Splinter (Fiction — Young Adult)

by Sasha Dawn

  My head pounds with every strike.

  Suddenly the hatch at the ceiling opens. The incandescent barn light shines like a halo around a human figure. He’s not more than a silhouette right now, but I don’t care who it is, only that he heard me.

  “Got her!” he yells over his shoulder.

  I catch it now: the hint of Dixie in his voice.

  “Ryan.” I want to thank him, but all I can do is cry in relief, in gratitude.

  I hear feedback from a cop’s radio, someone calling for an ambulance.

  Next I know, a ladder is lowered into the shaft and Ryan’s climbing down. “I got you.”

  My arms close around him.

  “I’ve got you.” His cheek is warm against mine. “I’ve got you.”

  The beam of a cop-issue flashlight washes over us.

  “Think you can climb, Sam?” Eschermann.

  “I know how it happened.” With Ryan behind me to stabilize me, I take the ladder rung by rung.

  “Plenty of time, Sam,” Eschermann says. “Let’s get you to a hospital and worry about that later.”

  Two sets of strong arms pull me up the rest of the way—Eschermann’s and Schmidt’s. “No,” I tell him as Schmidt wraps a coat around me. “Now.”

  It’s still dark outside. The sun hasn’t yet risen. Maybe I wasn’t in there as long as I thought.

  “I was following the dog.” My teeth chatter, although I’m already starting to warm up. “The passageway was open, and she went in, and—is she okay? She hasn’t been out in the cold, has she?”

  “The dog is fine.”

  “What time is it?” I’m about to ask why everyone’s awake if it isn’t yet sunrise, when I realize Schmidt’s home. Unless he drove all through the night . . .

  “It’s just after seven,” Ryan says.

  And it’s dark outside.

  “In the evening,” he adds. “We’ve been looking for you all day.”

  No wonder I’m so tired, so cold.

  And that means Dad and Heather have been gone for over twenty-four hours. “Did you find Dad and Heather?”

  Eschermann gives me a small smile. “We did. They’re both all right.”

  “Thank God.” It’s so enormous but I can just barely process the news right now. They survived the crash. And Dad didn’t hurt Heather.

  “I called your grandmother around eleven last night to inform you. They were both admitted at Lake Forest after the accident. Which is where you should be going too. We ought to get you checked out. You’ve been through quite an ordeal.”

  “Here’s your phone,” Ryan adds, wiping it on his jeans to clear the mud off of its case.

  “Thank you.” I don’t know why I try to turn it on; I know the battery is dead.

  “And here’s your caterpillar.”

  “Caterpillar?” I look up, expecting to see one of the fuzzy creatures I saw earlier. Instead, I see a pink plastic caterpillar dangling from a chain.

  It’s the same caterpillar that used to be attached to Mom’s keys.

  “So I’m right,” I say. “Mom was probably in that wine cellar. That’s her pink caterpillar.”

  All I really want to do is shower.

  But Eschermann put me, mud and all, in the back of an ambulance en route to Lake Forest Northwest Hospital. A paramedic sticks something in my ear to take my temperature.

  Officer Neilla Cooper, in some ironic twist, is babysitting me again. “It could be the caterpillar was in a box and wound up in the cellar. We won’t know until we look into it.”

  “But that caterpillar was on her keychain. You remember it, don’t you?”

  “I remember it was in the report Eschermann wrote after his initial interview with you.”

  “And my theory about Trina . . . it makes sense, right?”

  “I’d say in theory it does, but there are a few things that won’t match up. Your mother’s driver’s license, the records with the secretary of state, indicate that ten years ago, she was five-nine. One hundred forty pounds. Trina’s five-six, one twenty. Trina likely couldn’t have moved your mother’s body, even from one section of the passageway to the other, on her own, let alone into a vehicle. She would’ve needed help.”

  It takes only a second or two for me to see what she’s getting at. “You think my father helped her.”

  “I’m not saying that. All I’m saying is that the only way your theory makes sense is if someone else helped her.”

