by Ronald Malfi
“What?” She looked at me.
“A deer,” I said. “You know—as a mascot?”
She raised her narrow shoulders in a shrug before returning her gaze out the window.
“Trina, what happened was not your fault.”
She nodded fervently, bouncy little jerks of her head. She did not meet my eyes, but kept her gaze trained on the crows snacking on roadkill in the parking lot.
“Anyway, I’m sorry to bring all this up,” I said, sliding out of the booth. “I’m sorry about what happened to your friend.”
I went outside, patting down my pockets for my cigarettes. There was one left in the pack. I shook it out, lit it, then thought of you. I pitched it to the ground and crushed it under my shoe. Mentally exhausted, I leaned against the Sube while I listened to a train whistle in the distance. When I looked across the parking lot, I saw Trina crossing the tarmac toward me. She was hugging herself with her thin arms, much like Rita Renfrow had done while standing in the doorway of her daughter’s bedroom. Her dark hair billowed out behind her.
“That car,” she said, coming up to me but still not meeting my gaze. “I think I saw it that night.”
“Yeah?”
“After Holly left, me and Ian went looking for a place to… you know… to park?”
“Ian’s the guy who was with you two that night, right? He’s your boyfriend?”
“Yeah. I mean, we’re kinda dating. We went to the overlook that night. It’s this place where we sometimes go? There’s a lot of trees and you can’t really see it from the road, so kids sometimes go there? So we went, but there was a car there, and I remember thinking it was a cop. Because of what you said.”
“The spotlight on the car door?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you remember anything else about the car?”
“It was brown, a brown car. That’s all I remember.”
“Was someone in the car?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you happen to see the license plate?” I knew it was a long shot.
“No. We pulled in then drove back out. Ian had some, you know, some pot? We didn’t want to get stopped by any cops.”
“Did you tell this to the police?”
“About the pot?”
“About the car.”
“They never asked about it. Should I have?”
“It’s okay.”
She nodded. She was staring at her sneakers. Across the parking lot, the crows shrieked and, startled by something, took to the air.
“How do I get to this overlook place?” I asked.
5
There was a narrow strip of asphalt that cut through the woods, and it reminded me of the night you and I drove out to Manresa and searched for headlight ghosts. It concluded in a paved parking area at the cusp of a high ridge. Trash was strewn about the underbrush—empty beer bottles and discarded packets of cigarettes, mostly. Through the trees, I could see the openness of the sky, and knew that this ridge overlooked the river. I got out of the car and stood there for a moment, not moving, as if to harness something pertinent and illuminating from the atmosphere. I heard birds chirping and the wind murmuring through the trees. I heard, too, Rita Renfrow’s voice, speaking up in the center of my brain: When your kid dies, you find that you’re not afraid of nothing no more.
If this was where Trina Garton saw the brown sedan that night, was this also the spot where Holly had been taken to by her murderer? It was certainly secluded enough from the main road.
Rita Renfrow’s voice trickled in again: 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.
I crept through the trees, veering away from a used condom that looked like a large drip of snot dangling from a tree branch. The ground was not flat, but rather sloped at a sharp angle pitched down toward the edge of the ridge. As I drew closer to the edge, I used nearby tree branches as handholds. Bits of gravel and sand slid out from beneath my shoes and bustled in compact little avalanches down the slope.
Then, suddenly, the ground fell away beneath my feet. Tree limbs were stripped from my hands, slicing my palms, as I fell backward onto my ass and slid through the underbrush toward the edge of the cliff. It rushed up out of nowhere, the weedy ledge suddenly right there, illusory and precarious. At the last minute, my senses re-engaged and I managed to dig the heels of my shoes into the crumbly brown earth while scrabbling at the ground with my hands, halting my progress. Rocks and debris cascaded over the edge of the cliff; I watched them tumble down into infinity, my heart hammering against my chest, my breath coming in shaky gasps.
One of my legs swung out over the edge of the cliff. I felt gravity’s ravenous tug on me and grappled for anything, scraping at the earth with my fingers. I snagged a sizable root that arched from the loose soil and pulled myself up.
