Splinter (Fiction — Young Adult)

by Sasha Dawn

  I focus on the picture of Mom in Schmidt’s library. She isn’t looking at the camera. She’s intently focused on the pages in her hands. It’s almost as if Schmidt was enthralled with her image, as if he wanted to preserve the way she looked at that moment.

  It wasn’t as if she was dancing, or singing, or modeling an outfit. It wasn’t a special occasion, like Christmas or a birthday. Why else would Schmidt capture this moment, of all moments, on film? What about my mother in this pose spoke to him? I can’t understand it, unless . . .

  “Your uncle was in love with my mother.”

  Ryan shrugs. “I don’t know about that, but—”

  “Look at the sheer volume of these pictures, Ryan.” My voice cracks with either frustration or determination, or maybe a little bit of both. “My father doesn’t have this many. I don’t have this many. Your uncle says he knew her well. But what does that mean? Were they sleeping together?”

  “Sami.” Brooke calls up from Dad’s den, where she’s still on Lizzie duty.

  I focus on Ryan: “Tell me what you know.”

  “I just know what I picked up on when we spoke, and it sounded like—I don’t know—like she mattered to him.”

  “More to him than he mattered to her?” I ask.

  “Maybe.”

  I take more pictures from the box. Mom on the Lakefront Walk. Mom under the hickory trees. Mom beneath the sunflowers.

  Is it possible, if Schmidt loved my mother and she didn’t love him back, that he wouldn’t have wanted her to leave?

  Maybe he tried to stop her from going.

  Where was I when Mom was gone?

  Henry Schmidt’s place.

  And where did I think Mom had gone?

  Henry Schmidt’s place.

  And where had the dogs alerted?

  Behind Schmidt’s barn.

  Is it possible Mom and I went to Schmidt’s so she could say good-bye, and Ryan and I started playing, and something happened? An accident, maybe. He didn’t mean to hurt her, but he did. Or maybe it was calculated murder.

  I was gone for hours before Schmidt walked me back home.

  I was afraid of him.

  Maybe I was afraid because Schmidt yelled at Ryan and me for playing in the passageway, like Ryan says.

  Or maybe I was afraid of something I’d seen in the passageway. The dark passageway that used to haunt my dreams when I was little. The passageway I pushed out of my mind eventually until I forgot I had even been there with Ryan.

  “I used to think she was there, at Schmidt’s place, hiding in one of the rooms. I thought maybe she’d gone there through the secret tunnel that connects the house to our carriage house,” I say.

  “Mm-hmm.” Ryan keeps his gaze pinned to me.

  “And we were in there the day she disappeared.” I narrow my eyes at Ryan. “I have no recollection of how that happened.” I know Eschermann thinks I’ve repressed things. That’s why he wants me to be hypnotized, but Dad won’t let him. Maybe because Dad doesn’t want me to be traumatized. Maybe because he doesn’t want me to remember something that will implicate him.

  But for now, I’m focusing on Schmidt, not my father.

  “I’ll ask him about it—you could ask, if you want—when he gets home,” Ryan says.

  For a second or two, I’m frozen with the possibility of having a conversation with the man who might be responsible for my mother’s disappearance. As I’m grappling with this, Brooke enters the kitchen, her eyes wide. I know immediately that whatever she learned from her Internet research won’t make me feel any better.

  I turn back to Ryan. “When does your uncle get home?”

  “Tomorrow. Maybe the next day.”

  “I thought he was coming home early.”

  “He is. But it takes a while to drive from Florida.”

  “He drives all the way to Florida?” Brooke asks.

  “Uncle Henry won’t fly.”

  New information my brain has to process:

  Would someone take a detour through Georgia—perhaps to bury a body—on the way to Florida?

  When I close my eyes, I see stick figures with xed out eyes, hearts—or lockets?— and a smaller figure in the distance, sad.

  Was I trying to draw something I’d seen but forgotten?

  Schmidt.

