Shadows Among Us Read online

  SHADOWS AMONG US © 2019 Ellery A. Kane. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the US Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage/database system and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without prior permission in writing from the author, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, website, or broadcast.

  ISBN:978-1-7336701-4-2

  Cover Design:

  Giovanni Auriemma

  Developmental Edit/Line Edit and Manuscript Evaluation:

  Ann Castro, AnnCastro Studio

  Proof via Editorial Lens:

  Emily Dings

  Interior Design and Typeset:

  Mallory Rock

  This book is a work of fiction. Though some situations in this book are based on actual events, such as the Vietnam War, the situations in this book are purely fictional, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Shadows Among Us contains adult themes and is recommended for a mature audience.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  AFTER CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  BEFORE CHAPTER SEVEN

  AFTER CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  BEFORE CHAPTER ELEVEN

  AFTER CHAPTER TWELVE

  BEFORE CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  AFTER CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  BEFORE CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  AFTER CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  BEFORE CHAPTER TWENTY

  AFTER CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  BEFORE CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  AFTER CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  BEFORE CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  AFTER CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  BEFORE CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  AFTER CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  BEFORE CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  AFTER CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  BEFORE CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  AFTER CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ALSO BY ELLERY KANE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  For Gar

  My partner in crime

  “We serial killers are your sons. We are your husbands. We are everywhere. And there will be more of your children dead tomorrow.”

  —Ted Bundy

  Author’s Note

  Shadows Among Us contains numerous references to the Vietnam War, which began in November 1955 and ended with the fall of Saigon in April 1975. Though the Vietnam references in Shadows Among Us are loosely based on truthful accounts of wartime occurrences, all other identifying aspects have been fictionalized. There is no “Bravo Company, the 4th Battalion of the 10th Infantry, Ground Assault Division” or “Cam Chi” village; however, the emotional fallout experienced by the characters is no less real.

  It is my hope that this story will encourage readers to learn more about the Vietnam War and its enduring impact on all those involved, many of whom continue to be haunted by what they witnessed, what they experienced, and what they were called to do.

  AFTER

  Chapter

  One

  (Monday, September 24, 2018)

  I spot Dakota at the distant end of the cereal aisle between the Rice Krispies and Raisin Bran, rising up like an angel from the stark-white floor. She’s taller and thinner. Her hair longer and less bubblegum pink than I remember.

  But of course, she’s different. She would be.

  It’s been 766 days since I last saw her. That’s a lifetime in kid years. And I’m different too.

  Changed.

  Though that seems too soft a word for what’s happened to me. For the total obliteration of my old self. The nuclear fallout that’s left me pushing this sad shopping cart of cheap vodka, Oreos, and boxed mac and cheese. An ironic six-pack of Diet Coke. And a sack of Alpo, which Gus will begrudgingly gobble only because he’s long given up on waiting for the overpriced organic crap I used to buy.

  I linger near the Fruit Loops, awaiting confirmation as she raises to her tiptoes and cranes her neck at the top shelf, her contortions both strange and familiar. I grip the front of my shopping cart with quiet desperation, willing my legs to remain upright. The hairs on my arms prickle with recognition. A sob catches in my throat. Or is it a scream?

  Whatever it is, I swallow it. I don’t make a sound.

  As she turns to go, Cheerios box in hand, I see it there on her right shoulder, bare beneath the thin strap of her tank top. The tiny inked cage with its open door, the tiny inked bird flying just beyond her scapula. I’d raged at her when I’d first seen it, demanded to know who and where and why. And then I’d spit nails down the telephone line at a man who called himself Bull and claimed to be in charge.

  What kind of backwoods operation tattoos a fifteen-year-old girl? You know it’s illegal here, right, moron?

  Now, I’m grateful for Bull. For that tattoo. Because it’s irrefutable evidence.

  I know. For certain.

  It’s her. Somehow, it’s her.

  Behind the white bone fence of my rib cage, my heart shudders to life, sputtering like a half-dead thing awakened.

  I barely breathe. I measure every movement, wheeling my cart with the slow precision of a hunter belly-crawling through the grass. She’s a miracle—a forty-five-point buck, with antlers stretching to the sky—and I don’t want to spook her. I can’t lose her again.

  I follow her as she walks on, oblivious to my silent stalking. Past the slabs of bloody meat resting in their tidy Styrofoam packages. Past the shrimp and the lobster and the crawfishes’ filmy black eyes. Past the decapitated heads of broccoli and the bruised, too-ripe peaches. She skips, light-footed even in dime-store flip-flops.

  I notice the gentle swish of her hair—almost audible beneath the drone of the grocery store soundtrack—remembering how it felt between my fingers. First, her soft blonde baby curls that darkened to the color of my own cinnamon brown. Then, pigtails and ponies and braids I’d twisted myself. Bows I’d pinned to the top of her head. Tangles that had brought us both to tears. And then, finally, the what-the-hell-did-you-do-to-yourself pink. It stained the towels a pale red that never did wash out.

