Always Watching

Finn’s mother had sobbed and fallen on the ground, screaming that they were stealing her baby. Now I remembered my own mother crying in the background, Mary’s arm around her shoulders.
    “Whatever happened to all the marijuana?”
    She looked down, eyeing me from the side, still not trusting.
    I said, “I’m not going to tell the police if you had anything to do with it.”
    She studied my face for a couple of beats, then said, “There was a logging truck driver who used to come by—he liked the girls. We’d give him bales of pot, and he’d sell it for us, keeping a bit of the profit.”
    Larry and his red truck. I remembered now, the sounds of air brakes the night Finn went missing. I said, “So he got rid of it before the police came?”
    She nodded. “We took it up to the road, and he loaded it on his truck. After that, he wanted a bigger cut. That’s when Aaron decided to leave Shawnigan—he didn’t trust him. So I told him I’d stay behind to keep an eye on things.”
    “My mother, she told me she’d wanted to leave after Finn died, but she never explained how my father knew to come get us.”
    “She left a note for your father at the store. Told him that she wanted to come home, but she was scared of Aaron.”
    “He wouldn’t let her leave?”
    “She didn’t ask. When Finn died, we’d talked and she wanted out. She was going to tell Aaron, then I showed her this.” She held up her hand with the missing finger. “That’s when she got in touch with your dad.”
    I remembered my father showing up, the rage on his face and the gun in his hand. There was something else I had to ask.
    “Did she know that Aaron was molesting me?” My body tensed, braced for the blow.
    Mary held my gaze. “Not at the time. But after you came up here and talked, she didn’t understand why you couldn’t remember so much. Later, she started thinking about it more, how Aaron would take you swimming alone, the way he’d touch you, kind of possessive, how you changed that summer.…”
    I was crying again, wanting to stop the words out of Mary’s mouth, but needing to hear them.
    “She figured out that he’d probably done something to you. She was upset—and angry at herself for not protecting you. She was going to talk to you about what she suspected, see if it would help you remember.”
    “So she was just speeding?”
    “She’d been smoking pot all night, drinking some too, mixing it with those pills she was always taking. I told her she should stay that night, sleep it off and go in the morning. I was making up her bed when I heard her drive off.”
    She looked down at her boots, dragged them through the dirt, clearing a spot, like she was trying to erase something. “I heard the next day that she’d had the accident. I couldn’t go to the police, because Aaron had Daniel.”
    I nodded, looking at her house. For a moment I imagined I saw my mother on Mary’s porch, walking down the front steps, ready to protect her daughter. She turned and blew me a kiss. Then she was gone.

 
    CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
    Though we still didn’t know if someone was out to harm me, I refused to live my life as a prisoner. The next day I was kneeling in my yard, weeding one of the garden beds, my cell within reach, when I heard a soft thump to my right. I jerked around, the trowel in my hand like a weapon. It was the cat. I hadn’t seen her in months. She watched me lazily from across the yard, blinking in the sun. I pretended to ignore her and continued with my work. She strolled over and rubbed against my side, bumping her head on my elbow. I got up, slowly, but she still skittered away a few feet, ready to break into a run as she watched me brush dirt from my knees. I said, “You hungry?” then walked toward the house.
    I glanced back. She was following, but cautiously, taking a few trotting steps forward, then pausing. Inside, I put some tuna on a plate and went back onto the porch. She was on the top step. When she smelled the tuna, she cried plaintively, weaving back and forth between my legs, staring up at the plate.
    “Well, little miss—you’re going to have to come in and get it.”
    Leaving the door open, I walked back into the house and placed the plate on the floor in the middle of the kitchen, then walked farther into the house, sitting at the dining room table with the newspaper, where I could watch out of the corner of my eye. The cat stood at my back door, meowing loudly. I ignored her, turned a