by Ronald Malfi
Jesus Christ, how could I have been so blind? Had I inadvertently put Denise Lenchantin directly in Sloane’s crosshairs? Was it possible that the reason she hadn’t gotten back to me was because Sloane had taken a drive out to West Virginia and done something to her? A terrible certainty, bleak as cancer, settled over me.
“Did you know a man named Peter Sloane, who used to live in Woodvine?” I asked Tara as she drove. “He was a police detective back when Carol was murdered.”
—Po-leeeece-man, other-Aaron corrected inside my head.
“Sloane?” she said, twisting her mouth from side to side in thought. “Nope. Doesn’t ring a bell. Why?”
“Just a guy I know,” I said, and turned to gaze out the window.
By the time we pulled up outside a squat cement building with a sign over the door that read, in cursive pink neon, THE GAS FIRE GRILLE, my hands were trembling in my lap and I’d exuded a tacky film of sweat that made me feel like something that lived under a rock in a swamp.
I’ll admit that there was another thought niggling its way into my brain, something that had been gathering momentum ever since I came upon the burned-out remnants of your childhood home. All that I had learned about you on this journey, Allison—the misery and grief of your childhood, the calculating resolve you shouldered into adulthood, the violent revenge you were able to enact upon James de Campo in the parking lot of that bar—suggested you were a woman capable of anything. Anything at all. Even now, my wrists burned with the phantom sensation of those plastic bands you’d looped around them during our lovemaking, something that had seemed odd and out of character but not terrifying at the time. But everything had a new meaning now. A new you, Allison. Just how bottomless was the well inside your soul? Had your childhood home burned to the ground due to some freak accident, or had you crept back to Woodvine at some point in the past, under the cloak of darkness, hell-bent on punishing your mother for being such a lousy parent? A mother who let monsters like James de Campo slip through the bulwark of your innocence? A mother who was helpless to prevent the death of your sister? I can almost imagine the firelight reflecting in your eyes as you watched it all burn to the ground…
We got out of the car and went to the door of the Gas Fire Grille. Tara suggested she speak to Lynn first, and that I should wait by the bar. I agreed, although my nerves wanted nothing more than to get this over and done with.
The interior of the place was like every other dumpy chain restaurant, with kitschy bric-a-brac on the walls. I went to the bar and ordered an ice water while Tara went off to break the ice with Lynn. I watched her approach a thin, muscular woman dressed in black spandex pants, running shoes, and a sleeveless black shirt. She wore a stained green-and-white apron slung rakishly across her pointy hips. As they spoke, the woman looked past Tara and directly at me from across the room. The distance between us was too great to make out any details, except for the pale white face bracketed in curling strands of straw-colored hair.
Forcing myself to look away, I sipped my ice water and watched a man in a Mountain Dew windbreaker negotiate a dolly loaded with cases of canned soda through a doorway behind the bar. The door kept swinging closed before he could get the wheels of the dolly over the jamb. He cursed, scratched his balding gray head, then proceeded to twist the dolly around backward so he could prop the door open with his buttocks as he pulled it.
When I looked up again, I saw your mother moving toward me beneath a ceiling garishly lit with green-tinted light bulbs. She was wiping her hands on a towel which she tucked into the front pocket of her apron as she approached.
A pang of sadness radiated through me at the sight of her face. Scrape away the hard edges and the perpetual frown lines, the years and the heartache, the complexion ravaged by drug abuse, and this woman could have been you, Allison. In fact, this woman was so wholly, undoubtedly your mother, it was as if nature had conspired to replicate your family’s lineage with perfect acumen to fulfill some sacred and unknowable pact.
“Tara tells me we’re related,” she said, her voice hardened from years of smoking. She leaned an elbow on the edge of the bar, cocked a hipbone toward the ceiling. The flesh of her right arm was shiny and pink, stretched taut from skin grafts. There was a prominent ridge where the good flesh met the bad, like a demarcation line between two feuding countries. “She also says you’ve got some bad news about my daughter.”
