by Sasha Dawn
“He’ll be angrier if I don’t let him in.”
“Rosie, don’t.”
But she’s already halfway down the stairs.
It happens in slow motion:
The life drains from her face.
Her body goes flaccid against the door.
Wait a minute, Damien. Just a second. I see her lips moving, and I sort of hear her, but the words are cloudy; my ears are ringing.
She frees the deadbolt on the door.
Flips open the lock on the knob.
I drop my mother’s phone to the counter.
He bursts through the door like a hurricane and grasps my mother just under the elbow and forces her up the stairs.
I swallow over the lump in my throat and blink hard to focus.
“I don’t know what he told you.” Damien’s pulling the belt from his jeans. “But the boy has to be dealt with.”
“I’ll talk to him,” Rosie says. “Please. Just let me talk to him. He’s sorry—we both are—for what happened last night.”
“What happens between us is family business.” He shoves my mother aside and snaps his belt; the leather claps together. “No one has a right to tell a man how to deal with his family, and we have a lot to deal with these days, don’t we? You”—his finger is in my face—“you have something that belongs to me. Did you give it to your piece of ass?”
Rosie: “Damien.”
I have something that belongs to him? What do I have?
Is that why he trashed Chatham’s room at the Churchill? Because he thinks I took something of his?
In a split second, the hundred pieces of this puzzle I’ve been juggling suddenly start to fall into place. I practically hear them click together.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say. Except I do.
“I gave it to your mother.”
“The unicorn? That broke. I don’t know what happened that day, but—”
“Not the fucking unicorn.” He rhythmically slaps the belt against the table, slow and steady. Slap, slap, slap. “It’s important, so I want you to think long and hard about it.”
“If I knew, I’d tell you,” I lie.
He stares me down.
“Caroline found a picture in your closet,” I say. “Is there something you want to tell me?”
“I don’t know where that came from, and that’s none of your fucking business anyway.”
“Except it is,” I bluff. “Does the name Alana mean anything to you?”
Rosie: “Josh.”
“Shut your fucking mouth, you disrespectful punk.”
“Alana Goudy.” I take a step back.
He takes a step toward me, but I don’t care, as long as I draw him far away from my mother.
“She was at your place, wasn’t she?” I continue with slow words, so he’s sure to process and understand. “A long time ago? Except that’s not the only name she goes by anymore. You were following her. On the beach. At the diner.”
“Just give him the ring, Josh,” my mother says. “Damien, we can sort through everything. Start over. Start fresh, and we’ll figure things out, okay?”
“I don’t know what ring you’re talking about.” I keep walking slowly backward. He keeps in close pursuit. “But I do know you’ve been following my girlfriend. Chatham Claiborne. The girl with the X on her hip. That’s what you wanted to see the other day, isn’t it? When you were spying on us at the Churchill? You wanted to see if she had a scar where a birthmark used to be. You thought you recognized her when she came back to town. Maybe you followed the twins and me to Northgate Point Beach that day, and you saw her. You started following her after that.”
“What’s it to you?”
“Josh,” Rosie says.
“What were you going to do once you figured out who she was?”
“Shut your fucking mouth.”
“Josh,” Rosie says. “You know the ring. Just give it back to him.”
“I don’t know the ring, Rosie! I don’t have it! I don’t even know what it looks like!”
“Gold,” Damien says. “Dark red stone. Shaped like a teardrop.”
A teardrop that is half of a heart-shaped charm on Rachel Bachton’s necklace. No wonder the cops asked if the center stone of Savannah’s brooch was one piece or two. No wonder they weren’t fazed when I mentioned it. If I’m right, the heart-shaped charm on Rachel’s necklace was actually two tear-drop stones fashioned together to make a heart. And one of those stones is in the ring Damien threw at my mother.
Savannah’s brooch has nothing to do with Rachel, but this ring does.
“Dark red.” I start to nod. “Maybe I’ve seen it. Maybe I did give it to Chatham. You wouldn’t happen to know where she is, would you?”