I was more cautious now, seeing how easily the loose ground had surrendered beneath me. Far below, the Potomac roiled and frothed. Men fished from the opposite shore, tiny colored splotches from such a distance. Against the horizon, I could make out the stone bridge spanning the river.
I drew myself into a seated position and tried to catch my breath.
—If Holly’s killer had approached her on the bridge then brought her to this spot to murder her, maybe the arrival of Trina and Ian had spooked him before he could finish the job. It was other-Aaron, reasoning his way through it all. Perhaps he had bound her hands and attempted to strangle her, only to see Trina’s headlights coming through the trees. Seeing an opportunity, perhaps Holly had gotten away. Perhaps she’d run in a blind panic and had gone over the cliff herself.
It would explain why Holly hadn’t been strangled like Gabby had.
I peered over the edge and looked down, careful to keep a sturdy grip on a nearby tree limb to prevent me from falling over the side. What I saw was a partially submerged deadfall directly below, its black and shiny branches rising up out of the tide and clawing at the air. Perhaps the very same deadfall that had snared Holly’s body as the river’s current tried to wash her out into the bay.
CHAPTER TEN
1
I pulled the Sube into the parking lot of the Exxon station where Holly had last been seen alive. The place was larger than a typical gas station, and I could make out the neon ARCADE sign in one smoky black window. There were a few men in hunting attire loading up their trucks with coolers and fishing gear in the parking lot. I got out of the car and went inside.
The store was empty. “Come Go With Me” by the Del-Vikings played on tinny speakers, but otherwise the place was dead quiet, except for a steamy hiss emanating from a coffee station against one wall. I headed down an aisle toward the rear of the store, where, in an adjoining room, about a half-dozen arcade consoles stood against the wall like suspects in a lineup. There were a couple of Formica tables in here, too, and a trashcan painted to look like R2-D2. The air back here smelled of overheated electronic equipment. I looked up and saw a video camera tucked into one corner, where the wood-paneled wall met the acoustical ceiling tiles. I didn’t enter the room, merely observed it from the doorway, and tried to imagine Holly Renfrow, a girl I did not know, in this place while her own cosmic clock counted down the seconds until her death. I leaned against the doorframe. There was no door on the frame, and the frame itself was covered in graffiti—mostly names or initials or crude little slogans written in different colored marker or carved into the wood itself. How many generations had marched through here and left their initials on this doorframe?
One set of initials caught my attention over all the others, and not simply because it was directly in my line of sight. Printed with a stark black Sharpie were the initials ALD. Allison Leigh Decker.
This wasn’t you, of course. They could have been anyone’s initials. And while you had come out here, spent some time here, most likely even visited this place during your investigation, I found it highly i
mplausible that you would pause in your research to print those three letters among all the others right here on this doorframe, exactly where I happened to be standing. The idea was ludicrous.
Nonetheless, I took a pen from my coat pocket and printed ALD—Aaron Lee Decker—directly beside yours. When I finished, I found that my hand was shaking and my heart was galloping in my chest. A clammy, amphibious sweat sprung from my pores.
A shift, then—not so much in the atmosphere, but in my immediate line of sight, where a narrow channel had appeared and was yawning straight ahead of me, the colors of that world duller than the surrounding world. I could still see the arcade, the tinted windows, the R2-D2 trashcan, but it was like peering through the crack of a partially open door, the interior slightly distorted and off-color. I adjusted my weight from one foot to the other to alter my perception, and with it the channel slewed from view. I shifted back and it returned—a passage carved through the center of this world, or so it appeared, my flesh tingling, the Del-Vikings growing fainter and fainter on the speakers until the music was nothing more than a distant pulse of static…
“The hell you doing?”
I nearly jumped out of my socks at the sound of the man’s voice. I whirled around to find a towering, lanky fellow sporting an eye-patch gazing down at me with his solitary peeper. The son of a bitch looked at least seven feet tall. He wore a nametag that said gary.
“I’m sorry,” I said, shoving the pen back in my pocket as quickly as possible. “I didn’t mean to…” I motioned at the doorframe. “I thought this was, like, a thing.”
Gary said nothing, only cast a red-hot laser beam at me from his one remaining eye. The patch he wore over the missing eye looked like it was made from an old catcher’s mitt, which gave it an eerie, flesh-like quality.
