by Jenn Bennett
After a prompt, she talked reservedly about the elementary school she attended as a child. We weren’t really interested in that, of course, but I encouraged her to reminisce, trying to loosen her up. But once we moved on to junior high, any progress we’d made immediately receded. I worried that we’d never get to the Snatcher, so I pushed a little harder.
“You were attending junior high when your family moved here to the city?” I asked.
She paused, then nodded. “I was fourteen at the time. Ninth grade.”
“When was that, year-wise?”
“Early eighties,” she said, dropping her eyes. “Can’t remember exactly.”
“I bet it was hard to leave friends behind.”
She shrugged. “I didn’t have a lot of friends.”
“Me either when I was that age,” I said. This was true, but my attempt at solidarity didn’t even register. “So . . . why did you move?”
She blew out a cone of smoke and ran her fingers over a crocheted doily that covered her chair’s armrest. “My father got a job in Morella.”
“Do you happen to remember the month you left?” Lon asked.
Cindy gave him a strange look, then crossed her legs and blinked rapidly. “It was in the fall, I think. Why would that matter?”
“Just judging from your age”—which was the same as Lon’s? Dear God, he’d fared better—“you may have lived in La Sirena during a well-known child abduction case. Do you remember hearing about the Sandpiper Park Snatcher?”
Lon pressed his thigh against mine in warning, but I could already tell by the way Cindy’s shoulders tensed that I’d pushed too far. She sniffed a couple of times, then wiped away a bead of sweat from her brow. “What does this have to do with historical . . . what did you say you belonged to?”
“Preservation Society. We’re interested in how the cultural climate of the town influenced the experience of attending school there.” Pretty good improvisation, I thought, but not enough to quell her nerves. Her countenance shifted from wary to full-on suspicious.
Lon immediately took over the interrogation, attempting to calm her with a softer voice. “All of us have memories that we’d prefer to forget, but sometimes good things can come from remembering the past—even the bad parts. Your memories might help someone today. Were you aware that two kids went missing last week in La Sirena?”
Her breathing stilled momentarily. She blinked several times. “No, I hadn’t heard. I don’t keep up with La Sirena anymore.”
“The police think it might be the same person taking kids again,” he said.
The hand holding her cigarette shook. Ashes fell onto the crocheted armrest, but she didn’t notice. We all sat in silence for several seconds, then Cindy suddenly stubbed her cigarette and stood. “Look, I’m sorry, but I can’t talk anymore. I’ve got to go to work, so you need to leave.”
“But you said you just got home from work—”
“I’m tired!” she shouted. Her hands were shaking badly now, and she backed up to the window.
“We didn’t mean to upset you,” I said quickly. “We don’t have to talk about that. Let’s talk about something else.”
She shot me a steely look. “Get out, or I’m calling the police.”
Lon picked up his farming book, handed me my purse, and pushed me toward the door. Clearly he was reading Cindy’s emotions and knew that we weren’t going to get anything else out of her. He dug inside his jacket pocket and retrieved a small blue business card. “If you change your mind and want to talk—”
She refused the card and pointed toward the exit. “Get out. Now.”
The door slammed behind us right as we made it into the hallway. Locks clicked and chains slid into place. We stared at the door for several moments, then walked to the elevator in silence.
Disappointment and frustration flooded my thoughts as I watched a hobbled elderly woman using a walker at the opposite end of the dim hallway. Cindy definitely knew something about the original abductions. More than something. “You read her feelings. Tell me what you think,” I said.
Lon pressed the elevator button and pocketed his business card. “She was scared out of her mind. Someone wouldn’t be that afraid just casually remembering a town terror from childhood.”
“Someone would be terrified, however, if they’d encountered the town terror,” I said.
Lon nodded. “She was on the original list and was replaced at the last minute. She could’ve been captured by the Snatcher and either escaped or was released.”
“If that’s true, why didn’t she go to the police?”
