The Girl In The Woods Part 15

She had never been to the house before. When she and Dan were together, they met at her apartment, and Diana never got over feeling a little ashamed of her pathetic accommodations. The noisy neighbors, the peeling paint. It always felt like Dan was taking a step down, although he never said anything like that, and she knew most of it was in her head. But now that she saw his house-the suburban brick ranch with the azalea bushes out front and the two car garage-she wondered if the whole thing had been just a fun-filled fling for him, a mindless romp before he went back to his real life, the one with his wife and grown children.

Diana watched the house. Because of the closed garage door, it was impossible to know if Dan was even home, and she recognized the shortsightedness of her plan before she even dropped the car into park. She could find his house easy enough, but how would she get to talk to him without his wife finding out?

This is why you're not a cop anymore, she told herself. Not sneaky enough.

Shortsightedness seemed to be the theme for the day. In the minutes after she drove away from Kay Todd, leaving the old woman and her lies behind, Diana felt liberated from a bothersome burden, and knew, instinctively, that the feeling was a close relation to the one she felt driving away from Vienna Woods for the first time. I have my life back. This life belongs to me, and I won't be weighed down by the needs of others. But just like the day she drove away from Vienna Woods, a second, stronger emotion crept into Diana's psyche as the day wore on, and it was one she knew all too well from her days dealing with her mother. Guilt. Her old nemesis. Diana wished she could turn her back on people like Kay and walk away, but the past always came back and bit her.

So here she was, boomeranging her way back to Dan.

Her cell phone buzzed in her pocket. She pulled it out.

Jason. She'd been waiting for his call all day. If he knew where she was sitting, he'd s.h.i.+t.

"Hey," she said, trying to sound normal.

"I'm sorry I didn't call," he said. "They just let me off."

"I figured. What's the story?"

"I've got a lot to tell you. We were out beating the bushes all day. Foot patrol. Walking through the woods, knocking on doors, stopping cars. Nothing yet. They called it off because it got dark."

"Is the captain still working?"

"He left about an hour ago. Where are you? Are you in the car?"

"I'm driving, yeah."

"Do you want to come over? I'm starving, and I want to talk to you."

"I can't right now," Diana said, still studying the house. "And they really don't have any more to go on? On the news, they're saying they found her bike on the other side of town. Are you looking over there?"

"The working theory is someone grabbed her on the route she usually rode, then dumped the bike on their way somewhere else. Maybe on the way to Chancellor or Straw Grove. But I'm not sure. That's what I wanted to talk to you about. It's looking like a needle in a haystack unless a witness walks in at this point. She's been gone over twenty-four hours already..."

His voice trailed off.

"So?" Diana prompted.

"Jesus," he said. "I'm sorry, Diana. I know this has you thinking about your sister and all of that. It's just been such a long-a.s.s day. I didn't mean to be flip."

"It's okay." She took her eyes off the house. "Can you tell me anything more than what you've already told me? Anything?"

She heard Jason sigh on the other end of the line. "I don't know. It was pretty f.u.c.king depressing. We walked for miles and miles, through fields and into woods, looking for...I don't know what. A sc.r.a.p of clothing. A strand of hair. A shoe. It was tough."

Diana closed her eyes. She imagined the woods, the endless trees and tall gra.s.s, the dark s.p.a.ces no eyes could penetrate. She wished she could have been there, in the heart of the action, searching for the missing girl...

And then she felt the first symptoms coming on.

A sharp and pointed pain, like an ice pick or a nail being driven into the base of her skull. She opened her eyes, but the night before her was fading, dissolving away like a photographic technique in a movie. Blackness encroached from the edge of her field of vision.

It was coming.

"Oh, G.o.d," she said, her voice just a whisper.

"Diana?" Jason said. "What's wrong?"

Her heart rate accelerated, a rapid squeezing in her chest. Her eyes grew heavy, and it required an effort to keep them open. Her joints started to ache, and she felt her body closing in on itself, retracting, as though it wanted to simply shrink into a ball and fade away, disappear into the driver's seat and become invisible.

"Diana? Where are you?"