“I’ll just grab a pack of smokes,” I said. It was the first thing that came to mind.
“Behind the counter.” He pivoted and moved toward the counter at the front of the store. His gait was uncannily like the swinging-armed stride of Bigfoot in those old blurry filmstrips.
Before following him, I glanced back in the direction of the arcade, desperate to glimpse that odd rip in the fabric of the universe I thought I’d seen a moment ago. But there was nothing there. Or if there was, I was no longer permitted to view it.
“That security camera in the back room,” I said, coming up to the counter. “Is that the only one in the store?”
Without looking up from scanning my smokes, Gary pointed over my head toward the front door. I turned and saw two additional security cameras bolted to the metal doorframe, one facing the counter and one pointing out into the parking lot.
“I’m working with a reporter who’s investigating the murder of that teenage girl who was killed out here last fall,” I said. “I understand there was some surveillance footage from the night she was here? The night she died?”
He made a sound that might have been an acknowledgement or might have been him clearing phlegm from his esophagus.
“Do you think I’d be able to view the footage?”
He slid my smokes across the counter then quoted me the amount owed. I dug out my wallet and paid the guy in cash.
“You police?” he asked.
“No, sir.”
“What you interested for?”
“Like I said, I’m working with a reporter who was looking into it.”
“Murder’s been solved,” he said as he counted out my change. “Nothing to investigate.”
“Yeah, so I’ve heard. I’d still like to look at that footage, though, if you’ll let me.”
He handed me back my change in silence.
“You don’t recall seeing a brown sedan with a spotlight on the driver’s door that night, do you?” I asked him. “Maybe looked like an unmarked police car?”
“Hundred dollars,” he said.
“What?”
“Hundred dollars. To look at the tape.”
“Seriously?”
He hoisted one pointy shoulder in a lazy shrug then wended down the length of the counter toward a closed door marked private.
“Okay, wait,” I called after him. “Fine. A hundred bucks. You got an ATM?”
His impossibly long arm rose up over a tall display of scratch-offs. He pointed toward the ATM, which was wedged between a rack of straw sombreros and the coffee station. I went to it, fed it my ATM card, then groaned at the ridiculous five-dollar service fee.
When I returned to the counter, the fellow had one finger working around beneath his eye-patch while his other hand was extended to receive the money. I laid the five twenties in his palm. To my surprise, he produced a queer little change purse from his hip pocket, folded the bills into it, then tucked it away again.
“A’ight,” he grunted, and beckoned me to follow him with a flap of his long arm.
We went into the room marked PRIVATE. It was a cramped, narrow little chamber, with shelves of electronic equipment, including a flat-screen television monitor on one cinderblock wall. There were some cleaning supplies back here and a couple of folding chairs propped up in one corner. A poster of Miley Cyrus as Hannah Montana stared out at me from the wall above the chairs, unsettling in its out-of-placeness. The whole room smelled like a toilet had overflowed in here.
Gary went to the shelf and rummaged around some of the items. “Burned a disc for the police and made a copy for myself, in case some magazine wants to pay big bucks for it,” he said, producing a rewritable DVD in a white paper sleeve. “You ain’t the only one come looking to watch it, either.”
“Who else came to watch it?”
“Pretty gal. Newspaper reporter.”
“When was this?”
“Couple days after they found the girl’s body down at the river.”
“Allison,” I said.
“Don’t recall a name.”
“How much did you charge her?”
“Nothing.” He sneered at me, his one eye blazing like a lighthouse beaming through night fog. His teeth were irregular little coffee beans. “Like I said, a pretty gal.”
He removed the disc from its paper sleeve, bent over, and fed it into the DVD player. The TV came on automatically, a bright blue screen that was quickly replaced by a quadrant of images, each of the four boxes on the screen a different location in or around the store. I recognized the arcade, the main part of the store, the parking lot, and what appeared to be an alleyway behind the store where overgrown trees hugged a large dumpster.
“You get a lot of thefts back there?” I pointed in particular to the image of the dumpster.
“Came across a bobcat one night taking out the trash.”
“There was a bobcat taking out the trash?” I offered a meager grin to show I was joking, but he ignored it.
“Made a noise like a garbage disposal before running off into the trees,” he said. “Had teeth like bolts. Since then, I check the camera before I go out back at night.”
