by Ronald Malfi
Other-Aaron was right, of course: There would be no forgetting those images.
“Once she was gone, it was like a part of me broke off and floated away,” Rita said. She was staring off into the trees. Small brown birds leapt from tree branch to tree branch, peeping in the cool spring air. “Sometimes I still feel her presence. That’s why I don’t go into her room very much; it’s too painful. It’s like sometimes she’s still here. Do you ever feel that way about your wife?”
“All the time,” I said.
“And then, other times, I feel like that broken piece of me is still hanging around, too—a part of me out there, not bound by our reality, wandering in and out of time, lost, doomed like a ghost to go through the motions. It’s like there are two of me, walking along on different paths now, on different timelines. My hope is that this other version of me can slip back to a time where Holly is still alive. Is that crazy?”
“No.”
“In a way, that makes me a ghost, too.”
Me too, I thought.
“So, what happens now?” Rita asked after she’d finished her beer. I stared at her as the wind pulled fine threads of smoke from the tips of our cigarettes.
“Rita, did you lend my wife one of your daughter’s yearbooks?”
“I don’t remember doing that.”
“Is it possible?”
“Anything’s possible. My mind was a mess back then.” She smiled weakly. “Still is.”
“Would you mind if I took a look at the yearbooks your daughter had?”
“I guess. How come?”
“Allison had a theory that the killer might have been in one of Holly’s yearbooks.”
“In her yearbook? Like, someone she’d gone to school with? A classmate?”
Or a teacher, I thought, but did not say.
“That seems impossible to me,” Rita continued.
“Do any of her yearbooks have a green deer on the cover?”
Distantly, Rita shook her head. “I don’t know, Mr. Decker. I don’t know. But I can take you up to her room and you could look for yourself.”
“Is that okay with you?”
Her mouth went firm. She said, “You a cop?”
“No.”
“A reporter?”
“No. I translate Japanese novels into English.”
“Yeah? That’s a thing?”
“That’s a thing.”
“So then what are you looking into all this for?” She said it as if we were working through a crossword puzzle together.
“I want to finish what my wife started,” I told her.
2
We stepped into the house, but did not go farther than the foyer at first. There was a resistance here—not from Rita, but from the house itself, as if to instill in me the sense that I was an interloper, a trespasser. Someone who did not belong here. There was a wall cluttered with family photos, old wedding pictures with sepia tints, many photographs of a teenage girl whose face exuded an indescribable iridescence. The place smelled unclean, but it wasn’t as messy as Rita Renfrow had led me to believe. Rather, it was the smell of neglect in the wake of tragedy—a musty, forgotten odor that made me think of old warehouses and abandoned buildings.
I followed her up a creaky stairwell to the second floor, cattail-pattern wallpaper on the walls, a teal carpet with stains peppered indiscriminately across its threadbare surface. From the corner of my eye, I saw a tabby bullet along the upstairs hallway, zoetrope-like behind the staves of the banister as we climbed the stairs.
“I keep dreaming that there’s someone in the house,” Rita said as she labored up the stairs. The ascent seemed to take a lot out of her, both spiritually and physically. “A man. I get up and come down the hall here. I look in Holly’s bedroom. Sometimes he’s standing in there, a dark shape against the windows. Other times I catch him, like, fleeing down the stairs and going outside. He’s like a ghost but, like, you could touch him and feel him if you just reach out. I never touch him, though. I’m never quick enough. Once, I followed him out into the front yard and I was halfway down the hill before I realized I was sleepwalking or something and that there was no one there. And now I’m wondering if it’s the guy, you know? The one across the street who called her name? If it wasn’t Das Hillyard, then who was it?”
—It was Gas Head, said other-Aaron. I remembered my half-dream from the night before in the motel, a half-dream that was also a memory. You had muttered that strange phrase in your sleep: Gas Head will make you dead. That’s where it had come from, but I still didn’t know what it meant.
Holly’s was the last bedroom at the top of the stairs. A pair of windows looked down the slope of the wooded hillside and to the road below. The windows were open, the sheer curtains billowing like ballgowns. It was, for all I could determine, the bedroom of a typical teenage girl. Posters filled the walls, and there was a small desk and vanity with a gaming console on it. A large TV sat on a bureau and faced the bed, which was packaged in a bedspread with what looked like embroidered marijuana leaves on it. The carpet was brown shag, and it was littered with clothes, grubby with dried gunk, pockets of it filled with small colored beads, shards of broken pencils, a single glittering earring. The closet door stood open, and I could make out a wall of junk in there as well, everything held together by sheer force of will.
“When your kid dies, you find that you’re not afraid of nothing no more,” Rita said. She did not enter the room.
I stepped inside Holly’s bedroom, looked around. A traitor, a grave-robber. The reek of old cigarettes caused a momentary pang of grief to rise through the center of my body. How many times had I snuck off to smoke so you wouldn’t smell it, Allison? That one pitiful vice now, in the wake of your death, felt like a betrayal tantamount to infidelity. And yet I was still doing it.
