What Lies Below: A Novel

by Barbara Taylor Sissel

  “I know what it’s like to have folks judge you when they’ve got no clue what you’ve been through, or what you’re up against. Walk a mile in my shoes, I say.” April’s tone, her demeanor, invited commiseration, an exchange of confidences, but Gilly didn’t trust April. She didn’t think of April as a friend.

  “People usually prefer their own shoes,” she said, and she sensed April’s disappointment.

  They walked several moments in silence, shoulder to shoulder now because the path through the park was wider than the neighborhood sidewalk they’d left behind.

  “Why are you here, April?” Gilly asked finally. “Did Captain Mackie send you?” It seemed farfetched, but who knew? “Did he think I’d talk to you, tell you all my secrets?”

  “No!” April’s affront sounded genuine. “I can’t believe you said that.” She halted her steps.

  Gilly stopped, too, and turning, locked April’s gaze. “I don’t know anything about Zoe Halstead’s disappearance.” Bailey sat at her feet, leaning into her, looking anxious. He didn’t like controversy.

  “You think I’m going to help a cop?” April asked. “Are you kidding? After the shit that’s gone down in my life? I’ve got no use for law enforcement, the legal system, none of that.”

  Gilly didn’t respond.

  “Okay, so maybe I did come here because I think you know something about where Zoe is. I’m not saying you had anything to do with it, and, trust me, Captain Mackie didn’t send me. But I feel like there’s more going on with you and that little girl than you’re saying. When she comes into Cricket’s with her dad, you get this look. You, like, light up or something, practically trip all over yourself waiting on them, and those pancakes—you told me from the start you weren’t much for cooking, then the next thing I know, you’re showing off, showing me up. I thought you were after my job.”

  “No! Oh God, I’m really sorry if I gave you that impression.” Gilly meant it.

  “Listen, we’ve all got history, crap we have to deal with. I think you’ve got your own issues with the cops for whatever reason, that like me, you’ve had trouble in your life. So I thought maybe we had that in common and maybe you could use a friend.”

  April’s offer caught Gilly by surprise. She bit down on the urge to point out they had nothing in common beyond their employment, and even that connection wouldn’t have been established if Brian were still alive, and they were living the life they’d planned, the one where they’d been partners, lovers, and best friends. The one where they’d planned to grow old together.

  Don’t you dare die before me. Don’t you go off and leave me here . . .

  Remembering their foolish promises to each other made her heart ache. Why was she here? The one left? That was the question that dogged her, inexplicable, unanswerable.

  Now the threat of tears came, searing the undersides of her lids, and she pressed the thumb and index finger of her free hand to her eyes.

  April said her name. “Gilly?” She found a tissue and handed it over.

  Gilly blew her nose. Bailey was distressed, and she bent to soothe him. “I had a dream about Zoe.” She regretted it, but she felt pressured to say something, and she’d sooner have cut out her tongue than share a word with April about her husband and daughter, and their loss, which was unspeakable.

  “You had a dream,” April repeated, tipping her head to one side, waiting for the rest.

  “Yes,” Gilly said. “I saw a woman taking a child from what might have been the Little Acorn Academy. I saw very clearly that the little girl was Zoe, but I’ve never seen the school, so I can’t be sure of the location.”

  “The woman you saw, you know for sure it wasn’t Zoe’s mom?”

  “Not on any level I can explain. Honestly, if I saw the woman’s face, I don’t remember it. It was mostly covered by dark glasses anyway. You know how dreams are—” Gilly broke off, distracted when the image of the woman from her dream came together abruptly in her mind. She was walking around the back of the metallic-blue sedan, and as if Gilly’s eye were the zoom lens of a camera, she captured the motion when the woman lifted her hand to poke tendrils of dark hair beneath the hood of her sweatshirt. Now the sunlit glint of an earring was revealed. A hoop—Gilly saw it clearly—with a heart dangling from its lower arc.

  “What?”

  Gilly was aware of April’s gaze, intrusive and sharp.

