Splinter (Fiction — Young Adult)

by Sasha Dawn

  “Cass . . .” I lead Kismet, already leashed, toward the back door where my sister is sitting on a stool, taking off her ridiculously high-heeled pumps. “Don’t take off your shoes.”

  “We have to go.” Brooke grabs her brother’s elbow and attempts to steer him back out the door. “Cass, have you heard from your mom?”

  Zack pulls away. “First you say we have to come here. Now, we can’t stay? Do you know how hungry I am? We ordered a pizza.”

  “We have to go.” I sniff over the threat of tears. “The police are bringing in a team of techs.”

  “What for?” Cassidy unbuckles the other shoe and slips it off her foot. “What do they think they’re going to find here? It’s not like Mom knows anything about this mess.”

  “She might,” I say.

  Cassidy gives me a dramatic roll of her eyes—“Doubtful”—and reaches for Zack’s hand; he pulls her to her feet. “We ordered a deep dish pepperoni, and a small cheese for you, Sam.”

  “They have a warrant, and your mom . . .” I blink away tears. Hold it together. I can’t just blurt it out. Your mother is missing. “Cass, listen. The jacket I wore the other night? It isn’t a sample.”

  “I could’ve told you that. It was in the Goodwill box. My mom was going to give it away. She never does that with her samples.”

  Heather was going to give away the jacket? But why? If it had turned up after all these years and she truly had nothing to hide, would she have tried to lose it in a sea of donations at the Goodwill? Untraceable and lost to us forever?

  “It matches a jacket Trina Jordan used to have.”

  “Trina Jordan?” Finally, Cassidy straightens. “Then why would my mother have it?”

  “I don’t know, but she did. And I wore it, and Eschermann saw it, and the whole thing sort of snowballed.”

  Something dark and unrecognizable passes over Cassidy’s face. “Why’d you wear it in the first place?”

  Before I can explain that I felt it was somehow connected to my mother and that it was her favorite color, she continues: “Unless you knew it looked like something that girl would’ve worn—”

  “What?”

  “—and you were trying to put my mom in the same sticky situation your dad always finds himself in! God, you are unbelievable, you know that? Whatever trouble your dad’s in? He’s in it on his own. Why do you think they separated? Because Mom can’t handle the bullshit of it all!”

  None of this matters right now, this blame game. What matters is finding Dad and Heather. God, let her be all right.

  “I know how much this stresses you out!” A line forms between Cassidy’s brows as she’s screaming at me. “But if you were smart, instead of throwing Mom in front of a moving train you might think about saving her the trouble. I mean, where do you think you’re going to go, when the cops finally pin all this on your dad?”

  When she says it—your dad—her lips flatten to an angry line.

  “And he’s going to. That cop is determined to sink him on this.”

  I wipe tears on my sleeve. “Cassidy.”

  “I never used to believe anything people said either. What do they know, right? But you have to admit this stuff with this other girl . . .” She sighs and shakes her head. “It’s too much coincidence not to have some element of truth in it. And it doesn’t look good.”

  “Cass,” I choke out through tears. “Heather never made it to the station for her two o’clock appointment.”

  “What?”

  “Have you heard from her?”

  “I’ve texted, but . . . she hasn’t been texting back.”

  “If you don’t know where she is, she’s missing.”

  Her cheeks wash a tint whiter than they were a second ago. “What?” It comes out in a whisper. She goes sort of limp against Zack.

  “She was supposed to meet with Lieutenant Eschermann. Her car is in the lot, but she never made it to the appointment. No one’s seen her since she left here.”

  “Where’s Dad?”

  “I don’t . . . Cass, I—”

  “Where is he?” She’s screaming again.

  “They released him at the station.” I take a deep breath and add, “Right before Heather got there. Her car is at the station.”

  She springs out of Zack’s arms and lunges at me. “What did he do with my mother?”

  I fall back against the wall—Kismet yelps in surprise—but only when Cassidy’s hands meet my shoulders again do I realize she shoved me.

  Brooke is instantly between us. “Stop it!”

