“They found the body of a woman just outside Rome. They’ve connected the murder to several others throughout the northern part of the state.”
“A serial murderer? Working in Rome?”
“Not just Rome,” Raquel clarified, sliding her gloved hands into her coat pockets as if afflicted with a sudden chill. “They’re still checking with the sheriffs in the surrounding counties and the local police departments. The FBI has gotten involved.”
Chris frowned. “Why didn’t I know about this?”
Raquel gave her an are-you-serious? expression. “Honey, you’re a little obsessive. I doubt you’ve looked at much else now that you suspect this Martin Hays guy of the Atlanta kidnappings. If you’d looked at the news out of Rome, you’d have seen references to ‘the Boyfriend.’ That’s what the media is calling the unsub.”
Unsub stood for Unknown Subject. Raquel had schooled her on the lingo a long time ago. “The Boyfriend—ugh.” Chris made a face. “Why?”
“I’m not sure. I haven’t had a chance to see what I can find out. I don’t suppose you want to call Tyler and ask him?”
Chris glanced at Tavey again. “Why don’t you call him?”
Raquel rolled her eyes. “All right, chicken. She won’t hate you, you know, just for talking to the man.”
“Are you going to tell her you called him?” Chris challenged.
Raquel attempted to look indifferent, but after a moment she shrugged. “Probably not.”
Chris snorted righteously and changed the subject. “So, about Martin Hays—” But Tavey approached, marching up the steps to the gazebo.
“All right,” she announced, clapping her hands together, her laptop bag on one shoulder, purse on the other. “Let’s get over to the graveyard and then to the café before we freeze to death.”
Sunday meetings in the graveyard were a tradition. After church, the three of them would walk to the graveyard near the railroad tracks—the forgotten one that disappeared beneath the weeds in summertime—and renew their promise to Summer.
The irony of following church with lunchtime chatter about murderers and child predators didn’t escape Chris, but she figured she and her friends were doing God’s work, though perhaps less conventionally than the women who held food drives and bake sales for the needy.
“So, about the info I sent you on Martin Hays—”
“Chris, wait till we sit down at the restaurant,” Tavey interrupted. “I need to get my laptop out.”
Chris nodded, but kept talking as they walked. “Yeah. I’ll go over it again. Raquel, you think it’s enough for Atlanta PD to follow up?”
Raquel, who walked a careful line between her two strong-willed friends, answered patiently, “It sounds like a start.”
Chris grimaced—that meant Raquel thought it was thin and that she would have to work her ass off to get any detectives to pay attention to it. Most of the detectives who worked with Raquel thought Chris was crazy and that searching for the missing should be a job for the police, but Chris felt compelled to do it, to search, and for as long as she was able, she intended to keep doing it.
For some reason she was even more anxious today. The air seemed charged somehow, more finely drawn, as if the world were waiting for something explosive to happen. The smallest events seemed to have a startling significance.
The walk to the graveyard was only a few blocks, but there was no sidewalk leading to the rusty metal gate at the entrance to the small graveyard and Chris’s feet were damp with dew and freezing by the time they made their way to the tree. Pale gray light cast delicate shadows and the skeletal brown remains of enormous weeds created a susurrus as the wind shivered through them.
They made their way to the old oak, following the same path they always did, joining hands when they reached it.
A moldering wooden cross made from survey stakes and decorated with beads, glitter, and ribbons sat beneath an oak in the back corner, with the name SUMMER HAVEN written in permanent marker, but the ground beneath was empty, had been empty for nearly twenty-seven years. Tavey bowed her head and the three of them prayed—for Summer, wherever she might be; and for each other, to find the strength to keep searching.
They made a picture, gathered beneath a spreading oak in the chilly damp, all lovely, all silently missing their friend. Any of the tourists walking through town might stop at the scene and snap a quick photograph of the three beautiful women in the graveyard. Others might take them for witches, since their town was known for them, but the townies—those who had lived there for years—would simply shrug. Those girls had been gathering every Sunday for years.
