Читать книгу The Good Daughter: A gripping, suspenseful, page-turning thriller - Alexandra Burt - Страница 17

Dahlia

It’s almost as if there’s a hole in the ground somewhere, swallowing lives, like the hole in the woods was supposed to swallow Jane. At home, I throw the bag of cleaning supplies on the couch and power up my laptop.

The numbers are staggering; thousands of people go missing every day, adults and children alike. Other crimes take priority and missing persons cases are mostly solved by sheer accident or coincidence; there are tens of thousands of unidentified remains waiting in coroners’ offices all over the country; more than a hundred thousand cases are open at one time.

The computer freezes. As I wait for it to recover, I imagine a map with tiny dots for every buried body, missing, undiscovered. And there’s my Jane, found, safe, yet no one seems to know her. It seems impossible that no one but me seems to care who she is. But maybe nothing is as it seems, maybe the police have a clue, maybe found DNA even, but how would I even know? Bobby should know, or at least he should be able to find out. I dial his cell and he answers after two rings.

“I’m on patrol. Something happen?”

“No, nothing happened.” I don’t know how to ask the questions that bounce around all day long in my head.

“I’m in your neighborhood. I can come by.”

Fifteen minutes later we are in the very house and on the very couch where we used to sit together as teenagers.

“I can’t believe no one knows who she is. Someone must miss her. Is there anything you can tell me? The hospital won’t talk to me.”

“They expect her to wake up from the coma and tell them who she is. Who did this to her.”

“How do they know she’ll wake up and be okay?”

“They don’t know. They’ve done tests but they won’t know for sure until she wakes up. But we know she’s not matching up to anyone reported missing.”

“Why don’t they make her picture public? Someone might recognize her.”

“She’s got a tube in her mouth, her face is swollen—I’m not sure that would do any good. I’ve seen people after car accidents, or fights, and they are so swollen not even their own family recognize them.”

“You’ve seen her lately?”

Bobby pauses, ever so slightly, then takes a sharp breath in. “No, not really. Detectives are working on the case and I don’t really know any more than you do.”

“Are there others?”

“Other what?”

“Missing women. In Aurora.” There is a hint of a shadow descending over his face. His cheeks become stiff, no longer a friend sitting here, catching up, but a door just closed, like the gates of a fortress. “What if there were other victims, in the past? How can you explain the way he buried her? What if he was right there, watching me? What if I interrupted something and he knows who I am?”

“Dahlia—”

“There must be others. What he did to her, that’s not something that someone does once. There’s someone out there, maybe, I don’t know. Really, I don’t. But it’s not impossible. You can’t say it’s impossible.”

“You’re going overboard. I—”

“Bobby, what if there are more missing women? And no one does anything about it.”

“You need to stop worrying. There’s no reason to believe that he was watching you. How do you—”

“Are there others?”

“Dahlia—”

“Missing women. Cases like this. As a cop you should know if there’ve been any cases in the past ten years or so.”

His expression goes blank. I know the face, have seen it before. We used to get into a lot of trouble, back in high school. We smoked behind the gym, broke some equipment in the chemistry lab, but Bobby—the most honest person I know—changes when he lies. His face turns indecipherable with no signs of life. Your facial expressions give it away. Learn to have a poker face, he used to say to me.

“She’ll wake up. It’s only a matter of time.”

“So there are others?”

“Just allow it to play out for now. I think she’ll wake up and then we’ll know what happened. In the meantime, try not to worry. You saved her life. Isn’t that enough?”

His radio goes off, the voice of a female dispatcher squawking, just a couple of words at most, clipped, short. Bobby gets up and walks off to the side, pushing radio buttons, talking into his shoulder mic. “Let’s talk some other time,” he says and ends our conversation.

After he leaves, I go back to skimming through the articles. When I run across something with additional information, I hit the print button—I can’t stand reading on a computer screen—and finally I pull up the FBI site, which lists the missing by state.

I’m just about to compare online photos of missing girls with any resemblance to my Jane when I remember my mother and her lost purse. Lately, forgotten tasks enter my mind in completely unrelated moments, like an air-filled float popping to the surface of the ocean. The purse had completely slipped my mind, yet here it is, urging me to go find it. It’s too late to go out and search for it now; it’s about to get dark.

