by Casey Dunn
Captain finished a conversation with the head of the dive team and made his way toward Martin, his hands shoved in his pockets and a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth.
“Don’t be disappointed if they don’t find Michael,” Captain said.
Martin spun his phone in his hand. He knew he should be celebrating. Hazel and Ama would both spend tonight in their own beds. But he also doubted either one would sleep, that either one would feel completely free of Michael Walton until he was the one locked in a cage—or a coffin.
Martin’s phone buzzed with an incoming call, and Ama’s name flashed on the screen.
“Speak of the devil,” he muttered to himself. Captain raised an eyebrow.
“Hey,” Martin said into the phone.
“Have they found him yet?” she asked. Martin could practically feel her glaring.
“They just started,” he answered.
She was silent on the other end for two seconds. Three. “There’s a walking stick he carried. It has piano keys carved down the side.”
“I know the one. We found it. It’s bagged and tagged in evidence. GBI is taking over the case,” he added.
“Get it back,” she said.
“The case or the stick?” Martin asked, and pressed his fingers against his throbbing forehead.
“The stick.”
“You know I can’t do that,” Martin responded quietly.
“I need it, Martin,” she said, her voice breaking.
“You don’t want that in your house, Ama. God knows what he’s done with it.”
“If you don’t find him, that stick will be the best way to tell if he’s found me again,” she explained.
“How do you figure?”
“If he sneaks into my house or my office and the stick is there, he would have to take it, Martin. And if it’s gone, I’ll know he’s back.”
“Ama, we’ll find him,” Martin said.
“You don’t know Michael like I do,” Ama whispered, and hung up.
Martin stared at the ground, his hands squeezed into fists and planted on his sides. He needed to sleep for a week. He needed to drink or eat something besides coffee. He needed a damn body.
“You shouldn’t make promises you can’t keep,” Captain advised, regarding him from his peripheral vision. “I’m not saying Michael isn’t down there. With how many bone fragments we found in that bunker, I’d bet my fishing boat there’s at least one body in this river somewhere. Divers are just going to have a tough time finding it.”
Martin realized Captain was attempting to console him. “Why’s that?” he asked.
“The river is about thirty-five feet deep here, but the floor has a crevasse vein cut in it about four feet across at its widest points, and only the devil himself knows how deep that goes. They’ll do what they can, but it’s going to be slow going.” Captain dropped his cigarette to the damp earth and stomped it out with the toe of his shoe.
Martin leaned against a tree and watched for nearly an hour as divers surfaced, taking breaks or changing gear, and then sunk back down into the dark water. Each time they surfaced with no signal to the retrieval boat, the squeeze of pressure clenched harder. He tried to slow his mind, to calm his nerves, to silence the craving for a hit roaring in his blood. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and dialed Stacy’s number. She picked up on the second ring.
“What’s wrong?” she asked upon answering.
Martin relayed the events of the past forty-eight hours and the revelation about Jonathon Walks and Michael Walton. “We had him cornered on a riverbank. We had him, and he jumped,” Martin explained, curtaining his mouth with his hand. “They’re searching the water now.”
“You found the girl. Isn’t that the most important part?”
“Ama found her,” Martin admitted, and in his mind, he made the commitment to bring her that damn stick no matter who he pissed off to do it.
“You know, Marty, I know this is a rough day, but you sound… you sound like yourself. I think the move has been good for you.”
“I wanted a fix,” he confessed.
“You called me instead,” she reasoned. “Call me back if you need to.”
“I will,” Martin answered. A faint smile crossed his face. “I love you,” he said, and immediately wished he hadn’t.
“I know you do,” she answered quietly, and the line went dead.
Martin pocketed his phone and watched a diver’s bubbles rise, breaking the surface of the water. His craving was temporarily alleviated, but his heart was heavy as a stone. All he’d done in the last year was let people down: his ex and Toni, now Eddie, Hazel, and Ama. He needed to move his legs and clear his head, the pressure of this truth too thick to breathe through while standing still. Maybe he’d go buy a Sunday copy of the AJC and amuse himself with the fact that news of Ama’s kamikaze stunt had no doubt bumped Esther Kim’s article off the front page. He took one last glance at the water in spite of himself. The diver who’d just emerged pulled out his mouthpiece and waved.
“We got something!”
* * *
Martin stared down at the gray, lifeless faces of Michael and Janie Walton as a GBI forensic tech took photograph after photograph of their bodies. He zeroed in on Michael’s neck, where a silver cord looped in a snare around his throat, then ran straight for about a foot before coiling around Janie’s wrist, joining them together. Her fingers strangled the metal even in death. The coroner mentioned that it was too early to declare who had drowned who, but Martin recalled the stony resolve on Janie’s face during their drive to the factory, how she could smell the river, the way she had disappeared into the woods.