"Jason...I feel it coming..."

"Diana?"

But she was gone.

She was in the clearing...

...where she saw the trees and the large area of ground where nothing grew. Just the black rich earth and the moonlight s.h.i.+ning off the rocks, giving them a frosted glow. The wind picked up, carrying a chill that caused Diana's arms to break out in gooseflesh. And the breeze also carried a scent, something sweetly rotten and decaying. Diana stared at the rocks and at the ground, as though something there would reveal itself to her. And in a moment, it did.

At first, the movement was subtle. Something wiggled in the dark earth, something small and black, its body also reflecting the moonlight. Then she saw another and another. They writhed and squirmed in the black night, their bodies climbing over each other, their movements becoming more frenzied the longer Diana stared. Bugs. Squirming, black beetles.

And then the earth itself started to churn. The ground buckled and bubbled, s.h.i.+fting as though something larger were just below the surface trying to break free. Diana watched, unable to look away. Something thin and pale broke through the dark ground. It wriggled like one of the bugs, and soon two or three more just like it surfaced. It took a moment for Diana to recognize the squirming, clawing objects. They were human fingers, a handful of them, struggling to break free of the earth that imprisoned them.

Diana knew then. It was Rachel.

She dropped to her knees and plunged her hands into the earth, digging and churning the ground with her hands and fingers, trying to free her sister.

"Rachel," she said. "I'm coming."

But the faster and harder Diana dug, the deeper her hands sank into the dirt. The bugs crawled over her hands and up her arms. Diana reached out and tried to grab hold of the fingers in the dirt, but when she tried to get a grip, they slipped away like wet soap.

So she dug more, furiously displacing the earth with her hands, moving great fistfuls like a dog looking for a lost and precious object. Sweat rolled down her forehead and into her eyes. She felt its wetness creep down her back beneath her s.h.i.+rt. She dug and dug and then...

...her hand b.u.mped against something hard and solid, something thin. She closed her hand around it and pulled. There was resistance, like the object was anch.o.r.ed into the dirt, or perhaps held there by some force she couldn't see. But Diana kept tugging and pulling, using all of her strength, and eventually the object came free, sending Diana backward with the force of her exertion.

She held the object up in the moonlight. It was a human arm bone, gray and dirty and weathered by years in the ground. She knew it belonged to Rachel.

"No!"

She threw the bone aside and dug again. She dug even faster, the dirt flying off to the side in great spouts.

"I'm coming, Rachel. I won't let you go. I'm coming."

And she dug and dug until...

...arms grabbed her from behind. Strong arms.

Diana struggled against them, thras.h.i.+ng and pulling.

"No," she said. "No!"

"Diana..."

"No."

She freed herself from the hold and fell back to the ground. She started digging again.

Except she wasn't digging in the same dark earth.

She wasn't in the clearing anymore. The gra.s.s was green and lush. There were lights ahead, bright lights.

She tried to orient herself.

"Diana," the voice said again. She knew the voice, knew it well, and the realization slowly dawned. She wasn't in the clearing. She had never been in the clearing.

She stopped digging and tearing at the gra.s.s. She turned and looked behind her.

"Oh, s.h.i.+t," she said. "Dan."

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE.

Diana protested while Dan helped her into the house.

"I'm fine," she said. "I'll just go..."

"You're not fine," he said.

She knew he was right. She could barely stay on her feet as he guided her through the living room, the TV playing something masculine, something from the History Channel about World War II, and then down the hallway on the right to the bathroom. He brought her in there and let her sit on the edge of the tub. Diana looked at her hands. She was covered with dirt up to her elbows, and several of her fingernails were broken or cracked. The bright fluorescents burned her eyes, but not as much as the shame she felt at being caught outside her ex-lover's house, digging in the yard and muttering like a lunatic.

"Clean yourself up," Dan said. It was more of an order. He still wore his uniform, which meant he couldn't have been home for long.

"Just let me collect my thoughts for a minute," Diana said. "Then I'll go."

"What were you doing out there? What's going on?"

Diana couldn't find the words. There weren't any. How did she explain this to anyone, let alone Dan?

