Black Water Tales: The Secret Keepers (33 page)

“What?” The girl asked. They knew her, she was a familiar stranger. She was different now; her lips were full with the romance of young adulthood, her frame stood taller with more life, but her eyes were unchanged. Those eyes were the same ghostly orbs that had been watching Regina in front of the video store.

“Eden,” Regina spoke through a filmy consciousness as if remembering some illusive detail of a dream.

“Eden?” Natalie repeated looking at Regina and then back to the girl trying to resolve the name with the person that was standing before them.

“Eden DeFrank?” Nikki asked.

“You remember me?” She asked as she stepped into the clearing. Eden wore a long gray dress that fluttered around her; the strap of her bag was strung across her chest.

“Yes, of course. What are you doing here?” Regina asked.

Eden raised an eyebrow at the audacity of Regina’s question. “This is my family’s land. What are you doing here?” Eden returned the question.

“It’s a crime scene,” Regina told her.

The ends of Eden’s mouth curved into a mischievous smile. “Technically this is not a crime scene; this is only where they found her body, not necessarily where any crime was committed,” Eden informed the girls.

“My God, I have not seen you in so long!” Nikki spoke.

“It has been awhile.” Eden agreed. “When I turned 18, I moved to Johnson City, but my brother and I still owned this land.” Eden told them.

“You own this land?” Natalie asked.

Eden snickered, “Of Course I own this land. It belonged to my parents, and when they died it passed onto Glen and now it is mine.”

“Why are you here now?” Nikki asked her.

“For the same reason as you, for sweet, sweet Lola.” If Eden had wanted their attention, it was all hers now.

Why in the hell did she care about Lola?
Regina thought.

“How did you know about Lola?” Regina asked.

“Word travels fast. Now it’s my turn, what are you doing here? You shouldn’t be here,” Eden told them as she stood up against a massive tree truck, her thick mane fluttering around her face.

“Uh,” Regina stammered. “We just needed to take a look around, that’s all,” Regina told her. Eden narrowed her eyes, attempting to analyze Regina’s answer.

“Kinda morbid, don’t ya think?” she asked, beginning to bite her nails casually.

“Tell me about it,” Natalie agreed with exasperation.

“I mean…if my best friend was murdered and chopped to pieces, the last place on earth that I would want to be is in the place where her body was dug up.” Eden said. Regina’s attention shot to Nikki as she groaned a deep gurgling burp and grabbed her stomach as if she was about to lose her lunch.

“Nikki?” Natalie lurched to Nikki’s side in comfort. “You OK?” Natalie asked, pressing the back of her hand against Nikki’s cheek, which was burning hot. Nikki moved her hand from her stomach to her mouth for a second before thrusting over to release a burst of a yellow slimy liquid. When she was finished, she wiped her mouth with the sleeve of her dress.

“Sorry,” she said and burped again.

It was not long before Eden regained their attention. “Did you find anything?” Eden asked them slyly.

“Like what?” Natalie asked.

“I don’t know, a chainsaw, an axe, a note? Anything?” Eden’s voice darkened with the last word of her sentence.

“Should we have found something?” Nikki wanted to know. Eden turned away from them to face a piercing beam of white light that shined down on the drab forest floor through a break in the trees.

“I know what happened; I know what he did to her.” Eden spoke to the sky, her eyes peering into the heart of heaven from this deep place. Regina’s heart sank slowly, a jagged and insignificant rock sinking quietly to the bottom of a body of water without a fight. All of the things that she thought she wanted to know seemed a cross too big to bear and she feared that she would collapse under the pressure.

“What did he do to her?” Natalie asked, she begged. Eden rotated gracefully to face the girls that she knew so little, but so very intimately.

“The very same thing that he did to all of you.” She answered. It was hard for Nikki to swallow, especially with dry bile now corroding her throat.

“You knew about that?” Natalie spoke, her lips quivering.

“Yes,” Eden responded bluntly. Eden tilted her head and lifted her shoulders in a shrug.

