Splinter (Fiction — Young Adult)

by Sasha Dawn

  I stiffen. It would probably be in his best interest to say it’s Mom. It would get the cops off his back.

  “He is almost 100 percent positive that this is Trina Jordan.”

  A light bulb goes on in my head. Could Trina have been in Echo Lake yesterday, even for a few days? Perhaps searching for things that would make her posing as Delilah Lang more convincing? Could she have peeked into the window at the Funky Nun? Could she have inched Dad and Heather off the road? Maybe to divert the police?

  Maybe she meant to mail a postcard during her stay.

  She could’ve driven overnight to Saint Paul.

  It’s possible.

  The lieutenant takes a seat at the table with me. “Sami.”

  He’s going to tell me something I don’t want to hear.

  “There was a locket found not far from Jane Doe Georgia’s body.”

  An icy lightning bolt hits me square in the heart.

  “No picture left to speak of inside, but . . .” He opens a file, selects an eight-by-ten from the stack of photographs, and slides it across the table.

  It’s a locket much like the one strung about my ankle. Rusted. Weathered. But I can still make out the embossed sunflower.

  “It was a mass-marketed item in the late nineties, early two thousands,” he says. “A picture inside would’ve helped, or an engraving, but . . .”

  He doesn’t have to finish his sentence. I know what it likely means.

  My eyes have been fixated so long on the locket that it’s starting to blur. I blink away the fuzz. “Eschermann?”

  “Yeah, Sam.”

  I nod toward the picture on the screen. “Does this woman, the one pretending to be my mother . . . does her thumbprint match the one on the postcard from Gatlinburg?”

  “We’ll know soon.”

  My DNA is all over the country, it seems.

  Microscopic parts of me are hard at work in Georgia, in Minnesota, at the lab in Chicago where the pale yellow jacket with the stain on the cuff has been sent. Proving or disproving, as the case may be.

  I’m starting to think closure is overrated.

  If Jane Doe Georgia’s DNA matches mine, Jane Doe is Mom—lose.

  If it doesn’t, which means I still don’t know where Mom is—lose.

  If Saint Paul Delilah is my mother and was planning to escape the country—lose.

  If Saint Paul Delilah is actually Catrina Jordan-Lang, and all the evidence that my mother might’ve been alive traces back to this woman instead—lose.

  It’s not that I’ve given up hope. Just that I know now. My mother would never leave me. I knew it that day, when I went into the passageway to look for her, and I knew it every time I thought to sneak back over to Schmidt’s place, convinced she’d be there, waiting for me. There was a reason for that. It was the last place I’d seen her go. I’d just forgotten it along the way.

  But something still doesn’t add up.

  Who helped Trina move my mother’s body?

  Who else was there that day?

  Was it Dad?

  Neilla?

  Schmidt?

  There’s still no way to know.

  A knock on my door jolts me back into the here and now.

  It’s probably Gram. And I do have a million questions for her—starting with why she didn’t wake me when Dad and Heather were found—but I’m still tempted to pretend to be asleep so I don’t have to deal with her. I mean, I’m glad she’s always been here for my father, but that doesn’t mean I have to enjoy her company.

  Another knock. “Sami?”

  “Dad!” A sense of relief gushes through me.

  I spring off my window seat just as he opens the door, and an instant later I land in his arms.

  He palms the back of my head, like he must have done when I was a baby, and his embrace is warm and tight. “God, if anything had happened to you,” he whispers.

  “If anything happened to you,” I return.

  I think of all the scenarios in which he may have been taken from me, or instances in which I wouldn’t have even been born—a suicide mission after Mom’s disappearance, a conviction for the vehicular manslaughter of Lizzie Dawson, a fatal car accident, jail time for DUI, a prison sentence for murder—and I know that no matter what, he’s my father and I want him here where he belongs. Home.

  “They let you go?” I say when we pull apart a little.

  “My blood alcohol test proved I hadn’t been drinking. They couldn’t charge me with anything.”