"I came to talk to you about the Foley case," she said.

Dan started to say something, but before the words came out, Janine appeared in the bathroom doorway. Her eyes were wide with disbelief as she stared at Diana, like she had just found a giant insect crawling through her kitchen.

"What is she doing here?"

Dan looked confused, then nervous. His lips twitched, and he looked from Janine to Diana and then back to Janine. Diana thought she might have to step in and answer for him, but he finally found his tongue.

"It's about work," he said.

"Work? She's filthy."

"Janine just..." Dan looked at Diana again. "Can we just talk in the hall for a minute while she gets cleaned up?"

"What?"

But Dan, thankfully, managed to shuffle Janine out into the hallway and close the bathroom door behind him. But it didn't block out all of the noise. Diana heard the raised voices spoken through gritted teeth. She couldn't make out the words, but she didn't have to. She knew that Janine was telling Dan to get his mistress the h.e.l.l out of her house or else.

Diana pushed herself to her feet. She felt exhausted, the typical response to one of her episodes, what she liked to think of as the "vision hangover." Her head ached like she'd tied one on, and she leaned against the sink for support with one hand while she turned the tap on with the other. She let the water run until it grew comfortably warm, then started scrubbing her arms and hands clean using liquid soap from a dispenser that matched the bathroom tile. While she scrubbed and watched the dirt from Dan's front yard swirl down the drain, she tried to make sense of what had happened that evening.

The visions were back.

She had hoped to have left them far behind, in Westwood along with everything else from her childhood and adolescence, but that plan had never worked. Things always followed along, so why should the visions be any different? They were a part of her apparently, a part that wasn't going to go away. When Mrs. Platcher, her mother's former roommate, finally died or caught the bus she was always looking for, they could clear her bed for Diana, and she could climb right in and join her mom in Looneyville, a mother-daughter crazy act the likes of which the world had never seen.

As always, she remembered the vision well, better than she remembered the dreams she had at night. Unlike her dreams, the visions had no vagueness, no sense of something glimpsed out of the corner of the eye. The visions came at her head on, leaving no doubt about what she had seen and felt. But there was something new this time, something more disturbing than any of the other times she had visited the clearing searching for her sister.

This was the first time she sensed, and truly felt, that Rachel was dead.

In the past, even as she saw the clearing and sometimes even dug in the ground, she always felt a sense of hope, a feeling that she was moving toward something. An answer. A clue. A hint of some kind. But tonight, discovering the bone, holding it in her hand, it felt for the first time that hope might have vanished, and she understood exactly what Kay had been talking about that first day in the diner when she asked Diana if she could still feel Rachel.

Diana wasn't sure she could anymore.

Maybe Rachel was gone. Truly gone.

Diana hadn't known it before, but the visions clarified it for her-she really wasn't ready to admit it yet.

Tears burned at the back of her eyes, and her chin quivered. She tried to hold it in, but a sob slipped out through her lips, a gasping hiccup that she hoped the running water covered.

"No," she whispered to herself. "Not here. Not now."

She closed her eyes and pressed her hands against the lids, trying to hold it in. She took three deep breaths in succession and shook her head.

"No."

She switched the water to cold and splashed handfuls into her face, hoping to counteract any blotches or redness. The water felt good and helped her calm down. When she shut the tap off, she listened and heard no other words coming from the hallway. Diana couldn't decide if that was a good sign or not. She took a towel from the rack and patted her face and arms dry, then made sure there was no dirt left in the sink, nothing that could inflame Janine any more than she already was. As Diana hung the towel back up, she realized she couldn't blame Janine. Diana was the invader here, the one who had upset everything. If the roles were reversed, she'd feel the same way.

Before Diana could open the door and stick her head out, a tentative knock sounded. She pulled it open and saw Dan standing there, his face red, his eyes tired. He'd had a h.e.l.laciously long day at work and then came home to all of this. Diana thought she should have felt worse for him, but she didn't.

"Diana? Are you okay?"

"I'm just going to go."

"No," he said. "Let's talk. But we have to do it on your way to the car."