Children of the Earth

by Anna Schumacher

  “What’s this about?” she choked through the dryness in her throat.

  A look of pity flashed across Detective Fraczek’s eyes, but his voice stayed stern. “Last week you attacked a man and put him in the hospital. Now he’s dead.”

  “He is?” Bitter bile coated the back of her tongue as she remembered her attacker’s greasy hair and creepy, different-colored eyes. Now he was dead, and even though he’d attacked her first, she still felt the old unwelcome rush of guilt and helplessness flow through her and turn her limbs to concrete.

  “You have the right to remain silent,” the cop said in response. Daphne stood numbly as he recited the rest of her rights, trying to organize the thoughts ransacking her brain. What would this arrest do to her family, her community? Would her status as a prophet protect her, or would the townspeople of Carbon County turn on her yet again?

  “We’re going to take her down to the station for questioning.” Detective Fraczek looked down his hawk-nose at Aunt Karen, who was practically hyperventilating, her face tomato-red. “She should be out on bail later tonight or tomorrow morning, if you want to come get her.”

  “Tomorrow morning?!” Karen shrieked. “You can’t do that—she’d spend the night in jail!”

  “I’ll do what I can,” he replied grimly. “But if this manslaughter charge sticks, she may be spending a whole lot more than one night in jail.”

  “No!” Aunt Karen fanned her face, trying to tame the color in her cheeks. “I’m calling Floyd—and Pastor Ted—and the press. You won’t get away with this! Everyone knows she’s innocent. She’s a prophet, you know! She’s been chosen by God!”

  Daphne watched the detectives exchange glances.

  “I’ll be okay, Aunt Karen,” Daphne said, forcing herself to stay calm. “I’ll see you before you know it.”

  “How touching,” Detective Madsen sneered, steering Daphne toward the door. The cold air slapped her face, making her shoulders shake as they stepped outside. She could hear Aunt Karen puffing and fretting behind them, already on the phone to Uncle Floyd.

  “Watch your head,” Fraczek said gruffly, opening the door to the backseat. Without the use of her hands, Daphne fell cheek-first against the bulletproof glass divider, the cuffs digging painfully into her back and making pins and needles tingle in her fingers. The detective closed the door behind her and started the car, and she watched its flashing lights slash the world outside with panels of red and blue.

  Owen was out there in that world, probably getting ready to go to the Vein. She stiffened as she thought of her cell phone, back on her bedside table in Janie’s old bedroom in the Peyton trailer. Owen had said he’d text before he made the trip, and she’d wanted to wish him luck. Now she wouldn’t get the chance. All she could do was hope he’d be safe. If all went well, she’d soon be out of police custody and he would come back from the Vein, and they could find refuge in each other’s arms.

  The squad car pulled up in front of the Carbon County Police Station, a squat, one-story building painted a depressing green. The inside was no cheerier. Dusty venetian blinds masked the paltry light, and a pair of scarred wooden desks faced each other, both piled high with paperwork and half-empty cups of coffee. A dark hall led away from the room, its shadowy recesses filling Daphne with dread. The police station was a fraction of the size of the one in Detroit, but she still knew what was back there: interrogation rooms and holding cells. Neither of which she’d ever wanted to see the inside of again.

  Her thoughts beat double-time as the officers led her down the dark hall and into a small room, its smell so thick with dust and old coffee that she almost gagged. Dead flies fizzled in the bowl of a fluorescent light fixture above their heads, and the metal folding chairs on either side of an ancient table looked greasy and discolored from decades of handling.

  It seemed fishy, somehow, that they had waited to arrest her until more than a week after the attack. When Sherriff Bates questioned her in the hospital, he’d seemed to accept that she was acting in self-defense. Something had obviously caused him to change his mind. But what—or who?

  Detective Madsen locked the door behind them as Detective Fraczek undid Daphne’s handcuffs and settled in across from her, nicotine-stained fingers resting on a manila folder. He regarded her with hazel eyes ringed with shadows of sleeplessness, and his voice sounded like a sigh.

