Shadows Among Us

by Ellery A Kane

  Her mother flinched. And Dakota felt satisfied as she watched her walk to the dresser mirror and dot concealer under eyes. Her skillful dabbing would’ve made Hannah proud. “You know why.”

  “Because he’s crazy, and you don’t like him.”

  She was on a roll now. Her mother’s jaw tightened; her forehead tensed in her best attempt at a frown despite the Botox. Hannah’s mother was five years younger with perfect skin and probably didn’t need Botox yet. So the affair made sense, evolutionarily speaking. Her father was no less advanced than an ape. No more, either, apparently.

  “We’ve talked about this. Grandpa is mentally ill and has a drinking problem. It’s not safe for you to be around him. He’s unpredictable. Anyway, what’s brought all this on?”

  “Do you and Dad think I’m like Grandpa? Mentally ill?”

  “What?”

  Her mother met her eyes in the mirror, and Dakota looked away. She hadn’t meant to ask that question. She’d meant to say something snotty. Something like—just wondering who I’d live with if you and Dad kill each other. But now she couldn’t take it back.

  “I heard you tell Dad you thought I was depressed. And Dad is always asking how I’m feeling and if I want to talk about it.”

  “Are you? Depressed? Is that why you’re wondering about Grandpa?”

  “I didn’t realize I needed a reason to ask about him. Maybe I’m curious why everyone in this family is freakin’ crazy. Or maybe I’m just wondering who I’m going to live with when you and Dad finally kill each other.”

  That’s more like it, she thought. Until she felt the hot wallop of her mother’s hand across her cheek. It stung worse than the last time.

  ****

  Dakota lay in bed, studying her cell, her feet tucked under Gus’s warm belly. According to Google, Mol’s Junkyard had been closed for fifteen years, and the lone Yelp review declared it a one-star eyesore that should’ve been condemned by the county. There was no picture, no telephone number, and no sign of Grandpa Krandel. Dakota knew her mother would definitely not approve, which only made her more certain she had to go there to see it—to see him—for herself.

  A predictable text bubble from Hannah appeared on her screen, and Dakota’s stomach knotted.

  Where r u?

  Grounded.

  She hoped Hannah would let her leave it at that, so she wouldn’t have to lie. It was hard enough avoiding her dad, but lately skirting Hannah’s texts and calls had become as impossible as shaking her own shadow. Still, what choice did she have? Her father had handed her a ticking bomb and left it for her to decide where to toss it. The trouble was that any which way she threw it, lives would implode. That included Hannah’s.

  WTF. You never get grounded.

  Dakota tugged the covers over her head, wishing she was a little girl again, believing she could disappear beneath them.

  Got caught on Snapchat with Ty.

  The lie came easy off her fingers. Thank God she didn’t have to say it out loud. Because surely her guilt, sticking like a pebble in her throat, would give her away.

  OMG. Were you fully clothed?

  Dakota burrowed further under, raising her knees to make a blanket fort above her. She knew now, there was no disappearing. Whatever disaster your life became, you had to stay there. Stand there. Face it.

  I asked him to delete that pic.

  Begged was more like it. But he’d responded with an emoji wink—which reminded her of the wink he gave Mrs. McCarthy when she’d chided him for talking in class—as well as two poorly punctuated sentences: i won’t show anybody babe i swear.

  Of course, Hannah wouldn’t understand. Her next text served as concrete evidence.

  Why? It was hot.

  Dakota didn’t know how to answer. Because she partly felt proud Hannah would say that. About her. When Hannah was clearly the hot one. On the other hand, it served as further confirmation. That picture lied. It told Tyler things about her that weren’t true. Not even close. He’d already been pressuring her to wear the lacy red bra that didn’t even belong to her. And worse, to live up to its expectations.

  “Dakota? Honey?”

  When she heard her mother’s voice on the other side of her door, she steeled herself against it, tucking her phone beneath the pillow.

  “Can I come in?”

