by Ronald Malfi
“You’re right. I think my wife believed that the guy who stopped to talk to you on the road that night was the same guy who killed Holly Renfrow. And I agree with her. But it wasn’t Das Hillyard.”
If this took her by surprise, she didn’t show it.
“How many times did my wife come out here?” I asked.
“Well, we met just once. But we spoke a little bit on the phone before that. I told her what happened to me and she wanted to meet.”
“Did she say why?”
“I guess she wanted more details.”
“Did she say why she thought the man who stopped you was also the man who killed the girl in Furnace? What made the connection for her?”
“Oh,” she said, “it wasn’t just the girl from Furnace. Your wife thought this guy had killed a bunch of different girls.”
“She told you this?”
“Oh yeah. Talk about freaking me the fuck out, right? You’re telling me this guy who pulled up next to me on that road was a fucking serial killer? No thanks.” She held up one hand like a crossing guard halting traffic.
“What else did she tell you?”
“I don’t know. I can’t remember.” She smiled wanly at me. “I’m sorry, man.” But then her eyes widened. She looked like she’d just remembered she left the oven on at home. “Wait. There was that thing with the yearbook.”
“What yearbook?”
I could see the memory rushing back to her, the wheels and gears spinning behind her eyes. “Shit. Shit, yeah. Now I remember.”
“What, Denise?” I said.
“Your wife had some girl’s yearbook. She wanted to know if I’d be able to pick the guy out of a photo. If I’d recognize him, you know? Like those lineups on cop shows?”
“Hold on. I’m… I’m confused. My wife wanted you to identify the guy who came up to you on the side of the road in someone’s yearbook? Like, a school yearbook?”
“That’s right. But I told her I didn’t get a good look at the guy. I didn’t even look at the photos.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “Whose yearbook was it?”
“Uh,” she said, squinting at me as if I’d suddenly transformed into a blazing inferno. “I don’t know. She just said that the guy went to school with one of the girls he killed. She got a copy of the yearbook and wanted me to look. I guess maybe it was that Holly girl’s yearbook?”
“You’re fucking kidding me.”
“Hey, man. Creepazoids gotta go to school somewhere, too, right? Shit, I went to school with about a million of ’em.” She laughed, all teeth.
“This would mean that my wife had a suspect,” I said.
“Well, yeah. That’s what I’m saying.”
“That can’t be.”
“I’m just telling you what happened.” She turned in her chair and began rooting around in her purse.
“Denise, are you sure it was Holly’s yearbook?”
“I don’t really know.”
“Because a guy who went to school with Holly would’ve been too young to kill some of the other girls. Unless…” Unless he wasn’t a student, was what I thought but did not say. “Do you remember the name of the school?” I asked her instead.
“No name. I have no idea. What’s the name of the high school over in Furnace?” She produced a tube of lipstick and applied it to her lips, painting them a startling red.
“I don’t know the name of the high school in Furnace. Did you actually see the yearbook?”
“Yeah, but I don’t remember what name was on it. Like, the school name, I mean.”
“Do you remember what the yearbook looked like?”
“Yeah. It had a green deer on the cover.”
“A green deer,” I said.
“That’s right. You know it?”
I felt like banging my head against the table. “No,” I said. “No, I don’t know it. Denise, did she say anything else? Anything about who this guy is or why she thought she had a suspect?”
“No, man. Sorry.” She finished off her beer then emptied the rest of the pitcher into her glass. “She just didn’t.”
5
I had a belly full of beer but felt stone sober as Denise Lenchantin and I walked out of The Mineshaft.
“This is me,” Denise said, pausing beside a beat-up station wagon in The Mineshaft’s gravel parking lot. “Where’re you?”
I nodded across the street, where the Sube was still parked at the diner.
“Which car?”
“The Subaru.” I pointed it out to her.
“Okay. Just making sure.”
“Making sure about what?”
She hoisted one shoulder in a halfhearted shrug. “When you called me earlier, asked to meet, I was thinking maybe you were the guy. You know? And then my mind started to go wild, man. Like maybe your wife had a hunch that you were killing all these girls and so she started investigating, but now she’s dead, and here you come right on her heels, maybe for the same reason your wife came—to see if I could identify you. You and your car with the police light on the door.”
“I’m not the guy,” I assured her.
She held up one finger, as if to make a point. Her face was close to mine and I could smell the alcohol and cigarettes on her breath. “Maybe you don’t even know it,” she said. “Maybe you’ve got a split personality, like in the movies. I’m being playful, can you tell?”
“That’s some imagination.”
“At least you’re leaving a paper trail, picking up the bar tab and all,” she said, folding her arms across her chest as she leaned back against the station wagon. “Cops would be on you in no time if I disappeared. My guess is Janet would be more than happy to rat you out, too. She didn’t like you much.”
“She the bartender with the classy tattoo?”
Denise laughed.
I looked across the street, where the Coal River Diner glowed like a nuclear reactor. “That’s where you were working the night that guy ran into you?”
“Yep. Fancy joint, huh?”
“They got security cameras out here in these parking lots?”
“Here? Fuck, no.”
