by Ronald Malfi
“Whose house?”
“Yours. Whose do you think?”
“What was Owen doing in Maryland?”
“He had two nights in Baltimore for a conference, thought he’d be a good brother-in-law and take you out to dinner. Your loss, I guess.”
“Shoot. Well, that was nice of him. Tell him I said thanks.”
“Where are you?”
“Uh, I’m doing some traveling,” I said.
“Traveling.”
“I thought it would be good to get out of the house for a while.”
“Exactly where?”
“Pennsylvania,” I said before I could come up with a suitable lie. “Visiting some old college buddies.”
“Let me get you a plane ticket, Aaron. Come out and see the kids.”
“I can get my own plane ticket, Tray.”
“Then do it.”
“I’ve got work. Once I’m done translating this book I’ll come out. I promise.”
“You said you finished the book last month.”
I closed my eyes, rubbed a set of fingers along my brow. A headache was stirring to life behind my eyes. A part of me wanted to confide in my sister just what I was doing, but I also did not want to worry her. “Just working on some rewrites,” I lied.
“So you can do some traveling with old college buddies but you can’t visit your sister and her family.”
“You’re not really angry, are you?”
She sighed. “No, Aaron, I’m not angry. I’ve just been worried about you. You need to answer your phone when I call. And maybe I’m just… I don’t know. Overreacting? I hope so.” A pause. “I’ve been having a recurring dream that something bad is going to happen to you.”
“Tray,” I said. “Nothing bad is going to happen to me. You’re being silly.” Yet my voice shook as I said this.
“Aaron, I’ve been waking up in the middle of the night like you’re in my room, standing over my bed. Watching me. Like a ghost.”
It made me think of Rita Renfrow, and what she’d said as we climbed the staircase to the second floor of her house and to her daughter’s bedroom: I keep dreaming that there’s someone in the house. A man.
“Really, though,” Trayci said. “How’re you holding up? Be honest with me.”
“I’ve been able to keep my mind busy,” I said, which was the truth. Visiting dark places, tracking a murderer, but busy nonetheless. No lie there.
“Have you given any thought to seeing a therapist? I think it’s a really good idea.”
“I don’t know, Tray. I don’t want to wallow in that stuff.”
“It could help. You’re not one of those closed-minded macho idiots, Aaron. You know it could do you some good.”
“I’m just not in that place yet. But when I am—if I am—then I promise you I’ll look into it. I’ll talk to someone.”
“And you’ll come out here, spend some time, right?”
“I will. It’ll be nice to see the kids. It’s been a while.”
“Just do me one favor, huh? Answer your goddamn cell phone when I call, will you?”
“You got it. My bad.”
“Okay.” She sighed. She was three years older than me, and I was suddenly picturing her sliding me around the tiled kitchen floor of our childhood home in a laundry basket, me shrieking with laughter, Trayci’s bright, buoyant, wild face filling up the canvas of my world. “I love you, little brother.”
“I love you, Tray.”
I ended the call, surprised to feel a smile on my face despite the headache that was drilling for oil in my skull. For the first time since your death, Allison, I actually considered going out to Minnesota and spending time with Trayci and her family—of actually moving forward with my life instead of moving backward and creeping through your bleak, hopeless hunting ground, and now, today, with my sights set on your hometown and a mother you told me had died years ago, I was attempting to dig up your past to separate the truth from your lies. I should close the book on all of this, forget it, move on with my life. Your secrets had been your secrets for a reason, and I should let them be. And as for the Woodvine Killer… well, that had been your obsession, not mine.
Except that now it was. It was mine, too.
Spiritual transference.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
1
Dense black storm clouds had gathered above Woodvine, Pennsylvania, as if the town were brooding over some wrong-doing or perhaps plotting something sinister. For a time now, as I drove down the crumbling ribbon of asphalt that led into town, fluffy black filaments snowed lazily from the sky and collected along the Sube’s windshield. It wasn’t until a procession of smokestacks appeared on the horizon that I realized it was ash. In the winter, it snowed gray clumps, like bits of dirty pillow stuffing blown in from a fire, you had once told me. I understood you now.
