by Ronald Malfi
“You seemed to enjoy yourself all right.”
“Yeah, well, men are fools.”
“No argument here,” you said.
I went to the bathroom to examine the damage to my wrists. The nylon bands had irritated my flesh so that it had turned a raw-looking pink; the plastic bands had actually left deep impressions in my skin, made with such force that I could see the brand name—Loop Riot, LLC—engraved backwards along one wrist.
You came in, studied my wrists. Ran a finger along the abrasions, an archeologist fingering a groove carved in sandstone. “Oh shit, baby, I didn’t realize.”
“Yeah…”
You kissed the insides of my wrists, the outsides of my wrists. Sawed that finger back and forth against the raw places on my flesh then kissed my lips. “I’m sorry.”
“Next time, they’re on you.”
You laughed. Said, “Most likely not.”
“I’m gonna have a shower. Pop in?”
“I’ll go keep the bed company,” you said, and slipped out of the bathroom.
I took a quick shower then joined you in bed. You were already asleep, but I kissed the side of your face anyway and rolled over onto my pillow. I was halfway to dreamland when you uttered, quite clearly, a phrase that struck me as wholly, completely bizarre—
“Gas Head will make you dead.”
I rolled over and said, “What?”
You did not respond.
“Allison? Are you awake?”
You’d talked in your sleep before, but nothing so clear and projected as that. Gas Head will make you dead.
So bizarre, I laughed. Then I settled back down and closed my eyes, intent on asking you about it in the morning.
But by morning, I had forgotten all about it.
CHAPTER NINE
1
Pink, sinewy, glistening: dead things hung in rows from the roof of the Renfrow porch. I was halfway up a walkway of wobbly slate pavers when a man in a fleece jacket and a knit cap came around the side of a pale yellow A-frame, mopping grease or maybe blood from his hands.
“Hello,” I said, pausing in my stride. I gave this guy my best smile.
“This here’s private property. No soliciting. There’s signs posted up the drive.”
“I’m not soliciting. I’m looking for Rita Renfrow.”
“Yeah? Who’re you?”
“My name’s Aaron Decker. My wife, Allison, was a reporter. She met with Rita soon after… well, last fall. She was here about Holly.”
“Right, I remember,” said the man. His beard, black as a bear’s pelt, covered half his face. His eyes sparkled. “She here with you?” He peered past me, down the driveway and toward the road.
“My wife passed away in December.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean my wife is dead.”
At this, he offered a perfunctory nod, then said, “All right, come on.” Without waiting for me to move, he turned and lumbered back around the side of the house.
I followed him, using the branches of nearby spruce trees as handholds, since the front and side of the property sloped at a precarious angle toward the road below. Behind the house was a building smaller than a garage but larger than a tool shed. There was an ATV inside, its frame painted camouflage green. A mangy-looking dog of some indeterminable breed sat in a patch of sun, its leash tied to a stake in the ground. At my approach, the dog sprung to its feet and began barking at me. A small novelty skull hung from its collar.
“What were those things hanging from the porch?” I asked.
“Beaver,” said the man. He climbed a set of wooden steps and tugged open a sliding glass door. “Rita!” he called into the house. “Come on out here a minute, will you?” Then he leaned against the doorframe where he continued toweling dark gunk from his hands. To the dog, he said, “Shut the fuck up, you bastard.”
The dog shut the fuck up and dropped back down to sun itself in the pane of light. Yet its eyes remained on me, distrustful.
“Are you Rita’s husband?” I asked the guy.
“Boyfriend.” He looked up and pointed farther up the hillside, where the foliage was denser and, beyond, I could see distant houses. “I’m Chip. My place is up the hill. But Rita, she’s got this nice work shed. So, well…” Almost ashamed, he cocked a thumb at the shed.
“That your ATV?”
“Sure is. You ride?”
“Can’t say I do,” I said, and grimaced at the thought of careening around this sloping hillside on that suicide machine.
