Brood XIX

Jefferson, Texas

Two Years Ago

There were moments made for memory, when the universe aligned just right and granted the briefest glimpse into the benevolent heart it hid so well under the guise of oppression and pain. The perfect moment when one simply stopped doing whatever had seemed so important only seconds earlier in order to take the kind of mental snapshot that would rise unbidden through the years, bringing with it the wistful smile we save only for ourselves.

For Vanessa Snow, this was such a moment.

Time both stood still and raced past. The dishes in the sink vanished beneath the rising swell of bubbles while the faucet continued to run. In her hands, the glasses and plates washed themselves. The window in front of her afforded a view into another world entirely, where the early afternoon sunlight slanted through the shifting, Spanish moss-bearded branches of the cypress trees in golden columns so pure they could have been individual rays sent years ago from hundreds of thousands of miles away with this one occasion in mind. They shined like celestial spotlights onto the young girl kneeling at the edge of the yard where grass gave way to the morass of the Big Cypress Bayou and Caddo Lake beyond. The silky black locks that flowed over her shoulders shimmered in stark contrast to her filthy clothes. She was covered in mud; up her arms, down her legs, smears on her cheeks. Her companion, who was undoubtedly responsible for the mess, pranced around her, paws thick with brown sludge, his muzzle and the better part of his head already beginning to dry into a cracked crust. The Irish setter's tongue lolled sideways out of his mouth as he panted against the heat. The little girl wore a matching expression, although hers was the result of supreme concentration versus the enduring silliness that made it impossible to stay mad at the dog, despite the two-foot-deep hole he had exhumed from the trim behind the garden where once the now-uprooted blue fescue ornamental grasses had grown.

Vanessa turned off the water and wiped the suds from her hands. She opened the back screen door and stepped out onto the porch. The muggy heat swaddled her like a wet blanket. She closed the door silently behind her and swished through the damp lawn in her bare feet.

Buddy saw her first and bounded across the yard to greet her. He leapt up, braced his muddy front paws on her apron, and licked her chin.

"Good boy," Vanessa said, pushing him gently back down.

Emma looked up at her and blinked the sun out of her eyes. She beamed with a grin that lit up her entire face.

"Look what I made for you, Mommy."

She lifted what at first appeared to be a giant divot from the lawn with both hands and held it out in her cupped palms.

Vanessa crouched in front of her six year-old daughter, the center of her world, and accepted the sloppy creation with a smile.

"It's beautiful," she said, turning it over and over in her now-filthy hands.

Emma had packed mud into a shape that reminded Vanessa of a plump gingerbread man and wrapped the long blades of the blue fescues around it to hold it together. There were small knots where the grass had been inexpertly tied. Two shiny pebbles were pressed into its face to approximate eyes and bound in place with more tangled blades. Heart-shaped leaves had been affixed to the sides of its head to form ears. It was roughly a foot tall, and while a single drop from any height would undoubtedly destroy it, Emma had done a remarkable job of constructing it.

"It's a teddy bear," Emma said with evident pride. "I made it just for you."

Her smile grew even wider.

"It's amazing, honey. How did you know this was exactly what I wanted?"

"Every girl needs a teddy bear, Mommy. You can put it on your dresser just like the ones in my room."

Vanessa smirked. Lord only knew what kind of bugs and germs were crawling around inside that thing.

"Maybe the front window where we keep the plants would be a better place. That way it'll be the first thing people see when they're coming up to our house."

"Okay," Emma said. She smeared her hands across the front of her dress.

It's only mud, Vanessa told herself. It'll wash right out. There was no point in getting upset about it. Besides, how could she even consider being mad at such a precious, thoughtful little angel.

"We need to hurry up and get you in the bath," Vanessa said. "Your daddy's going to be home soon...and he has a big surprise planned for you tonight."

"A big surprise? What is it? Tell me what it is!"

"If I told you, then it wouldn't be a surprise, now would it?" Vanessa lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "But it must be pretty exciting if your daddy's taking off work early for it. I think you can probably even wear your new dress."

"All right!"

Emma whooped and ran for the back door with Buddy at her heels.

Vanessa followed, the filthy bear held at arm's length. It was slick and slimy and smelled faintly of marsh gasses, and yet still it was now one of her most treasured possessions. At least until it started to decompose.

Marion County Sheriff's Deputy Trey Walden had drawn the short straw as usual. He had already seen the sheriff and the other two deputies wandering toward the carnival with their families, while here he was, patrolling the broad dirt parking lot like some kind of minimum-wage rent-a-cop. The uneven rows passed to either side, packed with dusty pickups, older model sedans, and even a smattering of rusted tractors. Men and women strolled hand-in-hand toward the path leading down the hill through a grove of magnolia and cypress trees toward where the traveling carnival had risen from the marsh, seemingly overnight, in the seldom-used Marion County Fairgrounds. Some towed children in strollers and wagons, while others carried wide-eyed kids on their hips and shoulders. All of them were dressed for a night on the town. Women even wore dresses and scuffed high-heel shoes, as though an evening at the fair passed for high society in this remote section of Eastern Texas, mere miles from the Louisiana border.

