I find what I came for resting on the bottom shelf. Dakota’s freshman yearbook. And I start to hurry, feeling newly energized.
I slide it out, blow a thin layer of dust from its leather cover, and fling it open, flipping through the Bs like a woman possessed.
Cara Banks.
Joey Bates.
Benjamin Beatty.
Michaela Bishop.
Zoey Blackwood.
Graham Broomfield.
My heart quickens. No Blackburns. I knew it. But it’s a hollow victory. Because Cole’s voice is already in my head, admonishing me. What does that prove? You’re paranoid, Mol. You’re delusional. He’s probably not too far off the mark. But paranoia seems completely reasonable to me now. Same for soul-splitting grief. Murderous rage.
Satisfied with my discovery, I tuck the yearbook back in its place and walk toward Dakota’s bed, preparing to commence my usual routine. The pillow-sniffing. The picture-ogling. The exact opposite of moving on.
But I stop—I freeze—when I spot Gus snuffing at the floor.
“Leave it,” I say, my voice firm. Hard as a slap to his nose. He looks up at me and whines before he backs away reluctantly.
I drop to one knee and examine the business card that’s fallen there. WHITETAILS AND WHOPPERS: GUN, BAIT, AND TACKLE SHOP. ALLENDALE, CALIFORNIA. The familiar logo, a rainbow trout with antlers, had always made me laugh.
But now, I stand up fast and stagger back from it. It’s been so long since I thought of that place. Longer still since I was seven years old, gazing up at that strange fish and my father, a giant towering beside me.
I poke at the card with my foot like it might bite and take another look. Sure enough. It’s what I thought. The idea of Dakota touching it, slipping it inside her yearbook, unnerves me more than scythe-wielding DEATH on his creepy white horse.
I toss it into her desk drawer and slam it shut so quickly Gus bolts. And I’m right behind him.
Breathing hard, I press my back against the wall opposite the doorway. The drawer stays shut, but I know the past is alive inside it.
It’s unburied now. And it may as well be a hand clawing up from its shallow grave to seize me by the throat.
Chapter
Five
As soon as it’s light out, I walk down the path to the guesthouse Cole had converted into an office for me. Because after I’d gotten the axe from Napa State, I couldn’t do it anymore. It being much of anything. Getting dressed. Driving. Sitting in the mind-numbing funeral procession of traffic with nothing to do but think (before I discovered the magic of heavy metal). I didn’t tell Cole I couldn’t be a therapist either. Not even here. Steps away from my front door. But after the office had been empty for months, he got the idea.
My skin hums with that early morning buzz as I unlock the door and cross the threshold. That chronic-sleep-deprivation-two-shots-of-espresso-empty-stomach high. And it hits me like usual. The smell of paint and new carpet and overpriced furniture. Like the regal leather sofa in the corner that regards me with contempt. It understands why Cole left me. You didn’t even try, it says.
I make my way to the unfinished room in the back—my real office—empty save for the one unopened box I’d brought from Napa State and the two-thousand-dollar ergonomic chair Cole had insisted on. I’d wheeled it in from the office the day after he’d split. The day after he’d found me here at 2 a.m., muttering to myself like one of my patients.
I can’t sleep anyway, I’d said. As if that explained it.
There’s not much space left on my wall of suspects, but I find room at the periphery between photos of Tyler—Dakota’s jock ex-boyfriend—and Cole. As cruel as it had felt to post it there, to watch Cole’s eyes well when he’d sighted it, then harden to ice, I had my reasons. Never mind that the police had ruled us both out. I know better than anyone. The cops get it wrong sometimes. Way wrong.
I tack up the note I’d scrawled early this morning—Boyd Blackburn, Grieving Parents Group. Says his sister knew Dakota from AP English—along with the public records report I’d uncovered online, after forking out thirty-five bucks. Turns out Boyd is likely a thirty-two-year-old student at ITT Tech who lives in Cuttings Wharf with a fifty-eight-year-old woman named Martha. His mother, I’m guessing. According to Facebook, he has exactly twenty-three friends—none female, with the exception of the aforementioned Martha—and is employed part-time at Reptiles ‘R’ Us. Photo evidence indicates he’d attended Comic-Con 2014 dressed in full Stormtrooper regalia. Which makes him awkward and lonely and, therefore, a prime suspect. I never said my methods were logical.