“Probably smart,” Chip said. “I busted six bones on that thing.”
“All at once?”
“Huh?”
“Never mind.”
A woman appeared in the doorway. She looked scarcely older than me, and despite the chill in the air, she wore only jeans, a ribbed wife-beater and an open flannel shirt. Bright pink moccasins adorned her feet.
“That reporter lady who was here asking about Holly last fall,” Chip said to her. “This is her husband.”
“I’m Aaron Decker,” I said, and approached the woman with my hand extended.
She shook it. Said, “Where’s your wife?”
“His wife’s dead,” Chip said, as he tucked the filthy towel into the rear pocket of his jeans.
Rita Renfrow’s eyes volleyed from me to Chip then back to me again. “What’s he mean?” she asked me.
Because I didn’t have it in me to explain the details of your death, Allison, I simply said you’d passed away in December from an accident and left it at that.
“Well, that’s just terrible,” Rita said, and the expression on her face softened the slightest bit. She was haggard but pretty, with tawny hair pulled back in a girlish ponytail. Had she lived an easier life she might have even been beautiful. “Hurts my heart to hear it, Mr. Decker. I liked your wife. She was very compassionate. She was very kind to me.”
“You can call me Aaron.”
It was Chip who nodded at this as he tromped down the steps and, with his head down, cut a straight path toward the work shed and the ATV. The little dog barked once at his approach and then fell silent when Chip uttered a barrage of curses at it.
“I apologize for showing up out of the blue like this,” I said. “I hope it’s not an inconvenience. Can we talk for a few minutes?”
“House is a mess,” she said, stepping outside. “But sure, we can sit out here.”
There was a picnic table beside a shallow rock garden, and Rita headed toward it now, digging a pack of cigarettes from the breast pocket of her flannel shirt. Her jeans, I noted, were tight-fitting, the rear pockets studded with rhinestones. They looked like cheap imitations of some expensive brand.
I joined her at the picnic table. She offered me a smoke and I took it.
“I spoke with Hercel Lovering,” I told her. “Chief of police?”
“I know who he is. Went to school with his brother. Believe it or not, those Lovering boys used to be heartthrobs around here.” She waggled her eyebrows, but her eyes were dead.
“He says your daughter’s killer died of a heroin overdose back in January,” I said.
“Das Hillyard.” It seemed to pain her to speak his name. I understood her pain. “It’s good he’s gone, I guess. He was a monster, you know. Did some nasty things to some boys in Preston a while back. Spent some time in prison for it. I guess maybe they should’ve kept him there.” She flicked ash from her cigarette. “They found her sweatshirt in his house, you know.”
“Yes, I’ve heard that.”
“Herce says Das Hillyard most likely approached her, maybe offered her a ride that night. Came up on her like that.” Her gaze sharpened and she stared me dead in the eyes. “I don’t necessarily know if that part’s true. I don’t like to think that’s the way it happened. Holly was too smart to go off with someone… well, with someone like Hillyard.”
“Your daughter knew about Hillyard’s… uh, what he’d done?”
“You mean to t
hose boys over in Preston? Wasn’t no secret around here. It’s just…”
“What?” I said.
“If he killed himself by shooting junk up his arm, well, I guess that’s just fine and dandy—world’s a better place with one less murderer and child molester in it, you ask me—but I’ll tell you, Mr. Decker, I would have liked to hear him say it.”
“A confession?”
“An apology.”
I nodded, though I personally didn’t believe someone who possessed the black wherewithal to strangle a teenage girl to death was much inclined to apologize for anything.
“I would’ve liked to hear him say what he’d done to her and that he was sorry,” she went on, her whole body trembling now. There was a vacuous, absent look in her eyes, as if she were on valium, or like someone had siphoned some vital fluid from her veins. “He should have at least given me that.”
