by Gregg Olsen
Four
Ruth doesn’t utter a word until we are back on the gravel road. Her jaw is clenched, and I watch her grasp her hands and press them between her knees. I crack the window. Her wintergreen deodorant is working overtime.
“I’m sorry you came out all this way,” I say. “The kids should have called you or something.”
“Something’s wrong,” she says. “I know it.”
I try to calm her. “The fact that their parents left them alone is wrong in my book, but Joshua is old enough to look after his sister.”
I don’t tell her that my own parents were far, far worse. I survived.
“Something was missing,” she says. “It doesn’t make sense.”
I take my eyes off the road and glance at her for a split second.
“I haven’t been out here for several years. Maybe six. My sister always had her wedding portrait hanging in the front room. Next to the kids’ latest photographs.”
“Okay,” I say.
“It was gone. I think that’s weird, don’t you?”
“I wouldn’t know,” I say. “Maybe.”
I don’t tell her what I thought was out of place.
The T-shirt.
Maybe it was something Joshua had hidden and wore it only when his parents were away. Miller High Life didn’t fit the Wheaton family at all.
“I’ll check with the orphanage in Mexico,” I tell her. “Name?”
“La Paloma.”
“All right,” I say. “If it checks out, we’re good. If they aren’t there—though I’m sure they are—then we’ll fill out the paperwork and report them missing.”
“My sister never said they were going there,” she says. “She would have told me.”
“Do you share everything?”
“Yes. Everything.”
I look at her eyes.
“Does she know you wear mascara?”
Ruth turns away.
“No,” she replies, her voice hushed. “I only do that when I travel. I like to fit in when I’m outside of my church group.”
“Look,” I tell her, “we don’t know what happened. What we both know is that no matter how close you are with someone it’s only what you think you know. Only what they choose to reveal to you.”
She’s upset, and I notice that she is fidgeting with the shoulder harness, pulling it up and down… almost hard enough to leave a mark against her neck. She’s hurting herself. I immediately pull over and stop the car.
“Ruth, we’ll figure this out. You need to trust that we will do everything we can to find your family.”
Tears are flowing now. Silent tears.
“I know. I know. But…”
“Tell me.”
I gently pull her hand from the shoulder belt and she quietly reaches for a tissue she has stored under her bra strap. She dabs hard at her eyes. Harder, I know, than needed.
“Don’t tell my sister or my husband about the mascara.”
By the time we get back to the office and try the number for La Paloma, the administration staff is gone for the day. I ask Ruth where she’s staying for the night.
“I can’t stay,” she says.
“You’re going back home?”
“My husband wants me back tomorrow. I’ll have to drive all night as it is.”
I don’t understand this woman’s loyalties at all. Not even a little. Her sister might be missing and she’s going to leave before she finds out anything?
I don’t try to persuade her.
“How can I reach you?”
“Here’s my address.”
She hands me a card.
“A PO Box?”
She casts her eyes downward. “Our phone service is spotty.”
“I thought you have satellite and internet?”
“My husband has an account; I suppose I could give that to you. You’ll only call in an emergency, correct? He’s very busy and doesn’t like to be disturbed.”
I know that there is nothing I can do with Ruth Turner. At least not now. I’ll need her later if her sister and brother-in-law are missing.
“That’s fine,” I tell her. “I’ll be sure not to mention the mascara. Don’t you worry about that. I want to find Ida and Merritt and that’s all I want.”
We both know what I’m doing.
She gives me a cool stare and scribbles more contact information on the card. “There,” she says.
I stand and let her leave.
I don’t like it when people light a fuse and then get out of the way. If you want to find out something you need to stay on it. Never let go until you get where you need to be. Until you do what you need to do.
Tony Gray is leaning back in the world’s oldest office chair with his eyes closed. The chair has been repaired so many times that it appears to be upholstered with silver vinyl. On closer inspection, it’s clearly the work of a man who sees duct tape as the end-all, be-all. He’s well past early retirement, is married to a nurse he met at the hospital when he had a mild heart attack. He’s twenty pounds, maybe thirty, overweight and despite his constant complaining about dieting, I’ve never seen him eat anything that resembled doctor’s orders.
He’s either asleep or he’s succumbed from the empty contents of the Taco Bell bag that takes up the space in front of him.
“Sheriff,” I say.
His eyes flutter.
He bobs to alertness. “Detective. Just resting my eyes. Long day.”
“Tell me about it. It’s after six.”
He looks at his watch. “So it is.”
I fill him in on my adventure into the hills above Snow Creek with Wintergreen Ruth.
“I’m more of a peppermint guy myself.”
“Good to know.”
“Did I tell you about the time I went up there to arrest a bunch of freaks who were molesting their livestock?” he asks.
“Gross,” I say.
“Yeah, I even caught one in the act.”
I put my hand up. “No visuals please. But yeah, weird stuff goes on up there. Strange people. Probably more decent folks than freaks.”
“Not in my book,” he says. “People up there are there because they’ve got something to hide.”
He gets up, his eyes landing on the Taco Bell bag.
“Let’s not mention this to my wife.”
I agree. I know about keeping secrets.