I sigh and plop down into the gel seat that’s supposed to keep my butt extra comfy while I ponder which of these assholes killed my daughter. But I can’t look away from the Shadow Man. Because most of the wall is taken up with him. Whoever he is.
A few months back, I’d even paid off an administrator at Napa State to find me a copy of the 1989 psychological profile created for the FBI by our former chief psychologist. It told me Shadow Man was a white male between the ages of twenty-five to forty. Possibly former military or police. With unbridled rage toward women that he probably managed to conceal well in his day-to-day life. So, in other words, any number of men. What a waste of five hundred dollars.
With a firm push, my chair rolls across the smooth hardwood and stops with a thump against the wall. I reach up and snag the last article, published eight months ago in The Napa Valley Register. Eight long months. Cole had been gone for twelve. Life marches on for everyone but me. The caught fish, skinned and mounted, glass eyes affixed in dry sockets. With nowhere to go and nothing to do but read the same speculative bullshit the detectives expected would satisfy me.
The Shadow Man Returns After Twenty Years, Claims Another Victim
In a statement to the media on Friday, the Napa County Sheriff’s Department, accompanied by agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, confirmed long-standing speculation that the 2016 unsolved murder of fifteen-year-old Dakota Roark is being investigated as the work of the Shadow Man, the prolific serial killer who terrorized the Napa Valley throughout the better part of two decades. Authorities had speculated that the Shadow Man, who has been linked to the murders of sixteen young Caucasian women between 1976 and 1996, was deceased or incarcerated due to his lengthy cooling-off period. Other experts posited he may have changed his patterns, targeting victims like runaways or prostitutes, victims who would not be missed.
Peter Jacoby, Chief Psychologist at Napa State Hospital, which houses the criminally insane, said, “It’s unusual to see a cooling-off period of this length, but it’s not unheard of. For example, Dennis Rader, known as BTK (Bind, Torture, Kill), committed ten murders during a span of approximately thirty years. Joseph DeAngelo, the Golden State Killer, was arrested more than thirty years after his last known murder. We don’t yet fully understand this peculiar phenomenon, and it certainly flies in the face of what we do know about most serial killers. They are often compulsively driven to kill and to kill again.”
Investigators cited key similarities between the Shadow Man’s early crimes and the Roark murder, including the location of the young girl’s body, which was discovered in the same forested area of Lake Berryessa as Susanna Donnelly, the Shadow Man’s first known victim. All of Shadow Man’s victims disappeared from Napa or Solano Counties, and many of the bodies were recovered in varying states of decay near Lake Berryessa. Autopsy results indicated victims’ bodies, including Roark’s, had been burned following death. Detectives declined to comment on additional similarities due to the sensitive nature of the ongoing investigation.
I stab the pushpin back through the widening hole at the top of the newspaper clipping—take that, Dr. Jackass—and tack it back to the wall. Peter Jacoby had walked me off Napa’s grounds himself and sent me on my way with a patronizing I hope you get the help you need, Mollie, his swea
ty little hand resting on my arm like a warning or an invitation. Because I’d tried everything to feel alive again. Even self-destruction. Screwing Peter in his office or in the staff dormitory where he’d stayed when he was on call. Of course, Cole had other words for it when I’d confessed to him. Most of the four-letter variety. As if he had the right.
I stare at my suspect wall until the ink blurs. Until the whole damn thing is a shadow man. Luciana’s voice teases me, mocks me: Don’t you think you’re due for a change?
My face flushes, and I start to sweat. Lungs clamp shut. Brain goes on lockdown. Everything stops but my heart, which scampers on without the rest of me to destinations unknown.
Out. I need out.
I lumber past the disdainful sofa and across the haughty wool rug with its pretentious hand stitching. And finally, through the front door and into the glorious air, which I suck up unapologetically.
