Sia, Part Two

No gates, no fences. Just a sign: PRIVATE PROPERTY.

I drove up a gravel driveway and parked in front of a large, long log cabin. 

A woman opened the door. She wore cutoff shorts and a white Donald Duck T-shirt. “Hi! I’m Jenny. Are you lost?”

            “I hope not.” I took my sunglasses off. “My name’s Tom Jurgen. I’m looking for Dawne Etterling?”

Her parents had hired me yesterday. They hadn’t heard from Dawne for more than month, ever since she’d texted them that she was heading up to Wisconsin with some friends. 

“Dawne?” Jenny cocked her head. “Yeah, I think she’s back in the garden. Do you want to see her?”

             “Yes, please.” I closed the door and picked up my phone to call Rachel. My girlfriend. “I’m here.” I like to let her know where I am when I’m working on a case.

            “Great. I’m working. Big project.” She’s a graphic designer. Red hair, hazelnut eyes, vaguely psychic powers. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

            “Who, me?”

            Rachel snorted. “Jerk.”

            I followed Jenny around the cabin. In the wide yard behind the house a dozen or so people worked in a long garden surrounded by a low chain-link fence. They were pulling weeds, turning over dirt, digging potatoes from under the dirt and yanking tomatoes from tall stalks, tossing them into separate baskets, next to radishes and raw onions. Stalks of corn grew at the far end.

            In the distance I saw apple trees, their branches swaying in the breeze. Not ripe yet. But soon. 

            Jenny led me to the fence gate. “Dawne? Someone here to see you?”

            A young woman turned from a stalk of tomatoes. She wore jeans and a sleeveless T-shirt. Brown hair cut short, dirt on her arms. She brushed her hands off. “Hello?”

            “Hi, Dawne.” I recognized her from the photos her parents had sent me. “My name’s Tom Jurgen. I’m a private detective from Chicago. Your parents hired me to find you and make sure you’re safe.”

            Finding Dawne hadn’t been especially hard. The Etterlings had pointed me toward her Facebook page, which had links to a farm in Wisconsin called Icarus Farm. A lot of her friends had the same connection. It took only a few minutes to get the location on Google Maps.

            “I can’t force her to leave,” I told them on the phone. 

            “We just want to know she’s safe,” Marina Etterling told me. “My husband can’t drive, and I can’t leave him. Just make sure she’s okay. Ask her to call us.”

            Dawne blinked at me. “I’m fine.”

            “They haven’t heard from you in a few weeks.” I pulled out my phone, entered my password, and found the Etterlings’ number. “Would you mind calling them?”

            She looked around, nervous. Would she refuse? Insist on calling in private where no one—including me—could hear her? But she took the phone.

            A woman in shorts and a blue bikini top stood up from a rip in the ground and dropped a potato into a wicker basket. “Tom? Is that you?”

            Oh hell. “Hi, Bridget.”

            Bridget Sullivan. She had short pale blonde hair and sharp blue eyes, and although her face looked a little longer and her eyebrows seems darker, she was still as lovely as she’d looked when I met her in college. 

            “It’s Sia now. I changed my name. I changed—a lot of things.” She hugged me. “It’s good to see you, Tom.”

            “Yeah.” I cleared my throat. “Dawne’s parents—I’m a private detective—is it all right if she calls them? To tell them she’s okay?”

            “Of course.” Bridget—Sia—smiled. “We don’t allow cell phones here at the farm, but it’s fine. Go ahead, Dawne.”

            Dawne took the phone and stepped away, pressing the number. 

            Sia watched for a moment, then looked at me. “So how’ve you been Tom? You’re a P.I. now? What happened to journalism?”

            “Yeah, about that . . .” I hesitated. “That didn’t work out so much.” Mostly because I kept trying to report on supernatural phenomena that my editors wanted me to ignore. But I wanted to avoid my whole life story. “What about you? This is—different.”

            She shrugged one bare, tanned shoulder. “I found something better. It took a long time. I guess we’ve both been through some changes, huh?”

            Dawne came back. “They want to talk to you.”

            “Mr. Jurgen?” Marina Etterling’s voice shook. “Is she really okay? Are you sure?”

            “She seems fine. Everything here seems safe.”

            “All right.” She sniffed. “If you can—ask her to come home? Just for a visit?”

            “I’ll try.”          

            “Thank you.” She hung up.

            “I’m fine. Really.” Dawne looked back at the garden. “I should get back to work.”

            I nodded. “Go ahead.”

            Sia put a hand on my arm. “Stay for dinner, Tom. We have an interesting ceremony we do every night. You’ll enjoy it.”

            It would give me more time. To assess Dawne’s safety. And, okay, to see Bridget. Sia. Assuming it wasn’t some kind of trap. I’ve had too many cases where something innocuous turned into something terrifying. “Great, thanks. I’d love to.” I tapped my phone. “Let me just call my girlfriend.”

            “Right.” She grinned. “And if you feel like helping out in the garden for a while? We can always use an extra pair of hands.” She looked at mine.

            I swallowed. “Of course.”