“Come on.” Tavey wrapped an arm around each of her friends and tugged them toward the path. “I’m starving.”
The walk to the Alcove—their usual café—was conducted in unusual silence. Chris thought her friends felt the lightning-charged mood of the day as well. The sun, slowly seeping through the clouds, brightened the air, and the redbrick buildings of the town bled with color.
AT THE RESTAURANT they were seated immediately, though the church crowd had gathered.
“Three sweet teas, Charles, but no bread,” Tavey said, ordering for all of them.
“I want bread,” Chris protested.
“We don’t need it,” Tavey argued, as always.
Chris wasn’t even sure she wanted bread, felt certain she would regret eating it, but she made a point of arguing with Tavey whenever possible, since no one else dared.
“Raquel?” Chris attempted the majority vote, but Raquel, well used to such antics, held up a delicate hand in refusal. Raquel was tiny, with a small frame and features finely drawn enough to belong on a Disney princess, with large brown oval eyes, hot chocolate skin, and lush old-fashioned rose lips. She looked perpetually young, and was often mistaken for a teenager—a characteristic that had landed her in Atlanta PD’s Sex Crimes Task Force. She spent most of her day pretending to be a young girl online and writing to sleazy losers who liked to send pictures of their dicks to little girls.
Chris pouted and fiddled with a sugar packet while Tavey opened her laptop and waited for it to power up. She used it to record the meeting minutes. Because their organization was a nonprofit, all board meetings had to be recorded. Chris had brought her iPad and a keypad, but Tavey couldn’t handle waiting while someone else typed. Hello, control freak.
The sun, finally completely freed from the bank of clouds, streamed in through the restaurant windows and sparkled on a small crystal bud vase holding three mums, one red, one purple, one orange. They danced in the light, seeming to shiver and sparkle. Chris blinked, wondering if perhaps she needed to start getting more than three hours of sleep.
“Chris,” Tavey prompted, one of her authoritative eyebrows pulled up and fixed in an I’m-waiting-darling expression, which held both affection and exasperation. Tavey often wore that expression in Chris’s company.
“What?”
“You said you found something on the missing girls. Will we need the dogs?”
An image flashed through Chris’s mind, of Tavey in a lip lock with Tyler Downs, overlayed with an image of Tavey’s best search dog, Dixie, sniffing around an underground basement.
“Ahh . . .” She shook off the vision—more sleep was definitely in order; Tavey and Tyler hated each other. “I don’t know yet. I just have a name. Probably the cops don’t need to know exactly how I got it.”
“Hmm . . .” Tavey’s lips pursed together. In an earlier time, Tavey would have been called “handsome.” She had strong, bold features, a high forehead, a straight nose, and a too-small mouth, but she dressed stylishly and carried herself like the captain of a ship. Her hair, smooth and chestnut-brown, was often pulled back in a braid or worn in an old-fashioned twist. She was wearing a pin on her apple-green sweater; it featured a poodle wearing a skirt; its eyes were real emeralds. It had belong
ed to Tavey’s grandmother and had been a longtime favorite, but more significantly, it was the pin she’d been wearing when Summer had gone missing.
“Before I forget,” Raquel interrupted, before Tavey could grill Chris further about her information, “I wanted to tell you that I talked to Old Ninny—she says that our love lives are about to take a turn for the better.”
“This is a business discussion . . . and she always says that,” Tavey pointed out—always practical. Old Ninny was the psychic who worked in the witch shop. She told fortunes and occasionally gave manicures, but only to people she liked. Raquel was one of her favorite clients.
Raquel waved a jeweled hand—she loved dressing up on Sundays. “But this time she was more specific—she said that Chris would meet a handsome man first.”
Tavey and Raquel fastened curious gazes on Chris, but she just grimaced doubtfully. “Oh, yeah, where? Yoga class? I have two choices: college kids or old men.”
