"Stay with me, Mandy, come on now." Her folder had said Amanda, but Ben sensed people who knew her, really knew her, called her Mandy, and he leaned on that now, on the hope that this one tiny connection might bring her back from whatever dark hole she'd plunged into.
Her eyes rolled up, and he could see only the whites. Blood pulsed hot and steady from the wound in her neck as he bunched a handful of white sheet against it.
Kenya ran into the room and then shouted down the hallway for a trauma doctor.
Amanda's other hand flopped open, the one that hadn't been holding the scissors. Through the adrenaline giving him tunnel vision, Ben saw the golden unicorn head, the red ruby eye gleaming.
"What the fuck?" he groaned.
"You okay?" Kenya asked, nudging him aside. "Step out, take a breather. We've got this."
He almost grabbed the necklace. He wanted to snatch it from the girl's limp hand and run to the roof of the building and chuck it into the glowing night, but that would only ensure he'd cross paths with it again when the shift ended.
He turned away from it and stumbled into the hallway.
At six a.m. Ben walked bleary-eyed into the parking lot. More mornings than not he walked off a shift motivated, energized even. Not this morning. This morning he felt as if he'd biked five hundred miles the night before. During a hailstorm. With leg cramps.
He sagged against his car, catching sight of Ryan dragging himself in similar fashion toward his two-door pickup. Ryan offered a half-hearted wave. "Karaoke this weekend?"
Ben gave him a thumbs up, too tired to offer more.
Kenya bounded from the building a moment later. She'd changed from scrubs into a cream-colored business suit and red heels.
"Please tell me you're not going to your second job?" Ben asked as she paused beside her black Saturn.
She grinned, sliding sunglasses over her eyes. "Nothing a few shots of espresso can't cure. Paralegals don't get any more rest than nurses."
"When do you sleep?"
Kenya shrugged. "On my lunch breaks." She climbed into her car, fired the engine, and pulled from the parking lot.
Ben unlocked his door and slid behind the wheel. He started the car and the radio blared to life, though he was sure he hadn't turned it on when driving to his shift the evening before. Every Breath You Take by the Police screamed from the speakers. Ben slammed his hand against the radio button before twisting it so hard that he yanked the knob right off the dashboard.
"Shit," he muttered, tossing it on the passenger seat.
He drove home in a fog, walked through the front door and stumbled up the stairs to his bedroom. He needed to feed Leia, take a shower, eat something, but he did none of those things. He lay on the bed, shoved off his shoes, and fell asleep.
21
Lori paused from the witch fairytale she'd been reading when her phone rang. She saw Ben's name on the screen.
"Hey, how'd it go with the dream doctor yesterday?" he asked when she answered his call.
"Pretty good. Interesting. He suggested I try to revisit the dream while awake and imagine a happy ending."
"Huh. Please tell me he's not one of those two-hundred-dollar-an-hour shrinks. I could have given you that advice along with your coffee for free the other morning."
Lori laughed. "His rates approach that. Fortunately, my insurance covers it."
"Listen, I lined up a meeting with Bella Palmer's friend, the one who was with her when she vanished. She runs the Facebook page."
"You're kidding."
"Nope, dead serious. You want to go? I'm meeting her at six over in Reed City. I have to swing by Carmen's house and help Jonas with his bike for the umpteenth time. You can ride along."
Lori stared at the book. She'd highlighted several lines of text and could easily immerse herself in the stories for the rest of the afternoon. She bookmarked it and closed it. "Count me in. Should I come to your place?"
"That'd be great."
Before setting her phone down, she noticed three new emails in her inbox. One was from Stu. She hit delete without opening it. The second was from the office asking her to set up her out-of-office message and the third was from Dr. Chadwick. Lori opened it.
Lori—
Based on our previous meeting, I went ahead and gathered a few names for you: Jungians who work in the deeper archetypal stories. Irene Whitaker is right here in Michigan. Grand Rapids area. She no longer sees clients but works entirely on translating ancient texts, specifically folklore and fairytales. You can reach her at 616-525-9712.
