The water tower.
Standing at its base, craning backward to see the small latch just beyond the ladder. Nicole’s body isn’t strung up on a rope this time, but shadows of that night flash with every blink.
It’s not as tall as I remember it being, not up close. The powder blue has faded and cracked with age. Serpentine mazes of orange, brown, and black speckle the surface. Several NO TRESSPASSING and DANGER signs hang around the perimeter.
“Be careful.” Cap hands me a flashlight.
I nod, unable to respond. I have to go up there.
Two decades of submerged nightmares are the only thing standing between me and Abigail Scarborough.
It’s much easier to navigate without a body encumbering the process. Where once the ladder seemed to stretch infinitely, I’m surprised when I reach the top in a handful of breaths.
I swoop a leg over the barricade and test my weight on the catwalk. The metal groans in protest but holds. I grip the railing regardless, unable to shirk the image of Nicole dangling from its height. I peek over the edge, just once, and swear I see myself. Thirteen and covered in gore, shuddering beneath the cold night sky.
Time is fluid in this place. Warped and shimmering and thin.
The flashlight sputters, and I give it a stern smack until the beam steadies. “I will not fall,” I whisper. “I will not fall. I will not fall.”
Why not? I did.
I know her voice is in my imagination, but I jolt and spin, expecting Nicole’s corpse to be at my heel. My breath expels in dry, fast hitches. Heart racing, I clutch the railing until the worst of the shock passes.
Okay. I can do this.
Noises from below sound distant and strange. Bendy. Like I’ve been transported to a parallel universe.
There’s another sound near, though. Imperceptible for anyone on the ground where it’s safe from the ghosts of murdered children.
A clunking from inside the tank.
One step. The catwalk screeches and I freeze, gulping down air in short bursts to hear better.
Two. Three. Fo—
There it is again. The scuttle of movement.
The door is barely five feet tall. I lay my hand against the surface. Freezing. Rusted studs dot the outside, feathering in dusty orange bullets. I press my ear against the icy steel and listen.
She’s in there, the younger me whispers.
I step back an inch, noticing the amber ashes speckling the catwalk. Someone’s opened this door, and recently. I grab the handle with both hands and yank.
The hinges creak and squeal but oblige.
Someone screams. A high-pitched, vulnerable wail that doesn’t seem to stop.
“It’s not her,” I respond. “You know it’s not her.” The dead can’t scream.
Really? Come on down and join me. Find out for yourself.
I stare into the abyss with naked fear. Decades of fighting the horrors other people create, and now I’ve come full circle: this is where my demons lurk, where every bump of terror originates.
She’s in there with Nicole. A dead-girl party. Bloated and rotting and pissed—and they know what you did.
Stop. I can’t think about Nicole right now.
“Abigail Scarborough?” I say, shining the light toward the door.
The scream ends abruptly.
“Abby?”
At first, nothing, but faintly, from the impenetrable darkness, I hear a tiny voice. “Hello?”
“Abby?” I repeat, slipping my head and shoulders through the frame. It smells like (death) rust and wet iron. The absence of light inside the tank is disorienting. A sensory deprivation chamber. I move the flashlight in wide arcs and almost drop it when the figure illuminates.
Nicole.
No. Abby.
Alive.
The basin still holds a few inches of water. She props herself on the cold metal, barefoot and shaking. Her chattering teeth are masked by bluish lips and stringy hair zigzagging across her forehead. Old pipes run the length of the wall beside her. There’s a ladder, but it’s missing several rungs and impossible to see without the beam of the flashlight.
Shielding her eyes from the light, she raises a ghost-pale arm. The skin of her fingers is waxy and pruned. “Hello?” she cries.
My heart breaks, an actual snap in my chest. “Hold on, Abby, I’m coming.” I push out of the tank and shout to the team. “She’s here, I need a medic!”
I don’t wait for them to respond. I don’t let myself question the integrity of the forgotten ladder. I clench the flashlight between my teeth, find the rung with the heel of my boot, and plunge inside.
Come on in, the water’s fine!
Nicole beckons me from the depths, her skeletal outline splashing in the darkness.