  Now, I’d dye it for her myself if she’d let me. If I could.

  I will her to turn around and look at me.

  Look at me!

  I need to count the freckles on the bridge of her nose. To watch the light catch the flecks of gold in the green eyes she got from her father. To notice the thousands of other things I can’t forget but can’t quite remember. The things lost in the ether of the in-between world I inhabit, the one where I’m not quite alive, not yet dead.

  But she won’t look at me. She’s leading me somewhere. And I’m as helpless. Panicked, nearly. My breath comes in shallow little gasps. Still, every few steps, relief grips me by the neck, shakes me. And I laugh out loud.

  Bouts of panic and relief. This is motherhood. I slip back into it like an old jacket—a
straitjacket—its bindings as brutal as they ever were. No wonder my own mother had fucked it up so royally, and yet, somehow, no worse than I had. Was there any mother anywhere who really believed she’d gotten it all right? Who didn’t want at least one do-over?

  The thought of it—my second chance—nearly overwhelms me. My eyes well until the aisles go blurry, but I don’t stop.

  At the front of the store, Dakota’s pace slows a bit. I match mine to hers, holding back near the overripe strawberries, big and bursting as babies’ hearts. She’s looking for someone, I think.

  For me.

  “Mom . . .” She speaks that holy word. The word that summons me back to her from the edge of the earth. The rest is meaningless.

  Though I can barely stand, my body knows what to do. I shuffle toward her, spin her around by the shoulder. Already the tears are coming, hot and fast and endless. It’s a wonder there are always more.

  “Dakota?” The name is a wound to my throat.

  And now, with her captive before me, it’s my world that’s spinning, spinning, spinning. Knocked off its axis and careening toward another galaxy, light years from where I’d started.

  Because if I had drawn this face, I would have scratched through it with heavy strokes and crumpled it into a ball and tossed it into the trash and said to myself: Wrong.

  Pouty little upturned lips—where my Dakota had the mouth of a poet, serious and wistful. Sleepy gray eyes—where my Dakota’s were bright and clear and moss colored. My Dakota had a strong chin, teeth made straight with braces. An elegant nose she would’ve grown into. Not the bulbous button flaring its nostrils at me.

  All wrong.

  But the tattoo? The tattoo!

  The girl cries out as I claw at her right shoulder, searching. My nails leave tracks on her skin, otherwise unmarked.

  There is no tattoo.

  Half words stutter out of me, halting and crippled. Small peg-legged men that can’t quite stand on their own. And this girl—this wrong girl—stares at me, with a gaping hole of a mouth I want to shut with my fist.

  I turn tail, pushing past the wide-hipped woman who must be her mother. Through the doors that sense my coming and part for me, giving me a generous berth.

  Later, a pimple-faced stock boy will sort through my abandoned cart, reshelving its contents, wondering about the crazy lady who left it there. But for now, it’s stranded behind me, a symbol of the ordinary life I once claimed as my own. The life I took for granted.

  Outside, in the parking lot, I blink against the violent brightness of the sun. It stuns me, and I wobble there, slow and confused, like a creature emerged after too long a sleep. My shoulders, heavy; my spine, a wet noodle. I collapse under the weight of the cold, hard facts. Of what I’ve known all along. Of the truth that prowls the dark cave of my mind, its teeth razor sharp and always at my neck.

  That girl is not my Dakota.

  That girl is not my daughter.

  My daughter is dead.

  Chapter

  Two

  I drive through Napa in a half-dazed stupor, the way a drunk man would flee the scene of an accident. White-knuckling the wheel, tapping the brake pedal, trying to hold it steady. To keep it between the lines now.

  My eyes dart to the rearview mirror. As if not-Dakota might follow me. But behind my cranky old Jeep—the one I’d refused to part with even after Cole bought me the Range Rover—there’s only blacktop and the purpling twilight. Two shades of the same nasty bruise. I grip the wheel tighter to stop my hands from shaking.

  Dead.

  I let myself think that word, and now it’s all I can think. Even with Iron Maiden blasting on the radio. One of my schizophrenic patients had told me heavy metal drowns the voices best. But not this voice—my own.

  Not this word.

  Dead.

  But not just dead. Four weeks dead by the time they’d found her scattered in the woods by Lake Berryessa. By then, my girl was all parts: one fractured humerus, half a rib cage, a pelvic bone, one femur, three phalanges, and an intact mandible with teeth perfected by orthodontia.

