by Ronald Malfi
“That’s not true,” I told him. “That’s just the excuse you give yourself to keep doing what you do. The girl in West Virginia.”
I nodded toward Holly Renfrow’s file, atop the stack on the table. Childress didn’t take his eyes from me.
“She fell into the river before you could strangle her. You didn’t get to do it yourself, so you approached a woman whose car had a flat tire on the side of the road. That woman wasn’t brought to you, as you say; she was a convenient target and you were riled up and ready to kill someone.”
Lightning flashed at the window. I shied away from its glare but Glenn Childress remained motionless.
“There’s something else I know,” Childress said. “You haven’t gone to the police with what you know. If you had, I’d be answering questions in a jail cell right now. But you, like your stupid fucking wife, decided to go this route alone. And now here you are.”
“That’s not true,” I said.
I heard him cock back the hammer of the gun.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said in a low voice. And then again: “It. Doesn’t. Matter.”
A dim red light began to emanate from the bathroom. It turned Glenn Childress into a hulking, featureless silhouette. The glow intensified until it cast a radiant red glow on everything in the room.
Childress watched his shadow stretch along the wall. He turned and glanced over his shoulder at the light spilling from the bathroom doorway.
I grabbed the oar that was lying slantways across the bed and swung it at Childress’s head, just as he was turning back around to face me. I felt the heavy wooden oar strike the side of his skull. The force wrenched a strangled cry from him. He went down, knocking over the table on his way to the carpet. The gun went off, a report that sounded like cannon fire in the room. On the floor, Childress raised his head, and I could see a startling perforation along the left side of his head, from temple to jaw. The blood—black in the eerie red light spilling from the bathroom—spurted from the wound and filled his left eye socket.
Childress crawled behind the overturned table toward the corner of the room. I mistakenly thought he was retreating from me until I saw that he was groping for the revolver that had flown from his hand in the fall and now lay against the baseboard.
I struck him a second time between the shoulder blades with the oar, then dropped the thing and scrambled over to the gun. I scooped it up in both hands and spun around to face him. My heart was slamming in my chest.
Childress looked up at me. He managed to prop himself in the corner. The gash along the left side of his face pumped blood onto his denim jacket.
He was wheezing, his chest hitching. He drew one leg up then leaned his head back against the wall, gasping for air. I stood there with the gun trained on him, both hands wrapped around the hilt.
Glenn Childress raised one hand.
“All right,” he groaned. “All right.”
I watched as he touched the gash at the side of his face. His palm came away black and shiny with blood. He stared at it, and something like a laugh erupted from between his blood-streaked lips.
Another flash of lightning, and I saw Childress’s shadow projected on the wall—multi-limbed and monstrous, just like the mannequin I’d found in the abandoned refinery back in Woodvine. Or so it seemed.
I leveled the gun at his head, and pulled the trigger.
10
Ears ringing, I lowered my arm. The gun dropped to the carpet. I could smell the gun smoke, cloying and acrid in my nose. Another smell, too—like burning oil. I watched as the smoke rose from the wound in Childress’s skull, swirling as if alive. The smoke collected at the ceiling, a formidable mass that appeared to shift and move and churn with a certain disquieting measure of sentience. I dug the flashlight from my coat pocket and switched it on. The cloud of smoke undulated in the beam of light, slowly rotating like the eye of a storm. A tendril of smoke detached itself from the cloud and snaked dreamily along the ceiling and in my approximate direction; I tracked its progress with the flashlight. Like a cobweb, the smoky tendril levered itself down from the ceiling until it broke apart and vanished altogether. I redirected the beam to the clot of smoke directly above Childress’s ruined skull. A jumble of serpents, it roiled and eddied and churned. I stood there with the flashlight trained on it for an unknowable amount of time, until it had all but dissipated into the air.