  “If you hadn’t been defending him for so long, insisting he was innocent, maybe he wouldn’t have been out there—”

  “I know, I know.” All I want to do is wrap Cassidy in a hug and remind her we’re in this together, just like we’ve been in everything together for as long as we can remember. But she’s looking at me as if I’m the devil’s spawn.

  And maybe I am, considering the missing—dead?—women in my father’s wake.

  “We have to find her,” I say. “And we have to get back to the house. Eschermann’s meeting us there. He’ll help us find her.”

  “I’m not going anywhere with you.” She’s backing away from me now, treating me like a disease she’ll catch if she gets too close.

  Another consequence. In insisting on Dad’s innocence, I’ve risked Cassidy’s trust. How long has this been building, this rift between us, this suspicion on her side, without my noticing?

  Brooke turns to her brother. “You and Cassidy go in the Jeep. I’ll take Sami.”

  I tighten my grip on Kismet’s leash and start toward the back door, toward the back alley where Brooke parked when she moved her car.

  Cassidy grabs for the leash. “You’re not taking my dog.”

  I yank back on the leash, maintaining possession. “No. I’m taking our dog. She can’t stay here without Heather, and neither can you.”

  “Mom’s coming back,” Cassidy says. “She has to come back.”

  I understand. She wants to believe it will happen.

  I used to believe my mom would come back, too.

  Now that word is spreading about the Jane Doe, news crews from even downstate are amassing, overtaking our little town. Well-dressed field reporters saunter down our sidewalks saying things like, In a decade-old missing persons case, authorities may now have a lead. And that lead points to Northwestern University economics professor Christopher Lang.

  And they know where we live.

  “It’s like a circus over there,” Brooke says as we near my street.

  “Keep driving,” I say. There are too many troops gathered in front of my house to brave parking in the driveway. “We’ll park one block over.”

  I glimpse Gram’s motor home in the driveway as we pass. I wonder if she might know where Dad and Heather are, even if she didn’t admit it to Eschermann. And if she knows, maybe she’ll tell me. If I’m pleasant and respectful toward her, maybe she’ll treat me as an equal and talk to me instead of talking at me. If she’s really here to help, as Dad claims, wouldn’t she want to talk to me?

  I reach out with a text: Coming home from work. Talk soon?

  She doesn’t instantly reply, but I’m not surprised. She carries her phone in her purse, so she might not see my text for a while.

  When we get out of the car, we hear a rhythmic chop, chop, chop of an ax hitting chunks of tree trunk and branch.

  Brooke is texting her brother, warning him to park around the block and walk through Schmidt’s yard when he and Cassidy get here.

  I have Kismet by the leash, but she’s still difficult to control in the midst of all the craziness—the splitting of wood, the murmur of voices coming from the street side of my property—so I sit on the ground with her, petting her, calming her down as best I can before we cut through the lawn to my house.

  Ryan is in the side yard, near the bonfire pit, chopping hickory branches on a stump. He balances a hunk of lumber, swings the ax up and over, and bring
s it down hard, splitting the branch in two. Two more swings and hits, and the branch is quartered. He sweeps the pieces off the stump and repeats the process with another section of tree, then begins to gather the remnants in a wheelbarrow.

  As he’s rolling the wood away, he catches my glance. “Hey.” He lowers the wheelbarrow and wipes his hand over his forehead. “Did you want to see those pictures?”

  Oh. The pictures.

  Of my mother.

  With everything else going on . . . well, it’s not like I forgot, but . . .

  “Are you all right?” he asks.

  “Not really.”

  “There’s a lot going on right now,” Brooke tells him. “Maybe now’s not the best time—”

  “No,” I interject. “I want to see the pictures.”

  “That lieutenant is coming,” Brooke says.

  “Why don’t I meet you at Sami’s, then?” Ryan suggests. “Give me a minute to get cleaned up, and I’ll stop by.”

  Kismet lets out a ferocious growl, followed by a few angry barks. She yanks on her leash.

  “Kissy!” I yank back.

