I fell asleep to the sound of an honest-to-goodness summer rainstorm. We had been in a drought since I was ten years old. Over the last five years our storms would fizzle before they began, but this one had come in just like it was supposed to, with the leaves ruffling in an uneasy breeze in the late afternoon, flashing their pale undersides in warning. “The rain is coming! The rain is coming!” The world was coming back to normal, back to the way it should be. This summer we’d have lightning bugs galore again, the pastures would green up and stay that way, the horses getting fat and sassy on the thick, lush grass.
I awoke to thunder. After a moment’s disorientation I realized it was peaceful, quiet. The storm had passed. It came again, and this time resolved itself into a thunderous knock at the front door. My alarm clock read 12:00am.
In our little house it only took a second to reach the door. Through its oval window I saw Gillian’s face. Tears streamed from her eyes, her chestnut hair stuck to her sweaty forehead. I unlocked the bolt and threw open the door.
“Gill!” I cried. “What’s going on?” No sound escaped her. I led her inside and shut the door. “Is it Pro?” I asked. I saw a vision of Gill’s big bay thoroughbred dead from colic. She shook her head no. It seemed her throat was clenched shut from crying. “Let me get you a glass of water,” I said.
As I filled the glass from the kitchen tap I raced through the possibilities. Gillian was not a crier. Neither of us were. We were tough-as-nails horse girls who would shake off a fall with a laugh, no matter how big a bruise was marked our skin. Whatever had happened was bad.
I returned with the glass to an empty room. The open front door revealed the black, gaping maw of the night outside, all the darker against the garish light of the living room.
“Gillian?” My voice sounded small. “Gill?” I tried again, this time louder, deeper. The change of tone produced no better result. I half dropped the glass with a slosh onto the coffee table and raced into the sticky heat of the night. A chorus of cicadas greeted me, but Gill was nowhere to be seen.
Adrenaline flooded my bloodstream like a tidal wave. My muscles felt thick and heavy as I ran down the sidewalk, still wet with rain. I headed east, toward Gillian’s house. I reached the town square. Like my living room, the square was empty. In the distance I heard a siren. I sprinted back in the opposite direction—still no Gillian. Independent as I was, I knew when I was in over my head, and my next stop was my parents’ bedroom.
I raced through the house, down the stairs and through my parents’ bedroom door. I shouted and tugged and pulled them into consciousness. Next we were on the phone to Gillian’s house, but no one answered. Then we called 911. As I paced the front porch I could tell the conversation wasn’t going well. My dad’s eyebrows reached for the sky and I caught him giving me worried glances. Whatever had happened was worse than bad. Adrenaline gave way to dread. It rose from my feet to my knees, from my knees to the pit of my stomach, and from there it crawled with reaching fingers up my arms and neck, until it set my scalp to tingling and turned my face numb.
My dad announced, “They’re sending someone over.” I began to think back on my life with Gillian, my best friend who was in trouble. When we were five years old we met at a Pony Club meeting. Gillian had the world’s best pony, Smokey Joe, a 32-year-old Shetland with one hoof in the grave, while I had an evil little Welsh mix named Sweet As Sugar. Years later, Gillian and I would love to tell stories about that horrible creature, ending with the punch line, “Her name was a dirty rotten lie.” When Gillian graduated to a large pony, we named her Cecilia, a choice inspired by our mutual love for Simon and Garfunkel. After years of being at the same barn but different elementaries, we rejoiced when we reached middle school. We were now in our fifth year of sharing a locker and eating lunch together everyday and it was just as much fun as we thought it would be. Neither of us had many friends and we had always been each other’s one true ally. She was my rock, and I was her island, no matter what.
It was then a Pendleton police cruiser turned down Main Street. Its lights revolved lazily, but the siren was off. I knew where it was headed, but my stomach still dropped as it came down the drive. My parents and I stood straight and still on the front porch, as dour as the farmers in Grant Wood’s American Gothic. I glanced behind me and into the living room. The hands on the giant wall clock reached toward 3:13. More than three hours had passed since the knock on the door. I couldn’t believe it. It felt like five minutes. It felt like a lifetime. Time does funny things during nights like that, when the world gets ripped into pieces and is left lying in a jumbled heap on the floor.
A dark-haired detective with a paunch and a mustache got out of the driver’s side. He wasn’t a tall man, but he projected authority, and seemed to occupy more space than he actually took up. From the passenger side a deputy unfolded his long limbs. He was blonde and painfully thin, his body nothing but flat planes and points. The only round thing about him were his eyes, which were overly large and opalescent. As the detective strode up the walk there was a distinct air of victory about him. The deputy shuffled along behind him like a gentleman-in-waiting behind a triumphant king.