I examined the other three screens. It was nighttime on the video, and the parking lot footage was a patchwork of shadow and light. When the occasional car drove by on the road out front, all I could see were headlights and the barest suggestion of a vehicle. If a brown sedan were to drive by, I probably wouldn’t be able to identify it. The footage of the interior of the store showed only Gary standing behind the counter, stacking cartons of cigarettes on an overhead shelf.
It was the footage of the arcade that drew my attention. Two teenage girls sat at one of the tables while a tall boy in basketball shorts played one of the arcade games. The footage had a slightly fish-eyed distortion to it, but I could tell that the girl with blonde hair seated at the table was Holly Renfrow. She possessed the delicate profile that I’d seen in her photographs, undeniable on this security footage. When she turned her head, I saw that her hair had been shaved down to the scalp on the right side. The friend seated opposite her was Trina Garton. They were both smoking cigarettes.
“Do you know any of these
kids?” I asked.
“Well, she’s the dead one,” he said, tapping Holly’s image on the screen. “They’re all from town. Don’t know their names.”
“Do you live in Furnace?”
“I got a place up on the hill,” he said, which didn’t actually tell me anything. He handed me a slender black remote control. “Watch it as many times as you want. I’m going back out.”
“Is Das Hillyard on this footage?”
“Sure is,” Gary said as he sauntered out of the room.
“What does he look like?” I’d seen the lone photo of him online, along with the news article of his death and subsequent conviction in absentia back in January, but I wasn’t sure I’d be able to recognize him on the video.
“Like a goddamn pervert,” he said, and closed the door, leaving me alone.
The only light in the room came from the TV, so I tripped over a mop that was leaning against a wall on my way to retrieve one of the folding chairs. I set the chair up in front of the TV and watched.
There was the date stamped in one corner of the screen, a scrolling time-code beside it. By 9:43 pm, it was clear that Holly and Trina were engaged in an argument that was growing more heated by the second. The teenage boy in the basketball shorts—Ian, I assumed—occasionally glanced over his shoulder at them, but for the most part remained entranced by the videogame. A minute later, a man in a fishing vest entered the store. He was tall and slender but with a swollen bulge of belly protruding beneath his tight-fitting thermal shirt. He went down one aisle, absently observed some items there, then turned in the direction of the arcade. There was no audio to go along with the footage, but I could tell just by looking that Holly’s and Trina’s voices were probably growing in volume as their argument became more heated. Ian turned away from the videogame console at one point and interjected something but neither girl seemed to pay him any attention. It was most likely the girls’ argument that had attracted Das Hillyard’s attention.
After several seconds, Hillyard turned away from the arcade room and sauntered up to the counter. His features swam into digital focus—pocked, sallow cheeks, narrow little eyes recessed behind squinty folds, hair greased back into a scraggly ponytail. On the video, his age was indeterminable. I was reminded of the photo that had accompanied the news article from January; I got the same loathsome sense just watching him amble around the store on the video. He purchased a container of chewing tobacco and some scratch-offs from Gary then wound his way back toward the front of the store. He paused and cast a final glance back at the arcade room—on the other screen, the girls were standing and arguing now, Holly jabbing an accusing finger at Trina—before exiting into the night. The parking lot footage followed him to a dilapidated, two-tone Ford F-150. He got in and the headlights momentarily washed out the screen. In the store, Gary slipped out from behind the counter, crossed the floor, and stood in the doorway of the arcade where he could be seen talking to the teenagers. Hillyard’s pickup backed out of the parking lot and trundled onto the road as Gary returned to the front counter and Holly pitched her cigarette butt onto the floor of the arcade. Trina turned away from Holly, sidling up beside Ian, who flapped his arms, the expression on his face one of futility. Holly turned and headed for the door, but stopped as Ian began talking to her. He seemed upset, civil, placating. This was just a guess, of course, judging by his expression glimpsed through a fish-eye lens. Holly, I could see, was crying. It was a simple teenage spat, nothing more… but knowing the outcome, it struck me as unimaginably tragic. No wonder Trina Garton couldn’t look me in the eye as I asked her questions about that night. She would carry the guilt of that night with her for a long time.
