What We Lost in the Dark (14 page)

“Get your coat, Angela,” I said, “We’re going to the bakery.”

“Can I come?” my grandmother asked.

“Nope. She’s your daughter.”

Angie and I fled, but not before we heard my mother’s comment as she came back into the kitchen.

“At least the raccoons will dine well,” Mom said.

It was a great dinner. The next morning, I opened Mom’s big present to me. A dive camera.

It was December 29, a dark day with nothing going on.

My extended family had moved up to The Timbers, the big ski resort on Torch Mountain, where my mother’s other brother, Uncle Sean, with his new wife and new baby, would soon join the rest of us. This holiday was a splurge that was always on Grandma Mack’s dime: she loved to ski, and we did more night skiing than most families do in two years during those few days. I was a proficient skier, but Angela was a demon, soaring down the Black Diamond runs without benefit of poles. She literally had grown up on skis. Juliet had herself taught Angela, beginning when Angela was only four.

My mother was feeling festive and forgiving and only reminded me to hurry up and join them that night when I said I had some personal and private business to attend to. She assumed it had to do with Skyping Rob and repairing our breach. I only wished that were true.

Since Christmas Eve, although I couldn’t blame the stuffing, I had not been feeling my best. Headachy and shaky, I
found myself worrying as a second job, making lists of the way my grandmother could get mugged between her house and her car. This, I figured, was the debt from all those sleepless days. This score needed settling. I would expose Garrett Tabor.

For the first time since Rob and I broke up, I would sleep through the day knowing I’d repaid Juliet for her love. I would be able to tell Samantha Kelly Young’s family that her daughter had been found—and though their hearts would crack, they would have closure.

The night before, I’d called Wesley, who’d agreed to let me use his little inflatable Odyssey, as well as life jackets and gear. (He was headed out of town with one of the women he annoyingly called “ladies.”) I’d lied. I told him that I wasn’t planning any diving but wanted to take photos from a few hundred yards out on the lake, when everything was so quiet and still, with eighteen new inches of thick white powder having fallen daintily on Christmas Day. Because there was almost no wind, the cedars and pine were still festooned with frosting, perfect for black-and-white calendar quality shots I needed to complete for a photography class. Since I had keys to Rob’s Jeep, I decided to use that, rather than asking my mother to borrow her car.

MOM AND ANGELA dropped me off on their way up to the resort.

“Don’t get in any trouble,” Mom said. “And don’t worry about Rob. That will all heal over once he’s home.”

“I’m fine,” I told her, and, for the first time since our fight, we gave each other a hard hug.

When I arrived, the Tabor Oaks’ parking lot was deserted. But I still took the precaution of concealing the Jeep in a little off-road area. I didn’t want to risk dropping the keys in the
water, so I left the car unlocked, with the keys on the seat. No one would see it. Not one car had passed. With enormous satisfaction, I realized that, looking back, even with my headlamp turned up on high, I could barely make out the outlines of Rob’s car. Next to the car, on a tripod, I set up the camera Rob had bought for me, setting it to record five minutes of video every hour for the next four hours.

What had people done before time and date stamps? I could prove when I’d been here and what I’d found, so the links would be unbroken. I had clean copies of the maps Rob and I had made before our first free dive, so when I got out there, I would be able to orient myself easily. The little boat had two solid anchors. What I tried to think about the enormous risk of free diving alone … was nothing. As Wesley instructed, there was nothing I could think about that would do me any good. I was putting myself at risk, in a way that was terrifying. Not for the first time, I wished I’d learned to use SCUBA gear.

In the absence of that, I’d taken every safety precaution I could. I’d left my mother a note, letting her know I’d decided to go out on the lake to take pictures, in the impossible event that anything happened to me. I had my phone, fully charged, not that this would do me any good when I was forty feet under icy water. The immensity of the dark lake—no one was around, although the weather was forgiving for December. No one would hear me flail, or scream. No one would notice that dark blue little boat drifting, eventually losing its air, circling like a cork under the white eye of the moon. The big seawater. I could not crowd my head with all that lay beneath.