His own girlfriend was somewhere down there in the crowds as well, drinking foamy beer from a clear plastic cup and eating funnel cakes with her friends, while he cruised aimlessly through the rutted lot, the tires rising and falling awkwardly over clumps of ambitious weeds on the cruiser's stiff suspension, waiting for someone stupid enough to attempt to break into one of these cars with nothing of any real value locked inside.

Trey sighed and rolled down his window in hopes that the evening air would help keep him alert. Unfortunately, it was every bit as hot and stifling as that inside the sweltering Caprice.

Music and a riot of voices drifted uphill from where he could faintly make out the blinking white and red lights through the trees. He heard laughter, clanging sounds, and the rumble of a rickety roller coaster. This was going to be all everyone talked about for the next few weeks, two nights of fun and games, and all he would be able to add to the conversation was that he had ensured the safety of their vehicles so they could have the time of their lives without him.

He paused at the end of the main aisle so that his headlights washed over the wide path through the shadowed grove. A line had formed at the ticket booth under a large hand-painted sign. Crowley's. No one was about to mistake it for Ringling Bros., that was for sure.

A tapping sound on the side of his cruiser made him flinch.

"Hey, baby brother," a familiar voice said. "Keeping the world safe for democracy?"

"Very funny, Vanessa."

"Uncle Trey!"

He had to crane his neck to look up to where Emma sat on her father's shoulders, her legs hanging against his chest. Warren was more than six feet tall. Piggybacking around the doctor's neck must have been like a ride in itself.

"Hiya, munchkin. Are you ready to have some serious fun?"

"They have elephant rides, you know. Have you ever ridden an elephant?"

"Can't say as I have, but I expect you to tell me all about it. And make sure you get some of that cotton candy all these people are walking around with."

"I want one of those huge suckers instead."

"Call me on my cell if you're able to take a break," Vanessa said. "We could grab a beer or something."

"You suck."

She smirked, gave his left arm a squeeze through the window, and headed out of the parking lot with her family. With a flippant wave over her shoulder, she merged into the crowd funneling down the path.

Trey sighed again.

Two-thousand and thirty-two people in town, and it appeared as though every single one of them was down there around the big top.

Everyone but him.

Vanessa slipped her arm around her husband's waist and leaned her head against his upper arm. Myriad colors flashed all around her from the lights strung overhead between the roofs of the claptrap attractions. The mosquitoes were out in full force, but no one complained. She smelled spilled beer, sugar, manure, and the sour scent of body odor from the masses packed shoulder-to-shoulder in the narrow aisles. Bells clanged and alarms rang as giant stuffed animals were won in games of chance. Ticket-takers hollered over the chaos, summoning ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls to come right on up and see breathtaking and terrifying sideshow attractions and oddities. Rides grumbled. Children screamed. Every dozen feet she had to hop over a mound of animal dung.

It was an amazing night. Vanessa had never really been the kind who enjoyed carnivals like this. They always felt so dirty, as though anything she touched would make her sticky. And yet she was absolutely loving every minute of it. Not the rides or the curiosities. Just being with her husband and her daughter, doing something outside of the normal routine into which they seemed to have settled. They didn't have to talk about how the recession was slowly killing Warren's practice or about how Medicaid disbursement fell by nearly ten percent annually or about how the rising cost of private health insurance had become so exorbitant that fewer and fewer people were able to afford it. They were able to relax and enjoy the moment, each other's company, and the excitement positively radiating from Emma, who scampered ahead of them through the crowd, dodging legs and whipping her head from side to side to absorb everything there was to see. Her new dress was already dirty and her new shoes were covered with Lord only knew what.

She had never looked happier.

"This was a wonderful idea," Vanessa said. "Thank you for doing this."

"Nothing but the best for my ladies," Warren said. He hugged her around the shoulders as they walked. "Besides, you know I've never been able to resist the opportunity to lay siege to my arteries with a full frontal assault of fried food. I take it as a kind of personal challenge."

"Don't even joke about that. I don't know what I'd do if you ever left me."

"You couldn't get rid of me if you tried." He kissed her on the top of the head and pulled her closer. "Although there are much worse ways to go than death by corndog."

She pinched the skin above his hip and gave it a solid twist.

"Ow!" He goosed her ribs in retaliation. "I was just kidding, you know. Sheesh."

"You're just lucky I didn't go after my first choice of targets."

"Ouch. I think that would fall under the category of cruel and unusual..."

His words trailed off, leaving the clamor of hundreds of voices, all vying to be heard. He stopped and the crowd channeled around them.

