by Ronald Malfi
The only thing I knew about your older sister Carol was that she had drowned when she was a teenager.
Something prompted the Alexa to come alive, this time with Manfred Mann’s “Don’t Kill It Carol.”
I looked back down at your sister’s photo. I felt snared in some sort of dream state, my body moving with a preternatural slowness.
Your sister Carol drowned in a river. I never had a reason to question this, Allison. Why would I?
The music still playing, I grabbed the yearbook, raced up the stairs to my office, and began the process of digging up the bones of your long-buried sister.
3
We had been living together for less than a month in a tiny Eastport apartment when you returned home from attending a two-day media bazaar in New Jersey with blisters on the palms of your hands and a noticeable change in your demeanor. Something had shaken you. As usual, you put on a front, masked yourself, mummified your true emotions beneath layers of gauzy wrappings. It was what you did when you didn’t want me seeing your vulnerabilities, or when you wanted to pretend that you didn’t have any. When I asked about the bazaar, your responses had been curt, noncommittal. It had been great; you’d had a wonderful time. Then you would smile and change the subject. This bothered me. I wondered if something had happened during those two days in Jersey. Even though our relationship had still been fairly new, I’m ashamed to admit that my mind first went to infidelity. Had something happened between you and some guy while in Jersey? I wanted to come right out and ask you—perhaps that would have been the mature thing to do—but I was a coward in that regard. Maybe I didn’t want to seem needy or insecure. Maybe I didn’t want to anger you by suggesting I didn’t trust you. Or maybe I didn’t want to know about it, if in fact that was what had happened. Instead, I gently poked you—What’s wrong? You’re not yourself. Did something happen? You can talk to me. All those old chestnuts. People are funny creatures, aren’t they?
You, Allison, had been deft. Like some ninja or acrobat, you had always managed to negotiate your way around my queries, leaving me dizzy and tongue-tied. It was one of the things I admired about you but also one of the things that frustrated me.
“What happened to your hand?” I asked.
You were lying on the couch watching TV, your left hand extended so that it dangled over the edge of the couch. I could see your palm glistening in the TV light, and when I bent down to examine it I could see a rind of fresh blisters along the pad of flesh beneath your fingers. The shininess was from some salve you had applied.
You pulled your hand away from me and sat up. Your hair hung over half your face so that only a single eye stared out at me. I thought I saw a flash of… something… behind that eye. Quick as a lightning strike on the surface of an ocean.
“It’s from writing all day,” you said, pulling your legs up under you.
“You’re right-handed.”
“Typing,” you said. “Both hands.” You mimed typing in the air between us.
I took your right hand, turned it over, saw a collection of even worse blisters along the soft pads of your palm. They glistened with salve.
“Jesus, Allison.”
“It’s nothing. I’ve got tender palms.”
I laughed, but didn’t find it funny. You were holding something back and it worried me. “How’d you get these from typing? Looks more like you’ve been swinging a baseball bat for about ten hours straight.”
“They had some old manual typewriters at the bazaar. They were so kitsch I couldn’t keep away.” You held up both your hands, palms out, as if in surrender. “Occupational hazard.”
“Allison, did something happen on the trip?”
“I told you—no. I’m just tired and maybe a little disillusioned.”
“About us?”
“No, loser. About my work.”
“What’s to be disillusioned about? I thought you loved writing for the paper.”
“I do. I just worry that I’m not making much of a difference. You know?”
“Then what else would you like to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Allison…”
“If I think of something, I’ll let you know.” You wrapped your arms around my neck, drew me closer, kissed me on the mouth. “Let’s go upstairs.”
“Just don’t touch me with those gross hands of yours.”
“Touchy touch touch,” you said, and pressed your salve-coated palms against the sides of my face.
If you were trying to sidetrack me, Allison, it worked.
However, I wasn’t totally blinded by you. That night, after sex, you cried out in your sleep. You sometimes did this, although most of the time I never could comprehend the jumbled nonsense that you said. This night, however, it was clear that you were calling out for your sister. You said her name several times. Finally, when I jostled you awake, you sobbed then sat upright against the headboard. Your body was shiny with sweat and I imagined I could hear your heart pumping.
“Bad dream,” you said, swiping a tangle of damp, matted hair out of your face.
“About what?”
“Can’t remember.”
“You kept calling out, ‘Carol, Carol.’ Your sister.”
You looked at me in the half-light; our bedroom in that tiny apartment was never fully dark, with the orange-hued sodium lamps in the parking lot outside perpetually radiating against the windows. I waited for your response but you didn’t say anything; instead, you tossed the sheet aside and got out of bed. I watched you walk naked out of the room and into the hall. The bathroom light clicked on, followed by the faucet.
I got up, tugged on my boxer shorts, and followed you into the bathroom. I stood in the doorway while you washed your face at the sink. When you looked up, you caught my gaze in the mirror.
“It’s not the first time you’ve called out her name in your sleep,” I said.
“It’s nothing.”
“Doesn’t seem like nothing.”
You dried your face on a towel but didn’t respond.
“You never talk about her.”
