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“What was his mood like?” Keith again.
“Dunno. He shook my hand, offered to buy me dinner. I didn’t say no to dinner.”
“And just like that,” I speak up, “he reappears, buys you a meal, then introduces you to his sex slave?”
Walt frowns at me. “I saw him around a few more times. Even brought him to the old homestead. I was growing dope back then. Jacob appreciated it. I could tell the apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree. Guy that hard-looking, he was his old man all over again. Nothing he wouldn’t drink or snort. I tried to warn him, but he just laughed, told me not to worry.” Walt shrugs again. “Not my place to judge another man.”
“Did he tell you what he did?” Keith asks.
“Long-haul trucker.”
“And his mom?” My turn. “Did he mention her?”
“Nah. And I didn’t ask.”
“He had a daughter. Did he mention her?”
Walt looks more uncomfortable. “He showed up. Bought me dinner. We did a little talking. A little visiting. I wasn’t sure why he’d returned. What he wanted. I was still figuring it out, when he brought me here one night. Told me he wanted to show me something. Told me I’d be proud of him.”
Walt stares at me. “You don’t remember?”
I’m honestly not sure. Multiple voices in the basement? It rings a bell, but I can’t bring it into focus. I suffer an impression of incredible thirst and hunger. Of hearing footsteps and thinking desperately: Finally, I’ll be let out. There’d be burgers or wings or whatever Jacob’s most recent craving was. And water. I desperately wanted water.
Except then there’d been talking. On the other side of the box. So much talking. Me whimpering, clawing my shredded fingertips against the closed lid like a wounded animal. Why wasn’t he undoing the lock? Why wasn’t he feeding me? Then, the creak of the stairs. Footsteps retreating. Voices drifting farther and farther away, until I was once again alone and starving in the dark.
“He was proud of what he’d accomplished,” Walt says now. “Rigging up the place, building the box, snatching himself a friend. Told me all about you, how everyone was looking for you with your picture being all over the news. And still, no one suspected him, knew what had happened, where to look. Like he’d stolen some treasure from right beneath everyone’s noses. Guess he thought I’d be proud of him, too. Cuz that’s what he remembered from being a little boy. That’s what his mom had told him. That I was that kind of man.”
Walt doesn’t look at me anymore. “I felt shame that night. The trees screamed and raged at me. Wouldn’t let me sleep. That’s when I knew what I had to do. But I was too late.”
“Maybe that’s why he brought you over,” Keith offers. “He already planned on taking off. He just wanted one last moment to brag.”
“Maybe,” Walt says. He turns toward the basement stairs.
“Wait.” I hold out a hand. “Did Jacob mention being in the area before, say, fifteen years ago?”
I glance at Keith. The time frame of the other graves, and Lilah Abenito’s murder.
That shrug again. “Forty years of past is too much to cover. We stuck to the present. That was hard enough.” He hits the stairs, rat-a-tat-tat, down to the cellar.
I follow much more slowly, testing each tread, my head pressed against the cool wall for support.
Walt is correct about the cellar. What I’d considered a basement was really little more than a single, dark moldy room. Walt finds a lantern, lights it, and the infamous shit brown carpet once more comes into view. I realize now it’s just a remnant tossed upon an earthen floor. The sofa I hated so much is shoved against a wall, stuffing coming out in giant chunks. I remember a coffee table, cheap, compressed wood, but it’s nowhere in sight. Maybe I imagined it. Maybe some lost hiker broke it down for firewood. I don’t know.
The bathroom in the corner is barely as big as a closet and every bit as disgusting as I remember. I can just make out a moldy bar of soap. Same as the one Jacob let me use to wash my hair? It looks like a separate life-form; I can’t even bring myself to touch it.
In my mind, this place is every bit as foul and smelly and awful as my memories. Yet, I recall it somehow being bigger, even nicer. Or maybe that’s just how it seemed after being released from a pine box. Hell, Jacob probably could’ve stuck me in an outhouse after that damn prison, and it would’ve seemed like a luxurious master bath.
I’m shaking. I don’t even realize it until Keith puts his arm around my shoulders. I’m covered in goose bumps and shivering uncontrollably.
Walt, shotgun still in hand, eyes me worriedly. Does he think I’ll scream hysterically, break down?
AmI going to scream hysterically and break down?
I can’t wrap my mind around it. I’m here at last. Ground zero. And it’s the same, but it’s different. It’s just as horrible and horrifying... and yet it also seems smaller, less significant, less scary.
I’m no longer the girl in the box.
I am Flora Dane.