  “You were around the neighborhood back then. You heard the talk. What do you think happened that day?”

  “I think what I’ve always thought. That you were put somewhere out of the way while something terrible happened.”

  “You think my father was involved.”

  “The one thing missing from this whole thing, Sam, is motive. Your father is the only one having anything close to a motive.”

  If my mother was writing fiction based on actual events, that’s not necessarily true. “If Trina was jealous of my mother . . .”

  “Why wouldn’t she be jealous of Heather?”

  “Maybe she was jealous of both of them. But Mom just happened to be the one she had access to.”

  “Still, your mother was leaving town.”

  “So we’re back to my father.”

  “Well, Heather won’t budge on her alibi.” Neilla shrugs a shoulder. “She insists they were together, so I don’t know what to think.”

  “Eschermann said you found Dad and Heather last night.”

  Last night . . . If I’d known Heather was all right, I might not have gone into the passageway. I wonder why Gram didn’t tell me. She probably thought I was asleep, but still, she should have at least looked in on me. “What happened?”

  “Their two separate accounts say they were run off the road, but they’re all right. Cassidy is with her mom. Heather should be released tonight or tomorrow morning.”

  “And Dad?”

  “He’s okay.” She pauses. “Sami, there was open alcohol in the car. He was arrested at the hospital, once he was released.”

  I’m numb. I finally have a theory to clear his name, and he’s locked up for something else? Worse yet, I don’t know if I can bear to go through the dark days of his alcoholism again. I think of the bottle I saw tucked into the rock foundation in the passageway. “He was drunk?”

  “Actually, no. But open alcohol in a vehicle is against the law. We’re holding him. Given the direction the case is going, we can’t let him go.”

  If Dad helped Trina get rid of Mom, does he deserve to pay? Absolutely. He took my mother away from me. Justice must be served.

  But why do I have to pay, too?

  Tell a girl her mother, whom she’d assumed had simply abandoned her, has been dead a long time.

  Now tell her that her father’s responsible, and she’s about to lose the one parent she’s relied on for most of her life.

  Where’s the justice in that for me?

  “Knock, knock.” Brooke enters my hospital room with a duffel bag. “Brought everything you asked for.”

  “Thanks.”

  She’s wearing jeans and an oversized sweatshirt. Nothing out of the ordinary. But I’m struck with the realization that just a couple of hours ago, I thought I’d never see her again.

  “Clean bill of health, I hear,” she says. “So you managed to hide your psychosis.”

  I crack a smile. “Yeah, I’m getting there.” I’ve recently taken a shower, but the sense of cold won’t leave me. Beneath the heated blankets wrapped around my shoulders and tossed over my lap, I’m wearing hospital-issue scrubs, in that same bright orange you see prisoners wear, and I can’t help wondering what my father is doing right now.

  I don’t know when, or if, he’ll be able to walk through our door again. If he never again comes home, I’ll never be able to ask all the questions that need answering. I’ve lived with my father my whole life, but over the course of the past few days, I’ve come to realize that I don’t know him. At all.<
br />
  “I was damn near ready to crack out a divining rod to track you down.” Brooke begins to unpack the duffel. Leggings, T-shirt, sweater. Thick socks, which I grab first—my feet are freezing—and a pair of hiking boots.

  My gaze travels to the bag of things I arrived with. Cassidy’s boots are trashed. Everything is covered in mud. And Ryan . . .

  He climbed down into the shaft without hesitation.

  There’s so much to say to him, but no words will suffice. He was there . . . in the right place at the right time. He heard me. He helped me when every member of my family was otherwise engaged.

  Eschermann told me: Gram apparently heard Kismet making a racket and went out to investigate. She closed the door to the passageway and walked the dog back inside, but she didn’t bother to check on me. I wonder how she assumed the dog had escaped the house, if I wasn’t out there with her, but Gram didn’t question it. She didn’t check my room to see that I wasn’t in bed before she left for the station this morning, either. If she had, maybe people would’ve been looking for me.

