Splinter (Fiction — Young Adult) Read online

  “Were you?”

  “No!”

  “So why’d you dig up the jacket now? After all this time?”

  “I didn’t, Sam. I moved out of the house. It must’ve gotten mixed up with my things.” She sighs. “I was shocked when I opened the box and saw it.”

  Still, I wonder what she was going to do with it after all this time.

  Heather stands and heads toward the door. “I have to go. I have an appointment. But if you want to talk more later . . .”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’ll let Kismet out before you leave?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And if you want to keep things easy for your father”—she pauses at the doorway—“delete the pictures of that jacket.”

  Wouldn’t it make things easier for her if news of the jacket never reached Eschermann?

  A chill darts up my spine. Maybe I’ve been wrong.

  Heather isn’t solely covering for Dad.

  Dad isn’t solely covering for Heather.

  They both know things they’re not telling.

  My phone buzzes with a text alert. It’s from Ryan: Call me asap. Found something I think you’ll want to see.

  Ryan found pictures of my mother in a shoe box at his uncle’s place.

  Dozens of them.

  Appropriate photos, he’d said, but the number of them is alarming.

  Brooke is going to drop me off there once we close the Nun.

  Closing time can’t come soon enough. Reporters have gathered outside the shop, deciding to harass Heather now. One reporter even posed as a customer and started asking questions, but Brooke managed to get her out the door before she got any information. We locked the door after that. Brooke is straightening the rack of holy water, and I’m reading my mother’s manuscript.

  The phone’s been ringing off the hook with requests for comments too. The phone in the shop, as well as Heather’s landline upstairs.

  Every few minutes, one of the phones wakes Kismet from a dead sleep and gets her so riled up that she starts wagging her tail without regard for what she might hit with it . . . including me and the stack of manuscript papers on the counter.

  Based on the pages I’ve managed to read, Nobody’s Fool is a thriller about a woman whose marriage is on the rocks. When she accuses her husband of cheating, he turns it around on her and makes her think she’s crazy. And no one believes her when she thinks the mistress is threatening her life, either.

  “It reads like fiction,” I say. “But considering everything we know—”

  “You’re wondering if it’s autobiographical.” Brooke goes to work on aligning the vials of sand now.

  “I hope it isn’t.” My hands are numb, and I’m feeling a little lightheaded. “But it’s naive to ignore that possibility.” I inhale for eleven and lower myself to Heather’s chair. Kismet takes the opportunity to jump into my lap, as if she’s still twenty pounds of vanilla-colored fur instead of ninety pounds of dog. Her tongue is like wet pink velvet against my cheek. Exhale for seven.

  “You think Heather is involved in all this,” Brooke says. “You think she’s the mistress your mom was writing about.”

  “I think . . . it’s plausible that Heather and my dad coordinated their versions of what happened, or what didn’t happen, and this may be the closest I ever get to hearing my mom’s version.”

  Heather washed and hid a jacket, which was stained with something that might have been blood on the cuff.

  Dad has lost three ex-girlfriends/wives, though only one is confirmed dead.

  Dad and Heather had been in love most of their lives. Is it possible that Heather is responsible? That she got rid of Mom so she could have Dad all to herself?

  If she did—or even if my mom survived a fraction of the horrible experiences she wrote about—it means I’ve been loyal to the people who destroyed her life.

  I let Heather in.

  I trusted her.

  I allowed her to take my mother’s place.

  And she might be the reason my mother’s gone.

  “Listen.” Brooke snaps her fingers in front of my face.

  I shake free from the glaze.

  “I have a date with Alex tonight. But I’m going to cancel and hang with you.”

  “Don’t do that.”

  “He’ll understand. And I’m sorry, but Cassidy’s been far too casual about this whole thing. I mean, the report about your dad and this other woman who disappeared, the manuscript . . . and she’s at a friggin’ soccer tournament? She’s in the thick of this too, you know, whether she admits it or not,” Brooke says. “I know this has been going on a long time, and maybe you get desensitized to the drama after a while, but this is new drama. There’s no reason she should be worried about watching my brother kick a ball around at a time like this.”

  I chew on my lip. “Do you think it’s possible she’s being this way because she knows something we don’t?”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Something Heather told her but hasn’t told me. You notice she called him my dad today, when for years, she’s called him Dad and referred to him as our dad. Maybe she knows something that’s making her want to distance herself.”

  “You’re suggesting that Cass knows something that could incriminate your dad or Heather, and instead of telling us—or the police—she’s just decided not to think about it? Just back off from everything?” Brooke doesn’t look convinced.

  “All I’m saying is that she’s not acting normal. But I guess everyone seems suspicious to me at this point. It’s hard to think straight when I just found out that the police are working on identifying a dead body who might be my mom.”

  “Oh, Sam.” Brooke’s been chewing at her thumbnail, but she pulls it from her mouth when I say that. “You never told me that.”

  “Forget it,” I say. “Forget I mentioned it.”

  “Impossible.”

  “It could be nothing. It’s far away. But they think they should rule it out, so they’re testing the DNA to see if it matches my mom’s.”

