by Ronald Malfi
The kitchen was at the rear of the house, an outdated little alcove with an assemblage of pots and pans hanging from a ceiling rack. The kitchen table was burdened with reams of paper and an old manual typewriter. Wilted daisies drooped from a ceramic vase. Behind the table stood a rank of aluminum filing cabinets, and there were pages torn from newspapers pinned to the walls, a few of them in spotty frames.
“Sweet old typewriter,” I said, running the pads of my fingers over the keys. There was a clean sheet of paper in the roller. “You actually use this for work?”
Bobbi dumped her backpack on a chair. “It’s for my mom,” she said. “I dictate to her, make her type. It helps keep her mind active and alert. Plus, the typing keeps her hands strong and staves off arthritis.”
“That’s smart,” I said.
“Well, it’s becoming futile, but we don’t give up, do we?” She offered me a weary smile.
“No. I guess we don’t.”
I helped her relocate the reams of paper onto the kitchen counter. She left the typewriter and the vase where it was, setting down a laptop (which she had taken from her backpack) down beside them. Her crime-scene photos reappeared, set now in a tidy stack between the typewriter and laptop.
“I’m going to grab some stuff from my office,” she said, already heading down a darkened hallway. “Do me a favor and put on a pot of coffee.”
The coffeemaker was on the counter, but I had to hunt for the coffee. I finally located it in a rotating cabinet tucked between the dishwasher and the refrigerator. The filter from the previous batch of coffee was still in the machine. I tossed it in the trash, washed out the filter basket and the carafe, then proceeded to make a fresh pot.
On my way back to the rotating cabinet to put the coffee back, I was startled by a figure in the next room—a small parlor, the shades drawn—staring out at me. Before my mind could settle what I was seeing, the figure said, “Jeffrey.”
It was an elderly woman in a wingback chair. A shawl was draped across her lap. With the shades drawn and no lights on in the room, it was too dark to make out the woman’s approximate age, but her voice made her sound nearly prehistoric.
“Jeffrey,” she said again.
“Ma’am.”
I took a step into the room. The woman did not move; only her eyes—furtive, moist little buttons in the darkness—confirmed for me that the figure seated in the wingback chair was in fact alive, and the one who had spoken.
“Did you clean your shoes off, Jeffrey?”
“I’m not Jeffrey, ma’am.”
“You need to clean your shoes before coming into the house, Jeffrey. We’ve talked about this.”
My eyes having grown accustomed to the gloom, I could see she wasn’t as old as I’d originally thought—maybe in her early seventies at most. She was swimming in a too-big sweatshirt with the Baltimore Ravens logo on the front. Her hair was a wiry mass tugged into a ruthless bun behind her head, and streaked with bands of silver.
“Do you hear me, Jeffrey?” said the woman, a note of agitation in her voice now.
“Yes, ma’am. I cleaned my shoes before I came in.”
“Good boy.” Her head turned slightly, as if to look at something just beyond where I was standing. “What about your friend, Jeffrey?”
The question prompted me to turn and stare into the dark corner of the room. There were picture frames on the wall and a radiator against the baseboard. No one was there.
The woman in the chair leaned forward and studied the dark corner at the opposite end of the room. “Who is that?” she said.
The longer I stared into that darkened corner, the easier it was to convince myself that there was someone standing there staring back at me.
“Allison?” I muttered, and stepped further into the room. The darkness appeared to coalesce into the suggestion of something solid and real. Something there.
“Who is that?” repeated the old woman at my back.
Extending a hand, I grazed my fingers through the darkness at the far end of the room. I felt nothing except a cold draft of air. The chill of it resonated throughout my entire body.
In a papery whisper: “Don’t be afraid, Jeffrey.”
“Allison…”
“Don’t. Be. Afraid.”
A hand fell on my shoulder, nearly sending me through the roof. Bobbi stood there, embarrassed to have startled me. She turned to the woman in the chair. “This isn’t Jeffrey, Mom. This is my friend Aaron.”