Michael’s shirt had a gaping hole, revealing a gunshot wound that exited to the left of his belly button, blood washed clean from the wound and the fabric from a night spent in frigid, moving water. When Martin saw Toni’s trademark garnet ring bagged in the evidence collected in the initial sweep of Michael’s underground bunker, he’d held it up to the sun, watched the light wink off the stone, wanting to believe Toni knew, wherever her soul was, that he’d never stopped looking, never stopped trying to find who killed her. He’d been unwittingly hunting this man for a year, and even when he knew his name, he never knew his face. He studied Michael now, wondering if there could’ve been any telltale sign Martin could’ve spotted had he crossed paths with him when Michael was alive.
“I didn’t see the male at first,” one of the divers said to Martin. “The female’s body had settled across the crevasse and was lodged half under a rock. His body had dropped inside the crack, but the wire kept him from sliding all the way down.”
“Stroke of luck,” Martin managed to say, leaning back against the lip of the boat as the tech motioned for the coroner to zip the body bags. He watched Michael’s profile vanish beneath the black canvas and nearly asked them to reopen it just so he could make sure Michael hadn’t disappeared.
They followed the coroner off the boat and to the access road, where the bodies were loaded into the back of a van. Two uniformed personnel slammed the doors shut, and Captain clamped a hand on Martin’s shoulder.
“Martin, remember this feeling. Hold on to it like hell. This is over for the Stevenses and for Ama, but there will always be a next one for you.”
“So I’m not fired?” Martin asked, only partially joking.
“No. We’ve got a shelf full of cold cases with your name on it, when you’re ready. There will be an office door with your name on it, too.”
“Tomorrow,” Martin answered. “This is the kind of news I want to deliver in person.”
He headed for his car, his mind already inside Eddie and Hazel’s home, no longer silent, no longer plagued with empty places where Hazel should be.
HAZEL Chapter 88 | May 3, 2007 | Tarson, Georgia
DAD PULLS THE VAN INTO the lot at the Tarson Woods trailhead. It’s empty except for Ama. She’s leaning against a silver car, her arms folded across her chest, her eyes all shadows
. My palms break out in a clammy sweat, and my throat threatens to draw shut.
“You called Ama?” I manage to ask.
Dad nods. “You two fought your way out of those woods together. If you really got it in your mind to go back in there, I thought she might be able to help see you through,” he says. “But we don’t have to go one step on that path, Hazel. We can turn around right now and you don’t ever have to come back here.”
“I do,” I whisper. I’m leaving Tarson for Savannah College of Art and Design come August, and if I don’t face these woods, I am afraid I’ll bring them with me no matter how far I go. And I’ve tried. Oh, I have tried. Twice now, I’ve made it as far as where the concrete gives way to earth, but I shook with such a force, blown back from it as if by a rogue gust of wind only I could feel, and both times I turned, head down, and somehow made it back to the van on wobbling legs.
“Michael’s not out there, Hazel,” Dad says.
I nod.
We climb out of the car. Ama strides toward us. Even though the spring afternoon is warm and the air still, I swear I see her shiver.
“Thank you for coming,” Dad says to her.
“Thanks for calling,” she replies. “This is something I need to face, too.”
“You haven’t been back here?” I ask.
“Fuck no.”
She stares into the woods, and I am mystified by this. Ama Chaplin, the angel in a white dress who came through Michael’s door and would see it stand open long enough to slide me through, is rocked back on her heels, goose bumps covering her arms, her body stiff as if she is bracing against the same frigid wind I feel every time my mind travels this path, every time I breathe air that tastes like it tumbled across the surface of Cold River on its way to me.
“Are you ready?” she asks.
“No,” I say. We shuffle toward the path anyway, side by side, my dad a few steps behind.
Ama stops where the concrete turns to dirt. I glance at her face. She’s glaring up the trail.
“I can go first,” my father says.
“We got this,” Ama says. My legs are lead, my feet cement blocks, and it is everything I can do to not turn around.
“I need you to go first,” I whisper.
“You don’t,” she says. We stand in silence. I can feel Dad shifting, wanting to whisk me back to the car, back to our home, to cook dinner and put on my favorite movie and offer to add a blanket or take one away, making sure I am neither too warm nor too cold at fifteen-minute intervals.
“Without you, I would still be out there,” I whisper. This truth has haunted me, as present as a shadow in every room.
“Maybe,” she says. “Without you, I would still be out there.” She looks at me. “But we’re not out there. And those are not Michael’s woods. This is not Michael’s trail. We were not Michael’s fate, and he was not ours. That’s not how it works. Only one thing had to go right for Michael to take us—he had to not get caught. About nine million things had to go right for us to survive him. So if there is such thing as Fate, you tell me whose side Fate was on.”
“So why haven’t you come back here?” I ask.
“Because this is still the last place on earth I’d choose to be.”
I nearly smile. I keep my eyes on her taut face, witnessing her blatant reluctance somehow making it easier to define my own, and I step with one foot onto the dirt.
It is only dirt.
Not quicksand or a trapdoor. Not the center of a snare or the trigger point of a landmine.
“How far do you want to go?” she asks.
“I want to make it one step past the place where Michael took me. One step.”
“Okay,” she says. “We’ll follow you.”
We enter the woods. The trees seem taller, the air still. Even from this distance I swear I can hear the river. I breathe out slow and count as I’ve been taught to do when my pulse rockets.