Rosie approaches. “Josh, just give it to him!”
“Maybe I’ll beat it out of you.” Damien lashes with the belt, but not at me. It cuts across my mother’s thighs.
“Mom!”
She recoils, but swallows her scream.
“There’s no need for that, Damien.” My words are coming more quickly now, but I try to keep my voice even, so as not to give away my fear. “I know the ring.”
“I’ll teach your ass for lying to me.”
“I’ll tell you where it is. But you have to promise not to hit my mother again.”
“Oh, I’ve got other plans for her.” He cups his cock through his jeans.
“It’s in this room.” I only hope it’s still where it landed, under the breakfront. I can’t let him leave with it. “It’s in this room.”
“Yeah, and I might fuck her in this room, too.”
Keep him focused, keep him wanting.
“It’s in the flour,” I say. “At the bottom of the canister. It’s where she keeps the cash.”
Rosie hiccups over a sob.
“I’ll get it,” I say.
“And so will I.” He pops the button on his fly just to irk me.
I inch my way to the pantry, where we keep the canisters. I pull the top off the largest one, and just as I’m about to toss a handful of flour into Damien’s face, if only to buy my mother time to get out of the room, I hear the front door whip open.
Damien throws his belt around my neck and yanks me back to his chest.
The belt is tighter around my throat now, and he’s lifting me off my feet by my neck.
I manage to get a few fingers under the leather strap, and I’m wriggling to get free when I hear:
“County PD.”
“Lose the weapon, Mr. Wick.”
In seconds, I’m free, on my knees, coughing to draw breath.
“You talking about my belt, or my dick?”
I take to the floor, lying on my back, breathing through the panic. If Guidry’s guys hadn’t come in when they did, would he have killed me?
My mother is at my side now.
“Go to the girls,” I manage to say. “I’m fine.”
And I see out of the corner of my eye that Damien’s in cuffs. “Forced entry,” Guidry’s saying.
“She fucking let me in.”
“Yes, she did. Under threat. I think I heard another threat to rape your ex-wife in front of her son. That’s potentially two counts of sexual abuse—one against her, one against him. Another rap for domestic battery, Damien.” Guidry clucks his tongue. “Damn, you’re getting notorious for that these days. Not to mention the attempted murder we just interrupted.”
I wheeze when I sit up.
“I think at least one of those is going to stick, boss,” Hinkley says.
I nudge my way through the sea of people crowding this room, toward the breakfront. I reach beneath it and feel the square box at my fingertips. I grasp it, then think to get up, but I can’t. I’m just too tired. Exhausted is more like it. I stay on the floor, sitting, and leaning against the wall.
Within minutes, after the uniformed officers have removed my mother’s ex-husband from the house, Rosie returns with the twins, who are still cryin
g.
They dart to me, and I take them in my lap and wrap my arms around them. “It’s okay, sisters. I’m okay.”
“Joshy’s okay?” Margaret sniffles over her words.
“Love you,” Caroline says.
“Love you, too,” I tell them. “But I have to get up. Have to talk to the police now, okay?”
Rosie sits at the table with her head in her hands. “Nothing. We got him to admit nothing.”
“Not quite, ma’am,” Hinkley says. “We got him on—”
“Nothing at all about that little girl, though, and now—”
“No, Mom. You don’t understand. He just admitted everything. And I recorded it on my phone.” I drop the ring on the table and say to Guidry, “Show this to Rachel Bachton’s mother.”
“I’ll be damned,” Guidry says as he studies it.
Rosie looks up. “What?” Caroline crawls onto her lap, and Margaret snuggles in close to me.
“A while back,” Guidry says, “I closed a case on a kid missing over two decades. She had a rosary on her when she was snatched—she hid it from her abductor—and years later, she pulled a stone out of the rosary and made it into a ring for her daughter. It was in all the papers. I wonder if Damien might have done the same thing—pulled a stone out of the charm on Rachel’s necklace and made it into a ring for you.”
