Dark Hollows

by Steve Frech

  The truck goes into a spin. The SUV darts forward, accelerating into the night.

  The trees and road rotate in front of me, illuminated by the headlights.

  Then, I make the most instinctual and fatal of mistakes—I try to correct away from the spin.

  It puts all of the momentum of the truck into a fight against the direction of the tires. I feel the truck come up on two wheels, and lean.

  There’s nothing I can do to stop it, now.

  The truck is going to roll.

  As the wheels leave the ground, the engine’s RPMs spike in a high-pitched whrrrr. I scream as the world in front of me flips. There’s a sickening crunch as the corner of the roof crashes against the asphalt, causing the truck to skip. It does a full rotation in the air, and slams back down, again. There’s a pop, and my view is obscured by the airbag deploying. I roll one more time, and the truck lands on the driver’s side. There’s a sound like a thousand nails on a chalkboard, and sparks fly inches from my head as the truck slides along the road. The truck twists one last time as it goes down into the ditch, and lands on its roof.

  Everything stops.

  I’m hanging upside down, still strapped in by my seat belt. Already, I can feel the blood rushing to my head. I groan, and glance at the grass and trees through the hole where the windshield used to be.

  Gingerly, I unclip my seat belt and collapse onto the roof of the cabin. Everything hurts. I’m covered in cuts and bruises, but I think I’m okay. I pull myself out through the window, ignoring the bits of glass that cut my hand, and slowly crawl away from the smoking wreckage. I come to rest in the cold mud by the side of the road and look back at the truck.

  It’s totaled.

  I sink onto my back, look up at the stars, and catch my breath. It’s all I can do.

  My phone rings.

  I reach into my pocket, but it’s not there.

  I pull myself up, and scramble back to the truck. Every movement hurts. My phone, along with the burner phone, is lying on the ceiling inside the cabin. I pick up both, put the burner in my pocket, and answer my phone.

  “Hello?”

  “Mr Reese?”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Amy Winstead. I’m returning your call.”

  “What?”

  “Um, I’m Amy Winstead. You called—”

  “Oh. Yeah, yeah. Right.” I stand up, which causes me to grunt. “Look, thank you for returning my call, but now is not a good time.”

  “You said you were calling about Laura Aisling?”

  “Yes, I was, but it’s late. Can I call you back in the morning?”

  “I’d like to know exactly what this is about.”

  “It’s nothing, really—”

  “Is this about her disappearance?”

  “Yes, sort of, but like I said, this is not a good t—”

  “Mr Reese, tell me what’s going on. How did you know Laura?”

  Her tone stops me in my tracks.

  “Well, we dated for a few months. I knew her pretty well, but I’m trying to fill in some gaps. I’m trying to find out what happened while she was at New Hampshire University, and I was told you two were friends, so I wanted to talk, but, please, Ms Winstead, I really have to go—”

  “Mr Reese?”

  “Yes?” I answer. Why does she sound so pissed?

  “You’re telling me you knew her because you dated for a few months?”

  “Yeah. So, I’m trying to—”

  She scoffs. “Mr Reese, Laura and I dated for over a year.”

  Chapter 13

  Amy and I are sitting on a park bench across from her law office in Montpelier.

  “You look like shit,” she says.

  “Long night,” I reply.

  It was a long night.

  After we arranged this meeting over the phone, I called Triple-A about the truck. It wasn’t really a truck, anymore. It was scrap. I was shaken up, but thankfully, not permanently damaged.

  When the tow truck arrived, he took one look at the pile of twisted metal lying in the ditch and said, “Gotta call the police.”

  “Do you really have to do that?” I asked.

  “Gotta close down the road to pull ’er out. That requires the police.” He looked at the truck, again. “What happened?”

  “Swerved to miss a deer.”

  He let out a faint whistle. “Lucky deer.”