  Cole had been the one to call the dentist, to get the records, to go to the station. He’d been the one to bear witness to the remains of our daughter. Then, I’d simply felt grateful one of us could stand upright, could speak without sobbing. But after, it became another regret on a long list of them. Maybe if I’d laid my eyes on her bones, I’d stop seeing her. I’d stop imagining they’d gotten it wrong. Stop hoping for a miracle.

  Don’t ever hope. Hope is an empty box wrapped in shiny paper. It’s a gift from the devil himself. I should know.

  I turn down Highway 29 and fall in line behind a row of brake lights, inching along in the Monday evening traffic that’s part daily commuters, part tourists here for the annual grape harvest. I’d planned on stopping off at home before group to let Gus out and drop off the groceries, but that’s moot now, and I’d only spend the time holed up in the mausoleum of Dakota’s room sniffing her pillows, sucking up every lingering trace of her.

  So I take the long way, past Napa State Hospital with its blank-canvas buildings and sterile offices, one of which I used to call my own. Along with a full caseload of criminal crazies who I’d abandoned just like that shopping cart. Because when they find your daughter murdered, you turn into someone else. Your heart bloats, decays, liquefies, right along with your PhD and your doctorate-level compassion. You say things like fuck you, you sick pervert to the people you’re supposed to be helping. And then, they seize your employee ID and walk you off grounds like a pariah. Which you are now.

  Dr. Mollie Roark: a childless, divorced pariah.

  Fittingly, Bruce Dickinson lets out a primal shriek—arguably, the best scream in heavy metal—as I pull into the parking lot at Napa Valley College where I facilitate the Grieving Parents group every Monday. I certainly didn’t volunteer for the gig. I could barely stomach the hour-long pity parties myself. I’d been nominated by my fellow sad sacks and basket cases as the obvious choice when our fearless leader, Sandy Hooper, took a counseling job in Hawaii. Apparently, grief is better with hula skirts and mai tais. That makes me Lead Basket Case now. The one who tells the other basket cases when to speak and when to shut up and when it’s time to go home. They don’t even pay me to do it.

  With twenty minutes to spare before the masochism commences, I close my eyes and crank up the volume. Bruce is wailing now about his warped mind and the fire and the way it’s hard to tell sometimes whether life is real or just a bad, bad dream.

  The phone buzzes on the passenger seat. I already know it’s Cole. He always calls on Mondays, and I always let it go to voicemail. Where he clears his throat and uses his doctor’s voice, the one that means he’s delivering bad news, and spouts some variation of I feel sorry for you. Just checking on you, Mol. Hope you’re alright, Mol. Call if you need anything, Mol. But I’m sure he doesn’t mean it. That his weekly check-ins are only a salve for his guilt. So I never answer.

  I can’t let him off that easy, though. Not today. I kill the radio and slide my finger across the screen.

  “Hi, Cole.”

  Five seconds pass. Five sweet seconds I savor, picturing him open-mouthed in his white coat and wire-rimmed glasses. “You—uh—you answered.”

  I allow myself a smile. Maybe he’s not incapable of shock after all. Even if I had called him the Tin Man on more than one occasion. “I did. Now what?”

  His laugh is unexpected too. The laugh of someone I don’t know anymore. Maybe that’s what happened to our marriage. We both turned into different people.

  “Well, I’m not exactly sure. But I think this is the part where we make awkward conversation. You know, you tell me how you’re doing, how the dog’s doing, and I—”

  “Did you forget? Did you actually forget what today is? You’re unbelievable.”

  I wield
my voice like an axe sunk deep into his chest. I doubt he feels it. He’s all ice. Which I suppose I should’ve figured from our first date at Bistro Jeanty when he’d told me he’d just finished his residency in pediatric oncology. At the time, I’d oohed and aahed and branded him a saint when I really should’ve been asking who chooses a job like that? A job with a body count. Someone with an essential piece missing. Obviously.

  “God, Mol. Of course, I remember. I just don’t feel the need to relive it every goddamned second of the day. What good does it do? We can’t fix it. She’s gone. She’s not coming back. And I’m not sure we’ll ever have any answers.”

  I imagine him dismissing our daughter from eight hundred miles away, and my chest tightens. Cole thinks I need to move on. He’d actually had the audacity to tell me that before he’d packed a U-Haul with his cancer books and his dad’s stethoscope and his overpriced golf clubs and driven to Seattle to start a brand-new life. Like a real Doctor McDreamy. I sharpen my teeth on the memory.

  “You act like our daughter never existed. Like our family was nothing more than a speed bump on your way to claiming your precious chief oncologist gig.”

  In the long pause, I hear all the things he doesn’t say. All the things he’s already said. The things I’ve said too. Nails we’ve both hammered into our marital coffin. None worse than the spike I’d driven ten days after Dakota went missing: Did you have something to do with this? He’d fired back with a vicious nail of his own: You sound just like your father.