Page 62 of The Drowned Woman
“Do you remember getting sick? The nausea and vomiting and needing to spit, feeling flushed?”
“Those woke me up this morning. Vomiting first, then the others kept me awake. Around five-thirty, it was still dark out. I woke Jack with my throwing up and he got up as well. We tried to ride it out, and after a few hours I was feeling better, keeping fluids down, but he was worried, so he called you.”
“That was just after eight.”
“Right. Does that help?”
Leah considered her words carefully. “Risa, think hard. Did you get up during the night to eat or drink anything?”
“I don’t know. Like I said, I can’t remember anything until I started throwing up. Why?”
“Nicotine poisoning has a fairly quick onset as well as a short duration for minor overdoses. Which means however the nicotine got into your system, it wasn’t at dinner or while Dom was there last night. It would have happened early this morning.”
Risa frowned, shaking her head slowly as if bewildered. “I wish I had an answer, but the whole night is just a blank.” Leah blew out her breath in frustration. Risa reached over and gripped her hand, her gaze searching Leah’s face.
“You believe me, don’t you?”
Thirty-Six
Emily couldn’t help but feel sad that her daddy hadn’t really come back. Last night was the first night she hadn’t had a nightmare about the bad man and what happened to Daddy. Instead, she’d dreamed that Daddy was there, watching over her and Nate, telling them how proud he was of them for being heroes. Only then she and Nate weren’t inside their bunkbed fort, instead they were dressed like explorers in the movies and were accepting medals for bravery for their trek through the woods to retrieve Nate’s great’s medal—and somehow saving Nate’s great-great-grandfather as well. At least that’s who she thought the man in the old-fashioned army uniform was, even though he wasn’t very old and looked a lot like Luka. Then the Homan twins and Ms. Driscoll were all carted off to jail.
And then she woke up. Still half-asleep, she went downstairs, where she’d found Daddy’s name on boxes and his computer was back and she’d hoped and wished… but it was all like the dream. Not real.
Still, that didn’t mean she and Nate couldn’t make it real. Be heroes.
By the time Nate and Emily finished cleaning her room—and the living room and the breakfast dishes—the sun was shining bright, spilling tiny rainbows over the lavender plants lined up in their rows from the house to the woods. Emily had her plan finalized. The Homans scared her, not just because they were bigger than her but because they made her afraid deep down inside, like the bad man who killed Daddy had on that night she tried so hard to forget but never could. But Nate needed her help and she couldn’t let him down.
She gathered what they needed. After lunch—grilled cheese and tomato soup—Ruby told them to go play and they finished their preparations, including dressing in proper exploration outfits: boots, jeans, T-shirts under a fleece top for Emily and a flannel shirt for Nate, baseball caps, then windbreakers for both.
“Ready?” she asked Nate.
“Yeah.” He didn’t sound as enthusiastic as he had last night. “Did you ask Ruby?”
“Hang on.” She ducked her head into the living room where Ruby was listening to a book and flipping through one of Nellie’s old seed catalogues. “Ruby, can Nate and I play outside? It stopped raining.”
Ruby glanced out the window. “Enjoy the sunshine while you can. Be back before it gets dark—supposed to rain again tonight.”
“Thanks, bye!”
It felt so good to be out in the sun that they ran through the mud between rows of lavender plants, racing each other to the tree line. Then they came to the edge of the forest leading up the mountain.
The four-wheeler path wasn’t marked on the map on Emily’s phone, but it was pretty obvious where it began given the large patch of rutted and churned up dirt. Nate ran right up it, vanishing into the thick shadows of the trees, but Emily stopped. The trees were tall, with thick branches like long, knobby fingers that quivered in the wind, ready to wait until her back was turned and then they’d grab her. And the noises—they came from everywhere, above and below and around all sides. She hugged herself tight, trying to squeeze the panic away as her heart thudded and all she could see was blood…
Then Nate raced back down the path, smiling as he took her hand. “Hey, c’mon.”
She took a deep breath, her fear washed away by the clean scent of pine and wet leaves, then followed him into the trees.
They quickly came to their first obstacle: the path converged with four others, all leading in different directions. Emily scrutinized the map. She’d studied it so much that she thought she had it memorized, but it was difficult to translate it into the real world. She’d googled the Homans’ address and it was marked; they just had to cross the patch of green on the map to get there. The measurements said it was between half a mile and a mile. That was easy.
She held the phone flat on her palm beside Nate’s hand with the compass. Nate rotated until both were pointing the same way.
“Pops said the arrows always go north,” he explained. “So we need to go this way.” He stretched his left arm pointing into the trees. “Not quite west.”
She studied her map then the compass and nodded. “Right.” She chose the trail closest to their desired direction. “This way.” Emily led the way into the woods, following the ruts from the four-wheelers. The rain had left the tracks filled with puddles and the dirt around them was sticky mud, so they walked in the brush and leaves alongside the trail. The pine trees swayed in the wind and the naked trees that had lost their leaves in the winter had tiny red and brown buds breaking out. The air smelled fresh and wonderful, a promise of spring, and Emily forgot her fear. The woods weren’t dark and scary like she’d thought. Just different.
Nate stopped as a large bird spiraled above them. “Is that an eagle?”
“Or a hawk. Next time we need to see if we can use my daddy’s binoculars. Then we could tell for sure.” The thought of Daddy and her walking through the woods, on their own adventure, made her sad. She’d never get another adventure with him again.
