It’s not personal, Mollie, believe me. I asked the Board to reconsider. But you’re losing your shit. You’ve been crying in your therapy groups. You cursed at a patient. Given the nature of our work, we have to be pillars of mental health. You know that.
I still wish I’d kneed him in his own tiny pillar. But he’s not wrong. It does feel personal. As personal as being axed by the guy you’re screwing.
Later, I’ll have to thank Peter. He’s the reason I get up off the ground, drag my leaden feet out of the guesthouse, and plod back home. Because I won’t give him the satisfaction of being right about me. I repeat the words aloud. It’s not a mantra. It’s not an affirmation. This is a fucking battle cry.
“I am a pillar. And I am most definitely not losing my shit.”
****
Boyd’s yellow VW is parked in my driveway. I see it through the trees as I round the path. He taps the horn before he spots me, then holds up two sheepish hands. Like this is a stick-up, and I’ve got a muzzle pressed between his shoulder blades.
I follow his lead, act tough, but I’m grateful to see him. He’s my last human connection to Dakota. Even if he does know what no one else does—what an awful mother I’d been when it counted most.
“What do you want?” I ask as he cranks the window down. From inside the house, Gus barks once, twice. The sharp, staccato bursts, his version of warning shots fired over the bow.
“Is it true? Shadow Man left a clue?” He drops his voice, lowers his eyes. “Here?”
“How do you know that?”
“I’ve got an alert set up. Anytime there’s a mention of Shadow Man online, I get an email. So I read the story. Shadow Snoops is blowing up. I logged on as soon as I heard.”
“What are they saying?”
“That the cops found a dog collar at your house.”
Right on cue, Gus mounts his onslaught, and Boyd’s eyes dart to the house and back to me. The kinder version of myself, long dead now, would tell Boyd how harmless Gus is. That he hadn’t stopped Shadow Man. The worst he’d do amounted to death by licking. Wendall was proof of that.
“I’m going to ask you one more time. What. Do. You. Want?”
“I want to help.” He looks at me so earnestly I almost turn away, ashamed. “As long as you promise not to hurt me. No more bayonets.”
I smirk, because I think he’s making a joke.
“Or weapons of any kind.” Apparently, he isn’t.
“What makes you think you can help me? And why do you even want to? I understand you knew Dakota a little, but—” He raises his eyebrows in expectation. “Alright, alright. I promise.”
Boyd reaches for his phone on the passenger seat. He taps the screen a few times and holds it out to me. “This is why.”
It’s a photograph of a newspaper clipping from December 1980. Remains Discovered At Lake Berryessa Match Those Of Missing Napa Teen, Miriam Woodbury. I zoom in on the tiny print, finding all I need to know in the first paragraph.
Since their daughter and the family dog, Bucky, went missing in the spring of 1980, Joe and Alice Woodbury knew this day would come. Yet, they were still unprepared for the loss of one of their twin girls, Miriam, whose partial remains were discovered this week by a fox trapper at Lake Berryessa. “As painful as it’s been for us, it’s been worse for Martha, losing her twin,” the Woodburys explained.
A small photo in the corner shows the twin girls in matching dresses.
“Miriam and Martha,” I say aloud. “Miriam was your aunt.”
He nods. “I know it was a lifetime ago, but for my mom, it’s like yesterday. That’s why I found the Shadow Seekers website and joined Shadow Snoops. With all she’s done for me, I thought maybe someday I’d be able to give her some peace. A long shot, but I had to try.”
“Did Dakota know?” Her knowing feels essential to me. That we both saw this picture. That we both felt Boyd’s hand-me-down pain.
“Not right away. I didn’t go sharing it around on the site. But I trusted Dakota.”
“She must’ve trusted you too.” I wince as I imagine her telling him. My mom slaps me sometimes. I hope she was angry when she’d said it, not crying. That I couldn’t bear.
“She did trust me. That’s why I’m here. You asked about Dakota’s last post, the one we’d exchanged the day before she went missing—when she told me she was going to Allendale.”
“Right. There will come soft rains . . . You said you didn’t know how she got there or exactly where she went.”
