by Ronald Malfi
Ian followed Holly out into the store, perhaps trying to convince her not to leave. Holly was having none of it. When he reached out to grab her forearm, she slugged him and marched right out into the parking lot. Rubbing his arm, Ian watched her go, then retreated like a wounded puppy back into the arcade, where Trina sat on the tabletop lighting another cigarette. Ian was the boy they’d been fighting over, I suddenly realized. The way Holly had struck him when he’d reached for her arm, coupled with the look in her eyes: It was no wonder Trina’s guilt was overflowing.
I leaned closer to the TV screen and watched Holly Renfrow campaign across the parking lot until the darkness swallowed her up. Hillyard had already driven off and there were no lights beyond the parking lot. It was as if Holly had vanished like a ghost into the night. And in a way, she had.
I had been so occupied with what had transpired in the arcade while simultaneously studying Das Hillyard on the store camera that I did not pick up on what was happening in the back alley until my third viewing of the video footage. Moments after Holly had fled the convenience store, a pair of headlamps blinked on in the darkness of the back alley. There was a vehicle parked behind the dumpster and a meshwork of autumn tree limbs, something that had been there all along but hadn’t been visible until the headlights came on. I could not discern the make and model of the vehicle in the dark and given the grainy footage of the surveillance video. The headlights shrank incrementally as the vehicle reversed beyond the trees. For a moment, they were blocked completely by the dumpster… but then they reappeared and swerved out of view of the camera completely, heading toward what I estimated to be the main road. A thick cloud of exhaust rolled in front of the camera. A handful of seconds later, those same headlights appeared on the road that ran in front of the gas station parking lot. The vehicle moved more slowly than any of the others that had passed along that stretch of road throughout the night—methodical and plodding, like a predator stalking prey. I could not make out any details of the car as it coasted by, except that it expelled a cloud of dark smoke in its wake. But I didn’t need to. I was convinced that it was a brown sedan with a spotlight on the door.
2
One-eyed Gary was changing the filter in one of the coffee makers when I came out of the back room.
“Can I keep this?” I asked, holding up the DVD.
“I’ll burn you a copy,” Gary said. “For twenty bucks.”
“Are you serious?”
“Twenty,” he said.
I paid him another twenty bucks, and Gary vanished into the backroom to burn me a copy of the disc. He was grinning smugly when he reappeared, and handed me the DVD in a paper sleeve, which I tucked into the pocket of my peacoat. Before heading back out into the daylight, however, I paused, a thought having just occurred to me. It was your face that swam across the screen of my consciousness, Allison.
“That pretty reporter who showed up here a few days after they found Holly’s body in the river,” I said. “You got video footage from that day, too?”
One-eyed Gary chewed on the inside of his cheek. Something akin to suspicion danced in his eyes, but it quickly fled as he watched me open my wallet again. “I can probably dig it up for you, sure,” he said.
“How much?”
He extended his hand, quoted me a price, and I paid it.
3
There you were, on a grainy bit of surveillance footage, your dark raven hair obscured by a red beret. You spoke with Gary behind the counter, flashed your smile. He was right—you did not need to pay this man any money. It was your charm, your aura, your persuasion that got you in the door. He led you into the room marked PRIVATE and you stayed in there, watching the surveillance footage that I had also just watched. Did you see the same thing in it that I saw, Allison? Those headlights coming alive in the dark like eyes? Or were you already targeting someone specific, someone who was featured in a dead girl’s yearbook with a green deer on the cover? If only I could read your mind via the transmission of this video footage, suck your thoughts like a psychic vampire, maybe another piece of the curtain would be swept aside, another section of the puzzle dropped into place. How could I tell? How would I know?
When you exited the room, you went straight to the arcade. The camera in there picked you up, your features distorted by the fish-eye lens. You did not enter the room but merely surveyed it from the doorway. Taking in information just by proximity. You turned to leave, but then paused. You examined the graffiti on the doorframe—the initials wrapped in hearts, the phrases scrawled with marker or engraved by a blade. You headed down an aisle, tugged a marker from a metal arm poking out of the shelf. You opened the package, returned to the doorway, and printed something—your initials—on the frame. Then, realizing that the cameras were watching you, you looked up and stared directly into one. Your face—a face I hadn’t seen in months—stared up at me. You stared up at me. Here I was, looking into your eyes while you stared back into mine. In that moment, we were together again, gazing into each other’s souls.
4
Back in my motel room, I fired up my laptop and fell backward into the past. For each of the six girls, I searched for the names of their high schools and for images of their mascots. Margot
Idelson, the killer’s first victim, had attended John Tyler High School in Norfolk, Virginia, up until she was found dead ten miles from her home, her body face-down in a shallow creek, in the fall of 2006. John Tyler’s mascot was not a green deer but a bulldog with a spiked collar.