“The cops searched her computer and all her social media, back when they were still looking for the guy,” Rita said from the doorway. “They looked through her phone, too, which they’d found back, well… I mean, she’d left her phone behind and they were able to search it, even though it was broken. They found it on the bridge. I really don’t know how all that technology works.” Her voice snagged. “I was surprised to learn she’d been applying to colleges. Imagine that? Hadn’t said anything to me. Not that I got the money to send her anywhere.”
“Was she a good student?”
“Not good enough for a scholarship.”
“Neither was I,” I said, which was a lie.
Still in the doorway, Rita said, “See those? On the mirror?”
“These?” I pointed at the collection of photographs that were glued to the frame of the vanity.
“Look at her,” Rita said, her voice sounding farther away than it actually was. “She was just a baby, really. That’s all. Seventeen ain’t no age to die.”
Holly Renfrow was mostly with friends in the photos—a gaggle of bright, shiny girls and boys, peace signs and sexy poses, kisses for the camera, Halloween costumes, funky hairdos and overdone eyeshadow, the mangy mutt from the yard, a teenage boy kissing the side of another girl’s face, someone’s rust-eaten blue Firebird, roasting marshmallows before a campfire, cigarettes in their mouths.
“I try so hard not to think about what happened to her,” Rita said. “Those last moments of her life. But there it is, whenever I shut my eyes. These images just sort of jump into my head and I can’t get rid of them. Cops say she wasn’t… you know… raped or nothing. So I guess there’s that.” She turned away from me and stared off down the hallway. “That other girl,” she said. “How’d she die?”
I didn’t want to say it, but I felt I had an obligation, now that I was here dissecting this woman’s misery. “She’d been strangled.”
“Is that how you made the connection between her and Holly?”
“What do you mean?”
“That they were both strangled.”
I looked up at Rita’s reflection in the vanity mirror. “Chief Lovering said
Holly had drowned.”
“Technically, yeah, I guess so,” Rita said. “Holly was still alive when she went into the river. Maybe not conscious, but alive. She’d breathed water into her lungs. That’s what the medical examiner’s report said. But it also said that whoever had done that to her, there was evidence that she’d been… I mean, that someone had been… been choking her before she fell in the river… that her throat showed, uh, signs of… uh, signs that she…”
I straightened my back and turned around. Stared at her. She was lost again, her eyes unfocused and bleary, wandering the halls of her memory.
“Rita,” I said.
She blinked and her vision refocused on me. “Guess it was a mistake reading that damn thing,” she said. “Gives me night mares.” She shivered, then said, “Do you mind shutting the windows? I open them to air the place out every once in a while—she was always smoking up here, and not just cigarettes—but it’s starting to get cold.”
I went to the windows and peered out. I could see their mailbox down there beside the road, a wooden mallard with rotating propellers for wings. I could see my car parked down there, too, and the patch of dirt across the street where the mysterious figure might have stood and called to Holly a few nights before she was killed. Had he been able to see into her bedroom window from down there? Had he spied on her for nights prior to murdering her?
I shut one window, then the other. Those ghostly curtains went still.
“Thank you,” Rita said from the doorway.
“Rita, do you remember seeing a dark-colored sedan in the street or parked nearby? Something like an unmarked police car, with one of those spotlights on the door?”
“I don’t remember. I don’t know if I would have noticed.”
“Did Holly say if she saw a vehicle that night?”
Rita shook her head. She was gnawing on a thumbnail, a medicated look in her eyes.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Her yearbooks are on the bottom shelf,” Rita said. She motioned toward a rank of bookshelves that stood beside the vanity. Paperback novels and hardback Harry Potter cluttered the top shelves while the bottom held the slender volumes of yearbooks, textbooks, magazines, and random frills of loose-leaf paper.
I crouched down to examine the spines of the books on the bottom shelf. Somewhere in the house, the chirping of a cell phone drew Rita from the doorway; she said nothing as she slipped back down the stairs and disappeared.
Holly had just started her senior year when she was murdered, and had amassed three yearbooks from Jefferson High School. I slid all three volumes from the shelf and saw right away that none of them sported a green deer on the cover. Jefferson High School’s mascot was a cougar, its roaring muzzle rimmed in gold. There would be no confusing it. I opened one of the yearbooks and saw the countless signatures from Holly’s friends and classmates, the bubble-hearted sentiments and goofy drawings, the see you next years.
I closed the book and slid them all back onto the shelf when, at my back, the dog barked—two sharp reports that sounded like a starter’s pistol. I turned around to see the dog from the yard now standing in the center of the room, barking not at me but at the open closet door. Something moved inside the closet—the transference of a figure from one side to the other.
The closet light blinked on. There was no one standing in the closet, but in the new light, I could see Holly’s clothes swaying as if disturbed by some presence.
I stood up and approached the closet. The little dog took a tentative step backward, not because of my approach, but as if it sensed something it did not like emanating from that open closet door. I felt a twinge of apprehension, too. I swept aside the clothes that had been swaying when the light had come on, bracing myself for whatever tragic and impossible thing that might be crouching behind them—
(I keep dreaming that there’s someone in the house)
—but of course there was nothing there. Just the wall.