  Gram had managed to wake Cassidy late last night to tell her that Heather was at the hospital—and Cassidy subsequently booked it to Heather’s side. But Gram didn’t worry about telling me our parents had been located. She didn’t worry about me, period. She told Eschermann she assumed Cassidy would have woken me, and then she assumed, when I wasn’t in my room, that I’d gone with Cass.

  It’s also possible that Gram was blitzed out of her mind and forgot me completely.

  After all, she’s never been interested in protecting me. Her visits were about protecting Dad, making sure he survived. I stare at a wallpaper seam across the way, where the flowers don’t quite match up.

  “Hey.” Brooke snaps her fingers in front of my face.

  I jump.

  “No one’s denying you’ve had a shitty day, all right? But it isn’t over yet. Don’t check out on me.”

  For a few seconds, we stare eye to eye. “They all abandoned me. It was like they didn’t know where I was, like my mother, but they didn’t care. Like, where did they think I went? Did they assume I’d just walked out the door one day, like they thought my mom had done? Do you know how that made me feel? Growing up thinking your mom just doesn’t care?”

  Brooke sits on the edge of the bed. “All moms care. Some would just rather go to the Caribbean than deal.”

  I know she’s still operating on my old theories, assuming my mother left of her own volition.

  “But I know what really happened now. I know what happened, and no one cares. I could’ve died in there, and no one was looking for me.”

  “That’s not true.” Brooke drops an arm around my shoulders. “Ryan texted Cassidy and me. I texted Alex. Your sister called that cop. And check your phone. We all texted and called you.”

  Now that it’s charged—thanks to Neilla for loaning me her charger—I can see that Cass did reply to my text. And everyone reached out to me. I just didn’t know it.

  “We were all looking for you,” Brooke continues. “But no one thinks to look for a dungeon beneath a dungeon. If we’d known it was there, it would’ve been the first place—”

  “Gram saw the hatch open. And the dog running out of it. You’d think it wouldn’t have been too much of a stretch to search the passageway.”

  “She told us. We walked through it. We didn’t hear you, and you obviously didn’t hear us calling for you. We saw no trace that anyone had been in there. We didn’t see anything that made us think that other door had been opened, and it wouldn’t budge when we tried.”

  It must have been when I was unconscious, before I started making noise and moving dirt around.

  “Sam, people love you. Maybe you felt alone—we all do sometimes—but we love you.”

  The words warm me up. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like it, but Dad, Heather, Cassidy, and our friends . . . I know they care. Evidence: burritos. Thursday night dinners. A box full of haute couture samples I can help myself to at any time. Suddenly I have an overwhelming desire to tell them all it’s mutual, that I love them too. I reach for Brooke’s hand and give it a squeeze. “Brooke, thank you. For everything.”

  “Don’t get a big head about it,” she says.

  “Do you think Heather would want to see me? I know Cassidy’s pissed, but—”

  “Cass will want to see you, and Heather too. So get dressed, and we’ll head down to the first floor.” Brooke moves to get off the bed, but I stop her with a grip at her elbow.

  “Do you know what happened that day? The day my mother disappeared?”

  “I don’t think anyone really knows, Sam.”

  “I think I do.” I tell her about my Trina Jordan theory and why the cops think it doesn’t hold water. “And I get it: my whole life I’ve been spouting theories that clear my dad, and Eschermann always has reasons they’re not valid. But this one really is. They’re treating me like I’m just looking for other explanations, but I’m not blind. I got to the point yesterday when I faced the possibility Dad did this. I am 99 percent positive my mother is dead.”

  “Sam.”

  “No. It’s true. Ryan found this little plastic ornament she used to have on her key ring. It was a pink caterpillar. And somehow, it was in the space where I got trapped, beneath the wine cellar. Whether or not she’s Jane Doe Georgia, whether or not my father had anything to do with it, my mother is gone. I’m not just blindly believing—in anything—anymore.”

  Brooke bites her lower lip and nods. “Then we’ll make that cop understand.”