Something crackled in the bathroom. I leaned across the threshold and saw that the red light was coming from the heat lamp above the shower stall. As I stared at it, I watched its intensity diminish until it faded to a glowing pink ember at the center of a bulb recessed in the ceiling.
Before I could fathom how that light should work when all the rest of the motel’s power had been knocked out by the storm, the lights in the room blinked on.
11
I stepped out into the rain, feeling about as substantial as a man constructed from paper. An inkling of daylight poked through the distant trees while the moon, still partially shrouded in mist, hung directly overhead. The frigid air bit into my sweat-slickened flesh, and the rain felt good on my face. There was a marching band clambering around inside my skull.
I had every intention of heading to the lobby to call the police, but I was frozen when a pair of headlights swung into the parking lot. It was a silver sedan with a spotlight on the driver’s door. I raised my hands above my head, too rattled to stop and wonder who could have called the police, as the car came to a stop directly in front of me. The driver’s door opened and a man in a leather jacket over a western-style shirt climbed out.
It was Peter Sloane.
“Jesus Christ,” he said, rushing over to me. He put a hand on my shoulder and I lowered my hands. I didn’t realize how much I was shaking until Sloane’s hand steadied me. “What the hell happened, Aaron? Are you hurt?”
“Childress,” I said. I was vaguely aware that I was floating in a daze, unable to anchor myself to reality. “He’s in Room Four. He’s dead.”
Sloane squeezed my shoulder. He put his face close to mine. “What happened, Aaron? Tell me what happened.”
I told him what had transpired in the room, including Childress’s confession. When I got to the end, I told him how Childress had raised his hands and said all right, all right, but that I had shot and killed him anyway.
Sloane glanced over his shoulder at Room Four. The door was still ajar, the light from the room spilling out into the wet parking lot.
“It was self-defense, Aaron,” Sloane said.
I shook my head.
Sloane grabbed me on either side of my head and forced me to look him in the eyes. “Listen to me—it was self-defense. Do you understand? Do you?”
I nodded my head.
“Say it. Say you understand.”
“I understand,” I said. “It was self-defense.”
Sloane released his hold on me. The rain glittered like jewels on his leather jacket.
“There’s a campground up the hill,” I told him. “All of Childress’s victims had gone there. That’s how he found them.”
Sloane was nodding his head, but he had stopped looking at me. Instead, something over my shoulder had attracted his attention. I turned and followed his gaze.
Dressed in a pale yellow robe that was soaking up the rain, Glenn Childress’s wife moved with the dreamlike lassitude of a sleepwalker toward Room Four. She stopped as she reached the open doorway and simply stared into the room.
“That’s his wife,” I said. “I think I need to sit down.”
I dropped to the pavement while Childress’s wife did likewise before the threshold of Room Four. She glowed like something divine. Sloane rushed over to her, crouched beside her. If she made a sound, I couldn’t hear it over the storm.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
1
There is a word in Japanese, yugen, that has no English equivalent. In Japanese, it is the awareness that the universe transmits a profound and mysterious beauty that c
an only be understood by the man or woman engaged in the comparable beauty of human suffering. You had plumbed the darkest depths of this world and left a part of the curtain pulled away so that I, too, might peek behind it. This bleak, rusty machine we call life. This unexpected beauty.
2
There was police involvement soon after the events that transpired at The Valentine Motel—of course there was.
I spoke at length with two investigators from the joint Chester-Bishop Police Department, a female detective named Goodall who possessed the soulful, dulcet voice of a rhythm and blues singer, and her heavyset male counterpart, Detective Hart, who had the nervous habit of reducing his coffee cup to a pile of Styrofoam snowflakes. Sloane pulled some strings, and in less than five hours an attorney friend of his arrived from Asheville. This attorney, Juno Patel, arrived having already contacted three of the six families of the deceased, and was able to confirm that the girls had indeed attended Glenn Childress’s camp at some point in the year prior to their deaths.