“Well…I didn’t know at first of course, but after a couple of years, I figured it out. I was home most of the time when you had your lessons. He would always tell me to stay in my room until the hour was done, but sometimes, I would sneak out and I would watch through the staircase banister. Sometimes, I would line my dolls up so that they could watch too.” She chuckled to herself incoherently.

“Soon, I noticed how he would always take one of you into the study.” Nikki interrupted Eden’s story with an involuntary groan as she raised her hand pressing the bottom of her palm to her temple trying to push away the memories that threatened deluge. There was no need for Nikki to express what she felt; the other girls knew the exact sights and sounds that plagued her. Each of them had created a prison in their mind in which to store the
haunting memories and here was Eden standing before them with a key they never knew existed.

The booming strokes of the classical music that began in the pit of Nikki’s stomach, crawled through her chest, echoed in her ears and now escaped into the air around them and overtook the sounds of the forest, a disturbing lullaby guiding Eden’s story along.

“One of you would just play and play until my brother came from his study. Every now and then when there was a break in the music I could hear the sounds from that room. It was years before I realized what was happening. I was a child like you and even when I did figure it out…what could I do?” Eden asked.

And with an explanation so unsophisticated and pure, Regina wondered how she had ever lacked the same understanding.

What could she do? What could any of them have done? They were just children
.

“Did he do it to you?” Natalie asked. All of the girls were still fixed on the beautiful young Eden.

“God no!” she hissed. Natalie gasped as if she had been stabbed in the abdomen. “The guilt had been eating away at him for years and when Lola disappeared it became too much for him and he confessed to me everything that I had already known. It was not his fault; he was sick.” Eden protected her brother.

“Sick?” Nikki asked.

“What did he do to Lola?” Regina asked.

Eden wrinkled her brow in confusion, “I already told you. He …”

“You know what I mean!” Regina cut Eden’s sentence with her frustrated interruption.

“I’m afraid I don’t.” Eden said lifting her chin slightly in order to look down on Regina. Regina was brimming with a blustering rage that would not allow her to speak again without her words erupting in a barrage of frenzied berating therefore she used only her hand and pointed sharply at the hole in the ground. Eden’s gaze followed her finger to the hole and her eyes widened with mocking innocence as if she had never seen the grave before.

“Oh,” Eden said as she took a quick breath. “You mean, did he bash her head in, chop her up and conceal her broken body on my father’s land?” Eden asked. Regina summoned every power in heaven and hell to keep her from thrashing Eden and dumping her into the same hole.

“Yes,” Regina said, seething with anger. Eden squared her body with Regina’s, “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Open and shut; bittersweet victory,” Eden said. “That is precisely why I have returned to this God forsaken town. I knew what you people would be up to. I knew you would come back. My brother did a bad thing to you and he may have been a whole lot of things, but a murderer was not one of them. My brother did not kill Lola Rusher,” she confirmed.

“How do you know?” Nikki asked.

“BECAUSE HE WAS MY BROTHER!” Eden responded in a roar. “He told me that he didn’t kill her and I know he was telling the truth.” Eden’s eyes filled with tears.

“He was sick Eden.” Nikki did her best to reason with the unreasonable girl.

“He
was
sick, I know that. Everyone was after the explosion.” Eden revealed. The girls looked to one another in utter confusion.

Eden was sick herself; she was not making any sense
.

“What explosion?” Regina asked. “What are you talking about?” she added.

Eden’s eyes dilated with uncontainable excitement at their ignorance.

“At Waterford. You don’t know, do you? Eden asked.

Regina remembered that there had been some type of emergency at the Waterford facility when she was a child, but it was nothing she remembered in great detail.

“You probably don’t remember, but I do. Do you want to know why? The mischievous girl asked.

“Why?” Lifelessly, Natalie played along.

“That was the day that my parents died, they died in that explosion.” Eden answered. A bolt of memory flashed through Regina and she recalled the death of Mr. and Mrs. DeFrank with clarity.
It was not that she had forgotten their deaths, but simply that she had no cause to remember them. The memories of the Waterford incident floated back to her in a foggy parade of panicked sights, racing cars, sirens and broken pieces of animated dialogue and Regina realized that it had seemed much less monumental to her as a child than it did now.