"What?" she asked, but she already knew. She could feel the tension in his arms, in the way his posture stiffened. It raced through her like an electrical current. Bodies shoved past them from both directions. Faces flashed past, familiar and unfamiliar alike, stained by the winking lights, eyes recessed in shadow. Someone clipped her side in an effort to squeeze past and nearly sent her sprawling.

"Where's Emma?" she whispered.

Warren stood on his toes in an attempt to see over the restrained bedlam.

"She was just here," he said. He released her shoulders and turned a slow circle. "She was right in front of us."

"Emma!" Vanessa called.

"She can't have gone very far." The note of panic in his voice only served to amplify her own. "I'll go this way. You check over there."

He ducked away from her through the crowd toward the ring toss. She turned her back on him and shoved in the direction of a mobile home with a plywood façade painted with a two-headed goat and a mummified dwarf.

"Emma!" she screamed. Her eyes darted left and right, scanning faster than her brain could rationalize. People became blurs. She was bumped and jostled from all sides at once. "Emma!"

She watched for a fleeting glimpse of her daughter's black- and indigo-striped felt dress, of the red bows in her hair, of her chubby cheeks.

Nothing.

"Emma!"

She grabbed the nearest man without looking at his face.

"Have you seen my daughter? She has long dark hair and a---"

The man jerked his arm out of her grasp and rushed away from her.

"Emma!"

She turned and ran back to where she had left her husband. He met her halfway. She could tell by his expression that he hadn't found Emma either.

"Stay right here," he said, taking her by the shoulders and looking directly into her eyes. "This was the last place we saw her. She's a smart girl. Once she realizes we've been separated, she'll come back here. In the meantime, call your brother and let him know what happened. I'll keep looking. I have my cell phone. If I find her first, I'll call you immediately. And you do the same."

He tipped up her chin and wiped away her tears with his thumbs.

"We'll find her," he said more softly. "You believe me, right?"

She could only nod her head. Her heart was beating so hard and she was shaking so badly that she couldn't formulate a reply.

"We will find her," he said. He kissed her on the lips and dashed away through the throng of oblivious passersby.

And then he was gone.

"Slow down," Trey said. He had to park the cruiser and press his free hand over his opposite ear to glean his sister's voice from the background noise. "Start again. From the beginning. I can't understand you. Are you crying?"

He rolled up his window so the only sounds were the purr of the engine and the whoosh of the air conditioner.

"Calm down, Vanessa. Take a deep breath and tell me what happened."

His sister explained everything that had transpired up to that point. Consciously, he was sure she was overreacting, and had she been anyone else, he would have told her so. Emma had been out of her sight for five minutes at the most. She was a bright kid and would surely realize soon enough that she couldn't find her parents and would work her way back to where she had seen them last. Warren was right on the mark with his plan. It was exactly what he would have told them to do. And yet still he had a sinking sensation in his gut.

Perhaps it was the fear in his sister's voice, or maybe just the fact that it was his niece who was lost somewhere in the seething crowd, but he couldn't shake the feeling that something was desperately wrong. He knew he was being irrational, that children wandered away from their parents' side all the time in places like this, where everything was new and exciting and promised the kind of fun they only envisioned in their dreams, and that they always returned. A stranger would find them crying and help them locate their parents, or someone would recognize them and stay with them until their terrified parents tracked them down. Jefferson was a small community. That was one of the things he liked most about it. Maybe everyone didn't know each other per se, but they were all bound to each other in a direct way.

"Listen to me, Vanessa," he said. "Stay right where you are. I'll check in with you again in five minutes. If you find her before I call you back, then you call me. If you haven't, then I'll contact the sheriff and the other deputies and we'll canvass the whole carnival. But trust me, sis...she'll be right there with you again in a matter of minutes. I'll bet she probably just saw something she'd never seen before and got distracted."

This seemed to pacify her to some degree, but he could still hear the tears in her voice.

At least he was the one charged with the security of the parking lot. There were all kinds of petty little things that could happen right under his nose, but sneaking past him with his own niece definitely wasn't one of them. Emma was down in that carnival somewhere. There was no doubt about it.

But still, something felt...wrong.

The muscles in his lower back were clenched. His grip on the wheel was too tight. And the tingling sensation in his gut had spread to his groin.

Just five more minutes, he told himself, and if Emma didn't turn up by then, he would take matters into his own hands.

But he also knew, far too well, that an awful lot could happen in five minutes.

Warren slalomed through the shifting maze of humanity, shouting his daughter's name. Everyone he passed looked exactly the same, their features washed out by the blinking lights. He shoved people aside, his ears deafened to their shouts and curses. Every child resembled Emma until he was right on top of them. He had never been so terrified in his life. If anything happened to his daughter, he would never be able to forgive himself, let alone live with the guilt. He should have been carrying her, or at least holding her hand, but one often adopted a false sense of security in such a small community, where everyone felt like extended family to some degree. Strangers stood apart the moment they entered town, yet it was the evil that hid behind a friendly face from which one always had the most to fear.

