Her parents’ shrill bickering had jolted her awake that morning, and even Gus’s nuzzling didn’t ease the ache in her stomach. They’d kept it up while she showered and hadn’t even noticed when she’d slipped out the front door, her hair still wet, and sped away on her bicycle.
“I’m going to Hannah’s,” she’d announced to Gus, in an otherwise empty kitchen. He’d slumped down on the linoleum with a forlorn whimper channeled straight from her soul. She’d written the same words on a Post-it she stuck to the fridge as she listened to the war rage on.
Upstairs, her mother had half-yelled, half-sobbed, “I can’t do this anymore, Cole.”
“Then don’t.”
Cue slamming door. Cue Dakota making a run for it.
As Dakota had pedaled down Ridgecrest, the wind whipped at her face, burning her eyes until she’d teared up and nearly crashed into the curb in front of the library.
B.W.C., she’d thought, humorlessly, trudging up the steps. Biking while crying. Pathetic.
But then she’d crossed through the doors and into her oasis. A place where order could be catalogued, chaos bound and contained between pieces of binder’s board. A place where answers could be found if you knew where to look for them.
Dakota’s favorite computer waited unoccupied in the cubicle near Storybook Corner, and she’d slid into the heavy wooden chair with a sigh. In under sixty seconds, she’d texted Hannah another flimsy excuse and logged on to Shadow Snoops, dabbing away the evidence of her mess of a morning.
Welcome, Cagedbird18.
Your last login was July 10, 2016 1:37 p.m.
Dakota studied her profile picture with satisfaction. She’d doodled it herself in English Lit last year, not knowing then that it would become the story of her life. A girl’s face in silhouette. In her head, a tiny cage with a tiny bird inside. That Maya Angelou had it right. Dakota’s wings were clipped. In her throat, a song that wasn’t hers to sing. No matter how badly she wanted to sing it. Because she knew if she said it out loud—Dad is having an affair with Mrs. Montgomery—it would break her mother. It would break everything.
Dakota took out her pocket notepad and placed it beside her on the desk. She scrolled through what she’d missed since yesterday afternoon. Which was not much. Just a rules reminder from the admin to be respectful to other users and refrain from slander and absurd conspiracy theories. This, after someone had actually suggested Pat Benatar had unmasked Shadow Man in 1982, leading her to pen “Shadows of the Night.”
Admin: Remember the rules, Shadow Snoops. Play nice out there. There’s another human being behind that screen. Please, take your conspiracy theories somewhere else. May we suggest Roswell, New Mexico.
Dakota smiled. If only life had rules like that.
She consulted the list of questions she’d jotted down last night after finishing the Bundy book. Better that than tossing and turning and listening for the sounds of a serial killer’s muted footsteps.
Cagedbird18: Does anybody know anything about Todd Akers, the Donnelly’s neighbor? He graduated from high school with Mary Ann Strauss, mother of third victim, Emily.
Chewie: Ruled him out years ago.
Dakota rolled her eyes at the screen.
Cagedbird18: Why?
Chewie: Do your homework, noob.
What a prick. This Chewie guy—and Dakota had no doubt he was a guy even though his profile pic was the default gender-neutral smiley face—had apparently anointed himself king of the Snoops, declaring her a lowly peasant. Yesterday, he’d shot down DocSherlock’s theory that Shadow Man was a cop and Jojo666’s suggestion that some of the crimes were the work of a copycat.
Cagedbird18: Meaning?
Chewie: Meaning don’t be a moof-milker.
It had been a while since Dakota laughed, and she didn’t want to. The sound sputtered from her mouth without her permission like the backfire of an old engine. So she’d been right about the name Chewie. The king of the Snoops was a Star Wars geek. Dakota vaguely remembered the moof-milker scene. She’d biked to the cineplex over Christmas break three days in a row to see The Force Awakens, feeling guilt-ridden when her mom had asked if she wanted to catch the film on Christmas Day since Dad was on call.
While Chewie stewed, Dakota opened a new window and googled moof-milker. She lowered the sound and watched as Harrison Ford, her mother’s favorite, appeared in the Millennium Falcon.