  Heather.

  Dad.

  Who holds the key to the secret I desperately need to unlock?

  But if it’s Schmidt, why are Dad and Heather gone now?

  And while ties abound between Dad and Heather and Trina Jordan, there are no ties between my father’s first ex-wife and Schmidt. He couldn’t have had anything to do with Trina Jordan’s disappearance . . . could he?

  Are these pictures of Mom pieces of this puzzle? Or are they just photographs of a woman loved by a man?

  I pick up another stack of photos and look at them one at a time. In each, she looks comfortable. Happy. Not like someone who feels threatened. Still, I’m unnerved by the number of them and by the fact that some of them appear to be candid, as if he’d taken them without her knowing.

  And then I see it at the bottom of the box, peeking up at me from beneath pictures of my mother in various states of contentment: a road map.

  I pull it from the box and unfold it on the island.

  It’s a map of the United States, and certain towns are marked with tiny green asterisks. I know this map. It’s an exact replica of the one I see in my mind whenever I’m anxious. It’s the map that calms me down.

  “This map.” I can’t formulate words beyond these two. But a misty memory flutters in:

  Mom and me, sitting at a table with this map spread out in front of us.

  And I feel her here, my mother, as if it hasn’t been a decade since she last stood in this house.

  “Sami?” Brooke says. “Did you hear me?”

  Although I haven’t heard a word she’s said, I’m nodding because I am listening . . . to the memory.

  Mom: One more and we would’ve been lucky.

  I look to the markings on the map, count them—seven total. There’s a map spread on the table, and she’s marking it with a thick green marker. All the places we’re going to stop to picnic amidst the sunflowers along the way.

  Along the way to Georgia.

  I brush my finger over the mark at a small town at the outskirts of Atlanta. This town had been our destination. There were only six stops until she marked this one. Six isn’t lucky.

  Well, I guess we’re going to have to add another stop to make it lucky.

  Unless Atlanta counts.

  Yes, yes. Atlanta counts. Our final stop. Seven places total, seven places we’ve never been together, but seven places we’ll see.

  And we’d wanted to see every town on the whole map together.

  “She was supposed to take me with her,” I say. It was supposed to be a journey shared with me. Dad had me for a long weekend while Mom found a place for us to live in Atlanta, and after that, Mom and I were leaving. For good.

  How different would my life have been, if she’d made it back for me?

  I circle Atlanta again with the pad of my finger.

  There’s a body near this town. It was in the ground. And then in the morgue. And now, my blood samples might prove that Mom got to where she wanted to go, one way or another.

  The letters of recommendation and job applications—in Schmidt’s house. And now the map and these pictures.

  “Why does your uncle have this map?”

  Ryan looks at me with serious eyes. “I don’t know. I can call him right now. You want me to call him?”

  A thread of fear weaves into my system. The thought of speaking to him when I’m wondering if he might’ve dumped my mother’s body . . .

  But Ryan’s already dialing.

  “Hey, Uncle,” he says, casual as can be. “I found the box of pictures you told me about.”

  Brooke and I look at each other. Ryan had been looking for them? Schmidt told him to look for t
he pictures?

  “Yeah, yeah. There’s a map in the box. I’m here with Samantha, and she has some questions about it. I’m going to put you on speaker.”

  I grip Brooke’s hand. I’m about to talk to the man I’ve been avoiding for ten years. The man who publicly accused my father of killing my mother.

  Ryan puts his phone on the countertop. “Uncle Henry?”

  “I can hear you,” comes a voice from the speaker. “Samantha Mary?”

  I soften a little. Mom sometimes called me by my first and middle names. “Hi.”

  The background noises tell me he’s driving. “You have some questions?”

  As suspicious as I was three minutes ago, I figured I’d fly at him with guns blazing, but his patience, his tone . . . “Mr. Schmidt.” I swallow over uncertainty.

  “You can call me Henry. You’re not a little girl anymore.”

