Shadows Among Us

by Ellery A Kane

  I stare out at the mossy green lake that’s growing darker as the sun plunges toward the craggy hills. Soon, the water will be obsidian black, Glory Hole lit up by a sliver of moon. Or the hellfire down below.

  They found Dakota’s body not five miles from here.

  I remember the picture then. I’d tossed it on the passenger seat in such a hurry, it slid down to the floorboard faceup.

  There she is. My girl.

  I turn it over, half-expecting to see my father’s chicken scratch. Or nothing at all. Just the unmarred white canvas of photo paper.

  But the handwriting is loopy cursive. Just two words. And those two words snap shut around my heart, piercing it through and through like one of my father’s sycamore stakes.

  To Grandpa, it says.

  BEFORE

  Chapter

  Seven

  (Saturday, July 2, 2016)

  Dakota sat cross-legged on the bottom of the swimming pool, opening her eyes to the shimmering surface. She blew a trail of bubbles and watched them float to the top without her. She preferred it down here, where the world above remained both vaguely recognizable and strangely distorted. A lot like her life lately.

  Lungs burning, she counted in her head. Fifty-seven, fifty-eight, fifty-nine, sixty, sixty-one—she’d done it! Broken her own personal best. So what if it came nowhere near the female world record holder’s 18 minutes and 32.59 seconds. Eighteen whole minutes underwater. Dakota could hardly imagine it.

  Her muscles began to tense, and the urge to breathe became unbearable. Panic seized her, shook her like a pair of strong, violent hands. Ted Bundy’s, she thought, stretching her arms and pushing off the bottom. She gasped the moment her head broke the surface, blinking and breathing—nothing more—until she stopped seeing stars.

  That’s what it’s like to be strangled. She didn’t know for sure, of course. She’d never actually been strangled. But since she’d started reading The Stranger Beside Me, the creepy book she’d found packed away in her mother’s things from college, she’d imagined it plenty of times. Her mom called it a true-crime classic. Her dad, sensationalist garbage. One thing they both agreed on: It was a phase. Her serial-killer phase. And she’d grow out of it. At least she’d gotten them to agree on something.

  “What the hell, Dakota?” Tyler’s voice startled her, and she realized he’d been staring. Her other friends too. They’d gathered at the edge of the pool, pointing down at her. “You’re being weird,” Tyler said, frowning with such intensity she had to look away. But a second later, he started laughing when Eric snuck up from behind and shoved him in.

  Dakota turned away, only partly to avoid the swash of water. I am being weird. Weird, meaning different. Weird, meaning not a total clone. Weird, meaning an embarrassment to him. Tyler Lowry. A rising senior lacrosse phenom who’d asked her to the prom in April. Since then, they were sort of a thing. Which she was supposed to be like excited about. And she had been. Once upon a time. But lately, that felt like a monumental ask. Especially the way he’d been acting. Reminding her he wouldn’t wait much longer.

  “I’m okay,” she said, watching the waves ripple the surface like aftershocks. But they’d already moved on, laughing along with Tyler as he splashed like a deranged orca in the shallow end. Eric tossed a floaty at his head. It missed and dead-ended against the pool’s concrete edge.

  Dakota’s legs felt heavy as she swam to the steps and climbed out, suddenly conscious of her body, exposed and dripping. She had broad swimmer’s shoulders and was shaped like a board. Nothing like Hannah, who hosted her own beauty vlog on YouTube and dressed up as a sexy panda last Halloween. Only Hannah could pull that off.

  Ignoring the roughhousing in her wake, Dakota walked away from the pool and tugged on the jean shorts and T-shirt she’d left in a pile on the lounge chair. Her bikini top made wet spots on the front—two bullseyes for Tyler and his jock friends—but it felt better to be covered. Especially with Hannah prancing around like a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model. Everyone said she looked like Kate Upton. And her mom had actually worked as a catalog model before she became Nurse Montgomery at Napa Children’s Hospital. The same Napa Children’s her dad disappeared into most days, spending his time with sick kids who thought he was a superhero.