  For the moment, anyway.

  “Eschermann filled me in on the developments in the case.” This time he doesn’t say developments as if the word is garbage.

  We sit down on my bed.

  We have so much to talk about, but I’m not sure where to start. I find myself blurting out, “So Trina Jordan . . .”

  “Right.” He sighs. “First of all, I didn’t cheat on your stepmother with Trina.”

  “But you didn’t tell Heather you married her, and you didn’t tell her when Trina came back.”

  “Because I didn’t want to worry her. Trina was unstable, unsafe. She turned up time and again, asking for another chance, asking for money, asking for explanations—if Delilah and I were through, why Heather and not her . . . I was as clear as I could be, but even when she wasn’t getting the message, even when she became incredibly invasive, it was hard not to feel sorry for her. Things weren’t good between her and her family, and I know she was looking for a home.”

  He looks down at his hands, maybe trying to find the words to finish the story. “The day that picture was taken was the day she finally seemed to give up on us. She said she’d come for closure, and I assumed she’d gotten it. We said good-bye, and that was the last I saw of her.”

  For a good minute, we sit in silence, but everything left unsaid ping-pongs in my brain.

  “Dad? Do you think Mom took that picture because—because she felt unsafe with Trina around? Or do you think she just thought something was going on between the two of you?”

  He lets out an exhausted sigh. “I don’t know. I wish I’d known about the manuscript Delilah had written. It might’ve helped steer the investigation. But if Trina was here that day—the day your mom disappeared—I never saw her. I really thought, after I told her I was going to marry Heather, that she was ready to move on. If I’d suspected that Trina had any intention of harming your mother or Heather, I would’ve called the police, gotten a restraining order . . . I wouldn’t have stood back and let anyone get hurt.”

  “Okay.” I believe him, even if I still have questions:

  How could he not remember who the babysitter was?

  How could he not tell Heather about Trina?

  How could he have such insanely bad luck with women?

  Is he drinking again?

  But as I look at him and as he draws me in for a hug, I feel the entwining of our lives. We’re like that pretzel: two halves of the same heart shape, connected with a twisty, complicated path in the middle. I know without a doubt he never meant to hurt me. He loves me, and even though he’s made mistakes, he’s trying to make it all right.

  For the first time since the delayed reporting of Trina Jordan’s disappearance, I feel safe, as if I’m not alone anymore.

  I’m aware this security might be temporary. Dad still isn’t in the clear.

  But for now, I can’t ponder the inexcusable. I can only love him.

  Because he’s here now, and maybe if my grandmother hadn’t been there that night, he wouldn’t have been.

  “I know I’ve said this before,” Dad says. “Or maybe I actually haven’t. Maybe I just always assumed you knew it was true. But Sam: I couldn’t hurt your mother.”

  I lean my head against his shoulder.

  “You believe that, don’t you?”

  “I want to believe it.” It’s the best I can do.

  “Remember this moment. Remember this, whenever you start to doubt me.”

  I will.
<
br />   But then it hits me, what he said:

  Whenever.

  Not if.

  When Dad was released, he was ordered not to leave the county. That’s okay; none of us feels much like leaving the house. Gram’s still here, working a crossword puzzle in a chair across the room, and Cassidy and I didn’t even go to school today.

  We’re all gathered at my house—Dad, Heather, Cassidy, and me—for the first time in months. I’m not sure what’s going to happen with the divorce, but I assume they’re still going through with it. True to form, Dad and Heather don’t want to talk about it in front of Cass and me.

  Nothing’s what it used to be, but we’re all here. Doing our best to pretend everything’s okay—or at least that it will be.

  Reporters crowd the lawn, still gaming for a scoop, yet there’s a sense of calm about the place. Maybe it’s because for the first time since the search for my mother began, the police have acknowledged a person of interest in the case other than my father: Trina Jordan.

