It’s almost dusk when I reach the swamp. I check the shadows and realize I don’t have much daylight left. Just enough time to go in, see what I can pick up, and leave. If I can pinpoint the area where I think Billy Applegate’s body lies, I’ll have more leverage with Joe. It’s a big area, and I want to be sure. I know the final drainage will take place early tomorrow, and I need more than hunches to get Joe out here.
The first place Nate will go will be Shay’s. She’ll probably freak, and he’ll have to stay while she calls Rachel, calls Joe, calls everybody she can think of. I hate to put her through another disappearance of mine, but I can be home within the hour, or even sooner, if I’m lucky. I’ve made sure my cell phone is off, so I won’t have to feel guilty about ignoring the calls for a while. I’m not ready to talk to anyone yet.
I know the wetlands area well, thanks to Shay. She actually enjoys hiking around in this stuff. The reclamation project has used narrow wood decking to build a trail through the swampy area to make it easier for the scientists to gather information over the past years. I know the way, since Shay has brought me out here many times. I used to think Shay’s work was boring when I first got here. Well, I still think it’s boring, but I sure have learned a lot about wetlands.
I hadn’t counted on how the trees would block the remaining light in the sky. I wish I’d thought to bring a flashlight. I decide I’ll only go another couple of hundred yards and then try to get a sense of what I’m looking for. I remember my vision—I remember the way the branches hung, and the ferns that lay like a blanket nearby.
The only trouble is, I don’t know if the vision was of the present or the past. If it was the past, then things have changed since then—trees have died, have grown, ferns have given way to bushes and scrub.
But the landscape is looking familiar now, and I can feel the back of my neck prickle, and it isn’t from the falling mist. I’m close. I know it.
There was once a pond here. The water has been draining for weeks. I put one foot out and sink, but not too deeply. I know if I walk through these trees, I will find a dry area to stand on. I know there will be ferns and dead leaves. I know because I saw it.
The ground sucks at my shoes, and I have to drag my feet out while I walk, a creepy sensation. Something is pulling me onward, and I could no more resist it than I could a cold drink on a hot day. It will bring me relief, somehow. I will know. I will know everything that happened. I will know my father. I will know what is broken and can never be fixed, and I will know how to go on.
The land is firm, just as I’d seen. It used to be underwater. The light is fading, but I can see something shine ahead. A glint.
I go closer. Mud-smeared, filthy, but still intact. The edge of a shower curtain.
And unmistakably, a human hand.
I want to run, but I can’t, the mud is too thick. But the panic inside me is rising, and I can’t seem to make headway. The trail is just yards away, but it might as well be a mile.
I fumble for my cell phone in the pocket of my jacket. I stab out Joe’s number.
I hear the tones chime.
And I understand at last what I’ve been hearing in my head.
Dah doh din daa do…
It wasn’t a tune. It was the electronic tones of numbers on a keypad.
I disconnect the call before it rings. Slowly, I punch out numbers, trying to match the tones. It takes me a while, but I get it at last. 7 1 4 8 6.
It’s not a phone number. What is it? I play the tones once, twice. I close my eyes and feel the keypad, concentrating as I listen.
I see fingers stabbing a keypad.
I see Jefferson Ferris pushing the alarm code at his house.
Seven. One. Four. Eight. Six.
And behind my closed eyes, those numbers form a date. July 14, 1986.
July fourteenth. Bastille Day.
We met at a Bastille Day party.
The photograph of Nate at the party.
What am I missing? What is there that I can’t see?
“These days we have to remember so many codes and passwords, it’s a wonder our heads don’t explode. My secret system is to code everything on my dog’s birthday.”
“You remember your dog’s birthday?”
“No. That’s the problem.”
People pick codes that mean something to them. Wedding anniversaries. Their children’s birth dates. Jeff Ferris’s code was the same date that Hank Hobbs met Betsy Dunwoody. But why?
And then I remember something. When Hobbs’s house was broken into twenty years ago, the alarm didn’t go off. He’d told the police that he thought he’d set it. What if he had? What if the thief knew the code?
What if Hobbs used the date he had met his fiancée for his code? What if someone knew that?
Someone like Nate? He’d been at the dance.
He’d been at the dance with Jeff Ferris.
Dad sold Hobbs his first house on Beewick. A big sale for us, back then.
If Jeff Ferris knew Hank Hobbs’s alarm code, he could have been the one to steal the file and pass it along to Billy. But why?
So many whys, and it all happened so long ago. I’m confused now. Confused by things I’ve seen, confused by what people say and what they don’t say. Confused by facts that jumble together in my head. Confused by all my visions. Everything seemed to point in one direction, but now it feels as though they point in so many directions, sending me spinning like a top, bouncing from one thought to another.
Nate and Jeff at the Bastille Day dance.
I was never a great swimmer…
Jeff Ferris is a great guy. He coaches at the high school. He knows Mason and Dylan, who are both on the swim team…
I can’t untangle this. All I can do is go straight to Joe and dump it on him.
I turn my back on the shower curtain, but suddenly, I see it again.
The shower curtain rips off the rod. It falls to the bathroom floor. He drags the body onto it. The carpet is soaked with blood. He rolls the shower curtain around the body. It is hard to do because his hands are shaking so badly. He rolls the body into the curtain. Beads of sweat roll down his nose and drop, drop, drop onto the curtain. He secures the curtain with twine. It is no longer Billy he sees. He just sees…a body. Soon he will forget this. He will move on. After he lays Billy to rest. Not Billy. The body. The body.
Hobbs treads water. Blood trickles into the water. He’s getting tired. The boat circles him, chugging. Circling. Circling. Waiting…
I feel the fear of Hank Hobbs as the cold water locks him into a paralysis that is pure terror.
He doesn’t have the strength to scream, or the breath. The scream is inside his head. It is inside my head, and it is so loud that at first I don’t hear the sound of someone tramping through the marsh and dragging something behind him.