  The cops came out and blocked the road down to one lane. It proved an inconvenience to the three cars that passed in the hour it took to pull the remnants of the truck out of the ditch. I gave them the deer story, which they had no reason to doubt.

  It was two o’clock by the time I collapsed into my bed for a night of restless dreams.

  I picked up my Ford Focus from the rental company this morning and drove it to Montpelier for my one o’clock meeting with Amy Winstead.

  She was waiting on the bench, just as we had discussed.

  She’s tall. Her hair is cropped shorter than in the photo I saw. Her features are sharper, and her countenance more serious. Her years in law school and practice are etched in her face.

  “So,” she begins, eyeing the cuts and bruises on my face and hands. “Why are you asking about Laura?”

  “I’m trying to find out what happened to her.”

  “And how did you find me?”

  “Laura kept a scrapbook from her time at New Hampshire University. I got my hands on it. There were a lot of photos of you.”

  She smiles, sadly. “Yeah. She loved taking photos. Wait. How did you get a hold of the scrapbook?”

  “Her mother let me see it.”

  She raises a skeptical eyebrow. “Her mother let you see it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, at least now I know that you’re a liar.”

  “Ms. Winstead—”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, just call me Amy.”

  “Okay. Look, you’re right. I haven’t been totally honest with you, or anybody, as of late, but something is happening, and it has to do with Laura. Whatever it is, it has to do with her time at New Hampshire University, and you were friends with her.”

  “Friends,” she says in offended disbelief.

  “I’m sorry. You said you were more? Please, tell me what happened.”

  She considers, and shrugs. “What do you want to know?”

  “Everything.”

  She sits back against the bench, and looks out to the passing cars on State Street, which runs past the park. “We met during the second semester of our freshman year at a meeting of the Out Club. It was a sort of social support group for LGBT students. Things were getting better, but it was still a tough time to be a student who was open about their sexuality.”

  “Laura was gay?”

  She looks at me in disgust. “God, you really didn’t know her, did you? No, she wasn’t gay. She was bisexual. I mean, you said that you two dated, or was that a lie?”

  “No, we dated, and yes, that was a stupid question. I didn’t know. She never talked about it.”

  “Did you really meet her mom?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then you understand why she may have kept that to herself.” She laughs under her breath. “I remember that just in case her mom ever showed up, she had this poster of Jesus hanging ov—”

  “Over her bed.”

  She stops. Her expression softens. “Oh my God. You know about that?”

  “I saw it in her room. She told me about it.”

  “That poster …” she says, in that perfectly amused tone of someone speaking of a flaw in someone they love.

  The light in her face at being able to speak to someone who knew Laura is radiant. It’s clear she loved Laura in a way I couldn’t comprehend.

  “So, like I said, we met at the Outs. That’s what we called it. I watched her walk into the room. She was really nervous and very shy. She was also really upset. She looked like she was about to start crying. I introduced myself, and took her aside. W
e just talked. We talked for hours. She told me about her home, and the town she came from. She told me that she was bisexual, and how she had hidden it from her mother her whole life. She was in a lot of pain. I was lucky. I had the one thing every kid like us needs growing up.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Parents who loved me, supported me, accepted me, and knew way before I did that I was different. Laura didn’t have any of that. We developed a friendship. She’d come to the club meetings. We’d hang out. I’d introduce her to my friends. Things kept going, and before either one of us knew it, we were dating.” She smiles. “I fell in love with her … She was beautiful, and it was amazing to watch this whole new world open up for her. She talked about how, for the first time, she felt alive. It was amazing to watch her be herself.” Amy pulls back and stares down at the sidewalk. “Sorry. I don’t know how much of this you want to hear.”

  “As much as you’re comfortable telling me.”

  “Well, one night, it happened. We started sleeping together. I asked her if she had ever been with another woman, and she was a little cagey about it. She said once, but that it had been a mistake. It was like she felt guilty for it, but I told her that some hookups are mistakes … We kept seeing each other. She started helping at the Out Club, but she was still in a lot of pain because she lived in constant fear of her mother. I told her that she needed to come clean and tell her mother who she really was. That freaked her out. She said that there was no way, and that her mother would pull her out of the school.

