by Ronald Malfi
“Go to Woodvine. Find Allison’s mother.”
“Is that a good idea?”
“I don’t think I have a choice. I feel like I’m falling apart.”
“What about this killer? You putting it on the backburner or giving up completely?”
“Shit, I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. I started out looking for one thing and now I’m looking for something else. Except it doesn’t feel like looking. It feels like… I don’t know. Something else.”
Strangely, I thought of Bobbi Negri’s mother saying, We haunt ourselves. It caused a chill to ripple through my body.
“Aaron,” Sloane said. “I was able to make a phone call for you today. Norfolk Police Department. Margot Idelson, the girl murdered in 2006?”
That chill turned into an icy hand that clenched my heart. “Yes?”
“You were right. Her wrists had been secured behind her back by some kind of wire. They were still on her when her body was found, strangled to death. Police kept it out of the papers.”
“Jesus Christ…”
“I’m waiting on calls back from some of the other departments, but I think we both know what they’ll tell us.”
“Right.”
“Allison was right,” he said.
I shut my eyes. Rain pummeled the roof of the Sube.
“Maybe you’re right, too,” Sloane said. “Maybe there’s an answer waiting for you in Woodvine. Be safe, Aaron.”
He ended the call.
I pulled out of the parking lot and, in the rain and beneath the cover of darkness, headed west toward Pennsylvania.
PART FOUR
THE MISSING CIRCLE
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
1
Places have secrets, too.
During the entirety of our relationship, and as best as I can recall, you spoke of your hometown only once. It was during a drive to Lancaster for a weekend in Dutch Country for our one-year anniversary. You had reservations about going, but I had reservations at a five-star bed and breakfast which I’d sprung on you as a surprise. I knew you’d grown up in Pennsylvania, but you never spoke about it. You had alluded to the darkness you’d left behind in your hometown, a darkness born from the tragedy of your long-gone family: the accidental death of your father, the drowning of your sister, and the subsequent demise of your mother, who’d wasted the rest of her life in the bottle, angst-ridden from the losses your family had suffered. When you turned eighteen, you had run away and never looked back. There was nothing for you there anymore. Your past had come up during our courtship, of course, but you had made it clear it was a past you desired to remain in the past. I had respected this and never pushed you for information, never tried to draw things out of you. But then on that drive through Pennsylvania, something—some small but crucial wheel—began to turn inside your mind.
Out of nowhere, you said, “Do you know what they call the area between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh?”
“What’s that?”
“Pennsyltucky.”
I chuckled. “How far are we from where you grew up?” Despite your feelings about your hometown, it felt natural to ask this question in that moment. In fact, it had come out of me before I realized what I was saying. But when you didn’t respond, I decided to let it go. I turned up the music and kept my eyes on the road, pretending I hadn’t said anything.
You turned and stared out the passenger window. We were coasting along a strip of asphalt that clung to the side of a large hill. To the right of the road, the landscape fell away to long stretches of sun-dappled valleys and the periodic clusters of small towns. At some point, you clicked off the music.
“Woodvine, Pennsylvania,” you said. “It was a refinery town. The sky was perpetually dark from the smoke of the gas fires, and when the refinery eventually closed down, the air still tasted like soot. All the men had black fingernails and the women had purple pouches under their eyes. It was the missing circle of Dante’s hell. It pulled you in, you know? As a little kid, I’d wake up screaming, convinced that our house was on fire, but it was just the smell of the refinery—a smell that seeped into our walls and our bodies. Made all our food taste horrible, although I didn’t realize this until after I left town and experienced places that weren’t chemically poisoned.
“My dad drove a truck. He thought he’d escaped the pull of the refinery. Joke’s on him, though—he was killed in a wreck out in the Midwest while driving a big rig. I was just a kid. I only remember him as a shape—large, sullen, broad-shouldered, with big, rough hands. Always smelling of booze. My mother took a job at the refinery after the accident. She had those purple bags beneath her eyes, too. She worked there until she fell and got hurt. The company paid out, and then the whole refinery closed a few years after that. My mom, she ultimately drank herself to death. This was because of what happened to my sister, not my dad. Not losing her job at the refinery.”
