by Gen Griffin
“I'm sure you are, baby.”
“I'll get up with you later, David.” Ian waved good-bye as he and his mother headed out into the night.
David waited until Maggie's little car had left the parking lot. When he was sure he was alone, he closed the garage bay doors and turned off all the front lights on the shop. He sat down on the edge of the wrecker's bed and pulled out his cell phone. The text he sent to Cal was quick and to the point: 'Where u at?'.
'On my way back. Headed to your house.' The reply vibrated in his hand less than a minute later.
'Can you meet me here?' Appeared immediately after it.
David hesitated and then typed his own reply into the phone: 'I'll see you there'.
Chapter 14
“I don't think I've ever been this cold in my life,” Cal complained as he sat down on the ripped cushions of David's father's ancient couch.
David offered him a half-finished bottle of whiskey. “Here. Drink this. It'll warm you up.”
“Nah.” Cal waved the alcohol away. “Last thing I want right now is another drink.”
“Speaking of drinking, you said you dropped my Dad off at Leon's?” David was still more than slightly stunned to learn his father had accompanied Cal on his morbid errand.
“Yeah. He said he was going to go get so shitfaced he'd forget tonight ever happened. I don't think he was kidding.” Cal kicked his booted feet up on the wobbly wooden coffee table.
“He wasn't.” David slumped down into the couch beside Cal. “He probably won't even remember running into you by the time the sun comes up.”
“Just as well,” Cal said. “I only trust Ricky to a point.”
David just grunted. He had nothing to add to that statement. He agreed completely.
Cal closed his eyes and then opened them back up. “I'm going to head back to Possum Creek. I'm thinking I'll swing by Gracie's on my way home. I just really need to see her smile right now.”
“Go on.” David waved Cal towards the door.
“I am. Thanks for going and getting my truck for me,” Cal said as he stood up.
“No problem. It ain't that bad of a walk from the shop to the school. Helped me clear my head some.”
“I appreciate it,” Cal repeated. He hesitated in the doorway. “You staying here tonight?”
David nodded. “I'm going home, but not tonight. I don't want to see Pappy tonight.”
“Me neither,” Cal agreed. “He's got that way of taking one look at you and knowing something ain't right. I ain't up for his scrutiny tonight.”
“You ain't got to go home,” David reminded him. “You can stay here.”
“Me staying here on a school night will just raise even more questions,” Cal pointed out. “I'll see you in the morning.”
“You going to school?”
“Why wouldn't I be?”
“Ian is skipping.”
“Ian is failing, too.”
“Point taken.” David nearly smiled. “I'll see you in first period.”
Cal waved and was out the door with a thump. David laid down on the couch and closed his eyes, not expecting sleep to come.
Chapter 15
“I was starting to think I wasn't going to get to see you today.” Gracie was sitting up in her bed when Cal climbed into her bedroom by way of the second story window she'd intentionally left open.
Her golden hair fell in waves around her bare shoulders as she held her arms out to him. Her heart-shaped lips were curved up into an innocent smile.
She was so very much alive that his heart broke, just a little bit, as he watched her tug the neckline up on her spaghetti strap pajama top. Her turquoise eyes were shining with health and happiness as she beckoned him to her.
Cal didn't hesitate to go to her. He kicked his boots off and knelt down on the bed in front of her. “Have I told you how beautiful you are?”
“All the time,” Gracie reminded him with a bold smile. She closed the last of the distance between them, nestling her warmth and softness into the center of his broad chest. “I love you, Cal.”
“I love you too.” Cal pulled her tightly into him and burrowed his nose in the silkiness of her hair. Her heart was beating steadily and solidly against his chest.
“Did you have a good day today?” Gracie asked.
“No. Not really,” Cal admitted. “Are your folks home tonight?”
“Dad is. Mom's working a triple between two shifts at the nursing home and one at the hospital. We won't see her again until Thursday. Why?”
“I was thinking about staying the night here, with you.”
“Oh. Okay. You can stay with me if you want to.” Gracie reached up and ran her fingers through his thick, curly hair. She massaged his temples gently. “Dad will never come upstairs. You know that.”
“He wouldn't notice me here even if he did,” Cal agreed with a small smile He leaned into Gracie, relaxing as she caressed him.
“You're really tense,” Gracie commented. “Want to talk about it?”
“No.”
“You sure?” She looked surprised.
“I just want to lay here in bed with you,” Cal said. “Can I do that?”
“Of course.” Gracie allowed herself to fall backwards against the covers, pulling Cal along with her. The bed was full size but it still felt narrow as Gracie wrapped herself up in a burrito of covers. Her chin was resting against Cal's shoulder. “Can I tell you about my day?”
“Always.” Cal closed his eyes and breathed in the smell of her strawberry shampoo. The scent was heady and a little bit sickly sweet. He sucked it into his lungs as if he'd been deprived of oxygen.
“Today in Science Class, Maude Collins decided that it would be a good idea to give Ted Fram a blow job underneath their lab station. We were supposed to be watching a movie so I guess they could have gotten away with it there in the dark except her braces got stuck in his zipper. When Coach Lou turned on the lights, she was stuck under the table with her face...”
