Chapter Twenty-Four: A Long Night
It was a restless night for all the cabin's inhabitants. Nancy knew this because she herself spent the majority of it caught in a relentless cycle of vivid dreaming and sudden awakening, never sinking far beneath the threshold of consciousness.
"Damn hypervigilance," she muttered, the third or fourth time she jerked awake to see the front door closing behind one of the brothers. It had been Joe, this time, she thought.
Frank's voice floated out of the dark bedroom. "What did you say?" he asked.
"Nothing," Nancy told him. She pushed the clinging sheet away with impatient hands, then sat up and finger-combed her tangled hair back from her face.
"Where did Joe go?" she asked.
"Out," Frank said, and then added "Walking the perimeter again."
Nancy fumbled for her phone and turned it on, squinting blearily at the too-bright screen. 1:43 AM.
"Have either of you slept at all?" she asked, dropping the phone and lying back against her rather flat pillow.
"A little. Have you?" Frank asked.
"A little," Nancy echoed.
After a moment, she heard a rustling from the other room, then deliberate footsteps: Frank, approaching, was making sure to be audible enough not to startle her. She appreciated the courtesy.
"I'm sorry I threw a pillow at you," he said, looming up out of the dark.
"I think it was justified," Nancy admitted.
She sensed, more than saw, his shrug.
"Maybe," he said, sitting down at the foot of her bed.
Silence pooled between them for a moment. Nancy found herself growing tense, straining to hear footsteps approaching from outside. She sat up, pillowing her chin on her knees, and forced herself to take a long, calming breath.
"What if the intruder comes back?" she said finally, giving voice to the thought which was beating like a drum in her mind.
"Then we'll deal with him," Frank said coolly. "Is that what's keeping you awake, Nance?"
She nodded, then realized that he probably had not seen the gesture and spoke aloud. "Yes. Partly. That, and my dreams."
Frank scooted back a little on the mattress and then lay down, his feet still planted on the floor but his body supine across the end of the bed.
"I could blame the water bed, but the truth is that my brain won't shut off and let me sleep. I can't stop thinking about the baby," he said quietly.
Nancy lifted her head in amazement. The elder Hardy was not prone to spontaneously sharing his thoughts.
Frank Hardy, she thought. Are you using your personal life to distract me from worrying about the intruder? Because it's working.
"That's probably natural," she said aloud, carefully masking both her surprise and her sudden rush of fondness toward him. She lay back again, folding her hands across her abdomen and staring up at the dark ceiling. "Are you nervous?"
"No," said Frank, and then added "Maybe. More impatient than nervous, I think. I'm ready to meet him."
His choice of conversational topic might have been calculated, but the longing in his voice was genuine, and it triggered an answering longing in Nancy- a longing, and also a strange spark of resentment toward her friends, with their taken-for-granted mothers and their taken-for-granted reproductive abilities. She felt terribly alone, stranded between equally tenuous connections to her past and to her future.
It's not fair, she caught herself thinking, and was immediately ashamed at the childish sentiment.
"You're going to be a wonderful father," she said softly, letting go of her cloud of emotions.
Frank made no response. Based on the slow, rhythmic quality of his breathing, Nancy guessed that he had fallen asleep.
Good for him, she thought, shifting to a cooler spot on the pillow. I wonder if I could sleep, too?
She closed her eyes, and was not surprised when images from her recurring dream immediately flooded across her inner vision.
Nancy had always wondered whether the dream was based on a real memory or was simply a composite image, an animated portrait drawn from the photographs preserved in her father's carefully-curated albums. Either way, it felt intensely real: her mother, smiling from above. Her mother, leaning down, down, to kiss Nancy's forehead. Her mother, walking away without looking back.
Nancy sighed. Simple as it was, this dream always left her feeling torn between grief for the mother whom she would never know and remorse at the implication that Hannah's unconditional maternal love, which she had known for as long as she could remember, was not enough- a combination of feelings which was as exhausting as it was unpleasant.
She shifted again, carefully, trying to ease her restlessness without disturbing the slumbering Frank. Waking him would be a shame; they all needed all the rest they could get, and besides, if he woke up he might go back to his own bed.
I wonder if he feels as lonely trying to sleep without Callie as I do trying to sleep without Joe, she thought, yawning. He had certainly dozed off quickly once he had some company. Nancy, too, felt comforted by their proximity. Unable to resist the further reassurance of a bit of platonic contact, she stretched her feet down until she could feel the warmth of Frank's arm against her toes. Then, lulled by his friendly presence and by the ebb tide of her surge of emotions, she slept.
