Better Left Buried (11 page)

“Then l
et her find out that the guy’s a shitbag on her own. It’s not like a breakup is the worst thing that could happen to her. The girl’s never with anyone but you. I know you don’t want to hear this, but you’re coming off as jealous.”

“Of him?
” Harmony scoffed. “Don’t be stupid.”

“
You’re not the slightest bit worried what will happen if she has someone else to spend time with besides you?”

Harmony waved him off. “You’re a mechanic, not a psychologist. Stick with what you know.”

“I
know
you.” He met her stare, piercing her thoughts with his cool blue eyes like a human lie detector. “And I know when you’re keeping secrets. What really happened this morning? And don’t expect me to believe it’s just that some bullshit jock came between the two of you because I know better. There’s a reason Brea’s not taking your calls. What did you do?”

“Nothing, okay
? I didn’t
do
anything.” The situation with Brea was sending up too many red flags. She turned on the television and dug through her purse for the bottle of Xanax Bennett had prescribed for her anxiety. “Can you get me a glass of water please? I’m tired of talking about this.”

She pinched the
Xanax between her lips, knowing that Adam would never keep pushing her if she was already close enough to the edge to sedate herself.

“I’m sorry.” He ran his hand through his hair and
sighed.

“Water,” Harmony mumbled.

He handed her a plastic cup full.

S
he took a sip, threw back her head, and swallowed. “You want to know what caused the fight? It isn’t that Brea’s dating some rich, pretty boy jock. It’s that she’s been lying to me about it. We’ve been best friends our whole lives and she’s sneaking around with him behind my back. I tell her everything. What else isn’t she telling me?”

“
I’ll give you that one. It was shitty on her part. I’m sorry. Why don’t you come to bed?”

Harmony checked the time. It was late, almost 2:00. “I’m too amped up to sleep. Go on. I’ll come in later.” She regretted the Xanax as soon as she took it
and waited for Adam to go to the bedroom to brew a pot of coffee.

The only way she could think of to avoid the nightmare was to avoid being asleep at 2:34.

Thirty four minutes.

M
ay as well have been a lifetime.

She
interrupted the coffee pot for the first cup and chugged it as soon as it cooled off, taking a second one to the sofa. The caffeine wasn’t enough to offset the pill. She turned up the television’s volume and flipped through the channels, developing something like road hypnosis. The shows changed, but she was too dazed to notice which ones they changed to. She just kept clicking, fighting the urge to close her eyes.

“
Help me”

She wasn’t sure, at first, if she’d heard the words between changing channels or if she was imagining them.

“Help me.”

Th
e second time, she was certain.

She turned on the floor lamp and looked around, wondering if
the man would show himself with Adam just down the hall.

“Go away.” Her voice cracked, but the intonation was absolute.

She wouldn’t be victimized, not again. She finished her coffee and went to the bathroom to wash her face.

“I don’t know how to help you.”
The statement was equal parts resignation and wanting to be left alone. She closed the door and turned on the water. The faucet was cold, not the usual cool of room-temperature metal, but frigid enough to freeze her skin. A breeze blew her hair and she brushed it away, setting her cell phone on a towel off to the side so it wouldn’t fall in the sink. She adjusted the water temperature and checked the stream with her hand, but it wouldn’t warm up. Even with zero cold added, it still felt like ice.

She splashed a handful on her face and stared at her reflection in the mirror.

Did she really look so bad?

Why hadn’t Adam said anything?

Dark circles surrounded her lifeless eyes as the drugs took their toll. She felt detached, numb, and everything tangible became fluid and wobbly. She washed her hands, soaking the gauze on her arm. The cold water mixed with the scabs to create the illusion of fresh blood. She peeled off the tape and gently cleaned the wounds. The antibacterial soap burned, but the pain was sobering. It took her mind off the whispers and drew her back from the drugged fog.

“You’re going to be fine.”

Even as she said it, she knew it wasn’t true.

She stared into
the mirror and a sense of dread overcame her as she sank into the impossible depth of another world behind the glass.

She’d seen the space before, the basement from her nightmares.

Blood pooled at the bottom of the stairs and spattered the concrete walls. A single light illuminated the dark corner. A tall, bearded man with a feral look in his eyes turned to her.

“Help me.”

He moved toward her, head down and with ashen skin that could only mean one thing. The right side of his white t-shirt was stiff, crimson and brown from shoulder to waist. The smell of week-old rotted meat wafted off of him.

“
Help me.”

Awake.
Asleep. Drugged. Insane.

No matter what her condition, there was no helping this man who was so clearly dead.

She pounded the heels of her hands against the sides of her head and tears spilled down her cheeks.

“You’re not there,” she said. “
You’re not there!”

She
repeated it, over and over again.

Light reflected off the metal barrel of a gun aimed dead center between her eyes. A steady string of bloody spit dripped from the man’s chin as he set a finger to the trigger
and cocked the hammer.

“Not there!”

A shrill tone drew her back. Her screams were punctuated by the sensation of falling.

The man disappeared as quickly as he came and the only thing reflected in the mirror was the black and white shower curtain behind her.

Adam held her tight, rocking her back and forth, covering the top of her head with kisses. “I’ve got you, Harmony. I’ve got you.”

She noticed her phone open on the floor next to her.

A distant mechanical voice broke through her sobs. “Ms. Wolcott, hello?”

She hadn’t remembered answering it
.

