Page 109 of It's One of Us
Joey is repulsed by the very idea, but that’s her own experience speaking. She knows when to step away from a thread.
“Okay. So after you hit him, and you ran, what did you see? Forest? Lake? Pasture? Other farms?”
“Forest, mostly. I went past a lake. I heard the geese. There was a cemetery, too, on a hill. Not a big one, but at least twenty graves or so. It was sunset, getting dark, and I walked all night. Flushed a deer or two but didn’t see any people. I came out near a fence line and followed it, hoping I’d find the road.”
Joey tried to keep it less an interrogation than a re-creation of Jillian’s moonlit walk.
What did you see? What did you hear? How long did it take? Was there a path? Was the ground hard or soft? What did it feel like underfoot, damp, dry? How long were you in the brush before you hit the open road? Leaf-strewn or gravel? How long do you think it took to walk between the lake and the graveyard? Did you go over any fences?
They went on like this for several minutes, Joey gleaning everything she could, detail after detail. Jillian was fading by the time they finished, but Joey felt like she had a handle on where to start.
“I’m sure we’ll speak again soon, Jillian. I have to go look for your assailant now.”
She nodded, and her eyes grew distant. “I hope you find him. And I hope he’s dead.”
In the hallway, a trooper pointed her toward a staff break room, where she found Osley and Darden with a set of topographical maps. They were doing it the old-fashioned way, the trajectory being mapped with string and pencil to draw a hundred-mile radius around the spot where Jillian had been found.
Osley waves her over. “We’re figuring a trajectory that led her to State Road 13, just before the AES explosives facility. That site takes up thirteen hundred acres, and if she walked from sunset to dawn, and passed a lake, we think she came from the southwest. It’s pretty isolated back there. She couldn’t have covered more than twenty miles, tops, and that’s giving her a lot of credit. She’s in damn good shape, but she was barefoot, so it had to be slower going. Darden’s got his chopper ready for us to go do some flyovers looking for the landmarks she gave us. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
He grins, a pirate’s smile. “Wanna take a ride?”
43
THE WIFE
Blood. Olivia smells blood.
She drags herself to the surface. She is nauseated, in pain, and the thick, coppery scent makes her want to roll over and put her head in a trash can. Gorge rising, she goes to do just that, but finds she can’t move. She swallows hard, twice more, then realizes her eyes are open and it is dark, so dark. Has she slept all day? This doesn’t feel like her bed. It feels hard, and smells of gas and oil.
She tries to piece together what’s going on, what’s happening, but there’s a huge blank space where her memory of how she got here should be.
Is she moving? Thethwack, thwack, thwackof tires on concrete permeates the din of horror and she thinks,yes, I’m in a car.A car’s trunk, she realizes.
All of this has processed in the space of three heartbeats, and now comes the panic, rising like a tidal wave through her body.
Breathe, she coaches herself.Breathe.
When the panic subsides a bit, when she feels like she has a grip on the reality of things, she assesses her body. Her hands are tied in front of her, not behind. A small mercy; her collarbone feels like it’s taken on a load of shrapnel. She can’t imagine how much it would hurt if her arm was twisted back. She is wearing her silk top and soft fleece pants from this morning—assuming this is the same day, of course. It’s possible she’s been drugged into oblivion for hours, days, she has no idea.
He’s going to kill her. He’s just marking time—
A horn sounds, sharp, loud, and Olivia jerks awake with a massive gasp, heart thundering in her chest. It takes a moment to right herself.
She’s been dreaming again.
She’s had variations of this nightmare since she came to Alys, but this one was by far the worst. The scent of blood commingling with oil, and the terrible pain in her collarbone, which has been mending well these past few weeks, these details are new.
She is healing. All of her. Mentally. Physically. She had her first period since the miscarriage, and it was as sad and awful to start bleeding again as she expected. But being alone, consumed with the work on Annika’s house, helped dull the pain in her heart. Next month, she’ll have an idea of when her cycle is going to start and be ready for it. It is freeing, in a way, to know that there is no possible chance of being pregnant outside of an immaculate conception. That was the hardest part of the past several years of trying to get and stay pregnant—the damn hope of it all. Hoping that this was the time. Hoping that the two lines on the stick would turn pink. Praying that they were. And when they weren’t, waiting longer, three minutes, five, ten; dragging the stick out of the trash can hours later to examine the blank space under the light for any hint of color. Olivia had always stuck with the old-fashioned pregnancy tests. Somehow the ones that screamed Pregnant or Not Pregnant seemed too in her face. The two lines system was gentler on her psyche.
But no more of this emotional roller coaster. Next month, she’ll bleed, and there will be no tests, no fears. No hoping and praying. Just a regular woman’s body doing its monthly biological duty.
But these nightmares are getting worse.
She rolls out of the bed with a small yelp; the pain from the dream is explained—she’s woken up on her right side. Her collarbone aches, her shoulder feels stiff. But it’s progress that the pain didn’t wake her in the night. It’s felt better since she got the stitches out. She does her exercises quickly just to loosen things up.
The sun is rising, and she follows the liminal brightness to the kitchen, setting water to boil so she can take a cup of green tea out onto the deck and enjoy it. The days are growing incrementally shorter, and she knows vitamin D is the best possible remedy for dipping moods. Coming off the failed pregnancy, she was already living clean, but she’s stuck with it. No caffeine, no alcohol. She’s off the postsurgery pills, too. Loads of water, sunshine, fruit and green tea and exercise, and she’s feeling more like herself again.
She hasn’t been alone for such a long time. Hasn’t been self-sufficient like this since she was a kid, between the Perry breakup and the Park reconciliation.