He sets his eyes on mine, words waiting to be chosen and spoken, but he falters at the pivot point. Which words? Truth or lie? It’s a look I’ve seen before. On my mother’s face when she testified before the judge: Mollie told me her daddy has been touching her privates. On Cole’s, every time he denied it: I’m not cheating on you. You’re paranoid. Dakota’s too: Everything’s fine, Mom.
Even though I expect it—mentiroso, Luciana had called him—it stings like the first time, the last time, and every time in-between. Because it’s true what they say. The truth hurts. And it rises. Undeniable as a smoke signal in a clear blue sky.
“I lied.”
****
The inside of Boyd’s VW smells like a pine forest, the odor emitting from a small green tree dangling from his rearview mirror alongside a plastic Yoda.
“You know who else drove a bug?” I ask him, buckling my seat belt. In more ways than one. Because Boyd has something to show me at his house. The reason they’d gone to Allendale.
“Ted Bundy,” he answers, humorlessly. “Dakota said the same thing. She tested the door handle too.”
The tears are there in an instant, but I laugh in spite of them. “That’s my girl.”
I close my eyes and lean my head back, trying to conjure her here, in this seat with Boyd on her left, driving her to Allendale. Trying to feel what she felt. To think her thoughts. But it’s a blank, a void. It’s unknowable. “So you met her a few times then? In real life?”
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you right away. I figured it would look bad. Me being older and the way I am and all.”
“What do you mean?”
He takes his right hand from the steering wheel, displaying his burn scar. “I got picked on a lot in school. Freddie Krueger. Bernie Blackburn. They were relentless. Needless to say, I’ve never had much luck with the ladies.”
I open my mouth, ready to give my two cents. That the living at home in Mom’s basement or the Chewbacca slippers or the python might be to blame. But I think better of it. Maybe my heart hasn’t hardened to stone after all.
“I know what you’re about to ask. You still want to know what happened, don’t you? How I got this thing.”
“So it wasn’t the fiery pool after all, huh?” I’m ashamed of how curious I am. My unrelenting need to know. About other people. Because when it came to the important stuff, my stuff, I’d been clueless, indifferent. As content in my ignorance as a pig in slop.
“An answer for an answer.” Hands at ten and two, he lays down the gauntlet without taking his eyes from the road.
“Alright. I suppose that’s fair.”
“Okay. Picture this. Boyd Blackburn, eleven years old, at a Halloween party. He’s the new kid in school again, and he’s desperate to impress. He likes comic books, but his mom can’t afford to buy a costume, so she sews him one herself. The Human Torch from the Fantastic Four. He’s a sight to behold. Everybody says so. And what does he do when he gets dared to stick his hand in the fire pit? I mean, he is the Human Torch, after all.”
“Geez, Boyd. That’s awful.”
“Yep. The third-degree-skin-graft kind of awful.” He shrugs, with the kind of grin-and-bear-it smile I know well. “I suppose it could’ve been worse.”
“It could always be worse,” I say. Though I don’t believe that. Sometimes, the thing th
at happens to you is the worst. The loss of Dakota is all I am some days. Her absence is my substance. Which makes me even less than an in-between person. It means I’m nothing at all.
“Your turn,” Boyd says.
I look out the window at the Napa River—we must be close to Cuttings Wharf—grounding myself again. Because I am a pillar. Of salt.
“I don’t know if you remember, but you never answered my question that night at the Grieving Parents group. What would you do differently?”
Of course, I remember. The question meant for me. But I don’t tell Boyd. It’s bad enough he’s asking again, forcing me back there, to that last day. To the last time I saw Dakota. If there is something worse than losing a child, it’s this: With my last words, I’d cursed at her, called her a sneak and a liar.
“I’d listen better,” I say. “And whatever she told me, I’d believe her.”
Boyd nods, apparently satisfied, and leaves me to suffocate in silence beneath the mountain of my regrets.
“My mom’s home,” he tells me, easing the VW into the driveway. In the glow of his headlights, I spot Santa. Someone must’ve taken pity on him since my last visit, cleaned him and stood him upright. His boots, once defiled by my vomit, are a faded shade of black.