  “What’s up with you?” Hannah took a swig from a bottle of Gatorade that didn’t smell like Gatorade at all. When she offered a taste, Dakota took a sip, forcing herself to swallow.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re acting all emo. Like you don’t even want to be here. You’ve barely said two words all night.”

  “Actually, I said four words just now, so don’t exaggerate.”

  Hannah rolled her eyes. The perfect cat-eyes from her last makeup video tutorial. Dakota suspected that’s why she’d avoided the water. Just strutted around in her bikini and short shorts, preening. As hard as she tried, Dakota couldn’t remember when Hannah had turned into this person—the old Hannah was addicted to SpongeBob and thought high heels were an especially cruel form of torture—but it had happened so gradually, she’d hardly noticed. Somehow her best friend had risen to the top of the Napa Prep social strata, towing little ole Dakota behind her like a glamorous tugboat.

  “Whatevs. It’s your prerogative if you want to ignore your totally hot senior boyfriend. But don’t be a biatch to me too. What have I done?”

  “I’m not being a biatch.” Dakota hated the sound of that word as it left her mouth. “And he’s technically not my boyfriend.”

  “He won’t ever be if you keep acting like a biatch. You unfollowed Faces by Hannah. And you haven’t slept over since—when was it? Prom? That was ages ago.”

  Dakota knew precisely how long it had been. Two months and three days. But Hannah was right. It felt like ages. The Middle Ages with its Black Death and Hundred Years War. “Look, I’m staying over tonight. And I told you my dad’s on a kick. I guess he thinks too much screen time is corrupting my mind.”

  Dakota left out the other part. About how her parents had practically diagnosed her as depressed. They didn’t exactly say it to her face, but she’d heard them discussing it. And since they were both doctors, they always got it right. What a sham.

  “Well, he’s not wrong.” Hannah smirked at her, and Dakota understood all had been forgiven. At least for now.

  Hannah’s eyes widened, her mouth a little red O. Dakota spun around, saw what she saw. A light had come on in the house behind them. And then another, a bright naked bulb on the patio. It bore into her, and Dakota felt stunned. Zapped with a proton beam like one of her father’s patients. She’d had that feeling a lot lately. Since the incident. That seemed like a safe word for it. A word without emotion.

  “Hey!” Tyler yelled, catapulting from the water, Eric sploshing right behind him. They shoved their wet feet into their shoes, grabbed their phones and T-shirts from the deck, and took off for the fence. “Gotta go! They’re home.”

  Dakota watched as Tyler and Eric and two other older boys she barely knew scaled the pickets as swift as gazelles. They hoisted Hannah over and waited for her. But she couldn’t move.

  “Come on!” Hannah urged, waving her hand so wildly it appeared not to belong to her at all. It flapped like a bird’s broken wing. Like one of the pom-poms Hannah wielded on the sidelines during football season.

  Dakota almost laughed at her until Tyler pounded his fist against the fence, cursing, and she finally took his hand. He lifted her without effort it seemed, and her feet hit the ground running.

  ****

  Dakota felt sick. She curled onto her side and glanced at her phone on the nightstand. It had been silent, the screen dark for hours now. She almost believed it hadn’t happened. That she hadn’t done it. But that was stupid. Of course, she had. She couldn’t blame Hannah. Not really. Though Hannah had encouraged her—C’mon. He’s seventeen. He’s got
expectations. Plus, everybody’s done it. It’s no biggie—and coached her through it as they’d swigged from a bottle of wine Hannah had pilfered from her parents’ liquor cabinet.

  Hannah had redone Dakota’s hair and makeup, which had been washed away by the pool water, and told her how to pose—Let your hair down. Soften your eyes. Think of something sexy. Like Channing Tatum reading you poetry. Don’t laugh. Lean forward a little and tuck your elbows in. It makes your boobs look bigger—and snapped the pics. She’d even helped her choose the best one. The one where Dakota’s lacy red bra, which really belonged to Hannah, fell down from her shoulders, just revealing her breasts. But Dakota had been the one to hit Send. And now she’d give anything to take it back.

