by Ben Farthing
“She was planning a vacation to New York in December. Broadway and bookstores, she kept telling me. That was going to be her first ‘grown-up’ vacation.”
“She moved it up.”
“She would have told me.” Cessy touched his arm. It was thicker than when she was young, muscles grown through manual labor. “Dad. Jackson was calling her. Please believe me.”
“Of course I believe you.” Dad stared above Cessy’s eyes as he spoke. He took on a terse tone. “I can listen to reason. Sounds like Kate ran off with Jackson somewhere. He called her up and wooed her, like when they were teenagers. She ran off to meet him somewhere. Maybe New York. He probably never even showed up, and she’s on her way back to her apartment right now.”
He smiled. This story he’d just invented, he liked that more than the other options he’d been considering. Was it not Jackson that worried him? Was it something else about Kate being in Hamlin?
Cessy wanted to pick apart his claims, force him to be honest, but exhaustion slowed her thinking. “Wait. Is Jackson missing, too?”
Dad nodded. “Gordon said he hasn’t seen his boy since last week. Olivia’s worried sick.” His eye twitched, and he stared at his plate.
Cessy leaned down, trying to look him in the eyes. “You sound unsure. If Jackson’s missing, why didn’t you say that a minute ago? You’re dodging the facts so much you’re changing your story.”
Shuffling from the living room.
Mom stood in her nightgown, which hung loose around her diminutive form. She had curlers in her gray hair. She covered a yawn. “I saw Jackson walking the trails last week. What do you mean he’s missing?”
Dad’s lips tightened. He shook his head at Mom. “All I know is what Gordon told me.”
Mom shuffled over to embrace Cessy. “When did you get here, sweetie?” She’d worn so much rose-scented perfume over the years that it had bonded with her skin. “What are you two talking about so serious? Mornings are for reflection and calm.”
Cessy caught her up on Kate’s disappearance.
Mom furrowed her brow, looking at Dad, who refused to meet her gaze.
“She’s fine, I’m sure she is,” said Mom. “If she drove down to talk to Jackson, it was to tell him to stop calling. She wouldn’t get involved with vermin like that.”
Cessy’s tired mind grew frustrated. “Hold on. Is Jackson in town or isn’t he?”
“If your father says Mr. Wilder says he’s missing, then he’s probably missing. Maybe I saw someone else. Mike Redding looks a little like Jackson. Same mustache. Lordy, can you imagine, I think I said ‘Hi Jackson’ to little Mike Redding. I need to call his mother and apologize.” She went back to the living room. The phone clicked off the receiver.
Cessy took another bite of egg, now cold. This conversation had been as useless as interrogations usually went. More confusing, though. Mom and Dad were saying whatever came to mind without bothering to be consistent.
Dad crunched on his toast.
Cessy had wanted him to share the burden of finding Kate. He was their Dad. Sure, they argued. Terribly, when she was a teenager. But he loved her. He was proud of her career. Once he accepted that Pat wouldn’t be supplying any grandchildren, he hated the man more loudly than Cessy did. His occasional bullheadedness should not extend to his younger daughter going missing.
And Mom? Her decades as a therapist helped her flow with any situation. When her practice went under, she never ignored that it was happening. She watched the numbers sink deeper into the red, and then pulled the plug and retired. It didn’t make sense for her to deny that Kate was missing. Maybe it was her deference to Dad keeping her quiet.
She needed to get Mom alone. If she waited until Dad left for his handyman tasks, she and Kate had perfected getting what they wanted from Mom.
She scooted her chair out. It screeched on the floor.
“You okay, honey?”
“I’m going to go lie down in my old room, if that’s okay. I drove all night.”
“Of course. If I’m not off cutting down trees when you wake up, we can drive over to Gordon’s after you rest your eyes. He might know where Jackson and Kate ran off to.”
Cessy walked upstairs.
9
Cessy went to Kate’s room.
The twin bed’s purple comforter was tucked firmly beneath the mattress. A half empty bookshelf in the corner; Kate had taken all the books she cared about. Board games on another shelf--games Kate enjoyed enough to buy a copy for Mom and Dad, so they could play as a family at holidays.
