What She Found in the Woods

‘The day after tomorrow?’ I ask. ‘Tomorrow I have to be at the shelter in the morning for some deliveries.’

He shifts anxiously. ‘Would you like to come home with me again?’ he asks. ‘My mom was asking for you.’

‘Yes,’ I reply. ‘I really like your mom.’ Although I don’t know why she keeps inviting me when my presence so obviously endangers her husband.

‘Good. The day after tomorrow,’ he says, and moves away before I can come up with a way to ask him about that.

He drifts back into the gloaming, and I lose sight of him.

29 JULY

The drugs are completely out of my system, so it’s with me all the time now. The image of Rachel’s dead body. All the blood.

I can’t tell if I’m nauseous because I went off my meds, or if I’m nauseous because I keep hallucinating Rachel’s dead body everywhere because I’ve gone off my meds. It’s a subtle point, but one I can’t seem to get straight. The sweating has stopped and so have the tremors, thanks to Ray’s little white pills, but the nausea is still there. I wonder if I’m going to have to spend the rest of my life seeing corpses and being sick to my stomach. It wouldn’t be half the punishment I deserve; I know that. It would be inconvenient though; walking around always seeing the people I’ve killed.

First, always first, is Rachel. I see her at the foot of my bed when I wake up in the morning, then stretched out under my grandparents’ breakfast table when I go downstairs. I see her passing me in a car while I ride my bike to the shelter. I see her hanging from one of the hooks in the walk-in freezer. Her black tongue is pushed out between her blue lips.

But, wait. That wasn’t Rachel. Rachel wasn’t the one who hanged herself, I tell myself. I can’t even keep all my ghosts straight any more. And I need to keep them straight. I owe them that, at the very least.

‘Miss?’ says a man’s voice.

I whirl around, my high-pitched bark of a scream cut off as soon as I see who’s behind me.

‘Oh, Officer,’ I say when I register the blue uniform. ‘You startled me.’

The young policeman smiles at me. ‘I didn’t mean to sneak up on you,’ he says, amused.

Why do men love scaring women so much? Nearly every boyfriend I ever had thought it would be a great idea to pull some prank on me to make me scream. What do they get out of that? It’s never made any sense to me.

‘Is Maria here?’ the officer asks, all business now that it’s clear I am not amused.

‘No. Some mornings I do the inventory for her. Did you have an appointment?’ I ask, stepping towards him and forcing him to move back so I can exit the walk-in.

I’m not being rude. I smile to make sure he knows that. I’m just making it clear that I belong here, he doesn’t, and I don’t like to be cornered. Or frightened out of my skin so he can have a little chuckle.

‘No. I . . .’ He breaks off, cowed now that I’ve come right at him. He musters up his big-man voice. ‘I spoke with her the other day about a missing girl who used to stay at this facility.’

I nod and look down sadly. ‘Sandy.’

‘You knew her?’ he asks.

‘No. She left before I got here,’ I reply. ‘But Maria told the staff that you found her remains.’

‘You’re new here?’ the officer guesses.

‘I’m a summer volunteer. Officer . . .?’

‘Longmire,’ he says, supplying his name. ‘What’s yours?’ he asks, pulling out a notepad and a pencil.

I give it, and now I regret standing up to him. But maybe if I play docile for the rest of this interview – and I see now that’s what this is – I can seem innocuous enough so that he won’t look too deeply into my past.

It’s not like anything is on my permanent record. I’m not technically a criminal. No red flags are going to pop up if he enters my name into a computer.

But. He won’t have to dig too far to find several newspaper articles about a major humanitarian prize and a high school hoax that have my name all over them. That’s small potatoes, though. Embarrassing, but not criminal. At least my involvement in Rachel’s death never made the papers. After I was hospitalized, I was legally exonerated due to ‘extenuating medical circumstances’.

But. There’s a paper trail about how I was questioned by the police in New York City, although the details – including the fact that my interrogation was temporarily under the umbrella of a possible murder investigation – have all been expunged.

But. My state-mandated stay in a mental hospital would be easy for him to find, even if he did have to dig deep to connect my need for a state-mandated stay at a mental institution to a potential murder investigation.