Too Close to Home (15 page)

L
ater that night, I phoned my sister.

I waited late enough that I knew she’d be home, then dialed the number of the little coach house where she lived.

“How can I trust you after what you did tonight?” I said as soon as she answered.

Her voice was sweet and whispery, her response pure innocence. But she knew exactly what I was angry about.

“What did I do?” she asked, and then proceeded to answer her own question. “I welcomed a poor, scared woman to the Cherokee Rose. I took care of her. And she liked me, Brooke. Just as I knew she would. So why should you be upset? Gran and Aunt Lucy weren’t.”

Though I knew it wasn’t necessary, I explained myself.

“At lunch, you told us that the hotel’s guests didn’t really interest you. All you wanted to do, you said, was to visit the dining room in your capacity as chef. Introduce yourself. Ask
folks how they liked their food. Gran, Aunt Lucy and I agreed to that.
You
agreed to that.”

I paused, giving her an opportunity to apologize for that evening’s deliberate interaction with Jackie and the Underground. I wanted her to tell me that she’d made a mistake. That it wouldn’t be repeated.

But the moment was filled with the silence I’d expected. Her lack of remorse strengthened my determination to follow through on the strategy I’d come up with during the long drive home. Even if Katie had nothing to do with the remains I’d found near Camp Cadiz, I had to expose the rage she kept so well hidden from Gran and Aunt Lucy. Before someone got hurt. I intended to make my sister angry. Irrationally angry. With the one person who could control her.

Me.

“You lied to us,” I said.

My tone made it an accusation, which she dismissed.

“
That
was your fault,” she said. “I was trying to make you happy. To do what you wanted. And I really thought that I could be patient for a while longer.”

My sister’s voice grew bitter.

“But you left me behind again. Like always. While you went with Gran and Aunt Lucy. On
Underground business.
No one had to tell me—I knew it was an extraction. So it’s like I told you, Brooke,
before
lunch. I’m part of this family and I
will
be part of the Underground. You saw how happy I made Gran and Aunt Lucy tonight. You may not like it, but it’s pretty clear that
you
can’t stop me.”

“Oh yes, I can,” I said. “Because—”

Then it was my turn to lie. To myself, because I still believed that I could expose my sister’s anger and not become
its victim. And to Katie who, earlier that day, had unwittingly given me the means to provoke her.

“—because I know your secret.”

She didn’t call my bluff. Didn’t demand that I tell her what, exactly, I knew. Or how, exactly, I’d found out. She didn’t laugh at me or challenge me or deny having a secret.

What she did say made my blood run cold.

“If you tell,” she whispered, “I’ll kill you.”

Then she hung up on me.

Soon after that, I tried to sleep.

A hopeless undertaking.

I tossed and turned, solving no problems, gaining no insight, but compounding my fears. A few hours passed, leaving me more exhausted than when I’d crawled into my bed. Leaving me at a point of frustration and tears, where life seemed hopeless and problems insurmountable.

Tears never solved anything. That’s what Gran always said.

In my experience, she was right.

I resisted the urge to call Chad just to hear his voice. And pushed away a too vivid memory of the last night we’d spent together. The night he’d cuddled me in his arms, pressed his lips to the top of my head, gently wiped the tears from my cheeks. Asking no questions. Simply offering quiet comfort and a willingness to listen. Should I choose to speak. To tell him what was wrong.

I’d answered his love with my silence.

That thought chased me from my bed.

I wrapped myself in a sheet, grabbed my pillow, and padded through the dark and silent house, seeking the company of an old companion. Highball didn’t stir when I settled down next to his bed and stroked my fingers through
his thick, warm fur. And, though he was sleeping, I told him how I felt. As I had since I was a child.

I told him how frustrated and angry and hurt I was. How tired I was and how very lonely. How desperately I missed Chad. And loved my sister. And hated her. How I feared that another dreadful secret might be lurking in her past. And feared that Aunt Lucy and Gran had given her an opportunity to unleash violence in the future. But if I cried, they were silent tears. Unwitnessed and easily denied.

After a while, I leaned back against the kitchen door with one of my legs still touching the cushion where the old dog sprawled. I listened to the sounds of his deep, regular breathing.