I looked around at the rest of the clothes, the board games and puzzle boxes stacked on the top shelf, the jumble of sneakers and a pair of ice skates on the floor, the stuffed animals with droopy heads wedged into one corner. There was an open cardboard box on the floor of the closet, a pale pink sweatshirt folded inside it. It hooked my attention because of the bright red label on one of the box’s flaps that read PROPERTY OF FURNACE WV POLICE DEPARTMENT. I knelt down and lifted the sweatshirt out of the box. SAINT FRANCIS YOUTH LEAGUE was printed in blocky red letters across the front of the sweatshirt.
At my back, the dog whined then ran out of the bedroom.
Overhead, the closet light flickered.
I brought the sweatshirt to my face, inhaled its scent. Like the rest of the room, it smelled vaguely of cigarettes.
Rita spoke up from the doorway, startling me. “Saint Francis Youth League. It’s a local youth group. They do cookouts and camping trips in the summer, help the elderly in the winter. That sort of thing.”
“This was the sweatshirt Hillyard had in his house?”
Her face went grim. She nodded, her eyes growing distant again.
I folded the sweatshirt and placed it back into the box.
“Did you find what you were looking for?” She looked at the bookshelf while she hugged herself.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’m sorry to have wasted your time.”
Rita nodded. She covered her mouth with one hand as if she might be sick.
Before leaving, I asked if she still had a copy of the medical examiner’s report.
“I burned it,” she said. “Right out there in the fire pit. Made me sick to keep it in the house. It was a mistake, Mr. Decker, reading that horrible thing. A huge mistake.”
3
We stepped back outside. Rita shivered as a gust of wind wove through the hillside, rattling the leaves in the trees.
“It’s cold out here,” she said. “Doesn’t really warm up around here until late summer. And even then, we’ve only got a few good weeks of real heat.” She smiled at me, a smile that was soft and not without grace. It hurt my heart to witness it. “Anyway, take care,” she said, and headed back into the house.
I turned my face skyward. It was as if the mention of how chilly it was had caused an icy bolt to tremor through my body. Overhead, the sun poked a spear of white light through the otherwise oppressive clouds. Shivering, I headed back across the yard toward the slope of the hillside that led down to the street. Inside the work shed, Chip clanged around and muttered to himself. He appeared in the doorway as a broad-shouldered silhouette, rubbing the nape of his neck with one big hand.
The sensation that I’d overlooked something vital rose up in me then—a breathy, other-Aaron whisper that burned in my right ear and stirred the hairs on my neck to attention. I was still thinking about the car that had stopped alongside Denise Lenchantin on the night Holly was murdered. Days earlier, a man had been out here calling out to Holly. Had the same car been parked somewhere along this road? Had someone else seen a similar vehicle in the vicinity the night Holly was killed?
Chip noticed me, nodded in my direction. I raised a hand in return, then wound my way back down the hillside to where my car was parked in the road.
4
Trina Garton had been Holly’s best friend, and she had been with her at the Exxon arcade the night of Holly’s murder, along with a local kid named Ian. Trina and Holly had had an argument over a boy, which was the reason Holly had left on foot that night. Trina worked at the Burger Barn, a fast-food joint where all the employees wore paper hats and red suspenders. I got all this information from your notes, Allison. It seemed you had spoken with the girl on your visit out here last fall.
Trina was seventeen, pretty, waifish. Her hair was long and chestnut-colored, limp beneath her paper hat. She was still visibly shaken over what had happened to her best friend as we sat talking in one of the booths inside the Burger Barn.
“Did she ever mention someone hanging around h
er house, maybe in the days before she was killed?” I asked the girl.
Trina had been gazing out the window, where a pair of crows pecked at some bloody gruel on the pavement. She looked at me now. “How’d you know about that?”
“Her mother told me. Holly mentioned something about it to you, too?”
“Holly didn’t keep no secrets from me. She said a man had been watching her. A man who knew her name. She saw him outside her house one night, but she started to think he was always hanging around, even if she couldn’t see him.”
“Why would she think that?”
“Because she could smell him.”
“Smell him? What’s that mean?”
“When she saw him across the street, she said she could smell him, a smell like a fire. Like something burning. And then she’d smell it again somewhere else, and wonder if he was lurking around. Only…” Her voice trailed off.
“Only what?”
“Only she started thinking maybe it wasn’t a man at all.”
“What does that mean?”
Trina turned away from me, directing her gaze on the crows in the parking lot again. “I don’t know,” she said, her voice barely a whisper.
“What about a car? Like an unmarked police car with a light on the door? You know the kind I’m talking about?”
She shrugged, wouldn’t look me in the eye.
“Did you ever notice a car like that driving around?”
“I don’t know.”
“Were you driving that night?”
“The night Holly was killed? Yeah.”
“I know you guys got into an argument and that’s why Holly left.”
Trina seemed to become smaller before my eyes, and I realized this had not been the thing to say to this girl. It sounded too accusatory.
“Are there any schools around here that have a deer as a mascot?” I asked, changing the subject.
