Beverly Connor - Dust to Dust

“Shrinks can’t take things out of your head,” Samantha said.

“No, but they can teach you how to cope,” said Diane.

“I cope,” Samantha said in an uncertain voice, her eyes downcast.

“Are you having nightmares?” said Kingsley.

She nodded. “They’ve started back again. I had bad nightmares after El died,” she said.

“Take Diane’s advice. See someone, just to talk to, at least,” he said.

“Maybe,” she said, sticking the card in her purse.

“Have your parents been like this for nine years?” asked Kingsley.

“It comes and goes. It gets bad around Christmas and El’s birthday. It’s worse when Mother is drinking. Sometimes she takes a cure for a while, but sooner or later she goes back to it. She likes vodka in tea. Can you imagine? If she put it in orange juice, she’d at least get some vitamin C.”

“By ‘takes a cure,’ what do you mean?” asked Kingsley.

“She goes to visit my grandmother for a while. They don’t have any alcohol around and she stays in the house. Sometimes she goes to a clinic in Atlanta. She comes back and starts falling back into bad habits. I told them we should move, but they won’t. They don’t want to go to a house where El has never been. They think it’ll make her disappear, and I’m like, hello, she’s gone. She’s already disappeared.”

“You seem to have supportive neighbors,” said Diane.

Samantha shrugged. “Kathy Nicholson is pretty nice. I go over to her house some. She gets kind of lonely. We talk about things. But it’s not like she can do anything about my parents. Wendy Walters means well, but I think Mother wore her down. She used to try to discourage her from drinking, but now she just helps her. You saw when I brought the tea.”

“Why did Stacy want to speak with your parents?” asked Kingsley. “If she knew you, you could give her a lot of the answers she wanted.”

“Not really. I was nine when El died. I didn’t know a whole lot that was going on in El’s life. Stacy thought they could tell her about the day El disappeared. I didn’t really know much about that. Except, I think my parents think it was my fault.”

“How is that?” asked Diane.

“We’d been fighting that day and El said she didn’t want to ride all the way to Grandma’s house with me and she was just going to stay here. She wasn’t home when we got back,” she said.

“That wasn’t your fault,” said Diane.

Samantha shrugged again and took a sip of drink. “Maybe not, but still, if we hadn’t fought…”

“You think she might have wanted to stay home for reasons of her own?” said Diane. “And the argument with you was just her excuse?”

Samantha raised her eyebrows and opened her mouth slightly. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Did she have a boyfriend?” asked Diane.

“She always had boyfriends. You saw her portrait. That’s pretty much what she looked like. But it would have been in her diary,” said Samantha.

“She kept a diary?” asked Kingsley.

Samantha nodded. “I loaned it to Stacy to copy.”

“Your sister kept a diary?” said Kingsley.

“Yes, like forever. I mentioned it to Stacy one time and she begged me to let her see it. I told her it wouldn’t help. See, El caught Mother reading her diary when she first started writing one and she was really pissed. That’s when she started writing in this code she made up. El was really smart. Mother wanted to read her diaries after she died, to be close, I guess. But she couldn’t make heads or tails of them. Dad packed them in a box when he packed up El’s room. Mom wanted to keep it the way it was, but it was a little too creepy for Dad. They saved her things in the basement. I took her last diary so Stacy could copy it.”

“Did she copy it?” asked Kingsley. He leaned forward in his chair slightly. Diane knew what he was thinking. Diaries can be loaded with just the best clues.

“Yes,” said Samantha.

So, the copies were probably in the file that was missing, thought Diane. “What happened to the diary?” she asked.

Samantha Carruthers hesitated and was quiet a moment. Then, quick as a mouse, she slipped her hand into her backpack, pulled out a book, and handed it to Kingsley.

“Stacy returned it to you?” asked Kingsley.

“No, not exactly. When I found her… like that, it was in her bookcase. The spine was facing out, but I saw it right away. So, well, I took it. After all, it was mine. Or, at least, my family’s. I’ve been carrying it around, hoping maybe I could figure out how to decipher it,” she said. “Jimmi said Stacy’s dad told her Stacy’s folder disappeared… the one full of stuff about her investigation. I figured something in the diary might be important.”

The front of the journal had been découpaged with magazine cutouts from the television series Charmed .

Kingsley opened it up and he and Diane looked at the writing. It was a mixture of letters, numbers, and symbols.

“See,” said Samantha. “You can’t read it.”

“Will you let us copy it?” said Diane.

“Sure. There’s a place in the mall where we can go,” Samantha said.

They took the last bites of their oversized cookies, washed them down with their drinks, and threw the trash away. Samantha led them to a Mailboxes Plus store where Diane copied the entire diary. When she finished, she handed it back to Samantha.

Sam stood for a moment, looking awkward. “You aren’t going to call my parents, are you?” she asked.

“As you said, you are an adult now,” said Diane.

“Yeah, but…” She hesitated, looking at her watch. “I guess I’d better get to the library.”

“Thank you, Samantha,” said Diane. “Seriously, you should talk to your parents. They need to know what’s going on in your life.”

“I’ll think about it, but you don’t know them like I do,” she said.

“You may not know them as well as you think,” said Diane.

Diane and Kingsley left the mall with Samantha. They watched her drive off before they got into Kingsley’s Prius.

“She needs help,” he said.

“Yes, she does. And her parents need to wake up and realize they have another daughter to care for. She’s old enough to be out on her own. If she decides to make the break, it will be harder on all of them.”

Kingsley glanced at the package of copies Diane held in her hand. “So, how do we go about deciphering that?” he said as he left the parking area and headed back to Rosewood.

“I’ll ask Frank to do it,” said Diane.

She removed the first several pages of the diary from the store bag. The writing looked like gibberish to her-a lot of stars, squares, wavy lines, letters that didn’t make sense, and numbers scattered throughout.

“He can do stuff like this?” said Kingsley.

“He and Jin too. They love codes, but-and if you repeat this, I’ll have to kill you-Frank is better at it,” said Diane.

Kingsley laughed. “He can really decipher that?”

“Sure. I’ll have to see if he has time. If not, I’ll ask Jin to do it,” she said.

“I think the thing I appreciate most about working with you-aside from your brilliant mind, of course-is that all the people around you have such unusual talents that are terribly useful and interesting.”

“That’s true. I have a great appreciation of them myself,” said Diane.

They rode in silence for a while, Diane still trying to make sense of the writing. She gave up and slipped the pages back into the bag. Her talents simply didn’t run to encryption.

“You know I have to reinterview all of Stacy’s band members,” Kingsley said after a while. “I was completely fooled by Samantha and Jimmi. I thought they were telling me the truth.”