“Is it true it’s not her mom who has her?” Another man raised his voice.
“Is there some maniac on the loose? Should we be worried about our kids?” A woman spoke up, and from the sound of her, she was already worried.
“We haven’t ruled out any possibility, so by all means, exercise caution with your kids, with yourselves. Watch out for each other.”
Jake stepped forward, interrupting Mackie. He began by thanking everyone for coming out. Gilly noticed he made eye contact with several folks. He said, “I wonder if any of you would be willing to go up to Nickel Bend and help law enforcement up there search the area around the Texaco station at the corner of 1097 and County Road 231? Do you know the location?”
“Sure,” several people answered at once.
“Why?” someone—a woman Gilly couldn’t see—asked. “Did you find something there?”
Before Jake could answer, another person, a man holding a notepad, interrupted Jake to ask the question. A reporter, Gilly thought.
“Can you confirm the rumor that the trike you found in the woods here behind the school last night belongs to your daughter?”
“No. Not yet,” Jake said. “I know the media is reporting that I confirmed it was hers, but I didn’t. I did believe it was Zoe’s when I first found it, but when I got it into good light, it looked older than hers, as if it had been outside in the weather for a while. I try to keep Zoe’s trike in the garage, but when I looked, it wasn’t there. My mother thinks we could have left it at her house. She’s checking that out now. It’s possible Zoe left it at a neighbor’s house. If any of you see it, please let me or the police know.”
An assenting murmur rose from the crowd.
“So where’s the trike you found now?” the reporter asked.
“The police sent it to the lab—”
“Okay.” Captain Mackie moved to Jake’s side, making it clear he wanted an end to the questions.
The reporter ignored him. “Can you tell us more about what was found up at Nickel Bend?”
“We’ve got volunteers at that location working with the Madrone County sheriff’s department.” Mackie spoke before Jake could. “If you want to go there to help out, go right on. Sheriff Wiley, John Wiley, is handling that operation. Those of you staying here, if you’d gather round a minute, we’ve gridded out and color coded a search area from the woods here through the back gate, extending east and west of a line on either side of the trail back there. We’re assigning a team to each grid so we don’t miss anything.”
“I’m staying here.” April caught Gilly’s eye. “I know these woods a bit. I’ve done some hiking around Monarch Lake. You?”
Gilly answered she was staying put, too. “I just need to make a call.”
April nodded and headed for the picnic table where Sergeant Carter was dividing folks into teams.
Gilly dialed Liz’s number, and, getting her voice mail again, she left a second message, telling Liz where she was. “It’s really scary,” she said. “There are a lot of people here, but they can use all the help they can get. Come if you can, okay? Or maybe you’re here?” The possibility flashed through Gilly’s mind, and she looked around as if she might spot Liz. “I’m canceling dinner,” she said. “I feel like I’ve got to stay and help.” Gilly paused. “Call me back. If you’re here maybe we can get something to eat later.”
Stowing her phone, she saw Jake and the police captain, and she started to go in the opposite direction, but then she stopped. She wasn’t doing herself any favors avoiding the inevitable.
“I’d like to clear the air, Captain, if I may.” Gilly addressed the man in uniform as she approached him, but she was aware of Jake. She had an impression of his surprise. Maybe he had imagined she would confine herself to the shadows in the hope of escaping notice.
“How can I help?” Captain Mackie asked.
“You have some concerns about my whereabouts at the time Zoe was taken, you think I was involved—”
“We can’t rule out anyone—” the captain began.
Jake interrupted. “The sack with Zoe’s clothes in the dumpster—”
Mackie said, “That isn’t something we’re ready to make public.”
“He’s worried folks will panic.” Jake ran a hand over his head.
“I’d appreciate it if you’d keep the news to yourself,” Captain Mackie said.
“Yes, of course,” Gilly answered.
He went on. “What interests me about you in regard to Zoe’s disappearance is your claim that it isn’t her mother who took her. I understand now your certainty stems from a dream you had? Is that right?”
“You told him?” Gilly addressed Jake, disbelieving, appalled.
“I’m sorry,” he said, but it barely registered with Gilly.