I’m still taking it in like a starving child, too fast to savor it, when I hear the growl of a motor up the drive. The separate drive Cole had graveled for me and marked with a fancy sign pronouncing me ROARK PSYCHOLOGY SERVICES. The drive that’s never been traveled by me or anyone else. Except maybe a fox or two.
Too weak to move, I sit on the front step and wait for whoever it is to turn around.
But now I’m nose to nose with a brown Cadillac and its old-man driver. Beneath his cowboy hat, his face is more stricken than mine. Gray and swollen, the same as my mother’s at the very end. He pushes the door open, and his snakeskin boots meet the ground. A strange thought passes through my head like a cloud over the sun. He probably skinned that rattler himself.
“Are you lost?” I ask him, hearing myself from a million miles away. I sound almost normal.
“Don’t think so, Doc,” he says, leaning against the door to stand. “But I don’t feel so good. I haven’t driven in a while. Usually, I take that Senior Shuttle.”
He staggers toward me, a tired wind-up cowboy. One step, then two. Then one more. He reaches out a shaky hand before he quits entirely, bends over, and upchucks right there on Cole’s quarry stones.
I should help the old guy. Make sure he’s okay. But I can’t stop looking at the hood of the Cadillac. The ornament there. The red-and-yellow crest between two crescent halves of a wreath.
Because when you squint it’s not a wreath anymore. It’s a sickle.
Chapter
Six
The old man’s black Stetson sits on one side of the leather sofa, resting peacefully as a cat. On the other side, the old man himself. He downs a gulp from the cup of water I’d retrieved for him, wiping his mouth on his shirt sleeve. Every time he moves the smell of vomit and chew tobacco wafts my way. I have no doubt the sofa doesn’t approve. So I stand in the doorway, just beyond the reach of its judgmental gaze.
“Better?” I ask, hoping he’ll get to talking. Get to telling me what the hell he’s doing here. And get to leaving. Soon.
He grunts and runs a hand over his liver-spotted head, which gleams under the lamp light like the surface of the moon. With only a wisp of white hair to cover it.
“Are you sure there’s no one I can call for you?” He’d already blatantly refused an ambulance. “The Senior Shuttle, maybe?”
He straightens up and pins me in place with his rheumy blue eyes. Underneath that filmy wet is something sharp. Something that bites. It darts near the surface, then disappears again. “You’re Mollie Roark, ain’t that right?”
I nod. Unfortunately, I have to claim her.
“Then I’m exactly where I need to be.” And I believe him, even if it makes no sense. Even if his certainty discomfits. Even if my stomach flip-flops like a fish out of water when he smiles, revealing a dilapidated fence of stained and broken teeth.
“I’m afraid there might be a misunderstanding. I’m not seeing patients right now, Mister . . .” I flounder, realizing I haven’t even asked his name, partly hoping I wouldn’t need to.
“Wendall Grady,” he pronounces himself, extending his hand.
I don’t particularly want to touch him—not after he’s barfed up his breakfast all over my drive—but I step forward and surrender to those long fingers, let them swallow mine. If he’s contagious, I’m done for anyway.
“Pleased to meet you, Doctor Roark. And I hope you might kindly reconsider. I’m a special case.”
“I’m sure you are.” Aren’t they all? “But I haven’t practiced therapy since—” How long has it been?
“Since you lost your little girl.” Not a question. But a statement of fact. I recoil from it. From him. From the naked truth of words I hadn’t planned to say. And the shameless way he’d said them. “I am aware of your situation. In fact, that’s why I’ve come. I think you can help me.”
I lean against the doorframe so he can’t see my legs wobble. Am I dreaming? This old man can’t be real. He’s just a figment. A puff of last night’s marijuana smoke. An insomniac’s hallucination. I squeeze my eyes shut and open them again, but he doesn’t disappear. He leans back, comfortable now, and spreads his gangly arm across the sofa’s back, revealing a smattering of scabs on his crepe-paper skin. I can practically feel the sofa shrug him off, disgusted.
“Why me?” Two words that seem to sum the last few years perfectly. Even though I know it’s not personal. I’m just another ball of atoms bouncing around in the universe. Some bouncing balls crash through beach waves. Others end up flat as a pancake under the tire of a big rig.