Chewie: Akers is old news. Some of us take this investigation seriously.
DocSherlock: Back off, Chewie. Cagedbird, Akers was paralyzed in an industrial accident in 1995.
Chewie: See. Some of us actually do our homework. Unless Cagedbird is saying Shadow Man’s a quadriplegic . . .
Cagedbird18: Listen, fur bag. I did my homework. According to the last Shadow Man article in the Chronicle, the accident happened in 1996. AFTER the last vic disappeared. The reporter called Akers the best possible suspect.
Chewie: Fur bag?
Cagedbird18: Chewie is short for Chewbacca, is it not? BTW I am not a moof-milker. I’d never put a compressor on the ignition line.
Dakota sat back in her chair, smug. “What do you say to that?” she muttered under her breath, waving off the librarian who apparently thought she’d been summoned.
Chewie has gone offline.
Coward.
DocSherlock: Don’t let Chewie get you down. He’s a bit of a purist. A lot of folks joined the site after that news show last month. Chewie calls them CSI wannabes.
That stung. Dakota didn’t feel like a wannabe. She’d been listening to her mom’s stories about her crazy patients for years. Like the guy with the shoe fetish who’d cut off his victim’s foot and kept it in his closet wearing a red high heel. Dad didn’t know Mom had told her that one. And now that she’d finished The Stranger Beside Me, she planned to beg her mom for her copy of Mindhunter.
DocSherlock: The date in the Chronicle was a mistake. They did a correction on the story the following day, but Akers sued for libel and won. You’ll find all that on the main webpage in the folder marked EXTRAS. Happy hunting!
Of course. The one folder she hadn’t bothered with. Chewie had probably named it himself. To throw off the noobs.
Cagedbird18: Thanks, Doc! I’ll check it out.
But even as she typed, Dakota had already opened the link and saved the folder to the desktop. She’d delete it before she left like she always did. Not that anyone cared. But she relished the ritual of it, the guarding of her precious secret. She wondered if her dad felt that way too, locking their little family in a box for safekeeping while he banged her best friend’s mother.
An alert flashed on her screen.
Chewie has sent you a direct message.
Dakota’s heart raced like a rabbit as she opened her inbox, which had been empty until now. She scanned the two lines of text, uncertain how to feel.
Hi Cagedbird. I’m sorry for being a jerk. Not many girls can quote Han Solo. I’m assuming you’re a girl because of your profile pic. I’m not a girl, btw.
Her fingers poised over the keyboard, ready to strike. Her answer seemed essential, life-changing even, like picking between Robert Frost’s diverging roads in the woods. All her choices felt that way lately. Monumental. A day at the mall with Hannah or the public library? Avoid Tyler or break it off with him? Tell her mother or keep her mouth shut? Panic rose up in her chest, and she reached for the mouse, hurriedly closing the message before she lost it right there in Storybook Corner.
She took a few deep breaths and then a few more, focusing on the construction paper rainbow taped to the wall near the Babbling Book Brook. In her head, she said it five times fast, laughing silently at her own gibberish. Then she opened the folder marked EXTRAS and started to scroll.
Near the top, she spotted the 2006 Chronicle retraction. The original article had been penned by a gumshoe rep
orter who fingered Akers in a Shadow Man ten-year anniversary piece. To be fair, Akers looked guilty in all the ways that counted. He’d been convicted of child molestation in 1992 and locked up in San Quentin for two years. All that time, Shadow Man had stayed quiet.
Dakota eyed her suspect list. She still couldn’t rule Akers out. Mostly because his name was the only one on her list, and to cross it out would’ve felt like touching the pool wall a millisecond outside of gold medal time. Besides, there were only two murders after Akers was paroled. Both could’ve been copycats.
She clicked through the articles one by one, reading each twice and taking better notes than she had in AP Bio. She wouldn’t let Chewie get the best of her again.
With the last article opened on her screen—a 1992 story from the now defunct Allendale Gazette—she turned her phone over to check the time.
Hannah had responded to her lame excuse hours ago, calling her exactly that.
