by Chaz McGee
Yet I saw no one there.
Maggie continued her search along the forest floor, examining broken branches and trampled leaves, oblivious to the feelings that overwhelmed me. The first wave of sensation passed, but my conviction that evil was present lingered. I sniffed the air carefully, trying to determine where the feeling was coming from. A shadow passed behind a sycamore that guarded one edge of the grove. I was there within seconds but found no one. Yet I knew the force was human, not a lingering essence, but human.
There was someone else in the grove with us.
I had seen dark shapes often since I had died; they lived just outside my peripheral vision, a tribe of distorted skulls, grasping limbs, visible only in black outlines of deformed bodies that grew, then melted into the shadows before I could fix them in my sight. But they were real, and they were of my netherworld. That much I knew.
This was different. This was a man.
The evil passed behind me now, manifesting as an icy draft on the back of my neck. A foul, decaying smell filled my being. I turned around in a circle, slowly, hyper-vigilant of all I saw.
I saw no one.
But I knew that he could see her. And he would remember her face.
Maggie was bent over the roots of a tree, examining nicks in its gnarled surfaces, pushing aside leaves with her hands, unaware that she was not alone. I waited, completely still, suddenly certain that a fourth presence had joined us, this one less human than the other.
I was confused by the signals that assaulted me. Smell, noise, touch, empathy. My hearing had grown acute over the past few months and I imagined I could hear a rapid heartbeat nearby—or maybe I really could hear it. Or was it my own remembered pulse? No, it was real. It was someone’s heartbeat, someone very much a human. I detected a light snick-snick, no more than a whisper: feet creeping over dry leaves. A corporeal presence. Very human. And very much a danger to Maggie.
A human who remained hidden, watching Maggie and waiting.
But waiting for what?
Maggie knelt near the base of a large oak tree and ran her fingers over the bark. She took a penknife from her pocket and pried an infinitesimal bit of matter from under a groove in the gnarled surface, bagging it carefully. She backed away from the tree with deliberate steps and walked slowly in a circle around it, her eyes never leaving the trunk, her vision focused about three feet off the ground. She did not disturb the carpet of leaves pushed up against the base of the tree, but tiptoed carefully outside of its range.
As she moved behind the trunk, I saw him at last: a man, hiding behind a nearby tree. I could not see his face in the shadows, but I could tell that he was tall. Tall and very, very still.
Before I could react, before I could so much as move an inch, the man made a sound as if he were choking. He took off through the trees, pushing through bushes and fallen branches in his panic, without regard for the noise he was making, or for Maggie, who drew her gun the instant she heard him and took off in pursuit, her courage rising without hesitation.
I followed, wondering how I could be of help, but stopped abruptly when I saw Alissa Hayes standing in the spot where the man had waited. Her face was sad, but her eyes glittered with something close to triumph. She looked at me. Our eyes held. Contact. I understood: the man had seen her. I realized it in an instant. The man waiting to hurt Maggie had seen Alissa Hayes. That was why he had taken off running. He had seen her and the sight of her had terrified him. Because he had known her. And known that she was dead.
Who was he? I followed Maggie through the trees, but I was too late. She was hurrying back down the hill, gun holstered, talking into her cell phone.
“I lost him,” she said to someone on the other end. “He just disappeared on me. It was weird.” She listened for a moment. “I don’t know. It could have been a curious student who panicked.” She was silent. “No, I’m sure of it. There’s rope marks and poly threading caught in the bark. With signs of a struggle beneath. I think he kept her there for a while.” She listened intently. “Just send the whole crew. We can’t afford to miss anything. I’m thinking this guy likes his work.” She paused and frowned. “Sure, I’ll call him. He’s here somewhere on campus, tracking the victim. No, I understand. It’s not a problem.”
Maggie hung up and slowed as she reached the trees where she had discovered the signs of a disturbance. She did not enter the grove again and I felt a sense of relief. She stood in the sunlight instead, head tilted up to catch its rays, its warmth an antidote to what she had imagined among the dark shadows. After a moment, rebalanced, she called Danny on her cell phone and told him what she had found. He came huffing and puffing up the hill fifteen minutes later, his shirt soaked with the sweat of an alcoholic forced into physical exercise.
“I found where he kept her,” Maggie said as she held up an open palm, warning him to stop at the edge of the grove. “Or at least one of the spots. Bag-and-tag is on its way.”
“One of the spots?” Danny asked.
“There’s not a lot of blood.” Maggie frowned. “We’re missing something.”
“Well, I IDed her,” Danny replied, as if that settled the whole matter and they could now all go home to bed. He flipped open his notebook. “The dead girl is a junior named Victoria Meeks. Roommate hasn’t seen her since before the weekend. Thought she was away with a new boyfriend. I showed her a photo from the scene and the roommate is certain. It’s her.”
“Victoria?” Maggie asked. And then she did a curious thing: she searched the sky, her eyes tracing the contours of each cloud as if they held an answer for her. “Victoria Meeks.”
“Roommate called her Vicky. She’s local. Mother lives in town.” Danny stowed his notebook away. “So she was killed here?”
