Girls on Film

by Gregg Olsen

  Plan: Finish the job.

  MOM AND I ARE IN Alex Rader’s car, a boring Toyota Camry. I’m driving as fast as I can down the gravel road from the place where he’d raped and killed everyone but us, heading toward the lights of the Interstate. Our hearts are in sync, pounding like a couple of tom-toms. It is dark outside. I’m unsure of where we are until I see the signs to the highway. We haven’t said a word. Not about the fact that I’m driving without a license or the fact that I’d called my mother every name in the book. Not that I’ve just executed my monster of a biological father.

  And then I see it.

  Hanging on a thin silver wire from the review mirror. A picture.

  I slam on the brakes and the car slides before it stops.

  “Was it a deer? I didn’t see it”

  I turn and look at her. She is a stranger to me right now. This woman who I adored and still love with every bit of my being, is as much as a stranger to me as Alex Rader was until I did what had to be done.

  Shot him.

  Dead.

  “What’s this, Mom?” My fingers grasp the photograph and, still keeping it on the chain, I pull it closer for a better view. It’s a girl with a long blond ponytail, carefully arranged over her shoulder. She’s wearing a bright yellow top. There’s a gap in her teeth. She is four years old.

  Her name at the time was Sarah.

  My name at the time.

  “How in the hell did he get that?” I ask.

  “I had to,” she says, her tone bordering on hysterical. “I had no choice but to keep him informed. To keep him away, I kept him close”

  I am so disgusted I want to kick her out of the car. But I don’t. I put the gas to the pedal. I just keep going. It’s as if the speed will erase her words into a blur.

  “Mom, you’re messed up,” I say, turning to her as I drive. “You’re so messed up you don’t even know how much”

  She starts to shake. “He wanted a picture. I thought by giving it to him he’d leave us alone. He said he just wanted a reminder”

  She turns away and looks out the window. But I don’t let her. I grab her shoulder and yank her toward me. The car swerves a little and my adrenaline pumps.

  “Look at me when I’m talking to you,” I say. My anger is real now, and completely, I think, justifiably uncontained. “A reminder of what?.

  Her eyes are empty. She doesn’t cry out. She doesn’t try to pull me in with a sob story about what she did. She’s done with that. And for that, I’m glad.

  “Of you,” she says.

  I don’t know her. I don’t understand her.

  I do not scream at her, but I doubt if I did anyone would blame me.

  “What did you do?” I ask. “Send him newsletters about Hayden and me? Did you keep him abreast of my first tooth, when I started walking, my first period? Jesus, Mom! What in the hell?.

  She looks at me and I deflect her attempt for pity and support by focusing my eyes on the road.

  “He said he’d kill you”

  Perfect.

  “No, Mom,” I say without holding back my disappointment. “He didn’t. He said he’d kill you, isn’t that right? That’s why we ran?.

  Mom is thrashed and fretful. She shakes her head. “No, Rylee, that’s not true”

  “Don’t call me that,” I say, again as coolly as I can. “Call me my real name. Not Sarah. Not Katie. Not Rylee. My real name, Mom? Call me that”

  Tears roll from her eyes and she wipes them on her dirty sleeve.

  A dog barks somewhere and it fills the silence between us.

  “Alexandra,” she finally says. “Your name is Alex”

  This is a balled up fist in my stomach but I just take it. I don’t want to believe it. But there it is. She said it. My name. Like the tattoo she tried to erase. The one the other girls had too. Marked. I was marked too.

  Alexandra.

  I shake my head. “Who would do that? Who would do that with their child? Naming her after a monster?.

  Mom doesn’t answer for the longest time.

  “People do what they have to do, honey. To survive”

  I don’t respond. I don’t care anymore. I reach over and pull the photograph off the chain. I roll down the window and let it fly. Away.

  I’m so done.

  I PULL UP TO THE SAME DENNY’S in Kent and I let out my mother. We haven’t spoken a word to each other for the past forty minutes. I guess she tried, but there was nothing left to say.

  At least not by me and not right now.

  “Go inside and wait,” I tell her. It’s an order, not a request.

  She unbuckles her seatbelt and opens the door.

  “What are you going to do?” Her eyes are red and her skin is dirty and blotchy.

  “Something you should have done, Mom”

  She doesn’t ask me what my plans are and I’m grateful for that. I’m still making it up as I go along. I know that flexibility and randomness are protectors of the hunted. Rolland always said so. Even in the madness of the switch I knew that tipping a hand to anyone could only result in failure.

  “Be careful,” she tells me.