  But her mom didn’t wait for an answer. She just barged right in like always, ignoring the KEEP OUT sign she’d bought Dakota at that fancy home-interior store in downtown Napa. She’d cringed when Dakota had slapped a few glittery pink skulls on it to make it her own. That was her mother’s problem. She couldn’t let Dakota have anything for herself. It had to belong to her too.

  She felt her mother’s weight on the bed next to her, heard her mother’s weary sigh, but she stayed buried.

  “I shouldn’t have done that, sweetie. Mom and Dad aren’t getting along right now, but I was wrong to take it out on you. If you want to talk about Grandpa, we can. Anytime you want. Just say the word.”

  Dakota held so still. She hoped her mother would wonder if she’d stopped breathing.

  “Okay. I understand you’re angry with me. You’re entitled to your feelings.”

  When all else failed, her mother went into full-therapist mode.

  “Maybe you should talk with someone. I can ask the school counselor if she’ll see—”

  “No, Mom.” Dakota emerged, hot and red-faced, from beneath the covers. She didn’t know how her mother did it exactly, but she managed to win every time. “I don’t need to talk to anyone. I just want to be alone.”

  Her mother patted her leg, and Dakota stared at her hand, wondering how it could be so gentle one moment and so cruel the next. She must’ve known what Dakota was thinking, because she pulled it back quickly and tucked it beneath the other hand crossed at her waist.

  “I left that book you wanted on your desk.”

  Dakota merely nodded at the worn copy of Mindhunter she’d coveted, denying her mother the smile she so clearly wanted.

  “When you finish that one, maybe it’s time for Silence of the Lambs. What do you say?”

  Another nod. This one even flatter than the last.

  “Just don’t tell Dad, okay?”

  “Okay,” Dakota answered, halfway agreeable. But in her mind, she scoffed at her mother and sliced her with her smart mouth. Keeping secrets runs in the family.

  AFTER

  Chapter

  Twelve

  (Wednesday, October 3, 2018)

  Wendall tells me he’s having a good day. Which means he didn’t have to pull the car to the side of the road to vomit on the drive over. Already, he’s been talking for longer than the twenty minutes he’d managed yesterday.

  I’m better too, even with the fog of exhaustion muddling my thoughts. Sawyer and I hadn’t given up on hacking into Dakota’s Shadows Snoops account until the early hours of the morning. But at least I had a lead now. It had been so long since I’d had anything beyond the familiar faces on my suspect wall and my own suspicions scratching my mind raw.

  Wendall’s cowboy hat rests on his spindly knee like a crow on a telephone line, and every now and then, he reaches for it, touching it gently as if to remind himself it’s still there. I start to wonder if he’s siphoning his strength from its smooth black felt.

  “So what have the doctors said about your prognosis?” I ask him. He’d already told me he’d had the standard treatment. A lobectomy where the doctors had sliced and diced him, followed by chemo to fry that devil inside.

  He chuckles and offers a droll smile. “Not much of anything useful. Doctors are a lot like cops. They know more than what they say. And they never give you a straight answer.”

  I cock my head, ready to challenge him. I have to push him while I can. Who knows how long this vigor will last? Although, when I think
of Cole—all the half-truths, the non-answers—I have to admit he’s right. “You realize I’m a doctor. Is that how you feel about me?”

  “Nah. Head doctors are a different breed. You folks can’t hook me up to an X-ray machine and see what’s shakin’ up in here.” He taps the side of his head. “And thank the bejesus for that. There’s a lot of dark places between these ears.”

  “What would I find—if I could look inside?”

  “Well, let me map it out for you. You already know some about Vietnam. I’ll call that the scorched jungle. Then there’s this great big sinkhole. That’s my whole goddamned childhood. Barely got outta that one alive.”

  “Would you like to tell me about it?”

  “Ain’t much to tell. My momma was a whore, and my daddy was a good for nothin’ piece of shit. They say Momma left me in a phone booth when I was just a baby. So I grew up in Holy Pines. That’s an orphanage near Sacramento. Nowadays, they don’t call ’em that. It was a huge redbrick building with its own pine forest. Pretty as can be. But you know what I picture when I think about it now? A massive hole in the ground, like a gigantic mouth that swallowed everything that came near it. Especially little boys. I talked funny as a kid, and I got teased somethin’ awful. Joinin’ up with old Uncle Sam was the only thing that saved me.”