She was furious, mortified, some combination of the two.
He said, “It’s my daughter’s life that’s at stake. If you can help—”
“I can’t,” she said. She turned to the police captain. “As I explained to Jake, I didn’t see anything clearly enough to be of any help, which is why I wasn’t as forthcoming as I might have been when you asked me about my statement before. I’m uncomfortable talking about the experience. Obviously, from your tone of voice, you don’t believe it’s valid anyway,” she finished drily.
“Well, to be honest,” Mackie said, “I don’t know what I believe. Are you psychic? Do you call yourself that?”
“I don’t call myself anything, Captain, and if the dream had shown me in any detail how Zoe was taken, or by whom, or where, I would have told you immediately.” A flash in her mind illuminated a dark tendril of hair, a heart dangling from the gold loop of an earring. Gilly slammed the door on the images.
“If only you’d give it a chance,” Jake said.
Gilly looked away into the middle distance, wishing she’d remembered her sunglasses. Light in the Hill Country could be harsh, more brilliant than in Houston. It was all the rock, she thought. Beneath the sun’s unforgiving glare, the wind-scoured limestone ridges and cliffs shone as blinding white as glacial snow.
Captain Mackie said, “I’ve run into a few officers who’ve worked cases with psychics. One I heard about recently, a woman—a psychic in Florida—told police where to find the weapon in a pretty high-profile murder case down there. She saw the location in a dream. It led to the killer’s arrest. I can’t argue with results like that.”
“So you know it can work.” Jake was animated.
“It’s not reliable.” Gilly was almost pleading with him.
The captain’s phone rang. He stepped away a few paces to answer it.
A whirring noise cut the air as the helicopter’s rotor blades began slowly turning.
“The first forty-eight hours are critical.” Jake’s gaze was intense, full of his urgency.
Carl had looked at her the same way; he’d said the exact same thing after Brian’s murder. He’d warned that every hour that passed without an arrest diminished the possibility that Gilly would ever see Brian’s killer brought to justice. He’d reminded her that not only had she dreamed about the man, she’d been at the actual scene, watched him run across her field of vision as she sat waiting in the car. Carl was convinced that if Gilly tried she would remember something more definitive than the general idea of the killer’s height and weight. There had been no more distance separating them than the length of the hood of Brian’s car. The fluorescent light had been glaringly bright. Carl insisted she must have seen his face, what he’d been wearing. Possibly she’d seen identifying marks unique to him—a scar, a tattoo. Carl didn’t buy it when she argued, when she said her memory of that night was a blank.
You don’t want to remember, he had said. Not in disgust or impatience. But in sadness. He had said forgetting, like drinking, was a defense. It was avoidance. Maybe fear induced.
A cop-out. He hadn’t said that, but Gilly had, to herself.
“You don’t want to be involved. Is that it?” J
ake said now.
Her chin came up. She was tired of people—Carl, April, and now Jake—telling her what she did and didn’t want to do. “I’m here, aren’t I? I came because I want to help.”
“There are a lot of people here.” He chopped his arm in the direction of the crowd.
Again his implication was clear. He didn’t need another volunteer searcher. He needed a direction to go in. Like Carl, he needed concrete information. Where was his daughter? Who had her? In her dream, who had Gilly seen taking Zoe? She looked toward the spot on the road where she’d parked her car and saw April, talking to the KTKY News reporter.
Suki Daniels was holding a microphone in front of April’s face. April was animated, full of herself. Her fifteen minutes, Gilly thought. The sound of the helicopter’s blades thundered, churning the air. Folks retreated to a safer distance, hands clamped to their heads. Even April and Suki moved some feet away, the cameraman, juggling his rig, tracking them.
Gilly turned back to Jake. “You don’t know everything about me.”
He kept her gaze, waiting for her to explain.
But she couldn’t. It was one thing to profess her sobriety, but it would be something else to talk about the behavior that had put her there. If Jake had seen her, the stumbling drunk she’d become in the wake of Brian and Sophie’s deaths, if he’d seen what she’d done, he’d realize her mind was a train wreck, a house with no lights. She was always a whisker away—even less—from falling down the rabbit hole again. He would know he was asking the wrong person for help.