The refinery stood against a storm-darkened sky, a construct of steel girders, concrete walls, cylindrical smokestacks that, back when the facility was still operational, had belched thick, noxious smog into the stratosphere. I imagined that, back in the day, one might not discern between the gray, low-slung clouds and the seepage from those massive smokestacks; it all would have commingled into a churn of poison gas that hung above the landscape like the sword of Damocles. I stared at the refinery as I drove by. Something about it bothered me, and I was glad to leave it behind in the Sube’s rearview mirror.
Woodvine came into view soon after. Tumbledown white houses, a collection of them, lined the streets. A whitewashed church of indecipherable denomination stood powdered in gray soot. Downtown was a grid of single-story cement buildings and gas stations, of laundromats and bowling alleys, a bank and a coffee shop, a pawn shop with wire mesh drawn down over its plate-glass windows. A boarded-up movie theater at the far end of an empty, bombed-out parking lot. And drinking establishments—I counted seven of them as I wound up and down the narrow downtown streets. They outnumbered the churches.
At the crest of a hill stood Elk Head High School, a medieval brick saltbox that would have looked perfectly at home with bars on its windows, concertina wire on the fence and a sniper’s tower in the rear. It was a weekday and school was in session, cars shimmering in the parking lot, a few teenagers smoking cigarettes on the curb out front. There was a brick sign on the lawn with the school’s name embossed on it, the faded green elk’s head emblem right beside the name.
I parked across the street and stayed there for a while. Something wanted me to. On the passenger seat was your yearbook. I opened it to page fifty-eight—to the black-and-white photo of a younger Peter Sloane standing before a classroom full of students. The caption beneath the photograph read: “Detective Peter Sloane speaks with students about police work on Career Day.”
Back at Sloane’s bar, when I’d explained that the killer was in your yearbook, Sloane had been quick to brush that theory aside. When I kept insisting, Sloane had fingered James de Campo, pointing out the man’s photo in the yearbook. Had that been a deflection? A way to steer suspicion away from himself? Or was I overthinking this whole thing?
With my cell phone, I snapped a photo of the black-and-white image of Sloane. I texted that photo, along with the link to the newspaper article about the grand opening of Pistol Pete’s, which featured a more recent photo of Sloane, to Denise Lenchantin’s cell phone. She hadn’t gotten a good look at the man who’d approached her on that deserted mountain road that night, but perhaps something in Sloane’s posture or face might jog something in her memory. It was worth a shot, anyway.
I dialed her number to explain what I’d just sent, but the call went straight to voicemail. I left a message, asking her to look at the photos and see if the man in them sparked anything for her, then told her to call me back as soon as she was able.
Peter Sloane knew where I was. That last phone call to him, I’d told him where I was headed. Maybe there’s an answer waiting for you in Woodvine, he’d told me. Only the answer had been right here in the yea
rbook all along, hadn’t it?
Hadn’t it?
I cracked my window and had a cigarette. I had two. I thought the ash had blown from the tip and set the back seat of the Sube to smoldering—I even looked back there, ready to pour the remnants of my cold coffee over the scorched upholstery—but then I realized I wasn’t smelling burning upholstery at all. It was the air outside. It was dense and smoky and acrid. I watched as bits of gray ash collected on the windshield, a spot here and a clump there. The two kids smoking cigarettes on the curb had departed, and I could see two distinct patches of bare white curbstone where they’d been sitting. I glanced up the sloping lawn toward the school and saw them ambling slowly toward the parking lot, the backsides of their jeans dusted in gray. The refinery had shut down when you were a child, Allison, yet the pollution it had caused—the environmental trauma—had lingered. How many decades needed to go by before the remnants from that refinery were finally washed clean from the town?