“Too scared, maybe? I’ll tell you what, though—she was lying about her father getting a job. My guess is that her folks moved away to get her out of town and protect her from the Snatcher . . . maybe also to spare her from being in the public spotlight.”
“If any of that’s true, then she might know stuff, Lon—where the Snatcher took them the first time, what he did, what he said. We’ve got to get her to talk. She might be the only person alive with firsthand knowledge of all this.”
“She won’t talk,” Lon said shaking his head definitively. “We scared her, and she doesn’t trust us. If we want to get information out of her, we’re probably going to have to use magick—maybe one of your medicinals.”
I grimaced. “That seems icky. If she’s been through some sort of torture, I don’t want to traumatize her again.”
Lon sighed, heavy and deep. “You’re right. Maybe we can come up with a better way. In the meantime, I’m thinking we should find a death dowser.”
“A what?”
“An Earthbound who can find dead bodies.”
“Dead bodies . . . You want to find the original group of kids?”
“I don’t want to, but it might help. Might lead to Bishop or give us some clues. The bodies of the original kids aren’t at Sandpiper Park—we know that much. Police dug up the whole park looking for them. So if they aren’t there . . .”
“Then maybe wherever they are will lead us to Bishop,” I finished. “But what if they aren’t dead? What if they’re alive somewhere and have had their memories stripped or something?”
“It’s possible, but unlikely. But we have to try, and a death dowser would help. Earthbounds with that knack are extremely hard to find, though. Haven’t heard of one in La Sirena, so we’ll need to put some feelers out here in Morella.”
And by “we” he meant me. Seeing hundreds of Earthbounds walk in and out of Tambuku every week, you’d think that I’d have heard about somebody. I strained to recall any customers who’d mentioned a knack like this in the past. Though I was coming up blank, I could, however, think of one person who might be able to help track someone down. And unless hell froze over, I’d see him later tonight at the bar.
My shift dragged. During a lull, I found myself staring at a sign behind the bar. Two hooks on the top held changeable plastic numbers, and the bottom read __ MORE DAYS TILL HALLOWEEN in orange and black script. Since it was after midnight, and therefore officially a new day, I swapped out the 9 for an 8. Eight days remaining until Halloween, nine until All Saints’ Day, and three since the second kid went missing. My mind kept churning up images of Cindy Brolin and how she acted when we brought up the recent disappearances. She looked so . . . haunted. What did she know, and how could we persuade her to tell us?
As I was pondering this, a regular entered the bar, his arrival announced by the squawk of the motion-sensor toucan.
Bob.
Just the Earthbound I wanted to see. Well, the Earthbound I was forced to see every bloody night I worked. With slicked-back dark hair and an endless supply of short-sleeved Hawaiian shirts—tonight’s was blue, with Sailor Jerry–style pinup girls—Bob waved to a few other regulars before bellying up to the bar. I prepped his drink before he got there: a Singapore Sling with extra Cherry Heering. If I needed an important favor from any of the other regulars, I might have considered slipping in a drop of one of the magica
l medicinals that I kept hidden in a small compartment behind the bar, a little something to make them more compliant. Bob, however, was my number one fan. No push needed. A few weeks ago, he was depressed for days when I told him I was serious about Lon.
“Cadybell, Cadybell, trap me in your sweet summer spell,” Bob said dramatically as he spun toward me on the barstool. He drummed his hands on the bamboo edge, then dug into a wooden bowl of rice crackers.
“It’s autumn, you know. Not summer,” I said. “You need a new poem.”
He offered up a lopsided grin in response. One of Bob’s eyes was a wee bit lazy. You didn’t notice it right away; it was only after chatting with him for a couple of minutes that you realized something just didn’t quite focus on you. Even so, it was his bulbous, red drunkard’s nose that stole all the attention.
He wasn’t the easiest guy to look at, and he was mildly irritating to talk to. But he seemed to know just about every Earthbound in Morella, and I trusted him. After two years of hearing about the minutiae of his daily life, it was kinda hard not to.
“Bobby boy,” I drawled affectionately, laying it on thick as I poured his drink from the shaker into a hurricane glass. “I’ve got a weird, yet extremely important favor to ask.”