“Well, if you left your apartment occasionally, or bought a bigger bed, maybe your life would change for the better,” Tavey pointed out.
Chris rolled her eyes. “Yeah, you have a hundred bedrooms and sleep with three beagles, Octavia.” Chris deliberately pronounced every syllable of Tavey’s much-loathed proper name.
Tavey looked like she wanted to get huffy about that one, but then her sense of humor, which wasn’t as lacking as Chris sometimes intimated, got the better of her. “That’s true. At least your computers don’t snore, I suppose.”
“They don’t fart, either,” Chris felt compelled to point out, but she did feel a small ache somewhere in her chest, as if someone were tugging, trying to get her attention.
4
A DISCUSSION OF STRINGS
Stringman12: Most people don’t even see them, but they’re there. They look different for everyone, all unique in color, in shape, in texture, but only certain people see them—only the special ones—and even fewer can wear them like the Creator and I.
Merrygo: Okay, steal from the Japanese mythology much? By the way, that’s only for your true love.
Stringman12: They are not. You don’t see them. You don’t know. There’s a girl in the woods who can take the strings.
BigBangNerd: Who’s the creator? God?
Stringman12: No, my Creator. She makes me live. Through her I have taken the strings that I wanted.
FateFriend101: Clearly, the name of the city, Fate, has spawned some imaginative reinventions of Greek myths, but though references to “string-makers” have occurred throughout the town’s history, it’s commonly accepted that it’s a term used to describe a family named Dobra, who were famous for making strings for fiddles and other instruments.
Stringman12: You’re wrong. I’ve seen . . . touched strings. I’ve taken them from so many. I gained more today—taken from a girl with rainbow hair.
Merrygo: hello crazy
ThreeHands: You’ve taken them? How?
Stringman12: Stupid. With a knife.
Joe closed his browser in disgust. He should have known better than to talk about the strings. He’d been so excited when he’d found the website referring to string-makers in the histories of Fate. He’d thought it was a sign. His Creator was here; the string-makers were here. Surely this was the place where he was meant to be, but no, the people who contributed to the so-called Mysteries of Fate blog were as ignorant of strings as everyone else.
Joe didn’t know when he’d first started seeing them. He thought—maybe—it had started after the accident. He’d seen them on the nurses in the hospital. At first he’d thought he was hallucinating; the doctors had, too, and had given him drugs that made his tongue feel like it was covered in fur.
He’d learned to ignore them. He’d tried to go back to doing the things he used to do, like playing baseball and going to church, but it was hard, seeing the strings emerging from people, crossing, connecting together. His mother had told him that most people couldn’t see them and that he shouldn’t talk about them. The drugs didn’t help make them go away, but to make his mother happy he’d stopped mentioning them, and he tried not to stare when he went out in public, but it was hard; they were everywhere.
Almost everyone had them—some people had many of all different colors, strings dangling from heart and head, fingers and toes, strings that hung loose and went taught, strings that seemed frayed or gathered. Others had very few. Some strings were stitched together, some braided, some looked melted and burned. He liked studying them, though it made people think he was strange, think that he had some kind of problem. His father had certainly thought he had a problem.
“Stupid piece of shit,” the man would shout when he came home. “Why’s he fucking staring at me like that?”
Luckily for his mother, whose strings were sickly gray and mottled, his father was rarely home. He installed cable equipment and satellite dishes, working as a contractor for companies all throughout north Georgia, Tennessee, and Alabama. When he was home, he had two modes: silent and thoughtful, or drunk and loud. Silent was worse. Silent meant unpredictable.
His father’s strings were thick and muscled like snakes; they wrapped around Joe’s mother’s wrists and twisted. He hurt her; he hurt her with her love for him. Joe watched, uncertain, aware that he should love his mother—that he once loved his mother—but he couldn’t feel it, not as he did before the accident. Joe thought maybe his strings were broken, that he needed new ones.