“I don’t want to.”
“I understand that,” I said, “but maybe that’s why you keep dreaming about her. She’s coming to your mind whether you want to talk about her or not.”
You went to the medicine cabinet, took out a tube of ointment, and squeezed some onto the palm of one hand. Your blisters looked like angry red bullet holes in the harsh bathroom light. Then you sat on the closed toilet lid and massaged the salve against your skin.
“I know you don’t like to talk about her, or about your family at all, but maybe keeping that stuff packed away is causing you stress. If you’re not comfortable talking to me about it, maybe you could talk to a therapist or something.”
“Oh, please.”
“Don’t brush it off. It weighs on you, Allison. I just want you to find some peace. Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems to me like you carry this thing around with you all the time like some black cloud. Sometimes I don’t even think you’re aware of it. You’ve been doing it so long it’s become part of your personality.”
You looked up at me, angular shadows falling across the right side of your face. “You don’t know me, Aaron. I love you and we’ve got something great between us, but you really don’t know me.”
“Then let me know you.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t even know myself. I’m a tornado—spinning, spinning, spinning.” You gave up a humorless laugh. “I’ve worked very hard to bury the bad stuff in my past. My sister’s death—yeah, it is a cloud. You’re right. But it’s not your cloud.”
“You’re wrong about that,” I said. “We’re together, aren’t we?”
Your eyes simmered. You were a million times right, Allison: you were a tornado. I saw dead leaves and tree branches and all sorts of debris swirling behind your eyes. Spinning, spinning, spinning.
“One thing
I know,” you said, “is that the longer you spend in darkness, the easier it is for that darkness to become reality. It takes form, it gains life. I’ve spent a lot of time in darkness, Aaron, so much so that I’ve churned it up and stirred it to the surface and made it this real, tangible thing. It lives alongside me. It moves when I move. It’s in the bedroom right now, waiting for me to come back.”
“This is… what? Metaphorical?”
“Is it?” And you sounded hopeful, as if I could give you an answer that might fix whatever darkness roiled and churned inside you. “When you spend so much of your life sifting through dark and terrible things, you give those things the power to become real. The ghosts don’t leave you alone.”
I came into the bathroom, knelt down in front of you on the fuzzy pink bathmat.
“Jesus,” you said. “Please don’t tell me you’re about to propose while I’m sitting naked on the toilet lid.”
We shared a laugh. Your eyes remained stone sober.
“Carol drowned when she was seventeen. It ruined my mother. She became mired in grief until she drank herself to death. The whole thing ruined me, too. She was my older sister. I looked up to her, admired her. Loved her. And then, one day, she was gone. Just gone. And after my mother died, I was alone.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah,” you said, though not unkindly. You even smiled at me. “It’s what we say, isn’t it?”
“I love you, Allison.”
“You’re okay,” you said.
“Is that something you’d want to do?” I asked.
“What?”
“Get married.”
“Jesus, Aaron. Your romance is shit.”
I reached over and flushed the toilet, which caused you to laugh.
We never talked about your sister after that.
4
You lied, Allison. Your older sister, Carol Thompson, had not drowned. In 2004, her body had been discovered in a shallow, rocky offshoot of the Elk Head River on the outskirts of Woodvine, Pennsylvania, most of her clothing stripped from her body and her skin the color of wax paper. The cause of her death was strangulation. Few other details were available in the online news articles, but what I was able to determine was that in the fifteen years since your sister’s death, no suspect had ever been apprehended. If there had ever been any suspects at all, the news articles did not say.
There had been an outcry in 2004, as one would imagine. A seventeen-year-old girl brutally murdered and then dispatched of in such a heartless, grotesque fashion caused something of an uproar in Woodvine and in neighboring communities. Things like that simply didn’t happen in small towns like Woodvine, where good, hardworking people were always friendly and no one ever locked their doors. There’d been a rally, a march, a candlelight vigil. A wreath of flowers was placed on the stone footbridge that arched over a narrow section of the Elk Head River, not far from where your sister’s body had been discovered. It was like what happened to you all over again, Allison. That one family should sustain so much tragedy seemed not only an injustice but an impossibility.
And then, just like with your death, Allison, people began to forget. The news articles became scarce until they ceased altogether. Local papers stopped reporting on the status of the investigation, which had been stalemated from the very beginning. That a murdered teenage girl could vanish from the public consciousness so tidily and unceremoniously was a travesty in itself.
With Carol being your serial killer’s first victim, I was afforded an answer to your motivation. You weren’t just hunting a murderer, you were hunting your sister’s murderer. Yet this revelation only compounded the questions in my mind. Why hadn’t you told me about any of this? Why the lie about her drowning? Was it just that horrific for you that you made up a lie and stuck to it, just so you wouldn’t have to relive any of it in the retelling?
I was your husband, Allison. Your family would have been my family, whether they were still here or not.