Lame. But you can redeem yourself. Party at Tyler’s tonight. Get ready at Liv’s house at 5?
Dakota sighed and texted back one unenthusiastic letter—K—as she read the headline in front of her.
Allendale Community Unites In Search For Missing Girl Feared To Be Fourteenth Shadow Man Victim
The tight-knit community of Allendale came together this weekend to aid police in their search for Jessica Guzman. The fourteen-year-old has been missing since Thursday evening when she went jogging with her Golden Retriever, Blondie, and never returned. Friday morning, a road crew discovered the dog’s collar discarded in a ditch off Sweeney Road, several miles from Putah Creek Road where Jessica was last seen running. Blondie returned home on Saturday morning, unharmed. The discovery of the dog’s collar has intensified investigators’ fears that Jessica was kidnapped by the elusive Shadow Man, who is suspected in the murders of no less than thirteen other young girls, many of whom resided in the Napa area.
Dakota scribbled a note—Blondie’s collar in ditch off Sweeney—even as her eyes were drawn to the photographs at the center of the page. Jessica Guzman’s broad smile revealed twin dimples in her cheeks, which gave her face a spunky cuteness. But the long waves of her hair down her shoulders and her fierce bone structure—that’s what Hannah would’ve called it—hinted at her future as a drop-dead stunner. A future that would never be.
The camera loves her, Dakota thought, recalling her disgust when she’d seen her own freshman yearbook photo. That stupid pimple she’d tried to cover glaring at her like a third eye. For a split-stupefying-second, jealousy gnashed its teeth against her insides. Until she shook her head at her sheer lunacy. Jealous of a dead girl. Seriously?
Dakota already knew how Jessica’s story ended. Like all the others. With a cold, hard stop in Shadow Man’s graveyard. Only this time, three years went by before her remains had been recovered in the woods at Lake Berryessa. The teeth were hers, bones too. But she’d aged. She’d grown. In captivity, presumably. Shadow Man had evolved.
But then he’d stopped entirely. Or had he? Dakota wondered about that more than anything else. So did all the Shadow Snoops. There was an entire folder dedicated to it. The Desistance Problem, they called it, and she was partial to the Captive Theory herself. The idea that Shadow Man hadn’t died or had kids or been locked up or found God but rather had decided to hold on to his victims. To keep them alive a little longer.
Dakota nearly overlooked the other photos, unremarkable by comparison. Four dark figures with hats and walking sticks—she couldn’t tell if they were men or women—trudging through a field in their safety vests. The caption read Volunteers comb a field near Putah Creek Road. But what came next stopped her heart.
An unsmiling man. His eyes squinted, not meeting the camera. Behind him, a chain-link fence and a sign for Mol’s Junkyard, and when she looked harder, a dog with long ears like a basset hound. Her mother had told her she had one once. Roscoe, she’d called him. Dakota read the caption in a whisper, “Local small business owner, Victor Krandel, offers water to volunteers during the search.”
Victor Krandel.
Dakota sat still as a stone, letting the name sink into her. Then she printed a word in her notebook, barely feeling her fingers as she wrote. Grandpa?
****
Sweat stung Dakota’s eyes as she pedaled up the drive in the uneasy quiet. The gravel crunched beneath her tires like the snap of small bones, and her stomach twisted. She tossed her bike in the front yard and surveyed the scene for clues. Better to know what sort of ambush awaited her. For starters, the Mercedes was gone. Which meant her dad was too. In some ways, that was better. She didn’t have to dodge his eyes. Or listen to them go at it like a pair of cranky tomcats. But in other ways, it was worse. Her mom would be mopey, drifting through the house as gray as a ghost.
“Mom?”
Gus barreled around the corner, wagging his tail at her. He followed her into the kitchen, eyeing his empty food dish with anticipation. Weekends, Mom always fed him around noon. It was after two now, and Gus’s silver bowl gleamed like a whistle. He whined softly, nudging her hand with his wet nose.
“Alright, alright,” she told him, scooping a cup of King Canine, the ninety-five-bucks-a-bag kibble Gus’s vet had recommended when he’d started packing on the pounds last year.
