by Ronald Malfi
In 2011, Childress met a mousy, skittish woman named Sheila Longbaugh who worked at a laundromat in downtown Bishop. Sheila had known the Davenport family—they lived across the street from each other—so one might surmise that this was what sparked Childress’s initial interest in the woman. Perhaps he’d grown nervous at having murdered someone so close to the motel and was hunting for information that only the Davenport family and their close friends and neighbors might know. Whatever the case, their courtship lasted two months, after which they were married at the local courthouse in Bishop. Sheila quit the laundromat, moved out of the rundown duplex she shared with her mother and stepfather, and went to work alongside her newfound husband at The Valentine Motel. For Sheila, owning a motel and campground was a business venture the likes of which she’d never dreamed. Maybe she was even happy for a while.
They tried getting pregnant right away, but after three miscarriages, Sheila was told by her doctor that it just wasn’t in the cards for her. This sunk her into a deep depression, which lasted for several months. Whatever impact this might have had on her husband’s state of mind is open for speculation. During this time, Childress managed to travel all the way to Vineland, New Jersey, to murder Lauren Chastain, a girl who’d spent a week at the campsite earlier that summer.
The following year was another quiet one, or so it seemed. Childress had much of the motel remodeled. The construction on the place went on longer than anticipated, and he had to cut the camping season short that year. But then the following year, in 2013, a teenage girl named Megan Pollock caught his eye as she stepped off a bus in the parking lot of The Valentine Motel, a backpack slung over her shoulder and a sleeping bag rolled up under one arm. Childress waited months before driving to Whitehall, Delaware, where he strangled the girl and left her body in a twisted heap in the woods off a highway, on the bank of a muddy brook. The autopsy report determined she’d been strangled with such brute force that her neck had been broken in three places. In my mind, this had been the result of Childress having to make up for his previous year of dormancy, only to come out of the gate with a rage and fervor uncontrolled and nearly superhuman. But that’s just a guess.
There was Gabrielle Colson-Howe from Newburg, Maryland, in 2016—a three-year gap since the Pollock girl’s murder. Bobbi Negri had a theory that Childress had not been dormant during those three years at all, but that we simply did not know who his other victims had been. Bobbi suggested that it wasn’t possible for you to have identified all of Childress’s victims, Allison, and that your dossier had not been complete. And do you know what? She was right… although I’m getting ahead of myself.
Lastly, of course, there was Holly Renfrow from Furnace, West Virginia, murdered in the fall of 2018. I followed the news out of Furnace more closely than any of the other towns, until I came across a brief article accompanied by Hercel Lovering’s photo. Chief Lovering cited a “clerical error” for mistakenly finding Das Hillyard guilty of Holly Renfrow’s murder. After some disagreement with the local magistrate, Lovering resigned from his post as police chief. I thought it might give me some paltry satisfaction to learn this, but it did not. It just made me feel cold inside.
The nightmares I suffered soon after the events at the motel were of a fierce and merciless breed. Even in my waking hours, an image persisted—Glenn Childress’s dark form drifting across the Elk Head River bridge, his labored exhalations smoking in the chilly autumn night. Gray ash snowed down from the sky but never seemed to collect on this dark and curiously immaterial figure… as though he wasn’t fully of this world. I saw his car idling on random street corners at night, the sedan’s headlights dwarfed by the ocular glare of that single door-mounted spotlight.
You think you’ve got it all figured out, he’d said to me in that motel room, but you don’t. You see me, you see some monster. You see something ugly and detestable that needs to be stopped. But you don’t see what I see.
A part of Glenn Childress had survived that night and had pursued me back to our townhome in Harbor Village. This was dreadful enough, but it was made unbearable by the notion that his monstrous presence had eclipsed yours. Since my return, the closet light had stopped coming on by itself. The Alexa speaker no longer spontaneously played your shitty music. I could no longer discern your handprint on the windshield of the Sube. We will always be together because we have always been together, you’d once told me. We are acting out all our moments simultaneously right now. Ghosts are time travelers not bound by the here and now.
To escape the emptiness of our home, I visited my sister Trayci. She was happy to have me, and I was happy to spend time with her and my nephews (Owen was away on business travel). We went fishing, bowling, had a pizza and movie night, but I soon began to feel unsettled.
“Allison’s not with me anymore,” I confessed to Trayci one evening as we sat in her living room polishing off a bottle of wine. “After she died, it still felt like a part of her was with me. In the house, even. But not anymore.”
“She’ll always be with you, Aaron. You know that.”
I was searching for you, tortured by your absence. Torturing myself. And it was the insight of Bobbi Negri’s mother that kept returning to me whenever I considered this: We haunt ourselves.
Yes, Allison. We haunt ourselves.
It felt like a great weight was slowly crushing my chest.
4
Bobbi Negri had been right—there were more victims. Your tally of seven (including your sister) was ultimately augmented to eleven. The police learned of this after discovering Childress’s Cutlass Ciera in a storage facility in Bishop. Snared in the carpet fibers of the vehicle were strands of hair from some of the victims you had identified, as well as hair from others you had never keyed in on. In the trunk of the vehicle were leather driving gloves, spools of electrical wire, and fake police credentials.