I understood that burning hate, Allison. That missed opportunity. Your killer, Robert Vols, had taken his own life moments after taking yours. He’d left me unanchored and incapable of finding my footing in this world without you. He’d left me powerless to make sense of his senselessness, because he had taken his final, mad, fleeting thoughts with him to hell. Here was a mother who was tormented by that same bitter loss without the inviolability of resolution.
“But oh well,” she said, swiping at the moisture leaking from her eyes with the heels of both hands. Something like a dull smile flashed across her face, quick as lightning. I convinced myself I’d just caught a glimpse of the woman she’d once been, before her daughter had been stolen from her. “At least I know the monster is dead. That’s the only thing that gives me any peace.”
I opened my mouth then closed it again. Fortunately, other-Aaron stepped in and said, “Did my wife explain to you why she was out here investigating your daughter’s murder?”
“She was nice, your wife.” That faraway look in her eyes…
I nodded, waited for her to continue, but she didn’t. I asked the question again: “Did she explain why she came out here? Why she talked with you about Holly?”
“What do you mean? She was a reporter. I talked to a lot of reporters after she… after it happened. But your wife, she was different. She was compassionate. She listened to me. She wanted to see Holly’s room so I took her up there, showed her around. I gave her one of Holly’s school pictures.”
“I know,” I told her. “She kept it. I have it with me now.”
Rita nodded.
“What about one of Holly’s yearbooks? Did you let Allison borrow one?”
Rita didn’t respond. Her eyes were distant again, lost in the fog of memory.
“Rita, did my wife happen to mention to you the possibility that whoever killed Holly may have killed other girls?”
The fog fled from her eyes. She stared at me, the cigarette trembling in one upraised hand. “What do you mean? That Das Hillyard killed other girls?”
“I don’t believe it was Hillyard who killed your daughter.”
She shook her head, frowning. A vertical crease appeared between her faint eyebrows. “What’s that mean?”
It was Hercel Lovering’s voice in my head now, warning me to leave well enough alone. But if you were right, Allison—if you were right and Lovering was wrong—then I couldn’t just walk away from it, could I? Not after all you’d done. And not after what had happened to those girls.
“I think my wife came out here because she thought your daughter had been… had been hurt by a man who had done this to other girls in the past. She had been researching other murders, girls who died in similar circumstances.”
“You’re telling me Das Hillyard didn’t do it? He didn’t do… that… to my Holly? Someone… you’re telling me… someone else…”
“It seems that way to me,” I said.
She hung her head as a sob ratcheted up her throat. The sound startled me, shook me. I kept my eyes on the lengthening ash of her cigarette until a shadow fell across the picnic table. Looking over my shoulder, I saw Chip standing there, his eyes two dull oil spots above the nest of his beard. He looked agitated and uncertain.
“What’s going on?” he said.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I went to get up from the table, but Rita clapped a hand over one of mine, halting me in mid-rise.
“You sit back down,” she said, her lower lip quivering. Her cheeks were streaked with tears, but her eyes were hard and sober now. “You don’t just say something like this then get up and leave, mister.”
“What’s going on, Rita?” Chip said. Behind him, the dog began barking again.
“He don’t think Das Hillyard killed my Holly,” she said.
“My wife came out here because she identified a similarity in the way Holly was killed to another girl three years earlier, and maybe a handful of others, too,” I said. “She’d been… she’d been tracking these murders, studying them. If you knew my wife, you’d know she wouldn’t make a mistake, that she was diligent and dedicated and had been looking into these things for years…”
My voice broke. I saw my own grief reflected in Rita’s face, and felt everything come loose inside me in an instant. I struggled to keep it together, but my hands began trembling on the tabletop. To my surprise, Rita reached out and squeezed one.
“Go on,” she urged me.
I took a breath then said, “Hillyard couldn’t have killed the other girls because he’d been in jail since 2005 for what he did to those boys in Preston. And I don’t think he just killed Holly, because there were similarities between how Holly was killed and at least one other girl, back in 2016, when Hillyard would have been in prison. So, either my wife was completely wrong about this—which means that I’m completely wrong about this—or Hillyard didn’t kill any of them, including your daughter.”