  “Nothing,” Gilly answered, although it wasn’t. The dark hair, the earring—had her brain added those details to her vision of the woman, or had they been in Gilly’s mind all along? “I didn’t recognize her.” Was she asking?

  April was exasperated. “Then how do you know it wasn’t Zoe’s mother?”

  “It’s more like a gut feeling. It’s weird. Even to me.” You really don’t know how it works? Jake’s query, his disbelief, surfaced in her mind, feeling like an accusation.

  “You just said, though, that you don’t remember the woman’s face, what she looked like.” April studied Gilly. “Maybe you do, but for some reason you don’t want to.”

  “Of course I want to.” Did she? “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “You’d have to do something about it. If you knew the woman’s identity you’d have to tell the cops, right? Something you want to avoid as much as me.”

  What if I was wrong? That was Gilly’s biggest fear. That if she were to see the woman’s image vividly enough to describe it, the police would find a woman to match the description, and not necessarily the right woman. It had happened before. Crimes were committed, and the wrong people were arrested for them. She couldn’t live with it if that were to happen.

  April shrugged. “I didn’t mean anything. It was just a thought.”

  They shared a beat of silence, one long enough that Gilly had time to regret it again, confiding in April of all people. Gilly hadn’t even told Liz, and it felt wrong somehow that April knew and Liz, with whom she actually felt a kinship, didn’t.

  “I’m going out to the Little Acorn.” April broke into Gilly’s thoughts. “I could take you there. Maybe you should check it out. See if it’s the same building as the one you dreamed about. Who knows, it might shake something loose.”

  “I don’t know . . .” Gilly looked into the middle distance, conscious of her pulse beating in her temples, a less prominent drumroll of alarm.

  “Maybe nothing will come of it, but you should at least check it out. What if something clicks that helps the cops find Zoe?”

  Gilly didn’t answer.

  “I thought you wanted to help.”

  “I’ve got plans for dinner.” Gilly debated. If she went out to the school and joined the search, who knew how long she’d be? She doubted she’d have time to cook. But she could call Liz. Maybe she’d want to help hunt for Zoe, too. “Okay,” she said to April. “I’ll come.” Gilly brought Bailey around, retracing their steps toward the park entrance. It was the idea that Zoe could be in the hands of a stranger, frightened and bewildered, that weighed on her. That, and her memory of Jake, the panic and grief in his eyes that was so like Gilly’s own.

  “So you can really see the future in your dreams?” April asked. “You’re psychic? I’ve never known anyone who could do that. It’s so cool.”

  “Not really.”

  “Maybe you could see my future? Not now but sometime? We could sit down—”

  “You realize I’m probably a suspect,” Gilly said. Anything to divert April’s attention.

  April laughed. “Yeah, me too. Half the town is. I heard even Jake and his mom are suspects.”

  “That’s ridiculous.” Gilly left it there, keeping it to herself that she already knew.

  “Yeah. But you know how people talk, the way they spread rumors, especially in a town as small as Wyatt. Have you had other dreams like this one about Zoe? I mean where something terrible happens?”

  They were all terrible. Every precognitive dream Gilly had ever had involved a tragedy of some sort. “You think it’s cool, having the
dreams,” she said. “But it’s not.”

  “How often do they come?”

  “Sometimes I go a long time, months, as much as a year, between them.” Long enough that, at a few times in her life, Gilly had felt she was rid of them. She’d been relieved, as if a curse had been lifted. “They always come back, though, and they’re always about something bad.”

  “But if you have a dream far enough in advance, you can stop whatever it is from happening, right?”

  Gilly thought of Brian, the robbery and his murder—how he had dismissed her dream about it, how she had gone along, both of them ignoring the rightful warning they’d been sent. And she thought of Tommy, how she’d been rebuked for relaying what turned out to be a false alarm about his brother. She thought if she were to tally the score, her dreams and visions had been wrong more often than right.

  But Jake believed in them.

  Funny what desperation could do, the way it could cause you to toss aside your usual skepticism. She felt that about Jake, that in his ordinary life he was a cautious man, a good man, steady and reliable. Grounded. She doubted that in handling his current crisis, should it continue, he would do what Gilly had done and drink, or take drugs, to escape it. She had noted his surprise and the accompanying flash of his distaste when he realized she was the same as his ex-wife, only sober. For now anyway.