“Who else but you?”
“I don’t understand.”
He puts those eyes on me again, and I try not to squirm under their weight. “Stage two non-small cell lung cancer. That’s the name of the devil sent to end me. And I’ve got a few heavy stones to push off my chest before I go. I was hoping you might help me lift them.”
In my head, the stones are craggy and moss covered, nearly impossible to move, like the ones around Lake Berryessa. The ones I thought of as gravestones scattered in the clearing where they’d found her. His breastbone would snap like a cracker beneath them.
I frown and swallow hard, uncertain how to let him down easy. I’m not strong enough to carry anybody else’s burdens anymore. I can barely manage my own.
“Don’t go feelin’ sorry for me now. Some sorta devil comes for all of us eventually. I reckon you should know that. Sometimes he’s one of a goddamn million cells, just multiplying faster than a rabbit in heat. And sometimes he’s a man, slippery as a shadow. Either way, I think we’ll find some common ground. Help an old man out, won’t you?”
As he struggles to his feet, he reaches for his Stetson, sets it atop his head, and nods at me like a haggard John Wayne. With a hitch in his step, the wind-up cowboy comes to life again and makes his way around the sofa.
I realize I’ve left the door to the room with the suspect wall gaping, but his eyes gobble it all up before I can rush to slam it shut. I mutter an apology, my breath unreasonably loud like static in my head.
“I’ll swing by next week. Same time, same place. If you’re not here, I’ll just mosey on my way.”
I follow him to the front door. He opens it and pauses there. Just beyond the threshold, I see the Cadillac, those dueling sickles.
“Maybe I can help you too, Doctor Roark.”
I want to ask him what he means, how he found me, and how he knows about Dakota, but all I manage is a polite murmur.
“I’ll have to think about it,” I say, finally. But I already know if and when Wendall Grady comes back, I’ll let him in.
****
Wide-eyed, Luciana shovels in the last bite of a fish taco and swivels on the barstool to face me, dabbing at a drip of sour cream on her bottom lip. We’ve been making the trek to Fairfield for cheap Tex-Mex at Picante Cantina every Tuesday night since we’d first met at group, but this time is different. Because it’s only noon—I couldn’t s
tare at my suspect wall one second longer—and I’d already knocked back a vodka, neat, instead of my usual watered-down margarita, and started on round two. And because I’d felt pulled to take the shorter route here, the way I never go, up I-80 and past the billboard of Dakota’s smiling face. Hence, the vodka.
“¡Qué locura! I told you the cards have power. The goddess is giving you a nudge.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cards schmards.” But I can’t shake the thought of that skeleton man atop his alabaster horse. Or the other card that fell into my path early this morning, the one I’d shut away in Dakota’s desk drawer—out of sight, not mind. “You really believe the goddess wants me doing therapy with an old cowboy? He’s the earth-shattering change I’m due for?”
I don’t tell Luci I’d spent the last two hours holed up in my “real” office, googling Wendall Grady within an inch of his life. Because to her, I’m still the normal one, and I like that more than I care to admit. I’d lost my share of friends in the last two years. Nothing runs them off quicker than a dead kid. At least with Luci, I don’t have to explain why something as simple as a kids’ movie on the marquis leaves me teetering on the edge of a black hole.
Grainy photos from the annual Yountville Vietnam Veteran’s Association Picnics, Chapter 702, are all I have to show for my efforts. It’s the same chapter my father claimed way back when. When he could still be bothered with conventional obligations like picnics and a nine-to-five job and his only daughter.
Luci shrugs and laughs at me. “The goddess works in mysterious ways, muchacha. And I never ignore a jumping card.” Apparently, that’s psychic-speak for one that falls from the deck with a mind of its own.
“Maybe DEATH was meant for Boludo,” I say, trying to change the subject. “He’s in desperate need of a tune-up.”
“Please, that car has had one tire in the grave for years now. He’s about as useless as the pendejo I stole him from. And you had two jumpers in one night. They say if it falls on the floor, it’s at the door, you know?”
Shadows Among Us Page 4