“Your sister who drowned,” I said. You had mentioned it on one or two occasions, but it had always come up as if being drawn from you, like siphoning a poison from your veins. “What was her name again?”
“Carol. She drowned in the Elk Head River, which ran through town. Its waters were gray with runoff from the refinery, the banks always scummy with this strange yellow foam. There were always dead fish along the riverbank, too, and in the summer their corpses buzzed with flies and you could smell them rotting.”
It was no wonder you never talked of home and of your family. There was nothing but tragedy in your past.
“Sometimes it would rain for weeks nonstop,” you went on, still gazing out the window and at the countryside. “Water would flood through the town, and when it receded, it left behind black ash and mud on everything. There were no birds—the refinery kept them away, the stink of it unappealing. Birds are smarter than people in that way. We stayed and the birds left. Even after the refinery shut down, the birds stayed away. In the winter, it snowed gray clumps, like bits of dirty pillow stuffing blown in from a fire. The snow in Woodvine even smelled bad. Dogs screamed all day and night. Cats started walking on their hind legs. Children began speaking backwards for no particular reason. Once, a group of mean little boys from my elementary school pulled a mermaid from the Elk Head River and beat her to death with sticks. And there are places in town where you can exist along two timelines at once. Like, you could be standing on a street corner but also somewhere else in the world at that exact same moment. Sometimes you can see or hear yourself talking through one of those rips in the fabric of the universe.”
You turned and looked at me, your face drawn. “There’s a man made up of poison gas who lives in an abandoned castle. He’ll get inside your skull and drive you mad.”
I stared at you, unsure what to say, what to think.
But then you smiled. Laughed. You’d been putting me on.
“Jesus Christ, Allison. I’m not sure where the truth stopped and the bullshit started,” I admitted.
“Exactly,” you said. “That’s exactly what it was like living in Woodvine.”
2
I drove about two hundred miles under cover of darkness, stopping once for gas and for a cup of coffee to keep me awake. I did not give much consideration to the dull throb of apprehension that had begun to settle down upon my shoulders like a blanket of chainmail. Another hundred miles through the night, and its presence was now undeniable. The GPS on my phone started going wonky, recalculating my route over and over again. No sooner would I turn off the highway and onto a secondary road, the GPS would reconfigure my route and have me going off in the opposite direction. I must have wasted thirty minutes backtracking. Frustrated and lonely, I kept turning on the CD player just to have those sappy old songs trickle into the car. This made me maudlin, so the music did not stay on very long. Instead, I tried to harness a radio signal from the air but was rewarded with nothing but static. It seemed my cell phone was having trouble connecting to the network, too, which could have accounted for the way the GPS was behaving
. Or misbehaving.
Then, on a particularly desolate stretch of road, a deer flashed through the shimmer of the Sube’s high beams. Its proximity caused a cry to lurch up out of my throat as it bounded off into the woods beyond the shoulder of the road. I jerked the wheel and the Sube’s headlights cut sharply to the left, washing over the blacktop. I spun the wheel in the opposite direction, overcorrecting, and those headlights swung back across the road. Trees rushed up and filled the windshield. I stamped on the brake and the car fishtailed. There was the rud-rud-rud-rud of the rumble strip followed by what sounded like the blast from a cannon. The Sube juddered to a standstill, the acrid reek of burnt rubber filling my nose.
My heart racing and my hands squeezing the steering wheel, I sat there catching my breath. I waited for the world to swim back into focus. Once I’d gathered my wits about me, I eased my foot off the brake. The car galloped over the rumble strip and thumped back onto the road. It shuddered and wobbled like an old apple cart. I’d blown a goddamn tire.
“Shit.”
