The Departed

covering the ground had started to melt, it was colder now than it had been. “I feel her.”
    “Is she…”
    Dez looked down. “Just open it.” Then she frowned, squatted down. She reached inside her coat and pulled out a pen.
    He watched as she nudged something on the ground. A flower petal…What…?
    “She was here,” Dez murmured. “The lady.”
    Startled, he looked at her. “Lady?”
    “Yes. It was a lady who took her.” She rose again, her gaze shifting off to the side. Automatically, he followed her gaze, although he knew he’d see nothing. His heart screamed— Anna?
    But there was nothing.
    Setting his jaw, he bent and grabbed the handle. Logic told him it would be hard to move. It was an old well. Never used. The cover wouldn’t be easy to budge.
    It came up with barely a protest.
    He reached for the Maglite he’d tucked into a loop on his belt and pulled it off. “If the well’s deep,” he said hoarsely, “we won’t see much.” He looked up, focusing on Dez’s face. “If it’s full of water or anything…”
    She came around and rested a hand on his shoulder. “I can look.”
    “No.” He closed his eyes. He had to do this. He had to look. For Anna. For his father. Even for his mother. And for himself.
    He looked.
    It wasn’t very deep, maybe thirty feet. At some point since it had been dug, it had gone dry, too. Nothing, absolutely nothing, kept him from seeing the small, forlorn skeleton lying at the bottom.
    “WE’RE keeping it quiet.”
    Distantly, Dez was aware of the detective’s voice, knew he was talking to Taylor—she knew she should be more focused on him, but for the first time, Anna was talking to her , and she couldn’t have looked away from the girl if she’d tried.
    “You found me.”
    “Yes.”
    If anybody noticed her talking to thin air, Dez, at that point, didn’t care. She knew she would later, but right then, she didn’t care.
    “Is that…that’s Taylor, isn’t it?”
    “Yeah.” She shifted her gaze away from the girl’s face for a brief moment and focused on Taylor. He stood with one hand jammed in his pocket, head slightly bowed against the wind. “That’s him.”
    “I guess I should have expected him to look different.” Her image shivered, wavered. “I know a long time passed—I could feel it, even when I wasn’t really able to hold on much. But I didn’t expect him to look different.” A sad sigh escaped. “He looks so sad, so grim.”
    Dez didn’t feel like she was talking to a child. She supposed, in reality, maybe she wasn’t. It wasn’t something that had happened before. Most often, they seemed stuck, trapped by the horror of what had happened to them, unable to progress past what they’d been.
    But the horror hadn’t happened to her so much.
    Edging a little farther from those around them, she quietly asked, “He needs to know…if you can tell me. Do you remember what happened?”
    “Not all of it, no. There was a lady. She was sad. She wanted me to go with her—I knew I shouldn’t. But I hated that she was sad.” Anna reached up, tugging on one of her insubstantial ponytails. The habit seemed so simple, so human. And this woman-girl was anything but human now. No longer part of this world. “I told myself I’d make her feel better. I liked making people feel better. Then I’d leave. She wouldn’t want me to leave, but I was good at sneaking away. I did it a lot…even with Mom and Dad, because they just never knew I’d know when they’d come and look in on me.”
    A shiver wracked Dez’s body. Perhaps not as much woman as she appeared. But she’d died before she’d had a chance to lose that naiveté.
    “She wanted to keep me.” Anna’s eyes closed. “She was angry at my mother. She’d heard Mama yelling at me and it made her angry. It didn’t make sense, you know. But she wanted to keep me. Like I was a pet. The longer I was with her, the more I worried. But it wasn’t until she called me her angel that I got scared.”
    “That’s when you realized something bad had happened…to her.”
    Anna opened her eyes. “Yes.” She looked past Dez, to Taylor once more. “He looks like them,” she said softly.
    Dez followed her gaze. “I guess in a way he is. He spends his life helping people, trying to stop people from hurting kids…so things that happened to you don’t happen to others.”
    “But she didn’t mean to hurt me,” Anna said sadly. Her voice was tired and broken. “And somebody