“Jeffrey’s a good boy,” said the woman, adjusting the shawl draped over her legs. “He’s cleaned his shoes just like he’s supposed to.” She looked at me and I could see a muddy disconnection in her eyes. A smile creased her face. Then she looked past me and at the far corner of the room again.
“This isn’t Jeffrey, Ma,” Bobbi said, more sternly now.
The woman turned back toward us. Those moist little eyes blinked. Clarity filtered across her face. “Oh,” she said. She leaned over and clicked on a lamp beside her chair, the light pooling in a sedate yellow glow across her lap. She smiled at Bobbi. “Hello, dear. Should I get up?” She gripped the armrests of the chair, as if to stand.
“Sit, Ma,” Bobbi said. “Aaron and I have got some work to do. We’ll be right here in the kitchen. Do you need anything?”
The old woman settled back down in her chair. “No, Bobbi, I’m just resting my eyes for a bit.” She looked at me. “Nice to meet you, young man. Aaron, is it?”
“Yes, ma’am. Pleasure’s mine.” I had to push the words out of me; I was still chilled by what had just transpired… or what I thought had transpired.
Bobbi pulled me back into the kitchen, where the coffeemaker burped and trickled on the countertop.
“Jeffrey was my brother. He was killed in a car accident like ten years ago.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Most times she’s okay, but when her mind gets all fuzzy, she starts talking to Jeffrey.”
I cast a glance over my shoulder, back into the parlor and at the darkened corner of the room. Half expecting to see you standing there, Allison.
It was madness, I confess.
5
We sat together at the kitchen table while Bobbi combed through your files. Occasionally she would study a line or two from your notes and then type something on her laptop; other times, she would ask me to decipher your handwriting. Together, we demolished the entire pot of coffee while the daylight drained from the kitchen windows. At one point, Bobbi excused herself from the table. She slipped into an adjoining room—what looked like a cramped little laundry room off the kitchen—where she proceeded to make a number of phone calls on her cell phone. When she returned to the kitchen with her cell phone clutched in one hand, she told me to put on a second pot of coffee.
“Who were you on the phone with?” I asked her.
Instead of answering me, Bobbi said, “What was the name of the girl who was murdered last fall? The one in West Virginia, whose killer overdosed on heroin?”
“Holly Renfrow.”
“You said you went out there, spoke to the police chief?”
“Yeah.” I scooped fresh coffee grounds into a new filter.
“How did you say she was killed?”
“She drowned.”
“But how?”
“Her hands were tied behind her back and she was thrown in the river.”
“Tied with what? Do you know?”
I remembered what Chief Lovering had told me. “Electrical wire, I think.”
“And you said you initially thought these murders might be connected?”
“It was just a hunch. The victims all look the same—the same profile, you know? But the guy who killed Holly Renfrow couldn’t have killed these other girls, because he was in prison.”
“Come here,” Bobbi said, setting her cell phone on the table so she could shuffle through the crime-scene photos. I came up beside her just as she separated one photo from the stack and slid it in front of me.
>
This photo was a close-up of Gabby Colson-Howe’s left hand. I tried not to look at the missing digits, taken away by fish or crabs or whatever else, and instead examined what Bobbi Negri was pointing at: a ring of dark red lacerations around the wrist, stark and undeniable against the otherwise pallid flesh.
“Those are ligature marks,” Bobbi said. “I was just on the phone to my source at the coroner’s office. According to him, Gabby’s wrists had been tied together with something before she was strangled to death. You asked about scrapings under the fingernails? That’s why there was none—her hands had been bound behind her back while she was being strangled.”
“Just like Holly’s,” I heard myself say.
“I asked my guy what he thought Gabby had been tied with. You know what he guessed? Some sort of thin wire. Very unusual.”
“Jesus Christ,” I muttered.
“You were right from the start, Aaron,” Bobbi said. “Your wife had been hunting a serial killer.”