The details that kept trying to push their way into her brain—the dark hair spilling from the hood of the sweatshirt, the gold earring—who could trust that those details were real? It was just as possible, wasn’t it, that they were products of her so-called vivid imagination? Or, even more believably, she might be recalling them from some other dream.
“Jake?” Captain Mackie shouted as he shoved his phone in his pocket. “A word?”
Jake shot Gilly a searching glance before he walked away, half-accusing, half-pleading, altogether vulnerable, and dark with panic. The look got into her; it went to her core. But there was nothing she could do for him other than what she’d come here to do. Walking past him and the police captain, she approached Sergeant Carter. “Can you put me on a team?” she asked.
They found things, a child’s faded red sock hung up in a desiccated witch’s fist of cedar sticks, a tube of lipstick crusted in dirt, a half-empty packet of yellowing tissues. Bones, which according to a man on Gilly’s team—Charlie Phipps, a local hunter who said he knew—belonged to an animal, a fox maybe. Hope flared and died throughout the afternoon and evening hours a dozen times and still no one spoke of it—the very real and brutal possibility that Zoe Halstead was gone forever.
Like Sophie.
Gilly’s mind kept dragging her there. It didn’t matter how she pushed away the nightmare, her body remembered the onset of Sophie’s birth—the short-lived, debilitating pain low in her abdomen that struck her in the same hour as Brian’s death, the warm rush of amniotic fluid down her bare legs, splattering the gritty pavement. The utter silence while she—and everyone present—stared at the widening pool around her feet. Her body remembered trembling so hard her teeth had clacked together. She had wanted to push right there, standing on the sidewalk in front of that awful store, where, inside, boxes of Minute Rice, Kraft macaroni and cheese, and Hamburger Helper, stained with Brian’s blood, littered the aisles. She had fought the sensation, pressing her legs together, cradling her belly in her arms. But her effort, her will, was nothing—a wisp in the wind, pitched against a force of nature she was powerless to stop.
The hours searching for Zoe brought it all back. She couldn’t stop remembering.
Sophie’s loss and Zoe’s disappearance—the possibility that Zoe had been kidnapped by a stranger—which, as time wore on, was becoming more probable—weren’t the same. But Gilly’s heart ached for Zoe’s absence in the very same way. Every moment she spent looking for Zoe, Sophie was there. In her mind there were two little girls, the image of who Sophie would have been had she lived floated over Zoe’s image.
Gilly fought it as best she could, the comparison, the terrible tide of her thoughts, and by the time the search effort was halted near dark, she was aching with the effort. Around her there was talk of returning tomorrow. But she couldn’t do this again. As much as she wanted to help, she couldn’t come back here. She was afraid for herself, the ground she would lose. She needed a meeting. She told herself that, but what her body said, what it craved, was a drink. Here we go again. The voice in her head, Miss Goody Two-shoes, spoke up. Pay attention, it said.
Gilly couldn’t find April on her return to the school grounds, nor did she see Jake or Captain Mackie, and Liz didn’t pick up when Gilly called. She disconnected without leaving a third message. Stowing her phone, she overheard the helicopter pilot telling Sergeant Carter that he’d take his machine up again at daybreak.
A woman standing near Gilly—Mandy Bright, Gilly recognized her—said she wouldn’t get a wink of sleep for worrying about “that poor little girl.”
“We could keep going if we had flashlights, or those portable sodium vapor lights they use over at the high school football field.” A man’s shout cut through the deepening shadows. Other’s joined in his demand that they continue the search.
“Emergency responders are already stretched to the max as it is.” Sergeant Carter’s voice rose above the general mutter, aggravated, strident. “We don’t need people getting hurt, getting themselves into trouble some way. We’ll reconvene here at first light. We’ll broaden the search area. Unless something changes,” he added. “Keep it tuned to the local news, folks.”
