Read The Girl in the Woods Online

Authors: David Jack Bell

The Girl in the Woods (2 page)

BOOK: The Girl in the Woods
13.09Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
"Mrs. Todd..."
"Kay. Call me Kay."
"Kay." Diana couldn't avoid the heavy odor of fried food and greasy meat, and against her will, her stomach rumbled. "I have somewhere to be soon, so if you have something to tell me, you should hurry up."
"Everyone's always in a hurry, aren't they?"
"You brought me here," Diana said, but she saw something in Kay's eyes, a hard edge that hadn't been there before, and Diana wondered about the layers that were concealed within this woman.
"People don't really know about patience, do they Diana? Not like you and certainly not like me."
"I don't follow you—"
"Just listen to what I have to say," she said.
Diana had known women like Kay Todd her whole life. She had grown up around them. Her mother was one of those women. They loved to the best of their abilities, and they lived their lives in apartment complexes or trailer parks, scraping by on Social Security or disability, holding the pieces together as best they could long after the men in their lives had gone away or had the good sense to die. Diana knew Kay Todd had a story to tell, and more than likely it was going to be a sad story. She braced herself.
"My Margie was a student here at Fields University. She worked to pay her way through school and got a little financial aid as well. I helped her when I could, but I didn't have much. And I had another daughter at home. My husband died when Margie was eight."
She paused. Diana recognized her cue.
"I'm sorry," she said.
"That's okay. He was a good man. The only bad thing he ever did to me was die. A heart attack in the bathtub. He was thirty-eight. But we did our best, and like I said, Margie made it to college. She wasn't the best student in the world, but she got Bs and Cs. She was going to graduate. No one else in our family had ever graduated college. No one else had even so much as gone. Then during her last year, Margie dropped out. She decided she didn't like her major, didn't think she was learning anything. She was studying communications but decided that she might want to be a nurse or a social worker. Something that might make a difference, you know?"
Diana nodded. "I'm familiar with the impulse."
"So she quit school. She rented a room down here on Poplar Street and went to work for a cleaning service, cleaning people's houses. Rich people's houses."
She nearly spit when she spoke the last line.
"And you didn't like that she dropped out?" Diana said.
"I wasn't thrilled. I tried not to say anything about it, but I couldn't keep my mouth shut. That's always been my problem. I told her that I thought she was making a mistake, that she should just gut it out and finish that last semester. It was too important to throw all that money and time away so late in the game. She didn't take that very well. She said some awful things to me. She told me that since I'd never been to college and didn't even know anyone who had been to college that I didn't have any right to say anything. She was right, of course. I didn't really have any right. I guess I've come to realize that it's not that unusual to take time off."
"It's not," Diana said.
"We had that blow up when she was home for Christmas. I told her I loved her when she left, but things were icy between us. We didn't talk much. And I was wrapped up in my own life. Daphne, my other daughter, was in high school then. I was working full-time."
"And that's the last time you saw her? At Christmas break?"
Kay nodded. She recited the facts so well that it was obvious to Diana she had spent a lot of time thinking them over. "She disappeared one night in March. That's the last time she was seen. It was a cool night, cloudy, and Margie left her room around eleven o'clock. One of the neighbors saw her on the stairs. She took just enough money for cigarettes and left her wallet, her ID, clothes and everything else behind. She didn't even bring her glasses. We know she made it to the store because the clerk remembered waiting on her. He recognized her from a picture. But she never made it back to her room. Somewhere between the store and her room, she disappeared. Right there on Poplar Street. Nobody saw or heard a thing, according to the police."
Despite the hot coffee, Diana felt a cold tingle at the back of her neck. Stories of young women disappearing always had that effect on her.
"I've never heard of her." Diana leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms, looking for added warmth. Something about Kay Todd was bothering her. Not only did she speak with the central Ohio twang that Diana had grown up hearing and had tried to purge from her own mouth, but she also possessed the small-town, Midwestern habit of circling around a topic without ever really arriving at it. Diana knew there was something she wasn't being told, that there were layers to this story that were only going to be revealed after extensive peeling. "Kay, what year are we talking about?"
"Again with the hurry." Kay smiled, but there was no warmth in her eyes. "Does it really matter what year it happened? My daughter is gone, and no one has been able to tell me what happened to her. The police say they don't have a single clue. Not a single lead. No blood. No physical evidence. Nobody heard a scream or a struggle. They say she most likely ran away. Probably sounds familiar to you, doesn't it? The things these cops say?"
Diana started to get the feeling that their conversation wasn't leading in the direction that she originally suspected, that Kay Todd hadn't sought her our because of her connection to the police department but because of something else. And that uncertainty, that lack of confidence in the direction of the conversation, made her uneasy.
"What year are we talking about, Kay?"
"1984. March of 1984."
"Twenty-five years?"
"Twenty-five and a half," Kay said. "You probably weren't even born then, were you?"
"No, I wasn't."
"It feels like a lifetime since I saw her. A couple of lifetimes."
"So why are you bringing it up now?" Diana asked.