As Gus dove in nose first, Dakota scanned the kitchen. Her Post-it was gone. Mom’s fancy purse rested on the counter, the keys to the Range Rover tucked into the side pocket. In the sink, a single glass that smelled worse than Hannah’s bottle of pretend Gatorade. She rinsed it clean, dried it carefully, and returned it to the cabinet. She felt certain her mother wouldn’t want anyone to see it. Especially not her father.
The knot in Dakota’s stomach tangled tighter and tighter until it ached. It reminded her of standing on the starter’s block at the pool’s edge waiting for the signal. But now, there was only silence and nowhere to go but up the stairs.
Dakota went to her room first, slipping her pocket notepad beneath the mattress. Then she called out again for her mother. At the end of the hallway, her parents’ bedroom door loomed—closed and shadowy—like something out of a horror flick. The kind her dad completely forbade, but that she and her mom watched when he was on call, both of them shielding their eyes at the worst parts.
Dakota knocked first, pressing her ear to the door. She waited and listened.
Ever since she’d walked in on her father in Hannah’s basement last month, she’d been acutely aware of one thing. Obvious but shocking all the same. Her parents, both of them, had a life apart from her. A life where they behaved like people she didn’t know, people who didn’t belong to her. Mollie and Cole, not Mom and Dad. It felt dangerous to be so close to it. The door, the knob in her hand, too flimsy to protect her from their other lives, their other selves.
Finally, she opened it.
Dakota didn’t recognize her mother at first. Not because she looked any different. Brown hair tucked in a loose bun. Weekend sweats. The freckle on her neck Dakota would know anywhere. But her mother didn’t nap. Ever. Yet, there she was, lying on the bed with her back to Dakota, the curtains drawn.
“Mom?” she asked, tapping her shoulder the way she would rouse a sleeping dragon.
Startled, her mother faced her with a gasp. “What time is it? Where’s your father?”
“Uh . . .”
There it was, plain as day. Her mother’s other self. Peeking from behind her red-rimmed eyes, seeping out from her breath. Dakota debated whether to face it head-on or pretend not to see it. “It’s 2:30. Dad’s not here.”
“Of course he is. He went to Hannah’s to pick you up. And by the way, young lady, no one gave you permission to leave this morning.”
Her mother sat up and frowned, Mom-mask shifting back into place.
Dakota swallowed a lump and repeated herself more firmly this time. “Dad is not here. His car is gone.”
&n
bsp; “But he left . . .” The mask slipped again as her mother searched out the clock on the nightstand. As if it had something vital to tell her. As if it could explain the inexplicable. “He left hours ago. How did you get home?”
Hours ago. Dakota’s thoughts whirled round and round and round like a board game spinner, landing finally, firmly at the top of the Montgomerys’ basement stairs. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. You lose.
“Dakota.” Her mother’s voice was sharp.
“I rode my bike.”
“From Hannah’s house?”
She couldn’t answer. She didn’t want to lie. Lying made her no better than her father. But the truth was a domino line. Once she’d tipped the first domino, the whole thing would come down eventually, bit by gory bit, so she shrugged instead.
Her mother reached for the phone. “I’m calling the Montgomerys.”
“No, Mom. You don’t have to do that. I wasn’t there. I was at Tyler’s, and I asked Hannah to cover for me. Dad’s probably driving around looking for me right now, and he didn’t want to worry you.”
Dakota hated her mom then, with a fierceness that licked up her chest like a flame. Her mother returned the phone to its cradle without further protest. She didn’t bother to suggest the obvious—calling her dad’s cell, which was practically welded to his hand at all times. That meant her mother didn’t want to know the truth. Or worse, she already knew and had decided to live with it.
“You’re grounded.” Even that didn’t sound convincing.
Dakota nodded her head, though it felt heavy, loaded as a powder keg. It was bound to explode eventually. With an unceremonious, passive-aggressive boom. “Grandpa still lives in Allendale, right? Why can’t I see him?”
Shadows Among Us Page 12
