oxygen deprivation. They’re right: I am crazy. And wild and stubborn and reckless.
But I’m not broken. At least, not yet.
I reach the first tire. Grab onto the slimy rubber to get my bearings. Quick now, not much time left. Rear tire. I crab my way along the algae-covered frame till I finally reach the front cab.
Then I simply stare.
Lani Whitehorse. Twenty-two years old. Waitress, daughter, mother of a three-year-old. A woman with an already long history of bad taste in men.
She disappeared eighteen months ago. Runaway, the locals decided. Never, her mother declared.
And now she was found, trapped at the bottom of the lake that loomed next to the hairpin turn she drove each night after the end of her two a.m. bartending shift. Just as I had theorized while poring over months of interviews, maps, and extremely thin police reports.
Had Lani misjudged the corner she’d driven so many times before? Startled at a crossing deer? Or simply nodded off at the wheel, exhausted by a life that took too much out of her?
I can’t answer all the questions.
But I can give her mother, her daughter, this.
Lani dangles upside down, her face lost inside the floating halo of her jet-black hair, her body still belted into the cab she’d climbed into eighteen months ago.
My lungs are no longer burning. My clothes are no longer heavy. I feel only reverence as I curl my fingers around the door handle and pull.
The door opens easily.
Except . . . doors can’t open underwater. Wet suit. Oxygen tank. What is wrong, what is wrong . . . My brain belatedly sounds the alarm: Danger! Think, think, think! Except I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.
I am inhaling now. Breathing in the lake. Welcoming it inside my lungs. I have become one with it, or it has become one with me.
As Lani Whitehorse turns her head.
She stares at me with her empty eye sockets, gaping mouth, skeletal face.
“Too late,” she tells me. “Too late.”
Then her bony arm thrusts out, snatches my wrist.
I kick, try to pull back. But I’ve lost my grip on the door handle. I have no leverage. My air is gone and I’m nothing but lake water and weedy grasses.
She pulls me into the truck cab with unbelievable strength.
One last scream. I watch it emerge as an air bubble that floats up, up, up. All that is left of me.
Lani Whitehorse slams the door shut.
And I join her forever in the gloom.
* * *
—
Rumble. Screech. A sudden booming announcement: “South Station, next stop!”
I jerk awake as the train lurches to a halt, blinking and looking down at my perfectly dry clothes.
A dream. Nightmare. Something. Not the first or the last in my line of work. It leaves me with a film of dread as I grab my bags and follow the rest of the passengers off the train.
I’d found Lani Whitehorse three weeks ago, locked in her vehicle at the bottom of a lake. After months of intensive research on an Indian reservation where my presence was never welcomed by the locals nor wanted by the tribal police. But I’d stumbled upon the case online and been moved by her mother’s steadfast assurance that Lani would never leave her own daughter. Lani might be a screw-up with horrible taste in men, but she was still a mom. Why people assumed those things couldn’t go together, I’ll never know.
So I’d moved to the area, became a bartender at Lani’s former workplace, and started my own investigation.
Lani’s mom hugged me the day the police finally dragged the Chevy truck out of the lake in a deluge of muck and horror. Wailing, crying relief as Lani was finally brought home. I waited around for the funeral, standing outside the small crowd of mourners, as proving yourself right almost always means proving someone else wrong and therefore rarely wins you many friends.
I did what I needed to do. Then I headed to the local library, where I booted up the computer and returned to the national chat rooms where family members, concerned neighbors, and crazy people like me compare notes on various missing persons cases. There are so many. Too many, sometimes, for local resources. So, more and more, people like me have been stepping into the vacuum.
I read. I posted a few questions. And in a matter of hours, I knew where I was headed next.
Like I said, so many missing persons cases. Too many.
Which has brought me here, to Boston, a city I’ve never