A police car glided up the street in front of the school, the Woodvine Police Department shield on its door. Its rack lights looked like they were blanketed in mold.
Suddenly itchy, I moved on.
There was a park with a decrepit-looking bandstand in the center of a dead-grass field. A man walked his dog through a scrim of gray grass. A woman wearing a headscarf and clunky orthopedic shoes stood on the corner with an armload of groceries; she watched me drive, a look of dim impatience on her bronzed and wrinkled face.
I had located the address of your childhood home in an online directory, and had populated that address onto a satellite map. It showed a solitary house set back from a long stretch of road on the western side of town, surrounded by trees, and with the serpentine shimmer of the Elk Head River running nearby. I knew I was close when I crossed over the river by way of a picturesque stone bridge. A makeshift wooden cross staked into the earth on the shoulder of the road prompted me to pull the car over and get out.
Tugging my jacket closed, I approached the wooden cross that stood at an angle among the weeds on the shoulder of the road. The first thing I noticed was the doll’s arms nailed to the cross. I thought of the armless doll in your hope chest back home. The cross itself was weather-worn, but I could still make out the faded print of your sister’s name along the vertical stave, bracketed by those two rubber, bodiless appendages. The writing was faded but legible. I looked down the embankment beyond the cross at the languid brown water of the Elk Head below. Its surface was furry with soot, and there were yellowish clumps of foam gathered along the muddy banks, just as you’d said.
Something urged me down there. Before I could rationalize what I was doing, I was descending the embankment toward the river, using exposed tree roots and low-hung branches as hand- and footholds. It took some time and effort to get down, and by the time I set my mud-caked shoes on the solid, hard-packed soil of the riverbank, I was winded.
The Elk Head River was nowhere near as wide or imposing as the Delaware or the Potomac; this was just barely more than a creek, maybe three and a half feet deep at its center, and about forty feet across, if that. In one direction it wound through a forest of white pines, red maples, black walnuts, and the shaggy, drooping boughs of yellow-tinged weeping willows. I found it remarkable that anything could thrive amid such pollution. In the other direction—to my immediate left—the river tunneled beneath the stone bridge until it reached hazy daylight on the other side. I peered beneath the bridge through a curtain of dangling ivy. In that instant, I was overcome by the certainty that it was here, right here in this exact spot, where your sister’s body had been found.
I stood there and listened to water trickling from a drainage pipe tucked into the stone wall of the bridge. I heard another sound, too—a sound so much like someone sobbing that it caused a chill to ripple through me.
Swiping aside the tendrils of ivy that hung down from the overpass, I passed beneath the bridge while digging my cell phone from my coat pocket. I switched on the flashlight app, and held it out before me like a priest wielding a crucifix at someone possessed. The flashlight’s beam was too meager to penetrate the gloom beneath the bridge, except for a pencil-thin laser beam that stretched only about a foot in front of me.
I looked at the drainpipe. It was maybe ten inches in diameter, bisected by a single wrought-iron bar. A trickle of gray water spilled from it and pattered to the swampy earth below. The mortar around the pipe was mostly chipped away, the concrete blocks that comprised the abutment porous and crumbling. As I approached it, a smell like diesel exhaust exhaled from the mouth of the pipe.
I could still hear it—a sound, disembodied, thin as tissue paper, carried on a breath of air, something that sounded impossibly like someone sobbing from some great distance issuing from the drainpipe, causing my entire body to grow cold and the hairs on the back of my neck to rise up like quills.
I directed the meager beam of my cell phone’s flashlight directly into the mouth of the pipe. The darkness in there swallowed it up. Still, the sound of someone sobbing was unmistakable.
“Who’s there?” I said while simultaneously backing away from the pipe, my heart slamming painfully against my ribcage. “Is someone there?”
No sooner were those words out of my mouth than I was no longer standing here under the bridge, but back home in Harbor Village, gazing into our bathroom sink as a beam of light blinked up at me from the drain. Where I’d heard a man’s voice come through the pipes, speaking the very words I had just now spoken: Who’s there? Is someone there?
