The Lies We Told (17 page)

I felt the burden Simmee was carrying.

“What did you mean about the moaning?” I asked.

“Oh, nothin’ really. Lady Alice believes the woods are haunted.”

“By Jackson?”

Simmee looked surprised. “Jackson? Oh, no, no. By the
slaves
. In the olden days, the slaves was dropped off in Wilmington and was forced to walk all the way to Fayetteville, right past Last Run, though I guess it wasn’t called Last Run back then.
Anyway, a bunch of ’em died on the way and she thinks they haunt the woods, so she don’t like to walk through them alone at night. She also says—I don’t know if this part’s true—that some of the slaves escaped and started livin’ here at Last Run, and they’re her kin.”

“Wow,” I said.

“I hear the moanin’ myself sometimes. Gran said it was the slaves, just like Lady Alice, but Tully says it’s the trees rubbin’ against each other.”

I nodded at the deck of cards on the table. “Do you believe in them?” I asked. “The tarot cards?”

She shrugged. “Gran done ’em all my life,” she said. “She believed in ’em. I don’t tell people if I see bad things comin’. What’s the point? Lady Alice, I just see good things, but she don’t want to hear about all the good things happenin’ with her seven live kids. She just wants to fill up that hole Jackson left.”

“Her youngest,” I said.

“An’ her best. The onliest one that took care of his mama. The others is worthless.”

“You know her others?”

“Oh, yeah.” Simmee rolled her eyes. “I knew all her kids. They was older than me and they’d torture me, but it was just kids havin’ fun. All the others moved away down to Georgia…can you imagine? All your kids leavin’ you? ’Cept Larry, I guess. He helps out. He don’t like me, but when I take the boat over to Ruskin, I walk to his house and he takes me to the store. I get groceries for Lady Alice on top of for ourselves and he gives me money for hers.”

“Why doesn’t Larry like you?”

She shrugged. “Don’t rightly know. Probly ’cause I was always taggin’ along after him and his brothers. Bein’ a nuisance.”

“Doesn’t Tully go with you to Ruskin?” I asked.

She rolled her eyes again. “Tully hates leaving Last Run,” she said. “Don’t matter. I’m used to it. He gets the meat and fish, I get the other things.” She stood up, one hand against her back as if it ached, then opened the drawer of one of the end tables. She reached inside and pulled out a photograph, which she brought over to me.

I took it from her and held it toward the light from the window. The image was striking. Tully, his fair hair a little longer than it was now, grinned widely, flanked on either side by his two dark-skinned friends. Each man held a bottle of beer in his hand and they could have been any three, good-looking college-aged guys at a party. Simmee leaned toward me and I held the picture so she could see it. She ran one fingertip down the side of the image.

“That’s Larry on the left,” she pointed, “Jackson on the right and Tully in the middle, of course. They was goin’ on a fishing trip. Larry’s wife took the picture.”

I remembered how it had felt a short time earlier when Tully came home from hunting, how he’d instantly filled the room—the
house
—with male energy. Now he was alone at Last Run Shelter with only women for company. I wondered what it had been like for him to lose his friend.

“It’s got to be hard for Tully to be out here with just you and Lady Alice after having a guy friend to hang around with,” I said.

“I s’pose so.” Simmee took the photograph from me, looking at it one last time before returning it to the drawer again.

“Won’t Larry come again soon to check on his mother?” I asked, hoping Simmee would have a better answer than Lady Alice had offered.

Simmee sat down again. “He come out the first day after the storm,” she said. “Said he almost didn’t make it, there was so much…
mess
on the creek and the water was so fast. He
brung Lady Alice—and us, too—food and batteries and charcoal and such, and tried to talk his mama into goin’ back to Ruskin with him, but she wasn’t havin’ none of it.”

“Why not?”

“Would you leave your home, Miss Maya?”

I thought of my house. My beautiful neighborhood with its tree-lined streets. I let in the thought that hurt more than I could bear—Adam and Rebecca’s reaction to my disappearance. I needed to be with them
right that minute
. I needed to go home. My chest ached with the need.

“No, I guess not,” I said.

“Larry don’t know our boat’s gone,” Simmee said, “so he don’t know we’re stuck out here now.”

“So…what’s your best guess as to when he’ll be back?” I pushed. My hopes were pinned on the guy in the photograph.

Simmee gave me a mischievous smile, then leaned forward to tap on the deck of tarot cards. “We could try to find out,” she teased.

I smiled back at her. “I’ll pass,” I said, although if I thought the cards could truly tell me, I would beg her for that septic cross.

“D
O YOU MEAN THE TANGO
?”

Rebecca was cleaning one of the gurneys with an antiseptic wipe, but she looked up at the sound of Adam’s voice. He was sitting on the other side of the classroom-turned-clinic with his patient, a woman well into her eighties, and he suddenly rose to his feet, holding his arms out to her.

“I’ve never done it,” he said. “Can you teach me?”