Next, I traveled to 2008, to Bishop, North Carolina, where the body of sixteen-year-old Shelby Davenport was found in a quarry. The Bishop High School mascot was a Viking, but after I conferred with your notes and the articles detailing Davenport’s death, I learned that she had been homeschooled and had not attended Bishop High.
I repeated this process for Lauren Chastain of Vineland, New Jersey; for Megan Pollock of Whitehall, Delaware; and for Gabrielle Colson-Howe of Port Tobacco, Maryland. I conducted an image search for each high school’s yearbooks with the terms “green” and “deer” included in the search bar. There were no green deer in sight.
—Maybe there was no yearbook at all, other-Aaron piped up. Maybe Denise Lenchantin just had too much to drink that night and was confused. Or maybe she was just trying to impress you. She wanted to seem helpful so she made something up. Besides, how the hell would Allison have concluded that the killer had gone to school with one of his victims? There’s nothing in her notes to suggest that.
That was true, but—
—But nothing. Lenchantin made it up. You’re searching for a ghost.
I didn’t believe that. It didn’t seem… right.
—There’s something else that isn’t right, said other-Aaron. Did you notice, or did it slip right by you?
What?
—Back at the convenience store? On the videotape?
Had I missed something?
—Yes, said other-Aaron. Yes, you did.
“Tell me,” I said out loud, and looked up from my laptop, as if expecting other-Aaron to be right there in the room with me, perhaps perched on the edge of the bed. Of course, there was no one perched on the edge of the bed. I was alone in the room. And as if to underscore my loosening grasp on reality, I was suddenly hearing Denise Lenchantin’s voice in my head from the night before: Maybe you’ve got a split personality, like in the movies. I’m being playful, can you tell?
Someone knocked on my motel room door, startling me. I closed my laptop, swung off the side of the bed, and peered through the peephole in the door. It was Chip, Rita Renfrow’s boyfriend. He was standing out there wearing an army-green nylon jacket and he had his big beefy hands wedged into the pockets of his jeans.
I opened the door and said, “Chip. What are you doing here?”
“I think we need to talk,” he said, the words shuttling out of his mouth on a nervous burst of air.
“How’d you know I was here?”
“It’s the only mote
l close to town. I saw your car.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder to where the Sube was parked.
“Right,” I said, opening the door wider. “Come in.”
He hurried inside but did not seem to relax even after I closed the door.
“Chip, what’s the matter? What’s wrong?”
“Look,” he said. “I need to tell you something. I been thinking about it since you came by the house earlier. I just thought I’d come talk.”
“Okay.”
“So, yeah,” he said, shifting from one foot to the other. He reminded me of a kid about to confess some misdeed to the school principal. “Holly’s sweatshirt. The police didn’t find it in Das Hillyard’s house.”
I stared at him, thought I’d misheard him. “What do you mean?”
“Those cops were in and out of Rita’s house since this whole thing happened. I was there on one of the days they came by. The cops. They searched Holly’s room a couple times after… you know, after they found her. But after Hillyard was found dead, they came and carried some stuff out of Holly’s room. They took that sweatshirt with them.”
“The pink one,” I said, to make sure. “Saint Francis Youth League.”
“Right, yeah. That one.”
“You’re sure about this, Chip?”
“I saw them carry it out of the house.”
“Who did, exactly?”
“Hercel.”
“Chief Lovering,” I said. “He took the sweatshirt from Holly’s room? You saw this?”
“Right. I don’t think he realized that I saw him, and I didn’t think nothing of it until later, when they said they found it in Hillyard’s house. I knew that wasn’t true, but I figured the guy was a piece of shit, and that he probably did kill Holly, so I wasn’t gonna say nothing. Cops, they gotta do what they gotta do. Also, it gave Rita some closure, you know? She wanted them to catch the guy who did it so I figured no harm, no foul.”
I was nodding along with his story, trying to appear cool and collected, but inside, my body was boiling over with a heat that felt like molten lava. If I opened my mouth, a jet of steam might burst out.
“When you came around the house saying that Hillyard might not have done it and that the real guy might still be out there somewhere, well, I don’t know, man. I guess I thought I should tell you what I saw.”
“You’re positive about this, Chip?”
“Swear to God, man.”
And that was when I realized what other-Aaron had just been hinting at regarding the video footage: Holly Renfrow had not been wearing that pink sweatshirt in the surveillance video. She had been dressed all in black on the night she had been murdered.
“Jesus Christ,” I said, and ran a shaky hand through my hair.
“Look, Mr. Decker, I don’t wanna get nobody in trouble. I just thought you should know.”
“I’m glad you told me,” I said.
“And I didn’t say nothing to Rita. I don’t think she’d take it too well. You get me?”