And on the heels of this, your own enigmatic description of your hometown, that one day as we drove through Pennsylvania, coming back to me, no longer a joke at my expense or a metaphor for how you’d grown up in this place, but sheer, inarguable fact; your words, your words: 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.
I stood for a long time beneath that bridge, my body trembling, my mind grasping to cling to the solidity of the world. I stared at the gray water spilling from the mouth of the pipe, hearing nothing but the quiet babble of its progression now. No sobbing from that pipe. No other-Aaron at the other end of it.
No.
After a time, I turned and headed back up the embankment. By the time I stepped back out into daylight, and despite the chill in the air, I was sweating profusely.
2
Cane Road struck me as the type of remote strip of asphalt where outcasts and pariahs were unceremoniously dispatched and forced into obscurity. Desolate, absent of life—a forgotten memory on the outskirts of a forgotten town. Poplars scraped the gunmetal sky, their shaggy conical bodies powdered in marrow-hued grime. Mailboxes jutted at crooked angles from both sides of the road, their hulls peppered with buckshot, their misshapen aluminum doors gaping mouth-like in shock. There was a sizeable deer carcass in the middle of the roadway, its white-tufted belly split down the middle, its guts a glistening, viscous decoupage smeared along the ash-powdered blacktop. It hummed with flies. As I cut a wide berth around the carcass, I saw that the deer’s head had been lobbed off. Cleanly. Someone had made off with a roadkill trophy.
Your childhood home was buried among gnarled, leafless oaks wrapped in fog at the end of a long gravel driveway. Two posts had been hammered into the earth on each side of the driveway, a chain with a NO TRESPASSING sign hanging from it running between them. I parked on the side of the road and got out of the car. Birds warbled in the nearby trees and the air felt electric with an oncoming storm. I stepped over the chain and ducked beneath low-hanging tree branches and vine-like tendrils that unspooled from the trees and whispered along my shoulders and the top of my head. Overhead, storm clouds had gathered, an archipelago of stark black shapes rimmed in dizzying gold. As I advanced up the driveway, the trees appeared to part, first all
owing glimpses then a full view of the structure that lay hidden back there among the trees.
Your childhood home was gone. In its place stood a crumbling, skeletal structure, fire-scarred and insubstantial. The roof was no more; only a handful of charred beams remained, arching above an empty, decimated, two-story chasm. The front porch had been split in half, as if a fireball had come tumbling out the front door and rolled down the steps, trailing black smoke and reducing everything in its path to cinders. I looked up and saw a stone chimney looming against the overcast sky, stately as the Tower of Babel.
I approached the ruin, having to step around fallen beams, fire-blackened two-by-fours and sections of wall. The detritus lay in thick underbrush, and I could see vines curling around a downspout and along the remaining walls on the western side of the house, which suggested that this fire had not been recent.
The remaining porch steps looked about as reliable as a booby-trap, so I went around the side of the structure—it was so far gone I couldn’t think of it as a “house”—where yellow insulation poked through the scorched rents in the wall, flapping in the breeze. I heard a melodic tinkling sound and glanced up. Remarkably, a wind chime still hung from one of the eaves, a collection of pitted brass cylinders strung together with catgut.
The windows along this side of the structure were gone. I peered into one of the gaping, charred portholes and saw the devastation that was the interior of the house. Nothing remained; the fire had devoured everything straight down to the foundation. Small green plants sprouted from the ashy soil and there were great profusions of multicolored flowers running along the interior perimeter. The air, I suddenly realized, was electric with bees.
My mind spun. I had come all the way out here, retracing your childhood footsteps in order to peel back the final layer of who you were, Allison, only to find a dead end. As much as I hated to admit it to myself, it felt like you had somehow orchestrated this whole thing in order to prevent me from knowing you, fully and completely. Stalemate.