  Grown-ups were always saying how you’d regret the choices you didn’t make. But Dakota thought that was a load of crap. You’d always regret the stupid choices you made much more. Like sending Tyler the half-naked photo he’d been asking for. A stupid choice if ever there was one. There are no choices without consequences. Didn’t her mom always tell her patients that? Consequences like the brutal churning in her gut. Like horndog Tyler texting her back:

  finaly u show me sum skin damn ur hot wen can i c u like that 4 real

  Hannah had typed for her—soon, sexy—and they’d giggled about Tyler’s atrocious text-spelling before Dakota had deleted the word sexy and sent the reply hurtling out into the universe. Like an asteroid meant to destroy her life.

  She slipped from the bed where Hannah lay sleeping and padded down the stairs to the Montgomerys’ living room. She knew the house was empty. Hannah’s parents were away for the night at some ritzy fundraiser sponsored by her dad’s law firm, and her older brother, Zach, had stayed on at USC for the summer semester. But she couldn’t shake the feeling someone else was there, watching her. A pair of unblinking eyes just beyond her view.

  It’s that stupid Bundy book, she thought.

  After their phones had finally gone quiet, Hannah had dozed off, and Dakota had snuck the worn paperback from her duffle bag and read for at least an hour about the way Bundy had escaped from jail and crept into the Chi Omega sorority house through the door with a broken lock and bludgeoned to death two girls not much older than her and Hannah. It made her skin crawl in a way that wasn’t entirely unpleasant, and she reread whole paragraphs, imagining herself in that house, lying perfectly still under the covers while Bundy made quick work of Hannah. Of the two of them, Hannah would definitely be the first to go.

  Dakota shook her head at her own morbid freakdom. No wonder her parents were skeeved out by her lately. Well, at least her dad. Her mom understood, being a morbid freak herself. She worked with murderers every day. Crazy ones too. As if there were any other kind.

  Dakota tiptoed toward the sofa where Snowball, Hannah’s enormous Persian, had already staked claim to the middle cushion. Without lifting his head, he eyeballed her warily, and Dakota wondered if he could smell Gus on her T-shirt. Or if he was thinking about it too. The last night she’d spent here. Prom night. He’d been perched on the counter, amid the red plastic cups and half-empty party trays, casually licking his paw while Dakota’s whole world plummeted from beneath her.

  “It’s just me, big guy.”

  She scratched the top of his head until he purred with contentment. Then she left him to his throne, taking the pauper’s seat on the beanbag instead. She flipped on the television and turned the sound down low, scrolling through the channels numbly. The screen’s silvery white light cast shadows around her, conjuring ghosts of the past that flashed and flickered at the edges of her vision.

  There. Her eyes darted to the basement door. It looked innocent enough, painted the same eggshell white as the Montgomerys’ kitchen and affixed with an antique brass doorknob. When they were little, Hannah had declared it their secret fortress, with its long, creaky staircase, its washing machine treasure chest to store the jewels they’d pilfered, and its grumbling beast that would stop intruders in their tracks. Don’t tell Mom, Hannah had whispered. But I think the beast eats socks.

  The door was closed now. But on prom night, it had been left ajar, beckoning to Dakota like an open book. She’d peered down into the dimly lit cavern trying to make sense of the two familiar shapes moving in the dark below her.

  She could still see it. Hadn’t stopped seeing it. Even though she desperately wanted to. Hannah’s mother moaning like a wounded creature with her back pressed against the beast. Which had long ago lost its fascination and revealed itself as nothing more than an unremarkable Whirlpool dryer. Fingers curled like talons, head flung back. A man too, unrecognizable at first. His mouth latched to her pale neck like a vampire. A regular Edward Cullen, her father. His favorite blue flannel shirt had given him away.

  Dakota had been petrified. Like the redwood trees in that ancient forest they’d visited a few years back. A volcano had erupted smack-dab in the middle of her life, fixing her there forever on that step at the top of that staircase behind that wretched door.

  Snowball jumped from the sofa, meandered toward her, and rubbed his face against her knee with vigor, reminding her that life had gone on. That she wasn’t a petrified tree after all. Though she felt like one sometimes, the way she stood mute in front of her dad when he said good morning. When he said good night. When he said all the things in-between. But especially when he asked her what was wrong. What could she say to him that wouldn’t sound like a total lie?