Sloane told me all of this one afternoon as we ate lunch at a restaurant in Washington, D.C. He and Dottie had traveled to the city for vacation, so I agreed to meet him for an hour while Dottie visited a museum. Obsessions being what they were, Sloane had had a tough time letting it go, too. He kept in touch with detectives from the various police departments working through their individual cases, and also with detectives Goodall and Hart, who were closing the loop in Chester.
“You know,” Sloane said, “Goodall, she mentioned something in passing last time we spoke.”
“Yeah? What’s that?”
“That the forensics concerning what happened in that motel room don’t exactly comport with your version of the story.”
I paused with my Michelob halfway to my lips. “Meaning what?”
“Meaning that the angle in which Childress was shot, coupled with the blood spatter on walls, suggests he was low to the floor when you killed him. Not standing up and coming at you.”
“Oh.” I set my bottle on the table.
“It’s nothing anyone is interested in pursuing, so I wouldn’t sweat it,” Sloane said. “I just thought you should know.”
“And if someone does come asking about it?”
“I don’t think they will,” said Sloane, “but if they do, you stick to your story. It was self-defense.”
“And if that doesn’t satisfy their forensics?”
“Hey, it was a traumatic event. Who can be expected to remember every tiny detail?”
“Right.”
“The motel’s closed down, you know.”
“Yeah, I saw that.”
“Apparently it’s become something of a tourist attraction. People are tearing it apart and making off with souvenirs.”
“What happened to Childress’s wife?”
“She was questioned extensively by police then ultimately let go.”
“They thought she might have known something?”
“I guess it’s hard to fathom your spouse doing something so dark for so long and you not knowing about it.”
“I can fathom it,” I said.
&nbs
p; One corner of Sloane’s mouth tugged upward in the approximation of a smile.
“She went there to kill him, you know,” I told him. “Allison. It’s why she had the gun. It’s why she erased the hard drive on her laptop. My guess is her next step would have been to destroy all the files in her trunk. No connection to the crime.”
“But Childress wasn’t there when she showed up for him,” Sloane said.
“No. He wasn’t.”
“So you did it for her. You finished it.”
“I keep seeing him, Peter.” It came out as a confession. “When I close my eyes. When I dream. When I’m awake, too. I keep hearing that gunshot. The sound of it got trapped in my head.”
“You’ll forget in time.”
“He said that everyone’s got two people inside them. He was crazy, but I think he was right about that. Allison was two different people. I learned that along the way. She had a different side to her that was capable of things I would have never thought possible.”
“So do you, Aaron,” Sloane said.
“There’s something I never told you.”
Sloane eyed me and he took a swig of his beer. “Go on,” he said.
“When Childress died… I mean, after I’d shot him, Peter… I saw smoke come out of his head. Right out of the bullet hole.”
One of Sloane’s eyebrows arched. “And?”
“It wasn’t just a little bit of smoke. It moved like something alive. I watched it go up to the ceiling and move around up there. For a second, it was like it was considering whether or not it should go inside me.”
“What are you talking about, Aaron?”
“Gas Head.”
Sloane set his beer bottle on the table. “It was a story to scare kids, Aaron. Make-believe.”
Shamefaced, I looked down at my half-eaten club sandwich.
“You know what?” he said, his tone suddenly upbeat. “I think it’s time you and I quit wallowing in all of this. It’s over. No more talk about Glenn Childress or Gas Head or murders or anything else. We’re done.”
“I think that’s a great idea,” I said.
After lunch, we chatted on the sidewalk for a while until Sloane spotted his wife across the street in the crowd, waving at him.
“Listen,” I said. “Thank you for everything, Peter.”
“Thank you, too, Aaron.”
We embraced, and then I watched him stroll across the street. He joined his wife and they merged with the crowd until they disappeared from my sight.
I would never see Peter Sloane again.
5
On some random afternoon, as I sat in our (formerly) shared home office working on a translation, I received a telephone call from Rita Renfrow. She wanted to thank me for finding the real killer and not giving up. She said she was resting much easier now, although the grief over her daughter’s death was still great.
“It’s probably something I’ll always carry with me,” she said.
I thanked her for the call, and then she asked me a question.
Her voice barely above a whisper, she asked if Childress had said anything about her daughter before he died. I would’ve liked to hear him say what he’d done to her and that he was sorry, Rita had said when we’d spoken in her yard, back when she still believed Das Hillyard had murdered her daughter. He should have at least given me that.
My answer to her was the second and final lie I would tell concerning this matter, counting the one about self-defense I told detectives Goodall and Hart.
“Yes, Rita. He did. He apologized. Before he died, he said he was so sorry for taking Holly away from you.”
Rita was quiet on the phone for a very long time. At one point I thought maybe we’d gotten disconnected, but then I heard a quiet sniffle, and I just remained on the line with her, not saying anything. We stayed like that for a long time. In the end, she whispered, “I’m glad you killed him.”
I said nothing.