  “It sounds like you’re the one who knows something Cass doesn’t,” Brooke points out.

  The phone’s ringing again.

  “God, I can’t be here anymore. Let’s just go, okay?” I turn to gather the pages of Mom’s manuscript and shove them in my backpack.

  The phone has only just stopped ringing, but it’s making a racket again. Even though Brooke rarely answers the phone when she’s on the clock, she must have checked the caller ID because she says, “Sami. It’s the cop shop.”

  I pick it up. “Funky Nun. Samantha chooses joy.”

  “It’s Lieutenant Eschermann. Has Heather come by the shop?”

  “No. She had an appointment at two, and we haven’t seen her since.”

  “Right. That appointment was with me.”

  My heart flutters. Her appointment was with the police?

  “She never showed,” Eschermann says. “I’ve tried her cell phone and her landline at the apartment. The shop phone’s been busy—”

  “It hasn’t stopped ringing. But Heather’s not here. She left just before two.”

  “Well, she’s not here at the station. Her car is in the lot, but she—”

  “So she’s missing?”

  “In that no one seems to know where she is, yes. Have you talked to Cassidy? Maybe she’s with her mother.”

  “She’s at a soccer tournament. Have you asked my dad if she called or texted him? Since, you know, he’s right there at the station.”

  “Well, that’s the other thing, Sam. We released him. He left the station at about one forty. And if you’re telling me Heather left the shop just before two . . .”

  Oh no.

  “Sam, no one’s seen your father since then. He isn’t at your house, he isn’t on the NU campus. I spoke with your grandmother. Neither of us can get him on the cell either. Have you spoken with him?”

  “No.”

  “Do me a favor.
Try to call him. Maybe he’ll answer a call from you.” He pauses. “Sami, with the developments in the case, I asked your father not to leave town. As a courtesy to me.”

  Evidence must be building against him. “If you told him not to go, he won’t go.” But if he isn’t innocent, maybe he would.

  “Under normal circumstances, I don’t think he’d go without you. But Sam, he might have reason to keep Heather from speaking with me.”

  The world whirls around me. “Do you think he . . .” I can’t even say the words. “No, no, no. He wouldn’t. Not Heather. Why would he do something to Heather?”

  “Why Delilah, in that case?”

  But it’s different. He and Mom were divorced. He and Heather had dinner last night. Their divorce isn’t final. Their lives have overlapped longer than any other relationship Dad’s had. “Maybe they’re just having coffee. No one knows they’re not just sitting at the Madelaine—”

  “We do, actually, know they’re not sitting at the Madelaine. Or at any other restaurant in the area.”

  That means they’re out looking for them. That neighboring police forces are out looking for them. I feel raw, exposed, as if everyone knows, as if everyone’s judging.

  Someone on the outside presses her forehead to the glass and peers into the shop.

  I do a double take.

  Caramel hair. Blue eyes.

  I see her surrounded by sunflower blossoms.

  Mom?

  I drop the phone.

  I blink, and she’s gone.

  Just wishful thinking. Something I created at that moment to make myself feel better, to help me get through it all.

  No different from my childhood theories about my mother’s escaping to Schmidt’s place. Illusions, nothing more than fairy tales, dropped into my head like Candy Land daydreams.

  But it’s time to grow up. Time to realize what’s really going on—what’s been going on—since the day my mother disappeared.

  In all likelihood, my mother has not spent the past ten years on one endless carefree road trip, and there’s a good chance people close to me, people I trust, know what happened to her.

  I’m staring out the window of the Funky Nun, staring at the people gathering on the Walk. I look for my mother among them, although I know I won’t see her face. If she were here—if she were anywhere—she would have come for me by now.

  She’s gone.

  Replaced with the lens of a camera.

  Zeroing in on me.

  “Shit!” I instinctively duck behind the counter, where I curl into my own embrace, hidden.

  I hear Brooke talking with Lieutenant Eschermann on the phone, but I can’t concentrate on what she’s saying.

  My forehead rests on my knees, and my arms crisscross over my head. Heather’s creations drape around me, and for a moment, I feel safe.

  Safe, like when I was playing in the sunflowers, their radiant warmth and happiness surrounding me. I relied on those flowers, I realize now. They were dependable. Sprouted up alongside Schmidt’s barn and grew, grew, grew all season long, while other blossoms came and went—the tulips, the daffodils, the roses.

  Schmidt stopped planting them several years ago, right around the time I began to notice days could pass without my thinking of my mother at all, without my pondering her absence or whereabouts. When she truly became gone to me.

  I wonder if that’s when she became gone for him too.

  It’s not that I could ever forget her; I may have learned to live without her, but there’s a void carved permanently into my soul. A void no stepmother can fill, a void my father can’t come close to sealing, a void that tells me to trust no one because the one person I trusted more than anyone else on this planet—the person I needed more than anyone—left me.

  I know even my dreams about her coming back one last time and taking me into the passageway—however vivid—weren’t real, either. Those dreams, those visions, are my mind’s way of remembering her. Just a kid’s way of dealing with something she can’t possibly understand.

  Like the drawings I found at Heather’s place: stick figures attempting to make sense of a senseless situation.

