Page 30 of What She Saw

The handful of people damaged by the festival amounted to about two dozen. No one important in the grand scheme. Not enough people to warrant digging up the past. But even if the world had forgotten them, I had not.

My grandmother had never thought of herself as a grandmother and had trained me to call her by her given name, Sara.

Sara and I didn’t talk about Mom often. I didn’t bring the topic up much when I was little because I didn’t think about the mother I didn’t remember. In kindergarten, I began to have questions. Most kids had moms and dads, and some were raised by grandparents like me. Some parents were divorced, a few in jail, a couple dead. But my classmates knew where their parents were. When I asked Sara, she could never tell me exactly where Patty was. And even at five, unanswered questions irritated me.

Around my seventh birthday, Sara’s drinking had gotten worse. I’d wait until she was on her third G&T before asking for anything.

“Where’s my mom?” I asked.

“What?” Ice clinked in her glass as she drained the last of it.

“My mom. All the kids at school know where their mothers are. Gina’s mother is dead, but she has a grave and can visit her and lay flowers. Billy’s mom lives in Vegas and is a dancer. Where is my mother?”

“I don’t know.” Ice cubes clanked. Sara took another long drink.

“How could you not know? She’s your daughter. You always know where I am.”

“That’s because you’re little. I knew where your mom was when she was your age.” She looked in the empty glass, rose, and walked toward the kitchen. “But she grew up, and it got harder to keep up with her.”

I followed, unsatisfied. “Why was it hard?”

She unscrewed the top of the gin bottle. “She fell in love with a bad man.”

“My father?” All kids had a mom and dad somewhere.

“That’s right.”

“Where’s my dad?”

She drained the last of the clear liquid. “Prison. He’s in a big time-out.”

My time-outs were frequent but rarely lasted more than an hour. “For how long?”

“For the rest of his life.”

“Wow. Was he really bad?”

Sara’s eyes grew watery, and the lines around her mouth deepened with her frown. “He was.”

“Does he know where Mommy is?”

“He says he doesn’t.” She filled the glass with gin and dropped in a couple of fresh ice cubes. The clear liquid sloshed around the edges of the glass. “No one knows where your mom is, Sloane. We looked everywhere, but we couldn’t find her.”

“You didn’t look everywhere, or you’d have found her.”

I was good at pushing aside memories like this. I didn’t like to think about my grandmother, but she had a way of finding her way into my present.

Shrugging off the unease, I arrived at the Dawson senior center, I saw the elderly residents moving in slow motion. My mind wandered to Patty and the missing. Police and volunteers had searched all areas within fifty miles of the festival. This included fields, ravines, buildings, and forests. They’d sent scuba divers into the quarry lake, searched barns, basements, and ditches. Yet Patty and the others remained lost.

Bodies could be burned, chopped up, or buried deep, but they didn’t disappear. Even the smallest haystack needles were somewhere.

And I hoped the last thirty-one years had shaken loose a few truths. Because someone knew where the Festival Four were.

Chapter Eleven

CJ Taggart

Friday, May 20, 1994, 11:00 p.m.