The composite woman pops back into my head, and the report on TV I watched that day in the hospital. I do a search for her and come across an article.

I see a red blinking light coming from the printer on the kitchen counter. I reload the tray and wait for the last few pages to print. I grab the stack and sit on the couch in the dining room and I start reading.

Last week, a jogger found a young woman on the brink of death in the woods of Aurora, Texas. The very discovery has stirred up a cold case of another alleged missing person that began with a man appearing at the Aurora police station over thirty years ago. The headline in the 1985 Aurora Daily Herald read as follows:

Man booked for resisting arrest after reporting disappearance of a woman

Aurora, December 12, 1985

A man by the name of Delbert Humphrey appeared at the Aurora police station claiming his girlfriend, a woman known to him only as “Tee,” had gone missing after he looked for the woman at the Creel Hollow Farm in Aurora. Two deputies questioned Humphrey extensively but even the police chief, Griffin Haynes, was unable to make sense of his story. Questioned further, Humphrey admitted he was not licensed to drive a vehicle and he was also unable to produce a photograph of the missing woman. He did, however, offer a pencil drawing of her. When the police doubted his story, he insisted on a sketch artist. A composite was rendered of the mystery woman.

The deputies asked permission to search his vehicle. During the search, they recovered what looked like drugs, commonly referred to as rock cocaine or crack. The rocklike substance, however, had a strong fragrant odor. Upon questioning, Humphrey referred to it as “High John the Conqueror Root” and “Balm of Gilead.” Humphrey explained that the missing woman was part of a group of travelers working at local carnivals, reading palms and selling herb and plant resins, the very rocks deputies thought to be rock cocaine.

The deputies also recovered an old rudimentary brass scale and weights. Humphrey was booked for driving without a license, on suspicion of possession with intent to distribute an imitation controlled dangerous substance and possession of drug paraphernalia.

The young woman who was found by a local jogger in the woods, which locals refer to as the Whispering Woods, is on the mend, however. It’s been over a week but police are confident that her identity will be revealed as soon as they are able to question her.

At the end of the article is a rudimentary pencil drawing of the woman who went missing in 1985. Her individual features are flat, barely dimensional. The composite, however, shows more depth and dimension. She seems to be a woman in her twenties, long hair parted in the middle, full lips.

When I emerge from the stack of papers, it’s dark outside and the cold air coming in through the open sliding glass door makes me shiver. I sit on the floor and fan out the papers on the coffee table. There are Jane’s articles, and the woman whose only likeness is a composite.

When I run out of room on the coffee table, I arrange the papers on the floor. I get lost in sorting them and realize no one cares about Jane as much as I do. They can’t possibly know what I have come to realize the day I snuck into her room; how I saw and felt that she wanted to communicate with me. And that she holds the key to her very own identity and she wanted to tell me. How else can I explain what happened at that moment, the whiff of cinnamon, my mind slipping, feeling as if I’m tumbling down a staircase, the tremor going through my body? How can I explain what I saw that night? The vision of the woods. It can’t be nothing, I’m sure of that.

The printer behind me feeds more paper and I grab the last of that stack once the motor goes quiet. The mystery woman without a photograph was a rather big story—even papers of surrounding counties had picked it up. The articles revolved more around the man going to jail for the possession of an antique scale and some resin than the fact that he was there to report a missing person.

The papers on the floor get mixed up. Short of stapling them there’s no way to keep them in order. I collect them into a stack, and with thumbtacks I pin them to the wall. I run out of room; I have covered the entire wall behind the couch with papers.

I tuck the composite underneath the mirror frame. The woman looks to be about twenty years old. Her eyelashes are long, her eyes slightly bulgy between prominent cheekbones. Her face is gaunt. Her picture floats to the ground but I am out of tacks and nothing would irritate me more than the wall not being complete. I stick it back under the mirror and this time it remains.

