He felt the tingling in his hands again. He felt like there was nothing he couldn't do.
He climbed to his feet, dusting the dirt and leaves off of his skin, and then pulled his pants up, zipping and buttoning them, noting that he felt so much more comfortable now than when he had come to the clearing.
Yes, he thought, I'll find a new wife. A new one just as good as the old one.
He felt a pleasant burst of energy course through his body, a sense of freshness and renewal that he hadn't felt in a long time.
He grabbed the shovel. He had work to finish tonight.
And he had a new task to devote himself to tomorrow.
CHAPTER FOUR
Diana was driving down Highway Seventeen northbound, the main road between New Cambridge and Leesburg, when she reached for the radio volume dial and saw how much her hand was shaking. She brought it back, gripping the wheel with both hands, and shook her head, although there was no one there to see the gesture, just a farmer in his combine, chewing up acres of withering cornstalks and kicking up enough dust to partially obscure the red sunset.
She's crazy, Diana thought. Just a crazy woman who wants to mess with me.
And Diana had heard of plenty of people who do things like that—prey on the families of crime victims, tease them, get their hopes up and take advantage of them, all in the name of sick thrills or morbid curiosity. Diana shook her head again. She wouldn't give anyone the satisfaction of violating or victimizing her, and she already regretted losing her cool with the woman, grabbing her arm that way and giving her some sort of power or pleasure. She knew she had to collect herself and be ready to face her own mother. She couldn't go in there rattled or shaken.
Her mother had been in the Vienna Woods Long-Term Rehabilitation Facility for three years, as long as Diana had been living in New Cambridge. It had begun innocently enough for her mother. Forgotten names. Lost keys. A poorly balanced checkbook, which didn't matter much to a woman who never had any money. But then her mom started forgetting entire swatches of their lives. She spoke to relatives who had died years before.
And she repeatedly called Diana by the name of her other daughter, the one who had disappeared into thin air.
Rachel.
In Diana's most honest moments, the times when she turned the full force of her own critical judgment against herself, she admitted that it was this more than anything else—more than her mother's illness, more than the confining nature of the small town she grew up in, more than the opportunities that moving away presented—that drove Diana to commit her mother to Vienna Woods. She couldn't handle the almost daily reminder that it was she who was still there while Rachel, her little sister, was gone, evaporated like a fast-moving cloud on a windy day.
But who are you to judge someone else's mental health, with your visions of the dark woods you're never able to find? Diana chased the thought away and felt relief when she saw the hospital come into view.
The attendant at the Vienna Woods' gate stopped Diana and made her sign in on a beat-up clipboard. An eight-foot high chain link fence surrounded the parking lot, and while there wasn't any razor wire on top, it still made the place look like a prison. Diana swallowed her guilt and drove through, the guard's Have a nice day ringing in her ears.
The hospital itself looked rundown and vacant. It was three stories high with narrow windows and two turrets on either end, as if the original architect feared that someone was going to attack the place and release all the loonies. The brick, which once must have been a bright and healthy shade of red, had become grimy and blackened after years of exposure to the midwestern weather. Rumors appeared in the paper at least once a year that Vienna Woods was scheduled to close, that the patients living there were slowly being farmed out to other institutions. Families of the patients—inmates, Diana thought, they're really inmates—complained about the building's crumbling infrastructure, the leaky pipes and poor heating.
But Diana didn't like to think of the place closing. Where would her mom go then? How far would she have to drive to see her? Diana found an empty parking space. Six o' three. She hustled to the door while a little voice taunted her. You already don't visit her enough. Diana blocked out her negative thoughts. No time for guilt now. I'm here.