With a chuckle, the woman stood up and stepped into his arms. She began humming a tune, leading Adam as best she could around the cramped quarters of the room, dodging chairs and tables, the crash cart, a gurney, a wheelchair. Dressed in a purple jersey and beige pants, she took long, sultry steps, her slender, graceful body pressed close to Adam’s. Adam was awkward but game, and their smiles quickly spread throughout the room to the nurses, the volunteers, the patients. The man with the sprained ankle started to clap. The three-year-old girl with the black eye jumped up and down. Watching Adam, Rebecca felt close to smiling herself.
He makes people feel good about themselves,
Maya had once told her.

Yes, Rebecca thought.
He does.

“Good God.”

Rebecca turned to see Dorothea standing behind her, an amused expression on her face.

“He is so outrageously inappropriate,” Dorothea said. “I love it.”

“I know.” Rebecca held her breath as Adam lowered his partner in a careful dip. “Me, too.”

Adam and the woman took their bows, and everyone applauded. The dance had lasted all of twenty seconds, and each second had taken a year off the old woman’s face. Rebecca didn’t know what had brought her to the clinic in the first place, but she was going to leave cured.

“So, aside from ‘dancing with the docs,’ how are things going in here?” Dorothea looked around the room. It was divided roughly into six examining areas staffed with physicians, physician assistants and nurses, with a couple of nurses doing triage near the doorway. “Looks like controlled chaos,” she said.

“Exactly.” Rebecca organized her tray of equipment as she spoke. “We’re waiting for some partition walls. Then we’re golden.”

It amazed her how much they’d accomplished in two days’ time. Practically overnight, the school had been transformed into a sort of refugee camp. Only part of the building was being utilized, because the generators couldn’t provide enough power for the entire school, but the environment was far more civilized than it had been in the airport. More generators were expected, and in a few days, the kitchen would be able to produce at least one meal a day.

Three of the classrooms had been transformed into clinics, one of them staffed entirely with volunteer mental health workers who were at least as busy as the medical staff. A smaller
classroom housed a makeshift pharmacy, and a few more rooms were devoted to helping people find housing and cope with insurance headaches. It was hardly a happy atmosphere. Many of the evacuees had lost all they owned, and many others lived with the uncertainty of still not knowing
what
they’d lost. Which is why those rare moments like the one Adam had offered the elderly woman—and by extension, everyone else in the clinic—were pure magic.

“Take a break,” Dorothea said to her now.

“Soon,” she agreed as she wheeled the clean gurney against the wall and peeled off her gloves.

She was working long hours, and she was so glad to be busy. Every minute of every day, she was reminded that she was not alone in her heartbreak. The patients she treated didn’t know what she was going through, but she found strength in their strength, and the sympathy she showed them seemed to wend its way back to her somehow. There was a fine line, though, between giving her all to her work and being overwhelmed by it, and she knew she was treading that line on unsteady feet.

So did Dorothea.

“I’m serious, Rebecca,” Dorothea said. “Break.” She called to one of the triage nurses working near the classroom door. “Next patient is mine!” she said, shooing Rebecca out of her workspace. “You haven’t stopped moving in two days. Get a nap.”

With her treatment area snatched out from under her, Rebecca had little choice. “Okay,” she said, heading for the door. She looked at Adam, wishing he could take a break with her, but he was busy with another patient and she left the room.

She and Adam had been glued at the hip since they arrived at the school. They’d pitched in with the grunt work before
the arrival of the evacuees. They’d helped set up long, neat rows of green cots in the gymnasium. They’d organized the cafeteria, with its pallets of bottled water, hand sanitizers, snack food and MREs. Always together, and whether that was Adam’s doing or hers, she couldn’t have said. All she knew was that she wanted to be near him—near someone who understood what was going on inside her. Adam got it, because he shared it.

She walked through the school’s hallway, which was crammed with people sitting and sleeping on the floor as they waited for their turns inside the clinic, and headed for the exit. She passed the room that had been set up to aid family members find other family members. She found herself glancing into that room with longing. She wished she could step inside to discover a new method of finding Maya, a way that no one had yet thought of, because it still struck her as impossible that her sister had vanished from the face of the earth when she fell from that helicopter. So much had been accomplished in two days, and yet the search for Maya and the other passengers on the chopper had made no progress at all.

Inside the trailer, she didn’t even consider sleeping. Instead she spent her break as she and Adam had been spending all their free moments: on the phone, calling hospitals throughout the eastern part of the state, describing Maya to overburdened social workers. She sat on the bed, her back against the trailer wall, the list of phone numbers she and Adam were working from next to her.

She supposed if Brent were there, she’d be sharing this bed with him. In the trailer as well as in the clinic, he’d be like a wall between her and Adam. He’d get in the way of the growing intimacy she felt with her brother-in-law when they were
working, talking or simply lost in their own fears for Maya. Cut off from Adam, she would feel ten times more alone.

On their second night in the trailer, Rebecca was so exhausted that she fell asleep on top of the thin bedspread covering the double bed. It seemed like only moments later that Adam was shaking her shoulder.