We walk outside. The air is filled with the smell of rain after a warm day. Oil leaks from cars in the parking lot are rainbow-colored. I’m quiet, thinking about those secrets of mine.
“You okay, Megan?” he asks.
“I’m fine. I’ll see you tomorrow after I check out the Mexican orphanage.”
“Mañana,” he replies.
Five
I’m not fine.
Not really.
The thought of the Wheaton siblings and something sinister happening to their parents, stirs something inside of me. I have a gut feeling that something terrible has happened, something beyond a late holiday or time doing good works for some Mexican orphans.
I’ve been there. So, has my brother. One day in a blinding flash our parents were gone. We’d experienced the jagged range of emotions from fear to anger to constant dread—never really knowing what had happened.
My hands are trembling. I grip the steering wheel and turn onto the driveway.
I feel a compulsion that I’ve denied myself for a very long time. I’m not sure if it’s the Wheatons or something else that is driving me to dig into a Pandora’s box that I’ve carried with me from place to place for about a decade.
I rent an old Victorian in historic Port Townsend, though there’s nothing quaint about it. It’s cheap and needs more TLC than the landlady can afford at the moment. It’s a big house, divided into two units. The old maple floors are dangerously uneven. I’ve tripped twice at night on my way to the tiny bathroom down the hall from my bedroom. Set a marble down and it will roll around on its own, desperate to find a level spot on which to rest.
At the moment, I’m the sole tenant. The guy who lived in the other unit tired of unreliable heat in the winter and the sweltering that comes with western exposure. I don’t mind. I open the windows and let whatever is outside blow over me.
I drop my purse and keys on the table by the leaded glass door, the only part of the house that has any style from a bygone era. I expect one day the place will be razed and the door will end up in some fancy home in Seattle. I lock my gun in the gun safe in my office look at the blank screen of my laptop.
Ruth and her secrets.
Snow Creek people have theirs.
So do I.
Mine happened a lifetime ago.
I think about the box of tapes, how they have silently waited for me. I think of my psychologist, Karen Albright, and how she brought me back from the precipice that had been my world since I was born. I recollect how Dr. Albright’s blue eyes scared me at first. Almost otherworldly. How her office smelled of microwave popcorn.
How much I grew to trust her.
I was twenty when I first saw her. Defensive. Closed off like a street barricade. I had never let anyone inside, but I was smart enough to know that everything inside of me—from my experiences to the bloodline of my birth—had to be exorcized somehow. I’d been traumatized, and while I couldn’t see it in the mirror, others did. Night terrors are traumatic and uniquely embarrassing. You don’t know what you said, if anything. You don’t know if anyone heard your screams.
My roommate, Maria, did.
“Look, Megan, either you get some help, or you’ll need to find someplace else to live. Your night terrors are turning into a problem for me. I’m sorry. It’s the way it has to be.” Maria took me to a counselor and after one session he referred me to Dr. Albright, a professor of psychology, who maintained a small practice outside of her university duties.
“She can help you better than I,” the bespectacled counselor said. “Don’t be afraid. You can do this.”
I told myself that I’ve never been afraid a day in my life.
It was a lie, of course.
I open the windows and pour some iced tea that I’d made that morning before work.
The box is where I left it. How I left it. It sits in the back of the closet, taped shut.
“You’ll want these someday,” Dr. Albright had said.
I refused it at first. “I can’t see that happening.”
She smiled. “Trust me. You will. The day will come and listening to the tapes will make you even stronger.”
She put her arms around me. We both cried. We held each other for a long time. I knew it wasn’t goodbye forever, but it was the end of therapy that had spanned a year and a half. I was graduating from the university with a degree in criminology and had enrolled in the police academy in suburban Seattle.
I carry the small black box from the back of the closet and set it on the kitchen table. I take a kitchen knife—the irony of my action gives me pause—from the drawer and slit it open.
I draw a breath and peer inside.
More than two dozen mini cassettes, each numbered with the dates on which they were recorded. Dr. Albright had also, quite thoughtfully, enclosed a tape recorder.
I switch to wine.
My hand wobbles again as I insert a tape. Damn! My finger hovers and I push PLAY. I hear Dr. Albright’s soft, kind voice. She addresses me by a name that I no longer use, a name that I hope has been forgotten by everyone who ever knew it.
Dr. A: Put me there, Rylee. Take me step by step through what happened, what you did.
Me: Okay. I got home from school, and I heard the water running in the bathroom sink. I just knew my mother would bitch at me for leaving it on. Even though I didn’t. Mom had been critical of me, while praising my little brother, Hayden—despite the fact he didn’t do much to deserve it. If he remembered to flush the toilet after a late-night pee, she practically did handstands the next morning. Mom had always been harder on me.
Dr. A: Why do you think that was?
Me: She always said it was because I had so much potential. Which meant that whatever I did disappointed her. Like homeschooling. Mom was big on that. She homeschooled Hayden.
Dr. A: Why didn’t you want that?
Me: That’s easy and pathetic. I just wanted to fit in with other people. I didn’t want to be the loser at the mall who had no social skills and didn’t know what’s in and what isn’t. How to wear my hair or whatever. You really can’t learn all you need to know from TV or the internet, and contrary to what most people think—that all kids that age do is hang out online—it’s not true for all of us. Not for me at least. I’m a watcher. An observer. I liked being out in the real world, mostly because my home life was always so fake.