  “So the army was your escape?”

  “Yeah. Ain’t that a hoot? I’m still not sure which was worse, the Viet Cong or those little shits at Holy Pines.” I wait for him to laugh, but his eyes darken with indignation. “I was good at it though. Good at killin’ the enemy and gettin’ other men to do the same. Ain’t that a damn awful thing to realize? You come back and you try to act normal. But normal won’t claim you no more. That’s why I took the orderly job at the loony bin. I wanted to be around somebody less normal than me.”

  “You’re painting quite a desolate picture. A scorched jungle. A sinkhole. What else is up there?”

  Wendall strokes his hat. “I’m gettin’ to that. First, I gotta ask you somethin’ about a legal matter. Purely hypothetical, mind you.”

  I nod, already uneasy.

  “If a person was to tell you about somethin’ bad they did in the past—somethin’ real bad that they never got caught for—would you be obliged to report that matter to the authorities?”

  After working at Napa State, the question isn’t a surprise, though spontaneous confessions were rare there. The drive for self-protection is so strong that even full-on psychosis is no match. “It depends. Remember, we spoke about the limitations of confidentiality. If you tell me about an imminent plan to hurt yourself or someone else, then all bets are off. But confessing to something in the past would typically be kept between us.”

  He leans back against the sofa, which seems to have accepted him now, albeit reluctantly, the cushions giving way under his weight. “Alright then. You want to know what else is up there? It’s a field as far as the eye can see. Lush green grass beneath your toes. The smell of the earth. And all the deer you’d ever want to hunt, just grazing.”

  “A field? That doesn’t sound so bad.”

  “Just wait,” he says, with a strike of his finger to the air. “It’s only a field at first glance. But when you get up close, that’s when you see them. The stones. A helluva lot of stones. You catch my drift?”

  The room feels colder as he sets his eyes on me. They’re brighter today. Clearer. Sharp as tacks.

  “I may need you to spell it out for me.”

  He doesn’t look away when he answers. “Under every one of them stones is a body. It’s the biggest damn graveyard you ever did see.”

  ****

  After Wendall leaves, I lock the door and wheel the ergo chair back to the other room, to the suspect wall. I rub my arms, not for the first time, to stop my skin from crawling and focus on Dakota’s picture, pushpinned at the center, until my breathing is slow and measured again.

  Wendall is a murderer.

  It shouldn’t bother me. I’d spent years with murderers at Napa State. Counseled them, joked with them, even pitied them sometimes. At least three times a week, I’d sat in a circle in a closed room where I’d been the only non-murderer, armed with only a small plastic alarm. So small any one of them could’ve crushed it under his boot. Still, I hadn’t minded.

  But Wendall feels different. Or I feel different. Or both.

  Because he’s never been caught, for one. And for two, he’s not just a murderer. Like one of those paranoid schizophrenics who gets hyped up on coke and the voices in his own head and stabs his mother. Wendall had said stones—as in more than one. Wendall had said graveyard—as in more than two or three. Wendall had said I’m getting tired now, Doc but not much else, depositing his hat on his head with a courteous nod.

  Before he’d stood to go, I’d managed to ask him one question. A necessary one. “Are you planning on hurting anyone else?”

  To which he’d held out his hands, palms down, both of them shaky. His skin so pale, I’d seen the ice blue rivers of his veins beneath it. “I couldn’t hurt a fly. Even if I wanted to.”

  I’d left the unspoken question—Do you want to?—between us, which filled the room with a sickly dread.

  Wendall is a serial murderer.

  That’s why he’d come here, to me, to unburden himself. That’s why he’d told me we could help each other. I’m supposed to offer absolution. In return, he’ll grant me a peek behind the curtain.