Cal closed his eyes and allowed himself to doze off to the sound of her voice.
Chapter 16
The nightmare started the same way it had since David was a small child.
He woke up in his little boy bedroom in the middle of the night. He didn't know what had woken him up, but now that he was up, he wanted a juice box and maybe to pee.
His small feet hit the carpeting as he shoved the covers back into a pile on the bed. He crossed his room without incident, avoiding the cheap toys which were scattered all over the bedroom floor. His door opened with a low creak and he headed down the short hallway to the living room.
The blonde haired woman was waiting for him, just as she had been in every nightmare he'd ever had. She was laying silently on the purple carpeting next to the front door. Her thick hair was matted black with clotted blood. The skin on her face had been split open. Her nasal cavity was exposed to the open air. Her teeth were laying on the carpeting beside her.
David reached down to touch her and her eyes flew open. Her right hand clawed out, grasping for him. She grabbed the fabric of his pajama pants as he tried to run away. He stared down at her, expecting to see the bloodshot, blown out pupils he'd always seen.
Except this time her eyes were large, liquid and brown. Her hair shifted from bleach blonde to dark chocolate. Her dead skin's pallor darkened to tan.
Gasping and terrified, David reached down to pry her hand from his pant leg. Her long fingers had changed too. Now they were short, brown and wide with teal and silver nails. She yanked him to the ground and began to claw at him. She pulled herself across his body, her ruined face above his. Blood rained down from her injuries, coursing down his face and neck.
David screamed.
He was still screaming when he bolted upright on the couch. His heart felt like it was going to explode inside his chest. He gasped for air, curling into a tight ball so that his chin could rest on his knees.
The same old nightmare with a new twist.
The same old nightmare except the blonde woman had turned into Ian's dead girl.
David closed his eyes and bit his lip so hard that blood filled his mouth. The taste of the blood was the only thing that had ever succeeded at making the terror fade. The blood was real. The blonde woman was not.
Cal's parents had paid for hundreds of hours of therapy in an effort to convince David's subconscious mind that the blonde woman was not, and had never been, real. The therapy seemed to have worked. He hadn't seen the blonde woman in his dreams in nearly a year.
He hadn't woken up screaming in nearly a year.
David forced his eyes open. He found they immediately went to the floor right inside the front door. He didn't ever remember having purple carpeting in this trailer, but every other detail of the dream matched his father's living room.
Everything, from the pale checkerboard wallpaper to the dusty clock hanging on the wall, had been real. The dead girl had been real. Out of place, most assuredly, but real.
Suddenly David felt like the walls on the trailer were closing in on him. There wasn't enough air in the room for him to breath.
David stood up so fast that he stumbled. He practically ran down the hallway to the very same bedroom where his nightmare always started off. A duffle bag was sitting in the far corner of the room. He'd never unpacked it when he'd come back to live with his father last month.
He snatched the bag off the ground and threw it over his shoulder. He grabbed his familiar black and red quilt off the bed as well. He wasn't about to leave it behind when he wasn't coming back.
And he wasn't coming back.
Screw waiting for Sunday and worrying about whether or not Pappy was going to say he'd told him so. David was going home.
Epilogue
“What excuse did you give Pappy?” Cal asked as he watched the junkyard's vehicle compactor finish turning David's Ford into scrap metal.
“The engine's about to sling a rod.” David turned away from the Ford. He leaned against the bed of the older model Toyota Tacoma that Pappy had given him the title to earlier that morning. “For the record, the engine is about to sling a rod. Did you hear it knocking?”
“I could barely hear it over the whining of the transmission,” Cal replied dryly. “Sounded like you'd lost a couple of gears.”
“I had to drive it down here in second.”
“You did a hell of a number on it,” Cal said.
“Had to make sure there was nothing for anyone to want to salvage. Made sure it would go straight to the crusher.” David shrugged his narrow shoulders and then sighed. “At any rate, we've done it. Truck is gone forever.”
Cal looked back at the crushed Ford and then nodded. “We should go.”
David opened the driver's side door of the Toyota and climbed into the cab. Cal slid into the passenger's seat.
“I always wanted this truck,” David said absently as he cranked the engine, shifted the truck into first gear and drove out of the junkyard.
“And now you own it,” Cal said. He took a deep breath. “David, do you really think we've done the right thing?”
David hesitated and then shook his own head. “Hell no, I don't think we did the right thing. I think we're fucking cowards. All four of us.”
“You know she was just a kid, right?” Cal asked.
“I saw the missing persons posters her family has put up around town,” David said through a locked jaw. “Her name was Casey Black. She was 13 years old, five foot two inches tall and weighed roughly a hundred and thirty seven pounds. Brown hair and brown eyes. No tattoos or birthmarks. Pierced ears. She was an eight-grader at Possum Creek Middle School.”
“You memorized the flier,” Cal commented grimly.
“More like its burned into my skull,” David admitted. “I'm having nightmares again.”
“I know,” Cal said. “Momma slept in your room with you last night.”
