I move more of the smaller rocks and the pile begins to crumble. I hear larger rocks fall into the stream. There’s finally a large enough hole for my body to squeeze through. There’s a fleeting fear that I could get my body halfway through and then the boulder above it would squash me, but I can’t afford to give into fear anymore. I am dying, but I am not yet dead. This could be my final chance.
I have to bite my tongue as I shove my way through the hole. Pain slams through me with every cell in my body begging for relief.
Finally, I pull myself all the way through and face-plant onto the dry pine needle ground, dripping wet and shivering. I’m out. I’m free.
I smell pine and something like a summer barbeque or an autumn bonfire.
Smoke?
I turn over onto my back and let myself fall into sweet, beautiful unconsciousness.
37
Mason, 2015 (Monday night)
WITH A NAME LIKE Crystal, you would think my mother raised me with a hippy mentality (dreadlocks, being one with nature, and peace signs everywhere) or she spent her motherhood yearning for the days when the football captain and basketball coach were fucking her in the back of her daddy’s car. But, no, she was the perfect housewife-businesswoman combination and a terrible mother. Despite that, I don’t despise her in the way that I hate my father. I don’t imagine the perfect way my hands would fit around her neck or how picturesque she would look with a bullet in her head. I don’t want to kill her because she occasionally shows the mothering instinct to protect me no matter what.
When my parents divorced after Debbie’s death, I began to dabble in drugs. Maybe I was depressed by Debbie’s death, maybe the change of being raised by two separated parents caused me stress, or maybe I just needed something that would rush through my veins so fast that I would lose track of reality. I don’t know. I tried alcohol first, but I didn’t care for the taste, so I switched to marijuana.
My grades began to plummet, and by the time I was a high school sophomore, I was in real danger of being held back another year for academic reasons—such as the fact that I was barely attending class. This reality jolted my mother into action—in a sense. Instead of trying to get me help for whatever was wrong with me (she had no idea about the drugs, which by now had included shrooms and ecstasy), she decided to change my environment. I was shipped off to an East Coast boarding school. The more controlled environment (and being away from my parents and everyone else I knew) did end up helping me to improve my grades enough that I managed to get into the University of Alaska.
Of course, in college, there’s no one to make sure you’re not snorting every single powder up your nose. College became an incubator of reckless schemes and convincing professors that I was just a sweet boy from a small town. I drifted from college to college within Alaska for five years, citing intellectual dissatisfaction, but really transferring just ahead of being academically suspended. My father was angry that I never graduated college, so I told him that I did and convinced him I had an internship while I was really selling drugs to freshman while my mother helped pay my rent.
This ended when she remarried. Jeb has two successful grown children of his own, and strong feelings about how his refusing to give them any of his hard-earned mining money had helped make them become responsible adults worthy of inheriting it someday. My mother cut me off from a steady flow of money.
With my money cut off, I turned to theft. I wasn't good at it, largely because I was stoned, and after one too many emergency last resort bailouts—which caused problems in her new marriage—my mother wrote me off entirely. Out of sheer desperation, I turned to my father, who to my surprise, agreed to bail me out, but also made it a requirement that I had to go live with him.
I did, and almost immediately regretted it, because my father was hell-bent on making amends for his inattention in my early childhood and after Debbie's death by being the strict father he felt he should have been.
Now it seems like the time to cash-in on the guilt she will feel for the fact that she ditched me when I was at my lowest before.
“You look like you’ve lost weight,” she remarks. “Is it because Sarah’s missing or drugs? Is your father making sure you’re eating?”
“It’s not like that, Mom,” I say. “I’ve just been doing a lot of yard work.”
“Well, your father shouldn’t work you so hard. It’s his job as a father to take care of you. You shouldn’t have to pay for rent and food by doing work for him.”
She takes out bread and peanut butter from the pantry and strawberry jelly from the fridge. I sit down on the stool as she begins to make a sandwich.
“What do you think that bitch FBI agent and your father talked about?” she asks, her voice remaining casual but her body tensing. “I doubt they actually have a new strategy. If they had a new one, they would have used it by now.”
“I doubt she’s still alive,” I say. “They say the chance of finding a kidnap victim after forty-eight hours practically drops to zero.”
“Well, you have a macabre view of the world since…your sister died. But what bothers me is that FBI agent didn’t care what Jeb or I had to say. We could have had important information and she didn’t care at all. She’s the type that bullies others around in order to seem like a big deal when she doesn’t have any idea what she’s doing. I mean, I heard from Elizabeth Cull that she talked to her daughter. Why would she talk to Elizabeth’s daughter? She barely knew Sarah! All they did was work together.”
“Elizabeth’s daughter works with Sarah? At The Charcoal Grill?” I ask. Why would the FBI agent be questioning someone there?
“Yes, she’s a waitress. You must have seen her there before. She’s cute, around the same age as Sarah. She has curly blond hair and is a rather curvy young lady.”