Dr. A: You said you enrolled in school.
Me: Right. I was a sophomore at South Kitsap High School in Port Orchard. While I didn’t know for sure if I was fifteen or sixteen (long pause)—it’s complicated—I knew that for the first time in a long time that I actually fit in somewhere. That was no small feat. By then, we’d moved fourteen times. I think. So many times that I’ve lost track. But in Port Orchard, no one asked any awkward questions about where we lived before because people came and went around there all the time. Across the inlet was the naval shipyard. Moms and dads would arrive in the naval ships or go out to the Pacific on their way to the nearest war. Kids would come later and stay in crummy housing near the shipyard or the submarine base a little farther north. In a way, all the moving around that other people did made me feel as though I was actually part of something stable.
Dr. A: I understand, Rylee, I do. Let’s go back to that afternoon… after you got home from school.
Me: (long pause). Right. I heard Hayden squawking as I turned off the running water in the bathroom. I looked down at the toilet bowl, the water was the color of sunshine, and I dropped the lever and the whirlpool sucked down my little brother’s pee. Then…
Dr. A: Why are you stopping?
Me: It’s stupid.
Dr. A: Nothing is stupid. You need to trust me and trust the process. Everything, Rylee.
Me: It is stupid, but here goes. I remember glancing at myself in the mirror above the sink. Thinking how average I was. Sometimes I had actually wished that I had a big hairy mole on my chin or something that could distinguish me from other girls. The ones who lurk in the halls at school with pleading eyes and heavy eyeliner that makes them look more glamorous than I am. At my school before Port Orchard, I adopted a kind of Goth persona and really piled on the mascara—two extra coats of the blackest I could find. My dad thought I looked kind of slutty, but I told him that’s what I needed to look like in order to blend in.
Dr. A: Blend in?
Me: Right, Dr. Albright, my whole life has been about blending in, being invisible. My hair is brown now—not chestnut, not auburn, just a nondescript brown, the color of the bark of the dead tree near my dorm. My real hair color could be blond, but it has been dyed so many times I have forgotten what shade it actually is.
Dr. A: That’s not stupid. It’s about what you needed and how you survived. I understand completely. After you turned off the tap, what happened?
Me: My brother. He called from the kitchen. I thought he wanted me to fix him a chicken potpie or something as an afterschool snack. He was lazy that way. Home all day with a refrigerator and microwave at his disposal. He could make whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted it—the only undisputed benefit of being homeschooled. I followed the sound of Hayden’s irritating and agitated voice.
Dr. A: What did you see, Rylee?
Me: Hayden was on the other side of the kitchen. He was on the floor hunched over and when he looked up, I noticed two things. First, he was crying. The second thing I saw was so puzzling that it really didn’t compute. It was like my brain was stuck on a search engine to nowhere. His white T-shirt was soaked in red. I threw myself down on the floor and looked at the blank eyes of my dad, staring into space.
Dr. A: Do you
need a moment? I know this is very difficult. You’re doing fine. You are.
Me: No. I’m not fine, but I want to finish.
Dr. A: Drink some water. Take a deep breath. We can continue when you are ready.
Me: Okay. I’m fine. The room started to turn. Everything was spinning. I remember thinking for a second that this was what it must feel like to be really, really drunk. I pushed Hayden away and pressed my hands against Dad’s face, then his neck. He was wearing a powder-blue shirt, gray trousers and a red tie. But it wasn’t a tie. It was a slash of blood that had emptied from the top of his chest, drained down his shirt, pooled on to the floor. The black handle of a knife stuck out of his chest. I didn’t cry: Hayden was crying enough for the both of us. In my heart I had known that a day like that was always possible, that somehow darkness would come after my family. Our life away from others, our life blending into the background of the world, could be undone by someone. Fear and the possibility that something like that had always been there, had been what kept us together. Also, a barrier. It was what held us away from everyone that we ever pretended to know.
Dr. A: How was Hayden? What was he doing?
Me: Quiet. Real quiet. He was rocking back and forth like one of those weighted, blow-up clown figures. His light blond hair was compressed above his ears where his hands clamped the side of his head as he tried to shut out everything. He’d done that before. We all cope in ways that we can. My heart nearly heaved from my chest, but I did what I could to reassure him. Despite the fact that our father was a bloody mess, we could survive. We had to do the right things—and do them right away. I remember leaning closer and tugging at his shoulder so that he would look up at me once more. You know, listen to me. He finally tells me he was in the bathroom when he heard something, he said, yelling, and then a crash. I asked for more and he stayed quiet. It went like that. Me asking and Hayden being mute, focused on the blade.
Dr. A: What did you do next?
Me: So, I yanked the knife from our father’s chest. I wiped the blade’s handle with a kitchen towel. I didn’t want my fingerprints on it. Then I put it gently across my father’s chest. I didn’t know where else to put it. It dawned on me, right then, that our mother was gone too. Hayden and I were alone. And then, I saw it.