  The local evening news is on, and of course our family is the headliner. Cass hunts for the remote control so we can change the channel. By the time she finds it, the screen shows a reporter standing outside the hospital. The clip was obviously filmed last night. “En route to the police station on Saturday, Lang and his estranged wife were involved in an accident—”

  “Turn it off,” Gram says.

  Cassidy pushes the button, and the screen goes black. “What happened anyway? With the accident?” Cassidy asks.

  “Oh, they don’t want to talk about that,” Gram says briskly. She takes a sip of her soda, which sits on the table next to her. “They’re okay. That’s all that matters.”

  “We were rounding a curve,” Dad says. “The next I knew, there was a big white vehicle in our lane, and I swerved to get out of the way, and we were down the embankment.”

  I wonder if the experience reminds my father of the night Lizzie Dawson died. There was nothing he could’ve done to stop it, but unlike the night Lizzie died, he was in the driver’s seat, and thus, responsible for his and Heather’s accident.

  “But you were . . .” I’m embarrassed to ask this question in front of everyone, but I have to know. “Sober?”

  “Samantha!” Gram scolds me.

  “It’s okay, Mercy.” Dad frowns at me. “I’ve been sober for the better part of nine years now. I’ve slipped up before, but not in years.”

  “What about the bottle cap? The open alcohol?”

  “I don’t know,” Dad says. “I have no idea how it got there.”

  “It wasn’t mine,” Heather says, when Cass and I look to her. “And I never would have gotten in the car, if I thought he’d been drinking.”

  “But it was there,” I insist. “In the picture I saw a bottle cap, like the top of . . .” My gaze trails to my grandmother. Like the top of the vodka Dad had spilled into the sink. Like the bottle of vodka I saw in the passageway when I followed Kismet down into it.

  A chill races up my spine, and I look again at my grandmother.

  There’s no alcohol in this house, yet Gram has still managed to drink and get drunk. I assumed she was keeping the sauce in her RV, after Dad spilled a bottle down the drain, but what if she had stashed some in the passageway? Why else would the door in the floor have been open?

  The only person in this household who’s been drinking is Gram.

  “It was you.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Gram says.

  Dad sits up straight, swallowing hard. Pieces of this puzzle are shifting in his head too.

  A large vehicle in his lane.

  The bottle cap on the floor of his car.

  Gram had been inexplicably gone for a large chunk of time the day Eschermann brought Dad in for questioning, the day my entire world burst into a million little pieces. My grandmother had said she was going to the station to be with Dad, but maybe she lied.

  “Where did you go after they brought Dad in?” I ask Gram.

  “I was running errands,” she says.

  The air is still.

  “Dad?”

  He looks up at me with an expression of puzzlement on his face.

  “Was it Gram who ran you off the road?”

  No answer. He probably doesn’t know. If it happened quickly, maybe he didn’t get a good look at the vehicle.

  “You weren’t worried about them,” I say to Gram. “Cass and I were scared, but you were sure they’d be okay. You knew the air bags deployed. Eschermann didn’t say anything about that, but you knew.”

  “This is ridiculous,” says Gram. But I can tell by the sharpness of her voice that I’m right.

  She did it.

  She ran them off the road.

  And maybe Gram looked in on them in the car to make sure they were alive, and maybe she dropped the vodka, or even planted it so the police would think Dad was drunk.

  She called emergency with Heather’s phone, then threw Heather’s purse, with the phone inside, to the brush—and in the midst of it all, the postcard she meant to mail that day fell out of her bag.

  Her thumb knuckle is nearly white as she grasps her glass and glugs down some of her drink.

  A scene from days ago flashes in my mind: Gram raving about a burger recipe. A recipe I picked up in Nashville.

  She’s been in Tennessee. Recently. I’ll bet, if we look back over the map she’s traveled, we’ll see she’s been in Dover, Delaware; Biloxi, Mississippi; anywhere else in my stack of postcards. And where did the first postcard come from? Atlanta. And where was Jane Doe Georgia located? Just outside of Atlanta.

  “You were sending me the postcards,” I say.