I have seen her. I specifically remember her being there the day I met with Pete and Kenny to demand the money they owed me. Apparently, the FBI agent does have a strategy. She’s trying to piece together Sarah's last day in town, trying to uncover who she talked to and who she interacted with, and who those contacts interacted with.
If she's spoken with the waitresses at the burger joint, the waitresses had likely mentioned that they saw Pete and Kenny in there on Friday. They’re both rather suspicious-looking individuals, but would they have remembered me, too? Possibly, if they remembered that I was related to Sarah.
I feel exposed. Too exposed. They’re going to pull me in for questioning and I don’t know how well I could answer questions without giving something away while I’m trapped in an interrogation room. Just the thought of the locked room makes me anxious. And a prison cell would be so much worse.
While I might be able to explain things by saying I was collecting evidence against Pete and Kenny for the state police, I couldn’t be certain that they’d believe that. Maybe I need to leave before I had planned. Maybe I’d be better off just playing it cool. I don’t know for certain. If I run, I will certainly look guilty, but I’ll have the chance to hide before they realize I’m gone. If I play it cool, I could look like an innocent guy who coincidentally spent some time with the kidnappers, but they may have more evidence than my mother or I know of.
The house phone rings. My mother gets up from the table and removes the phone from the hook. “Hello?” she asks. “Jeb, how’s your day?…What? Why won’t you be home until later?….Yes, I’m at home. That’s why I’m answering the phone…why wouldn’t I be able to get out of town?…A fire? How big?”
I glance up at her. A fire in town?
“Does the fire department really need to close the roads? It’s that big?” she asks Jeb. She turns to me. “Jeb says that there’s a large fire spreading through the woods. Roads are being closed. They're keeping the road to the quarry open long enough for his people to get out, and for them to loan the department the use of one of their bulldozers. You don’t have to do anything for your father that will require you to leave town, do you? Only the road running by the qu
arry is open and that’s only for a short window of time. Jeb said maybe for half an hour at most…”
There’s the sensation that a noose is closing around my neck. I’ll be stuck here in Wyatt with the FBI agent until the fire's out, and that might give her enough time to corner me and question me.
I have the money and the meth in my car. I can leave now. Maybe if I disappear now, everyone will think the fire consumed me. I can start over new. I won’t even take any clothes. I could even ditch my car near the fire, so they’ll only find its charred remains.
I walk out while my mother is still on the phone, her back turned to me as she whispers concerns and reassurances to her husband. As her front door slams behind me, I hear her calling out for me.
As I open my car door, I notice the midnight sun. It never sets in Alaska during the summer. It’s twenty-four hours of light, which seems good for those afraid of the dark, but they don’t realize that sunlight causes shadows and shadows are where anything can creep and kill.
38
Aaron, 2013
THERE ARE ENDLESS REFLECTIONS of fire.
On the fire trucks. On the pools of water on the sidewalk. On the face shields of the firefighters’ helmets. There are endless flames—red, orange, and yellow—while my home resembles a black shadow of a house with fire bursting out the windows and smoke billowing over it like a dozen storm clouds.
I rush toward the door, knowing that I would be running straight into flames.
“Lisa!” I scream, inhaling a lungful of smoke. I cough, pain ricocheting through my chest. “Lisa! Becky!”
I can’t see through all of the smoke. My hands reach forward, searching for the entrance’s coatrack, my wife or daughter, a single reason why my house would go up in flames. My hands land on something solid and all I feel is piercing pain. I jerk my hand away, but the pain keeps pulsing in my palms.
“Lisa! Becky!” I stumble over something else. As I land beside it, I realize it’s the coatrack. Flames lick up my pant legs. As I scramble onto my feet, I feel a hand grip the back of my shirt and jerk me back. Someone drags me out of the house—I feel the cold air of the night, but even with my burned hands and my ruined pants, I yearn to return to the heat of the fire. I need to find my family.
“Get back,” a gruff voice says. It’s a firefighter and he pulls me all of the way back to the sidewalk.
“You don’t understand,” I say. “My family is in there. I have to go get them.”
He jerks me in front of him, his hands on my arms to keep me still as I try to escape his grip. “I’m sorry, sir, I’m sorry. There’s nothing you can do. It’s too late.
“No!” I shout. “You don’t understand. We were supposed to have ice cream…we were supposed to have pizza and I…I couldn’t because I was working.”
Tears well up in my eyes and the fire wavers even more through my blurry sight.
“Sir, why don’t you sit down?”
A scream pierces through the air. I dodge under the firefighter’s arm and rush back toward the house.
“Lisa!” I yell. Something hits me square in the middle of my back and I feel electricity run from the center of my body to the edges of my fingers and toes. My body drops right in front of my porch.
For a second, I see Lisa on the second floor, in her room. She’s pounding against the window glass that wasn’t there a second ago.
Why weren’t you here to save me? she asks. Why weren’t you here to protect your family?
Right before I black out, she disappears along with the window. The flames return, bursting out of the house and I know they will intrude in my thoughts for the rest of my godforsaken life.