Dad’s uneven strides are a comfort in my ear. I know the sound like I know my own hands. Ama treads so lightly I’m not convinced she’s there until I peek over my shoulder to see her. Her stare is fixed beyond me, and her lips are pressed into a line.
The trail turns on a series of switchbacks climbing the first big hill. Sweat beads on my hairline. The exertion feels good, and every few seconds I realize I’m just thinking about my breathing, the trail, my pace, and I am the girl who could run this six-mile hike in under fifty minutes, not reduced to the headline of the girl who survived a year with Michael Jeffery Walton. Then I see the scars on my swinging arms and I am back in the bunker, cold and hungry and terrified and silent. That girl still lives inside me, still wakes up gasping for breath when dreams of black water haunt my sleep.
We reach the bend in the path, and I remember seeing Michael come through the trees and start the other way down the path. My legs demand to move faster, and I start running down the hill. Ama keeps pace, stride for stride. My dad’s footfalls come heavy and quick. The trees blur, the dirt feels like a wet sandbank under my shoes, and each breath feels like it’s made of shards of glass. My lungs could be on that wall, my vocal cords strung across them. I run harder, legs and arms burning, air whipping past me.
I remember exactly which two trees we had stopped beside when Michael pretended to see a turtle in the leaves. I’d bent down for a better look, then felt a blow on the back of my head, a crunch reverberating in my skull, and when I woke, I would not see the sun again for a year.
I see the two trees now, unchanged, still leaning away from each other in a haphazard V. I slow to a stop in front of them and stare up at the sky. Light winks down through the canopy of the forest. Ama stops beside me. Dad catches up, one arm swinging in front of him, the other hand pressed into his side.
“What happened to Michael’s walking stick?” I ask as my breathing slows.
Ama lets out an uncharacteristic bark of laughter.
“What’s so funny?”
“That damn stick.” She walks in a circle, her chin tilted skyward, her hands on her hips. “I asked Martin for it before we knew Michael was dead. Once his body was found, I fantasized about all the ways I could get rid of it—burn it, bury it, throw it in the river. But they all seemed too… meaningful.”
“So what did you do?”
“Put it out with the trash,” she answers. “Michael doesn’t get one minute more of my life.”
I draw a line in the dirt with my toe, nodding. “This is where Michael took me.” Standing here, I understand why. It’s mostly downhill from here to the bunker, for anyone willing to hike off the trail, and not many people come out this far. I step over the line with both feet.
“Okay,” I say. I’m not exactly sure what I’m feeling, but it’s a stirring of something, or maybe it’s the stirring of nothing at all, but I find myself still glad to feel it.
“Okay?” Dad holds himself up with his hands on his knees, one eye open, sweat pouring down his face, dripping from his chin.
“Let’s go home.”
Ama glances up the trail. “My line in the sand is a little farther from here,” she says. “And actually, I think I want to finish this run one last time.”
“Do you want company?” I ask. I feel Dad’s stare on my cheek.
“No.” She slides her Walkman along her waistband and pulls earbuds out of her jacket pocket. “You got me this far,” she says. “I think I can go the rest of the way on my own.” Then she jogs down the next hill at a relaxed pace and disappears around a bend.
Dad and I walk back to the car.
“Should we wait for Ama?” Dad asks.
“No.” I stare into the trees. “She’ll be okay,” I say.
We pull out of the lot. Dad glances at me every few seconds. I roll down my window and stick my hand out, feeling it slice through the air. Then I turn the knob for the stereo. A song comes through the speakers. I watch my fingers ride the wind, feel the music as it fills the car, imagine Ama running up the trail, reclaiming it stride by stride.
The singer reaches the chorus, one I know by heart. I close my eyes, and I hum along.
Acknowledgments
I’VE OFTEN HEARD THAT AS an author I should write what I know. In the case of this story, I (thankfully) first had a lot to learn. Thank you Katelyn DeRogatis and Jason Lovell for answering all my questions, no matter how minor the details or unnerving the subject matter. Thank you to my husband for helping me bust through the walls of the dead ends I’d written myself into. You’re better at it than you think. To all three of you: I am grateful not only for all of your expertise but also for your support. Another person’s curiosity is like a breath of pure oxygen on an open flame, and when that fire becomes too small to cast warmth, people like you are who keep it burning long enough to catch the next piece of kindling.
Thank you to Christina Kaye for making me believe the draft I sent you could really be something, for teaching me and guiding me, and for shining your light every step of the way. To Shayne Leighton, a creative force of nature, who is, by turns, both the storm and the captain of the ship, and the kindest person I know.
My deepest gratitude to a brilliant editor, Katie McGuire, for your vision, your encouragement, and your love of these characters. And to an extraordinary agent, Rosie Jonker, who has quite literally changed my life and become a champion of my dream. It feels like we’re nearing a finish line as I type this, and in a way we are, but I realize and I hope—desperately hope—that this is also just the beginning.
About the Author
CASEY DUNN was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, but now lives on a horse farm in Southern Oregon with her husband and three children. As Jadie Jones, she’s the author of the Hightower Trilogy. Silence on Cold River is her first thriller.
