What Lies Below: A Novel Read online

  Gilly paused at the swinging door to the kitchen. “What about him?”

  Liz was grinning as if she knew a secret. “You’ve got a thing for him, don’t think I haven’t noticed.”

  “No, absolutely not.” Heat climbed out of Gilly’s shirt collar, and it annoyed her.

  “Hey, I’m glad. You deserve a good guy in your life. I’ve seen how he looks at you, too. For what it’s worth, I think the attraction is mutual.” Liz was laughing now.

  “I’m like you. I can’t go there either.”

  Liz came to her, and giving her a hug, said, “It’s okay, you know.”

  “But it feels all wrong and so confusing. Is it him or his precious little girl I feel drawn to?”

  “Who cares? You’re allowed to have feelings for someone. From the way you’ve talked about Brian, I don’t think he’d want you to be alone the rest of your life, would he?”

  “But I don’t know how to do it, how to go forward on my own, much less start over with someone else.”

  “Me either.” Liz smiled. “Once I move down here for good, we’ll help each other.”

  “Yes,” Gilly agreed, smiling, too. “That’s what I’m hoping for.”

  There was something wrong. While the little girl went willingly with the woman to the car, Gilly felt the grip of cold terror in her bones. She wanted to get at the woman, to yank the child’s hand from the woman’s grasp. She would have, but there was a barrier between them, a wall of thick glass. She paced along it, walking her fingertips over the surface, heart thundering in her ears. Beyond the barrier, some distance away, the woman was chatting with the child, head bent, listening for the little girl’s response.

  God, her small upturned face was so sweet and trusting.

  “Stop!” Gilly shouted the word, but neither the woman nor the little girl looked in her direction. It was as if Gilly were invisible to them. Her throat constricted; her eyes burned. How could it be this easy, taking a child? There were laws, safeguards.

  The woman lifted the tiny girl, who held a Nemo backpack, into a child-size safety seat in the back seat of the car. It should have been reassuring, seeing that, but it wasn’t.

  “No,” Gilly whispered. “No, no, no . . .”

  She pressed her face to the glass, memorizing details: the woman was tall, slender, wearing a navy hoodie and sunglasses. Gilly had the impression she was dark-haired, but with her head covered, it was only an impression. The woman’s car was a light-metallic-blue sedan, medium size. Newish, she thought, but the make and model eluded her. She wasn’t good at identifying cars. It was parked in front of a building—small, one story, faced in dark-red brick. The woods that surrounded it on three sides appeared dark and sinister. But there—that scrap of pink just at the edge of the woods behind the building—what was that? Gilly pressed close to the glass, cupping her hands around her eyes. It was a trike, a child’s trike flipped on its side. A soft moan escaped her. The scene began to dissolve now—the woman’s face, the building, the car, the pink trike—all of it was retreating, fading into a haze. Except for the child. It didn’t seem possible, but it was as if the little girl had climbed out of her car seat to peer at Gilly through the car’s rear window. Every feature of her small face stood out. She was smiling; she seemed happy. But somehow Gilly knew it wouldn’t last, that she was in terrible jeopardy.

  She lunged at the glass . . .

  . . . and woke, thrashing and disoriented. Hot. So hot. Gone still now. Rigid. Waiting—for her breath to settle and for a semblance of normalcy, the recognition of her surroundings to return. The bedroom walls swam at her. The furniture—a dresser and a linen-upholstered French country chair—floated in her peripheral vision. A stack of moving boxes against one wall was familiar. It and the furniture belonged to her. The walls belonged to the house she was renting. But they were real, as real as the cold weight of her dread.

  Turning her head, she looked at the clock on her nightstand. The numbers glowed: 5:47. The alarm would go off at 6:15. Her shift at Cricket’s started at seven, thirty minutes before opening. Gilly wanted the last half hour of sleep, but when she closed her eyes she saw it again—the woman taking the little girl. She felt her suffocating helplessness to stop it from happening—what she knew, knew to her core, was an abduction. Gilly didn’t care how unconcerned the little girl had seemed. The woman was dangerous, and the girl didn’t belong with her.

  Damn it.