One day at school he noticed that the boy who liked to beat him up, the tall boy on the football team, whose strings were mostly egg-yolk-yellow, had one bright red string connecting his wrist to that of his best friend, a boy named Cole.
“Are you two in love?” Joe had asked, and the fist had smashed his face, breaking his nose. He didn’t remember much else, only that he’d woken up in the hospital again, this time with a broken arm and two broken ribs. He didn’t have to lie this time when the social worker asked what had happened.
After that, his mother had encouraged him to stay inside; she’d bring him books at first, and then a computer. He didn’t remember how old he’d been, old enough to drive, he remembered, though he rarely drove anywhere during the day, just at night, when there were fewer people around, especially where he lived. He’d loved using the computer, reaching out to people from the safety of his room; he’d stay up all night if he could, just watching and reading. He hadn’t found anyone else who could see the strings, not as he explained them, but he liked talking to people online.
When his mother died, his father told him he had to work, and had started taking him along every morning to help install cable lines. His father was a contractor; they would drive in a big white van with no windows in the back, all over the north part of the state and into Tennessee. Joe would read about natural disasters while his father talked about banks, about niggers, about goddamn Obama, and whores. His father’s favorite topic was whores, though, as far as Joe could tell, his father thought all women were whores.
Sometimes his father would pick up whores on the road. Sometimes he would have Joe drive while he did things to them. Joe thought it was interesting that most of these girls didn’t have many strings, sometimes just one or two; most were gray and thin like his mother’s, but some were sickly yellow or the color of a bruise. Until the last girl. She’d had long hair, but all he really remembered were the strings she’d been wearing. Wearing. They weren’t her strings; many of them were black, but there were other colors and textures, strings that burned with a strange blue light, strings that screamed, strings that were light shining on a blade. She’d worn them, these strings of others, knotted like the bracelets girls wore on their wrists.
When his father had pulled over to the side of the road to pick her up, Joe had been in the passenger seat of the van. His father had pulled over and told Joe to get in the back.
“Hey,” the girl greeted his father as sh
e yanked open the door to the van. Her voice, cheerful and confident, was very different from those of the other girls his father called whores. They’d been wary, afraid, desperate—this one was fearless, even eager. She’d climbed into the passenger seat when his father stopped, but instead of settling into the seat, she’d immediately leaned over and stabbed his father, quick as a thought, directly in the heart with a long, ancient-looking knife. His father shuddered and gasped, his mouth opening comically, his wide eyes meeting Joe’s in the mirror. Joe watched him die and felt almost nothing. There was a tiny shred of relief, but even that was far away and floating before Joe processed it.
The girl watched his father, her head tilted curiously, like a bird examining a particularly choice worm, and when he gasped his last breath, she plucked several long black strings from his father’s heart. She braided them into her hair, glancing briefly back at Joe and smiling, and then she’d jumped out of the van and left, as suddenly as she’d come, running away into the woods, into the mountains, running faster than anyone he’d ever seen, bounding like a doe through the trees.
He’d stayed for several minutes after the girl left, watching the trees to see if she’d return, but after several minutes the trees seemed to be pressing in on the windows of the van, creeping closer and closer.
He’d known that he couldn’t leave the van along the road and that he would have to do something about his father’s body, so he drove to the place that his father drove to sometimes, an abandoned mill deep in the forest, where an old pond that had been used by the mill was closed off because of pollution. It was deep enough to hide the collection of bodies his father had dropped there over the years. He’d weighted his father down and let him sink.
And then the thought: What to do now? He didn’t know, so he’d driven for a while and then parked at a McDonald’s. He’d used the money he’d found in his dad’s wallet to buy a Coke and a cheeseburger from a girl with a fat pink string that was shiny like satin. He’d wanted to take it and rub his face on it, but he knew that he shouldn’t, so he took his food to the van and ate there.
Strings of Fate (Mistresses of Fate) Page 2