I shifted into Park then turned off the ignition. Silence dropped down on me like a shroud. In both directions the road stretched into pure darkness. Trees crowded the shoulders on either side, black and massive and overbearing. The moon was nonexistent; the only light out there was the milky sheen issuing from the Sube’s headlamps.
I climbed out of the car and into a night that was frigid and windy. The air felt thin and smelled discreetly of smoke. When the wind blew, it shook the trees with a low, moan-like susurration. I went around to the passenger side and, using the flashlight on my cell phone, saw that the front tire was hanging loosely from the rim. It could have been worse; the blowout could have sent me careening into the trees.
I went to the rear of the Sube and popped the trunk. Beneath the floor mat was a donut and a jack. Also, a crowbar.
Christ, Allison.
The trees whispered and rattled their leaves all around me. Something caused the hairs to stand up on the nape of my neck, and it wasn’t the wind. I reached down and grabbed the crowbar.
—What is this? other-Aaron spoke up.
Perhaps it was the culmination of all I’d been through over the past several weeks—or perhaps it was more specifically related to the story Denise Lenchantin had told me, about blowing a tire on that desolate mountain road in the middle of the night—but I was suddenly overcome with the certainty that I was not alone out here. The deer bounding across the road had caused me to jerk the wheel and lose temporary control of the vehicle, sure, but how plausible was it that someone had also sabotaged my tire at some point in the evening? It could have happened easily enough during one of my stops for gas or coffee. Someone could have pulled up alongside me, jammed a screwdriver or a nail into the wall of the tire to weaken its integrity.
The crowbar in my hands, I turned around and surveyed the dark, empty roadway. A gauzy mist was creeping out from between the trees and swirling along the blacktop in both directions.
“Hello?” I shouted, the echo of my voice bowling down the mountain road. “Is someone out there?”
—There’s no one out there, said other-Aaron. You are alone.
Was it so impossible to think that in all my running around, I had inadvertently tipped off the killer? That this whole thing would end right here because he’d been following me these last few hundred miles? That he’d used the same trap on me that he’d used on Denise Lenchantin last fall? I thought of your gun, Allison, still tucked away inside the chest in our closet. Fat lot of good it would do me there if someone were to stroll out from between these trees…
—Just change the tire and get the hell back on the road.
I did just that: I tossed the crowbar back in the trunk, took out the donut and the jack, and went to work. The donut was firm and filled with air, but I wouldn’t be able to move along too quickly on it. When I’d finished, I held up my cell and examined the GPS route on the glowing map—a route that continually recalculated and repositioned itself even as I stood there holding the phone steady. A few times, it mapped a course where no road existed, a bold blue line straggling off into the trees. And then that route vanished, too.
I was mopping grease from my hands with a wad of fast-food napkins I’d found in the glove compartment when a pair of headlights appeared on the horizon. I paid the vehicle little attention until it slowed to a stop in the road beside the Sube. I looked up just as a third light—bright as a lighthouse tower—winked on and pinned me there like a felon on the side of the road. I brought one arm up to shield the glare from my eyes.
“Is there a problem?” said a man’s voice from within the car.
“Blew a tire,” I said. My heartbeat had picked up again, so potent I could feel it pulsing at the base of my throat.
“Need assistance?”
“I’m okay, thanks. I had a spare.”
The vehicle idled there, expelling plumes of exhaust that trailed down the center of the roadway before it was carried off by the wind.
“I am a bit lost, though,” I said. “I’m trying to get to Woodvine.”
“Fifty miles east on this road,” said the man.
I approached his vehicle, sidestepping out of the glare of his spotlight. The man’s face took form behind the spotlight, a pale, square apparition with a military buzz cut. Despite the undercover car, he was in uniform. Pennsylvania State Trooper.
“Fifty miles east?” I said. I pointed for clarification in the direction I had come. “That way?”
“That’s east.”
Somehow, I’d driven right past the town. How had that happened?