6
I stayed for a dinner of Hamburger Helper and cans of Budweiser. As I set the picnic table out back, Bobbi’s mother, Lois, ambled out of the living room and sat at the kitchen table before the old typewriter. I heard her clack a few keys as I carried a handful of napkins and plates to the table in the backyard. When the food was ready, Lois joined us, her Alzheimer’s in temporary remission throughout the meal. The crispness of the air and the scent of the nearby river were invigorating.
“What is it you two have been so stealthily working on all afternoon?” Lois asked once we’d all finished our meals. We were watching the boomerang shapes of small bats zigzag across the deepening sky.
“It’s getting too cold for you out here, Ma,” Bobbi said, handing me a fresh beer from the cooler at her feet.
Lois dismissed her with a flap of her hand. “Nonsense. Is it top secret?”
“Just some project my wife had been working on.”
“And where is this wife of yours now?”
“Ma,” said Bobbi.
I offered a gentle nod in Bobbi’s direction—It’s okay. I told her you’d passed away in December, and left it at that.
Lois tented her hands at her breast, as if in prayer. “Oh no. Was it sudden?”
“Yes.”
“She still haunts you.” It was not a question.
“Yes.”
“It was that way with Jeffrey. My son. He was killed in an automobile accident.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s good for them to haunt you in the beginning. It’s how we grieve. It’s how we get through it without them.”
“I suppose so,” I said.
“But after a time, we must let them go. They need to rest and we need to move on. Do you see?”
“It’s too soon for that,” I confessed. “I’m not ready to let her go.”
Lois leaned closer to me from across the table. Her hands were still clasped at her chest in prayer. “Do you want to know a secret?”
I nodded. Bobbi said nothing.
Lois said, “We haunt ourselves. In the end, if we don’t come to peace with it, if we can’t resolve it, we haunt ourselves.”
I looked at her face—her rheumy, glittery eyes, and the stark black lines around her mouth. As I watched her, I saw something dark and introspective overtake her features. The glitter fled from her eyes. It was like a mist creeping over a city.
“You’re not Jeffrey,” Lois said. Her mouth formed a scowl. “You’re not.” There was undeniable hatred in her voice, as if I was not only not her son, but some imposter here to fool her into thinking I was.
“Okay, Ma,” Bobbi said, casually rising from the picnic table. “Let’s call it a night. It’s getting late.”
While Bobbi took her mother upstairs, I cleared the plates and empty beer cans from the picnic table, soaked the glassware in the sink, then sat down at the kitchen table to digest all that Bobbi had figured out following her phone call to her source in the coroner’s office.
At one point, my gaze shifted to the single sheet of paper in the roller of the typewriter. Prior to joining us for dinner, Lois had hammered out a single phrase in the center of the page. I read it now—once, twice, three times—and couldn’t help the chill that shuddered down my spine as I did so:
YOU WILL DIE
That was it. That was the whole of it. An elderly woman in the throes of Alzheimer’s, this phrase could have meant anything—or nothing—at all. Yet in that moment I was suddenly, profoundly certain it was a missive left behind for me to find. A dire warning the old woman had, in her confused mental state, snatched out of the ether and transcribed for my benefit. It made me uneasy, those three words.
—You’re just scaring yourself, other-Aaron advised. You’re like some superstitious fool divining portents in tea leaves.
It was nearly nine o’clock when Bobbi reappeared, arms folded over her chest as she leaned in the kitchen doorway. I was still at the kitchen table, all six of your files open to the static black-and-white photos of the dead girls. I had forced myself to dismiss the note Lois had left behind in the typewriter.
I glanced up at Bobbi. “Remember when I said the victims all looked the same?”
Bobbi nodded but didn’t say anything.
“I bet that’s how my wife knew to come out here when Gabby first went missing. Allison didn’t have to wait for a body to show up. Gabby fit the profile.”