My mouth went dry. I mustered enough courage to say, “My name is Aaron Decker. Allison and I were—”
“What happened to my daughter?”
That hornet was back in my throat, the feisty bastard. I said, “She passed away last December. I’m sorry to tell you this. I’m so sorry.”
A vertical crease appeared between Lynn Thompson’s eyebrows. Otherwise, she remained stoic. “How?” she said.
“She was… there was a… someone…”
“Go on,” she said, tapping her hand on the bar. “Let’s hear it.”
I cleared my throat and said, “She was killed. Shot. Someone shot her. There was a shooting at a strip mall near our home. She was killed. She was shot. Allison was shot.” The words avalanched out of me.
The crease between your mother’s eyebrows deepened, but the expression on her face—one of mild agitation at having been called away from her job clearing empty dishes off tables—did not change.
“Anything else?” she asked.
I just stared at her.
“I got work to do,” she said.
“Wait,” I said, struggling to find my voice and to line up my thoughts into some semblance of coherence. “Allison told me you were dead.”
“I was,” she said. “Just like she was dead to me.”
“How does that happen? She was your daughter.”
She leaned close to me, so close I could smell the cigarettes on her breath. In a low rumble, she said, “Who the fuck do you think you are?”
This stymied me. I could say nothing, only stare into eyes that were so much like yours, except these were rimmed in a seething, fiery anguish.
“I’m sorry,” was all I could manage to say. The same thing everyone had been saying to me, Allison, since your death, and now here I was, helpless to say anything wiser to your estranged mother.
“I’m sure she told you all sorts of shit about me,” Lynn said. “Let me tell you something, bud. My life wasn’t easy. I’m only human. I had problems, you know. I got fucked up on a lot of shit. Men, mostly, but a lot of other shit, too. I ain’t proud of it. Hell, my own mother was a waste, how should I know any different? And now you come here to lay this on me. What’d you expect?”
“I just thought you should know what happened.”
“Yeah, well, mission accomplished,” she said, straightening up. But she didn’t walk away; instead, she stood there sizing me up, looking at my clothes, my haircut. Judging me. For a moment, I thought she might hit me up for money or something.
I took a deep breath and said, “Can I ask you about the house?”
Lynn frowned. “What?”
“The fire,” I said. “What caused the fire?”
Something like a laugh creaked up out of Lynn Thompson’s throat. “You with the insurance company, too? My lucky day.”
“Was it Allison who set the fire? Did she come back here?”
“Once Allison left, she ain’t never come back. Not once.”
“Then how’d the fire start?”
Her eyes narrowed to slits. “This is what you’re here asking me?”
“I need to know. I need to know just how far she went.”
Lynn plucked a cigarette from behind her ear, held it up. “Passed out on the couch with one of these in my hand,” she said. “That good enough for you?”
I felt my body grow loose. An icy hand had been slowly squeezing my heart; it released its grip now and I could breathe again.
“You think that batshit crazy daughter of mine came back here to burn the place down? Take me out in the night?”
“I’m think I’m all talked out,” Lynn said, taking a step back from me while tucking the cigarette back behind her ear. “Thanks for the laughs.”
I watched her strut back across the restaurant. By the time she reached her next table of customers, she had a smile planted on her face.
Tara, who had been watching from the far end of the bar, came over to me. “You okay?”
“Sure. Hell. Never better.”
“Your hands are shaking.”
“They’ve been doing that for months,” I confessed.
7
Back in Tara’s car, we sat in the parking lot of the Gas Fire Grille where we passed my last cigarette back and forth like a couple of high-school kids. The rain was holding off for now, but judging from the tumultuous black clouds creeping toward us from the east, it wouldn’t be long before we were treated to another deluge.