The four of us sat together in a room with no windows, your notes, newspaper clippings, yearbook, and photos of the murdered girls on a stainless-steel table between us. There was a spray of blood across the cover of your yearbook, Allison, a rust-brown beading that arched above the green foil-stamped head of the elk. Bagged as evidence was the revolver, which they showed to me only once so that I could acknowledge that it was in fact the same handgun I’d taken with me across state lines and used to kill Glenn Childress.
In that windowless room, I walked Goodall and Hart through everything as best I could, frequently backtracking to fill in the gaps I had inadvertently overlooked the first time telling it, or to add clarifying statements to things I had previously said. When it came down to telling them about the final few moments in that motel room, I went with the story that Peter Sloane had advised: I told them that there had been a struggle during which I had managed to get the gun away from Childress; while holding him at gunpoint, he had come at me. My killing of Glenn Childress had been in self-defense. Juno Patel conveyed his endorsement with periodic nods of his head throughout my telling of the story.
Hart had a problem with me. Mostly, he had a problem with me transporting an unlicensed firearm across state lines, which I then used to kill a man. Patel was not ruffled by this; he began questioning why Detective Hart would want to play the sympathy card for a man who was clearly a serial killer—a serial killer who’d been living undetected among them in this otherwise peaceful mountain town, no less.
“Serial killer,” Hart scoffed. Despite Patel having connected three of the six victims to Childress’s campground, it was clear that Detective Hart found the concept wholly preposterous.
Juno Patel just grinned. Shark-like.
By the end of that day, Patel confirmed that the remaining three girls had also attended the camp. The connection was irrefutable. Detective Goodall said that my approach to this whole thing was reckless, and that I could be charged for a variety of crimes. In the end, however, she said that the district attorney had declined to press any charges against me. Detective Goodall wished me well. Detective Hart said nothing—he just stewed at his desk, picking apart his Styrofoam coffee cup with his blunt, brown fingers.
3
Obsessions are hard monkeys to shake. For the days and weeks following the events of that early morning at The Valentine Motel, I continued the process of peeling back layers and exposing things to the light. So did various police departments and journalists. Many things became clearer soon after. Many other things took more time to wriggle free and reveal themselves in the daylight. Much of what I learned came from Bobbi Negri; her ability to dig up the truth was rivaled only by your own ability, Allison. The more she traveled backward into Glenn Childress’s eerie past, the more certain she became that this story—all of it—should be a book.
“And not just about Childress,” she said to me one afternoon over the phone. “About you and Allison, too. A woman tracking a murderer for over a decade, and the husband who picks up where she left off.”
I told her I wasn’t interested in writing a book about it. In truth, I was trying to let it all go. I’d spent enough time in the dark.
“Why don’t you do it?” I suggested. “You know it all just as well as I do. More so, if you include whatever creepy skeletons you’re still digging up in Childress’s past.”
“But it’s your story. Yours and Allison’s.”
“We don’t want it anymore.”
Bobbi ultimately ran with it. She promised that if the book sold, she’d split the advance with me. It sounded like blood money, so I told her I didn’t want any profits. I told her that Bill Duvaney had started a charity through the newspaper, named after your column, Allison’s A-List, whose mission was to help girls who’d been abused, neglected, or otherwise needed assistance. I suggested she could send my share of any book royalties directly to the charity.
“You’re a conscientious fellow,” Bobbi said, chuckling on the line. “Do you want to hear what I found out so far?”
I almost said no, but in the end told her to lay it out for me just this once.
What Bobbi Negri learned:
A few years before Glenn Childress had murdered anyone, he had been working as a custodial engineer at the AstroOil gas refinery in Woodvine, Pennsylvania, when he started getting headaches. They were bad, so bad that sometimes he couldn’t get out of bed in the morning. After a while, he went to see a neurologist in Philadelphia. The neurologist found nothing wrong with him.