. . . . . . . . .
Discouragingly, it was still dark when she awoke again. Joe sat cross-legged beside her, reading something on his phone.
"What," she said blearily; and though she was not awake enough to complete the thought, he seemed to understand her intent.
"Can't sleep," he explained quietly, setting his phone aside. "And I missed you."
"I missed you, too."
Frank's voice, sleep-roughened, floated up from the end of the bed. "Want me to leave so you can defile this mattress, too?"
"If you're offering…" Joe teased.
Nancy sat up. She felt slightly more coherent now. "Behave, boys. What time is it?"
"Almost four," Joe said.
She nodded, accepting this. Swallowed. Straightened her rumpled top. Even now, at the coolest part of the day, the cabin felt uncomfortably warm.
"Here," Joe said, handing her his water bottle.
"You read my mind," she murmured gratefully. "Thank you."
"All quiet out there?" Frank asked.
"Dead quiet," Joe said. He took the bottle back from Nancy, capped it, and set it on the side table. "I think you got a text a few minutes ago," he told her.
Nancy retrieved her phone from beneath the pillow.
"Oh," she murmured. "It's Bess."
He left his phone on the bathroom counter, Bess had sent. It's fair game, right?
"Hmm," Nancy said, typing. Is it locked?
"What's up?" Joe asked.
"Tom left his phone unattended," Nancy told him.
I know his password, Bess sent back. I'm going through it. I can't not look.
It's your decision, Nancy wrote back. She felt conflicted. On one hand, invading Tom's privacy would do nothing to repair the marriage. On the other hand, this could be Bess's best chance of finding the answers she wanted. Nancy knew that if she were in her friend's shoes, she would undoubtedly choose to snoop.
"That's one way to get closure," Joe remarked.
Nancy's phone buzzed again.
THIS IS VERY FUCKING INTERESTING, Bess had written.
? Nancy sent, and then What did you find?
There was no response. Nancy stared at the screen until her eyes burned.
"Damn it, Bess," she muttered.
"Did she get a name?" Joe asked.
"I don't know what she got. She's stopped responding," Nancy said, fidgeting with a loose strand of hair.
Joe reached over and gently disentangled her fingers from her hair, enveloping her hand in his own instead and rubbing his thumb along her knuckles in a calming way.
"Give her a minute to process."
"I just want to know she's okay."
"She's fine, Nan. Tom's a sneaky son of a bitch, but he's not violent."
Nancy nodded reluctantly. "I know. But I'll feel better when she texts back."
A heavy sigh emanated from the foot of the bed.
"Send George over to check on her, or worry about it in the morning," Frank said, rolling over with an air of finality.
Message received, Nancy thought, exchanging guilty-but-amused looks with Joe. Clearly, Frank wanted them to shut up and let him sleep.
"She'll tell you," Joe whispered, squeezing her hand reassuringly. "If she found a name, we'll all hear it before morning. Don't worry."
Nancy nodded and squeezed Joe's hand in return. She should let go, she knew. Even here in the dark they needed to be careful. But for a moment she could not find it in herself to care. She craved his touch, craved the reassurance and the familiarity of the connection between them.
"Are you okay?" Joe asked.
Nancy nodded again. "Just restless," she said softly. It was, as they were both quite aware, an understatement. She felt ready to crawl out of her skin with impatience and curiosity. "I don't think I can get back to sleep. I might go for a short walk."
"Want company?" he asked.
For a moment, Nancy was tempted. She allowed herself to imagine stealing off into the darkness with him and finding a secluded place where they could burn off some tension in the simplest and most primal way. Joe's particular brand of tender roughness never failed to set Nancy's overactive mind at rest.
But it was too risky. They could not afford to be seen together- not here, and not now.
"Not this time," she said regretfully.
"I can still hear you," Frank pointed out in a muffled tone.
Joe stifled a laugh. "Go," he told Nancy. But he did not immediately release her hand. Instead he circled her wrist with his fingers, holding her lightly in place while he fumbled for something in his pocket. Only when he had found it and pressed it into her palm did he let her go.
"Your backup knife?" Nancy said.
Joe shrugged. "It gets restless cooped up inside. Don't let it run off, okay?"
"I'll keep it on a leash," Nancy promised. Impulsively, she leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. "Get some rest. I'll be back soon."
. . . . . . . .