  “Henry?”

  “Yes.”

  “You have a lot of pictures of my mother.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I was in a photography class at the college where she taught.”

  “Oh . . .”

  “I used to take pictures of my gardens. She suggested I take the class, and she was a willing subject for portraits. There should be quite a few pictures of you in that box, too.”

  I’m looking through another stack. There are some pictures of me . . . me and Mom.

  “I’d like to keep a few of them,” he says. “But you’re welcome to keep some of your favorites too.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Of course.”

  “There’s also—there’s a map in this box.”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you get it?”

  “She left it at my house.”

  “The police might want to see it.”

  “The police have seen it. I turned it over to them ten years ago, and they returned it after they looked through it. I’ve been holding onto it, thinking you might want it someday, but you’ve been pretty distant until now.”

  “Why did she have the map at your house?”

  He doesn’t really answer the question: “We used to spend a lot of time together. You, your mom, and me.”

  Ryan clears his throat.

  “And Ryan,” Schmidt adds. “When he was in town.”

  I suppose she must have left things at his place from time to time. I sink into the memory again, counting destinations on the map. Eating chocolate-covered grahams.

  “Seven stops,” I whisper. “Eleven, seven.”

  “Your mother’s lucky numbers,” Schmidt says.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s a biblical verse,” Schmidt says. “Ecclesiastes, chapter eleven, verse seven.”

  Brooke already has her tablet out and Bible app up.

  “My mother read the Bible?” For the most part, I’ve grown up without religion. I don’t recall ever setting foot inside a church.

  “Your mother read everything.”

  Brooke pushes the tablet in front of me. I read the verse:

  “Oh, how sweet the light of day, And how wonderful to live in the sunshine! Even if you live a long time, don’t take a single day for granted. Take delight in each light-filled hour, Remembering there will be many dark days.”

  It’s my mother’s philosophy.

  I rewind time to the day Mom and I were sitting at the worktable in Schmidt’s kitchen. Seven stops is lucky. Apparently, that luck didn’t serve her well.

  If she had actually gone to Georgia, she would’ve taken her map. Just as she would’ve taken her job application materials. Just as she would’ve taken me.

  “Were you . . . you know . . . Were you involved with my mother?”

  After a long, drawn-out sigh, he says, “Things weren’t good, Samantha, between your parents.” Again, he didn’t quite answer my question.

  “Because of my father’s affair.”

  “So you know about that.”

  “Dad told me. And I found a picture of him with another woman before they were divorced.”

  “Your mom needed a friend. She’d left her life behind in Georgia, her parents had been gone a long time . . . She needed refuge, somewhere to go when things were tough.”

  “I used to think, right after she disappeared, that she was hiding at your house,” I say. “I was so sure that she’d come out of your house one day.”

  “Well, she stayed there a few times after your parents’ divorce was final, when they were sharing the house. He’d drop in to see you, and she’d drop in to see me.”

  I wonder, again, if she chose to stay there because he was a friend, or because he was more to her. He seems like a nice guy. Nothing like the ogre my father insists he was. Could my mother have found a companion in him? “She was planning a trip to Georgia.”

  “Yes.”

  “To get ready for a move there.”

  “That’s right. But she’d promised to come back every fall.”

  “For the bonfires.”

  “You remember the bonfires.” He chuckles.

  Of course I do. Lately it’s hard to forget those things. “She was going to take me with her?”

  After a long pause, he says, “That’s how I know something happened to her. She was gone, but you were here.”

  After Ryan leaves, I go back to Dad’s office and read the article Brooke found.

  Lizzie Dawson’s car was run off the road by a larger vehicle. She and her fiancé—my dad—had just had an argument. Dad later admitted as much in court, when he was tried for vehicular homicide.

  He was acquitted due to lack of evidence.

  This is too much to take in. He was tried but acquitted. For lack of evidence. That makes it sound like there could have been evidence if they’d only found it, not that he was actually innocent.