“Her sweatshirt,” Rita began.
“Maybe there’s another explanation for how Hillyard got it,” I said. “I don’t know. I really don’t. I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
I shouldn’t have come here. This was wrong. I felt like I was slicing open fresh wounds that had scarcely begun to heal. What you had accomplished with tact and decorum and great tenderness, Allison, I had bulldozed and razed to the ground.
Rita’s hand slipped off mine. To Chip, she said, “Go inside and get us a couple of beers, will you?”
Chip nodded then slunk away into the house. The dog stopped barking as soon as Chip disappeared through the sliding glass door.
“You’ve got me thinking of a man now,” Rita said. She examined the filter of her cigarette with something like melancholy before pitching it into the dirt and digging a fresh one from the pack. “A man down at the bottom of the hill one night.”
“What man?”
“Couple nights before… before it happened, Holly goes out to drag the trash down to the curb at the bottom of the hill. It’s dark. When she comes back inside, she’s all nervous and shaking and, like, pretty freaked out. She says there was a man across the street, watching her. She said she didn’t see him until he called her name. Scared the tar out of her.”
I glanced over my shoulder and peered down the slope of the hillside, but from this vantage I couldn’t see the road. Only trees. “Who was he?”
“She didn’t know.”
“She didn’t recognize him?”
“She didn’t see him clearly; it was too dark. He was just there, watching her from across the street. Almost like he was trying to hide from her. That’s how she said it.”
“Why hide if you’re going to call out her name?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you tell this to the police?”
“Not that night, but after… after what happened, yeah, I told Hercel myself. I had forgotten about it at first, but I eventually remembered. I told him in case it was all connected, you know?”
“What’d he say?”
“Herce wanted a description, but I couldn’t give any. He came out an
d checked around the woods on the other side of the street—about where the guy would have been standing—but he found nothing. Then later, after they found Holly’s sweatshirt in that bastard’s house, Herce said it was Hillyard, that he’d probably been watching…” Her voice hitched. “That he’d probably been watching her for days.” Rita’s gaze leveled on me. “But if it wasn’t Hillyard—if that’s what you’re telling me—then who was it standing out there, calling to my girl?”
“I don’t know.”
“Because whoever it was, he had to know her, right? To call her by her name like that?”
“I guess so.”
She lowered her voice, as if confiding a secret. “I went out there that night. Holly was so frightened. I went across the street to look around. I didn’t see nobody. There’s woods there, and I went partway into ’em, but then I started spooking myself. I kept thinking someone was in them woods with me, moving around me and watching me. I kept thinking someone would come out from the trees and grab me. Or just stand there, maybe call my name. I don’t know. Anyway, I hurried on back into the house and bolted the door. And that was that.”
Chip returned with two Buds, the caps already off. He set them down on the picnic table without uttering a word, then meandered back toward the work shed. When the dog started yapping, he told it to shut the fuck up or he’d string it up a tree.
For the next few minutes, Rita and I drank our beers in relative silence. She was working her way through her pack of cigarettes, too, and offered me one again. I accepted, grateful, and confessed to her that I had been smoking for quite some time behind your back, Allison. Maybe you knew and never said anything, but I thought I did a pretty good job keeping it from you.
“I guess I don’t have to hide it anymore,” I said, inhaling.
“The secrets we keep,” she said, grinning sadly at me now. “Am I right?”
I couldn’t help it—I coughed up a laugh. Rita’s grin transformed into an actual smile. She reminded me of her daughter in that instant. Or of her daughter’s photograph, anyway.
—You’ll be dreaming of those crime-scene photos for a long time, other-Aaron, ever the pragmatist, spoke up in my head. Those images of Gabrielle’s body face-down in the mud beneath that bridge? Her fingers and toes missing, that solitary eye socket as blank as a keyhole. The marks on her wrist. Let’s not forget about those photos.