“You been drinking tonight?” said the officer.
“No, sir.”
“Make sure to clear any debris from the road before you leave.”
“Yes, sir.”
The cop’s window scrolled up and he pulled away—slowly at first, as if struggling with whether or not he should leave me here on the side of the road. I watched as his car picked up speed until his taillights, those beady red eyes, were eaten up by the night.
Something in my head, some gear or cog, rolled over and clicked into place with an audible latching sound. His hot breath against my ear, other-Aaron whispered that he knew what I was thinking.
3
I stayed that night at the Red Robin Motor Lodge, where I stripped out of my clothes and took a long, hot shower. Thirty minutes later, I crawled into bed where I turned through every page of your high-school yearbook, looking for someone in particular. A face I had seen before. A name. Exhausted from driving, I could feel my eyelids grow heavier with each page that I turned. Twice, I nodded off, only to jerk my head up and slam it against the rickety headboard, convinced in my half-sleep that the character for whom I searched had sprung up from these pages and had fled from the motel room while my eyes were shut.
I had gone through the yearbook several times before, of course. I had a recollection of a particular page—a particular photo—and now I was desperate to confirm the notion that was pinballing around inside my skull. A notion that had occurred to me as I’d watched the Pennsylvania State Trooper drive away down that lonely stretch of road earlier that night. And just when I thought the page did not exist—that I had somehow conjured it up in my mind—I saw it. Right there. Page fifty-eight.
I sat up in bed for a very long time. When I finally switched off the little lamp beside the bed and eased myself down onto the stiff, overly starched pillowcase, I remained staring at the ceiling and at the zebra stripes of moonlight filtering in through the blinds. Wondering if I hadn’t been so wrong back in the car, when I had frightened myself by humoring the possibility that the Woodvine Killer had somehow gotten wind of my involvement in all this, and that he was tracking me right at this very moment. That he knew where I was headed and was close by, maybe even in this very same motel, maybe in the room next to mine. That I might have already confronted him about your theories without realizing his true identity. Maybe the burst tire ha
dn’t been an accident after all. The same thing had happened to Denise Lenchantin, hadn’t it? My mind kept returning to that, and this time, other-Aaron did little to dissuade me from it.
It was the clicking sound that had echoed in my head after the Pennsylvania trooper in the unmarked police car had driven away that returned to me now—a sound very much like the snapping of fingers. It was the sound of realization, echoing throughout the curved and lightless chamber of my skull. It was, too, the words other-Aaron had whispered in my ear.
—Denise Lenchantin said it was someone pretending to be a cop. Yet who’s to say the man was pretending?
It was Peter Sloane’s picture on page fifty-eight of the yearbook.
4
I dreamed of you ghosting toward me across the surface of a river, your body shrouded in an early morning mist, your flesh pale and bare except for a bright red sweatshirt that really wasn’t red at all, just a faded pink, but saturated with the blood from a gushing head wound, so red now that it was black, SAINT FRANCIS YOUTH LEAGUE printed on it in scrawling script, and your arms reached out for me and your neck was a corkscrewed purple stalk impressed upon by furious fingers, and your eyes were hollow pits, and when I awoke, I did so screaming and clawing at the air, as if I could rip through the fabric of this life and crawl screaming into the next.
5
Around ten o’clock the following morning, as I sat devouring a breakfast of Dunkin’ Donuts in a shopping center where, at the Midas across the street, I was having a new tire put on the Sube, my cell phone rang. I thought that maybe it was Sloane, and so I hesitated, but it was Trayci again. I’d forgotten she’d tried to get in touch with me yesterday afternoon. I decided to answer it so she wouldn’t think something terrible had happened to me.
“Where the hell have you been? I’ve been trying to reach you for days.”
“Hey, Tray, nice to hear from you, too.”
“Don’t be a dick. What’ve you been up to? Owen said he stopped by the house last night but you weren’t home.”