His grin faded as he glanced from side to side, making sure I wasn’t talking to some other Bob. “Really?”
“It’s on the down low,” I said, putting a silent finger to my lips.
He leaned low over the bar and spoke in a soft, conspiratorial voice. “Anything, Cady. Name it.”
“I need to employ the services of a death dowser. Ever heard of one?”
A couple of seconds ticked by until he finally answered. “Umm . . . yeah, I know a guy.”
Good old Bob. For a moment there, I’d wondered if he was going to hold out on me. “Is he reliable? He can really find dead bodies?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
Better sweeten the pot, I thought. He was a sucker for freebies, so I quickly constructed a fruit extravaganza on an extralong umbrella skewer—lime wedges, cherries, orange segments, and four pineapple slices—and settled it horizontally across the rim of the glass.
“O-o-oh,” he said appreciatively, holding out both hands to cradle the ridiculously top-heavy concoction.
“Tell me more about this guy.”
“The death dowser hasn’t done any work for me personally.” He pulled fruit off the umbrella and popped it in his mouth as he reached for the right words. “He’s a little, well, out there. Not exactly someone you’d want to take home to Mom, you know?”
I washed my sticky hands at the bar sink. “I don’t care about that. Is he good?”
“People say he has skills. He brags that the Morella police have paid him under the table a couple of times to find bodies. I can’t verify that, but I did hook him up with someone a few months ago, and they said he completed the job.”
“Awesome. Can you set up a meeting? It needs to be fast.”
“How fast?”
“Every day counts.”
He slurped his drink. Pale pink foam stuck to his lips. “How ’bout later tonight?” he finally asked, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand.
“Really? Yeah, absolutely.”
“I’ll make a phone call. He’s a night owl. Has a couple of side businesses. . . .” Bob’s mouth puckered slightly. I probably should’ve taken note of this at the time and asked more questions, but I didn’t. “Anyway,” he continued, “I’m sure he’ll agree to meet. He doesn’t live far from here. Maybe ten minutes? He’s skittish about visitors, but he trusts me. I can take you there when your shift is over.”
The last thing I wanted to do was tool around the city with Bob in the wee hours of the morning, but I put my feelings aside and merely said, “I’m counting on you.”
That’s all he needed. His good eye fixed on me with saintlike devotion. “I won’t let you down, Cady.”
I finished up all my closing duties and locked up the bar around 2:30. Bob offered to drive, but I declined, knowing exactly how much alcohol he’d consumed the past couple of hours. He wasn’t drunk—I’d never seen him cross the line into sloppy—but no need to chance it.
He gave me directions along the way. The drive was a lot longer than he’d promised, nearly a half hour, and Bob fidgeted in the passenger seat the entire way. Turned out the dowser lived on the outskirts of Waxtown, a former industrial neighborhood in southeast Morella that was in the middle of a painful gentrification. Converted lofts, upscale bakeries, and trendy restaurants had driven up property taxes—and driven out most of the original residents from the center. On the outskirts of the neighborhood, however, blocks of small apartments, once home to factory workers, were now occupied by a motley mixture of art-school idealists and some of the displaced residents who could no longer afford the skyrocketing rents further in.
I parallel-parked outside one of these old brick apartment buildings, which Bob said was a few blocks away from the dowser’s place. Headlights from the occasional car whizzed past as we navigated around prostitutes and late-night clubbers stinking of beer. Instead of heading to the entrance of the building where the dowser lived, Bob led me to a rusting chain-link fence on the side. As I looked on in bewilderment, he quickly foraged around the crumbling sidewalk for a small pebble, then reared back into a pitcher’s stance and lobbed it in a high arc to ding against a second-floor window.
“What the hell, Bob?” I whispered.
“Sorry. He’s weird about too many phone calls.”