  “We left it at that. Over the summer, we stayed in touch. We emailed, but no phone calls or text messages because her mom paid the bills and might see it. I was living in Colorado, so there was no way to see each other. Those were the three longest months of my life … That first day back on campus, we saw each other outside her dorm, ran to one another, and kissed like we—”

  Her speech fades but her smile grows.

  “We had held hands in public before, but that was the first time we kissed and didn’t care if the world saw us. We picked up right where we left off. It was wonderful. We almost got caught though, one night about a month after we got back.”

  “By whom?”

  “Who else? Her mom. She paid one of her surprise visits. We were fooling around in her room when she knocked. We barely had time to get ourselves together before she opened the door. Laura introduced me as her friend. Her mother said that I could join them for dinner. I went along because I wanted to be there for Laura. I wanted her to tell her mother who I really was. We walked to this Mexican restaurant, and the whole way there, Mrs Aisling kept telling Laura to be careful of boys and their sinful ways, but to be on the lookout for a good, Christian man. She asked Laura if she was going to church. She also asked me if I was going to church, and asked if I had been saved. I wanted to shout at her.

  “When we got to the restaurant, Mrs Aisling was offended when the server asked if she would like to have a margarita. When the food came, she made us hold hands and she prayed …” Amy suddenly turns to me. “Look, I’ve prayed with people before. There are people in my life—friends and colleagues—who are religious, and they are some of the most wonderful, caring people you will ever meet. I love them, and they love me. When we pray together, it’s about love. For Mrs Aisling, her prayer was all about sin. To her, punishment for sin was God’s love. I knew right then and there that Laura was right. She could never tell her. She had to wait it out until she could simply get away. That’s what she wanted to do. We even talked about it—about what we would do once we finished school …”

  Amy’s voice cracks and her eyes glisten. “Listen … I’m married. I love my wife. We have a son. My life is wonderful, but sometimes, and I’ve never told anyone this, but sometimes at night, when I’m lying in bed next to my wife, I think about Laura more than I should …” She waits for her nerves steady. “We continued to see each other. We even became more open about our relationship. I asked her if she was really bisexual or if she was gay, but she said, no, she was attracted to men, too.”

  “Did that bother you?”

  “No. All I cared about was that she cared for me. She even told me that she loved me. That was one of the best days of my life … Then, one night, it just started to fall apart.”

  “What happened?”

  “We were out at dinner. We were sitting on the patio, which was next to the street. Our table was right by the rail, and this girl comes up and starts talking to Laura. She’s asking Laura all these questions about why she won’t talk to her, and asking who I was. It was crazy. Laura tried to calm her down, but she wasn’t having any of it. She ends up screaming at Laura, asking how Laura could do this to her, and saying that she’s going to tell Laura’s mother.

  “I was stunned. Laura tried to get her to go, but she kept at it, about how they should be together, how they make up one person. Real crazy shit. I finally convinced Laura that we should go. The restaurant let us leave out a side door because that crazy bitch was waiting for us out front. I found out later that the restaurant ended up calling the police. We got back to my place and Laura was shaking like a leaf. I asked her who the hell that was, and she told me … It was that first girl that she hooked up with—the one she called a ‘mistake’.”

  “Who was she?”

  “Her freshman year roommate.”

  “Laura hooked up with her?”

  Amy nods. “They hooked up the second week of school. Laura said that she had been fighting her feelings towards women her whole life, and when she got to New Hampshire University, she felt free. It was just a thing. A chance to explore, and it only happened a few times.” Amy looks at me. “You went to college, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Proud of every hookup you had there?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “For Laura, she couldn’t have picked anyone worse.”

