by Ronald Malfi
There was a buzzer on the counter, what looked like a doorbell bolted to a block of wood. I pressed it, heard the buzzing behind some distant wall, and immediately thought of the revolver buried in my duffel bag which I’d left back in the car.
—See? You’re not prepared for this. What good will that gun do you in the car?
It was not Glenn Childress who emerged out of the gloom beyond the two cane-backed chairs and the dark television set. It was his wife. An angular, wire-thin woman with mousey brown hair and clothes that looked ill-fitting and hand-sewn. She possessed the beseeching, quizzical stare of a barn owl, only there was nothing predatory about it. She’d been the one to check you in when you came down here last fall, Allison. The woman who’d spoken to me about you when I’d first come down here, too. Yet if she recognized me now, she made no show of it.
I asked for a room. When she learned I had not booked a reservation, her pale face went grim. “Currently under a two-week restocking moratorium from the DNR,” she said, poking at the keys of her computer. “Hope you’re not here to fish.”
“That’s unfortunate.”
“There’s rafting trips.” She nodded at a rack of brochures that stood against the wall beside the plate-glass windows. “Guides at the mouth of the river leave at seven sharp. Fifty dollars will get you the day trip plus lunch. Nothing fancy, mind you. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.”
“I don’t mind peanut butter and jelly.”
“They go soggy on the river.”
The creak of a floorboard drew my attention back to the unlit alcove toward the rear of the place. I waited to see if Glenn Childress would appear in the darkened doorway.
“Credit card and ID,” Childress’s wife said.
I dug my Visa card and driver’s license from my wallet, handed it to her. She fed the card into a machine and I returned my gaze to the alcove. But then something stirred the hairs on the nape of my neck to attention. I glanced over my right shoulder and spied other-Aaron’s wan countenance reflected in the night-dark window at my back.
—This is a mistake, he said. You should go to the police.
The credit card machine beeped. Childress’s wife handed me back my card and driver’s license, and I tucked them back in my wallet. When I looked up, I saw that she was studying the wound in my scalp. I had removed the bandage and had shaken my hair down over it as best I could, but the area around the knot had begun to bruise, making it look as though I had a smudge of dirt across my forehead.
She handed me a brass key affixed to a plastic fob with the motel’s name on it. “Room Four,” she said. It was the same room we’d both stayed in on our previous visits.
I thanked her, told her to have a nice evening, and shoved myself back out into the encroaching darkness.
2
This suffocating little box of a room. Wallpaper with its green and brown fish, a twin bed packaged in a burnt umber bed spread, the ghosts of cigarettes haunting the threadbare, oatmeal-colored carpet. All of this beneath a large Texas-shaped water stain on the ceiling.
There was a circular card table on the far side of the room, the two mismatched wooden chairs gathered around it like seedy conspirators. The bathroom door stood partway open, a vertical shaft of black space not unlike the opening of a defunct mineshaft—or the old AstroOil refinery back in Woodvine—beyond the door. The red Cyclopean eye of a smoke detector stared down at me from the ceiling.
It was all stage dressing. I switched on the futile little lamp beside the bed, the bathroom light, the solitary bulb over the dingy shower stall that blazed with an unholy reddish glow. I was looking for cracks in the foundation of the world, the zipper on the back of the rubber monster suit. I peered beneath the bed and opened all the dresser drawers. A section of wallpaper had curled away from the wall; I pinched it between my thumb and forefinger and administered a series of quick tugs until I could see the gummy, colorless drywall beneath. Had I expected to find some hidden missive under there? If I cut the carpet down the middle and splayed both halves in an autopsy fashion, would I locate a secret hatch to another world, a world where the realness of these past several months might be diluted by an alternate state of being? You and I exist outside this plane, where space and time are wound into a ball and not in a straight line, you’d once said to me. I cannot recall the reason for you saying it, cannot recall what we had been doing at the time; yet your words were clear as a handbell in the center of my head. We will always be together because we have always been together. We are acting out all our moments simultaneously right now. Ghosts are time travelers not bound by the here and now.
