And, of course, there’s the new housing development.
They sold the Sherman land, Mom had said one day on the phone.
Oh?I’d said.
They’re going to put a bunch of new houses there. They started digging.And before either of us could express what exactly that might mean, she told me about the newly painted benches at the library, and we didn’t say anything more about the Sherman land. We didn’t say Izzy’s name. But she was there anyway, like she always is, the oxidized layers of an antique mirror splotching the surface of our lives.
I pass the developer’s signpost, announcing,SHERMAN RANCH. BUILD ON YOUR OWN LOT! RIVERFRONT PROPERTY AVAILABLE.I can’t help but look over as I nudge through traffic that didn’t used to be here when I was a kid. Trees have been swept away, wild earth leveled into neat, flat parcels. A few houses stand in various stages of completion.
The construction vehicles tear the earth apart just outside my window, beeping, rolling, digging, tracks grinding over dry dirt. I watch as an excavator jerks, like an animal being shoved forward against its will, before its metal teeth muscle down, audibly straining as the ground breaks and gives way. Its neck lifts, its mouth full. The long yellow arm spins and releases a bucketful of soil and chunks of limestone, white as bone. It gnaws into the earth again. And again. And it groans. It gnaws at me—the sound—all those gears crunching, all that unearthing.
I jump at the sound of a horn. I’ve missed the light turning green, and the rusty pickup behind me is annoyed. I look in the rearview to wave an apology and lock eyes with the driver.
It’s him. It’s been twenty-five years, he’s let his hair get long and scraggly, he’s grown a beard, but I would recognize Ben Sherman anywhere.
And he recognizes me.
I know that for sure, because he’s looking at me now like he’s seeing a ghost.
I stare back, certain I’m looking at a killer.
CHAPTER FIVEMELANIE
I hurry past the break room door, hoping my coworker, Tom, won’t notice me, but the swish of my scrub pants gives me away.
“Melanie Jane Campbell,” he says with the cadence of a headmaster calling out the truant student, “you are not skipping your lunch again.”
I turn to him, holding up two decks of cards like the guilty evidence they are.
Tom crosses his arms. “You can’t keep giving up your breaks. You are running yourself ragged.”
Just this last weekend, I stayed up late to bake Tom’s husband my famous turtle cheesecake for his birthday. And Tom never minds asking me for a lift home when he’s had one too many margaritas at happy hour. People love to tell people pleasers how to stand up for themselves, but don’t mind leaning on us when they need it. I don’t hold it against them though. It’s just how people are. And besides, I love people fawning over my cheesecakes.
“We stopped yesterday when Mrs. Whitmore was up by seven hundred points, and I can’t have that old biddy thinking she can clean the floor with me.”
Tom chews his lip, considering this. Tom is tall, with thick dark hair and thick dark eyebrows over chocolatey dark eyes. The old ladies here go gaga for him. Earlier today, I heard Doris telling Lenore about how good his tight rear end looked in his navyscrubs. “Canasta again?” he asks. He already knows it’s a lost cause.
I smile. “Canasta.”
“You better not let her win.”
“It’s all I can do to keep up.”
I spin on my heel and make my way to room 301, picking up Mrs. Whitmore’s chart before I enter. My stomach dropped the first time I saw her name on my patient list. Tom isn’t from Anhalt—he doesn’t know the Whitmore name, doesn’t know the way people in this town still lower their voices when it comes up.
I take extra care with all my patients, but with Mrs. Whitmore it feels different, like a kind of duty. Playing cards with her is the least I can do.
I was in the same grade as her twins, Ingrid and Isabelle. Of course I remember the day Izzy went missing—everybody my age does. At the time, I only saw it through the lens of a teenage girl, whispers at lockers and candlelight vigils. Now, with a seventeen-year-old daughter of my own, I can’t stop myself from imagining what it must have been like for her mother.
Mrs. Whitmore is sitting up in bed, pillows propped behind her back, watching HGTV on a volume so low I don’t even know that she can hear it. It happens a lot here. Too much time to think. So much time to worry.
When she turns to me, I hold up the cards. “Mind if we finish our game?”
Her face brightens. I love that, love when people look at me like I’ve made their whole day, their whole week.
“Honey, you bring that chair over here.” She straightens the hand-knit blanket that’s been laid over her hospital sheets. She is wearing a soft, pink terry cloth robe her husband brought from home. Her hair is smoothed, a rich dark shade like black coffee, though faint threads of gray glint at the roots. Mrs. Whitmore has always been a portrait. Even after surgery, she still finds the energy to put on makeup, to put in gold hoop earrings.
She pulls out a folded piece of notebook paper from between the pages of a paperback book, holds it at a distance to read our score from yesterday. “I believe,” she says, as I deal out the cards, “that I was in the lead.”