Laura jumped into the bucket seat behind the Mustang’s wheel, cranked the engine, slammed the gear shift, and lurched forward. She had one more stop to make—and it wasn’t going to be an easy one.
Laura cruised down Saratoga Way and eased onto Evergreen Drive. She banked onto a narrow road and through an open gate under a black, iron sign for Longview Cemetery. She rolled down a winding interior road to a tree-lined lot. She parked in the back row next to a stand of spruce and climbed out of the Mustang. Strolling up a lush, grassy hill, she passed under a canopy of towering oaks, their interlocking limbs forming a cover for the rows of headstones and monuments. Above them, thick, gray clouds blotted out the setting sun.
She stopped at a plain granite marker at the top of the hill and read the inscription:
Janet Tobias
Loving Wife and Mother
Born
March 6, 1962
Died
January 16, 1996
Laura’s eyes welled with tears, her mind conjuring up distant memories. Her mom. Beautiful. Vivacious. Loving. The most important person in her young life. A person—along with her dad—she couldn’t live without. Laura remembered how her mom always seemed to have a smile and a kind word at the ready. Her touch and sage advice made the most insurmountable problems become no big deal.
Until the cancer came. Janet Tobias’ battle against the disease turned out to be long and painful ordeal for everyone. The surgery. The chemo. The hospice nurse. Even an eight-year-old girl knew what it meant. Even an eight-year-old girl felt the pain.
A light rain started to fall on the cemetery grounds. It spattered the gravestones and the little flags left for the veterans. Wind swirled in the oaks. A flock of crows rose from the branches and vanished into the fog. Laura clasped her hands and closed her eyes. “I’m sorry, Mom. I should have been there for you.”
Laura still had a secret locked in her heart all these years later. She knew she should move on, but she couldn’t. The day before her mom’s death, Laura had marched up to her mom’s deathbed and screamed at the dying woman, excoriating her for abandoning her only child: “I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!”
Janet lacked the strength to respond and just drifted off to sleep. She passed away before Laura could take back the words.
After her mom’s death, Laura retreated to her own room, feeling like the sun had been blotted out. The grieving girl tried to bury the pain, but it lingered like a dark force. How could she live without her mom? The woman who took her to school, held her hand when she was afraid, held her close all night when she was sick, and took her side when kids bullied her? Her champion?
Laura choked back tears as the rain droplets glistened on the cemetery lawn.
“I’m doing better now, Mom. I think you’d be proud of me.”
Laura closed her eyes at the gravesite and conjured up an image of a girl’s bedroom:
Pink walls. A puppy poster. The lights are dim. The door is locked. A teenage girl sits cross-legged on her bed. She wears cut-off jeans, a t-shirt, headphones, and a somber expression. A grim rock ballad blares through the speakers. The girl holds a razor in her hand. She rests the blade against her bare thigh. She presses the serrated edge to her flesh. As she slides it forward, glorious pain emerges from the crimson flow.
Thunder boomed.
Laura snapped back into the here and now. It was raining harder, and the wind was picking up. Time to go. Before she got drenched. She stepped up to the gravesite and placed a hand on the tombstone. Then, she turned and headed back down the hill—careful not to slip, encircled as she was by the dead.
She stopped short when the parking lot came into view. A man stood at the trunk of her Mustang. Was he messing with her car? As she continued down the hillside, the man spotted her and slipped away into the nearby woods. From a distance, he looked a lot like the man in the blue blazer.