The sergeant meant if Zoe was found, Gilly thought. Whether dead or alive. But Sergeant Carter wasn’t going to put that into words. Folks knew, though. They were discouraged, frightened of the outcome—that it had been too long now to be good. As they broke apart, heading for their individual cars, their faces were grim with ongoing worry and exhaustion. A woman walking next to Gilly said nothing so awful had ever happened in Wyatt before. She said she doubted there was anything on earth worse than losing a child. Turning to Gilly, she said, “I’m going home and hug my kids extra hard tonight. Do you have children?” she asked.
Gilly stumbled.
“You all right, dear?” The woman caught her elbow.
Gilly said she was fine, but she was far from it. At her car, frantic to be gone, she dropped her keys and had to scrabble for several seconds in the dirt before she found them. Inside, she gripped the steering wheel, shaky with the need for a drink, almost sick with the desire. It dried her mouth, pounded her brain. It was a monkey jumping around in her mind, yapping at her, drowning out Miss Goody Two-shoes, reminding Gilly how easy it would be to drive to a liquor store.
You could get a bottle of something, take it home, said the monkey. Gilly imagined it, taking the glass out of the cabinet there, adding ice and two or three fingers of booze—scotch, or bourbon, maybe Seagram’s. Old number seven, whispered the monkey. Or Jack Daniel’s.
Sipping whiskey, they called it.
You remember. The monkey grinned.
She could do that, right? Just sip it while she fed Bailey and walked him. The monkey hammered her ribs in anticipation, some kind of crazy elation. He turned cartwheels inside her head. Gilly waited and, when her turn came, joined the traffic headed back to town. She pictured the liquor store in her neighborhood. They would have what she needed. It would be all right. She could handle it. She’d only have one and then stop like a normal person, a normal drinker.
You can do it, said the monkey.
She was late. The meeting had already started by the time Gilly arrived at the Knights of Columbus hall. A man she didn’t recognize was at the podium. From his demeanor, she could tell he had some time in. He didn’t have the deer-in-the-headlights look of a newly and precariously sober drunk.
She glanced around the room, searching for her sponsor, and when she spotted Julia Benton sitting in a row of metal folding chairs near the back, Gilly made her way there. She looked at no one else, saw nothing else. It was as if she were drowning, and Julia was a life raft.
“Honey, are you all right?” Julia looked Gilly over.
“No,” Gilly said.
Julia’s grasp when she took Gilly’s hand was warm and comforting, a mother’s grasp. She was old enough to be Gilly’s mother, with two grown children of her own. Gilly looked at their hands, intent on the contrast between her own very pale skin and Julia’s, which was the color of rich mocha chocolate. She felt Julia’s gaze, her concern, but Gilly knew if she were to look at Julia, if she were to see the compassion that was most certainly there in Julia’s expression, she would lose it.
“Can we go for coffee when we’re done here?” Gilly asked in a rough whisper. “Do you have time?”
“Yes,” Julia answered, and she squeezed Gilly’s hand.
12
The coffee at Bo Dean’s was awful and the food was worse, but the truck stop across the street from the Knights of Columbus hall in Greeley was convenient, and the waitresses were nice. Gilly sat across from Julia in a booth at the back. And the silence sat between them, measured in minutes. Julia was waiting. Gilly didn’t know where to begin.
“It would have been easier, stopping at the liquor store,” Gilly finally said, and the monkey in her mind winked.
“Yes, maybe. Until you sobered up and had to face yourself all over again.” Julia spoke from experience.
She and Gilly had talked one-on-one many times since Julia had agreed to become Gilly’s sponsor at her second meeting six months ago. Julia knew about Brian’s murder and Sophie’s loss, and Gilly knew Julia’s story, who she’d been and what she’d done while under the influence. She knew Julia had lingering issues with members of her family, but the family was still together. Julia’s husband, Bonner, had stayed by her, and her children—daughter, Tanika, and son, Duron, both in their thirties now, and married with their own children—still spoke to her even though she’d robbed them of a thousand intangibles—trust, confidence, the right to a childhood free of heartache and drama—and quite literally, of their college funds, cleaning out their savings accounts to buy drugs and booze. That had come at the end, when the family’s intervention had forced Julia into a ninety-day rehab program.
What Lies Below: A Novel Page 13
