The Girl In The Woods Part 10

"Nice."

"I try to be," he said.

Diana took another drink and told him about Kay Todd showing up at her apartment. She relayed Kay's story and her promise to supply information about Rachel provided Diana helped find out what happened to Margie. Jason listened to the whole thing, nodding along and drinking his beer, but not asking any questions. She liked that about him, too. He didn't ask a lot of questions, even when Diana ended with the details about "Rhinestone Cowboy" and the flowers sent to her mother. He raised his eyebrows a little, an almost comical gesture, but he didn't ask any questions.

"I've never heard of this girl," he said when Diana finished.

"Me either. And there's nothing about it on the internet. But the Captain knows about her. He was one of the first on the scene."

"That's why you went to see him." Jason whistled. "The old man must have been a rookie back then."

"He was."

"So this old lady finds you through your website, looks you up and presses you to help her out. She sends flowers to your mom to add more heat." He shrugged. "Maybe she does know something about your sister, but I doubt it's anything meaningful. I understand why you're freaked out by all of this, but it's easily explained. We can file a complaint, give her a talking to, and she'll stay away."

"How did she know that about the song, Jason?"

"Is it on the website or in the papers?"

"No." She shook her head. "I don't think so."

"But it could have been. Or maybe she met someone who knew Rachel. Westwood's only an hour away. It's not such a big world."

Diana started to doubt her own judgments. In a way, she felt grateful for the calm that Jason brought her. But there was still a part of her that didn't want to be calm, that wanted to be stirred up and agitated for a change.

"There's more," she said.

"Okay."

"Something started happening to me when Rachel disappeared. Something I can't quite explain." Diana picked at the label on her beer bottle. She had never told anyone about this. Not her mother, not a doctor. No one. She wasn't sure she liked what she was about to reveal, but she felt she needed to do it. "Not long after she was gone, I started seeing something. It was like a dream, except I was awake. Some sort of vision or hallucination would overtake me at certain moments, and I would see a place in my mind. But it was more than just seeing the place. I was there. It was real. As real as you are right now."

"What is this place? What do you see?"

"Woods. Dark, thick woods. At night. The moon is s.h.i.+ning, and there's a clearing."

Diana had seen the images so many times, and she knew them so well, that describing them made her realize how inadequate words were for the task she had at hand. She felt like her words would fail, and the only way to truly convey the meaning of what she saw would be to take Jason there.

But she knew that was impossible. She couldn't find the place, didn't even know if it existed.

But it had to. If it didn't, if it were all in her head then...Vienna Woods, here I come.

"What happens there?" Jason said.

"I dig."

"Dig?"

Diana nodded. "I see something on the ground in the moonlight. Something white. It's a human bone, and I drop to my knees and I dig and I dig until I pull the bone out of the ground." She swallowed. "It's Rachel. It's Rachel's skull, and I pull it out of the ground."

"Jesus." Jason's eyes were wide, full of sympathy. "It sounds like a nightmare."

"But it's not. It only comes to me-or it used to come to me-when I was awake."

"Used to?"

"It mostly stopped a few years ago, before I moved here. It's only happened a few times since then. I can still remember it vividly, but it doesn't come upon me that way anymore."

"You want another one?" Jason said, pointing at the empty bottles. He didn't wait for Diana to answer before he went to the refrigerator and brought back two more. He sat down, took a drink from his, and let out a soft belch. "I guess you're lucky. You moved on, time pa.s.sed, and these...visions...stopped. It's not surprising, really. Time heals, I suppose."

"It's supposed to," Diana said.

"If you believe fortune cookies and greeting cards."

"But seeing that woman yesterday, talking to her, that brought it all back again." Diana held the cold beer bottle between her two hands on the tabletop. "I used to go looking for that place, that clearing in the woods. I thought that if I could find it, if I could find that spot, I'd find out what happened to Rachel."

"You thought she was buried there."

"Yes. But it wasn't that simple. I just thought I would know something, that some part of the mystery would be put to rest."

Jason scratched the top of his head. "You know, Diana, you're telling me all of this stuff, and I get the feeling you think it all makes you crazy or odd or different in some way. But I have to be honest, nothing you're telling me seems that unusual. You lost a member of your family, and you're trying to get over it. That could take a lifetime."

"You make it sound so logical, so...normal."

"I think it is."

"Except I didn't always go looking for that place by choice."

"What do you mean?" Jason said.

"Sometimes I'd go there...to the middle of the woods. But I wouldn't know how I got there. And a couple of times, I didn't wake up. People found me, digging in the woods with my bare hands, and they'd have to call an ambulance or bring me back to town, and I wouldn't remember any of it, and I wouldn't tell anyone why I was there. Except I knew what I was looking for. I always knew."

Jason nodded slowly. Diana could imagine the wheels turning in his brain, the rea.s.sessment of everything he thought about her.

"It's bad, isn't it?"

"It doesn't sound like a walk in the park on a sunny day."

Diana sighed. "There's more."

CHAPTER SIXTEEN.