“Anyone ever tell you they saw someone messing with your car that night? Messing around with the tire?”
“Jesus, you think that’s what he done? That guy?”
“I don’t know.” I looked her over. “You sober enough to drive home? I can get you an Uber.”
She brayed laughter. “No fucking Ubers out here, man,” she said. In one fluid motion, she reached out and hooked a finger in the belt loop of my slacks.
“Uh, hey.” I took her arm in one hand and jiggled it to release her grip, but it just made the situation more suggestive. She tugged me toward her. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea, Denise.”
She smiled and stared at me. Yanked again on my belt loop. The tip of her nose nearly collided with mine.
“Listen,” I said, tugging with a bit more force on her arm. “Denise, I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. I’m not drunk.”
“It just isn’t…” I stammered. “This isn’t the thing to do. I can’t. Allison…”
“Allison,” she repeated. Her hand fell away. “Yeah. Well. Whatever.”
For the first time, I realized she possessed some of the same qualities as the killer’s other victims—blonde, slim, pretty, with petite features that were almost too youthful. If she were a few years younger, she could have fit neatly among all those black-and-white newspaper photos shuffling speedily through my brain. A whole history of dead girls.
“Be careful,” I told her, “and have a good night.”
“Watch your six,” she said, and blew me a kiss.
I hurried across the street to where the Sube sat beneath the sickly glow of neon lights radiating off the diner’s rooftop sign. I climbed into the car, tossing my satchel onto the passenger seat, and started the engine. “Manic Monday” came on the CD player. I lowered the volume and sat there, the car in
Park, while I watched Denise Lenchantin smoke a cigarette in the parking lot of The Mineshaft all by herself.
She looked like someone’s victim.
6
It was well after midnight by the time I got back to Furnace. As I coasted down Main Street, the combination of exhaustion and alcohol edged me closer and closer toward sleep. My mind continued to wander and my head kept nodding. I recalled having passed a motel on the opposite side of the river earlier that day, and as I drew closer to the river, I could hear it calling my name.
When I hit the stone bridge, I slowed the car to a crawl. Chief Lovering had been correct about one thing—with no lampposts on this bridge, it was as if I were about to drive clear off into space. The heavy cloud cover, which had been there all day like a bad omen, blotted out the moon. The only light was the feeble issuance from the Sube’s headlamps, meek and futile in such tremendous, expansive darkness.
I stopped the car halfway along the bridge and shut down the engine. The driver’s window was halfway open, and I could smell chimney smoke carried along on the cold night air. I was parked in roughly the same spot Lovering had parked his cruiser the day he’d driven me out here to point out the place beyond the bend in the river where Holly Renfrow’s body had been found.
“Who came and took you, Holly?” I said to the darkness. “What monster came across your path on this bridge?”
As I gazed into the dark, I sensed a faceless predator, silent and lethal as poison gas, creeping toward me across the stone bridge. In my head, I was listening to Denise Lenchantin’s story again. Of the man who had hidden behind a sphere of dazzling white light, saying, Leave the car. Come with me.
Come with me.
I turned off the headlights, and sat there in the dark. My breath was coming in shallow gasps now. Still, I found my voice, and counted aloud from ten down to one. Slowly, poignantly, as if each number was a heartbeat.
“Ten… nine… eight… seven…”
The darkness at the far end of the bridge looked as dense as a wall.
“… six… five… four…”
Your voice took on a presence in my head: It has nothing to do with ghosts. It’s a game all about the power of perception.
“… three… two…” and my heart was galloping now, “one.”
I flipped on the headlights, and there she was, Holly’s ghost advancing toward me along the bridge, snared in the glow of the headlights, an insignificant figure who defied description, except for the youth and the beauty of her, gnashing bubblegum, trailing a hand along the concrete railing, her face illuminated by the bluish light issuing from her cell phone, her platinum hair swept to one side, resting in a coil on one shoulder…
I stared at her, my heart tightening in my chest. She took a few more steps in my direction then stopped. Looked up at me, as if sensing my presence, the two of us bridging some unfathomable gap between space and time and death. Her gaze hung on me, and even from this distance, I discerned a flicker of apprehension in her eyes. A fear of things to come. A sense that—
Nothing. Nothing was there. I blinked my eyes and saw only the wall of absolute darkness swallowing up the far side of the bridge. In that moment, I knew two things at once—that my overtaxed mind had tricked itself into seeing a ghost, and that maybe, at the end of the day, that’s exactly what ghosts really were. A composite of all we need them to be. Our aching desire that makes them real. And if that’s true, where were you, Allison?
Where were you?
Air shuddered from my lungs. Despite the cold night, my neck prickled with perspiration and the palms of my hands felt made of glue.
Feeling as though something bleak and dangerous had seeped in through the pores of my flesh, I cranked over the ignition and sped away.
CHAPTER EIGHT
1
I spent the night in the motel in Maryland, about fifteen or so miles from the border of Furnace, West Virginia. I was you, Allison, tracking a killer and bunking down in seedy roadside motels. Telling no one. Just like you.