“Our lessons began before your parents died, Eden,” Nikki told her.

“I know that!” the girl snapped. “But when did the private encounters in the study begin?” she asked.

Each girl took several seconds to dig into the memories that they had spent so many years burying, each coming to the grim realization that before the death of the DeFranks, their son had never hurt them. It was captivating, but hardly a definitive victory for Eden; she continued.

“It was the explosion itself that changed Glen. It changed lots of people. The fire started in the factory, but the explosions it caused blew the factory and the lab, which released the gas that burned and burned for days. The fumes, they changed people,” Eden told them.

Regina’s eyes darkened as she did her best to sort through the fog of that day and extract a logical progression of events.

Her mother hurried into her bedroom grabbing her duffle bag out of the closet and began dumping clothes into it.
What’s happening?
Regina called out to her mother several times before Mrs. Dean replied that everything was fine and that they were just going away for a couple of days. Once on the road Regina recalled the sound of cars zipping by them, crisscrossing the streets as her father sped out of town on I-48 with his wife in the passenger seat and his daughter crouched in the back. The world was moving faster than it had ever moved in the past.

In days, they returned to their home where one would have been hard pressed to even hear the topic brought up again. Regina had let the incident pass as a small emergency that resulted in a little vacation with little more thought than that. It soon became an event only spoken in whispers on the phone between housewives
and hushed conversations amongst brooding men. Regina looked into the eyes of the other two girls and could see the firing of synapses sparking recollections similar to her own as they stood glued to the forest ground.

“The company paid everyone what a country family thought was a tidy sum in exchange for their signatures on the dotted line and they moved on, within a month it was as if that place had never been here. There was only one problem, the waste they left behind. Some people weren’t the same after that day, those of us that it did not affect directly it affected indirectly. It changed my brother. He was no pedophile. Before that day he had never hurt anyone in his life. But after a couple of months I began to see that he was different. At first I just thought it was the death of our parents. It was having its effects on him the same as it would on any person who had lost their mother and father and was then forced to raise a young child, but it was bigger than that, he was sweet, but easily agitated, sensitive, but surly. It got to a point where the sunlight began to hurt him, he craved water, but had trouble drinking, and his muscles would retract so tightly that he would have trouble walking. His struggle was with something much darker than the loss of our parents. But it was a long time before he gave in to what infected him and had been growing inside him, touching and killing every part of his soul, even longer before I realized what was happening. It wasn’t just physical, it was mental. He never hurt anyone else.” She told them as if that should assure them in some way.

“You don’t know that!” Natalie fired back.

“Shut up, Natalie,” Regina barked at her not wanting Natalie to accidently reveal any incriminating information to the girl that was set against them.

“Ask your parents, they know what happened,” Eden snipped.

Regina tried to steel herself against the whirlwind of bizarre notions that Eden had let loose to attack her, but the fact that Eden was right almost brought her to her knees. She could not validate the truth of all of Eden’s words, but there was one thing, of which, she was sure; people were different after that day. Her
own mother had been different after that day. Regina cringed at the thought of the mirrors.

Soon after their return to Black Water after the explosion, her mother developed a condition, in which, the sight of her own image in the mirror was maddening. At first, Mrs. Dean shied away from the sight of her reflection, then she covered the mirrors with towels and light blankets, but soon even that was not enough to ward off the compulsion to cast away the sight of herself. A sharp wind cut across the forest, a wind not much different from the summer breeze that cooled Regina years ago one afternoon when she returned home after bike riding. After stepping into the foyer of her home her eyes were immediately drawn to the sharp pieces of glass that gleamed on the floor in the afternoon sunlight, her eyes moved to the wall where an ornamented mirror had hung just before she left the house. Regina called up the stairs to her mother while taking them two at a time. She screamed for her mother again as she threw open the door to her parent’s bedroom, but there was no one there, just the hangover of some terrible act illustrated in jagged pieces of glass from the mirror that had been on top of her parent’s dresser that now littered the carpet like insignificant pieces of paper.