  I know she means it, but I’m still so sickened and mad I don’t wish her the same. Instead, I throw the vehicle into reverse, back up, then drive away. I watch Mom fade in the mirror. She’s closer than she appears just then, but she’s still very far away. I know that she’s always been far away.

  FUCHSIA LADY APPEARS TO BE GONE, which is good. From the glovebox of the Camry I retrieve a garage door opener. I push the button and the door at 2424 Summer Hill snakes up its track. I park next to the van. It is old, bronze-colored, with the words Sun Catcher Express painted merrily on the side. A big sun winks from just over the S. It is grotesque and if I didn’t have something very important to do, I’d grab a paint can from the workbench and splatter it. I’d tear up the seats. I’d rip out the wheelchair lift. I would do all of that and more so that it never would be used for what it has been.

  By Alex and Marie Rader.

  It passes through my mind that Aunt Ginger’s car isn’t there and that I’m going to be in big trouble for losing it. Then I scratch that thought. Where Alex Rader ditched my aunt’s car is the least of my worries. If I’m in trouble for anything, losing a car is somewhere at the very bottom of the list.

  And the list is getting longer by the minute.

  The garage door rolls down behind me and I don’t need to use the keys because the door leading into the house is unlocked.

  “Baby,” I hear Marie call out. “I’m in the kitchen. Made you a pie today. Bet you’d love a slice”

  I’d love to slice her.

  I have the gun and the two bullets, but something tells me that’s going to be my last resort.

  “Hi Marie,” I say.

  She’s sitting in her chair, of course, at the kitchen table. In front of her is a cherry pie that looks like something out of a cooking magazine. Besides luring girls to their deaths, it seems that Marie Rader is a supremely talented baker. I love pie. In fact, cherry has long been my favorite. After I get done here, however, I know that the tart taste of the fruit will always make me think of her.

  “Where’s my husband?” she says, looking past me like I was a kitten that he’d dragged home and let loose to find his precious Marie.

  “Alex?” I say casually, smiling. “He’s dead, Marie”

  Her head jerks, and I see a faint layer of sweat above her top lip.

  “Lying little bitch,” she snarls, scanning the table for something.

  The knife.

  I let her get it. I want to fight her. I want to feel her struggle and gasp. I want her to know how the others felt when their final moments came. The sequence of events that Marie, poor old wheelchair-bound Marie, set in motion with her pathetic but effective ruse of needing help.

  I picture each one of Alex Rader’s Sweet Sixteens—Leanne, Megan, Shannon, Mom, even me. I know that if not for Marie, all of those innocent girls would b
e alive. She’d been bait. And she’d gone along with it all.

  “I shot him,” I say without feeling. “In the head. In the crotch. Though neither of those areas were any use to you, you withered bitch”

  She doesn’t blink. I wonder if her lids are paralyzed like her legs and her unfeeling heart.

  “You’re lying,” she says, holding the knife.

  Marie Rader doesn’t even look human to me anymore. I think of her as a vile spider, scooting around with those arms of hers. I point the gun at her.

  “Drop it”

  “Make me,” she says.

  “Don’t make it easy on me, Marie,” I say.

  She pushes back from the kitchen table, her arms rippling with sinew and muscle. I don’t mind the challenge. I welcome it. I am consumed with fury, but I don’t show it. It’s like the idea of killing her is a drug to me. Like vanquishing her pathetic kind of evil will give me the biggest rush of my life. Bigger than shooting Alex. He was an obvious monster. I’m all but certain that I’ll get so much more pleasure at taking out this insidious creature who has just baked the most beautiful pie I’ve ever seen.

  “Why do you want to kill me?” she asks, inching closer. She’s about to play the victim card. I can smell it. “My husband forced me to do all sorts of things,” she goes on, blinking hard to force out a tear of emotion.

  As if.

  “Marie,” I say. “You are like a Venus flytrap. So pure and tragic in your wheelchair, with no feeling below the waist. The truth is, you just sat there consumed with bitterness, waiting for the next girl to come by so you could entrap her”

  “It wasn’t like that, Rylee”

  “You know my real name, don’t you?.

  She glances at the knife she’s holding. Her face is hard again. I can tell she hates me for reminding her.

  For knowing what I know. Not about him. But about how pathetic she is.

  “Yes, I do,” she says, her voice snapping a little. “I should have killed you when I had the chance, Alexandra. I should have tattooed you like the others and then slit your little throat. I know what you are to him”

  It figures that she was the tattoo artist. The tail of a koi fish peeks out from under the bulging upper sleeve of her light pink T-shirt.