“I get you.”
“I’m saying don’t say anything to her.”
“Right,” I said. “I understand.”
“And another thing,” he said, and cleared his throat. “You came and told Rita that Holly’s killer’s still out there. You stirred that all up after she thought Hillyard had done it and that the case had been closed. Well, lemme just say you better find the guy who really did it and make this thing right for her again. Because now she’s in hell all over again.”
My throat felt tight. It was all I could do to eke out the word, “Okay.”
Chip wrung his hands together then went to the door. “You never saw me,” he said. “I was never here.”
“You’re a ghost,” I told him.
He slipped out of the motel room and into the waning daylight.
5
The Furnace Police Department was housed in a historic brick building that looked like it had once been an armory during the Civil War. There were wrought-iron bars on the windows and the brickwork appeared to have sustained a barrage of small-caliber rounds at some point in its long history. It sat downhill from a quaint stone church, the land between the two buildings studded with ancient tombstones and flowering dogwood trees.
I pulled up outside the police station to find Chief Lovering standing on the cemetery grounds, hands on his hips, scrutinizing a section of the stationhouse roof that appeared to be sinking. He turned in my direction as I pulled into a spot beside a police cruiser and got out of the car.
“Is that Aaron Decker? Mr. Decker, you’re becoming a permanent fixture around here,” Lovering said as I approached.
“I think you made a very big mistake,” I responded, moving toward him down an aisle of tombstones.
Hercel Lovering did not seem perturbed in the least by my statement. His hands still planted on his hips, he kept his gaze leveled on me, his face expressionless. He said nothing.
“I know you took Holly’s sweatshirt from her bedroom,” I said. “It was never in Hillyard’s house.”
“Is that right,” he said. It was not a question.
“Rita’s boyfriend saw you take it from the house.”
“Charles Zacks doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground.”
“I also reviewed the security footage from the Exxon station from the night Holly was killed. She wasn’t wearing the sweatshirt. She’s dressed all in black. My guess is she probably stopped wearing pink right around the same time she stopped playing with dolls.”
Hercel Lovering took an easy step in my direction. For now, his hands were content to remain on his wide hips. “Mr. Decker, I’ve been very patient with you, feeling bad as I do about what happened to your wife. But I’ve only got so much patience to go around, you understand?”
“Holly’s killer is still out there. That man who stopped Denise Lenchantin in Hampshire County the same night Holly was killed? I think that was the guy. I think my wife believed that was the guy.”
Lovering frowned. “You’re talking about that waitress again?”
“You told me Lenchantin was approached around eleven o’clock that night, making it impossible for Holly’s killer to drive the ninety miles from Furnace to Romney in such a short time. But Lenchantin’s shift ended at midnight that night, not eleven, giving Holly’s killer an extra hour to make it out there.”
“Mr. Decker—”
“My wife also believed that the killer knew one of his victims, that he’d either gone to high school with her or was maybe even on the faculty.”
“You’re back on this serial killer kick,” Lovering said.
“Chief, I’m willing to sit down with you again and tell you everything I know. We can go over all my wife’s work, all the deductions and links she made, all the connections. I’m not a cop; this isn’t what I do. But I could show you.”
“Das Hillyard killed Holly Renfrow, Mr. Decker. I don’t care what you think you know or what that moron Chip thinks he saw. I don’t care what sort of wild deductions you think you can make from reviewing some security footage. This case is closed. There is no serial killer. I told you before, Mr. Decker—you’re looking for something that ain’t there.”
“The girl from Maryland, killed in 2016,” I said. “Her hands were bound behind her back with wire, just like Holly’s.”
Lovering’s stoic expression did not falter. He took a step toward me. “You like playing police detective? You’re looking for something to solve, Mr. Decker?”
“I’m not playing anything. These are the facts.”
“After we spoke, I read about what happened to your wife. The guy who did that to her killed himself, too. You got no answers because that madman took all the answers with him when he blew his brains out. So, now you’re trying to find answers elsewhere. Well, Mr. Decker, it just don’t work that way.”
“Please,” I said. “I’m not judging what you did. I don’t care about that. What I care about is finding the real killer. He’s still out there,
and when he kills again—when he kills some other teenage girl in another county or state or wherever—this time you’ll be partly responsible. Because I’m telling you he’s out there, that he’s been doing this for a long time, and I don’t think anyone has ever been aware of him except for my wife. So please, Chief. Please hear me out and take this seriously.”
Lovering’s mouth stretched into a wide, carnivorous grin. His steely eyes narrowed. I couldn’t tell if he was trying to look smug or if the sun was in his eyes. “I think,” he said, “that you’ve been in my town long enough, Mr. Decker. I think it’s time you go on home.”