Concentrate, I tell myself, biting down hard on the flashlight. One step at a time.
The bars are slick but navigable. I reach the bottom, sweating in spite of the chill. Stagnant water ripples around my feet, and I feel something graze my ankle.
Marco!
No.
Polo!
How long can bones stay intact under water before they start degrading?
I spit the flashlight into my hand and swing it to the other side of the tank where Abby struggles to maintain her footing.
“Stay there,” I say.
I don’t know the symptoms of hypothermia, but I’m fairly confident that hours in a freezing vault without proper clothing or a source of heat would be a good way to get it.
“Please.” Abby wraps her arms around herself and shakes harder. “H-help me. Cold. So c-cold.”
“I’m coming,” I say. “I’m coming.”
“I d-dropped the f-flashlight looking for the l-ladder. I t-tried to c-catch it, but s-slipped. The blanket f-fell into the water. Please.”
Marco!
I scale the side and extend to meet her. I feel her flesh, deathly cold but alive, but even then my mind refuses to cooperate.
She’s alive.
She’s dead.
Nicole.
If Jackson’s timeline is accurate, Abigail Scarborough has been trapped in this water tower for almost twenty-four hours with the bones of his wife’s first victim.
“My name is Emilina,” I say to the quivering child. I unzip my jacket and swaddle her inside, not feeling the cold air or the shiver of the past. “Everything’s going to be all right. I’ve got you.”
“Detective Stone?” A concerned voice floats down, a blue silhouette against a starry black sky.
“Here.”
The floodlights come next, so stark and bright I’m blinded by their arrival. Abby inches closer. “You’re a d-detective?” she asks.
I rub her arm and rest my chin on top of her head.
Her voice is a cold whisper in my ear. “I was s-so scared. I think there’s s-something down here.”
Nicole.
I search the murky water, my mind playing tricks with the floodlights on the surface. Every ripple is her. The tip of a femur, the jut of a tibia.
I hear footsteps on the ladder.
No one’s being added to this watery grave. Not tonight. “You’re not alone. We’re going to get you to a hospital.”
Her teeth clink.
“I know this has been terrible, but I need you to be prepared, okay?”
What am I doing? She’s too fragile. I look at her shaking, so small yet so resilient. She’s terrified, yes, but she survived.
It’ll be worse for her if the press drags her through the mud. “We found Missy,” I say before I change my mind.
“Missy? Oh, my god.” Abby rocks. The zipper of my coat hits the tank with delicate clink, clink, clinks. “My m—mom. My mom. Killed her.” She cries.
No more assumptions. Here is the truth. Here is absolution.
What absolution? a voice scratches from the depths of my conscience. Are you really going to leave me down here, bitch?
I stare at the water.
The tears that follow are frigid and raw. I let them soak the fabric of my thin shirt until I’m also racked with shivers. From the rectangle, I see Jennifer and me, lugging a broken body to the steely edge. I blink, and the mirage disappears, replaced by two responders sending down a rescue stretcher secured with canvas straps.
A scratchy blue blanket materializes around Abby’s shoulders, and the extraction begins.
An EMT anchors at my side. I grab his elbow and point to the bottom of the tank. “Hey,” I say, hoarse and thin. “I think there’s something in the water.”
Drew leaves the light above the sink on for me. He knows I don’t like coming home to a dark house. I crave the reassurance on a night like this. I kick my shoes onto the welcome mat by the door. They’re caked in dried mud, and dead leaves dust the floor like rusty confetti.
I leave a trail of damp clothes behind me. Socks, pants, shirt. Abandoning them sporadically as I slog up the stairs to the bathroom.
It’s after midnight. I’ll have paperwork, mountains of it, but all of it can wait.
I brush my teeth, conscious of the fact that I threw up multiple times throughout the day and didn’t stop to do it earlier.
Better get used to it.
“Hey, Wonder Woman,” Drew says as I shimmy under the covers. The sheets are cool, but he’s as warm as buttered toast. My own personal space heater. I curl into his side and sigh as the stress dissipates from my muscles.
“Hey, yourself.” I kiss the soft spot between his shoulder blades.