  Could she speak to the future? Could she alter it? No. Gilly glanced at April, and gave her the same answer she’d given Jake. “The dreams don’t work that way.”

  She took Bailey into the house and unsnapped his leash, then tried to reach Liz. When she was instructed by her voice mail to leave a message, she said, “Hey, it’s me, Gilly. Change of plans. They’ve set up a search headquarters for Zoe at the Little Acorn. I’m going out there now. I’m hoping you’ll want to come out, that we can meet there instead of the house. I doubt I’ll have time to cook. Maybe we could go out to dinner? Call me, okay?” Clicking off, she stowed her phone. At her feet, Bailey wagged his tail, looking at her with soulful eyes, already missing her. “I’ll be back,” she told him.

  He trotted with her to the front door. She closed it behind her, shutting him from view. Didn’t matter how many times she left him, she always felt vaguely guilty.

  She waved her car keys at April, who was parked and waiting at the curb. “I’ll follow you,” she called.

  “Oh.” The syllable popped out of April’s mouth, a little puff of disappointed air. “I thought we’d ride together.”

  Gilly shook her head. Telling April about the dream had been enough of a mistake. She wasn’t about to trap herself inside April’s car, too. She was curious now, fascinated. The eager light of belief shone from her eyes. She had questions. She would go on and on, picking at Gilly, wanting to know all about her “cool” so-called “psychic” power. For different reasons, the believers were as bad as the skeptics. Throughout her life, at a party or with a group of people, when Gilly had slipped and let on that she sometimes knew the future, she’d been hounded for the lottery numbers, or next week’s stock pick, and her refusal to provide such tips had been met with disgust. She was screwing with them, people would say. She was messed up, a weirdo. A fake, a fraud.

  Why can’t you be normal?

  Her mother’s worn-out, oft-repeated query ran through Gilly’s mind. Dreams are just dreams . . . They aren’t real . . . I don’t want to hear it . . . You’re too sensitive . . . You let your imagination run away with you.

  Gilly’s mom had said it all.

  “I’ll follow you,” Gilly repeated now.

  It wasn’t until they left the Wyatt city limits, where Main turned into FM 1620, heading west, that Gilly began to wonder, actually to worry a bit, where April was taking her. She had expected the Little Acorn Academy to be in town. It crossed her mind that if she were to drop back, turn around, April might not notice. What could she do about it anyway?

  April’s turn signal blinked on, and Gilly followed her onto a meandering road named Shady Oaks. The tarred, two-lane ribbon of asphalt rose gently and then more sharply where it had been cut through the bleached bone of a limestone cliff. Spiny ears of prickly pear cactus and sharp-leaved clumps of yucca clung to the dry, rocky sides, fiercely green, tenacious, defiant in their hold on life.

  Gilly was back to telling herself she was on a fool’s errand when, cresting yet another hill, she caught sight of it, the building from her dream, and her foot backed off the accelerator. Her blood cooled in her veins. The Little Acorn Academy was isolated and small and eerily familiar. Gilly knew it as well as if she had seen it for real dozens of times. She knew the half-circle drive in front, the rectangle of black asphalt parking lot to the right. She recognized the picnic grounds, an area some distance away from the school, beyond the parking lot. Sturdy tables and a couple of barbecue grills were scattered over the wide apron of shade cast by a grouping of massive live oaks. The scene that had been quiet—except for Zoe and the woman—in Gilly’s dream was now teeming with activity.

  Cars, many of them belonging to law enforcement, were parked everywhere. Dozens of people were gathered in the picnic area, a majority wearing orange vests. There were several dogs, and a helicopter waited in a nearby field. Gilly pulled over behind April across the road from the school, nosing her RAV4 onto the graveled shoulder.

  “Were you listening to the news?” April asked, meeting Gilly at the back of her car. She went on before Gilly could answer. “The tricycle Jake found in the woods? They’re saying it’s Zoe’s, that he confirmed hers is missing.”