  Flinging the covers aside, she sat up, propping her feet on the bed’s metal frame, bracing her head in her hands. It didn’t do any good, telling herself it wasn’t real. It was like arguing with a rock. The fact of it—whatever it was, vision, prophecy, head-trip—wasn’t moving. It wasn’t fading into the nether reaches of her mind in the way an ordinary dream would. This was different. In the same way she’d known it was different a handful of other times in her life.

  She had dreamed about Brian’s death the night before he was killed, and when she’d wakened in much the same kind of panic, he’d soothed her. He had known about her dreams and visions, that they were sometimes prophetic. She’d told him about them while they were still dating, and she’d been relieved when he hadn’t laughed or looked at her as if she were strange—or possibly demented or evil. He hadn’t asked her to read his palm or the lumps on his head either, all of which had happened in the past. Often enough that she’d taken her mom’s advice and gone silent on the subject. Brian had been different, safe; she could talk to him about anything. He listened; he respected what she had to say.

  But their final morning together, when she’d wakened in a cold sweat from the nightmare that predicted his death, he’d teased her.

  He had put his ear against her belly, burgeoning at twenty-six weeks with the healthy, growing weight of their soon-to-be-born daughter, and whispered, “Mommy’s hormones are being silly, aren’t they?” And he listened, nodding, saying, “Yeah, that’s what I think, too.”

  Gilly had tangled her hand in his unruly mop of chestnut-brown hair, laughing. “No secrets, Daddy.”

  “The dream you had?” He brought his face level with Gilly’s. “The sprout and I think it’s hormones.”

  “I heard that, and her name is Sophia.” Gilly turned awkwardly on her side, putting her forehead against Brian’s forehead. “Sophia Marguerite.” She whispered the name they’d chosen for their little girl. Sophia was Brian’s mother’s name, and Marguerite was Gilly’s favored paternal grandmother’s name. “We’ll call her Sophie.” Taking Brian’s hand, Gilly guided it to a low spot on her belly, where the baby was kicking.

  “Turning cartwheels,” Brian said. “She’s going to be a gymnast.”

  It had been right before Christmas, December 16, 2013. Gilly had been due in about twelve weeks, and Sophie—her in utero antics, her personality—was well known to them and a source of pure delight. Even unborn, she was no stranger.

  Neither was the little girl Gilly had seen in her dream—vision, premonition, whatever it had been. She went into the bathroom, flipped on the light, stared sightlessly at her reflection in the mirror. She had recognized the girl.

  It was Zoe—almost-four-year-old Zoe Halstead.

  Gilly parked in the area for employees, in the alley behind the café, and she entered through the back service door. April was at the big worktable, dicing peppers for breakfast tacos.

  “You look awful,” she said, glancing up.

  “Gee, thanks,” Gilly said.

  Her first day at work Cricket had told Gilly—in front of April—that, while April was an expert at food preparation, her social skills weren’t so great.

  Deadpan, April had cracked: “That’s why they keep me chained up in the kitchen.”

  Gilly had laughed, uncertainly, then. But over time, she’d become accustomed to April’s sharp tongue, her trenchant humor. April’s jokes were like the chemicals she used to bleach her hair, harsh and inevitable. And she was nearly as much of a fraud as her hair color. Or that was Gilly’s impression
anyway—that April’s wisecracking was a shield. She was a relative newcomer to Wyatt, too, having lived there only a year. Talk around town was that she had done prison time, serving two years of a five-year manslaughter sentence at the Murray Unit in Gatesville for shooting to death her husband, Nick’s dad, when he’d gone after Nick in a drunken rage with a knife. Some people might have a problem with that, but Gilly thought, if she ever had the chance, she’d kill the monster who shot Brian in a heartbeat—with her bare hands if that was all she had for a weapon—and gladly serve whatever prison time a judge gave her. God knew what she might do if the bastard hurt her child.

  “You sure you feel okay?” April asked.

  Gilly opened the dishwasher.

  It had been a hectic morning. Cricket was out—a doctor’s appointment, April had said. She and Gilly had handled the breakfast service between them, and Gilly had muffed more than her usual number of orders. Now the lunch rush was upon them.