  Brooke crouches on the floor before me. “We have to go. That cop wants to meet us at your place. He has a warrant to search the Nun and he’s sending evidence techs over here—he doesn’t want us getting in their way.”

  “Is the camera crew gone?”

  “No, and there’s more than one now, but I closed the curtains over the window.”

  At this, I snap back to the present.

  “We’ll have to be quick getting to the car,” she says. “I’ll go out the front and drive around to the alley for you. No one’s looking to have a word with me. As far as they know, I just work here.”

  I hear the hum and click of Heather’s printer-slash-copier. Hummmmm, click. Hummmmm, click. “Are you copying something?”

  “Well, yeah. I told the cop about your mom’s manuscript. He wants to see it.”

  I look at her; she’s the best friend ever, but she’s crazy. “If Eschermann wants to see it, it’s evidence. And you’re copying it?”

  “You deserve this piece of her, Sami, and if we turn it over to the cops, who knows when you’ll be able to read the rest of it.”

  “Heather didn’t make it to the station.”

  Brooke shakes her head. “Doesn’t sound like it.”

  Her car is in the station parking lot, but she never made it in for her meeting. My dad was released at the same time, and they’re both unaccounted for. My stomach is turning somersaults. “What could have happened to her?”

  “I hope she’s okay.” I know Brooke is trying to calm the stormy waters right now, but the fact of the matter is, nothing is okay at the moment. One of two things happened to my stepmother:

  Knowing evidence was starting to mount against her, she took a train out of town. That’s how I’d travel, if I needed to disappear. By train. No identification needed. Just pay cash for your ticket, and you’re literally gone.

  Or . . . knowing she had evidence against him and was about to blab, Dad took her somewhere. Either to talk her out of spilling the beans, or . . . or to do whatever he might have done to Trina, to my mom. And maybe even to the girl he knew in college.

  I think of what Eschermann told me at the station the other day: Your father has a third ex-wife now, doesn’t he? Anything happens to her, and we won’t be able to call it a coincidence.

  And I think of Dad in the hallway the other night: Heather—nothing happens. Maybe he really said what I thought I heard. And maybe he’s changed his mind since then.

  “We have to reach Cassidy.” I’m positive she won’t answer Eschermann’s calls because she won’t recognize the number, and particularly because she’s busy watching Zack. And I know the brand of nonspecific that Eschermann uses in his messages. He’ll ask her to return the call. Either she’ll put it off, assuming he’s calling for information about my mother, or she’ll call back instantly and hear that her mother is, for lack of a better word, missing.

  That kind of news, I know firsthand, should come from someone close to you.

  “It’s my fault.” I’m texting my sister now. We have to go to the soccer fields, or if the tournament is over, we have to go wherever Cassidy might be with Zack. “If something’s wrong with Heather, it’s my fault.”

  “That’s ridiculous, Sami,” Brooke says. “How is any of this—”

  I hold up a finger to delay Brooke’s commentary, just until I finish the text: Have to talk to you. 911.

  She returns: Heading to the Madelaine with Z. Meet us there.

  Me: Come home instead. Important. 911.

  Heather left the shop, but she never got to the station.

  And it’s my fault.

  Because I protected him all these years. I defended my father, even when the case against him looked grim and foreboding.

  I believed in him when I should have believed in the truth.

  Mayb
e my father waited outside the station for Heather to arrive.

  Maybe he lured her into his car. How difficult would it have been? They had dinner at the Madelaine Friday night. All he had to do was tell her he was worried about me or Cassidy, and she would’ve walked right into his trap.

  That’s where my imagination hits a brick wall. I can’t imagine what might have happened next because I can’t imagine Dad doing something so sinister. But that doesn’t mean I don’t think he’s capable. Not that long ago, I would’ve insisted otherwise, but knowing what I know now, it’s hard to think he isn’t.

  But it’s so unlike him. This is my father I’m talking about. The guy who put me on a pony and jogged at my side throughout the entire mile-long trail ride when I was nine. The guy who transformed his basement gym into a strobe-lit slumber party tent when I was twelve.

  That guy couldn’t have done even a tenth of the things crossing my mind now. Could he? But it seems Heather’s been wiped off the face of the earth . . .

  If only we knew what had happened to Mom, or to Trina, we might be able to piece together a scenario that might help us find Heather now.

  But if Jane Doe Georgia isn’t Trina Jordan, and even if she turns out to be my mother, I still won’t know how she died because Eschermann can’t disclose.

  Then I have a flicker of an idea:

  The first girl. Dad’s college fiancée. She’s confirmed dead. If I could learn what happened to her . . . even if the police ruled it an accident . . .

  I click open the browser on my phone and search for Lizzie Dawson accident.

  “What’s going on out there?” Someone’s banging on the back door of the Funky Nun—Kismet stirs—and Cassidy’s voice carries in from the back foyer. “It’s like Strawberry Fest all over again with the traffic and the cameras.”

  “You like strawberries?” says Zack, who’s with her. “Dipped in chocolate?”

  Brooke and I share a glance. We’re about to shake her world to the very core, and Zack’s talking aphrodisiacs.