  The dog is straining toward the house, where an invasive news crew is inching farther and farther up my driveway. I glance back at Ryan. “We’d better go in. See you in a few minutes.”

  We won’t be able to go in through the front door without being in direct view of some of those cameras. We’ll have to cut through the carriage house and into the breezeway.

  “Samantha!”

  Stupidly, I turn toward the sound of my name, only to be blinded by the spotlight of a camera.

  I quicken my pace.

  Soon I’m power-housing toward the carriage house door: painted lavender against the slate gray of the building, with a small window divided into three narrow panes at the very top.

  I lead Brooke and Kismet inside and close the door behind me with a soft click.

  It’s dark in here. I hate it.

  After a glance at the door in the floor—still there, still shut—I reach for the wall to guide me to the breezeway.

  The voices of the reporters on the driveway and on the street in front of the house are muted, but I know they’re still there, homing in on us.

  I hustle us through the breezeway and into the house. In the kitchen, I pause.

  A paper cup with a bend-straw and lid sits atop the island.

  The Madelaine Café’s logo is plastered to the side of the cup, and there’s lipstick on the straw. A shimmery pink.

  “Sam?” says Brooke. “You okay?”

  I point to the straw. “That’s Heather’s signature lip color. She was here.”

  “Maybe it’s someone else’s drink.”

  “Whose? It’s not mine, and no one else lives here.”

  “Your grandmother’s, maybe?”

  “She doesn’t wear lipstick. At least not that shade.”

  And if the cup is Heather’s, it means she didn’t go directly to the police station. She stopped here first. The last place Mom was seen? Here. The last place Heather was known to be, now that we’ve found her cup in the kitchen? Here.

  Mom’s car disappeared with her.

  Heather’s car is at the station. But no one saw her there. And anyone with a license and keys can drive a car and park it wherever he wants to.

  Kismet whines, perhaps sensing how tense I am.

  Trina Jordan went missing. So did her dog.

  If Heather took off of her own volition, she would’ve taken Cassidy with her, even if she didn’t take Kismet.

  And the same is true for my mother. She wouldn’t have left me. I know that now. I was supposed to go live with her in Georgia.

  Heather has information. About the jacket. About the creepy things I drew as a kid. About whatever else she’s been hiding about what happened the day Mom disappeared. And she had an appointment at the station to disclose it all. It’s not like the other times, when Eschermann called her in. She chose to go.

  And come to think of it, even if Dad really thought Mom must’ve taken me with her for good, wouldn’t he have called the police anyway? Immediately? Her leaving with me wasn’t the plan. There was supposed to be a babysitter. Mom was supposed to have gone to Atlanta, scouted out a home for us, and come back for me.

  See you Wednesday, Samantha-girl.

  She did say good-bye. She wouldn’t have left me alone to wander to Schmidt’s place. She thought she was leaving me in good hands.

  And whoever she left me with knows what happened to me that day . . . and likely what happened to Mom.

  “I can’t handle this.” I pace the kitchen. “I mean . . . what more can possibly happen today? Heather being gone is one thing. But now, having evidence that she was here before she disappeared? How much more am I supposed to handle?”

  “As much as you have to.” Brooke grabs my wrist.

  I stop moving for a second.

  “You’re asking why you?” Brooke continues. “Well, why not you? You don’t want to be special, don’t want to be singled out. Well, if nothing bad ever happened to you, that would single you out.”

  I guess that makes sense. But I still feel as if an abundance of bad has happened to me. When do I meet my quota?

  “We’ll get you through this,” she says. “However bad it gets.”

  “And I’m just supposed to sit here and wait for everything to work itself out?” A breath later, I know what to do. “You know what? My dad has secrets. He has this ex-wife, this ex-fiancée . . . Hell, he won’t even tell me why he and Heather are getting a divorce! We know he has secrets.”

  Brooke’s subtle nod proves she’s at least willing to see where I go with this.

  “So why the hell am I honoring his privacy?”