Warm Regards,
Dr. Chadwick
Lori almost set her phone down, followed her usual ‘save the uncomfortable things for later’ mentality, but then she punched in the number for Irene Whitaker.
A woman, sounding cheerful, answered on the first ring.
"Hi, I'm trying to reach Irene Whitaker."
"This is she."
"Hi, Irene. My name is Lori Hicks and I was given your number by Dr. Chadwick in Traverse City."
"Hello, Lori. Yes, Dr. Chadwick mentioned you. He and I worked together lifetimes ago at the Centre for Analytic Studies in the United Kingdom. I too was interested in the study of dreams. Aren't we all? But ultimately I was called to the stories and that is where I've stayed.”
"Do you have time to meet at all? I've been reading some folklore stuff and would really appreciate an expert opinion."
"I can always make time to talk about my passions. I'm in the office most days here in Grand Rapids working on translations. You could come by anytime."
"Okay, great. How about tomorrow, maybe twelve o'clock?"
Ben was sitting on his screened-in porch when Lori arrived. He pushed open the swinging door and walked down the driveway.
"Hey,” he called.
"Hi." Lori closed her car door and pushed her hands into her pockets. "Are we officially private eyes now?"
He grinned. "Oh, yeah. We need to hit up a dollar store and get one of those little plastic sheriff badges and a pair of handcuffs."
"Handcuffs?"
He smirked. "Maybe we better skip the cuffs.”
"How was your shift last night?" she asked.
Ben glowered. "Rough. Full moons are a nightmare in the ER. I need to get a moon calendar and start taking that day off every month."
"Really? I always thought the full moon hysteria was an old wives' tale."
"Those old wives knew what they were talking about. I've got to grab some tools out of the garage and then we can roll."
He typed a code into a box on the exterior of the garage and the garage door groaned as it slid up.
"Welcome to my church," he said as the door opened, revealing an ordinary garage with cement floors. Shelves stacked with clear totes covered one wall. At the back of the garage stood a long wooden workbench. Tools hung from hooks on the wall above it. A rubber mat in front of the desk held a metal stand that a bicycle hung suspended from.
He walked into the garage, paused beside the bicycle and spun the back tire. "I've gotten on my knees more in this place than anywhere else."
Lori thought of her own recent visit to the overeater's anonymous group, which took place in a literal church. Was there anything about the space that compelled her to bare her soul, to fall to her knees and weep? No. She'd wept in plenty of groups, but it had nothing to do with the structure surrounding them. She could have been sitting in someone's living room or in the community hall of a trailer park—in fact she had been sitting in both places on occasions when she'd found herself sobbing to the group, detailing an out-of-control night when she'd eaten until she'd made herself sick.
But were those meetings her church? The space she clung to when her heart was troubled? No, she didn't think so. The image that rose to her mind was her little bay window with Matilda curled into a ball of fur, clutching the pillow Grand Mavis had carefully stitched in Lori's favorite colors of purple and yellow.
"We used to go to church before my dad
left," Lori admitted. "Afterwards we stopped. I'm pretty sure my mom decided God had abandoned her."
"Does she still feel that way?" Ben paused at the worktable, gathering tools into a little blue pouch and folding it closed.
"I don't think so. A few years after Bev disappeared, my mom started talking about how I'd been spared that night—how I must have had a guardian angel." Lori released a harsh laugh that sounded more like a croak. "It was unnerving to hear her say that."
"Why?"
"Because the necklace Bev wore that night—a bola, she called it—was supposed to summon her guardian angel. That's what she told me." She shook her head. "After Bev disappeared, I lost it. I'd never really had it. Who does at fourteen? I was kind of chubby and food had always been a comfort for me. I started binge-eating. By the time I ended my freshman year in high school I weighed almost two hundred pounds. It took a long time to get myself under control. Apparently, I was having night terrors. I don't even remember those, but my mom took me to see a psychologist. Don't remember him either. I didn't realize how much stuff I blocked out.”