  “Daphne, we’re going to ask you a few questions. It would be in your best interest to cooperate and answer everything with as much detail as possible. If you can do this, we may be able to get you out of here tonight. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.” Daphne rubbed her wrists where the cuffs had dug in. “Sir,” she added, with what she hoped sounded like respect.

  Detective Fraczek raised an eyebrow. “Well, that’s a start, anyway.” He opened the manila folder and slid a photograph across the table while his partner paced back and forth behind them. “Do you know this man?”

  She shivered in disgust as she looked down at the greasy hair and bruise-mottled neck of the man in the photograph. One gray eye and one brown stared back at her, lifeless, unseeing. The picture had obviously been taken after her attacker died.

  “Yes. That’s the man who attacked me.”

  Detective Madsen stopped pacing and put his hands on the table, leaning close enough for her to see the broken blood vessels around his bulbous nose. “And you still allege that he attacked you? What you did to him there—the way you strangled him—was that in self-defense?”

  “Yes, of course.” Daphne fought to keep her voice calm. She’d been over all of this before, with the sheriff. Where was the sheriff, anyway? “Why would I try to hurt him? I didn’t even know him!”

  Detective Madsen opened his mouth to speak, but Detective Fraczek shushed him with a sharp look. Instead of replying, he opened the folder and took out another photo, inching it along the tabletop until it was directly under Daphne’s nose.

  “How about this guy?” he asked. “Look familiar?”

  The face staring up at Daphne was porky and sad-looking, with jowly rolls under the chin and a grim set to the eyes.

  “That’s the sheriff.” She looked imploringly from one cop to the other. “Why are you showing me this? Where is he, anyway? Shouldn’t he be here?”

  “That’s what we’d like to know.” Detective Fraczek sat back and crossed his arms. “He’s been missing since last night. And he’s not the only one. Have you ever seen this little guy before?”

  He opened the folder one last time and handed Daphne a photograph. An involuntary gasp ripped through her as she took in the little boy with the sandy bowl cut, the one who had observed her with curiosity in the hospital room the night of the attack. She could tell from the sadness in Detective Fraczek’s eyes that something was wrong, and a cold certainty twisted in her gut. Something had happened to this boy, something bad.

  “You’re upset,” Detective Fraczek said bluntly. She raised her eyes from the photograph just in time to catch the two officers exchange knowing glances. “What are you feeling right now, Daphne? Sadness? Regret?” His eyes probed hers, a glimmer of triumph sparking in their hazel depths. “Guilt?”

  “No!” The word erupted from her, unnaturally shrill. “I’m worried. You have to find him!”

  “That’s what we intend to do.” Detective Fraczek said quietly. “We’re asking you.”

  “Me?” The word echoed off the concrete walls. “Why?”

  Detective Madsen sighed. “Because of this.” He tapped a police file. “We found it on the sheriff’s desk after he went missing. It’s an investigation into the murder up at the drifter’s camp, and it implicates you as the number-one suspect.”

  Blood thundered in Daphne’s ears. The room around her felt airless, like it had been stuffed with wet cotton and was being slowly jammed down her throat. Everything she thought she’d escaped, the very crim
e she’d been finally absolved of once the town of Carbon County accepted her as a prophet, came rushing back at her, threatening to drown her. She wanted to bang her head against the table, to scream at the officers that they were wrong, to find the sheriff and shake him by the shoulders until he agreed to take it back.

  Instead, she allowed herself one long, shaky breath before fixing her eyes solidly on Detective Fraczek. Her only chance, she knew from the past, was to get as much information as possible and hope that a good lawyer and an understanding jury would take care of the rest.

  “Why me?” she asked with as much dignity as she could muster. “What makes him think I’d try to kill a man I’ve never met?”

  Detective Fraczek twiddled a pen between his scrawny fingers, tapping it rapidly against the table with a clicking that made her want to jump up and bite his hand. She forced slow breaths through her lungs, trying not to panic.