  She follows me through the house and down the stairs to the basement, where Dad’s private lair is located. I pass his free weights and punching bag and head to the room Dad uses when he’s working and needs to spread out. I click the switch on his desktop monitor, and it flickers to life.

  “He’ll have it protected by password.” Brooke takes a seat in Dad’s swivel chair.

  “So we’ll try everything we can think of.” I pull books from his shelves. Mom hid a nearly-complete manuscript between the pages of books. Who knows what I might find here, in Dad’s library?

  “Sam, he didn’t shut it down.”

  It seems like forever ago, but I remember he left in a hurry this morning. I took a walk with Lieutenant Eschermann; Dad must’ve come in here before his workout. Then I came back, and he left for the station.

  “Or maybe Heather was in here.” Brooke clicks on his browser history.

  Would Heather have known his password? Maybe. Maybe not. But it makes more sense that she would’ve left the computer on, not Dad.

  “Search Lizzie Dawson.” I shove one book back onto a shelf and pull another down and begin to leaf through it.

  “Wow,” Brooke says. “Lizzie Dawson comes up in his search history.”

  I’m looking over her shoulder now at countless social media profiles of women of all ages named Lizzie Dawson, Elizabeth Dawson, Libby Dawson. None of them looks dead.

  I take over the keyboard and search “Elizabeth Dawson accident.”

  Nothing overwhelmingly helpful hits on that cue, either.

  But either Dad or Heather was recently searching for information about Lizzie.

  “It was before we were born,” Brooke says. “Maybe none of the articles are digitized. Let’s try his name too.”

  The back doorbell chimes.

  Ryan is here with the pictures he found.

  “Get the door,” she says. “I’ll let you know . . .”

  But as I walk out, I catch a glimpse of a long list of search results with an old headline at the top: Local Student on Trial for Vehicular Homicide.

  “Here we go.” Ryan hands over a shoe box; it’s heavier than I expect, labeled with a hastily scrawled D. I set it on the table in front of me and lift the lid. Suddenly I’m
nervous and excited and scared all at the same time.

  My mother is staring up at me.

  Slowly I sift through the piles of snapshots, the scenes coming alive in my mind.

  As the years have stretched like miles between us, I’ve allowed her to become more and more a mix of indistinct memories, but as I hold these mementos in my hands, vivid recollections return to me in a sweep of emotion:

  I smell the marshmallows and hot dogs on the bonfire.

  I hear the far-off echo of Def Leppard coming from Schmidt’s speakers.

  I feel the nip of cool night air at my cheeks and the warmth of the fire emanating from the stone ring in the middle of the flagstone patio.

  And I see my mother laughing, her skin glowing a russet orange, reflecting the fire. Her eyes, blue like mine. Bright, vibrant. Her hands on my cold cheeks: Do you know what you are, Samantha-girl? You’re the best part of my life.

  I blink away tears. For a moment, she was here. One blink, and she’s gone again.

  I can’t rewind time. Can’t hold her any more tightly than I did at that moment. But as I sift through the photographs in the box, glimpses of her come back to me:

  Mom on the beach, smelling of coconut oil and sun.

  Mom setting a picnic lunch in the backyard, just because.

  Mom with a box of homemade cookies. Happy Valentine’s Day.

  Mom reading a book, her glasses perched on the end of her nose, as she’s lazing on a chair in Schmidt’s library.

  I look down at the memories I’ve recovered. Snapshots of Mom’s calming yet somehow contagious smile scatter over the table.

  “There are hundreds of them.”

  “Yes.”

  “Where did you get these?”

  “Attic. I was talking to my uncle, and he said—”

  “Why does your uncle have so many pictures of my mother?”

  He nibbles on his lower lip for a second, and his brow crinkles up. “I talked to him earlier, and he hinted that he knew her well. Better than anyone, maybe.”

  I don’t remember Mom and Schmidt being close enough for him to take this many pictures, and I don’t know if that’s because I was too young to understand or because there was no relationship to understand, period. What if it was all in Schmidt’s head? What if Mom was being neighborly, and Schmidt assumed they were something more?