Snow Creek(17)

I say that because sometimes they don’t know.

“We need everything preserved for the lab. That means every bit of carpet. Scrap of paper. Gum if there’s any in the cab. Coffee cups. The condition is unimportant right now. If you think anything is trash, then you should get another job. We need to ensure that nothing slips through the cracks here. That means the truck too.”

I’m pretty sure someone mutters the word bitch. That’s fine. That means I made an impression. I’m not here for a date anyway. I’m here for justice for the dead woman.

“Did anyone find anything on the perimeter?”

The trooper who met me when I first arrived pipes up.

“I did,” he says. “I found a plastic shoe.”

He holds up a clear plastic bag.

“Trooper, that’s a Croc.”

“Sorry,” he says. “I thought it could be helpful.”

Everyone laughs. His face goes scarlet.

“It might be,” I say with a reassuring nod. “That’s the brand of the shoe.”





Ten





The forest is full of eyes. Tiny eyes. Bigger ones. When an intruder or a pack of them find their way into the dark world of green with its sweet, musky smells, watchers track every movement. Every interloper is a threat. To the single eye that tracked the police, nothing was more dangerous than what was transpiring over by the truck she’d carefully hidden. She watched, unblinking, as the coroner and another deputy carried something away on a stretcher.

Another body?

Regina couldn’t believe what she saw. How did she miss that? How was it that there were two? Her attempt at concealment was a devastating failure, one that could ruin her life with Amy.

Damn!

Fuck!

What can I do? What will I say if they come calling?



That night, she carried Amy to the barn. She was asleep, and the weight of her body was heavy in Regina’s arms. She made some soft wheezing sounds and to Regina the noise was as lovely as an aria.

Amy opened her eyes.

“I love you, baby.”

“I love you more.”

Regina could feel Amy’s gentle, almost timid, embrace. She longed for the day when she’d be better, and they could live with carefree abandon. They could live as they did before that terrible day two years before.

“I’m going to put a note on the door that we’re away for the rest of the summer.”

“Good idea, Regina.”

“I try. Besides, we used to love sleeping up here anyway.”

Amy smiled as Regina lifted her onto a mound of straw she’d fashioned into a bed in the loft of the small barn they’d built so many years ago. It was like a homecoming of sorts. Memories of those early days were magical. The best years of their lives.

She put Amy to bed and went down to the kitchen in the house and wrote out a note.

Reminder: Amy and I are out of town traveling with our friends in their RV. Jared is taking care of the animals so no worries. We’ll be back in September or thereabouts.

Love, Reggie and Amy





The way Regina saw it as she stuck the message on the front door, the ruse would buy the sheriff enough time to find the answers to what happened with the truck without trampling on their privacy. They had made their own world, and the outside was not invited in.

Especially law enforcement.



Regina peeled back her thoughts two years, to the last time she left the farm in the woods for town. She remembered how she felt. Alone. Strange. Different. She walked the streets of Port Townsend in a daze. It was as though she’d never been there. An alien. Everything and everywhere was so loud. So irritating. She wondered why she needed to be party to a stranger’s phone call as a young man passed by yacking about some woman he’d “boned” the night before, bragging that he’d already ghosted the “skank.” It made Regina grimace. A mother whisper-yelled into her phone about her child’s latest tantrum and how she was at her wits’ end and wished she’d adopted a Korean baby instead of a Russian one. A man in his seventies stopped in front of a girl, not more than twenty, selling seascape paintings and proceeded to tell her in no uncertain terms that the colors she had selected clashed.

“I don’t know if you’re going for realism or kitsch, but either way, you’re way off,” he said.

It was missing the mark. Unnecessary. Everyone seemed to trample over each other’s privacy as if they’d been invited to do so. Amy would hate the way it was out there. She really would. Regina knew that was truer than anything she could measure as she gathered supplies. She hoped that it would be another two years before she needed to make the trip to PT.

She ordered a mocha with whipped cream, and an avocado and cream cheese sandwich from a downtown deli. With each sip of the mocha, each bite of the sandwich, she vowed it was the last she’d have from another’s hand. She and Amy were self-sufficient. More so every day. They had a robust vegetable garden. A flock of chickens for eggs and meat. Goats provided milk, cheese and meat. They even grew their own wheat in a field behind the barn. Before she closed the trunk, she surveyed the results of her shopping trip, things that she and her wife couldn’t raise or grow but needed.

The list was quite small, yet in its own way, crucial—olive oil, cornmeal, tissue paper, some plastic piping, and a box of activated charcoal.