Cessy sat at the desk under the back window. She’d given it to Kate before she moved away.
Cessy had been nineteen. Kate was in kindergarten. The desk was too big for her, but she clapped and jumped when Cessy said she could have it. Dad said he’d later found Kate sitting crosslegged on the desktop, hunched over a coloring book.
Kate had wanted to be just like Cessy, even when her friends repeated the rumors about Cessy from their parents. Kate never saw the people Cessy had hurt as a teenager. She only saw the fun grownup who visited every month and brought gifts from the big city.
A plastic replica of the Lincoln Memorial sat on the desk. Cessy picked it up. Kate had rubbed the paint off the sides from handling it so much.
When Kate was seven, Mom and Dad took her to visit Cessy in D.C. Cessy’d been working as a federal security guard. After a weekend of museums, monuments, and restaurants, Kate kissed Cessy’s cheek and said, “I know you’re the best policeman because you love me.”
Sitting in her baby sister’s room now, Cessy tapped the badge on her belt. She’d gone back to school, then applied for the force, and now sixteen years later was a detective because her seven-year-old sister saw her as more than she was.
By the time Kate turned thirteen, her respect for her big sister had plummeted. Kate came into her cheery, happy self. She noticed that Cessy didn’t smile all the time. By middle school, Kate knew all about Cessy’s reputation, and she overcompensated to be different. A smile for everyone she passed. “Sir” or “Ma’am,” for every adult. “Sweetie” for every little kid.
Cessy normally hated people like that, but Kate was family. And she was genuine. She didn’t overcompensate superficially in order to build a different reputation--she was making up for the damage Cessy had done.
That’s what she yelled at Cessy one summer vacation when Cessy teased too hard about being a goody-two-shoes.
Cessy backed off and learned to appreciate Kate for who she was. The world needed aggressively loving people. But that emotional distance made Cessy powerless when Jackson showed up.
Cessy imagined Kate saw a careless bully and thought she could change him. Maybe she thought she was saving Hamlin from another Cessy. Just as likely, she fell for the bad boy with the cool truck. For three years, Cessy tried to warn her. Kate would stop answering her calls, so Cessy would drop it for months at a time, then come back to it.
Mom and Dad wouldn’t listen.
Kate’s smile became less genuine. Jackson was an ass. Rich, compared to his classmates. He thought he was doing Kate a favor by dating her, and he let her know it. By the time Kate left for college, she was withdrawn, and saw herself as worthless.
Cessy was thrilled when Kate chose American University. She helped her move, bought her dorm furniture, and showed her the hippest restaurants so Kate could impress her new friends. It only took a few weeks for Kate to rediscover her confidence.
When Kate called her sobbing that she’d broken up with Jackson, Cessy had never been so happy.
Cessy stood up from the desk.
It was five years later. Two college degrees, her dream career as a tenant’s rights advocate, a close knit circle of likeminded friends, and Kate still came racing back when Jackson called.
Cessy remembered Landis’ overly compassionate warning: if she came willingly.
Fear for her baby sister threatened to overtake her.
Cessy wasn’t read
y to confront it. She hurried out of Kate’s room.
Dishes clanged from downstairs. Dad was still here.
Cessy went into her old room to lie down until he left. Then she’d get some answers from Mom.
10
Cessy woke to a pinprick of pain on her ankle.
Sunlight seeped through blue curtains, which covered the one window in the claustrophobic bedroom.
Cessy lied on a twin bed, atop the potato sack comforter, still in her clothes. A white painted dresser squatted next to the door. A matching bookshelf served as a nightstand.
Sunlight filtered through the curtains to taint the white furniture with a sickly blueish gray.
Pain pricked the top of her foot.
Groggy, she swatted at it. Probably a mosquito. She suddenly remembered the black widow spiders that often took up residence in the crawlspace.
Something light brushed up her ankle.
She jolted up. Swatted at the cuffs of her jeans. The tingling wrapped around her calf, circled her knee, then was gone.