“Bad day?”
“The worst.”
“Want to talk about it?”
“Not yet,” I say. We fall into comfortable silence. I soak up his acceptance, but it doesn’t stop my nerves from firing. I can’t shake the events of the past couple hours. Phantoms, old and new.
Drew rolls to face me. Soft moonlight filters in through the shades. He’s handsome and attentive, and it makes me want to cry. “Did you find her? Chloe Cates?”
How do I answer that?
“Yes,” I settle on, “and no.” I tell him everything I can, everything that’s not decades-old, and the tension evaporates with every word.
“A second body?” he asks.
“Bones. They think they’ve been down there a long time. Joss is going to be busy this week.”
“Jesus. And Chloe was in there with it.” He shudders. “What a nightmare.”
Not it. Nicole.
“She almost died in that tank, Drew. Because her mother was too crazy to let her have a normal life, and her father was too scared to leave.”
“I can’t imagine,” he says.
“No blankets. No light. Twenty-four hours alone in the dark.” With the remains of my past. “Not knowing what was going to happen to her.”
“That’s horrible.”
“You know what’s more horrible? Having a mother who tries to blame you for a murder she committed.”
“That’s an oddly specific example of horrible.”
“Drew.”
“Emilina.”
“Doesn’t it scare you?” I ask him, shrinking into myself to lay bare my other unspoken fear.
“This. Us. Having a kid. The enormous, not even slightly improbable chance that we’ll mess her up for good.”
“Her?”
“Or him. You know what I mean. Don’t you feel how irreversible this is? One mistake, one bad choice, and we’re fishing our kid out of a water tank or dragging her out of a tree house.”
He doesn’t budge. “Is that really what you’re scared of?”
“Yes,” I grimace “and no.”
Why is it that the most important things we want to say are always the trickiest to string together? Words slip out of reach and leave bread crumbs of what they should’ve been in their wake.
Try.
And for once, I don’t jump out of bed or change the subject. Once you’ve battled your darkest secret, it’s hard to find excuses to be afraid.
“I didn’t have a mother, Drew. I have no clue what I’m doing, and I have no idea where to start. What if I’m not good at this? What if our child hates me? What if—” (just say it) “what if I’m not supposed to be a mom?”
What if I’m not here to be a mother?
I haven’t been able to silence the fear that the bones will lead back to me. Guilt renewed.
Drew grips my shoulder, a warm mix of strong and gentle, and in his face, I find nothing but adoration. Certainty. “That is never going to happen,” he says. “Our child is going to love you, and you are going to love him.”
“Him, huh?”
“Our strapping young lad,” he winks. “Or lass. Yes, we’re going to make mistakes, a ton of them, but we’re going to work through them together because that’s what families do.”
“Yours maybe.”
“Yours too. Patrick and your dad may not have understood everything you experienced.”
“But they were a damn good support system. Do you know how proud they’d be of you right now? Em, you saved a girl’s life tonight. How could you possibly doubt you’ll be a good mother?”
That girl is traumatized because of me. “You have to say nice things about me because you’re my husband.”
“Shouldn’t I say awful things about you because I’m your husband?” he asks with a playful nudge.
“Such a jerk,” I say, but I’m laughing and crying and enjoying the unfamiliar tingling of his hand on my lower belly.
“I love you.” He states it with the ease of someone spouting a universal fact. The sky is blue. There are twenty-six letters in the alphabet. I love you.
“I love you too.” I lean in for a kiss and stop short of his lips.
“What? Do I have morning breath already?”
The gears inside my brain whir and wiggle.
Drew starts to pull away. “Okay, I was joking, but now I’m getting self-conscious.”
“It’s nothing.” It’s something. I can’t put my finger on it, a detail just outside my reach. I kiss him and shuffle back to my side of the bed. “Nothing. Sorry. Turning it off for the night.”
A ping of doubt surfaces. Abigail is only thirteen. A child.
And yet.
A young girl is still dead.
Two young girls, my mind hisses. Can you live with that?
As I close my eyes and wish for sleep that will not come, I know that I cannot.