“She wasn’t killed here. Just held here.” Maggie sounded certain.
“Why?” Danny asked, looking around. “There’s a quarry right over that hill with a million hidden spots. He could easily have tortured her and dumped the body over there. We’d never have found it.”
Maggie’s voice was soft as she nodded toward the grove. “It’s beautiful in there, that’s why. It’s almost like a church. The light filters through the leaves like stained glass. And farther up the hill, you can see for miles.” She looked at Danny. “I think he just thought it was a beautiful spot for what he had in mind.”
Danny looked perplexed. He stared at the trees, his brain working out the pieces. Alissa Hayes emerged from the shadows right in front of him, her pale body barely visible in the bright sunlight. She passed through the living, unseen by them both, though Maggie cocked her head and stared at the air between them. She had sensed something, I knew, but not enough.
Danny was, as always, oblivious. He looked right through Alissa Hayes, still not seeing her, still not understanding that he had failed her—and that I had helped him fail.
Chapter 9
“Her mother’s listed as next of kin,” Danny explained as Maggie directed the forensic team to the site in the grove. “She lives pretty close to here. I can run over and let her know.”
Yeah, and stop at a bar on the way. I knew Danny.
Maggie blinked as she took in Danny’s rumpled appearance, the mustard stain on his shoulder, the odor of alcohol and sweat that clung to him. “I’ll do this, Danny.”
“You sure?” he asked. “ ’Cause it can be tough duty.”
“I’ve done it before.” She hesitated. “Is the mother a widow?”
“Looks like it. No father was listed on her papers.”
“Then I need to do it. Consider it women’s work.”
“Suit yourself.” Danny yawned. “This hot sun makes me sleepy.”
Maggie left Danny in the parking lot of the station house, scratching his armpits in the warmth of the winter afternoon, yawning without apology, the dead girl named Victoria Meeks and her mother already forgotten.
I stayed in the backseat of Maggie’s car, ashamed for Danny—and even more ashamed of myself for havin
g played a part in what he had become.
Maggie did not notify the girl’s mother alone. Instead, she made a phone call, then detoured to a shabby apartment complex filled with old people. Danny and I used to call it D. B. Heights, because so many dead bodies were reported from there each year, frequently bloated to unrecognizable form by how long they had lain, dead and unnoticed, on a bathroom or living room floor. I’d harbored a fear that I might end up there myself one day had Connie ever made good on her vow to throw me out of the house if I kept drinking. I guess that was one fear that death had erased.
Today, the complex looked like Shangri-la. Indeed, anywhere would have been paradise with a sun so bright in the sky, clouds so pure, air so clean. It was the best of winter, a gift to the living. Yet here I was, the dead, enjoying it more than anyone. It was enough to make me feel alive. That had been happening to me more and more over the last month. I had come to notice the beauty of the physical world, the times when it left behind human misery and struck out on its own to prove that this was still a generous planet, one that was far too bountiful and forgiving for the likes of human beings.
Maggie stopped at a neatly maintained duplex near the entrance. It was painted slate gray and rimmed with beds of winter foliage that bloomed with a hardiness that mystified me. After a moment, the door opened and Morty, the beat cop I had disparaged for so many years because of his apparent lack of ambition and his willingness to walk the same neighborhood his entire career, came down the steps wearing his full dress uniform, right down to a pristine shine on his shoes. He was dignity personified. His white hair gleamed against the deep blue of his hat. He looked more like a chief than a street cop.
He knew Maggie well. “Hello, Rosy,” he said as he climbed inside her car. “Need me again, do you?”
Maggie’s smile was sad. “I think she may have been all this lady had. I couldn’t bear to go it alone.”
Morty touched the brim of his hat. “That’s what I’m here for. You break the news; I know you see it as your job, but you can leave the rest to me.”
“I bet you thought this part of your job was over once Dad retired,” Maggie said as she headed out for the bypass that encircled our town.
Morty shook his head. “This is one part of my job I know will never be over. At least not until it’s me they’re notifying someone about.”
“You have a family?” Maggie asked, a little startled, as if it had never occurred to her.
“A brother out in California. He has a family of his own. I haven’t seen him in years. Not quite sure why. Seems like every passing day pulls us further apart.”
“It happens that way sometimes,” Maggie admitted, as if she were thinking of the people in her own life who had drifted away from her for no real reason.
“It does.”
They rode in an easy silence I envied, having never reached that point of comfort with anyone, not even my wife. I was always getting berated for something, or apologizing for a transgression, and there had been no time for this sort of peace. But I had slithered out of facing my failings with the skill of a jackal, so how could I blame those who had disgorged their disappointment on me when they had me pinned down?
The mother of the dead girl lived in a two-story clap-board house that was too large for a person living alone. She had been unable to leave after her daughter left for college, I guessed, perhaps unwilling to abandon the memories that the house held. Oh, but she would likely leave after today. This would not be a memory to cherish.