If I were lucky, I’d be down, get the photos, and be up again within minutes—home again for a hot shower and to tear that note into tiny pieces.

If I got unlucky—that didn’t bear thinking about. At least my mother wouldn’t be like the Youngs, and never know.

As I left the parking lot and hiked down to the little natural harbor where Wesley said he would leave the beached Odyssey, crazy things ballooned in my mind. It was as though I were asleep and dreaming, despite never having been more alert and awake.

What if the bodies were dummies? They could be faked. Anything could be faked.

The boathouse brides—why did I think of them this way?—in the caves seemed now to me like images from a Disney thrill ride.

I’d seen dead bodies before, but never so old and so macerated by their environment.

They had to be real.

But what if I was doing all this for nothing? What if they were old Halloween decorations?

As I checked out the equipment in the boat and slipped into the layer I would wear under my dry suit, I felt the imprint of my ring and the little pendant, on their chain next to my skin.

That wasn’t faked. I had seen that girl’s smiling face—her short, carefree curly hair.

I finished suiting up. I checked my long blade fins, my hood and gloves, my weight belt, my camera’s flash and housing, and the double clip that attached it to a harness I snapped around my chest.

You can be scared and still be doing the right thing.

With a penlight on a clipboard attached to the maps, I quietly motored out to where Rob and I had gone with Wesley.

Carefully, I slipped both anchors into the water and made
sure the boat was secure and would not drift. In the waterproof case I’d brought for this purpose, I stowed my phone and the clipboard. I breathed gently and centered myself as I secured my weight belt and fitted my mask, twice for safety.
Alexis
, I thought,
a prayer to the grown woman I will one day become, be with me. Rob and Juliet are with me. Protect me, and help me prevail
.

Then I dived.

I had luckily moored even closer to the ruins of the old boathouse in the cliff, because I saw it right away. Closer, I swam. There was the opening to the little man-made “cave,” that I now remembered looking like the doorway to some sort of elfin chapel. They were chained right inside the door.

Except they weren’t.

The chains were there.

Among the chains, tangled in their coils, there were a few bits of fabric, including what once might have been a shred of Samantha Kelly Young’s scarlet sweater. But the girls were gone.

He’d moved them. They had to be in one of these other pocked, small openings. But where? Who knew? Garrett Tabor could have come out here, at his leisure, in his own dry suit with ninety minutes of oxygen. He could have moved them one at a time. He could have brought a boat, a little inflatable or a big boat, and taken the brides up, wrapped them in sailcloth, just the way I’d seen him do with someone or something long ago. Perhaps he put them in his truck and buried them on a lonely hillside, deep among the thick trees? It wouldn’t have been difficult; they would not have been heavy. There was nothing left but rags.

Zeroing in on the piece of what looked like knitted cloth, I snapped ten pictures. I could not find even a strand of bright
blonde hair or a shred of bone. How could he have so thoroughly eliminated every trace of them? He was the medical examiner’s son, that’s how. He was a trained nurse. He knew how to clean up.

Could I have found the wrong part of the boathouse? I was sure I wasn’t wrong. It looked exactly the same as what I remembered from that night—but of course, that night had exploded in the terror of Rob’s faint and Tabor’s “rescue.”

I snapped more pictures.

Well, I had done it once. I was not uncomfortable, or panicky, only enraged.

I could do it again. If I had to, I’d learn how to use oxygen tanks and I’d search.

At that moment, a big shadow passed overhead. At first I thought, oh hell, that’s the legendary ten-foot-long sturgeon. But the shadow wasn’t fast moving. It was broad and flat. No! It had to be the little boat. The boat was drifting. I had to get up there, and fast, or I’d find myself stranded three hundred yards from shore and lose Wesley’s boat on top of it.

With prudent speed (I couldn’t risk the bends), stopping every three feet for a couple of seconds to clear my ears, I made my way through the darkness toward that shadow. When I broke the surface, I put my hands out for the ladder. There it was—but the boat was bigger, more solid than the little Odyssey.

A strong hand grabbed my dive hood, ripping it from my head.

“Little Allie,” said Garrett Tabor. “Happy New Year.”