She smacked her jeans, determined to crush whatever it was before it bit again. If it was a black widow, she’d have to drive thirty minutes to the hospital. Back over the mountain, so more like an hour. Wasted time that she wasn’t looking for Kate.
She took off her jeans and turned them inside-out. No spiders, squashed or otherwise.
She shook the comforter. Nothing. She leaned over the side of the bed.
There.
Eyes still heavy with sleep, she spotted a black dot gliding across the carpet. Not black, a deep violet. She didn’t see a red hourglass, but her eyes were still groggy. She needed a closer look.
She rubbed goop out of her eyes. The dark speck slid towards the closed door.
When Cessy was a child, she’d play in the creek that ran behind the Post Office. She watched the fingernail-sized waterbugs swim across the water’s surface, legs invisible underneath so they looked like their namesakes: boatmen.
She thought of that now as she watched the dark dot that had tickled her ankles glide across the carpet. She couldn’t see any legs. She told herself it was due to the unnatural lighting, or her groggy eyes. Even still, it didn’t bump and judder like a beetle as its six legs launched it forward. It slid like a boatman from the creek behind the Post Office.
And there was something else strange about it. The way the light hit it. Too much shadow. As it if weren’t on top of the carpet, but a pencil-eraser-sized hole within.
Last night, Valerie had said she was afraid of bugs being holes.
It disappeared under the door.
Cessy flopped out of bed. Sweat dried on her bare legs. Her shirt hung heavy and damp. She probably still had half-decayed leaves down her shirt from Valerie’s shack. She needed a shower.
But right now, she wanted to see the violet pest that had woken her. It couldn’t have been a moving hole. Maybe her exhaustion had recreated the delusions that Valerie had put in her head.
She opened the door. The hallway was a corridor of uniform closed doors. Two more bedrooms, a bathroom, and a linen closet. A tiny blur in the stairway to her right.
Still with its gliding movements, the speck slipped down the stairway wall. It glided over high school portraits of Cessy and Kate. The inch-thick frames didn’t slow the thing, even for a moment.
Cessy chased it downstairs.
“Cessy?” Mom called from behind her closed bedroom door.
Around the corner, the living room. Cessy took in the room’s clutter all at once, a panoramic focus waiting for movement. Late morning sunshine poured in through the front windows. It pierced a glass Nutcracker ballet. The Rat King and Sugarplum Fairy cast twinkling sunbeam ribbons across the carpet, coffee table, and bric-a-brac.
Under the coffee table. The dot moved through a glimmering sunbeam. It shrank within the light to the size of a pinhead. Darted up the inside of the table leg.
Cessy stepped over to the table. She carefully flipped it onto its side, straining with the weight. The edges of the thick tabletop had barely been sanded, leaving an uncomfortable grip. The legs and frame were built from a dark red wood with tight grain patterns, an odd contrast to the pale top with wide, looping grain.
She braced herself and lifted the heavy table once more to flip it fully upside-down.
In the corner, a patchwork of holes. They varied in diameter from a freshly-sharpened pencil, to a pencil eraser. Looked like insect damage, but Cessy didn’t know enough to guess termites or ants or worms.
She waited for one to move.
She laughed at herself. Grogginess had blurred her vision and her thinking. Valerie’s delusions had latched hold for a few seconds, that was all.
With the flashlight from her phone, Cessy peered into the holes. Too narrow to hold her phantom bug. Unless bugs could squeeze through spaces tinier than their bodies. Which they probably could, now that she thought about it.
Her flashlight only revealed that the tight tunnels curved upon entry into the wood. Cessy took another look around the room. A cuckoo clock ticked from the wall. It was juxtaposed between a blurry Monet print of a harbor, and an airbrushed print of high definition Jesus holding smiling babies on his lap.
She tapped her fingernail on the table. Her insect--that’s what it was--had either buried itself in the table, or scuttled away into the chaos of her parents’ living room.
