But Dan, thankfully, managed to shuffle Janine out into the hallway and close the bathroom door behind him. But it didn't block out all of the noise. Diana heard the raised voices spoken through gritted teeth. She couldn't make out the words, but she didn't have to. She knew that Janine was telling Dan to get his mistress the hell out of her house or else.
Diana pushed herself to her feet. She felt exhausted, the typical response to one of her episodes, what she liked to think of as the "vision hangover." Her head ached like she'd tied one on, and she leaned against the sink for support with one hand while she turned the tap on with the other. She let the water run until it grew comfortably warm, then started scrubbing her arms and hands clean using liquid soap from a dispenser that matched the bathroom tile. While she scrubbed and watched the dirt from Dan's front yard swirl down the drain, she tried to make sense of what had happened that evening.
The visions were back.
She had hoped to have left them far behind, in Westwood along with everything else from her childhood and adolescence, but that plan had never worked. Things always followed along, so why should the visions be any different? They were a part of her apparently, a part that wasn't going to go away. When Mrs. Platcher, her mother's former roommate, finally died or caught the bus she was always looking for, they could clear her bed for Diana, and she could climb right in and join her mom in Looneyville, a mother-daughter crazy act the likes of which the world had never seen.
As always, she remembered the vision well, better than she remembered the dreams she had at night. Unlike her dreams, the visions had no vagueness, no sense of something glimpsed out of the corner of the eye. The visions came at her head on, leaving no doubt about what she had seen and felt. But there was something new this time, something more disturbing than any of the other times she had visited the clearing searching for her sister.
This was the first time she sensed, and truly felt, that Rachel was dead.
In the past, even as she saw the clearing and sometimes even dug in the ground, she always felt a sense of hope, a feeling that she was moving toward something. An answer. A clue. A hint of some kind. But tonight, discovering the bone, holding it in her hand, it felt for the first time that hope might have vanished, and she understood exactly what Kay had been talking about that first day in the diner when she asked Diana if she could still feel Rachel.
Diana wasn't sure she could anymore.
Maybe Rachel was gone. Truly gone.
Diana hadn't known it before, but the visions clarified it for her—she really wasn't ready to admit it yet.
Tears burned at the back of her eyes, and her chin quivered. She tried to hold it in, but a sob slipped out through her lips, a gasping hiccup that she hoped the running water covered.
"No," she whispered to herself. "Not here. Not now."
She closed her eyes and pressed her hands against the lids, trying to hold it in. She took three deep breaths in succession and shook her head.
"No."
She switched the water to cold and splashed handfuls into her face, hoping to counteract any blotches or redness. The water felt good and helped her calm down. When she shut the tap off, she listened and heard no other words coming from the hallway. Diana couldn't decide if that was a good sign or not. She took a towel from the rack and patted her face and arms dry, then made sure there was no dirt left in the sink, nothing that could inflame Janine any more than she already was. As Diana hung the towel back up, she realized she couldn't blame Janine. Diana was the invader here, the one who had upset everything. If the roles were reversed, she'd feel the same way.
Before Diana could open the door and stick her head out, a tentative knock sounded. She pulled it open and saw Dan standing there, his face red, his eyes tired. He'd had a hellaciously long day at work and then came home to all of this. Diana thought she should have felt worse for him, but she didn't.
"Diana? Are you okay?"
"I'm just going to go."
"No," he said. "Let's talk. But we have to do it on your way to the car."
*
They were halfway across the lawn, approaching the spot where Diana had been digging, before anything was said, and then it was just Diana mumbling an apology she didn't think she owed but felt obligated to deliver. She was more sorry for herself, she knew, sorry to have been exposed as fragile and shaken in front of both Dan and Janine.
Dan ignored the apology.
"What did you want to talk to me about?" he said.
Diana shook her head. "You're not going to like it," she said.
"If you want some inside dope on the Foley case, I don't know anything more than what they're saying in the papers. I really don't. And you should let it go—"
"I've heard that before. Let it go." They were down by the street. Diana looked back at Dan's house and saw the curtains move in a bedroom window. Janine watching them, no doubt making sure Diana left without planting a wet goodbye kiss on her husband's face. If only it were that simple. "It's not about the Foley girl. Not directly anyway."
"Then what?"
"Margie Todd."