At some point, I slept.

I dreamed that I searched alone through a forest and found a place where ancient trees pushed upward from stagnant water. Above me, dark-feathered turkey vultures gathered in the branches. They twisted their ruddy, cadaverous heads as they followed my movements with glittering eyes.

I walked carefully along the mud-slick shore, anxiously searching the water’s surface, indifferent to the sinuous passage of snakes and the twisting larvae of unborn insects. I had hidden it well, I told myself.

Above me, I heard flapping and rustling, so I looked up into the trees. The birds were drawing closer, smiling down at me. I looked away from them, back out into the swamp. And saw what I had most feared. Bobbing just above the water was the roof of a passenger van, its corroded surface draped with duck weed and covered in slime.

I have to move it, I told myself.

My clothes fell away from me and, for a moment, I stood naked in the moonlight. Then I walked slowly into the water.

Above me, the birds screamed their approval.

Soon the brackish water covered my head, filled my mouth and nose and lungs. But that didn’t matter because I knew I was among the dead. A forest of twisted human skeletons greeted me, their skulls and torsos impaled by the tree roots, their ivory hands and bony fingers floating loose and pointing the way.

She was still trapped inside the van. Where I had left her. But she’d shed her blanket and the crushing weight of the rocks I’d placed on her. She’d moved into the front seat, locked her hands around the steering wheel. And all around her, like holiday streamers, pale ribbons of waxen flesh floated gently on the current. Above the dark hole of her mouth, her colorless eyes were wide open, staring forward, trying in vain to find her way home.

When she saw me, she pushed the van door open. Caught my hand with bony fingers and urged me inside.

I followed willingly, took her place behind the wheel, touched my foot to the accelerator.

The car drifted forward into a narrow shaft of greenish light that penetrated the watery tomb. It skimmed along one of my passenger’s rotting cheeks and exposed razor teeth lurking within the rictus of her smile.

The corpse wore my sister’s face.

I panicked.

I pushed the door open, kicked outward, then upward. Away from the horror. Away from the danger. Back into the air.

Suddenly, I was breathing again.

I swam to the shore, lay there naked with my face in the mud. Gasping, crying, knowing that I had failed. I would go back, I told myself. Before it was too late. But some impulse made me roll over before I had strength enough to stand.

I looked up into a circle of rustling wings and cadaverous
faces. Up into beady, red-rimmed eyes that glittered with anticipation. Then broad wings blotted out the sky and pain lanced through my neck as they crowded forward. A heartbeat later, and the carrion eaters’ hooked yellow beaks were tipped with bits of flesh and crimson.

I awakened with a crick in my neck and a scream on my lips.

A nasty night.

A morning that begged for buttered toast and comforting ritual.

Almost every morning, I made wheat toast for Highball and me. Butter on his. Butter and something sweet on mine. What had started as a girl’s indulgence of a too-thin stray had evolved into a predictable moment for an adult at the start of almost every day.

In years past, I’d bring Highball in from his kennel in the barn before dropping his two slices of bread into a squatty aluminum toaster. He would pace the kitchen floor until, cued by the sound of the toast popping up, he would race to my side, tail wagging expectantly, watching intently as I slathered one piece of toast with butter, then put the other on top.

Now, as I had for many months, I dropped his toast sandwich into the dish beside his bed in the kitchen.

“There you go, Highball, baby.”

He raised his head and tipped it to one side, as if digging through memory for the meaning of the familiar sounds. Old age was robbing him of memory and vitality. Failing eyesight had made him cautious. He waited, relying on his other senses to provide more information, to give him a reason to expend precious energy.

I counted the seconds until he registered the smell. One,
two, three. Four, five, six. Seven, eight, nine. Ten. Ten seconds before he sighed and slowly stood. He stretched, stepped away from his cushion and lowered his grizzled muzzle into the bowl. Eating was accompanied by the slow back and forth swing of a curly tail. Happiness, if not enthusiasm.

A week earlier, it had taken him only five seconds to remember the joys of buttered toast. A few weeks before that, only two. And earlier, in his prime, Highball could have located toast from several miles off.

