were born of her imagination, so their dry and rigid bodies would crunch beneath someone’s feet and there’d be no mistaking the actual weight of a real person for shadows and ghosts are weightless and luminous.
When she couldn’t stand it another minute, it got worse. There was another knock at the door—yet a glance out the window revealed nothing but a porch bathed in the harsh light of a bare bulb—and she ran out the back door then, leaving it wide open.
She had to lay the ghosts to rest, silence them somehow. She had to see the farm one more time. Yet again, it was the little things she didn’t take into consideration. If Dahlia had thought her to be in bed, Memphis would have made it out to the farm and back home by the time the sun came up, before Dahlia woke. She could even have waited until after Dahlia was asleep and taken the car, but she didn’t, just ran out, and that was another blunder in her thinking. The only reason she’d agreed to stay at the hospital was to calm herself, get her story straight. She could have fought the hospital stay—no one was able to keep her against her will, that wasn’t even legal—but she needed time to think. Time to put her ducks in a row.
That night, after Memphis realized she had lost her purse, it took her some time to find the dirt road behind the trees and shrubs. Over the years, property lines had been redrawn, new roads had appeared, and if it hadn’t been for the old wooden bench she would have never found the place. The fact that it was still there meant there was money in the bank to pay property taxes, even though she had never checked up on how much exactly was left, but Bertram County had only a couple of schools and taxes were low and the money must have been enough or the farm would have been sold by now, or even torn down.
That night, she didn’t plan on setting foot onto the property at all; she just wanted to look at it from afar. It was still so vivid in her mind—the winding dirt road, the meadow, the shed, and the barn—and decades later reality matched her memory. The farm was still intact—the barn slightly warped, the meadow in full bloom—but as she stood peeking through the trees, crickets started chirping all around her, and one did jump at her, pecked at her leg, or maybe it was something else, she couldn’t be sure. And she stood by the road, determined not to set foot on the property, as if history was going to catch up with her, as if merely walking the grounds was going to infect her with some contagion.
Her muscles were tired, her limbs heavy from the long walk. She licked at her cracked lips, feeling the thickness of her saliva. She looked past the shed, and there it was. The cypress. She couldn’t make out anything underneath, but the old cypress stood there, firmly anchored; had gained a few more feet in height, even. She beheld the tree from afar but still she felt mocked by it, as if it said, I’ve guarded the secrets, but they are still here. Don’t you get any ideas. You haven’t escaped.
In a way, she had it coming, Memphis knew that. And she decided to stop fighting.
Dahlia
It’s almost as if there’s a hole in the ground somewhere, swallowing lives, like the hole in the woods was supposed to swallow Jane. At home, I throw the bag of cleaning supplies on the couch and power up my laptop.
The numbers are staggering; thousands of people go missing every day, adults and children alike. Other crimes take priority and missing persons cases are mostly solved by sheer accident or coincidence; there are tens of thousands of unidentified remains waiting in coroners’ offices all over the country; more than a hundred thousand cases are open at one time.
The computer freezes. As I wait for it to recover, I imagine a map with tiny dots for every buried body, missing, undiscovered. And there’s my Jane, found, safe, yet no one seems to know her. It seems impossible that no one but me seems to care who she is. But maybe nothing is as it seems, maybe the police have a clue, maybe found DNA even, but how would I even know? Bobby should know, or at least he should be able to find out. I dial his cell and he answers after two rings.
“I’m on patrol. Something happen?”
“No, nothing happened.” I don’t know how to ask the questions that bounce around all day long in my head.
“I’m in your neighborhood. I can come by.”
Fifteen minutes later we are in the very house and on the very couch where we used to sit together as teenagers.
“I can’t believe no one knows who she is. Someone must miss her. Is there anything you can tell me? The hospital won’t talk to me.”
“They expect her to wake up from the coma and tell them who she is. Who did this to her.”
“How do they know she’ll wake up and be okay?”
“They don’t know. They’ve done tests but they won’t know for sure until she wakes up. But we know she’s not matching up to anyone reported missing.”
“Why don’t they make her picture public? Someone might recognize her.”
“She’s got a tube in her mouth, her face is swollen—I’m not sure that would do any good. I’ve seen people after car accidents, or fights, and they are so swollen not even their own family recognize them.”
“You’ve seen her lately?”
Bobby pauses, ever so slightly, then takes a sharp breath in. “No, not really. Detectives are working on the case and I don’t really know any more than you do.”
“Are there others?”
“Other what?”
“Missing women. In Aurora.” There is a hint of a shadow descending over his face. His cheeks become stiff, no longer a friend sitting here, catching up, but a door just closed, like the gates of a fortress. “What if there were other victims, in the past? How can you explain the way he buried her? What if he was right there, watching me? What if I interrupted something and he knows who I am?”
“Dahlia—”
“There must be others. What he did to her, that’s not something that someone does once. There’s someone out there, maybe, I don’t know. Really, I don’t. But it’s not impossible. You can’t say it’s impossible.”
“You’re going overboard. I—”
“Bobby, what if there are more missing women? And no one does anything about it.”
“You need to stop worrying. There’s no reason to believe that he was watching you. How do you—”
“Are there others?”
“Dahlia—”
“Missing women. Cases like this. As a cop you should know if there’ve been any cases in the past ten years or so.”
His expression goes blank. I know the face, have seen it before. We used to get into a lot of trouble, back in high school. We smoked behind the gym, broke some equipment in the chemistry lab, but Bobby—the most honest person I know—changes when he lies. His face turns indecipherable with no signs of life. Your facial expressions give it away. Learn to have a poker face, he used to say to me.
“She’ll wake up. It’s only a matter of time.”
“So there are others?”
“Just allow it to play out for now. I think she’ll wake up and then we’ll know what happened. In the meantime, try not to worry. You saved her life. Isn’t that enough?”
His radio goes off, the voice of a female dispatcher squawking, just a couple of words at most, clipped, short. Bobby gets up and walks off to the side, pushing radio buttons, talking into his shoulder mic. “Let’s talk some other time,” he says and ends our conversation.
After he leaves, I go back to skimming through the articles. When I run across something with additional information, I hit the print button—I can’t