  I reach for my cell and start to dial Sawyer. But I hang up fast, before it rings. It feels too familiar and too dangerous. My need to be rescued. If I’m honest, it’s the reason I’d ended up married to Cole in the first place. And look how well that turned out. He’d said it himself the night before he left. I can’t take care of you anymore, Mol. You have to do that for yourself. Sink or swim.

  I’d bit back the urge to spit in his face. Take care of me? I’d heard my voice crack. Is that what you were doing? Because you did a shitty job of it.

  Seeing Sawyer last night sitting on my sofa, drinking from my coffee cup, grinning his perfectly imperfect grin, I’d realized. No man had set foot in the house since Cole, and his ghost lingers there still in the caverns of my own bitter, cobwebbed heart. I’m neither sinking nor swimming without him. Just treading water.

  I scroll through my contacts until I find the number for Detective Sharpe. Each shrill ring buzzes my nerves, reminding me I don’t exactly have a plan aside from the usual one: Find the bastard who killed my daughter. Vague, sure, but no less profound.

  The last ring goes to voicemail, and I disconnect. Probably for the best. Until I get my bearings. Until I figure out what to say.

  I shut off the lights and close up the office, trudging back toward the house where a dog and two ghosts wait for me. The in-between person.

  On any other Wednesday, before all this, I would’ve been taking my lunch break, leaving the cold, dank corridors of the hospital to cop a squat in the sunshine somewhere on the sprawling grounds and eat something unnecessarily healthy, like a kale salad. Napa State Hospital could be drudgerous and depressing as hell, but it had its moments.

  Gus’s barking whacks through the memory with the urgency of an axe. I move faster than I have in months, skirting around the house to the unmarked police car parked in the driveway.

  Luciana must be rubbing off on me, because it’s no coincidence. It can’t be. Detective Clifton Sharpe leans against the front hood looking like Morgan Freeman as Alex Cross. Tall and grizzled and obviously a much better detective than I’d ever given him credit for. Dakota would be so jealous. When she’d stayed home from school with the flu freshman year, I’d played hooky from work, and we’d watched Kiss the Girls and Along Came a Spider in our pajamas. Looking back at us now, shoveling popcorn without a care, I wonder if I’d missed something. A sign that our lives would become a film noir. Improbably dark, impossibly sad, and with
no real ending in sight.

  “Are you a mind reader now?” I ask.

  His face is a blank. I know this trick. I’ve used this trick. But I fall for it anyway, launching my explanation.

  “I literally just called you. I know things have stalled a bit with the investigation, so I’ve been doing some poking around, and we need to talk.”

  He stands up, hands on his hips, towering over me, and I see my father in the unforgiving lines on his face. “You’re right. We do need to talk. Unfortunately, it’s a conversation we’ve had before. Several times.”

  “If this is about Boyd, I can explain. I—”

  “Boyd? The guy you left me a message about the other day? Something about a yearbook photo and your father.”

  Inwardly, I groan at the drunken conspiracy theory that I knew would come back to haunt me at the most inopportune time.

  He removes a small notepad from his pocket and scrutinizes the last page, shaking his head. “This fellow told me his name was Lyle Mitchum. He’s the assistant manager over at Whitetails and Whoppers. Anyway, you scared him real good, ripping that bayonet off the wall like you did. He didn’t even want to call us. But apparently his boss was pretty adamant about his reporting it since the knife is a relic and all. Lucky for him, he took down your license plate, you know. Petty theft. Criminal threats. Assault with a deadly weapon. C’mon, Mollie, what were you thinking?”

  “Well, I—” He doesn’t give me a chance to answer. Bulldozes right through me like my father always did. It’s just as well. How could I explain the burned circuit in my brain? Frayed and fried from the relentless surge of torment and fury.

  “I thought you’d learned your lesson after the incident with the Lowry kid. The restraining order, remember that?”

  “Yeah, I remember it well. And I’m not sorry. C’mon, Cliff. He sent half-naked pictures of my daughter to the entire lacrosse team. If you ask me, he should’ve been arrested for distributing child pornography.”