“I tried to warn you,” Tara said, reclining in the driver’s seat, her window partially cracked. Across the street were two billboards, one depicting the somber face of Jesus Christ, the other advertising a strip club called Pole Position. “Did you have any other business out here?”
“No.”
“So you’re heading back tonight?”
“There’s a motel out by the highway. I’ll probably stay there tonight, head back home tomorrow morning.” Of course, what I was thinking was that if I didn’t hear back from Denise Lenchantin by this evening, I’d be driving back out to West Virginia tomorrow to see if I could locate her. And if not, then I’d go to the police and tell them what I suspected about Peter Sloane.
—Po-leeeece-man, other-Aaron whispered inside my head.
“Where you gonna eat?” Tara asked.
“I can’t even think about food right now. My stomach’s all jumpy.”
“Hell, come over for dinner tonight. Meet Eric. He’ll be home by five.”
“That’s very kind, Tara, but I couldn’t impose on you like that. This has already been way too much.”
“Hey, now.” She turned toward me, jabbed a fist against my shoulder.
“Ouch.”
“Listen, man. You came out of nowhere and dropped this bombshell on me about my old childhood friend. Least you could do is stick around and have a home-cooked meal with me and the hubs.”
“All right.” I smiled at her, my face feeling old and tired and made of sackcloth. “How can I argue with that?”
“Right on, man.”
“Just don’t punch me again.”
Tara laughed.
8
By the time we reached the mustard-colored ranch house on Cane Road, the rain had tapered to a drizzle again, and the windshield wipers were squeaking and leaving black smudges along the glass. I thanked her for the ride and she told me dinner was at five-thirty sharp. I thanked her again, this time for her hospitality.
Back in the Sube, I sat behind the wheel for a time, replaying what your mother had told me. I felt guilty for thinking you capable of something so heinous as burning your house to the ground with your mother inside, but I also felt relief for knowing that I had been wrong. Here I was, a fool, desperate to cling even tighter to this alien thing that drew further and further away from me. Unanchored, unmoored—drifting, drifting.
My vision blurred. I swiped a hand across my eyes and my fingers came away wet.
I headed back toward town, planning to purchase a bottle of nice wine to bring to dinner and maybe grab a shower back at the motel room, when my cell phone trilled. I checked the screen and saw that it was Peter Sloane. I pulled the car onto the shoulder of the road and stared at the phone, unsure if I should answer it or not. Would it be too suspicious if I let it go to voicemail?
I answered it.
“I’ve got some news,” Sloane said. “Confirmation from the medical examiner in the Megan Pollock case. Aaron, she was found with her hands still bound behind her back by a length of wire.”
My mouth was dry. I stared out of the Sube’s windshield, where the smokestacks of the defunct refinery rose up beyond the trees at the horizon.
“Did you hear me?” Sloane said.
“I did.”
“Aaron, where are you now?”
“I’m in Woodvine, Peter,” I said, wondering if this was something he already knew. Had he followed me out here? Had he been the one to tamper with my car tire? Or was I making huge leaps in logic?
“I think it’s time we reign this in. There’s enough here to go on now. Why don’t you come back out here and we’ll sit down, get all our ducks in a row? I’ve got people we can take this information to. They can put the rest of the pieces together.”
I stared at the outline of the refinery against the darkened sky. “I don’t know, Peter. There’s still some stones I’d like to turn over first.”
“What stones? Aaron, I think we should talk. Come on back out here. I’ve still got friends on the force who can look at this stuff.”
“Not just yet,” I said. “Give me one more day.”
“What else can you do, Aaron?”
I closed my eyes. My head throbbed. “I just want to make sure I’m not overlooking something,” I said.
—Po-leeeece-man, said other-Aaron.
And that was when I realized what I was looking at. Those smokestacks rising up over the trees at the horizon. I counted them in my head.
“Aaron? You still there?”
“Listen, Peter, I’ll be in touch, but I gotta go now,” I said, and disconnected the call.