The big top rose above him, reaching high up over the surrounding forest canopy. Vendors blew by to either side, hawking everything from glowing necklaces to foil balloons. The ticket booth materialized through the crowd to his right. It stood lifeless and forlorn as the entire population now swarmed within the carnival's hastily erected fence.

He caught movement on the path across the field that led uphill to the parking lot. Two silhouettes of shadow against darkness. One tall, one much smaller. Holding hands. Walking fast.

"Emma!" he shouted.

He ran past the ticket booth. A voice from inside yelled something about a hand stamp as he sprinted out onto the path.

"Emma!"

The smaller shadow stopped. Even in the dark he could see the fringes of a dress at her knees. The larger figure urged her onward with a tug on her arm.

Warren swore he heard Emma's voice, calling to him from somewhere beneath the tumult.

"Stay where you are!" he yelled. "Wait for me right there!"

He forced his legs to run faster than they ever had before.

Focused solely on the smaller figure, he didn't see a third shadow emerge from the tree line to his right until it was too late.

A sharp impact to his chest.

A sensation of bitter cold in the right side of his chest, then heat.

Then searing pain.

His legs slid out from under him and he landed on his back.

He saw stars dotting the night sky. A quarter moon shrouded by clouds. They were eclipsed by the wild-haired silhouette of a woman's head. She screamed right into his face and the pressure in his chest momentarily abated.

A flash of reflected light on a long kitchen knife, already slick with blood.

Then it was gone and the pain in his chest intensified.

Another flash.

More pain.

His mouth filled with blood. He couldn't manage to breathe.

The woman vanished and he saw the stars again. They were now blurry and appeared to drift aimlessly.

His trembling hands pawed at his chest and probed through his tattered shirt until his fingertips slipped into the deep wounds, from which damp heat poured unimpeded.

He tried to call his daughter's name, but only produced a coughing sound and a rush of blood that drained down his cheeks and over his chin.

His thoughts were disjointed, murky, and yet he managed to focus on Emma, drawing strength from her image, a sense of purpose.

He rolled onto his side and struggled to all fours.

Blood poured from his mouth and chest.

His watery vision constricted.

Two large figures now held his daughter. One restrained her arms and silenced her with a hand clasped over her mouth. The other pinned her legs.

He recognized them now.

It wasn't my fault, he thought.

He saw them duck from the path into the dense forest.

And then he saw no more.

Barely four minutes had passed when Trey heard the first screams.

He hit the gas and sped straight toward the end of the central aisle. The path wasn't wide enough to accommodate the cruiser, but he didn't care. Branches scraped the sides of the Caprice, slicing through the paint before snapping off. With a resounding crack, his side mirror disappeared. The trees fell away and a small meadow opened to his left. He slammed the brakes and skidded to a stop on the gravel.

Dust settled over the car. Through the haze, he saw a clumped gathering at the edge of the field.

Screams tore the night.

He threw his door open and drew his pistol in one motion, and hit the ground running. Left arm extended, he forced his way through the small crowd.

A man knelt over a supine form. Gus Tarver. The lower half of his face and his arms, clear up past his elbows, were covered with blood. Hands clasped, he thrust his stiff arms down against the other man's chest. Over and over. Compressions, which only served to squeeze more blood out of the man's ruined torso.

Trey looked down at the man's waxen face and felt a sudden and deep sorrow.

Gus leaned down and closed his mouth over Warren's. Crimson burbled from the wounds as the ribcage rose once. Then again.

Trey walked around his brother-in-law's body and gently placed his hand on Gus's shoulder before he could resume compressions.

Gus toppled onto his rear end and smeared the blood from around his mouth with his sleeve.

Trey looked at the stunned faces surrounding the corpse. His stare latched onto one he knew nearly as well as his own.

"I'm so sorry," he whispered.

Vanessa screamed and threw herself toward what remained of her husband, but her brother stepped into her path and wrestled her backward. She hit his chest, the side of his head, begged for him to let her go.

He held her even tighter.

Over his shoulder, she saw the love of her life lying dead on the ground. Blood shimmered black on his face and torso, in a wide pool around him on the wet grass.

She moaned and felt her legs give out.

Trey managed to support her weight long enough to lower them both to their knees.

She screamed and he held her head against his, their damp cheeks pressed together.

"Where's Emma?" she sobbed into his ear.

She curled her fingers into fists in the back of his uniform shirt.

The crowd closed in on them.

"Where's my daughter?" she shouted.

"We'll find her," Trey said. "I swear to you. We'll find her and whoever did this to Warren."