  “First of all,” he said, “we have no evidence that you didn’t know him. It’s suspicious that you were up at the drifter’s camp in the first place, and your coworker’s story that you were quote-unquote ‘acting weird’ beforehand doesn’t help your case. People often ‘act weird’ when they’re about to commit a murder, don’t you think?”

  “But—” Daphne sputtered. “But there were witnesses! People saw him attack me first.”

  The detectives shook their heads in slow, perfect tandem, like a pair of hound dogs following the trajectory of a biscuit.

  “Not so,” Detective Madsen said. “We were up there earlier. There were witnesses all right, but what they saw were two people on the ground—and you had your hands around his neck. Nobody saw him attack you. They heard a scream, but they say now they’re not even sure whose it was.”

  “But that’s crazy!” Images from that night flashed in quick strobes through her mind: the knife glinting in the moonlight, the crazed look in the man’s different-colored eyes, the greasy stench of his stringy hair and rancid breath, and the terrifying visions that overtook her when she thought all was lost. “He had a knife against my neck. I didn’t even know what I was doing when I strangled him . . . I was seeing things, it was like I was in another world . . .”

  She trailed off, suddenly realizing what her words implied. Seeing things. In another world. She sounded like a schizophrenic. In a flash, the line between being a prophet and being straight-up crazy narrowed until, seeing it through the detectives’ eyes, she could barely discern it at all. In the religiously charged valley of Carbon County, her visions were accepted as truth and proselytized as gospel, but in other places, like police stations and courts of law, she’d be medicated and locked up. She needed to stop talking before she gave the cops more ammo to convict her for a crime she didn’t commit.

  “Were you seeing things when you murdered your stepfather, too?” Detective Fraczek leaned in for the kill. “What about when you murdered the sheriff . . . or his son?”

  “I didn’t murder anyone!” Daphne’s words thundered through the tiny room, bouncing off the sweating stucco walls.

  “Come on.” Detective Fraczek laughed. “You have to admit, it’s pretty suspicious that Sherriff Bates disappeared as soon as he started investigating you.”

  “But what about Charlie?” Anger blazed in her cheeks. “You really think I’d kill a child?”

  Detective Madsen shrugged. “According to some, you already have. I’m sure the name Jeremiah Varley means something to you.”

  Daphne felt like she’d been kicked in the chest. The mention of Janie’s stillborn baby always brought tears to her eyes, and now she wiped them away furiously, glaring at the detective’s doughy face and suspicious eyes. “How could you even—you know that’s not true.” She struggled to draw a breath, but the pain had a stranglehold on her. It was like the detectives had found all the most horrible and agonizing moments in her life and laid them in front of her on the tabletop. Now they were burying her face in them, trying to smother her with the memories.

  “All we know is what people in town tell us.” Detective Fraczek steepled his fingers, and she noticed a mottle of black hairs like spider legs growing from his knuckles. “Some folks think you had a hand in baby Jeremiah’s death. Others don’t. Some think you killed your stepfather back in Detroit and that man up at the drifter’s camp. Others don’t. As for me—well, I’d bet a good chunk of change you’re behind these other disappearances, too.” He tapped the photos of the sheriff and Charlie. “We won’t know until we find the bodies. Unless, of course, you want to save everyone a lot of time and trouble and just tell us where they are.”

  “I don’t know.” She twisted her fingers until they were white in her lap. “All I can say is that I’m innocent.”

  “We’ll let the jury decide that.” Detective Fraczek stood abruptly and gathered the photos, collating them neatly on the edge of the table before slamming the manila folder shut. “I think we have what we need for now. Detective Madsen will take you next door so the judge can set bail, but let me give you a piece of advice first.”

  He crouched so his eyes met Daphne’s and his stale coffee breath was hot against her cheek. “You’re gonna want to get yourself a damn good lawyer to beat these charges. Because this case is not looking good.”

  She felt the snap of handcuffs bite into her wrists as she watched him turn and saunter slowly out of the room.

  17

  OWEN COULDN’T SEE WHERE THE bonfire ended and the smoking red sky began.