I pulled the drapes closed, propped your creepy armless doll on the nightstand, then opened my duffel bag while I sat on the edge of the bed. Wrapped in a pair of my boxer shorts was the revolver. Unreality washed over me as I picked it up, set it on one thigh. Looked at it. There was a child’s playground seesaw in the center of my brain, other-Aaron at one end of it, me at the other. We did not go up and down, up and down. We remained perfectly balanced, the two of us, while a strong wind gradually gathered momentum and advanced toward a full-blown tornado all around us.
I released the cylinder and loaded each chamber with a round. It was frighteningly easy. A child could do it, as they say. I thought of you as I loaded the weapon, and of the man who had taken your life. Had Robert Vols, your murderer, fired his father’s pistol on numerous occasions before he decided to finally fire it at you? Had he gone on family hunting trips when he was younger, shot skeet, used a pellet gun to pop cans at the local dump? Or had that asshole woken up that morning with that single-minded, burning purpose scorching a hole in the fabric of his diseased gray matter, itchy with it, unsettled and sweaty and twitchily disturbed, thinking for the first time, It’s right up there, that gun, right in their bedroom, that thing that could end lives, that thing that will make the sweating and the twitching go away?
Once six rounds were in the cylinder, I locked it back in place. The gun was heavier with bullets in it. Like someone handling plutonium, I rewrapped the gun in my boxer shorts then tucked it carefully back into my duffel bag. I buried the remaining ammo underneath.
From my satchel, I removed the file of the murders, opened it, and proceeded to place all your documents on the small circular table that was wedged between the bed and the wall on the far side of the room. Each girl’s face smiled up at me as I placed her photo down on that rickety clapboard table. Margot Idelson, murdered in 2006. She would have been nearing thirty years old now, had she lived. Shelby Davenport, murdered in 2008, in nearby Bishop, North Carolina. It wasn’t Davenport’s murder you had been down here investigating back in October; by then, you had already spoken with Denise Lenchantin, had already learned the identity of the killer from hearing her story. You had come here to end it. That was why you’d bought the gun. You had come here to kill Glenn Childress. Only problem was, he hadn’t been here when you arrived. His wife had checked you in. You’d stayed two days hoping he would show, and you gave some bullshit story about car trouble so you wouldn’t arouse suspicion. But Childress never showed. And after two days you had to leave. You had to get back home to me, so I would not become suspicious, either.
After Shelby Davenport’s murder, there was a period of roughly two years where nothing happened, at least as far as your records were concerned. But then in 2011, Lauren Chastain was unfortunate enough to run into Childress in New Jersey, only to have her body discovered on the swampy, cattail-rimmed bank of the Delaware River a couple weeks later. Another brief respite for Childress until Megan Pollock was found in a black and blue jumble of limbs in 2013 in Whitehall, Delaware. Jump ahead to 2016, and there was Gabrielle Colson-Howe, dead and purpled and bloated beneath the Harry Nice Bridge in Newburg, Maryland, strangled with such ferocity that her head had been twisted backward on her neck. Two years later, Holly Renfrow had crossed paths with Childress, only to fall into the Potomac River with her wrists bound behind her back and drowned.
<
br /> I heard the seesaw creak inside my head. Other-Aaron’s side ticked incrementally closer to the ground. He was positing a question.
“I feel it, too,” I told him, leveling the seesaw out again. “They’re spread out all over the place. How did he find these girls?”
It was the question that kept returning to me, kept nagging at me. Had Childress simply traveled the byways of the east coast, up and down and state to state, searching for teenage girls whose appearance so closely resembled your sister Carol’s? Had it been that random? Or had he lurked behind the anonymity of the Internet, scouring social media sites for girls who fit the desired description?
—Social media would explain how he knew Holly’s name, said other-Aaron. But then to locate her house? Had Holly been careless enough to post her address online somewhere?
The seesaw went crrrriiiiiick.