As I trailed Maggie and Morty up the long walkway, I knew I was about to witness the tipping point in another human being’s life, that very moment at which they gave up on living and decided to wait it out until the end. To lose a child could not be easy; it was not the way of the world. Had I been paying attention in the past, I might have absorbed the magnitude of it before. Certainly I had delivered this kind of news to parents more than once. But all those notifications of next of kin, delivered according to some script Danny and I had been given in the academy a good twenty years before, had blurred into a single uncomfortable sense of aversion and left little impression on my soul.
This one would be different. I would be seeing the destruction of a human heart, the loss of all of its hopes and endearments, from a place close to inside that heart. I resolved to see it, to remember it, to learn from it. I would make up for what I had missed the first time around.
The enormity of the suffering that awaited slowed me down. I hung back, gathering my courage, as Maggie knocked on the door. A trim, middle-aged woman answered. The welcoming look on her face collapsed into disbelief and uncensored anguish as Maggie delivered the news. Morty caught the woman on her way down and led her to a nearby sofa. There, the mother aged before my eyes. I saw the flow of blood leave her complexion, the brightness in her eyes deaden to gray, the lines of her face harden and deepen in permanent sorrow. The air around her solidified, as if the universe itself was trying to embrace her, trying to remind her that she, at least, was still among the living. She sank against the cushions of her couch, speechless, as Maggie filled the room with words, giving the woman time to compose herself and to absorb the enormity of what she had lost.
Morty sat next to the mother, holding her hand, waiting his turn to serve. The woman closed her eyes, unable to face the world that had betrayed her, and Maggie waited until she had opened them again before she offered to answer any questions she might have.
The woman asked how her daughter had died.
The news that her child had been murdered hit the mother with the force of a blow. She jerked back and Morty put his arms around her, holding her tight, as if infusing her with his strength. She began to weep, her tears flowing like liquid silver from her eyes until she buried her face in her hands and sat, face hidden, absorbing the details of her daughter’s demise with a determination that shone through her sorrow as a testament to human endurance. It was the worst possible news a mother could hear and yet she was forcing herself to face the truth. I was awestruck at her courage.
Maggie sat on a footstool at the mother’s feet, speaking slowly and clearly, assuring her in a dozen different ways that whoever had done this to her daughter would be brought to justice. The light I had glimpsed in Maggie the first time I had seen her returned, surrounding her, making me wonder if my Maggie—for I thought of her as mine by now—was more than human, might even be an avenging angel sent down from the heavens to repair the unholy violence humans visited upon one another.
Or did we all have that light within us, that brightness and strength?
No, I told myself. Not everyone. It was Maggie. Maggie was special.
When the mother asked if they were sure it was her Vicky, Maggie was ready. She had known the question was coming, had known that the mother would be unable to risk hoping for a reprieve. She gently showed her the photo Danny had shown around campus. The hopelessness in the mother’s eyes told them all they needed to know: the dead girl was absolutely Victoria Meeks, only child of a loving mother who would now need to face the worst alone.
Then Morty worked his magic. I saw that he was not the passive oaf Danny and I had labeled him. He was, indeed, a gentle man whose heart ached for those who hurt around him. In the kindest of voices, he asked the mother to tell him about her daughter, saying it would help them find her killer if they all knew more about her.
I understood that this was not why he had asked.
He was asking because he knew that the broken woman before him needed to talk about what she had lost, would want to honor her daughter’s brief life—and that talking would help her reconcile the awful truth of the present with the lingering light of her dead girl’s past. Perhaps, in talking, she would realize that though her daughter was gone, the memories of her remained and could never be taken from her—the kindest gift the human mind has to give its host.
At first the mother answered Morty’s questions in a faltering voice. Eventually, her voice grew stronger. She began t
o tell them about all her remarkable daughter had accomplished, despite having lost her father at an early age.
The mother paused abruptly and I knew she was thinking of her long-dead husband, wondering, with the endless optimism of the human race, whether he might not be waiting somewhere for their daughter, a loving presence that would usher her to a better place than this world.
I wondered, too. There had been no one there for me. And no one able to give testimony to my memory, not the way this loving mother had. No one had grieved for me like this, in fact, yet I had no one to blame but myself.
Morty seemed to know that the mother was thinking of her dead husband, was envisioning a reunion between her loved ones. He patted her hand as if to reassure her that this was almost certainly true. The mother wiped her eyes and asked if Morty would like to see photos of her daughter’s life.
“Oh, yes,” he agreed at once. “I would. Let me get them for you.”
Soon the mother had stacks of albums piled before her on the coffee table and was poring over them with a rapt Morty beside her. He listened quietly as she sketched a portrait of her daughter. Unnoticed, Maggie found the kitchen and made them all tea while the woman led Morty through page after page of her daughter’s life.
Maggie listened intently as the mother talked, sorting out all that the woman said in some part of her amazing mind, searching for a clue to the girl’s killer. That was what made her different from Morty, I realized, and more dangerous to the killer. Morty was listening with his heart, Maggie with the total sensory acuteness of a hunter seeking prey. Yet, she had known this about herself—had known her sympathy would quickly give way to the desire for vengeance—and so she’d had the good sense to bring Morty with her to provide the gentleness she lacked.