  “Come with us!” A woman danced close to him, her flimsy white dress falling over her curves like water. “Dance with us!” She held out a sinewy hand, fingers beckoning him forward, into the circle. Laughter spilled from her mouth, and her green cat-eyes glittered wickedly.

  Behind her, others flailed to the ecstatic beat of an unseen drum. Their shouts mingled with showers of sparks, tiny blasts of light against the night’s infinite darkness.

  He could feel their joy in his veins, the hot rush of blood finally stirred to life. He was meant to be with them, doing the dance of life and death around the fire, becoming part of that circle of chosen ones born of the very core of the earth. His heart beat with the drum, with their footsteps, with their gleeful cries. They were the Children of the Earth, and he was one of them.

  “Dance with us!” the woman in white spun in a circle, her hair a rainbow cutting the night. When she faced him again it was with Luna’s gaze, Luna’s heat and life and emerald eyes. “Come, Earth Brother, be one of us.”

  He shook his head miserably, not trusting himself to speak for fear he would do as she asked, finally acquiescing to the longing that burned night and day in his soul.

  “Come.” The silver in her voice turned to lead.

  He closed his eyes, unable to look at her, knowing the power in her gaze. If he went with her, took her hand and let her lead him to the fire, followed the flow of his blood, then he would lose Daphne. And if he lost Daphne, he would lose his moral compass, the core of goodness that kept him from falling headfirst into darkness.

  A searing pain shot through his hand, and his eyes flew open. Luna stood above him, hair a nest of vipers writhing around her head, murderous rage in her eyes. Blood dripped from the dagger she brandished, and he looked down to find the pinky of his left hand severed, the joint bleeding out onto the dirt beside him.

  “This is what it’s like to deny your family!” she shrieked, bringing the blade down onto his ring finger, a slice through his flesh so swift and sharp he barely had time to register the loss. “It’s like losing a part of yourself.”

  He let out a howl, twisted and ugly like the burned-out trunk of a gnarled tree dying in the flames.

  “Please stop,” he panted, dark spots dancing in his vision as blood gushed from his hand.

  Her eyes flashed in the firelight as she brought the blade down again, severing his middle finger from its bed of tissue and bone. Owen l
et out a scream. “You are one of us, Owen. You are a Child of the Earth.”

  His face was a wet, hot mess of tears or sweat—he didn’t know which. All he knew was the torture and the longing, the need to surrender to Luna and his brothers and sisters.

  “You see what you’re doing, Owen.” Luna’s voice was faint, and he sensed that soon he would pass out from loss of blood. When he looked up she was a shadow, a ghost flickering in and out of his vision. “Look at what you’ve lost.”

  She put her hand on his head and forced his eyes to the ground, to where his three lost fingers jumped and wriggled in the dirt.

  “Stop it!” Owen kicked at the sheets tethering his feet to the bed, thrashing his way up from the panting, sweat-soaked nightmare. Pinpricks of heat spiked the three fingers on his left hand. He must have rolled onto them in his sleep, trapping them under his hip and cutting off their circulation.

  He slapped his fingers against his thigh to wake them, waiting for his heartbeat to slow. The sky outside looked like steel wool, and it was cold in his room, so cold that his breath left his mouth in frosty puffs.

  It was late afternoon, far later than he’d meant to sleep, but in a way that was a relief. It meant he didn’t have to wait around, killing time until his trip to the Vein. Patience had never been his strong suit, and he was eager to have a mission for the day, eager to get answers.

  He typed a quick text to Daphne as he waited for his truck to warm up, then rubbed his hands together near the thin stream of heat drifting from the air vents. He’d need to take it to be winterized, he thought—he hadn’t realized how early winters came in Wyoming. And then he remembered, with a pang, that he didn’t have a job anymore, and his savings would be gone by the end of the month. Winterizing would just have to wait.

  Snowflakes started to fall as he drove up to the Vein, drifting from the sky in a lazy ballet. By the time he pulled in, they were starting to blanket the ground. He cut his engine and checked his phone again, but there was no return message from Daphne. Maybe she was busy on the rig, he reasoned. He knew how cranky Dale got when they looked at their phones on the job.