Boyd catches me looking. “It’s already October. Mom thought it’d be easier to leave him out.”
“Did she have to—?”
“Don’t sweat it. I sprayed him off with a garden hose before she got home.”
I follow Boyd inside and wave at Martha, grateful her eyes are fixed on the giant screen. “She never misses Wheel of Fortune.”
“It’s true,” she says. “That Pat Sajak. Golly, now there’s a man.”
His cheeks reddening beneath patchy stubble, Boyd motions me over to the basement. He leads me down the stairs, past the scrapbook supplies to the heart of the Overbridge, where Yoda rules from her terrarium throne. From beneath his desk, he produces a plastic crate stacked top to bottom with newspaper clippings and file folders.
“My Shadow Man research,” he says, sifting through the pile. He offers me a thin folder near the top. “This is why we went to Allendale. It’s where the clues led us. And it seems spot-on with that dog collar you found.”
I run my hand across the smooth brown paper, where Boyd wrote DOGS in black marker. That word is a lightning rod. A witch’s finger, stirring my memories in a poison brew. They bubble to the surface, undying and grotesque. I open the folder anyway.
Five pages in total, each titled SOLANO COUNTY DOG LICENSE APPLICATION. I scan the first, my eyes drawn to the names I recognize as well as my own.
Owner: Glenda and Mark Donnelly
Dog Name: Hank
Breed: Beagle
Adopted from Solano County SPCA: May 21, 1976
Boyd perches at the edge of his recliner, his fingers drumming against his thighs until he can’t keep quiet anymore. “Eight of Shadow Man’s Allendale victims, including my Aunt Miriam, had dogs. Dakota and I thought it might be important. Some of the dogs might not have been registered, and the records from the seventies had already been destroyed. But the eighties were still being stored in an old warehouse off the 505.”
I flip the pages, my stomach knotting itself like a hanging rope. Jennifer Dooley, the youngest of Shadow Man’s victims, vanished from a carnival with her bulldog, Duke.
Owner: Scott and Lisa Dooley
Dog Name: Duke
Breed: Bulldog
Adopted from Solano County SPCA: June 5, 1981
Victim number eleven, Stacey Johannsen, had run away from home with Trixie after a fight with her mother. Her badly burned body turned up three months later at the Lake Berryessa site. The coroner ruled the cause of death as blunt force trauma to the head. Trixie was never found.
Owner: Marta Johannsen
Dog Name: Trixie
Breed: Mixed
Adopted from Solano County SPCA: April 1, 1983
Carrie Munroe, victim thirteen. She’d never returned from sunbathing at the park with her dog, Buster. Her skull was found in a field two miles from Lake Berryessa. Buster never came home.
Owner: George Monroe
Dog Name: Buster
Breed: Basset Hound
Adopted from Solano County SPCA: December 24, 1985
And finally, Jessica Guzman, victim fourteen, snatched while jogging with Blondie. The dog’s collar turned up in a field in Allendale. With skin cells left behind on the nylon, DNA unknown.
Owner: Raul Guzman
Dog Name: Blondie
Breed: Golden Retriever
Adopted from Solano County SPCA: May 15, 1990
“See anything in common?” he asks.
“Yeah, obviously. All adopted at the SPCA. Just like Gus.” But there’s something else nagging me, pieces forming in the back of my mind, disfigured and misshapen. Like Frankenstein’s monster. I can’t say it out loud. Not to Boyd. Not to anyone. When he continues on, oblivious, so do I.
“My mom told me that my grandparents adopted Bucky too. She remembered how excited she and Miriam were to pick him out. But Miriam cried the whole way home. She wanted to adopt them all.”
“Dakota was the same,” I say, remembering how she’d lifted Gus’s ear to whisper to him on the ride home—We’ll rescue your friends soon—as Cole and I turned to each other with the same panicked face.
I push the memory aside and flip to the first page, to the Donnellys’ license. “You said the seventies records were destroyed. Where’d this one come from?”