  “I’m fine,” Gilly said, which wasn’t true. She lifted clean coffee mugs, still steaming, from the rack and set them with a clatter on a tray.

  “You seem shaky, and you’re awfully pale.” April was at the worktable shredding pork for barbecue sandwiches, that day’s lunch special.

  “I had the worst night—” Gilly stopped, biting back the urge to recount it, the whole thing with the dream. The sense that it had been more than a dream, that it was more like a warning, haunted her. It would be a relief to speak of it, to have April laugh and dismiss it. Dreams can be so crazy, she’d say. But who knew how she might react? Gilly could as easily imagine the narrowing of April’s eyes, the curl of her lip—the expression on her face would be just short of a sneer. Or possibly April would be alarmed, or dismissive, or pitying. She would think Gilly was unhinged, advise her to seek help, the comfort of antidepressants, sleeping pills, tranquilizers.

  But Gilly had already gone that route. She had consumed a vast array of pharmaceuticals, washing them down with quantities of vodka, or whatever liquor was on hand, and Brian and Sophie were still as dead. Besides, as Gilly’s mother so often pointed out, dreaming a thing was going to happen was of little use if no one believed in your ability, if no one—most of all the subject of your dream—paid attention.

  “Gilly?”

  She jumped, startled by April’s touch on her arm. “Sorry.” Her apology was rote. “Cramps,” she added. “That time. You know.” It was a cop-out, the female one-size-fits-all excuse, and Gilly deplored using it. But it worked.

  April looked sympathetic; she offered aspirin. “Take a few minutes, if you want, in the dayroom before we get going again. There’s only a handful of the regulars here, and they’ll keep. Cricket’ll be back any minute to help with lunch anyway.”

  “Thanks,” Gilly said. “I’ve got aspirin in my purse. I’ll just run get it and be right back.”

  April was watching her. Gilly felt her gaze following her progress as she left the kitchen. It unnerved her. She wasn’t sure why. It made her feel she had to go through with it, the ruse of getting her purse from the dayroom-cum-office. In addition to a desk and a couple of filing cabinets, the dayroom near the café’s kitchen was furnished with an antique iron daybed, a small dining table and chairs. A row of lockers against one wall housed personal belongings. Gilly got her purse from the locker assigned to her, making sure to slam the door loud enough for April to hear. She went into the adjacent employee bathroom, locking the door behind her. Setting her purse on the vanity, she turned, leaning against it, bringing her fingertips to her temples. The thud of her heart was loud in her ears. She felt half panicked and had an urge to bolt. Maybe through the window? It was open. The late-morning breeze was sun warmed. The sheer eyelet drape fluttered in her peripheral view. Gilly held it aside, bent her face to the glass, closing her eyes, drifting, thoughtless. She didn’t know how much time passed before the image formed in her mind, the one from her nightmare of Zoe Halstead being helped by a woman—the wrong woman—into the back seat of a car. Gilly felt the looming threat more keenly now than before.

  Why? If Zoe Halstead was imperiled, why was she—Gilly—being made aware of it? Why not someone close to the little girl—her dad, or her mother, wherever she was? There must be dozens of people better than Gilly for the universe to tip off about the impending danger to a child, assuming the dream was accurate.

  Turning to the sink, she ran the water until it was cold, then rinsed her face and blotted it dry with a paper towel. She tossed the paper towel in the trash.

  Cricket was back, and she and April were talking when Gilly returned to the kitchen. She quickened her step. “I’ll handle the front—”

  “There aren’t many folks out there yet.”

  April’s voice caught Gilly midway through the door into the dining area. Her stomach clenched.

  “I wondered where you’d gone off to,” April said, giving her an odd look.

  “I was just in the restroom. I couldn’t find—” Gilly stopped. What was she doing, defending herself? From what? But she’d heard something in April’s voice. Curiosity? Suspicion? Or was it Gilly’s own paranoia working overtime?

  “Have you got a sec?” Cricket asked. “I want to go over the schedule.”

  Gilly joined them, grateful to be included, to have a job and a schedule.