I glanced at the percolator, noted that the coffee bubbling into the glass knob on its lid was nearly the proper shade of brown, and dropped a single piece of bread into the toaster for me.

Out in the yard, Possum began barking and howling, demanding my attention, demanding his breakfast. More than any of the other puppies I had looked at two years earlier, he’d had the best combination of instinct, intelligence and remarkable sense of smell. Possum had the potential to be better at his job than Highball ever was. He had a level of energy that Highball had never achieved and, for the promise of a tennis ball, would do whatever was asked of him. Highball’s only goal in life was to please me and, for that reason alone, he had excelled at search-and-rescue.

Possum could never replace Highball as my companion.

Pity, more for myself than the elderly dog, was interrupted by the smell of smoke. I turned away from my contemplation of Highball and saw that the toaster was smoking. Fire, fueled by my toast, licked up the blue-and-white gingham curtains covering the nearby window.

I yanked the toaster’s plug from the wall, then doused the growing flames with the liquid nearest at hand—the entire contents of my coffeepot. Then I followed up by yanking the
still-smoldering curtains from the window, dropping them in the sink and soaking them with water.

When I was sure the fire was out, I looked at Highball.

In the old days, he would have been underfoot, excited by the smoke and activity, frantic to help or protect me.

He had returned to his cushion and was almost asleep.

After cleaning up the disaster in my kitchen, I didn’t bother searching for an alternative to toast or making myself another pot of coffee. I pulled on jeans, hiking boots and a hot-pink T-shirt—not a fashion statement, but a color that would make it easy for Chad to see me when we were down in the ravine. Then I drove to Statler’s seeking caffeine, carbohydrates, conversation and another tankful of gas.

The first thing I noticed when I pulled into the filling station was a colorful poster that completely blocked one of the filling station’s big plate-glass windows. Hand-drawn palm trees, pink flamingos and stylized blue waves surrounded a cartoon drawing of a black man in an apron and a chef’s hat. Beetle brows and a gold-toothed grin suggested the character was Ed. Emerging from his mouth was a comic-style text balloon.

The Missus Is On Vacation, it read. No Ham And Beans On Wednesday. Come On In For Ed’s Special Jamaican Pork On A Bun.

When I pushed the door open, I discovered that my hot-pink shirt blended in nicely with the filling station’s new decor. And amusement chased away the bleakest of my thoughts.

A Beach Boys tune was playing over the store’s speaker system.

Throughout Statler’s Fill-Up, pink flamingo yard ornaments roosted on all of the horizontal surfaces—floor, shelves,
counter and tables. And a mounted swordfish—one that I recalled his missus wouldn’t allow in the house—was hung in a place of honor above the beer cooler.

The counter area was furnished like a party-store version of a beachcomber’s hut. An eight-foot-tall inflatable palm tree shaded the filled doughnut tray from the fluorescent lights overhead. A fisherman’s net hung from the ceiling, weighed down by the catch of the day—shells, bits of driftwood and loops of colorful Mardi Gras beads. Obstructing the narrow cigarette shelves on the wall behind the counter was a bamboo-framed photograph, blown up to heroic proportions, of Ed standing on a beach.

But the store’s decor paled by comparison to Ed’s outfit. A parade of tiny pink flamingos marched along the hem of a lemon-yellow shirt. Below the shirt were brown surfer’s shorts trimmed with stylized yellow and pink waves and palm trees. Ed’s grizzled hair was covered with a hot-pink silk ball cap with a hooked brown bill that suggested a flamingo’s beak.

I could practically see the laughter bubbling up inside Ed as the filling station’s heavy glass door swung shut behind me. As he struggled to keep his laughter from escaping, his lips compressed, the edges of his mouth tipped down and his eyebrows slanted up over his dark eyes.

Traffic stops pretty much ensured that I was confronted daily by the absolutely ridiculous or the totally improbable. So I’d had plenty of practice keeping a straight face. I used that job skill now as I lifted my hand palm out and splayed my fingers in an exaggerated attempt to shield my eyes from the bright colors. Then I dropped my mirrored sunglasses back down on my nose and made a show of sniffing the air.