She stumbled over her words, telling him secrets she hadn’t told her own boyfriend of four years.
“I finally got connected with a doctor my senior year who got me into a group,” Lori continued. “Basically, AA for binge-eaters. Hardly anyone knows that. I never told Stu. My mom and my grandma are the only people who know. The other day you asked me about touching my stomach.” She swiped a hand over her stomach. “It’s a throwback thing, a quirk I guess, from my days of being so self-conscious about my body."
As she heard the confession, she laughed dryly. "Maybe this is like a church. I'm sorry to tell you all this. I don't know why I am. I was so ashamed by that, ashamed that I couldn't do it on my own, that I didn't have the same self-control other people had. That's what happened the day I met you at King’s Post. I saw Stu and… went into that same old cycle. After it was over, I went to a meeting at the Holy Faith Church."
Ben frowned and carried the tools back out of the garage. Lori walked behind him, wishing she had a time machine that would allow her to erase the last thirty seconds, which in itself was an embarrassing thought. Of all the wrongs she could right with a time machine, her first thought was to erase a moment of verbal diarrhea.
"I lost it too,” Ben said. “I did a bunch of crazy stuff the year after Summer disappeared. I broke into her house when her parents were at church one Sunday morning. I was chasing wild theories then. I didn't find anything, but I stole a pair of her socks. Stupid. But they seemed like the least likely thing to be missed.
“I also broke into her locker at school. I keyed her uncle's truck. I tried to get her file at the police office. I went in there under the guise of a school project, said I needed to use the bathroom and slipped off to the evidence room. They caught me, threatened to arrest me. Even after I moved away from Manistee, I kept obsessing. I'm not a drinker, I've never been into drugs, but Summer's disappearance was my drug. I lived on it. I pored over the newspapers every day searching for stories about sex offenders and murderers. I drove all over the state, buying papers and taking notes. I still have a lot of it stuffed into cardboard boxes in my basement. There were years when I hoped a heavy rain would cause my basement to flood and destroy it all.”
"How did you stop?"
"I saved someone's life." Ben massaged the knuckles on his right hand. "I was at the pier watching the waves. It was something I did a lot in those days. I'd spend hours reading the papers and then I'd go out to that pier and try to connect the dots, come up with theories. I was out there one day in my early twenties and I saw these kids playing on the pier. It was too cold for swimming. We were coming into the time of year when the water gets icy. This tremendous wave came in and crashed right over the pilings and washed the girl into the water. The boy held his ground. He started screaming for help, and there were no parents around.
“I ran out there and dove in. The water was so cold it took my breath away. It took me a while to find her and when I did, she'd swallowed a ton of water. I got her onto the shore and bent her over, beating on her back. I thought she was dead. Her skin was ice-cold and gray and she wasn't breathing, but I didn't stop. I did mouth-to-mouth, and suddenly she gurgled and spit up.
“For the next two days, I didn't think about anything except saving that girl. I didn't think about Summer one single time. I'd found it, the path out of the obsession, and I felt like I had this one shot. I had to run it down and not look back. I enrolled in college the next day, did an accelerated program, applied to nursing school and now here I am."
"And then I showed up and dropped the obsession at your front door."
He shook his head. "It's different now. It doesn't have the same hold on me it once did."
Lori and Ben arrived at a modern farmhouse with a wrap-around porch and a wooden swing set in the side yard. Lori felt a little jangle of nerves at the thought of meeting Ben’s sister.
"That's Carmen," Ben told her, gesturing to a woman sitting in the front yard with two small children. "And that"—he pointed at the garage where a man was biting his lip and staring in frustration at a bright yellow road bike—"is Jonas, who calls me over here twice a week to help him with his bike."
Lori smiled. "He looks like he's trying to solve a complicated algebra equation."
"Now that he could do in a cinch, but changing the gears on a bicycle? Not so much."
Ben parked, and he and Lori climbed out. "Hey, Carm," Ben called. "Go have a chat. I'll be over shortly."