“But why?” Rosie asks. “Knowing what’s at stake, knowing he could be found out . . . why would he risk it?”
“Well.” Hinkley sits down next to my mother. “Think about it like a stolen car. It’s harder to salvage what’s lost, if all the parts are scattered in different places. So if the stone in this ring used to be part of Rachel’s necklace . . .”
She nods. “Okay. If.”
“I’m pretty sure Mrs. Bachton will tell you,” I say. “The stone in this ring is half of the red and gold heart charm Rachel had on her necklace when she disappeared.”
H o l l o w
“Breaking news: Wayne and Loretta Goudy, residents of rural Catoosa County, Georgia, have been arrested for the murder of their foster daughter, known only as Alana.”
I drop my cereal bowl in the sink—I think it cracks and breaks—and glue my eyes to the television, while I try to swallow a mouthful of cornflakes, mushy and sticky in my throat. Tears well in my eyes.
She’s dead. Just like I told Toad at the Temple Tattoo.
I conjured her at the beach that first night, and I erased her from existence just as easily—with just a spoken thought.
I think I’m going to throw up.
“The remains of the child, Baby A—”
“What?” I breathe through the nausea. And although I’m confused, I know one thing for certain: “It’s not Chatham. Not Chatham.”
“—were buried at the confluence of the Vernon and Moon Rivers, in Chatham County, some three hundred fifty miles south of the Goudy tract. Originally thought to be those of missing Rachel Bachton, the remains were discovered in late summer. It is estimated the murder occurred nine to twelve years ago.”
“Police sought Wayne Goudy for questioning for months before tracking him down in relation to the Bachton kidnapping, which police say is closely linked to Alana’s murder. No details yet as to how these cases are linked, but the timeline proves it’s possible. Rachel Bachton disappeared—”
“You can get the girls to school today?” Rosie breezes into the kitchen and dumps a few items into her bag for lunch: an orange, an apple, a few stalks of celery.
“Yeah.” I sniff over my emotions. “Yeah, I got it.”
I look up at the television again to see a picture of Wayne Goudy today alongside a composite sketch of Rachel’s kidnapper. There’s no resemblance. “. . . leaving the media puzzled as to what the connection may be.”
“Josh.” My mother touches me on the arm and looks at me. Really looks at me. “You okay?”
“Yeah. There was a bulletin about a murder, and I thought it was Chatham.”
“But it wasn’t.”
I shake my head. “I broke a bowl.”
“That’s okay.”
For a second, we stand there in silence.
“Maybe you shouldn’t watch the news for a while.”
“I can handle it.” I think not knowing would be worse than knowing too much.
“We’ll talk later? After school?”
“Sure.”
I drop the girls at Peppermint Swirl Pre-K, and I’m on track to hit Sugar Creek High fifteen minutes before breakfast club starts, but instead, I wheel down Washington and head to Northgate Beach.
It’s only fitting. It’s the first place I saw her, the first place I went when I realized I needed to see her again. And that night, I imagined she was here, and then she materialized. If only I could do that again.
I pinch my eyes shut and imagine her casually strolling down the shore.
Hey, cute boy. She’d kiss me, instantly warming me, and maybe she’d laugh at the idiocy of it all—how, despite withstanding the attacks of our perpetrators, losing track of someone who makes you feel whole can rip your heart out and leave you hollow.
By now, everyone on the team must know what happened with Chatham, and they’ll have to forgive me for being a bit late to the weight deck. I text Coach Baldecki for the fiftieth time since everything went down, tell him I’m going for a run on the beach this morning. Clear my head. Get ready for Friday night. All the stuff he wants to hear, sure, but it’s also the truth.
There’s a nip in the air, but I’m layered in a T-shirt, a waffle-knit, and a hoodie. I park at the gate and climb over the rails to the boardwalk. I lean against the railing and watch the waves, silvery and already smelling of impending winter, roll up on the shore. Winter always comes to the lake first. We won’t see snow for a month or two, but here on the beach, everything is gray, as if the great artist upstairs is readying this canvas before all others.