  “Really?” Gilly’s composure was pretense. It frightened her having the images from her dream become confirmed fact—first by Jake and now the media. She thought of the call he’d gotten, the one advising him that Zoe’s clothing had been discovered north of here in a dumpster near Greeley. It was horrifying—all of it. Gilly didn’t know what to hope for. That the trike and the clothing proved to belong to Zoe? That they didn’t? She crossed the street with April, and paused with her at the edge of the parking lot.

  “Look, KTKY News is here, and that’s Suki Daniels.” April nodded at a nearby news van, where a strikingly beautiful Asian woman was interviewing a man in a uniform. “She is so gorgeous, isn’t she?” April sounded in awe. “I watch her on the news all the time.”

  KTKY broadcast out of Greeley. Like April, Gilly watched the station’s newscasts. Suki Daniels was an investigative reporter for the channel. There were other reporter types scattered throughout the crowd, poised and waiting. Like vultures, Gilly thought. And necessary at the same time. They performed a service, getting the word out. But the media’s presence lent a kind of surreal and terrible urgency to the atmosphere. It was a feeling Gilly remembered from when Brian was murdered, and she felt the same sick sinking in her stomach. The same icy fear seized her heart.

  Across the parking lot, from behind one of the picnic tables, someone—Gilly recognized it was Sergeant Ken Carter—hollered for the crowd’s attention. There were other folks who looked familiar from when she’d served them at Cricket’s. Gilly saw Mandy and Augie Bright, sitting at a table with Shea and AJ from the xL Ranch east of Wyatt. What was their last name? Jake had mentioned it earlier, but she couldn’t remember. She did know Shea’s mom, Dru Gallagher. A local and well-loved baker and caterer, Dru supplied Cricket’s with a variety of breads and pastries.

  But it was catching sight of Kenna Sweet, the owner of the Little Acorn Academy, that jolted Gilly’s heart. Kenna was by herself, part of the crowd but not. And although Gilly was several feet from her, Kenna’s grief, her exhaustion and shock, was palpable. She would have to live with the consequences of this, a child having been abducted from her school—and the possible legal ramifications—for the rest of her life.

  “First, thank you to all of you for coming out here today to help us hunt for Zoe. I know most of you know her and her dad, Jake.” Sergeant Carter’s voice lifted over the crowd. “We all want to find her, but for the search to be eff
ective, we need to be organized. Make sure to sign in before you head out. I know most of you are familiar with the terrain. You know how difficult it is getting through a heavy growth of cedar. You’re not careful, it’ll poke your eye out, scratch up your skin right through your clothes, so go slow. Keep each other in view. I see some of you have got loppers and such and can cut a path. Maybe those of you who don’t could join up with the ones who do. Remember you’re not only looking for Zoe but also for clues. You see anything the least bit suspicious, or questionable, anything looks out of place, you give a shout, okay?”

  A general mutter of assent rose.

  “Above all, folks, be careful and stay safe.” Clint Mackie stepped forward to address the volunteers. “We appreciate—Jake here does, too—we appreciate y’all coming out.”

  Gilly caught sight of Jake now, standing in the police captain’s shadow. His gaze, meeting hers briefly, was hard and lightless, his jaw rigid, back and shoulders stiff. But Gilly knew his terror and anguish. She saw the raw vulnerability fishing through his eyes. She’d seen the same look in her own eyes every time she’d looked in the mirror in the days after Brian’s murder. And like Jake, she had tried holding on to what little control she’d had left through sheer grit. She’d been where Jake was now. She still went there on nights when she couldn’t sleep, when the memory would seize her in its monstrous fist, forcing her to relive it—Brian’s loss and then Sophie’s. She wouldn’t wish the nightmare on anyone.

  Her throat tightened in commiseration. What had been found in Nickel Bend? What had he been forced to look at and identify?

  Something awful, she thought.

  “Do you know who took Zoe, Captain?” A man Gilly couldn’t see called out the question. Around her the crowd, which had been on the verge of breaking apart, shifted uneasily back together, becoming still.