39
Teresa, 2013
I DON’T REMEMBER MUCH before the Daniels adopted me. I was adopted when I was three years old, which according to my psychology professor back in Yale, is when children begin to form memories. I have flashes of memory—a manicured hand giving me a teddy bear with a polka-dot tie, lips pressing against my forehead to check my temperature, a broken bulb with burnt glass and a small clump of crystal meth inside it. My birth mother’s face is never clear in my mind, but the emotions I feel for her range from rage to insensible devotion and love.
Which is why I’m at Alaska Regional Hospital, sitting in a chair as she lies skeletal on a gurney.
Her hair is gray and has small, tight curls that crown her head. Has she always been a small woman? Or did age and drugs shrink her? Her wrinkles remind me of desert sand, undulated and tan.
“People always think that drug use only ends in death if someone overdoses,” the nurse says as she checks my mother’s vital signs, “but drugs wear down the body. I’m sorry. It’s a terrible way to lose a mother.”
“I haven’t seen her since I was three,” I tell the nurse.
She opens her mouth, but her brow is furrowed and the conversation has clearly gone in a direction she didn’t expect. “Well…I’m sorry. She was still your mother and…that bond doesn’t fade.”
She scrambles out of the room, her face burning red. I tuck a few of my braids behind my ears and stare at my mother’s hands. They are gnarled and her nails have begun to yellow. I wonder if they are the same hands that gave me the teddy bear with the polka-dot tie or if those thin, cracked lips are the ones that pressed against my forehead, making sure that I wasn’t ill.
All my life, I have felt this lack of love despite the fact that the Daniels were the most loving family anyone could ever have. Maybe I was missing the love of a biological mother or maybe I simply thought I was. Maybe I have desperately searched for love my whole life when all I needed to do was receive it.
Somebody knocks on the door. I glance up to see Dr. Adams standing in the doorway. “Are you ready, Miss Daniels?” he asks, his voice soft as if he’s afraid he’ll frighten me away. “Do you need a few more minutes?”
“No, no, you should do it,” I say.
He walks over to one of her life-support machines. I watch as he removes the IV lines from her port. I stare at her heart monitor as he switches off the machine. I don’t realize he’s moved next to me until I feel his hand on my shoulder.
“She’s going on to a better place,” he says.
I ignore him. I sense him taking a few steps back, but I keep my eyes on the heart monitor. The jagged movements of the ECG wave get shorter and shorter until the line goes flat and the machines beeps, high-pitched and desperate.
Dr. Adams clicks a button on the machine and it stops. He leans over my mother as he places his stethoscope on her chest. A nurse enters the room and mentions the time of death. I barely take notice of her.
“Do you want a moment with her?” Dr. Adams asks.
I shake my head and stand up. “No, no,” I say, but I can’t find any more words to tell him. I rush out of the room as it feels like the walls are caving in. Once I reach the hallway, I just keep moving. If I stop, the facade I have been keeping since I found out yesterday that my mother was dying will crack and I will fall to pieces.
I have three other biological siblings, but none of them came to be with our mother as she passed. The two who are older than me—Alicia and Terrence—had no desire to have any relationship with my mother because of her addiction and lackluster parenting skills, while my younger sister, Michelle, was only a year old when we were taken away by social services. She doesn’t remember her at all and has zero desire to form a relationship with her.
A sound that is the pinnacle of anguish rattles me. At first, I think it must be coming from my own mouth. It sounds exactly how I feel, but when I touch my lips, my mouth is closed. I follow the noise until I reach a room, where I see a man with dark hair and bandaged hands being comforted by an older man who’s wearing a police uniform. The man is hunched over, his bandaged hands covering his face, rocking back and forth while making feral sounds of grief.
“Aaron, look, the department will do everything it can to figure out what happened,” the older man says, who is turned away
from me, so I’m unable to see either face. “We…everyone grieves with you, Aaron. I know it’s painful, but…”
The man makes a small choking noise and I know that he is crying now, too.
I turn away from the scene, continuing my walk through the hospital. I pray that I will forget this memory, just like I have forgotten the memories of my mother. Pain, grief, hatred, sadness, anxiety…I cannot cope with any of them. I will stash away all of these undesirable memories until all that is left is Agent Teresa Daniels. I will become a caricature of what I need to be.
40
Mason, 2013
WENDY NORRIS IS A chubby version of Jackie Kennedy with her dark brown hair framed around her face and high cheekbones, which seem to protrude from the rest of her face when she forces a smile.
Like she is doing now.
“Mason,” she says, sitting across from my father and me. We’re in her office, which is filled with books, oak wood furniture, and the scent of freshly made coffee. “By now you know that Detective Grant suffered a terrible tragedy yesterday.”
“Yes, it’s terrible,” I say, bowing my head. I’ve studied sadness in people’s faces before. Their eyes tend to stare off and lose focus, the corners of their mouths will turn downward, their shoulders will droop, and they will do their best to hide their grief. I can copy this emotion to the point that even the best therapists believe that I can feel it. “I heard it was those twins from town…”
Midnight Sun: A Gripping Serial Killer Thriller (A Grant & Daniels Trilogy Book 1) Page 12