"I've never told you the full story of how Rachel disappeared, have I?" Diana said.

"The full story? Tonight is the most I've ever heard."

"I really don't like to talk about it."

"You don't have to now if you don't want to."

"I want to," Diana said. "I need to."

Jason shrugged. "I have a fridge full of beer."

Diana felt half of a smile form on her face. She took a deep breath.

"My dad left the family when I was twelve and Rachel was nine. Just up and left one day. Packed his s.h.i.+t and told Mom he was moving to Colorado. I think he still lives there, but we stopped hearing from him after a while. He was supposed to get remarried."

"So more than one person in your family has disappeared, I guess."

Diana nodded. "Right. Anyway, after he flew the coop, my mother went into a deep spiral. She's never really come out of it. That's why she's in the hospital."

"Alzheimer's, right?"

"Yeah." Fifty-fifty chance. "But when she went to ground after my dad left, she didn't leave Rachel and me much choice. We had to raise ourselves, you know? There would be weeks at a time when my mom wouldn't even come out of the bedroom. We wouldn't even see her. She didn't bathe. She didn't get dressed. She barely ate. She just..."

"Disappeared?"

Diana nodded again.

"It must have been s.h.i.+tty."

"We did what we had to. We didn't have any choice."

"Weren't there any relatives you could have called?"

"Not many. And I felt sorry for my mother. I wanted to protect her. I kept thinking that if I kept things going at home, she would eventually come around and be okay."

Someone started singing out in the street, and soon they were joined by two more voices, ridiculously out of tune and loud.

"Somebody's having fun," Diana said.

"I ought to go run them in," Jason said. "Disturbing the peace and general obnoxiousness." He scratched his jaw. "Go ahead."

"My mom. She never came around. And, for all intents and purposes, I started running the household. I shopped. I paid the bills."

"You paid the bills?"

"I filled out the checks and got my mom to sign them. She could be convinced to write her name. But I did all of that stuff. And I took care of Rachel. I made sure she got to school, and I made sure she ate on time. I helped her with her homework. And all of that was fine for a while. We were young, just kids. We couldn't get into too much trouble, so we made it work."

"I sense a 'but' coming," Jason said.

"A big one. The kind that makes all the difference." Diana paused a moment. She felt something swelling in her chest, something that made it difficult to speak. She took a long drink of her beer.

"Are you okay?" Jason said. "We don't have to go on-"

"I'm fine," she said. "I'm fine. I just haven't talked about this in..."

Never.

She cleared her throat. "Rachel was a pretty girl. A beautiful girl. Much prettier than me, and much prettier than just about any girl in our school or in our town. But it wasn't just her looks that made her special. She had a quality, a sense of life and a vitality about her. An energy just radiated out of her, at least when she was really young, and people responded to it. Especially men.

"It was obvious from a very early age that she was going to be popular with the boys. They started calling her and coming to the house right around the time Dad left, before Rachel was even old enough...before she had even reached p.u.b.erty. And these weren't boys her age. These were boys who were older, fourteen or fifteen years old."

"Sounds like a recipe for trouble."

"It was. I was young, too, of course. It took me a while to figure out what was really going on, and what these boys really wanted. By the time I did, Rachel had already been raped."

"Oh, G.o.d," Jason said, his face turning white. "How old was she?"

"Eleven."

"Oh..." Jason took a long drink of his beer. "I don't know what to say."

"Rachel went to a party. There were older kids there, kids from the high school. She ended up in a room with one of the older boys. He was from one of the rich families in town. Brian Barone. His dad was a vice-president at the ball bearing factory. A whole family of a.s.sholes if you ask me. Anyway, Rachel ended up in a room with this kid. Locked in a room with this kid. I found all this out months later, but people who were at the party told me that they heard Rachel calling out, saying, 'No, no, no.' But n.o.body did anything about it. They let it go. I guess they thought boys will be boys and all of that."

"How did you find this out?"

"People at school started talking about it. I overheard them in the locker room after gym cla.s.s one day. I heard them saying that Rachel had already lost her virginity. I confronted them. I called them liars. I even punched one of the girls in the face. Sally Bingham. I made her cry. She told the vice-princ.i.p.al, and they gave me a three-day suspension. That didn't matter since I didn't really have parents paying attention to whether I was going to school or not. But I did talk to Rachel about it. I told her the story I'd heard at school, and she broke down and admitted everything to me. She was at the party, and she was in the room with Brian Barone. She said no, but he kept going..."

Diana paused, felt the emotion swelling within her.

"It's okay," Jason said.

Diana stood up. "I have to go to the bathroom."

She took her time, was.h.i.+ng her hands thoroughly and splas.h.i.+ng cold water over her face. A new, open beer waited for her at the table when she came back.

"I got the feeling you might want that," Jason said.

"I do."

They both drank, and a brief silence hung over the table.

"You know," Jason said, "I don't see any of this as your fault. You were a kid, too. You couldn't control her. Adults can't even control kids all the time."

"But there was something I could control," Diana said.

"What's that?"

"My reaction to what Rachel told me."