  “You agree with me?”

  “Always, Sam. No one knows better than you what happened that day. If you think this is a possibility, I’m behind you. We’ll make Heather understand. And Cassidy.” She moves again to leave. This time I let her go, but just as she’s reaching for the door, I stop her. “Brooke?”

  She turns around.

  “What would’ve happened to me, if Ryan hadn’t been there?”

  “Don’t think about it. Don’t worry about something that didn’t happen.”

  But if Ryan hadn’t been there to visit, no one would’ve been in the barn stacking firewood.

  With every member of my family tending to other emergencies, without Ryan to alert my friends he couldn’t get a hold of me, I would’ve been entombed there, another piece of the puzzle, keeping track of the passing days with tally marks on the walls. And Lieutenant Eschermann probably would’ve found a way to blame that on my dad, too.

  Eschermann is in Heather’s room when I get there.

  The door is closed, but through the window, I see my stepmother, bruised a little on the face and neck from the air bag. Her hair is pulled back into a high ponytail, and she’s dressed in a uniquely-Nun ensemble: high-waisted, embellished jeans and a batwing sweater. Only Heather could be in a car that hit a utility pole and come out of it looking even more stylish than ever before.

  She’s sitting on the bed, feet dangling toward the floor, as if she’s ready to go home.

  And reading in the chair at the corner of the room is my sister.

  Last week, I would’ve walked in without knocking, made myself at home, and made Cassidy share the only chair.

  But everything is different now.

  Brooke thought it best for me to come alone; she’s in the waiting room with her brother. Brooke is probably right; we don’t need extra people crowding this room. But I’m afraid to face Heather and Cass. They don’t know what I think I know.

  Depending on why Heather took a drive with Dad, instead of honoring her appointment with Eschermann, Cassidy may still be calling for Dad’s arrest . . .

  Except that he’s already been arrested.

  Heather spots me peering through the window, and before I even manage to wave, she’s crossing the room, opening the door, and pulling me into her arms.

  “Samantha!” A heartbeat later, Cassidy’s in the mix too.

  “What you’ve been through, my sweet girl!” Heather kiss
es the side of my forehead.

  Instantly, I let my guard down. I physically feel my shoulders relax, feel the tension release from my jaw, from my spine, from my legs.

  This is what it feels like to have a mother.

  I never want to lose this closeness.

  But we know there’s a great possibility we will lose it.

  And I’m apologizing, and Cassidy’s apologizing back.

  And they’re laying their hands on me, telling me they were worried, that Eschermann filled them in on my experience, telling me they love me, and I’m telling them I love them too.

  “I ruined your boots,” I say to Cass. “I’m sorry. I’ll buy you new ones.”

  “I don’t care about the boots, Sam.”

  “But I will. I shouldn’t have worn them without asking, and—”

  Cassidy wipes away a tear. “It’s not your fault.”

  “None of this,” Heather says, holding my face in her lovely hands, “is your fault.”

  I know right then and there: this couldn’t possibly be the woman my mother wrote about in Nobody’s Fool. My mother wouldn’t have wanted someone else to raise me, but if she’s really gone, I think she would’ve been grateful to Heather for loving me.

  Then I catch sight of Eschermann’s clipboard, or rather what’s clipped onto it: the drawings I did as a child. The stick figure kid standing in the rain with a sunflower umbrella, looking from a distance at the maybe-dead larger figure with the heart on its chest.

  Perhaps realizing what I’m looking at, Eschermann pulls the drawings from the clipboard and drops them atop the wheeled cart next to the bed. “I’ll give you some time.”

  I gravitate toward the pictures.

  “Sam . . . ,” Heather starts. But she doesn’t say anything else.

  I clear my throat, which is still sore from screaming. “I’m sorry I took these from your boxes. I just saw my name, and . . . yeah.”

  “Eschermann told me what you thought. You thought you were drawing your mother.”

  I sniffle through a nod.

  Heather takes a seat on the bed and pats the space next to her. “Come here.”