and when she did, her dreams were harsh and scraped raw with images of her being chased by a man with a cold face and barren eyes and a wide unnerving grin that still gave her chills whenever she thought of it.
She’d been a part of something last summer that she could not forget and would never forgive herself for, something she tried not to think about every night when she lay down to go to sleep.
And every day when she awoke.
But the memory of that gun beside her ear, of squeezing the trigger, of the sound of the man who was about to kill her dropping to the floor, of seeing-out of the corner of her eye-all that blood splattered across the wall…
It had all happened so fast, so It was way too much.
She slid the memory to the side. Buried it.
Refused to let it crawl to the surface.
A distraction.
That’s what she needed.
She flicked on the light beside her bed, pulled out one of her notebooks, propped herself up, and picked up a pen, “as carefully as if she were pulling out a scalpel to do surgery,” the words whispered through her mind, seemed to hover in the air before her, “against the black insidious tendrils of shame tentacling through her heart.”
Okay, that was too much. Too melodramatic. Definitely in need of editing, but something else would come.
She placed the tip of the pen against the virgin page, but hesitated. When she opened herself up like this on paper, she could be certain it would bring everything to the surface again, paradoxically making her feel worse and better at the same time.
Just like the razor blades.
But leaving different kinds of scars.
However, when she didn’t write, when she kept everything inside, the dreams only got worse. She began with a few disjointed thoughts, then wrote, my soul is famished, yet feeds on phantoms. my stomach grumbles at me, starving for something real. i lift another forkful of vapors to my mouth. when my diet is made up of so much illusion and mirage, the more moments i devour, the emptier i become.
She tinkered with the words a little, then wrote for half an hour, poems stained with the past, but the harder she tried to forget, the clearer she seemed to remember.
At last, clicking off the bedside lamp, she put the notebook aside, drew Francesca close, and stared at the light easing from the bathroom doorway. “She knew it was important that she rest,” she thought, visualizing the words again, almost as if they were scribbled on a page, “but Tessa Bernice Ellis did not close her eyes, lest the sleep she needed, the dreams she dreaded, would find her once again.”
15
After picking up our room keys at the motel’s front desk, Jake and I agreed to meet tomorrow morning in the lobby at 8:00, when it would finally be light enough to view Tomahawk Lake. Natasha, who would also be staying at the motel, told us that she was returning to the Pickron house in the morning but would meet up with us later in the day.
In my room, I stowed my suitcase in the closet and gave Torres, the SWAT Team Leader, a call. He told me they hadn’t found Reiser. “Don’t worry, Pat. We’re on this. We found blood on two of his knives. We checked the DNA. Matched that of two missing persons-one in Milwaukee, one in DC. The DC victim was female, but the one from Milwaukee was male. Doesn’t fit the pattern. And no prints on the knife. He must have wiped it clean.”
DC? He brought the knife in the knife block back here from DC?
“I’ll be back down there as soon as I can,” I told him.
“I know,” he replied. “What are you thinking about the case up there? Double domestic homicide? The husband the shooter?”
“It’s too early to tell,” I said honestly.
After hanging up, I realized that I was becoming more and more concerned about the approaching snowstorm. I tried Tessa’s number again but only reached her voicemail.
Not a fan of texting, I left another vm for her to call me first thing in the morning: “It’s supposed to start snowing in the early afternoon so I need you to leave the winter session early, by 8:30 or so. Either that or I’ll reserve a room for you at a hotel there… Okay, so talk to you in the morning.” Out of habit I found myself calling her by the nickname I’d given her a year ago, a small way of acknowledging her independent spirit and her insatiable interest in Edgar Allan Poe: “I love you, Raven.”
I said nothing about hoping she would sleep well.
It was a topic best left untouched.
Ever since the day last summer when her father had been accidentally killed and I shot a man who was threatening Tessa’s life-was in fact about to shoot her-she understandably hadn’t been able to sleep well, rarely making it through the night.
I’d suggested a counselor, but that didn’t go over so well. She’d scoffed at the relaxation exercises I looked up online and tried yoga once but hated it.
Being a vegan and not wanting to use any drugs that had ever been tested on animals, she’d tried all the natural and homeopathic cures she could find. Then practical, commonsense things: no caffeine or food within four hours of bedtime, calming music, different ambient lighting combinations in her bedroom, candles and incense, getting up and doing something else rather than lying there dwelling on the fact that she couldn’t fall asleep. Nothing had really helped, at least not in the long-term.
Obviously, it’s not healthy for a high school senior to be unable to get more than four or five hours of sleep a night, and her GPA had taken a dive. In just one semester her cumulative 4.0 slipped to 3.65-pretty traumatic for a girl who’d never gotten a B on a report card in her life.
Her resultant testiness had also eroded her budding relationship with a new guy friend. He stuck with her for a while, but as she became more and more moody he finally broke things off just before Thanksgiving, which only made matters worse.
It seemed like the more I tried to find something to help her sleep, or the more I asked her how she’d slept, the more upset she became, so last month I stopped bringing it up. As long as she wouldn’t take medication or see a therapist, I wasn’t sure what else I could do for her.
Now, I set down the phone, but I left the ringer on just in case she called back.
After cranking up my room’s heater, I sent Cybercrime the emails and web history I’d downloaded from Donnie Pickron’s computer, searched through our online files for other instances of three shots through a window at a crime scene to see if that was the signature of any known criminal, but came up blank. Then I took some time to familiarize myself with the online maps of the miles and miles of snowmobile trails that intersect Tomahawk Lake and weave through the surrounding forests.
I found out that nearly all of the national forest service staff are seasonal and the ranger’s office closes down most of the roads once winter hits. It didn’t take me long to realize that, based on the location of the sawmill in relation to the Pickron residence and the long, looping county roads that wound around the marsh, it would have saved Donnie time and money if he rode his snowmobile to work through the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest rather than driving his car.
I committed the trails to memory.
Finally, emotionally drained from the events of the day, especially from seeing the four-year-old girl Lizzie’s body, I put my laptop away and headed to bed, unsure, with all of this on my mind, if I would be able to sleep any better than my stepdaughter.
16