My gaze draws from the horizon, near the lighthouse, down the shore to the patch of sand where I first saw Chatham Claiborne create.
A line of footprints mars the smooth, wet sand high at the shoreline, where the early morning waves break against the bluffs.
I picture her at the end of that line of footprints, lifting her chin confidently, hands on hips. It’s been days. What took you so long?
I hurdle the boardwalk railing and land in the sand below, and beeline toward the footprints in the sand.
With every footfall, I acclimate to the terrain and become more focused.
I know I won’t find her, trailing these prints, but not finding her is not an option. I just have to go about it another way, stick to it until I figure it all out. Here are the facts:
Damien had Rachel’s necklace.
On it was a charm—two red, teardrop-shaped stones pieced together to look like a heart.
He broke the stones out of the charm and used one of them in a ring he had made for my mother.
The other stone is likely still at his place, and maybe the police have even found it by now. But it’s not information they’re sharing with the public.
When Damien realized Chatham was special to me, and when Rosie failed to wear the ring he threw at her, he thought I’d stolen it and given it to Chatham. That’s why he tossed her room at the Churchill. It was imperative that ring not fall into the hands of those who could connect it to Rachel Bachton.
Twelve years ago, he did, in fact, bear resemblance to the longhaired man who snatched Rachel, as long as you forgive a few inches in height discrepancy.
If that were all there was to it, okay. He’d be a suspect in Rachel’s kidnapping. Why would he have taken her? What would he have done with her? The police would form theories, bring the dogs in, maybe dig up the land around his creek-side shack, and maybe demolish the shack itself, in search of bones.
But there’s more to it than that. The case is complicated . . . because of Chatham Claiborne.
If I’m right, Chatham Claiborne followed her sister’s trail here aft
er the discovery of bones at the confluence, when Wayne was already gone.
Savannah came here because she remembered witnessing the kidnapping of Rachel Bachton. Maybe she, like the media, assumed the bones at the confluence were Rachel’s remains, given the rumors about the girl in the floor of the stables. She’d wanted Chatham to come along. Maybe she knew Chatham would come eventually, which could be the reason she’d left her journal under Chatham’s pillow. They’d be here, then, far away from the Goudy tract, when the police identified Baby A, and she’d be able to tell the police what she knew. She’d be able to incriminate her abusive parents before they realized she knew too much to let her live.
Chatham, remembering nothing, came in pursuit of her sister, following clues Savannah purposely left behind in a journal, when Chatham realized her life might be in jeopardy, too.
So who did the clothes beneath the floorboards belong to? Were they Rachel’s? Were they the clothes Alana was wearing when she died?
The Bachtons had denied the photograph Savannah found there was Rachel.
My guess is those clothes were Alana’s.
And given the scar on Chatham’s hip, the house she continued to sculpt and draw, and the images of Damien’s swing she’d included in her works of art, my guess is that Rachel Bachton is alive and well.
My guess is the child beneath the floorboards was the Goudys’ foster daughter, Alana. She died, maybe before they put her under the stables, or maybe because they put her there. Wayne buried her at the rivers. And if she’d been dead twelve years, and Rachel’s been missing twelve years . . .
What if Damien took Rachel to give to the Goudys? He would keep the necklace and the charm as a memento of what he did, of course.
But what’s the connection between Damien and the Goudys?
“He scouted her,” I say aloud. “Goudy sent a picture. The child had to pass for Alana, the child they’d killed. When he’d found the perfect target, the Goudys came to town. Went to the farmers’ market that day, used Savannah to lure Rachel, and Damien snatched Rachel and handed her over later at Damien’s house.”
It would explain how the same picture of Alana ended up in two places with a stretch of America between them. The Goudys had taken the picture, and sent a copy to Damien.