Outside the cabin, she felt more vulnerable than she had anticipated. She closed her fingers around the knife in her pocket for reassurance and kept moving, channeling her nervousness and restlessness into maintaining a swift and steady stride.
After a few minutes, she began to relax. Both her good night vision and her sense of hearing, which told her that the night sounded normal- neither too quiet nor too loud- reassured her, and she trusted her instincts to warn her if anything changed.
The world feels so much bigger at night, she thought. Not that this place is small in the daylight, either. I don't think I fully appreciated the scope of the camp on paper. Which makes it even more bewildering that Elizabeth Langley's remains turned up so many miles from where she was last seen.
The line of thought brought her inexorably back to the question she had asked earlier that day: Could Elizabeth's remains have been moved off the camp property?
Vince is completely dedicated to making this place work. But is he that unscrupulous?
She frowned. By her assessment, Vince was a man who had clear goals and would let little stand in his way of achieving them. He was also, she had noticed, more comfortable engaging with other men; in the few times they had met with him, he had addressed Frank or Joe more often than he had addressed Nancy.
But slight misogyny doesn't make him either a killer, or complicit in covering up someone else's crime, Nancy concluded.
A small, dark shape scuttled across the path several yards in front of her. An opossum, maybe, or a stray cat. Nancy paused, listened, and then, satisfied that she was not about to come face-to-face with any startled wildlife, continued walking.
For the sake of argument, she thought, if he did move Elizabeth- where were the other girls? Did the killer hide their bodies in separate locations? Could that have something to do with the sites chosen for vandalism?
She dismissed this idea almost as soon as it had formed.
If there had been a body hidden at each of those sites, and Vince had moved them all, more would have turned up by now. I think the vandalism was simply an attempt to delay or even stop renovations before the work started on more sensitive areas of the abandoned camp.
She stepped carefully over a particularly prominent tree root.
If Vince didn't move Elizabeth, she pondered, could she have escaped from the killer? She could have made it that far before succumbing to an injury or to exposure.
Nancy felt a pang of sympathy. She could imagine the girl fleeing- scared, disoriented, and most likely injured, only to die alone in the wilderness.
She was Daria's age, she remembered, with a surge of renewed anger.
I am going to find out who did this.
The real question was, where to start? Elizabeth's potential escape implied an entirely different psychological profile than what she had assumed thus far; it suggested a suspect who took girls and held them prisoner for some time, rather than an ambush killer.
Someone patient, Nancy decided. Someone acting according to a set of internal rules. Someone who has felt secure for decades and now feels panicked enough to lash out at Vince's property, but not yet panicked enough to lash out at Vince himself. Although- could Vince be the next target if the renovations don't stop?
Nancy came to an abrupt halt, surprised both by her own question and by the sudden realization of just how far she had wandered. She had strayed well beyond the campsites, far enough that she no longer recognized her surroundings.
What's that?, she wondered, peering at the indistinct dark mound just ahead. Though the sky was beginning to lighten, the spot remained in shadow. Was it a building of some kind? Nancy had avoided using her penlight thus far, in order to be less conspicuous; but now she clicked it on as she approached, keeping the beam aimed low.
"Oh," she said softly, playing her light carefully across the stones of an old foundation. This must be the farmhouse Joe had found on the map, the one which Vince had said had burned down. It was a little eerie, a little sad, sitting there all alone in the darkness- and yet Nancy felt drawn to it, like a moth to a flame.
I wonder if there's any way inside, she wondered, attempting to get closer to the foundation as she circled it. This was no easy task; shrubs and tall grasses grew thickly around the remains of the building, with nettles concealed in their foliage. After Nancy's bare ankles had been stung three or four times she ruefully turned back. As interesting as it would have been to find the cellar door, it was not worth that amount of pain.
I should have gotten Wellesley Withers to teach me his secret, she thought, retreating.
Now that the farmhouse was at her back, its level of eeriness seemed to grow. Nancy fought back the urge to run and forced herself to walk away quickly but calmly. She felt the same prickle of fear up her spine that she had felt as a child every time Hannah had sent her to retrieve something from the basement of the Drew home; the prey's terror beneath the eyes of a predator unseen and yet sensed, the irrational fear that something sat in the dark, watching and waiting.
"Honestly," Nancy scolded herself. "Frightened by an old pile of stones? Not your finest moment."
Nevertheless, she once again wrapped her fingers around the hilt of Joe's knife, and did not feel at peace until she had reached the door of their little cabin.