3
Behind the motel and partially obscured by trees stood a double-wide trailer where, presumably, Glenn Childress and his wife lived. There was a clothesline that ran from the rear of the motel to a pulley attached to one corner of the trailer, a few plain white bath towels hanging from it. Now, in the stone-gray light of evening, the towels looked like ghostly, flapping apparitions.
I stood smoking a cigarette in the clearing between the motel and the trailer. Ivy crawled up the walls of the trailer, crept along the roof, spooled around the stovepipe that jutted up from the shingles. All the windows were dark.
It wasn’t the trailer that interested me, but the large automobile parked alongside it, hidden beneath a brown canvas car cover.
I took one last pull on my smoke before tossing it to the ground and crushing it out beneath the heel of my shoe. I closed the distance between the motel and the trailer at a quick clip, realizing that there was still enough daylight along the western horizon to frame me in stark relief for anyone who might happen to look out one of the trailer’s windows. If someone was in there watching me right now, I wouldn’t know it.
As I got closer, I bent in a crouch and made my way over to the car. A few feet from it, the texture of the ground changed beneath my feet. I heard things crunch and break, which caused me to freeze in midstride. I looked down and saw that the ground was covered in broken bottles and shards of terracotta pottery. There was a mound of junk piled up against the side of the trailer, broken lawn chairs and an old bookcase and less identifiable items all thrown together in a schizophrenic heap. I maneuvered around the junk as quietly as possible, stopping to catch my breath and give the muscles in my calves a break only when I reached the car.
Sweat stung my left eye. I reached down and lifted the hem of the car cover, pulled it up over the grille, the hood, the windshield.
It was an old Thunderbird, its rusted frame an iridescent whitish blue beneath the moonlight. Its two front tires were flat.
It was Peter Sloane’s voice that returned to me now: There is no evidence that links this man to any of the murders.
Had you led me astray, Allison? Had I followed your irrational obsession instead of following the clues? Was all this one big charade?
I remained there, crouching beside the car, my mind awhirl with a million different outcomes and consequences, unanswerable questions and illogical leads. After a time, I pulled the cover back down over the car. Bits of broken glass crunched beneath my shoes.
Beyond the trailer, the woods rose in a black swell. I discerned a path—large enough for a vehicle to pass through—vanishing into the trees. There was a wooden sign posted at the path’s entrance:
CAMPGROUND CLOSED FOR THE SEASON NO TRESPASSING
I crossed over to the path, my head down, my hands stuffed in the pockets of my peacoat. I hoped that if anyone were to see me, I’d look like the perfect example of an ignorant fool out for an evening stroll and nothing more.
The path cut through the woods for a time until it emptied onto a vast clearing. Kayaks were stacked on a wooden trestle and there was a collection of small cedar cabins tucked among the trees, each one dark and vacant in their off-season retirement. I caught a whiff of ancient campfire smoke, yet instead of it being a comforting smell, I thought of Tara Whitney’s childhood fear of the terrible thing called Gas Head: For years I imagined this creepy white cloud of smoke coming into my bedroom while I slept and blowing up my nostrils, filling my head with smog.
I heard running water, so I followed the slope of the land until I arrived at the cusp of a shallow brook, its surface cloudy with mist. Along the opposite bank, the trees formed an impenetrable shroud, shielding this part of the land from the road farther down the side of the mountain. The sensation was one of complete isolation, despite knowing that the motel and the road beside which it resided was probably less than half a mile down the mountainside.
I peered through the trees to my right and saw that a gravel passage wound farther into the woods. I followed it until a thing began to take shape among the trees—a large, barn-shaped garage with a set of double-doors at the front. A sign above the doors said DANGER—ELECTRICAL EQUIPMENT INSIDE, and a sign bolted to one of the doors said DO NOT ENTER. A hefty chain was lashed through the handles of the doors and held in place by a padlock, as ancient and rusty as something salvaged by divers from a sunken ship. There was a single window on the west-facing side of the building, its grime-caked windowpane glowing with the reflection of a distant sunset. I carved an arc in the grime with the heel of my hand and peered inside. The interior was crowded with items, hulking shapes indistinguishable in the gloom. I noted, however, another vehicle beneath what looked like a sheet of blue tarpaulin. Staring at it, I felt the back of my throat constrict. I was suddenly, unwaveringly certain it was an old sedan under there.
