In the Blood (33 page)

My phone was constantly buzzing. I’d turned the ringer off, but I could feel it vibrating in my pocket. My aunt, Sky, Dr. Cooper, another number I didn’t recognize.

I decided I should listen to the messages:

“This is a bad move,” Sky warned. “Just come back and we’ll figure all of this out. That lawyer, whom you obviously are going to need, is on her way. Come back, meet with her, and we’ll go talk to the police. They don’t know you’re gone yet, but it won’t be long before they figure it out. I can’t hold them off forever.”

“Please, sweetie,” begged my aunt. I could hear the tears in her voice. “I promised your mom that I would take care of you if she couldn’t. You need to let me do that. I know you. I know you wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

“Running away might seem like a good choice,” said Dr. Cooper. “It might seem like the only choice. But we have lots of options that we can explore together. Call me. Or just come to my office. I’m here for you.”

Why couldn’t I ever let anyone help me?

There was one more message.

“You don’t know me,” he said. “But I know you. My name is Peter Jacobs, and you might be familiar with me as the man who has been leading the initiative for your father’s release. Some new information has come to light and I want to discuss it with you. Give me five minutes of your time.”

All famous killers have their followers, and my father was no exception. And this guy was his number one fan boy, the journalist who always believed that there was another man at the scene of the crime, my mother’s lover. It was my initial testimony that encouraged this idea. I said that I had seen a strange pair of shoes at the door. But I wasn’t sure of that anymore. I couldn’t swear to it now. In my memory, there is a pair of simple black walking shoes. But was it that afternoon, or another afternoon—I couldn’t be sure. Even so, it had been enough on which to hang years of defense, appeals, and investigations. Who is
S
? This initial that was scrawled into my mother’s calendar with a little heart beside it that everyone seemed to think was evidence of an affair. Personally, I had no idea who it was. My mother, as far as I saw, only worked and cared for me.

As I came into the clearing, I saw it: a mine-shaft entrance, built into the swell of a small hill. The splintered wood frame was bent and sagging, and the hole was boarded shut. It looked like something out of a fairy tale, the hole in which a troll or hobbit might live, and I stood looking at it for a second. Was she in there? The sky had grown darker, and the air ever colder. I was so far from everything now, a three-mile trek in either direction to safety. It was then that I realized how stupid I was. I needed to call the police, or someone, and I was going to do that right away. I took the phone
from my pocket and was about to dial when I heard something that I was sure came from inside the mine.

I dropped my bag, moved in close, and listened. I laid my head against the wood for a moment. The boards were nailed in tight, no amount of prying with my bare fingers was going to pull them out. And the nails were rusty, as if they’d been there for a hundred years. A big red sign warned people away—
DANGER: CAVERS, SPELUNKERS, HIKERS AND ALL, DO NOT ENTER THIS MINE SHAFT. IT IS TREACHEROUS AND UNSTABLE AND NOT FIT FOR ENTRY!

I tried to pull at the boards anyway, and then started yelling: “Beck, Beck, it’s me. Are you in there? Answer me! I’m sorry!”

My voice rang out, strident and panicked. A flock of blackbirds fluttered away, squawking into the sky.

“Have you completely lost your mind?”

The voice rocketed through me, a blast of adrenaline nearly shot me into the air. I turned around to see Langdon standing there. He was red-faced and sweating from exertion, in spite of the cold. I leaned against the wood and slid down to the ground, wrapping up and burying my head in my arms.

“How many times am I going to have to ask you this question?” he said. “What are you doing?”

“I thought she was out here,” I said.

I fished the book from my bag and tossed it over to him. He was bent over, leaning on his knees. He was still trying to catch his breath. But he picked it up and looked at the page I had marked.

“Was that you calling me?” I asked. “All those miles ago.”

“Who else?” he asked.

He walked over and inspected the shaft. He ran his fingers over the rough surface, touched the nail heads. “No one’s been in
this mine for a hundred years,” he said. “These nails are so rusted they’re practically fused to the wood.”

“I heard something,” I said. I was still listening, but there was nothing. It could have been that all I’d heard was Langdon’s approach. I was so confused and so tired now, I couldn’t trust any of my perceptions.
She’s dead,
a voice whispered in my head.
She’s dead because you left her alone in the woods. It’s your fault.

Langdon put his head to the wood. “No,” he said. “I don’t hear anything.”

I was spent, completely and utterly done. I felt myself shutting down, going blank, all feeling draining down that hole in my center.

Langdon reached down a hand and lifted me to my feet.

“We have to get you back, Lana,” he said. “This doesn’t look good. Everyone’s going crazy. Your aunt . . . she’s a wreck.”

“That’s not my name.”

The gray daylight seemed to deepen, and the whispering of the leaves all around us swelled to a chorus of voices.

“I know,” he said. All the color had left his face, and his features had fallen slack. He was a black tower against the gray behind him. And something in my body was responding—a hollow in my gut, a tightness in my throat.

“I know that,” he said again.

A universe of understanding passed between us. I ticked back through the last few months, remembered him pulling Rachel’s ad from the board, turning up places he had no reason being, climbing down into that grave after the last scavenger hunt clue. Impossibly, he was part of this. But how?
Why?
I couldn’t even think of the right things to ask.

