She climbed into the shower—only after locking and double locking the doors and windows of her apartment—and washed the grit and grime of the alley off her body. She no longer felt in complete control of her own mind, a process that began shortly after Rachel disappeared, but one that seemed to have intensified in recent weeks. While the water dug into her skin and she scrubbed with the thin bar of soap, Diana noted that the visions and dreams had picked up recently, only after she had made a conscious decision to step away from any involvement with any of the missing persons' cases. Was something—some thing?—exerting its power over her, reminding her of who was boss and the influence it could have over her life, at any time, in any place? The thought brought Diana down from the momentary sense of relief she had felt when she first came back to the apartment. She had never thought of the visions in such terms before, and now that she did, they seemed, if that was even possible, more ominous and threatening than they ever had before.
She toweled off and pulled her robe on, then walked to the front door and made certain that the locks were still secure. With that task finished, she went and sat on the couch, flipping the TV on to something mindless, distracting background noise and visual stimulation. It was three-thirty, the middle of the night and still not quite the darkest hour.
She had never ascribed any agency to the force that brought the visions and dreams down upon her. She had always taken it to be a shortcoming in her own mind, a misfiring brought about by her own inability to deal with Rachel's disappearance and her own culpability for it. In other words, she blamed herself. Her mother had crawled into the black hole of dementia, while Diana had tried to suppress her guilt and fears, shoving them down beneath the surface of her mind, an attempt to drown them. But inevitably they popped back up.
But what if there were more to it than that? What if there was something out there, something that existed independently of her own mind, a force that worked on her, and possibly her mother? What would be the point? She used to think it was so simple—find the clearing, find her sister. But had she created that formulation, as simple as first grade arithmetic, just to make herself feel better? To give herself a purpose and a way to go on? Was she being called to do more—or something else?
She flipped the channels, not really paying attention to the images that passed on the screen. A black and white movie, a soccer game. A guy selling some kind of blender that ground vegetables into juice drinks. Diana stopped and muted the sound.
Kay Todd had said she knew something about Rachel, and to back it up, she dropped the name of Rachel's favorite song. If it had just been Kay, Diana would have no difficulty dismissing her as an eccentric crackpot, a lonely old woman who had secondhand knowledge or had taken a wild guess at something about Rachel and used it to manipulate her. But now Diana rethought the actions and health of her own mother. She had, much to the chagrin of her mother's caretakers, dismissed her health problems as a weakness, an inability to deal with the hand reality had dealt. And for so long Diana took comfort in that assessment of her mother's condition, believing that if it was simply a matter of will and determination, then the visions and the dreams would never completely consume her life in the way they had consumed her mother's.
But what if that weren't the case?
She remembered her most recent visits to Vienna Woods and most notably the one in which she received the crack across the face from her mother's hand. What was it her mother said about the painting?
That's my daughter's house. She lives in that house.
Did her mother know something? Did she see something no one else could see?
Were the two things—Diana's visions and her mother's illness and babbling—connected in some way?
She stared at the door and then the windows. There was nothing there, nothing coming after her. She turned the volume up on the TV and stayed there the rest of the night, waiting for the first light of dawn.
*
She was waiting for Dan when he arrived at the station.
It was early morning, just before six, and the sky was still colored shades of red and gray while the sun rose above the horizon line. Diana wore a sweatshirt and a ski vest, but she hadn't been able to locate her gloves before leaving the house, so she stood and then paced in the parking lot with her hands jammed into her jeans pockets, the tips of her nose and ears tingling in the cold.
She had no doubt Dan would arrive on time. Even with Jason missing and the other crises the department had been dealing with, she knew Dan would show up with the punctuality of a machine. She imagined he had been at the station late the night before, and may have stayed all night, only going home to shower and shave and change into a clean uniform. He was a constant, old reliable, the kind of man the world could set their clocks to, and she knew that's why she'd fallen for him. She'd had precious little of that in her life, not from her mother and not from any men.
True to form, he arrived exactly at six. His headlights were on, and they caught Diana's eyes, temporarily blinding her. She squinted against them and held her hand up as a shield. She heard him place the car in park and set the brake, and then he stepped out into the cold air. He didn't wear a jacket or a hat, and he didn't look surprised to see her.
"Do you know something about McMichael?" he said.
"No, do you?"
"Not a damn thing." His breath came out in little puffs when he spoke. He still looked tired, and she knew he hadn't slept. "I guess you're here about something else, some other piece of business like the one we talked about last night."
"John Bolton," Diana said. "If it's not him, who is it?"
Dan looked around as though someone might be listening. "Careful what you say, Diana. Not so loud."