“Wake up, Bec,” he said. “Dot’s here.”

She sat up quickly, her head instantly clear despite the darkness.

“It’s not about Maya.” Dorothea’s voice came from the middle of the trailer, and Rebecca saw the bright disc of a flashlight bobbing in the darkness. There was a second flashlight, and the cones of light bounced off each other over the little table in the kitchenette.

Rebecca got to her feet as Adam turned on the dim kitchen light, and she saw that Dorothea had a man with her. The two of them turned off their flashlights as Rebecca padded into the kitchen. The man was about fifty years old. He was bearded and bespectacled, and his bare arms were muscular and heavily tattooed.

“What’s going on?” Rebecca glanced at Adam, but he only shrugged. They both wore the same clothes they’d had on all that day and the day before. She knew she looked as disheveled as he did. They had a shower now in their tiny bathroom. What they didn’t have was the time to use it.

“This is Cody Ryan,” Dorothea said. “He’s head of the search team at the site of the chopper crash.”

Rebecca sucked in her breath. “Why are you here?” she asked.

“Tell us something good, man.” Adam made it sound like a dare.

The guy—Cody—shook his head. “Nothing good, I’m afraid,” he said.

Rebecca turned to Dorothea. “You said this wasn’t about Maya!” she said.

Dot put her hand on Rebecca’s arm. “It’s not. Not…directly.” She physically moved Rebecca to the long built-in couch that Adam was using as his bed. Adam had already sunk down on it, and when Rebecca sat next to him, he put his arm around her. Tugged her closer.

“We found one of the bodies this evening,” Cody said. “A girl. Woman. Not your sister, though.”

“Janette Delk,” Dorothea said. “New DIDA nurse. You hadn’t met her yet. I spoke to her parents tonight.” She shook her head. “First volunteer I’ve lost.”

Rebecca stood up to hug the older woman. She knew Dorothea would take the loss personally, no matter how well or how little she had known the nurse. “I’m sorry, Dot,” she said, but Dorothea was already extracting herself from Rebecca’s hug, easing her onto the couch again. There was something more. Something they were not saying.

“Where?” Adam asked. “Where’d you find her?”

“On the banks of the Cape Fear,” Cody said. “A few miles from the crash site.”

“Fuck.”
Adam leaned forward, rubbing his head in his hands, and Rebecca knew what he was thinking.

“Maya could be anywhere, then,” she said.

“Well, now, that’s not completely true,” Cody said. “But finding Miss Delk gives us an idea of what the current was doing that day.”

Adam looked at him. “If Maya’s
dead,
you mean,” he said. “You mean, you now know what the current would do with a
body
.”

Rebecca knotted her hands together in her lap. “Don’t give up looking in the woods,” she pleaded. “If she got out alive, that’s where she’d be.”

“We’re in the woods, miss,” he said with an expression that told her he was not a quitter. “Trust me,” he added with a half smile. “We don’t give up easy.”

“There were litters on that chopper,” Adam said. “Wouldn’t they have shown up by now?”

“We’ve only seen the one,” Cody said. “Now today, though, we did find some articles of clothing.”

For the first time, Rebecca noticed the plastic grocery bag he was carrying. “I showed them to Dr. Ludlow, and she ruled them all out as possibly belonging to Miss…to Dr. Ward, except this shoe, so we wanted y’all to take a look at it.”

He lifted the bag toward Rebecca and Adam and neither one of them reached for it. On the man’s forearm, Rebecca read the words
So Others Might Live
angled in blue ink. She wanted to run her fingers over the tattoo. Wrap her hand around it. She didn’t want to touch the bag he held, though. After a moment, Adam took the bag from the man and rested it on his lap.

Don’t open it,
Rebecca thought.
Don’t. Don’t.
If they didn’t open it, didn’t see what was inside, Maya could still be safely traveling through the woods.

But Adam opened the bag to reveal a Nike tennis shoe. Once white, now gray and battered.

“Nearly everyone wears Nikes,” Rebecca said, but Adam was reaching inside the shoe, digging a little with his fingertips, and she knew what he was after. He pulled out the orthotic.

“It’s hers.” His voice was almost too soft to hear.

Rebecca drew in a ragged breath. “Where did you find it?” She raised her gaze to Cody’s. There was such sympathy in his eyes.

“On the bank of that creek. Billings Creek, they call it.”

Adam reached for her hand. He held it on his thigh as he
stared like a wounded puppy at the shoe and orthotic in his lap. Rebecca didn’t shift her gaze from Cody’s.

“I’m going out there with you,” she said to him. “I can’t stand this waiting.”

“Not a good idea, miss,” he said. “Excuse me for saying so, but you’d be in the way.”

“Let them do their job, Bec,” Adam said quietly.

She blew out a frustrated breath. “All right,” she said. “But…just don’t give up.”

“We’re doing everything we can,” Cody said, “and like I told you, we’re nowhere near ready to give up.”

But did he think he was looking for a person or a body? she wondered. She clutched Adam’s hand hard and didn’t bother to ask.