"I have lung cancer. Inoperable. The doctor says eight months, maybe a year. My other daughter, Daphne, died two years ago. Ovarian cancer. It runs in our family apparently. My mother died of it, too."
"I'm sorry," Diana said again. She sometimes felt as though it was all she could say to the Kay Todds of the world.
I'm sorry
. Sorry for the hand they'd been dealt, sorry that the world isn't fair, sorry that whatever god hands out the breaks and the advantages hands them out with all the care and foresight of an overgrown, temperamental child.
I'm sorry
.
"I want to know something before I go. I want to know what happened to my Margie. For a long time, I thought she was still alive. I believed it. I could feel it in my heart. Lately, I'm not so sure. I don't feel her anymore the way I used to. The way I always did, since I carried her inside me." She licked her lips. "Do you still feel your sister, Diana? Do you still think she's alive?"
The cold sensation at the base of Diana's skull spread down her spine and radiated through her body. She let her hands drop to the top of the table.
"Why did you say that? Why did you bring up my sister?"
"You didn't answer my question," Kay said.
Diana studied the old woman's face, which no longer looked as helpless as it had in the parking lot. Her withered, wizened features and watery eyes looked like a mask, one that hid some deeper motivation Diana couldn't begin to understand.
"You have no right to say that," Diana said. "You have no right to talk about her."
Kay brought out a cigarette and lighted it, ignoring the posted No Smoking sign above their table. She blew a plume of smoke up toward the fluorescent lights and leveled her gaze at Diana.
"I want to help you, Diana," she said. "But you have to help me first."
"How can you help me?"
Kay held up her hand, a request for Diana's silence. "I want you to find out what happened to Margie." Her eyes were pleading again, but her jaw was set tight. "I need you to."
"It's been too long. Twenty-five years is too much time. Seventy-two hours is too long in a case like this."
"Find her," Kay said. "Find her and I can tell you what happened to your sister."
Diana made a quick, instinctual grab for Kay's right arm. She gripped the old woman just above the wrist, felt the bone just beneath the papery flesh, and in the process knocked her coffee mug to the floor where it shattered.
"Don't," Kay said.
Diana looked down and saw the lighted cigarette poised above the back of her hand, the tip burning an inch above her flesh.
Diana let go.
Kay didn't rub her arm, didn't give Diana the satisfaction of thinking she had hurt her. She took another drag while the waitress returned and asked if everything was okay.
Diana looked and saw the old-timers staring at them, their faces impassive, but inside, they were no doubt thrilled to have this display of female emotion, something to chew over in the days to come.
"We're fine," Kay said, without taking her eyes off Diana. "It's a family matter."
The waitress looked them both over, then left without cleaning up the mess. When she was gone, Diana said, "You don't know anything about Rachel. You don't know anything about me."
Kay used her saucer as an ashtray and stubbed the cigarette out. "I've been waiting a long time, longer than you. I have more at stake here. Find out what happened to her, and then I'll tell you what you want to know." She scooted back from the table, gathered her purse and stood up. "Do you mind paying for the coffee?"
She didn't wait for Diana's response, and Diana wasn't sure she could have given one anyway. She sat at the table, the broken crockery and spilled coffee at her feet, and watched Kay Todd walk away.
CHAPTER THREE
Roger waited until sunset to bury the girl.
Even though he wouldn't be seen in the woods, he still waited until the sun was falling, the shadows slanting through the thick trees, elongating their shapes across the ground until it seemed they stretched for miles.
But Roger didn't want to wait too long. He had a lot of digging ahead of him.
The girl's death had been a terrible one. At first, Roger thought she was faking. She complained about the pain in her abdomen for weeks, even going so far as refusing to eat, and it put him in mind of the days when she had first come to live with him and refused to eat, a spoiled child throwing a tantrum. But her complaints didn't end. They only grew worse. She started losing weight. She vomited during the night. Her skin turned yellow, her eyes developed dark circles beneath them like someone had punched her...
Roger hadn't punched her.
He hadn't punched her since those first days, back when she cried all the time and refused to eat. He didn't like punching the girl because it only made her cry more, but eventually she stopped crying and started eating, and their life settled into a routine and it felt like he was home again.
And everything was great, for years and years, until she got sick.
And when she died, he had to take her to the woods.
His father had warned him about it. When he was a child, they hunted the woods near their house, land that had been in the family for close to two hundred years. They navigated the narrow trails, hunting deer mostly, but if need be, settling for squirrel or opossum. He cherished those times, learning at his father's side, and he looked back on them now and missed their simplicity, the clear-cut sense of belonging he felt. His dad was the boss. He did whatever his dad told him to do. And his dad told him to stay away from the clearing a mile behind their house.
"Why, Daddy?"
"Just stay away."
"There are probably deer there. Lots of them."
"There ain't nothing there," his dad said. "Nothing you ever want to see."
So he stayed away, as best he could. But when he grew older and started hunting on his own, he would find himself coming near the place, his body drawn in that direction as though by an invisible force. And that's what he remembered most of all, that sense of not having any choice.
BOOK: The Girl in the Woods
13.09Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Los huesos de Dios by Leonardo Gori
Toxic Secrets by Jill Patten
Who Rules the World? by Noam Chomsky
Love Takes the Cake by Betsy St. Amant
Always Leave ’Em Dying by Richard S. Prather
Strip Jack by Ian Rankin
The Freak Observer by Blythe Woolston