It was around this time that a number of other Woodvine residents became inexplicably ill. Some of them committed suicide. Some others picked up and left town, claiming that the air in Woodvine was poisoned. Everyone pointed fingers at the gas refinery. AstroOil shut the place down pending the results of numerous air-quality, safety, and equipment tests. The test results came back unremarkable, but that did not quell the concerns of the people living within the shadow of the refinery. Politics and public pressure ultimately resulted in the refinery closing its doors for good. This resolution was not met with unanimous approval; the refinery had employed over half the town’s population, and now the residents of Woodvine, Pennsylvania, were faced with staggering unemployment in the wake of those refinery doors having been closed.
Glenn Childress ultimately took a custodial job at Elk Head High School, under the supervision of James de Campo. While purely supposition on Bobbi’s part, this was probably how Childress first became aware of Carol Thompson. Carol had attended the school, but would have also interacted on occasion with de Campo, who had been engaged to Lynn Thompson at the time.
While working at the high school, Childress had also applied to the Woodvine Police Department, but was rejected for a variety of reasons, to include failing the psychological portion of the examination. It was around this time that Childress purchased a shit-brown 1996 Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera. He mounted a spotlight to the door and began patrolling the parks, schoolyards, and back alleyways of Woodvine during the night.
Glenn Childress murdered Carol Thompson in the summer of 2004. Records showed that Childress had also begun suffering from his headaches again—or perhaps they’d never left him—and that he had gone to see another specialist in Philadelphia. The findings were no different this time than they had been the first.
Not long after the murder of Carol Thompson, Glenn Childress thought it best to leave the town of Woodvine, Pennsylvania, for good. He traveled east in his Oldsmobile sedan, got jobs on cleaning crews at various restaurants, municipal buildings, civic centers. In all this time, he garnered not even a single parking ticket. At least outwardly, Glenn Childress appeared to be a model citizen.
He eventually journeyed south to Chester, North Carolina, where he found work assisting an elderly couple with the upkeep of their motel and campsite. It was a quiet, remote place that suited Glenn Childress just fine. Perhaps the isolation had even helped with his headaches. But it would soon prove to be t
he perfect hunting ground for whatever monster was hiding behind the mask of Glenn Childress’s face.
In the summer of 2006, Childress readied the campsite, then watched as a consortium of teenagers and preteens tumbled off buses from various parts northeast. It was on one of these diesel-grimed Greyhounds that Margot Idelson arrived—or, rather, was served unto him. One can only speculate what may have transpired between Childress and Idelson for the seven days she stayed at the campsite, but my guess is that nothing transpired. Not at that point. He would have been too cautious. He had studied her from afar, perhaps only lingering in the periphery of her awareness, something toothy and clawed biding its time from behind a veil of sagebrush. At first, conceivably, he had been transfixed by the physical similarities she shared with Carol Thompson—her slender frame, startling eyes, a mane of blonde, wavy hair. Perhaps, too, he had recognized something in her that had flipped his switch—the pollution that he had professed to me that night in the motel room. Whatever it was, he had waited for Margot Idelson to return home to Norfolk, Virginia, before going after her and killing her there. How had he located her in Norfolk? It was confirmed by the FBI, who later got involved in all this, that Childress collected the girls’ names and home addresses from letters they’d write home while staying at the camp.
The following year, Childress bought the motel and campsite from the elderly couple, who’d been yearning to retire. Childress stayed quiet that year, busying himself with this new venture; if he’d targeted anyone else during this timeframe, no one has ever found any evidence of it to date.
In 2008, after getting arrested for underage drinking, Shelby Davenport was sentenced to community service. She spent two weeks traveling from nearby Bishop to Chester, where she and some other youths assisted Childress in preparing the campsite for that summer’s impending campers. Whatever Childress saw in Shelby Davenport, it was enough to risk the proximity; he murdered her that same year in Bishop, no more than thirty miles from the motel. No suspect was ever considered in the girl’s murder.