She scratched at her ankle and foot. She couldn’t see anywhere the skin was broken, although in two spots, it was pink and mildly swollen. Probably not anything dangerous, or the bite itself would be visible.
Cessy checked the time. Nearly eleven.
She’d slept too long. But four hours gave her enough rest to function. She headed to the bathroom to wash off a day’s worth of sweat and grime. And hopefully wash away Valerie’s delusions. The thought of a tiny hole gliding through her skin made her shudder.
After her shower, she’d head out to get some answers.
Dad’s idea to visit Gordon Wilder wasn’t half bad. But first, she’d pay a visit to the man she’d tormented as a teenager: Sheriff Miller.
11
By the time Cessy showered and changed, Mom was in the kitchen filling the counter with lunches. A casserole version of Tex-Mex beans and rice, shoveled into sixteen washed-and-reused ziplock freezer bags. The radio was back on, and the same roundtable hosts were now sharing their favorite Hamlin memories.
“Christmas caroling up on Rag Hill,” opined the cheery woman.
Now that Cessy had Mom alone, maybe she could talk some sense into her. Cessy sat at the counter. “I’m worried about Kate.”
“I wish you wouldn’t be.” Mom plopped a spoonful of casserole into a bowl and set it in front of Cessy. “I’ve got to make my rounds delivering these, but your father should be back in an hour or so, and he’ll go with you to talk to Gordon. You’ll see that everything’s just fine.”
The dish smelled of cumin and canned enchilada sauce. It managed to taste both bland and spicy at once. “The old folks like this?”
Mom smirked. “They wouldn’t tell me if they didn’t. They’re always kind to me.”
Since Mom’s retirement from counseling, she’d been amused to take on “housewife duties” full time. Her decorating aesthetic led to the crowded knick-knacks in the living room, and her taste for cooking led to mediocre-but-palatable dishes like this. Her career helping others left a hole that she filled with a local version of Meals-on-Wheels.
“In fact,” Mom said, “it’s almost a miracle some of them still have a nice bone in their body. So many of their children turned out to be vermin.”
“Like me?” Cessy asked.
Mom laughed a little too hard, as if the idea scared her. “Heavens, no. We don’t always see eye-to-eye, but I know you’re trying to do the right thing.”
“Then like Jackson?” Cessy suggested. “Dad called him vermin.”
Mom piled her bags into a cardboard box. “You won’t get any gossip out
of me.”
“I need to find him. But you guys can’t decide whether he’s in town, missing, or out hiking.”
“He’s missing, just like your father said.”
Cessy quashed a flare of frustration. She spoke calmly. “Remember when I was worried that Pat was cheating on me? Before I found out for sure? You told me I was being paranoid.”
“I was wrong, and I’m sorry.”
“No, you’re fine. But after you said not to worry, you still talked me through how to deal with my worries. How to validate my fears, and have an open talk with Pat.”
Mom hugged Cessy. “I’m sorry I put you through that.”
“It was good. I’m asking you to do it again. I’m worried that Kate is missing. If you think I’m being paranoid, help me with what I should do next.”
Mom rubbed her fingers, probably used to fiddling with a pencil when she was running a therapy session. “Think about what’s causing you to worry.”
“Kate is missing.”
Mom shook her head. “I mean what’s going on in your life that’s causing you to project your fears onto your sister.”
“I haven’t heard from her for two weeks. She hasn’t been at work. She’s not at home. There’s voicemails from Jackson asking her to come to Hamlin.” Cessy left out the screeching phone call, and the references to emails that Landis was trying to access. “That’s what’s going on in my life.”
“Please don’t take that tone. You asked for my help.”
“Alright. I’ll play along. I’d like a promotion. My lieutenant is an ass. I’ve been divorced for three years, and haven’t been on a single date since. I can’t decide if I’m more afraid it’s because the stress eating is making my belly pudge out, or if it’s because fifteen years arresting scum has made me impossible to get along with.”
“Oh Cessy.” Mom went to hug her again. These were problems she could help with.
Cessy held her back. “Those problems haven’t changed for three years. My worries about Kate are new.”