I feared a series of brutal dreams were lying in wait for me just beyond the edge of sleep. As it was, a memory filtered through the veil of semi-consciousness as I lay there in bed, a memory of a phrase and of a faceless, distant thing known as Gas Head. In those moments, I remembered… but my weariness, coupled with an overindulgence of alcohol, saw to it that I was unceremoniously dispatched into the country of Unconsciousness without so much as a whimper.
2
One humid summer evening, after we’d finished several bottles of wine and climbed drunkenly up the stairs toward our bedroom, groping and kissing each other’s necks, you said, “I want us to try something.”
In the bedroom, you stripped off my clothes with precision while I went at yours with a distempered, inebriated sort of hunger—
tugging, pulling, twisting. When we were both naked, you kissed my lips, licked the tip of my nose, and pulled something from the top drawer of your nightstand.
“What are those?” I asked. It looked like a shoelace tied in two loops.
“Flex cuffs. Police use them when they don’t have enough handcuffs.”
“Yeah? What are you doing with them?”
“I found them in a box of junk at the office. Leftovers from Police Week.”
“Thief.”
“That’s me,” you said, smiling in the half-light coming through the bedroom window. “Now turn around.”
“Me?”
“I don’t see anyone else here.”
“Lord,” I said, grinning, shaking my head.
“You don’t trust me?” Then you reached down and grabbed me. Hard. “Someone does.”
“Yes,” I had to agree. “Someone sure does.”
I turned around and you bound my wrists behind my back.
“Too tight?”
“No, ma’am.”
“See if you can pull out of them.”
I tried, but the flex cuffs provided too much resistance.
“Snug as a bug,” I said. Despite my initial reticence, I was rock-hard; all the blood had rushed from my head to my groin.
“Good,” you said, and shoved me down on the bed.
I rolled over and you climbed atop me. You waited for no invitation, impaling yourself on me like an assault. Your fingernails left crescent-shaped indentations in the sparsely haired flesh of my upper chest.
“Come on,” you urged, breathlessly. “Don’t you want to touch me? Don’t you want to reach up and grab me?”
“Yes.”
“Do it.”
“I can’t.”
“Try.”
“I’m trying.” And I was—tugging against the restraints, my hands an uncomfortable ball of flesh and bone pressing into the small of my back as you rocked on top of me.
Then, just as sudden as this all began, you climbed off me. Your body glistened in the moonlight coming in through the window, and something about you looked spectral.
“You look like a ghost,” I said through heavy breaths.
“Shhh,” you said. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Come here. Roll over. There’s something else.”
“Help me,” I said, my legs flailing over the edge of the bed. With my hands bound behind my back, I couldn’t shift my weight to my legs.
You pulled one of my ankles to the floor. I stood there panting like a dog. I felt like I could level a small forest with my erection.
“Turn around,” you said, producing a pair of scissors from the nightstand drawer. “I’ll cut those off you.” You snipped them off; they dropped to the carpet. But when I tried to turn around, you braced me with your hands on my biceps. “Put your hands back.”
“Back where?”
“Back here.”
I slipped my hands to the sweaty pocket of flesh at the base of my spine. You worked something over them and onto my wrists. Tugged them tight. Too tight.
“Ouch!”
“Don’t be a baby,” you
said, and kissed my ear.
“These hurt.”
“They’re plastic. The others were nylon.”
“I like the nylon better.”
“Duly noted.”
I made for the bed, but you tugged my wrists, halting my progress.
“No,” you said. “On the floor.”
“Help me.”
You helped me down on my knees. I sat, then swung my legs around. You came around to face me, crouched down, sat astride my hips. You were a goddamn sieve.
We went at it in that fashion for several minutes. As I was nearing the end, you shoved me backward, throwing your weight against me. I went down, not flat on my back but against the mound of my hands. The floor less forgiving than the mattress, my bound hands pressed like a stone into my spine. You kept grinding against me, and your weight only added to the pain.
“Allison—”
“Move them.”
“Okay. This hurts.”
“Then break free.”
“Come on. Stop. Stop.”
You didn’t stop. You railed against me, droplets of tangy perspiration pattering across my face and stinging my eyes. My hands ached from the weight of us and my back ached from the dull pressure of my hands which were now balled into fists and quickly growing numb.
“Allison,” I grunted, bucking my hips to knock you off me.
You moaned, kissed me full on the mouth. Clamped your thighs around my waist. “Come with me,” you said.
My orgasm felt like it started at the base of my brain and blew through the trunk of my body with the force of a bullet fired from a gun. My whole body tensed, spasmed. Atop me, you whipped your head back, your fingernails slicing deeper into my flesh. Your body shook and you moaned. The delicate stalk of your neck looked shiny and blue, like polished steel, in the moonlight. Something like a laugh burst from you. Then we both went limp. Like a cat, you rolled off me then curled in a fetal position against me on the floor, exhaling sex-breath in my face.
Between gasps for air, I said, “Get… these fucking things… off me,” and rolled over onto my side. You clipped them with the scissors and I immediately sat up and rubbed at my wrists. “That was a bit much,” I commented.