  I’m struggling to process everything I’ve heard. “So, Laura’s roommate was gay?”

  “I have no idea. I suppose so, but more than anything, she was crazy. She was obsessed with Laura. Kept saying that they were in love. Laura tried to reason with her, but ended up moving out after the first semester. That’s when she and I met. I realized that this was why she always wanted to go back to my place, and that she wasn’t just worried about being found out. She was worried about her. I urged her to go to the campus police, but she thought that they would tell her mother.

  “Laura wasn’t the same after that. She was always paranoid. I tried to get her some help, but she wouldn’t hear of it. We kept seeing each other. It started to get a little better, but then there was that night. The night … It was getting close to Christmas, and we were at my apartment. We were cuddling on the couch, staring at this little plastic Christmas tree we bought at Walmart. There was a knock on the door. I opened it, and there was Mrs Aisling. I’ll never forget the anger in that woman’s eyes. She looked at me, and then at her daughter, and she knew. We didn’t have to say a thing.”

  “How did she find you?”

  “How do you think?”

  “The roommate?”

  Amy shrugs. “Mrs Aisling told Laura to come with her. She said she was taking her out of school. I tried to argue with her, but Mrs Aisling screamed at me, ‘You’re not taking my daughter to Hell with you!’ Laura tried to speak, but her mother cut her off with a look. I told her not to go, but she did. She walked right out the door. I—” Her voice catches and the tears start, anew. “Laura was so scared, and I felt so helpless. Before she walked away, her mother looked at me and said, ‘Don’t ever speak to my daughter, again’.”

  I’m speechless. I’m weighing everything I know about Laura against what I’ve just heard, and it hits me—this is what she was trying to tell me in the weeks leading up to that night in the warehouse. She was trying to tell me about all of this, and I was too self-absorbed to listen.

  Amy wipes her eyes and steadies her voice.

  “Anything else, Mr R
eese? My lunch break is almost over.”

  “Did you try to contact Laura after that?”

  “Of course, I did, but her mother took her phone away. She wouldn’t even let Laura out of the house. She didn’t have a computer for email. I was worried sick.”

  “Why didn’t Laura run away?”

  “Where would she go? She didn’t have a place of her own, or money, or a job. I would have let her stay at my place, but her mother would have found us. About a month later, I finally got an email from her. She said that her mother was enrolling her in a Christian college, and that this was her good-bye. She was writing it from the local library. She said that she loved me, and maybe somewhere down the road, we’d see each other, again. I wrote back, pleading with her to let me help. I even said that I would run away with her.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She wrote back that there would probably be more mistakes … She meant it as a joke, but it hurt.”

  “What happened then?”

  “I went after her roommate.”

  “Are you serious?”

  Her eyes flare with intensity. “Oh, yeah. When I got that last email, I snapped. I found out which dorm she was in and her room number. I got inside the dorm and was ready to kick her ass. I found her room and pounded on the door, and this short, scrawny girl answered. I looked past her into the room, and there was stuff only on one side. The girl asked me what I wanted. I asked her where her roommate is and she said ‘gone’. I asked when she’s coming back, and she said, ‘Never, thank God.’ She said the girl’s parents had come, and taken all of her stuff the week before. Apparently, she had some sort of mental breakdown. It had to have been about Laura leaving the school. Her parents pulled her out. The roommate said she had gone crazy. Now, she had the room to herself. She said she heard her parents talking about putting her in Sacred Heart. Know what that is?”

  “Yeah,” I reply.

  Anyone who grew up in the area has heard of Sacred Heart. It’s an old psychiatric hospital—the stuff of Halloween legends.

  Amy sighs, and sits back. “After that, it was over. I missed Laura. I was still in love with her, but every day, it hurt a little less. I tried to move on … That is until the day I heard she was missing. It opened up every wound. I went to the cops, and told them about the roommate. Even mentioned that I thought the mother was messed up. They said they followed up on everything, but nothing came of it.”