  She’d been grateful when Cricket had hired her on the spot even though Gilly had not one day’s worth of waitressing experience, and her only reference had been provided from her Houston-based probation officer. If the background check Cricket had run had turned up evidence of Gilly’s troubled history, her addiction, the subsequent legal woes, Cricket had never spoken of it to anyone so far as Gilly knew. Maybe the news coverage of Brian’s murder, and all the rest of it, hadn’t been picked up by media outlets this far north. Or maybe Cricket was one of those rare individuals who didn’t hold a person’s past against them. Maybe she believed in second chances.

  “I still have boxes stacked everywhere,” Gilly said.

  The café closed at three o’clock, and she and April were cleaning the kitchen. Cricket was in the office.

  “I’d lived here almost a year before I got the last box unpacked. It’s only in the last few months I’ve felt Nicky and I are settled,” April said. She scraped browned bits of bacon, beef, and chicken from the grill. “I could help you out sometime.” She glanced sidelong at Gilly. “Unpacking, I mean.”

  “Oh, thanks, but it’s mostly the nonessential stuff that’s left to sort through.”

  “Well, if you change your mind, the offer stands.” April went to the sink, turned on the tap, and rinsed the basin. Her elbows darted, seeming to jab the air.

  Gilly opened the refrigerator, running her eye over the contents. They were low on mayo. It was handmade every morning from Cricket’s mother’s recipe. She felt April’s glance. Was she angry? Hurt? Gilly didn’t know. She could never decide whether April liked her or resented her. If Liz were to ask about the boxes, Gilly would have explained she wasn’t ready to unpack, that to do so would mean she was making a commitment to this job, the town, her “new” life, but she didn’t feel comfortable enough with April to say that. She might turn it into a joke the way she did most things.

  “Where is the linen delivery?” Cricket came out of her office.

  “They’re late as usual,” April said, shutting off the tap.

  “We’re low on mayo,” Gilly said.

  April was saying she’d stay and make up a batch when the police captain came in through the back-alley door.

  “Clint? What’s happened?” Cricket wiped her hands on a towel.

  It was the look on his face that made her ask. Even Gilly could see he was shaken, and when he said it, said, “Zoe Halstead has gone missing,” her heart fell against her ribs.

  4

  That day, of all days, for no real reason, Jake was late picking Zoe up from school. He got to talking with one of the concrete truck drivers, Marco Lopez, about the Texas Rangers’
batting statistics, or something stupid like that, and when he checked the time and saw it was after twelve, his heart sank. Zoe hated it when he was late, hated being the last one to leave. She’d chew him out. Probably let him have it the rest of the day and half the night. It would seem outrageous later—even bizarre, given what was ahead of him—that he thought that was the worst that could happen. He figured he might get out of some of it if he took her up to Greeley to the Mickey D’s to get a Happy Meal for dinner. He rarely consented to going there. He was a nut on eating right. Except when he was in trouble. Then he used Mickey D’s and the occasional pancake for dinner to get himself back in Zoe’s good graces.

  He never argued with her over what to wear either. If she put on the same outfit three days in a row, he let her. If she wanted to wear red socks with her orange pants, he told her she looked great. When she’d worn her swim goggles every day and to bed at night, he had only questioned why. It hadn’t been that long ago that he’d come into her bedroom to read her a bedtime story and found her with the goggles strapped to her head.

  Very casually, he’d asked, “What’s up with the goggles?”

  “I might fall in the ocean like Mommy,” she’d answered, “and get eaten by a shark. If I have on my goggles, I’ll see it before it can get me.”

  “Mommy wasn’t eaten by a shark, ZooRoo,” he’d answered. “She didn’t fall in the ocean.”

  “You don’t know, Daddy. You don’t know where she is.”

  Technically speaking, Zoe had been right. Jake hadn’t known where Stephanie was, not precisely. “The ocean is hundreds of miles from here,” he’d told Zoe.

  She’d been unfazed, worn the goggles anyway, nonstop, for weeks.

  He parked in the drive, near the front entrance to the Little Acorn, and went inside to the office. A girl he didn’t know looked up from where she was sitting behind the tall counter. She was young, twentysomething, with pink-streaked blonde hair.