  I tell Brooke to go home. I just desperately want to be alone.

  ////

  When Lieutenant Eschermann finally arrives, Cassidy is his reluctant companion. The tension between us is as thick as morning fog on Echo Lake, and to make matters worse, Gram joins us too.

  Kismet alternates lying at my feet and Cassidy’s, as if proving her loyalty to each of us spans beyond the issue now dividing us.

  The one positive development is that Eschermann’s team has managed to keep the news crews off the lawn and off the street, so they’re a safe distance from the house now.

  Eschermann tells us, “We reviewed security cameras at the station. Heather got into Chris’s car willingly, but I can’t prove she stayed willingly.”

  I can’t bear to look at Cassidy. “My dad’s in enough trouble, right?” I say. “So why would he take Heather?”

  Eschermann sighs. “Let me tell you something about crime. There’s an element of panic in being found out, and when that threat is imminent, even the most rational criminals risk getting in deeper, if it means evading consequence.” Even though Gram and Cassidy are both in the room, I feel like he’s talking just to me. “Whoever pulled off the disappearance of Delilah Lang is smart. After all these years, do you think he’s going to take a pass on protecting himself? Say if someone knows something and she’s about to disclose, do you think he’s going to let her walk into the station?”

  I take a deep breath, wait for the towns to pop up on the map in my mind, watch the roads connect into perfect little triangles.

  Eschermann leaves us to our own devices while he coordinates with his team. Gram gets busy in the kitchen, kneading something that looks like dough, but she’s not the type to be making bread.

  Cass and I sit on opposite ends of the living room.

  I’m looking through the photo albums, continuing the search for a picture of someone in the yellow jacket I wore.

  So far, I haven’t found anything as intriguing as Mom’s manuscript, which interrupted the search for the picture the first time around.

  “I’m not here because I want to be, you know.” Cassidy speaks in a low voice, I assume so
Gram can’t hear. “I’m here because I don’t have a choice. Eschermann doesn’t want me at the apartment alone, and there was no chance in hell he was going to let me go to Zack and Brooke’s for the night.”

  “Okay.” I study pictures of Dad and Heather. Me and Cassidy as little kids. We were fast friends, instant sisters, even if it did take our parents an age and a half to tie the knot. But she may as well be a stranger to me now.

  Silence falls between us for a spell—a dark, brooding awkwardness that chews at the air—until she speaks again: “While we were waiting for the evidence team at the Nun, I started reading your mom’s manuscript.”

  I busy myself with straightening a photo that’s loosened from its adhesive, just so I can avoid looking at her.

  “I know what you’re thinking: that she was writing about my mom. But Mom had nothing to do with it.”

  “Okay.”

  “Don’t you want to know how I know?” She leans a bit closer. “Because that’s not my mother in the picture we found. If you look at it closely, you’ll see the hair is curlier.”

  I suppose she’s forgotten the curling iron wasn’t invented yesterday.

  “And the mini-dress,” Cass says. “Mom’s not a fan of the empire waistline. High-waisted miniskirt? Sure. With the right top. But a dress like that does little to accentuate the female form. Mom wouldn’t have worn it.”

  “It was so long ago. She might’ve worn it back then.” Although in all the pictures I’m now perusing, Heather’s style has remained pretty constant.

  “Please. Fashion sense is fashion sense.”

  I could tell her—again—that Dad admitted their affair and Heather didn’t deny it, but where would that get me at this point?

  “Whoever that woman was,” Cassidy continues, “she’s your key. She’s the reason your dad did whatever it was he did to your mom. And my theory? He was cheating on my mom too. Why else would they suddenly split, after they stuck it out for so long? Why else wouldn’t they tell us what happened between them?” She takes a deep breath, stuttering over budding tears. “And now history’s repeating itself.”

  “Cass.” I bite on my lip for a second in deliberation. Will anything I say satisfy her? “Dad loves Heather. He just said it the other day.”