“Hey there,” said a man.
I jerked away from the window as if zapped by a current of electricity.
Glenn Childress stood maybe twenty feet from me, a sturdy fellow with a dark mullet and a great expanse of pale forehead. He wore a denim jacket and jeans so faded they were practically white. He held a large flashlight in one hand—one of those heavy-duty Maglite jobs—but there was still enough daylight in the sky so that he hadn’t needed to turn it on.
He chuckled good-naturedly at having startled me. “Didn’t mean to spook you,” he said. “Although, truth be told, you gave me a bit of a start myself. Wasn’t expecting to find anyone out here.”
“I was just out for a walk,” I said.
“Well, I can certainly understand the allure of the woods out here,” Childress said, smiling amiably enough. Across his chest was what I at first mistook to be a Sam Browne belt, but when he turned his body to inhale a great lungful of air, I could see the barrel of a rifle poking up over one shoulder. “Not an ounce of pollution out here. Pure as the driven snow, as they say. Only problem is, camp’s closed for the season. We don’t open back up ’til summer.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Big ol’ sign out by the road behind the motel.”
“I must have missed it.”
He waved a hand at me, still smiling. “Ah, no harm. I assume you’re the fella checked into Room Four earlier this evening?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, we should probably head back there. It’ll be dark soon, and this ain’t the best place to be wandering around once the sun goes down.”
Without waiting for a response, Childress turned and began trudging back through the trees. Already the night was creeping through the underbrush, and stars were beginning to poke holes in the firmament. I followed him through the woods, my gaze locking onto the rifle strapped to his back. I was aware now that the temperature had dropped considerably and that an owl was singing a dirge in a nearby tree. I cast a glance back over my shoulder at the garage with the DANGER sign over the doors; it was already being swallowed up by the encroaching night.
Childress slowed his gait so that we could walk in tandem. He was watching me now, studying my face. The muscles of his jaw appeared to tighten.
“Say, fella, do I
know you?”
“I was here about a month ago, asking about my wife.”
“That’s right,” Childress said, snapping his fingers; the sound echoed through the trees. “I remember now. Something about she died, is that right?”
“She did, yes.”
“Well, that’s just…” He shook his head, his lips tightening. “It’s just terrible, really.” A cloud of vapor wafted from his lips. “What brings you back this way?”
“Turns out my wife had come here to see an old college friend,” I said. “I didn’t realize it at the time. Anyway, I thought I’d come out and tell her about my wife’s death. I didn’t want to do it over the phone, but I guess I should’ve called first. She isn’t home. So here I am.”
“Well, that’s mighty nice of you,” Childress said. “Who’s the friend? Maybe I know her.”
“Julie Sumter.” It was the first name that popped into my mind.
Childress made a sour face. “Don’t sound familiar. She here in Chester?”
“Bishop,” I said. It was the nearest town to Chester, down in the foothills of the mountain—the town where Shelby Davenport had been killed back in 2008.
“Well,” Childress said. “Can’t say I know everyone down there in Bishop. I hope she takes it well. And I hope you find some peace, too, fella.”
“Thank you.” I stepped over a spindly deadfall. “You’ve owned this place long?”
“Few years.”
“What’d you do before this?”
Childress froze. I stopped short beside him, suddenly perspiring despite the cold evening air.
“Hear that?” he said. He held up one finger, his bloodshot eyes scanning the treetops. I noticed patches along his square jaw where he’d missed some spots shaving. “You hear the son of a bitch?”
I listened but could hear nothing.
“Hold this,” he said, and handed me the flashlight. The thing was as heavy as a medieval mace.
It was then that I did hear something—a machinegun rat-a-tat somewhere in the upper branches of a tree.