“Keep in mind that while the evidence linking Gabby’s and Holly Renfrow’s deaths is pretty solid, at least in my estimation,” Bobbi said, “we don’t know for certain about how the other girls were killed. You said it yourself—newspapers leave out all the juicy details. Sometimes they do that because their readership doesn’t want to know, and they cater to that. Other times—most times—it’s because the cops are keeping their cards close to the vest. They rarely talk about the particulars of cases like these to the media unless they think it might help their investigation.”
“Can we make some more calls? Get some info from some of these other coroners?”
“I don’t know how successful we’d be with something like that, Aaron. My connections outside this town are fairly limited. You might have better luck going back to the police at this point.”
“I’m a little gun-shy about going back to the police.” I considered all we had learned. “What does this mean about Das Hillyard? That he didn’t kill Holly?”
“It would seem so.”
“Police chief said Holly’s sweatshirt was found in his house.”
“There could be a million reasons why that sweatshirt was found in his house. He could have found it on a park bench. Doesn’t mean he was a murderer. Maybe he was just a thief.”
“And a convicted pedophile,” I added.
“Well, even that doesn’t fit, does it? What interest does a pedophile have in teenage girls?”
“If they’re truly connected, why was Gabby strangled and Holly thrown in a river to drown?”
Bobbi shook her head. “I don’t think like a murderer, Aaron. I don’t know.”
“So what do we do now?”
Bobbi went to the fridge and returned to the table with two fresh cans of beer. She handed one to me. “There’s an article in the Renfrow file that talks about a woman who was approached by some creepy guy in the middle of the night when she blew a tire,” she said.
“Yeah. Denise Lenchantin. Chief Lovering said what happened to her wasn’t connected to what happened to Holly.”
Bobbi shrugged, suggesting she didn’t put much stock in any particular theory at this point. “I’d be curious what she had to say to your wife. If we’re dealing with an honest-to-God serial killer here, Aaron, it clearly can’t be Hillyard. Which means someone else is out there. It might very well be the guy who stopped that Lenchantin woman on the road that night.”
“You think I should talk to her,” I said. It wasn’t a question; I already knew the answer.
“It’s what I would do,” B
obbi said. Then she added, “It’s what Allison would do.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
1
Denise Lenchantin finished her shift at the Coal River Diner just after eight in the evening. She was still clearing tables when I arrived and introduced myself. We had spoken earlier on the phone, and she had agreed to the meeting, but my arrival now seemed to catch her off guard. She was a slim, attractive woman in her early twenties, dressed in an unflattering Pepto-Bismol-colored waitress uniform with an aquamarine ribbon in her dirty blonde hair. Hefting a tray cluttered with greasy dishes and half-eaten wedges of pecan pie, she summoned a weary smile then suggested I wait for her across the street at a pub called The Mineshaft. I slipped back outside, the air having dropped a good fifteen degrees since the sun had gone down, and I hurried across the curl of blacktop that separated the neon-lit diner from the pub. Fronted by a massive gravel parking lot populated with four-wheelers and pickup trucks, The Mineshaft looked like the kind of bar where the bouncers carried batons.
I stepped inside, a guy in a charcoal peacoat, a cornflower-blue Van Heusen button-down, and a leather satchel over one shoulder that, in this environment, might be mocked for resembling a woman’s large purse. I waited for the jukebox to screech to a halt and for heads to swivel in my direction. But no one paid me any attention as I wove through the dim barroom and selected a stool at the far end of the bar.
I looked around, noting that there were no pool tables in here, no karaoke machines, no tight little bandstand for live music on the weekends. This was a place for serious drinkers—people who did not come for a good time or to simply burn a paycheck, but career alcoholics who opted for the only form of acceptable suicide, which was to drink themselves to a premature death. Most of the men in here sat by themselves, hunched over the bar or at tables just beyond the cones of light issuing from the milky cataract bulbs recessed into the ceiling. Men in hunting attire whose heavy beards gave them all an air of anonymity. For the first time, I understood the futility of trying to hunt down a killer in these hills. The Mineshaft looked moderately populated with America’s most wanted.