My satchel containing the murder files sat beside me on the passenger seat. I tore it open and dug through it until I found the loose sheet of legal paper. I held it up against the windshield, so that your sketch of those six rectangular columns stood next to the outline of the refinery smokestacks on the horizon. The pattern of those smokestacks matched the drawing.
“Jesus Christ,” I muttered.
I was startled by the ringing of my cell phone again. I checked and saw that it was Peter Sloane calling me back. This time, I rejected the call and let it go to voicemail.
9
There was a paved road that led to the refinery, its sun-bleached blacktop marred by spray-painted graffiti. Slogans warning travelers to turn back were emblazoned on the surface of the road in neon pink, orange and lime green. Stick figures had been sprayed along the blacktop as well, featureless effigies whose bodies looked ill-proportioned and crude. I slowed the car to a crawl when I spotted what looked like a nude person standing on the shoulder of the road; as I drew closer, I saw that it was a department-store mannequin tied to a post like some hideous version of a scarecrow. Several more of these dummies rose up from the shoulders of the road as I progressed toward the refinery. A placard hung from the neck of one of the mannequins, the phrase SURRENDER DOROTHY spray-painted on it.
“What the hell is this place?” I said to myself, leaning over the steering wheel to get a better look at the refinery as it came into full view.
Indeed, it looked like something out of Oz, only an Oz that had been decimated by nuclear war. Those six massive smokestacks rose from a rectangular concrete building, with two rows of milky, wire-meshed windows running from one end to the other. Everything was crowded with scaffolding and steel girders, but I could still see the graffiti that crowded the entranceway of the building. Most prominent—curled like a welcome banner above a set of large metal doors—was the phrase THERE IS MADNESS HERE in stark streaks of red spray paint.
I stopped the car and shut it down. From my vantage, I could see that the metal doors of the refinery were not sealed; a column of darkness separated them, wide enough for a person to slip through. Two more mannequins stood guard out here, one on each side of the entranceway like a pair of doormen. One of the mannequins wore what looked like a conductor’s hat.
I got out of the car and crept along the busted slabs of asphalt toward the building. The smell in the air was undeniably different out here. It was as if hidden things still b
urned. If gas fires had souls, then their ghosts haunted this place.
The smell only increased as I approached the doors. I looked up and surveyed the dual rows of grimy windows, each one set behind a cage of wire. Birds’ nests poked through the meshwork.
I took out my cell phone and activated the flashlight app. That meager, pencil-thin beam drilled a hole through the column of darkness between the two doors. Inside my head, other-Aaron stirred like something prodded by a white-hot poker.
—Why in the world would you go in here? he spoke up.
“Hush, now,” I said, and squeezed myself through the opening in the doors.
10
I found myself standing at one end of a long, narrow corridor. The ceiling was high and there were rectangular windows up near the rafters, but their panes were so filthy that little daylight was able to penetrate. Moreover, the feeble javelin of light generated by my cell phone could hardly illuminate anything more than three feet in front of my face.
The place smelled awful. I tugged my undershirt up over my nose as I advanced down the corridor. Ahead, I could make out the vague suggestion of an open doorway. As I passed beneath a milky panel of light coming through one of the high windows, I noticed something affixed to the wall off to my left. I went to it and saw that it was a child’s doll, its cloth body black with mold, its hollow rubber head and limbs the color of ash. It was hung by a harness of thin wire and nailed like a picture frame to the wall. Farther along the corridor I came to a second doll, this one strung upside-down by its legs. As if this sight wasn’t disconcerting enough, I noted that both the doll’s eyes were missing and that a black sludge had dribbled from its empty sockets.
My eyes had adjusted somewhat to the gloom by the time I reached the open doorway at the end of the corridor. I passed through it and into a large open space, where the dual rows of windows permitted more light into the chamber. I tucked my phone back into my coat as my eyes adjusted further to the murky half-light.