Boyd lifts his eyes, puffs his chest. “Glenda Donnelly. I called her a few months after Dakota went missing, and she mailed me a copy. It turns out they’d adopted Hank just a few weeks before Susanna disappeared. She held on to the form, not knowing if it might be important one day.”
The same way I’d held on to everything Dakota touched that summer—movie stubs, books, Post-its. I hadn’t even returned The Bell Jar to the library. When they’d mailed the year-overdue notice last summer, I’d mailed it right back after sobbing for a good hour. Return to sender.
“Did anyone else know what you were working on?” I ask, closing the folder and returning it to Boyd’s outstretched hand. “Any of the other Shadow Snoops?”
Shaking his head, Boyd tosses the folder on his desk. He walks to the terrarium and lifts Yoda, her granite skin pulsing as she coils herself into a ball. “I certainly didn’t tell anyone. I was a bit of a Shadow Man elitist. It got too crowded on the site for me, too much morbid curiosity. I left completely after Dakota went missing. But she might have exchanged intel with some of the other users.”
“Like who? I joined the site, so . . .”
If Boyd is surprised, he doesn’t show it. He gently strokes Yoda’s head with his finger. It’s barely visible between the folds of her skin. “Maybe Jojo666 or DocSherlock. They were online a lot.”
“Do you know anything about DocSherlock or Jojo?”
He shrugs. “Not really. Why?”
“That is exactly why. Dakota was talking to these people. And you. You were all complete strangers. Just names on a screen.”
“Welcome to the internet,” Boyd deadpans. But then he looks at me, sees my face, and his tone softens. “If it helps, they were both already on the site when I joined back in 2014.”
“So what are you planning to do with that?” I ask, gesturing to the DOGS folder.
“It’s yours if you want it. Just keep my name out of it, okay?” He clutches Yoda to him like a security blanket, and my therapist’s antennae prick.
“What are you so worried about?”
“Aside from your proclivity for weapons? The cops. They don’t take too kindly to guys like me meeting pretty teenage girls. Haven’t you ever seen To Catch a Predator?”
“Girls? Or girl?”
&
nbsp; “Girl. Singular. Jeez. Are you sure you’re a shrink, not a lawyer?”
“When it comes to my kid, I’m both.”
I wait for him to tell me I’m too late. But he only hands me the folder, cradling Yoda in the crook of his arm and nodding. “Fair enough. Hey, I want to show you something.”
Boyd cracks the basement door, and I shuffle out behind him. Now that Jeopardy! is on, Martha dozes, her head lolled to one side.
“I’m glad she’s asleep,” Boyd whispers. “She doesn’t like it when I bring Yoda upstairs.”
He pads down the hall, stopping short of the living room, and I nearly ram him from behind. I stifle a laugh, imagining Yoda, still coiled in a tight ball, flying through the air and landing squarely on Martha’s lap.
“This is Miriam,” he says, pointing to a framed photograph hanging on the wall. In it, two girls pose in front of a picnic table. “And my mom.”
I move in closer, peering over his shoulder, and follow his finger as he speaks.
“And Bucky. The dog.”
Boyd’s mouth keeps moving, Martha’s snore rattling in the background. Yoda pushes her head out from between her coils and considers me. But I take it all in from somewhere else. Somewhere far away and long ago.
In a place where I had a basset hound named Roscoe.
A mutt I called Waggles.
A bulldog, Rex.
And before them all, my very first dog, a collie my father had named Rambo before I’d even arrived at Mol’s. I’d called him Sambo instead. A collie that looked just like Bucky.
****
“One more question,” I tell Boyd, his VW idling in my driveway, his headlights glowing like cat eyes against the dark house. “Do you know Dakota’s password?”
He frowns. “You don’t believe me? About the message?”
“I just . . . I’d like to read what she wrote to you. To everyone. It may sound silly, but it makes me feel like she’s not so far gone.”
“The site requires a password change every ninety days, so the old one—whatever it was—would be disabled by now.”
“What about her password recovery phrase? His wings are clipped . . .”
Boyd takes his cell phone from his pocket. “You really don’t know?”
Shadows Among Us Page 22