5
Phone calls to the Woodvine Police Department were of little help. The 2004 murder of Carol Thompson remained unsolved, and the police were unwilling to provide me any information that wasn’t already public knowledge since the case was technically still open. I told them I was family by marriage to the deceased, hoping this might loosen them up a bit. They told me to submit a photocopy of my driver’s license and our marriage certificate as proof, which I did, but all they supplied in return were heavily redacted copies of old police reports. These reports failed to provide me any details that weren’t already online, with one exception: I discovered that the name of the detective who had been investigating Carol’s murder had not been redacted from one page of the report—a detective with the decidedly cop-like name of Peter Sloane. I called the Woodvine PD and requested to speak to Sloane, but was told that he had retired years ago. When I asked how I might get in touch with him, I was informed (rather curtly) that their policy prohibited them from giving out that sort of information.
I took to the internet and searched for Sloane’s whereabouts. I checked the usual social media sites, but the name was too common. There were too many rabbit holes. When I felt defeated, other-Aaron reminded me that anyone—anyone—could be found online in some capacity nowadays. I narrowed the search to include “Woodvine,” “police,” and “detective” among my search terms. What I found was a newspaper article from a few years back detailing the grand opening of a pub called Pistol Pete’s in the town of Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. According to the article, the owner, Peter Sloane, was a retired police detective from Woodvine, Pennsylvania. The accompanying photo showed Sloane and his wife (according to the caption) standing in front of a Bavarian inn, the pub’s name in copperplate font on the tinted front window.
I telephoned the pub and asked the woman who answered if I could speak with Sloane.
“Can I ask who’s calling?”
I told the woman my name and that I was a relative of a woman who was killed in Woodvine, Pennsylvania, back in 2004. “Mr. Sloane was the detective on the case,” I said. “I’m doing some research and would like to speak with him.”
“Is he expecting this call?”
“He’s not, no. I’m calling out of the blue. But I was going to be in the area and I was hoping he might find the time to sit down with me for a bit. I’ve got some questions about the case.”
“He’s retired from all that,” the woman said.
“Are you the manager?” I asked.
She laughed—a sharp whip-crack that conveyed little humor. “I’m the wife.”
I made a sound over the phone that suggested she’d caught me off guard: a little wheeze that scrambled up the stovepipe of my throat.
“Listen,” she said, all business; she sounded like a retired police detective herself. “He’ll be in tomorrow around noon. Stop in for lunch. I’ll let him know you’re coming.”
“Great. Thank you so much.”
“Just don’t get him riled.”
Before I could ask what she meant by that, the line went dead.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
1
Pistol Pete’s was situated in a shopping center that looked like it should have been on a brochure for skiing in the Swiss alps. It was tucked between a mattress store and a European bistro, the type of place someone might drive by without realizing what it was. Pistol Pete’s could have been a pawn shop for all anyone knew.
I entered the place at exactly noon, having made the 115-mile drive in under two hours. It was a typical neighborhood tavern, with a central bar and booths around the perimeter of the dark, wood-paneled interior. There was a stage beneath a wall of TVs where a guy with a ponytail was checking the tones on a Fender amp, an acoustic guitar strapped to his chest. The place was doing a fair amount of business, with much of the bar and several booths occupied by men and women in business attire.
I went to the bar where a guy in his twenties was drying pint glasses with a dishtowel. “What can I get you?” the gu
y asked. He had a metal barbell through his septum.
“I’ll have a Yuengling,” I said, nodding at the tap handle. Across the bar, a guy in a rumpled tweed jacket with his necktie askew sat stirring a bowl of what looked like clam chowder, a dour expression on his face. He was examining something on his cell phone, the glow of the screen making him look like Bela Lugosi in that ancient Dracula film.
The bartender filled a pint glass and set it down in front of me on a coaster.
“Is Peter Sloane around?” I asked.
“Wow,” said the bartender. “Haven’t even taken a sip and already you’re looking to complain to the owner.” He looked me up and down. “You a friend of his?”
“I’ve never met him, but I called to schedule a meeting. My name’s Aaron Decker. He’s probably expecting me.”
Truth was, I didn’t know what Peter Sloane was expecting. If anything.
The bartender waved over a waitress, a wide-hipped gal with a shock of spunky purple hair, and said something close to her face. The waitress shifted her gaze toward me, nodded. She had a cat’s paw print tattooed along the left side of her neck. I smiled at her, prompting her to quickly look away. I watched as she disappeared through a doorway at the back of the bar. The whole thing looked like a mob hit was about to take place. The bartender came back over and said, “Mr. Sloane will be out in a few minutes. Why don’t you have a seat over there?” He motioned with a thrust of his chin toward the nearest empty booth, hidden in a dark section of the bar against one wall.
“Thanks.”
Some sporting event was on the TVs; something happened on-screen and the men and women around the bar cheered. The old fellow in the rumpled tweed sports coat glanced up, his face under-lit by his phone as if by a pool of radioactive liquid; he looked like someone jerked awake on a subway. I sat at the booth and watched the guy with the ponytail jigger with his amp, strum a few chords, jigger with his amp again. When he looked up and—rather dismally, I thought—surveyed his audience, I saw on his face the bleary-eyed countenance of someone perpetually stoned and inherently distrustful of others.