“Hello?”
Adam had picked it up, keeping one arm around her as he tucked the phone between his shoulder and ear. He stroked her hair, rocking her as he spoke to the woman on the other end. The volume was turned up loud enough for Harmony to hear everything.

“
I need to speak with Harmony Wolcott please.” The voice belonged to an older woman and bore the authority and formality of impending bad news.

“This is her
boyfriend. Harmony’s not feeling well. Can I help you?”

“This is Reston Memorial Hospital calling. We were given this number as the listed next of kin for Charity Wolcott.”

Next of kin.

Harmony lowered her head. The Xanax took the edge off the weight of the call she’d been expecting for as long as she could remember. “Ask if she’s alive
.”

Adam held her tighter.
“Has something happened? Is Charity all right?”

“I’m afraid I can’t release specifics over the phone, but
I wonder if you might be able to come in and speak with one of our doctors.”

“Ask if she’s alive,” Harmony said, this time with conviction.

“Yes, she’s alive,” the woman answered, having obviously heard her, “but we need to speak with family as soon as possible.”

“Absolutely.
Yes,” Adam said. “We’ll be right there.”

Brea swept concealer under both of her eyes, the minimal coverage doing little to improve her appearance. She was exhausted and couldn’t get the man out of her head.

W
hatever Harmony had gotten into was now her problem as well.

“You realize this is a one-time deal, right?” Joan
said.

“I know, Mom.”

It hadn’t been too difficult to convince her mother to give her a day off after telling her she’d fought with Harmony. Brea had said she needed time for things to cool down between them and promised to work on her mid-term report if her mother would let her spend the day at the library. The excuse was the kind a parent could buy into.

“I’ll pick you up at 1:00, okay?”

Brea nodded. “That’s fine. I’ll be ready.” She reached through the front seats and picked up her backpack off the floor behind them. “Thanks.”

“1:00, Brea
,” Joan reminded, as if in the last two minutes Brea might have forgotten.

“I got it.”

The ramshackle, one-story town library had once been someone’s house. The floor plan had been opened up some, but not enough to change the claustrophobic maze-like feeling of too many rooms crowded into too small a building.

The
air smelled of paper, dust, and copy machine toner.

Brea lifted her
backpack strap onto her shoulder and headed toward the preoccupied sixty-something librarian.

The library was empty, as far as she c
ould tell, other than a middle-aged man pecking away at a keyboard and cursing the internet. He was unkempt and clearly unfamiliar with computers. There were classifieds open on the desk next to him so she figured he was looking for a job.

“Excuse me.”
She cleared her throat to get the librarian’s attention.

The woman
let out a yelp and held her hand over her heart. She tucked a scrap of paper between the pages of the romance novel she had been reading and closed the cover. “I’m sorry. I didn’t hear you come in.” She removed her thick glasses and folded the arms so that they hung level from the strap around her neck. Her eyes were the color of slate, gray like her hair, turtleneck, and skirt. She was literally monochromatic. “How can I help you?”

“I need to find newspapers from 1996
.” Brea had done as much searching as she could online, but quickly became frustrated by how little her sleepy town contributed to the electronic archives.

“Those would be downstairs.” The
woman smiled, her teeth the color of weak tea. “We don’t have microfiche, but we have bound copies. Come on. I’ll show you.” She stepped out from around the desk, limping on a built-up orthopedic shoe that made Brea feel guilty.

“I’m sure I can find it
. Really.”

“Nonsense.
The new hip needs some exercise.” The woman’s peg leg gait thumped louder every other step.

Brea
did her best to stay behind her, finding it hard to walk so slowly.

The basement archives were what she expected. She’d been to the library dozens of times over the years, but never had reason to
visit them. The librarian held the rickety banister with both hands as she led Brea down the narrow stairs to the low ceilinged room that smelled of moth balls and mildew.

“Watch your head.”

Brea ducked to miss the low crossbeam that would have otherwise knocked her out. It was a wonder the building passed code.

A dehumidifier hummed in the corner, the sound of water running th
rough it making Brea wish she’d gone to the bathroom before going down there.

“Let me see,” the librarian said, scanning the bindings. “It looks like the papers from 1996 are from here down.”

Brea looked at the long line of bound copies, folded and standing neatly against one another. “There are so many of them.”

“Three hundred sixty five days in a year, dear.
Is there anything else?”

She had three hours to get through them all, or
be lucky enough not to have to. “No, thank you.”

The woman set her knotty hand on Brea’s shoulder. “It’d be appreciated if you could keep them all in neat order.”

“Of course.” She’d have felt terrible, otherwise. She pulled out the first section of paper and started at January 1
st
.

The overhead lighting was terrible and
coupled with the mildew air she wasn’t sure she should be breathing, she quickly developed a headache. The chair was too hard and the table too small for the amount of papers she had to go through. She made do as best she could and searched, uncomfortably, for anything she could find about a local man named Tom.

It would have been so much easier if she had more to go on.

Front page news in Reston wasn’t like in other towns; the cement plant shutting down and the first opposed run for Mayor made headlines here. There were stories about a benefit for a boy with cancer who would have been her age, two, at the time and commentary about the rise in unemployment—a curse the town never quite recovered from. She couldn’t help thinking how funny it was to see ads for stores closed over a decade ago, some of which she knew she should remember but couldn’t. She searched for the line of demarcation where events became clear and realized she recalled very little from before she’d turned five.