My Darkest Rose

Chapter 17

Dead in the Water

While rain drenched Moonwood, Jack sat on the couch and drew.

An hour passed. He drew Rose in the bathtub. Her eyes were closed and she looked completely at ease. He drew her breasts poking out of the water and her arms resting on the sides of the tub.

While he worked, he forgot about the body that had been found along the road. He forgot about the creature and became completely absorbed in his work.

As he finished the drawing, he thought back to the first night she ever stayed with him in Moonwood. They'd spent nearly the entire day in his bedroom. He remembered how long he'd lingered on things that he now rushed and sometimes skipped altogether. No wonder Annie hadn't called him back.

He glanced down the hallway to the closed door at the end of the hall.

He hadn't gone in there yet. His first night back he'd been so freaked out he hadn't even looked inside just to see what was there.

He stood and walked to the window, peering outside. The forest was green and wet. It was the kind of steady rain that could last for days.

Deciding he might as well get it over with, he tossed his sketchbook on the couch and walked down the hall to the bedroom.

The room was dark and peaceful. The blinds were closed tight and what little light crept through fell upon a line of boxes stacked neatly under the window where his bed had once stood.

There was a floor lamp near the door, which to his surprise, still worked. Once again, he was struck by the smallness of the space he'd grown up in. But unlike the rest of the house, there was a coziness to the space, a safe feeling.

He closed the door behind him and took in the contents of the room.

One stack of boxes was labeled JACK, the other, FAUNA. In the corner were rolled rugs and a stack of terra cotta pots. Leaned against the closet were a dozen 3x2 canvases. He crossed the room and pulled the first one back.

It was a painting from his highschool art class, they all were. His mother once had them hung around the house. One was her favorite bird, the wood thrush, that she loved to hear sing in the forest around her childhood home. She'd never seen one in Moonwood.

He sat on the floor and looked through them all, laughing out loud at a portrait of a girl he'd dated before Rose. He wondered if that was why they'd broken up, because the painting was so bad.

There was even a self-portrait, which he had to admit, wasn't half bad.

He found drawings in the closet. More portraits of people that were in his art class, still lifes of garlic cloves, perspective drawings of buildings. Fauna kept it all.

He scooted across the floor to the boxes and opened the first one labeled JACK. Inside were small trophies from when he played soccer in elementary school. A jersey from seventh grade basketball with a button of himself.

Two more boxes held more of the same, things his mother must have kept. He wondered if she'd ever opened them, looked at his trophy from second grade, held it close to her chest. He tried it out, just to see if he could get any sense of her. Feelings lingered, sometimes, on things and in places. But he didn't feel anything as he held the small piece of metal and plastic to his chest.

The third box was full of sketchbooks. All of them he'd ever filled, by the look of it, but he couldn't bring himself to look through them. While there was an absence of feeling from the trophies, the sketchbooks felt almost alive within the box, like earthworms suddenly exposed to air from underneath a rock.

He closed the box and returned it to the bottom of the pile.

He laid down in the center of the room and closed his eyes. Rain drummed on the window as he tried to revisit the lighthearted feeling he'd had when looking through the paintings, before he found the sketch books.

As he drifted to sleep, unbeknownst to him, Robbie Bernardi parked his truck along 1000S, turned off the engine, and sat quietly. Mandy and Detective Hernandez were back at the station and the body of Eric Holstetter had been moved to the morgue. News was spreading throughout Tacoma of what happened.

Through the window he could just make out the dark siding of the Channing house. There was light along one edge of a window, like someone had cut through the side of the house with a knife, showing him the insides.

Jack woke some time later, sitting up with a start. When he looked outside, he found the rain had stopped, and it was much later, nearly dark.

Remembering his cat, he left the room and walked back to the kitchen. The can of tuna he'd left on the deck was untouched and overflowing with rain water.

He opened the back door and called, "Theodore!" He stepped outside and called again. When he didn't come, he bent over, picked up the can of tuna and dumped out the water. "Theo! Tuna!"

He saw movement out of the corner of his eye, down by the water. "Theo?"

It was still light enough to see between the trees, though shadows had begun to pool at the edges of the forest. He glanced around but saw nothing. But there was definitely something in the water. He could just make out a small dark shape in the water.

No way his cat was in there, he thought. No way he'd gone into the water.

But he couldn't tell for sure from so far away. He walked cautiously down the stairs to the path. It was muddy and his boots squelched and slid in the mud as he neared the lake.

The closer he got to the lake, the more certain he became that he did not want to see what floated in the water. But he had to know.

It looked like hair.