“I noticed,” David said as a slight blush crept up his tanned cheeks. He tightened his grip on the steering wheel. “She wasn't in there when I went to sleep, but she woke me up before the nightmare even got good and started. We talked for a little while and then I fell back to sleep. She was curled up in my recliner with her e-reader when I woke up.”
“She's worried about you,” Cal pointed out.
David was silent for a long moment and then he shrugged. “What do you want me to say, Cal?”
“I wasn't asking you to say-.”
“I can hold everything together when I'm awake, but all the bad shit I've seen comes out in my dreams. I've always had nightmares. You know that.”
“You'd stopped having nightmares,” Cal said. “You hadn't had one in a long time until-.”
“Until we killed Casey?” David filled in the words Cal didn't want to say. “We killed a kid and hid her body and now I'm having nightmares again. No fucking surprise there, Cal.”
“David, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to piss you off.”
“You're not pissing me off, Cal.” David shifted his grip on the steering wheel. His shoulders practically radiated with tension. “I'm just...”
“You're just what?” Cal asked.
“I'm seeing Casey in my nightmares,” David said. “Its making me wonder if maybe the blonde woman was real too?”
“You mean-.”
“The blonde lady from my nightmares. You know I've always had the same nightmare. A blonde woman with her face smashed up, laying right next to the front door of Dad's trailer. What if she was real, Cal? What if she's as real as Casey?”
“Shit, David.”
David took his foot off the gas pedal and knocked the gear-shift into neutral. He eased the Toyota into the grassy ditch on the side of the road. “I'm fucking scared.”
“You can't let yourself worry like this. I don't know anything about the woman you've been seeing in your dreams except what you've told me over the years. I don't think she's real David, but even if she was, there's nothing we can do about it now.” Cal leaned back against the seat of the truck. “As far as the thing with Casey goes, we did what we had to do,”
“We saved our own asses,” David corrected. “And not because we had to. We did it because we wanted to. Addison offered to take the blame for everything. He would have done it.”
“He'd be in jail,” Cal pointed out.
“He'd be in jail and the girl Ian hit, Casey, would be home.”
“She's dead. She wasn't going home,” Cal said.
“She wouldn't be missing.”
“She'd be buried in the county cemetery,” Cal clarified. “She'd be buried in the county cemetery and Addison would be in jail. Nothing good would have come from Addison taking the fall for Ian and going to jail.”
“Nothing good is going to come of hiding that girl's body in the swamp either,” David practically spat the words at Cal. “We fucked up.”
“Maybe we did,” Cal admitted. “But we can't exactly walk up to Sheriff Chasson and confess now. We'd be in more trouble than we would have if we'd called him the moment we realized there was a dead girl under Ian's truck.”
“Pappy told me Frank's not even looking for her.”
“You talked to Pappy about the dead girl?” Cal didn't even try to hide his surprise. Or his disapproval.
“No. Give me some credit for having some sense. We were at the courthouse transferring the title to this truck into my name when her grandmother came in and asked the clerk if she could put a couple of those missing persons fliers up in the courthouse. After we left, he told me Frank said the girl ran away. Apparently she has a long history of running away from home. Sheriff's department has brought her home a few times before, so Frank says he's not wasting his man power worrying about her.”
“I guess that's a relief,” Cal said mildly.
“Pappy told me that Casey Black comes from a bad family,” David rolled the words off his tongue with more than a slight hint of irony. “He said Frank says she lived down in the trailer park
with all the meth heads and sex offenders. He's not worried about finding out what happened to her because she's a nobody in this town. He thinks she's going to come back on her own.”
“She's not coming back,” Cal said.
“Promise me no one will ever find her body?” David stared hard at the steering wheel in his hands.
“No one will ever find her body,” Cal promised.
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Chapter 1
“You're a real bitch, you know that?” Brett Parker scowled at Gracie across the dimly lit interior of his overpriced BMW.
“And?” Gracie didn't feel the least bit sorry.
“You didn't need to hit me.” He stuck his fingertips in his mouth and sucked on them.
“When a girl tells you to stop trying to stick your hand up her skirt, you should stop trying to stick your hand up her skirt.” She wasn't surprised his hand hurt. Gracie's own thigh stung where she'd smacked her heavy leather purse down on top of Brett's creepy crawly fingers. He'd been trying to slip his hand under the hemline of her skirt without her noticing. Her reaction had been instinctive.
“Tonight was supposed to be magical. You aren't letting the magic between us happen.” Brett shot her another baleful, disapproving glare.
“Magic?” Gracie couldn't help laughing. “We're at Take-A-Taco. In the drive-thru.”
“What's wrong with Take-A-Taco?” Brett appeared genuinely insulted.
“Nothing. Unless you think it’s magical. The only thing magical about a .29-cent taco special is that they managed to put any meat in the tortilla for that price.” Gracie considered explaining her thoughts but then decided Brett Parker wasn't worth the effort. She twisted her long blonde hair up into a ponytail. She no longer cared if she messed up the delicate curls she'd spent two hours and a whole can of cheap hairspray creating. “You promised to take me out for a nice dinner. Take-A-Taco is pretty much the opposite of a nice dinner.”