She offered a final thank-you and a goodbye, and ended the call. I sat there staring at the phone, and for the first time in a long while, I didn’t feel completely horrible. It was as if that weight that had been crushing my chest had eased up the slightest bit.
And then there came a knock on our front door.
I went down the stairs and was halfway across the foyer when the person knocked again, more urgently.
I opened the door to find a woman standing there. The first thing I noted was that she was wearing a long black woolen coat, which was an unusual choice for a midsummer day. The second thing I noticed was that the woman standing before me was Sheila Childress. Our eyes met, and as recognition dawned on me, I could see that her eyes were red and glassy, as if she had been recently crying. Unsure what to say or do, I just stood there staring at her.
The crazy thing that returned to me in that moment was a memory from your work party that we had attended back before we were married, the one at Bill and Maureen Duvaney’s house. Madam Golganor, the drunk, foul-mouthed psychic, with her crystal ball that was MADE IN CHINA. The warning she had given me, imparted by a woman in a red beret: Don’t. Open. The. Door.
Sheila Childress produced a small handgun from the pocket of her wool coat. She aimed it straight at my chest and pulled the trigger.
There was nothing at first, except the feeling that I’d been struck in the upper chest by a great force of wind. I fell backward into the foyer and lay there, blinking haplessly at the chandelier above my head. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t draw in any air. The pain came next, spreading its burning tendrils throughout my body, each one stemming from the molten supernova where my heart was supposed to be.
Sobbing audibly, Sheila retreated from the doorway. Somehow I managed to raise my head and watch her totter down the steps toward the road. Some of our neighbors were coming over. I looked down further and saw that I was wearing a bright red shirt, only I had been wearing a white t-shirt a moment earlier, and none of it made any sense. My head dropped back down onto the floor. There were three chandeliers up there now, rotating like a—
(Great Cosmic Clock)
—pinwheel. The lights flickered on and off, on and off.
Distantly, I heard another gunshot. People screamed. I couldn’t fathom what was happening. I couldn’t remember what I was doing lying here on the floor, my body cold in the middle of summer, my shirt red instead of white, my vision breaking down and growing dim, my mind not here, not here. A figure swam in front of my field of vision, recognizable yet unfamiliar all at once. Other-Aaron, his face grim, his voice a gunshot of its own in my head.
—Be still. Be still. Be—
6
–here, suddenly looking down at myself, a reversal of roles, a mind within a mind and a soul within a soul, seeing the life drain from my eyes, ascending and descending all at once, as I watch me die. And there I go, that solid, skin-and-bones version of me—gone.
7
I am suddenly standing alone in the dark of our townhome. I sense you here somewhere, Allison, but I cannot find you. I smell your perfume; I hear the wisp of your feet on the carpet. I traverse the hallways, hunting, searching. I do not find you; only a blurry image of myself, this skin-and-bones other-me who also wanders the halls in search of you. I am everywhere at once, everywhere this other-me goes. Because we haunt ourselves.
I am there in the doorway to our office as other-me comes up the stairs and sees me. He comes toward me but I am already retreating into the black. I am everywhere, everywhere.
I am standing in one dark corner of a gloomy parlor while an old woman in a wingback chair stares directly at me and says, What about your friend, Jeffrey? Who is that? And the other-me comes close, reaches out, and grazes the cold mist that is me.
Everywhere; everywhere…
I ghost through the house playing your music, Allison—it comes on when I think of it—and I am always playing it, always, and I am turning the pages of your yearbook, and when other-me comes into the house, he sees the image of your si
ster right there in front of him, and I keep playing your music…
I am in the bathroom of The Valentine Motel, making the red light over the shower burn like a supernova…
I am in our bedroom closet, knowing now where you keep the key to the padlock on your hope chest, and knowing that there is only one way you and I can ever be reunited, Allison, and so I compel the other-me to begin the quest. I dig the key out of your running shoe and place it on the mystic pedestal…
When other-me loses hope, I flash the closet light on and off, on and off, on and off. Because if other-me is going to open that door and die in the end, I need to get him there. It’s my only way back to you, Allison. My only way.
We haunt ourselves.
And then I am in our bedroom, Allison, watching you leave. Red beret and houndstooth coat. Saying, Come with me. Kissing other-me’s forehead before you leave. I rush to the version of myself still in bed, reach down, try to grab him, pull him up—not to stop you, Allison, because nothing can stop what has already happened, but for one final glimpse of you before you depart this world for the next. And other-me must sense my presence, because he rises with a confused sense of urgency, and goes to the window to watch you leave one last time.
8
And then this world fades and the next one begins. I am floating in space. Yet I sense that I am not alone. Somewhere, two voices are counting down from ten. Somehow, I can hear them.
The blinding light from two headlights cuts through the darkness. Blinding, yes—but I can stare at it without it hurting. Do you know who I see back there, beyond the headlights? Behind the windshield? A version of you and me that is at once wholly familiar yet fleetingly alien. People on another plane of existence, and in another time. People I’ve known and loved and am quickly forgetting.
I turn around and see you there, Allison. Floating in the black with me. You are backlit by a fluttery spangle of white light, cool and not too bright.