  I take the glass from her hand and catch a whiff of alcohol. “If Lieutenant Eschermann tests the print on this glass against the one he found on the postcard from Gatlinburg . . .”

  “I didn’t want you to lose hope.” Gram’s voice takes on an imploring tone that I don’t trust. “Do you know how important hope is? For a girl growing up without her mother?”

  Coming from someone else, in other circumstances, that might be a convincing sentiment. But this is Gram. Maybe she’s been there for my dad. Maybe she’s been overprotective to a fault. But she’s never sympathized with me, never tried to comfort me, barely even acknowledged the hole that Mom’s absence left in my life. And now, of course, there’s the possibility she ran my father and Heather off the road.

  “Why would you have to concoct something like that,” I say, “unless you knew for certain Mom wouldn’t contact me on her own?”

  “That’s not all you did, is it?” I ask Gram quietly. “Was it you who hid my mother’s letters of recommendation behind the lathe in Schmidt’s barn?”

  Dad stands up now, his expression heating to a combination of anger and disbelief. “Mercy?”

  She gives an almost imperceptible shake of her head, but it’s less a denial than a let’s not do this now.

  “Why?” Dad’s boom practically shakes the house.

  Behind me, Cassidy gasps.

  “The law was all over you,” my grandmother says, almost hissing. “The force down in Georgia already assumed you’d gotten away with murder, and I didn’t need them poking around, trying to tie more evidence to you. If they found things belonging to Delilah in your possession—”

  He turns from white to bright red in a split second. “I was not responsible for Elizabeth’s death!”

  “Your car was seen following her. What were they supposed to think?”

  “One witness said a woman was driving the car behind her,” I say to my grandmother. “Was it you? Were you following Lizzie that day?”

  Dad’s gaze snaps to mine in shock.

  “Gram’s been driving a large vehicle through bad weather since before I was born,” I point out. “If she was driving it while you were engaged to Lizzie, which I assume she was, driving an SUV in an ice storm wouldn’t have been a problem for her.”

  “She was leaving you,” Gram says.
r />   “Maybe she should have,” Dad says. “I was engaged to be married to her, and with one visit from a childhood friend . . .”

  Heather.

  “. . . I was questioning the commitment I’d made. The moment I saw Heather again, I knew I couldn’t marry Lizzie. Lizzie knew it too.”

  “It wasn’t my fault,” Gram insisted. “That girl had no business driving in that storm. It was horrific to watch.”

  “Watch?”

  Gram’s throat bobs with a heavy swallow.

  “Is Samantha right? You witnessed Lizzie’s accident?”

  Gram doesn’t deny it.

  “You ran her off the road, didn’t you?” Dad asks. “Just like you ran Heather and me off the road yesterday. Were you afraid we might compare notes with the police? Were you afraid, now that the police uncovered a body, that the case might actually be solved?”

  “It was an accident. I had a drink with lunch. I just wanted to be sure you had your bases covered, wanted to make sure—”

  “You ran us off the road!” Dad yells. “Do you have any idea what might’ve happened to us? What damage you could’ve done?”

  “It was an accident,” Gram says again, sounding desperate now. “You were getting ahead of me, and I swerved around another car, and . . . I didn’t mean to do it.”

  She’s been meddling with the investigation since day one. It’s why she’d turn up unannounced. Maybe she was concerned with Dad’s well-being. But isn’t it more likely that the grandmother I know would have been more concerned for herself?

  It adds up. Just when the investigation would kick up again, she’d be here. Every time.

  “You’re going to have to tell the police.” Dad’s fighting to stay controlled, to hold in the building rage. “About everything. About running us off the road, about following Lizzie that day—”

  “The police? Why? Everything’s okay now.”

  “Okay? Ask Lizzie Dawson’s parents if their lives have been okay!”

  “I did it to protect you!” Gram shouts. “Everything I’ve done was to protect you!”

  Everything she’s done.

  “You were here, weren’t you?” I say quietly. “The day my mom died.”