Lori walked toward Carmen, who sat on a yellow and red checkered blanket. A baby, wearing only a blue onesie, lay on her back with several toes from her right foot inserted in her mouth. Another child, this one a little boy in the toddler range, sat coloring a picture of a cow, scribbling huge streaks of pink across the cow's backside.
Carmen smiled and struggled up to her feet, wincing. "I'm embarrassed to admit that at thirty-three, it's a lot easier to get down there than back up. Hi, I'm Carm." She extended her hand and Lori took it, noticing something warm and wet pass from Carmen's hand into her own.
Carmen pulled away and looked at her palm. "Oh, Jesus, peanut butter. I'm sorry. I swear it's not baby poop. Here, let me grab you a wipe."
"No big deal," Lori assured her, holding her hand out so she didn't unconsciously swipe it on her pants.
"So, you've been chumming around with my big brother. I hope he's treating you well."
Lori flushed. "Well, not… I mean, we're not dating or anything. We've just both been looking into the disappearances."
Carmen's smile fell, and she stepped back toward her children, leaning down to ruffle her son's red-blond curls. "Here, Thomas, have a drink from your sippy cup." She bent over and grabbed a blue cup decorated in whales and held it out to the boy, who continued coloring with one hand while guiding the lidded cup to his lips with the other. He didn't even look up.
"He's determined," Lori said.
"He sure is. A lot like his daddy. Jonas insists on cycling, but nothing about it comes naturally to him. Every time he goes for a ride, he comes home with road rash."
"Ouch," Lori said. "I'm afraid I'd have a similar experience."
"Do you want some iced tea? I have a pitcher on the porch."
Lori glanced toward the garage.
"They'll probably be twenty minutes,” Carmen explained. “Ben's big on giving Jonas a lesson every time he comes to show him something on the bike."
"Sure." Lori followed Carmen up the porch, accepting the tall glass of tea she poured. "This place is really beautiful," Lori told her, noticing the matching rocking chairs on the porch engraved with words ‘His’ and ‘Hers.’
“You lost a friend too? In the woods?” Carmen asked, her expression pinched.
“Yes, my best friend, Beverly Silva. We were both fourteen.”
Carmen stepped to the porch rail and busied herself brushing pollen off the wood. “It’s such a terrible thing, to
lose a friend like that. I had to forget. It was the only way I could move on.” She forced a smile, eyes flicking toward the garage. "Ben acts like I sold out, gave up. He thinks that's why I live this life, married with kids, doing the mom thing, but you want the truth? Ben's the one who's afraid. Not me.
“Well, that's not quite true. I am afraid. I'm terrified of something happening to the people I love, most of all my children, but I still had them. I still got married. I'm the one who's invited genuine love and vulnerability into my life. Ben acts like he's the risk-taker, but the truth is he's running from vulnerability. He has been ever since Summer disappeared. Did he tell you he and Summer were going out?"
22
Lori's eyes widened at the sudden outpouring of information. "No."
"He acts like everything's on the table, everything's transparent, but in reality, he picks what you see and paints it like it's the complete picture. They were. I was pissed as hell when it started because I was losing my best friend to my brother. Summer would come over and they'd sneak off to the garage to make out. It drove me batshit crazy.
“But what do you do? Forbid your best friend from dating your brother? It's the oldest fight in the book and nobody ever wins. It would probably have fizzled. She was fourteen, he was sixteen. Those things rarely last, but then… then she disappeared, and that changed everything. She was frozen in time.
“And Summer going missing was just the beginning. It got so much uglier, so much harder on Ben most of all because people in town blamed him and that extended to our family. My dad started drinking, his business went under, foreclosure, divorce… Ben fled. He's a runner." Carmen turned to face Lori, shaking her head. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be saying this stuff. I love my brother. I adore him, but… sometimes I feel judged by him, like he thinks I sold out somehow.”
"This looks like a pretty enviable life to me,” Lori said, looking beyond Carmen to her two children.
Darkness Stirring: A Troubled Spirits Novel Page 14
