Adam furrowed his brow. “Not specifically. Anything else?”
To end this. I swallowed and looked away. “That was it.”
“So we still don’t know anything.” Adam sighed, his shoulders slumping.
“We know she was at Ryder’s this afternoon,” I said. “She had quite a pill collection up there, and Ryder said she seemed out of it. Maybe we should call the hospitals again. Caleb, can you do that? And I suppose there’s a chance she got picked up for DUI, so maybe Ellen could call the police station. Adam, call anyone and everyone you can think of who might have some connection to Lanie. And I . . . I’ll do something.”
As I hung up the phone, Aunt A came into the room. “Josie, Adam, you’re back. Did you find any leads?”
A pit forming in my stomach, I brought Aunt A up to speed on what I had learned from Ryder.
“Oh, no,” Aunt A said, her eyes starting to water. “Oh, honey. I can only imagine what you’re thinking. I still remember the worry that your mother gave me, and it was nearly unbearable.”
Of course, I thought. Our mother.
The dashboard clock read 11:00 p.m. when I pulled up to the cemetery gates. They were locked, with a sign informing me the cemetery closed at dusk. I knew posted hours would not deter my sister, and so I parked the rental car down the street and scrambled over the fence. I immediately tripped over a low tombstone, and reached for my phone to illuminate the path but found I had left it in the car. Involuntarily, I shivered, suddenly realizing I was locked in a cemetery in the middle of the night. A breeze shook the leaves of a nearby tree, producing an ominous rattle.
I swallowed my sense of unease and picked my way through the dark, stricken with the irrational fear of falling into an open grave. At one point, I thought I heard someone moving across the dry grass, an eerie shuffling sound. I froze. It could be the caretaker, come to place me under citizen’s arrest for trespassing, or it could be some degenerate skulking around the cemetery, like Warren Cave claimed he used to like to do.
Or it could be my sister.
“Lanie?” I called, my voice coming out a tiny croak. “Lanie, is that you?”
There was no response.
I held my breath and waited, but I could no longer hear the noise. The cemetery was completely still.
Unsettled, I continued my path to my parents’ final resting places. My mother’s grave was easy to find, the only plot topped with fresh earth. My chest tightened as I drew nearer and saw no sign of Lanie. No flowers or trinkets had been left adorning the graves, no mascara-stained tissues hid in the grass. She hadn’t been here—or, if she had, she was gone. I turned to leave, eager to get out of the creepy cemetery, but something held me back. I knelt before the headstones marking my parents’ side-by-side graves and stretched out a hand to touch their names.
I don’t know what I had hoped for, but I felt nothing. Disappointed, I sat back on my heels. Somewhere in the distance, the shuffling sound started up again, and I jumped to my feet and ran the entire way back to the car.
From Twitter, posted September 29, 2015
chapter 21
Once I was safely back in the car, I began to cry tears of frustration. My mind raced in aimless circles, replaying the previous day’s events over and over on an endless loop. I had the nagging sensation that I knew something—or should know something—but it felt just out of my field of vision.
I replayed our last conversation in my head, concentrating on every word I could remember, turning each inside out to look for clues. I came up empty. She had mentioned our mother a couple of times, but if she wasn’t at the cemetery and she wasn’t in California . . .
Was I sure she wasn’t in California? Adam said she hadn’t used her credit cards to buy a flight, but what if she had a secret credit card? Or what if she had paid cash? Hands shaking with desperate energy, I pulled up an airline’s phone number, the first step in an impractical plan to call every potential air carrier and describe my sister. As I listened to the automated message, I remembered Caleb saying it would be difficult to find the LFC, even if we got to California.
It would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. Worse—a needle in a barnful of hay.
I hung up the phone.
Lanie’s paintings. The hay Adam had seen in her hair.
I knew where my sister was.
A neon-lettered NO TRESPASSING sign was affixed to the rusted gate, but the gate itself hung open. My heart leapt; someone was here. Even though the early-morning sky was still inky dark, I turned off the car’s headlights as I pulled through the gate, allowing me to creep undetected along the rutted dirt road. I could hear the feathery tops of weeds brushing against the car’s undercarriage as I slowly inched forward in the darkness, squinting to make out the confines of the overgrown road. There was a time I could have found my way to the farmhouse in my sleep, but now I worried about missing a subtle curve and finding myself mired in the marshy grass surrounding the pond or driving out into the fields. I considered switching the headlights back on, but I was too close to finding my sister to allow some farmer with a gun and strong sense of personal property to keep me from her.
And then, under a moonless sky, the farmhouse took shape. My heart caught in my throat; I let the car idle as I stared up at what was once a home so picturesque it could have been a Grant Wood painting. Now the paint was peeling from the house in chunks; what remained had faded from bright white to a dingy gray. The wooden railing surrounding the porch was missing spindles, and the steps leading up to it had rotted and fallen away. It looked more like something from a horror flick than the site of rose-tinted family memories.
The farmhouse was empty, and clearly had been for some time. Frankly, I was surprised the house remained at all. Family farms had long gone out of fashion, and I assumed the farm’s new owners would have razed the building to make way for more money-making fields. But, for whatever reason, they hadn’t, and the house stood before me, neglected and ominous.
I turned off the car and stepped outside. I heard nothing other than the frenzied chirping of crickets and the occasional eerie call of an owl. I crossed to what was left of the porch and hoisted myself up on the rotted beams beside where the stairs once stood. The wood was soft and damp, and I could feel my feet sinking slightly with each step. I held my breath as I carefully neared the front door. I took the knob in my hands and twisted, almost expecting the door to spring open as it had in my youth, unleashing the scents of freshly baked bread and Grammy’s cinnamon-scented candles. The knob rattled uselessly in my hands, unyielding.