“Was that you in the house today?” I asked. There were a million
other, more important questions. But that’s the only one that came to mind.

He smiled, but it was not the warm and reassuring smile that I expected and needed from him. He offered a slow nod, and he didn’t seem like the person I knew at all.

Run,
said the voice in my head.
Get away from him.

But I was frozen where I stood. I couldn’t get my head around the idea that this man . . . my mentor, my adviser, my professor . . . was anything other than my trusted friend.

This was always my Waterloo, that I’d stand around trying to figure out the things that confused me—like that day on the playground after I pushed the boy who’d been bullying me off the jungle gym. The world was so impossibly complicated, so many factors at play in any circumstance—physics, psychology, chemistry. That boy and I hadn’t liked each other, that was the first thing. Bad blood. He’d teased me, so I pushed him. Cause and effect. He was too close to the edge to save himself with a step back, too heavy to stop his own backward momentum. Physics.

Such a delicate interplay of forces; and I had always been fascinated by how things wove together. I got lost in contemplating it. It always unsettled people, made me seem like a freak—just standing there and thinking like I did.

I saw Langdon bend down and pick something up.

“What are you doing here?” I asked him. "What do you want?”

“I’m here for you,” he said. “Just like I’ve always been.”

He moved closer, reaching out a hand for mine. I let him take it and realized how little physical contact we’d had over the years. His palm was cool and soft.

“I’ve been waiting for you to tell me who you are,” he said. “To let me in.”

His nearness unsettled me; he didn’t even look like himself. There was a strange yearning gleam to his gaze. He kept moving toward me and I realized too late that he was leaning in to kiss me. I pulled back quickly, shrank from him, really. It might have seemed like disgust, but it wasn’t that. I don’t know what I was feeling, other than a desire to get away. Certainly, under other circumstances I’d have been more gentle with him. I watched that yearning turn to anger, dark and petulant.

“No,” I said. “I’m not like that. It’s not like that with us.”

It was a realization for me, too. I started backing away from him. Again, that voice in my head:
Run.
This time I nearly listened, but it was too late.

“I have to go,” I said. I still thought he might let me. “Okay?”

He didn’t answer, just drew his arm back. Then slowly but inexorably, his fist was flying in my direction. But I was already on the ground, my head filled with the twin sirens of fear and pain, when I realized that he had hit me.

I stared up at him, feeling small and helpless. He stood over me, a rock in his hand. I tried to ask him why he was doing this. It was crazy . . . and what did he want? But none of those words made it out into the world. His face, as blank as my own, was the last thing I saw before everything went from bright white, to fuzzy gray, to black.

When I came back to myself, I was lying on the cold, hard earth and night had fallen. The cloud cover must have hung thick and low, because I couldn’t see the stars, and the moon was just a silvery glow in the sky. I squeezed my eyes closed, assessing the pain in my head, the hard place where my hip connected with the earth, the bindings on my wrists and ankles. There was a rhythmic sound that echoed off the trees around me. It was a sound I recognized immediately. And for a second I thought I’d lost my mind or that I was stuck in some kind of nightmare loop in my life.

The night I helped to carry my mother’s body out to the place where my father buried her, I kept thinking I was dreaming. Several times I was sure of it. Because such things didn’t really happen, and my daydreams and nightmares were often much more vivid than my waking life. And, certainly, even with all I’d suffered, nothing had prepared me for a reality like this.

The truth was that I often knew my visions weren’t real. I knew there wasn’t an old woman in my room that told me my mother
didn’t love me anymore. I said things like that to upset my mother when I was feeling jealous or insecure. And I had overheard my mother and grandmother talking about my child-murdering grandfather. That time I was trying to comfort my mother. Maybe if she thought my grandfather was sorry, she wouldn’t think he was so bad. And if she didn’t think he was so bad, maybe she wouldn’t be so worried about me. It all makes a sick, twisted child’s kind of sense, doesn’t it? My poor mom. I wonder if she’s at peace now. I hope she is.

The digging continued, and I listened to its echo in the night.

This is the right thing. I know you’ll see that someday,
my father said. I sat weeping against the tree.
Otherwise, what will happen to you? Stop crying. You’re too old to be crying like a girl.

Yet another gender inequality: Boys and men are not allowed to feel. They’re not allowed to accept and express their emotions in the same way that women are. It’s weakness. Only pansies and little faggots cry. Everyone always talks about how bad women have it, how systematically they have been abused, maligned, hated, and discriminated against throughout history. And, of course, it’s true. But no one ever talks about how that misogyny has had its backlash on men. When you hate women, you hate all the female elements of your own psychology. Jung believed that there were two primary anthropomorphic archetypes of the unconscious mind. The animus is the unconscious male, and the anima is the unconscious female. Because a man’s anima, his more sensitive, feeling side, must so often be repressed, it forms the ultimate shadow self—a dark side that is hated and buried. Jung was a big believer in accepting the shadow, embracing it . . . or suffering the consequences in psychic pain.

I didn’t want to stop crying then. My father himself had been
weeping just minutes earlier. The pain inside me was a living thing, a beast of fear and grief and horror. If I didn’t weep, I might have imploded.