On instinct, I kicked away from his boat: small and sleek with a little outboard motor. He easily kept up with me, smiling, casually swiping at me with one of the oars, aiming for the back of my head and hitting me hard on the shoulder.

I shrieked into my mask, and then shook it off. I kept stroking.

He could have killed me right then, pulled a gaff hook from the bottom of that boat and put it through my head and watched me spiral down with a ribbon of my blood trailing. Instead, he stood up and drew the oar up over his head. He would like it, I thought, if it looked as though I’d hit my head and drowned.

The beach was directly to my left. The rocks were in front of me.

I reached up, flipped my headlamp off, and dived.

The one thing Garrett Tabor didn’t count on, as he tried to follow me, was that I could hold my breath for a very long time.

Shedding my fear like a layer of ice, I clasped my hands over my camera and scissored toward the rocks that made the natural shoulders of the little beach where Wesley had wound one of the lines from the Odyssey around a round boulder. When my gloved hands touched rock, I began to climb, scrabbling for traction on the slippery dark teeth of the cliffs. I kicked off my blade fins and let them fall. In the dive booties that protected me from the worst cuts, I staggered to my feet.

Tabor was still a hundred yards out. I could see him making a slow circle in the boat. He couldn’t even see me, my black suit against the dark rocks. Silently as only a Parkour tracer could, I made my way over the uneven surface of the tumbled rocks. Then I came to a crevasse. I could jump it. But this close in, there could be ice on those rocks. If I fell and went down between them, breaking my leg or knocking myself out, he wouldn’t have to kill me. I’d have done it on my own.

I decided to take the risk. For an instant, to “derive” the course ahead, I switched on my lamp. Immediately, I heard Garrett Tabor’s shout of rage and heard the motor spring to life. But I did not think of him: this was
parcours du combattant
, like an obstacle course used to train soldiers—except it was war, for real. The distance was perhaps six feet. My
Saut de Précision
(precision jump) would have to be perfect and, for the first time, completely blind.

Mom, Rob, Juliet
, I thought, and I leaped.

David Belle would have been elated. I hit the opposite rock, dropped and rolled off. Then I beat it up the beach across the parking lot, my miner’s light full on as I made Rob’s Jeep, nimbly located the keys, and roared out of the protective cover of the fir trees.

TWO HOURS LATER, washed clean, my hair curled, and a menthol patch on my throbbing shoulder, (an Aurora Borealis of bruises by morning), I was in our family’s chalet on Torch Mountain, sipping a glass of champagne and feeling about as powerful as I’d ever felt in my entire life.

He hadn’t gone to Canada. He’d followed me. He’d lain in wait for me.

But I’d beaten him. I’d beaten him!

And yet, he knew exactly what I was going to do. I put my glass down.

Garrett Tabor derived
me
. He’d seen where he needed to go to get me, like a Parkour trace.

Bonnie was wrong.

I would never be safe, even in a crowd, as long as he was alive.

I would begin school on January 19, one day after I turned eighteen.

It was January 3, and Rob would be back on January 6. He’d sent me a postcard, of snowshine (naturally, although he’d never seen it that way) on the huge triple black diamond run called Lindsey’s, in honor of the Olympic gold medalist Lindsey Vonn, who came from Vail.
All good
, he wrote, Rob. Not
Love, Rob
. Or
I miss you, Love, Rob
. Just Rob. They were staying at a resort called Heavenly. I’ll bet there were plenty of girls in soft sweaters and tights around the fire at night. I’ll bet they looked at him, that beautiful pale boy with black hair, exotic-looking, almost remote.

Maybe they did more than look.

How could I begrudge Rob his one and only vacation? His good time? How could I even begrudge him the admiration of girls who were normal? If he could have somebody who wasn’t a freak, why shouldn’t he, even for a night?

I sought comfort the best way I knew how: I made
double-decker sandwiches with Brie and pimentos (don’t knock it until you try it) and ate two at a time. And I focused. My camera was very good. I downloaded and copied onto discs my pictures of the mouth of the “cave.” I copied the one piece of film that showed Garrett Tabor, clearly visible in the headlights of his own black truck, backing a boat trailer down the beach.