“Great. That sounds on the up-and-up,” I muttered as I folded my hands around my middle and shivered. A few seconds passed before a girl with a dark green halo leaned out the window. Bob announced himself in a loud whisper. Without a response, she left for several seconds, then returned and tossed down a single key on a large silver ring, which turned out to unlock the front entrance. We headed up a couple of flights in a depressing stairwell straight out of Soviet-era Russia, with concrete steps lined by flaking metal handrails. Every surface of the stairwell was smothered in a thick coat of cheerless, glossy gray paint—even the dust on the exposed pipes.
We made our way to the last apartment at the end of the hall. The same girl who’d thrown us the key answered the door. With sugary-red dyed hair, she looked like a Latina Raggedy Ann doll. Dark circles hung beneath dull eyes that wanted us out of her sight. She held out an impatient open palm to Bob. He set the key in her hand and mumbled a timid hello as we entered.
The apartment was filthy. A cramped kitchen overflowing with trash and dirty dishes funneled into a narrow dining room. As we passed into a larger living space, the smell of damp hamster cage transitioned into a vinegary, burning-soil aroma: sømna, an opiate derived from the dried gills of a mildly toxic Pacific Northwest fungus. Like valrivia, it was smoked mostly by Earthbounds. Unlike valrivia, it wasn’t a mild, legalized smoke you enjoyed on your afternoon coffee break, but rather, a highly addictive and highly illegal narcotic.
“Bob, you asshole,” I mumbled.
He shot me a nervous sidelong glance. A thin sheen of sweat covered his forehead.
An Earthbound with a large, bright blue halo sat on a striped couch at the far end of the living room, near a curtainless window. Two humans were hunched over a coffee table in front of him, their backs to us. One of them bent to inspect something on the table. The Earthbound on the couch glanced over his head and caught my eye. “Take it or leave it,” he said to the men. “Makes no difference to me.”
“It’s not what I expected,” one of them said.
“Not my problem. You paid, I provided. Get out. I’ve got company.”
Both men turned to look at us, fear pulsing in their eyes. One grabbed the mystery item off the table, stuck it in his jacket pocket, then slapped his mate on the shoulder. Both kept their eyes on the floor as they marched out of the room, parting like a wave around Bob and me. The apartment door slammed behind them.
“Robert,” the blue-
haloed Earthbound said, “introduce me to your friend.”
“Cady Bell, one of the Tambuku owners. Cady, this is Hajo.”
“A pleasure.” The Earthbound stood up, unfolding a frame well over six feet. He was dressed in jeans and a slim, black leather racing jacket with a mandarin collar and three silver stripes on one sleeve, zipped all the way up to his throat. He was about my age, I guessed, mid- to late twenties. Short dark hair and darker eyes. Long, thin sideburns styled into diagonal points. Smoldering good looks.
“Bob failed to mention that the death dowser he knew was a sømna addict,” I said.
He emitted a rough chuckle as he looked me over a little slower than I liked. “No worries. My willpower is rock solid.”
If you had self-control, you could supposedly use the drug in small amounts for years without much backlash to your health. Problem was, once you crossed the line and upped your intake, you hit a no-return point, referred to as tribulation. Past this, you were pretty much screwed. Dead man walking. Medical rehab success was slim, and if you couldn’t stop, toxicity levels stacked up exponentially. A state law passed five years ago was one of the harshest in the country: possession of any amount was a felony that got you an automatic ten years in prison and a $20,000 fine. But half of those imprisoned died within a week of being denied the drug.
“I don’t give a damn what you do on your own time,” I said. “I just don’t want to be in your home when the cops catch up to you.”
“Oh, I don’t live here.” He unzipped his jacket to reveal the suggestion of a well-defined chest beneath a shirt that clung to his skin. “This is Cristina’s place. I don’t shit where I eat.”
So very classy. You know how people get better-looking the more you know and like them? That applies in reverse too. The smolder was dying.
“I’ve seen you at your bar a couple of times.” He sat down and spread his arms over the back of the couch. An upturned Ducati motorcycle helmet teetered near his thigh. His voice was low and hard to hear over the volume of the flat-screen TV across the room.