I step back and take in my wall. The pattern of the pages—aligned with perfect angles and grouped by person, sequenced by date and positioned in a star-shaped design in the center of the wall—seems to shift, appears to close in, yet the pages remain, as if all my senses are tuned in to this design I just created. A strong emotion overcomes me—I feel afraid of what’s happening but all my senses kick in at the same time—I see the composite face, the wind outside plays with the leaves, a sprinkler hisses somewhere down the street, I smell the dank soil of my neighbor’s lawn. Fusion. That’s what it feels like. A fusion of all my senses. It must mean something. I just have to figure out what. There is a feeling of anticipation and my senses seem to battle with one another, not to dominate but to achieve equality. It is overwhelming, as if some thing makes itself known, telling me not to be afraid. The images of the two women jumble, like dice in a cup, just to emerge again, tumble out on a table that is my wall.

There is a hunch, a premonition of some sort.

A spark of the whitest light I have ever seen sears into my eyes like a camera flash. The ground shifts as if someone is picking me up. I am on my back, looking up at the ceiling fan blades wop-wop like helicopter blades. They slice the air, disturb the light, turn it into snow.

I’m in a blizzard yet again, the same blizzard I keep seeing over and over. I can’t escape it—can’t hide from it either.

Like a monster, it just won’t go away.

Roswell, New Mexico, 1988

Camelot Mobile Home Park

I read the sign. I don’t know what the word Camelot means. But I know what a mobile home park is. It’s where I live now. Small paved walkways lead to similar houses just like ours. They are not really houses, I don’t think they are—they shake and hum when it rains and strong winds come through the cracks in the wall. Mobile homes are what they’re called.

Outside my window I see a long driveway with occasional weeds peeking out from cracks in the concrete. Sometimes I can see mom through the window as she walks from door to door. She collects the rent, she tells me. I watch children play through the window. They must be smarter than me, must be because they get to go to school and I don’t, and so I study more, study harder, force my mind to make connections, do my math even though I have to imagine things like balloons or pizzas to understand the concept of multiplication and subtraction. And one day, once I catch up with those children, then I’ll get to go to school too.

The coffee table is covered in books. Most of them have torn pages and crayon marks but I don’t care. I love books. I read anything I can get my hands on.

I have many questions when mom comes home for lunch: Do airplanes fall out of the sky and what’s the meaning of “Lockerbie”? What are the rules of tennis? Most of those questions I can’t ask because she’d know that I changed the channel from the only one I’m allowed to watch. Mom only stays for a little while and when I tell her I have more to ask about she tells me she’ll get me a book that will answer all my questions.

“All of them?”

“Yes. All the words in the world are in it,” she says and hugs me. I hang on to her shirt, I don’t want her to leave, and I need to know about that book.

“When?” I ask and don’t really believe her. There’s no such thing as an answer to all questions.

“Soon.”

I want to cry. Soon is like saying never. Like soon I’ll be going to school. Soon we’ll have friends over, soon, everything that never happens is soon. I cling to the thought of owning such a book, vow that the first words I’ll look up are Camelot, then Lockerbie, then tennis game rules.

I have a schedule. Reading Rainbow after mom leaves. I write down all the words I learn as I watch and then The Jetsons comes on. After The Jetsons I read until mom comes to make lunch and checks my workbooks. I have so many questions: Why can’t I get on the bus with the other kids in Camelot? Why am I not allowed to play outside?

I did sneak out that one time. The girl’s name who was playing outside I never asked as if I knew I wasn’t going to see her again. We stole chalk from the bucket by the community board and we drew squares on the concrete, picked the biggest rock we could find—there were plenty in between the patchy grass and the crumbling road—and we played as the sun was beating down on us. When mom pulled up in her car, I ran back to the trailer and locked the door behind me, pretending to be studying. As if I could trick her, make her believe that she had seen another girl looking just like me outside while I was inside practicing my upper- and lowercase letters. She was mad, but not that mad. But I can’t do that again. Ever.

As I learn to read and draw, as I begin to prefer the news channel to The Berenstain Bears , as my mind expands, the road leading to the trailers crumbles a bit more with each passing day. And then we leave.

The stolen chalk, the stones, and the memory of the nameless girl are all I take with me from Camelot the night we pack up the powder blue car and drive farther west.

West, is what mom says, We are going west, as if it is going to be the end of all our troubles.