So I was at DePaul University, studying journalism and working on the student newspaper. The editor sent me out to review a student production of Marat/Sade. It’s about the Marquis de Sade in an insane asylum, staging his own play about the assassination of some guy called Jean-Paul Marat during the French Revolution. It’s a weird play by itself. The production took it to new depths. 

            I took notes, and afterward I got invited to a cast party. Maybe they thought it would help with the review, even though my notes were pretty positive. At the party I spotted the woman who’d played Charlotte Corday, who stabs Marat in his bathtub. She was pumping beer from a tap.

            I walked up and grabbed a cup. “Hi. You were great tonight.”

            “Oh?” She lifted an eyebrow. “Thanks. Or is this just about the nude scene?”

            Of course it was about the nude scene. “No, no. I just thought your performance was great. I’m Tom. I’m doing the review for the paper.”

            “Oh.” She sipped her beer, her blue eyes peering at me over the top of the cup. “What’d you like? Be specific.”

            “Your singing.” She did have a wonderful voice. “And, okay, the nude scene.”

            She groaned. “I’ve been eating salads for weeks to get ready for that. I could really use a hamburger right now.”

            I could take a hint, even then. “You want to get something to eat?”

            Bridget took a long gulp of her beer. “Sure.”

“So was she your first one?” Rachel interrogated me on the phone as I sat in my car.

            Not exactly. “Let’s just say the first one when I wasn’t worried about someone’s parents coming home.” Or one time in a graveyard, but I didn’t want to go into that.

            “Okay. Now?”

            My relationship with Rachel is sort of complicated. We live together. We’ve both said the L word, but neither of us are in any hurry to get married. I’ve got an ex-wife, and Rachel has commitment issues. And we both understand that. 

            That doesn’t mean we don’t get jealous sometimes.

            “Now?” I shrugged. “I have to stay here for dinner. Maybe overnight. My job is to make sure Dawne’s all right.”

            “No, I mean . . .” She sighed. “Just tell me what happened? Just a little. I don’t want all the gory details. Unless you want mine.”

            “Uh, no.” I tried to think back. “The usual, I guess. We, uh, hung out a lot. It got intense for a few weeks. Then we started arguing. Bridget was always getting ready for a new play, and I was always working on stories for the newspaper. This was before I started seeing monsters, but . . .” I shuddered. “We didn’t have a lot of time for each other. But it was pretty amicable when we ended.” One last night in my apartment. Then a kiss, and she was gone. “I saw her a few times on campus, and in plays, and sometimes we chatted. But today is the first time I’ve seen her—or thought about her—in years.”

            Like I said, Rachel has somewhat psychic powers. But after all this time together she didn’t really need those to tell when I’m lying. Apparently she believed me. “Fine.”

            “I’ll call you. And really, this is just business. You’ve got nothing to worry about.”

            “Hah!” Rachel snorted. “I always worry about you, jerk. Get home safe, or we’re going to have words.”

            I smiled. “Love you.”

            “Shut up. Me too. Don’t forget that.” She hung up. 

So I took off my jacket, rolled up my sleeves, and plucked tomatoes from the vine for a few hours until the sun started to set.

            The group was pretty diverse—mostly young people, African American, Hispanic, tall, short. One Asian guy had a big butterfly tattoo on his bare chest. And they were friendly, asking my name, coaching me on how to pluck the tomatoes without bruising them, talking about how they’d gotten here.

            They liked working with the land. Getting their hands dirty. Leaving behind the city and starting over.

            I managed to get next to Dawne. “I love my folks, don’t get me wrong.” She carefully placed a tomato into another wicker basket. “I just needed something different. I was majoring in marketing, and that just seemed so meaningless after a while. The climate is changing, the world’s going to hell, and I don’t have it in me to become an activist, going to protests and getting arrested, you know? I just wanted to get out of the whole system.”

            “Yeah.” That came from a guy named Carlos next to her. “Sometimes you have to get out. Just for a while, maybe? This is better.”

            “What drew you here?” I twisted my wrist the way I’d just been taught to free the tomato just right.

            “I connected with Sia on her website.” Carlos paused for a drink of water. “It just sounded cool.”

            I glanced at Dawne. “You too?”

            She smiled. “You’ll see. After dinner.”

Dinner was vegetables, rice, lentils, and fruit. Rachel, a vegetarian, would have approved. We sat at long tables lit with candles. Dawne sat across from me. Sia was at the head of the table in a T-shirt and shorts. She offered a short grace before we started, ending with, “. . . And we welcome our visitor, Tom, an old friend of mine from Chicago. Make him feel welcome.” She winked.

            A woman next to me asked me about the Lincoln Park Zoo. The man on the other side told me stories about fishing in Michigan. Dawne chatted with her friends, not looking at me.

            We shared fruit for dessert. “How do you know Sia?” the man, Gilbert, asked.

            “We were friends in college.” I bit into a banana. “I was in journalism. She was in theater. Pretty good, too.”

            “Yeah, she’s very—theatrical.” Gilbert grinned, looking at her. “We love her.”

            The woman—Gina—nudged my arm. “Do you have to go? You should stay for the ceremony.”

            “What’s the ceremony?”

            Gina smiled. “You’ll see.”