  “Is there anything else I can do to help? Anything?”

  “Now that you mention it,” he says, “we found something else at the scene where your father’s car was, in the brush.”

  What now?

  “A postcard from Gatlinburg, Tennessee.”

  A postcard? A shot of adrenaline darts through me, carrying with it a renewed sense of hope. Quickly, though, I push past the hope and land on confusion. If my mother isn’t coming back, she isn’t sending the postcards. So that means someone at the scene of the accident was planning to send it on Mom’s behalf—Dad or Heather.

  “It’s addressed to you with the same typed labels as all the others.” He flips through images on his phone and then turns it toward me for a look: 11/7 is written in the message portion.

  I meet Eschermann’s stare.

  “It’s stamped,” he says, “but not cancelled. It was never mailed, Sam.”

  “So someone local had it here?”

  And it was found near Heather’s purse. Thrown from Dad’s car.

  “There’s a good thumbprint on this one. We’ll run it through the system, of course, but as you know, that takes time. Did Heather mention anything before she left the shop? Anything of interest? Anything out of the ordinary? Was she, maybe, planning to go to the post office?”

  He’s implying Heather has been sending the postcards all along. And if she’s sending postcards, it means she knows Mom can’t.

  “No,” I tell him. “If she had somewhere else to go, other than the station, she didn’t say. She didn’t even say anything about coming here first, but considering the cup, obviously she did.”

  “Have you noticed anything missing? Something Heather left when she moved out and has been meaning to pick up, maybe?”

  It could be anything. “Photo albums, maybe. But that wouldn’t be so urgent that she had to stop on the way before seeing you, and anyhow, if that’s what she came for, she left them here.”

  I take a deep breath. “Heather did say something. She said my father’s college girlfriend died in a car accident. And Brooke found an article online. My dad was tried for vehicular homicide.”

  Eschermann nods. “He was acquitted.”

  “Only because of lack of evidence.” I feel my eyes glazing over with another scenario: Dad and Lizzie argued. She left in a hurry. He followed her, but she refused to stop to talk to him. Things got out of hand . . .

  “No one could prove that the car tailing Lizzie was actually your father’s car. He had an alibi. One witness said it was a woman driving the car.”

  A woman.

  “No matter who was in that other vehicle, Sami, the road conditions were to blame. They get an inch of snow down south and the whole state shuts down. That ice storm would’ve made driving rough. And Lizzie Dawson, with little experience driving in such a storm, was going too fast. It’s unrelated to the other cases involving your dad. Trust me. I’ve studied the file to exhaustion.” Eschermann palms the back of his neck, and his eyes are veined with faint red lines. I wonder if he’s slept since Jane Doe Georgia blipped on his radar. “She wasn’t the only one to die on the road that day. Terrible weather conditions, curvy roads. Recipe for disaster.”

  “But is it too much of a coincidence?”

  There’s irony in our sudden role reversal. Usually, I’m the one presenting possible scenarios of my father’s innocence while Eschermann is trying to make me realize I’m being naive. Now, I think he’s blind not to see what I’m driving at.

  An uneasy feeling flips in my stomach. All these women, missing or dead. “I just think—Lizzie Dawson was the first. Maybe she sets a pattern.”

  “A jury didn’t convict him,” Eschermann says, as if he can read my mind and knows it needs easing. “You need to let it go.”

  But my father went through quite an ordeal to prove he hadn’t caused Lizzie’s accident. And no one thought to ask Heather about any motive she might’ve had to kill my father’s first fiancée. “If Heather loved my dad back then, she could’ve followed Lizzie in Dad’s car. She could’ve scared Lizzie into driving too fast. And maybe something similar happened with Trina, with my mom.”

  “Sam, you don’t have to do my job.”

  “I don’t mean to. I just want to help.”

  “And I appreciate it. But you can leave it in my hands.
I’m going to take care of it.”

  “There’s one more thing you should know about.” I take the second locket off my ankle and hand it over. “Ryan found this in his uncle’s yard. I thought it was Mom’s.”

  Eschermann opens the locket.

  “But I don’t think the picture in this locket is Dad and me. I think it’s Dad and Cassidy, which means this locket must be Heather’s. We found it on the lawn—Heather could’ve dropped it when she came here earlier. And the photo means that Dad’s been involved in Cassidy’s life since she was a baby—way longer than I realized. What if Heather was jealous of my mom all along? And what if—she had something to do with what happened to Mom? If I saw something that might incriminate her, it would make sense that she’s been hiding my drawings.”

  “Maybe.” He’s nodding. “But why keep them all this time, Sam? If she saw them as evidence of something she wanted to hide, she would’ve thrown them away by now. And looking at it from the other angle, if she thought your father was behind Delilah’s disappearance, she wouldn’t have let him around her daughter. She wouldn’t have married him.”

  I suppose he’s right.

  “Sami, I spoke with a child psychologist. A few, actually. There’s no definitive evidence that there’s always a correlation between a kid’s drawings and what a kid has seen. It’s an inexact science, so anything a shrink might tell us about why you drew what you drew would be speculation. If we’d interviewed you while you were drawing, maybe it would’ve helped. But as it is, those drawings can’t be used as a diagnostic tool.”

  “But the things I drew—”

  “The only thing all three psychologists agree on is that the sad face on the smallest figure, as well as the distance you drew the child figure from the larger parent figure, denotes trouble and chaos at home. And we already know your life was chaotic at that time.”

  At the time? More like all the time.

  “And you drew the parent with a big heart on the chest area, which showed that despite the chaos, there was love between you. But we already know that too.”

  “Then why did Heather keep the drawings at all?”