When they reached us the deputy hung back, mute. Now that he was closer I could see he was trying to grow sideburns, without much success.
“Detective Curtis McKinney,” the shorter man said. He added with a careless gesture behind him, “Deputy Young.” The appropriately named deputy tipped his hat toward us. We remained immobile.
“I understand you called emergency services at approximately 12:45am?” The detective’s voice was low, with a sweet Southern drawl.
“That’s correct,” my dad said. I could hear the anxiety in his voice. The detective placed one foot up on the porch and crossed his forearms over his knee. After he considered his hands for a moment he looked up into my face. His brown eyes knew things I didn’t want to learn.
“And you are Miss Zan Edgefield?”
“Yes, sir,” I replied.
“You claim to have seen Gillian Watson tonight?”
Claim to have seen? With all the force I could muster I said, “I did see her tonight. She knocked on the door at midnight. She was crying. She was hysterical.” As I said ‘hysterical’ a note of hysteria sounded in my own voice. I willed it into submission.
“Are you sure about the time?”
“I’m positive,” and this time, I heard the authority that I wanted to convey. “I looked at my clock and it was exactly midnight.”
My dad came to my defense. “She woke us up not too long after that, detective.” The detective looked back at Deputy Young. They exchanged glances. A spike of panic jolted through me.
“Look, will you tell me what’s going on? Where’s Gillian? Is she okay?” Again, the hysteria crept in.
“Miss Edgefield,” he said, before a long, slow exhale. “Miss Watson has passed away.”
The words washed over me. Passed away. Disbelief and anger jostled to be the emotion that met me first. She didn’t pass away. Elderly people passed away. People with cancer passed away. The girl that was in my living room was vibrantly alive. You don’t go from vibrantly alive to passed away.
“That’s not possible,” I croaked.
“Oh my God!” my mom gasped, “Oh my God! How?” She began to cry. The sound strengthened me. We were tough, Gillian and I. When people fell apart we took charge. If my mom was going to dissolve, I needed to be that much stronger. “How did she die?” my mom wailed, her sentence ending in a shriek.
I could see the detective waffle. He wanted to steer my parents away from me, save my child’s ears from what he had to say. I would have none of it. I stepped down from the porch so that I was on the same level as Detective Curtis McKinney. I was two inches taller than him. I made my hazel eyes steel as I demanded, “How did she die?”
The law man’s eyes softened as he spoke the words, “Child, it pains me to tell you that someone has taken her life.” The words came along slowly, like a muddy river finding its way to the ocean. But there was an edge to his words, too. Something like satisfaction. I was vaguely aware of my mother sobbing behind me.
My father swallowed hard, fear in his eyes. Nobody was ever murdered in Pendleton, South Carolina. It was a tiny town where everyone knew everyone else. It was a town from a Norman Rockwell calendar, stubborn in its fight against the relentless march of time. My dad looked right and left, as though the killer would leap upon us at any moment. The detective read my father’s mind.
“We have arrested a suspect.”
“Who?” I asked, but I already knew, and my stomach dropped again.
“Her brother,” said the detective. It was what I expected. Hagen was not Gillian’s brother, but her stepbrother. They’d only shared a house for the last two years. Hagen was troubled. He had been arrested for assault before.
“We found him down on Cherry Street, crying in his car, his face scratched up to hell.” He added, “by fingernails.” And there it was, the victory. He had already gotten his man. I supposed detectives like Curtis McKinney lived for such moments, the apprehension of a killer who had dared trespass into his territory. I almost got the feeling it was worth it to him to have somebody die.
Here the man looked at me, a curious light in eyes.
“We took him into custody at midnight.”
The wheels in my mind ground to a halt. Confusion wrinkled my brow as my eyes met McKinney’s.
“But she was here at midnight. In my living room.”
“Gillian was found in her room at 11:33pm by her father. She had already passed on at that time.”
“No, that’s not true,” I said, but it felt like somebody else had said the words. Whatever it was that made me me was floating above the scene, an observer, not a participant.
“I’m telling you, she was knocking on the door at midnight.”
The detective put a comforting hand on my shoulder, a gesture I wasn’t sure if I resented. “Miss Edgefield, I know that sometimes nightmares can seem powerfully real. And I do not deny the mysteries of this world. Perhaps as you slept you somehow knew.”
That was no nightmare, I thought. But I stayed quiet. Detective McKinney gave my shoulder an extra squeeze before he let go. Now I was certain I resented him. He enjoyed this too much.
I heard Gillian’s voice say, “you are my rock.” And I silently answered her, “and you are my island.”
