I was totally alone except for the cars passing on the freeway and I realized that—for the first time I could remember—I didn’t want to be anywhere else on earth. I didn’t want to be trapped in a cramped airplane seat, flying to a strange city with nowhere to go after the plane landed. I didn’t want to be onstage with the lights up and a full audience watching my every move. I didn’t want to be lying in my bed alone while Mom cooked some dinner I didn’t have the stomach to eat. There was something so comforting about the blankness of the land around me, the empty fields edged with naked trees and patches of stubborn snow.
No one knew I was here. Suddenly that fact was wonderful. I could have said it my whole life to everyone I’d ever met—No one knows I’m here—and they would have laughed and rolled their eyes and patted me on the back. Oh brother, they’d say, but it was true. I’d spent my entire life playing parts, being whatever they wanted me to be, focused on everyone around me while inside I’d always felt like I was sitting in this exact spot: curled up in the middle of a dead, endless prairie, without a soul in the world for company. Now that I was here it all made sense. Everything clicked, just like it does in the movies when the heroine realizes she’s in love with the stupid guy, or she can achieve her All-American, underdog dreams, and the music amps up and she walks, like, determinedly out of some random room. It was just like that, except without the sound track. I was still sitting in a ditch in the middle of nowhere, but everything on the inside suddenly changed.
I heard my mother’s voice again. I remembered what she said last night when I was too busy sobbing on her shoulder to listen or understand.
Get off the stage, sweetheart, she said. You can’t live your life acting for other people. Other people will just use you up. You have to know yourself and figure out what you want. I can’t do that for you. Nobody can.
I knew exactly who I was—for maybe the first time ever—and exactly what I wanted and what I had to do to get it. It was clarity. Like waking up from a dream where you thought things were real and then feeling the actual world come into focus all around you. I stood up—ready to ditch this pathetic, crying girl forever. Good effing riddance.
Gerald’s old camcorder was tucked in the top of my suitcase. I pulled it out and set it up on the back of the pickup, hitting the record button on a brand-new tape and centering myself in front of the lens.
“Okay, hi.” I wiped my eyes, breathing deep into my diaphragm the way Gerald taught me. “This is me now. My name is Henrietta Sue Hoffman.”
And by the time I was done with Pine Valley, no one would ever forget who I was.
DEL / Saturday, April 12, 2008
THE DEAD girl lay faceup in a corner of the abandoned Erickson barn, half floating in the lake water that flooded the lowest part of the sinking floor. Her hands rested on her torso over some frilly, bloodstained cloth that must have been a dress, and below the hem her legs stretched bare and shocking into the water, each swollen to the size of her waist and floating like manatees in the dirty lagoon. The upper half of her body had no relation to those legs. I’d seen slashed-up bodies before and a share of floaters, too, but never both nightmares lying side by side in the same corpse. Even though her face was too mutilated to ID, there was only one report of a missing girl in the entire county.
“Must be Hattie.” That from Jake, my chief deputy.
Dispatch had gotten the call from the youngest Sanders boy, who’d found her when he and some girl snuck out here. There was a fresh spot of puke, just inside the crooked door, where one of them had lost it before they’d made their escape. I didn’t know if it was that or the dead stink that made Jake gag a little when we first came in. Normally I would’ve made a point to rib him about it, but not now. Not staring down at this.
I unhooked the camera from my belt and started snapping pictures, angling out and then in, trying to get her from every side without slipping into the water next to her.
“We don’t know it’s Hattie yet.” The sudden stone in my gut aside, we had to do this by the book.
As soon as we’d walked in the door I’d called the crime lab up in the cities and requested a forensics team to tag and bag every last scrap of evidence. We had maybe an hour alone with her before they got here.
“Who else could it be?” Jake moved around her head, watching his step as the boards groaned underneath his ex–defensive tackle weight. He leaned in closer and I could see the lawman had clicked on in his brain.
“Can’t make a positive ID with her face like that, especially since she’s already bloating. No rings or jewelry. No visible tattoos.”
“Where’s her purse? I’ve never met a girl that didn’t keep one glued to her hip.”
“Taken, maybe.”
“Hell of a place for a robbery/murder.”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself. ID first.” I crouched down next to her. With a gloved finger, I nudged her lip open and saw her teeth were intact. “Looks like we can go dental.”
Jake checked the dress for pockets, didn’t find any.
“Cause of death, stabbing, most likely.” I pulled up one of her hands and saw the knife wound either right at or just above her heart.
“Most likely?” Jake snorted.