  It was going to be a long summer. Endless. Dakota sighed, letting her eyes wander back to the TV screen, where she resumed her aimless clicking. Until—

  She sat up straight and pushed Snowball aside, turning up the volume. The spooky intro music belonged to one of those true-crime news shows she liked—the kind she planned to work for someday—and she recognized the setting even before the camera panned wide, revealing an elderly woman walking the hilly shoreline of Lake Berryessa. Her white hair whipped across her face as she stooped to place a teddy bear at the foot of a wooden cross.

  Today marks forty years since Glenda Donnelly’s only daughter, thirteen-year-old Susanna, left her family’s home in Allendale on a walk with her best friend, her beagle, Hank. Neither she nor Hank ever returned. Susanna’s charred remains were discovered weeks later, here at Lake Berryessa in Napa, California. It took four more years before detectives realized she had been preyed upon by a serial killer, an enigma dubbed the Shadow Man. Today, the police are no closer to solving Susanna’s decades-old murder or the murders of the fifteen young women who came after her, falling victim to the same tragic fate. The Shadow Man has proven elusive, evading all attempts by law enforcement to shine a light on his face. Recently, a group of online sleuths has set out to . . .

  Better than Bundy, Dakota admitted to herself. Because it had happened here, practically in her backyard. The idea of Shadow Man worked like the swimming pool trick, blurring all her bad decisions. The nude pic that lived on Tyler’s phone now, like patient zero with a virus waiting to spread. The basement door and her father and Mrs. Montgomery too. Until it all felt like something she’d seen in a movie. Something that didn’t belong to her at all and never had.

  Dakota leaned in, riveted. It turned out murder could be a useful distraction.

  AFTER

  Chapter

  Eight

  (Monday, October 1, 2018)

  A fierce little ray of midday sun sneaks through the blinds I’d pulled tight. I tug at the blanket, shielding my face from its callous persistence, but the jerking leaves my feet cold, my legs exposed. The bed feels oddly shaped and hard beneath me.

  I roll onto my side with effort and force my eyes open despite the vague throbbing in my skull. The night—the last few nights, if I’m being honest—comes back to me with the sudden brutality of a gut punch. A sandbag shot delivered by Dakota’s buoyant smile. Because the yearbook photo I’d snatched from Dad’s bunk bed is right there next to
me. On the floor.

  I’m on the floor. In the office. Beneath the suspect wall.

  The ray of light I’d cursed doesn’t belong to the sun after all—there are no windows in here—but the desk lamp I must’ve carted in from the other room after it got dark, possibly several nights ago. It had toppled over at my feet next to an empty bottle of Russian Standard, its small bright bulb drilling me with judgment.

  I close my eyes again—sweet relief—too tired and achy to reach the five feet to shut it off. My mind is a jumble of tangled threads, a smattering of breadcrumbs, each one leading me back to last Tuesday. To Mol’s Junkyard and my father. To the photograph and its inscription. To what came after I’d fled from Glory Hole with the past nipping like a wolf at my heels.

  The days since then collapse like a house of cards into one long, dark night of pounding vodka and staring at the faces on my wall and falling under the spell of a heavy, dreamless sleep. Rinse and repeat. I realize I can’t even be certain how many days have passed.

  I stand slowly, wary as a newborn fawn, Dakota’s 49ers sweatshirt falling in a heap at my bare feet. No wonder I’d been cold. I take a few uncertain steps, testing my legs, and survey the damage.

  I count four bottles in total, all drained dry. A half-eaten bowl of mac and cheese, and whatever I’d eaten it with—spoon? fork? soup ladle?—God knows where. An empty gallon of chocolate-fudge-brownie ice cream, Dakota’s favorite flavor. No coincidence, I’m sure. Because when I wallow, I go full-bore. And the sight of it comes with a flash of memory. Me, in the self-checkout at the grocery, catching a frightening glimpse of myself in the little camera aimed at my face. The scanner’s beep punctuating my descent down every rung of the dignity ladder. Vodka. Vodka. Vodka. Ice cream. At least I’d eaten something.