  Just then, she starts coming toward me. She is turning the wheels of her chair with one arm. In her hand is the knife. I fire but miss. Shit! I have only one bullet left. I fire again, striking her in the kneecap. As if that would give me any hope for retreat. Blood flows from her dead limb and she doesn’t even acknowledge it.

  She can’t feel anything.

  The wheels of the chair spin faster.

  I take a step back, thinking what to do. How I will stop her. I have no bullets. I drop the gun to the floor, regretting doing so instantly. I should have used it to bash in her skull.

  “Alex isn’t much,” she cries at me. Now her eyes are narrow and full of sorrow, but she’s a fraud and I know it. “He’s pathetic. But he’s mine. He does what he’s told. He goddamn owes me”

  I think back to what my father freak said before I obliterated him.

  “I did what I had to do. I had no choice”

  “You pulled the strings, Marie!” I scream at her. “You’re the pathetic one!.

  The knife sends a triangle of reflected light into my eyes and I blink.

  “Guilt was Alex’s motivator. Revenge on all the pretty girls was mine,” she says, as she lunges with the blade pointed at me. “Now you’ve ruined everything”

  In a flash, she’s nearly on me and I do the only thing I can think of. I plant my foot between her legs and catch the base of the chair. It is fast and decisive. The knife falls to the floor. Marie Rader goes flying backward through the plate glass slider that leads to her patio.

  Oddly, she doesn’t scream.

  She starts coming toward me again. I don’t know exactly how I accomplish it, but I manage to plant my hands on her chair as she flails about. With all the strength that’s somehow still inside of me, I push her through the glittery shards of glass on the patio toward her massive koi pond.

  The one she bragged about while she was poisoning me with her ice tea.

  The water surges over her head as she starts to sink down beneath the surface.

  Instinctively, I return for the knife. I stand by the water’s edge as Marie flails around. She’s coughing and choking, but she grabs hold of the cement edge of the pond. I see her rise up. Those arms of hers. They are like a pair of pine trees. They undulate with muscle tissue. I see the veins in her forearms press upward like a mass of worms under her skin.

  “Goddamn you!” she says. Her eyes are wild. She starts to pull herself up and I do what I know I have to do.

  And partly because I want to do it. I can’t stop myself. I take the knife and slam its glinting edge through her fingers and she screams. Yet she hangs on. I stomp on her other hand with my shoes like I’m crushing the life out of a scorpion. Which she is, and at the same time, she’s an insult to the creature. Her fingers are lying there on the edge of the cement and the water is turning to blood.

  She goes under again.

  The koi are drawn to her. I wish they were piranhas. I wish the waters were a vat of hydrochloric acid.

  No matter. I am done. So is Marie.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Cash: None.

  Food: None.

  Shelter: None.

  Weapons: None.

  Plan: Finish the job.

  I KNOW I DON’T HAVE much time. Fuschia Lady told me she was watering her precious plants herself because she was leaving town and didn’t trust the neighbor kid to do a thorough job. She’s gone and she’s the closest neighbor. That’s in my favor right now. Marie and I made a lot of noise and I’m hoping no one else heard or cares enough to call the police. The police. Since Alex Rader was a cop, my respect for the cops has nose-dived. Rolland once said that the police are limited in what they can do, but I know that there was at least one among them—and maybe more—who do what they want no matter the price. Going to the police? Mom went there for help and look how it turned out for her. It is one thing of two that I know she and I will agree on. The other is that Hayden must never know what I know to be true. Like Mom, I carry that burden now. I love my little brother too much to have him live a life knowing that his heart circulates poisoned blood.

  Like mine.

  The koi pond is red with Marie’s blood and I feel sorry that the fish have to swim in the filth of her body. Even so, I kick her fingers into the water with the tip of my shoe. Under the surface I see her face. Her eyes are open and so is her mouth, in a permanent scream. She was handicapped but she put up more of a fight than her husband, the worthless pig.

  I start for the living room and though I scan it with speed I still see everything and capture it in my memory forever. Like a camera with my finger on the shutter. Click. Click. Click. The scene, the furnishings. Everything is mundane. A TV sits across from a sofa. A recliner points toward the set and a basket containing needlework sits at the end of the carpet ruts left by Marie’s chair. I grab the wedding photo of Alex and Marie, smash the glass and pull the photo from the frame. Folded, it goes in my pocket.

  The ruts. My eyes trace the worn parallel lines in the carpet throughout the house. They stop at the only place Marie cannot go.

  The door that leads upstairs.

  If Alex Rader had wanted to keep a souvenir from the prying eyes of his wife then it would be where she could not follow. He wouldn’t have to lock it. I turn on the light and head up the steps. It is one large room with the dormers looking out toward the street. Alex Rader has set it up as his office. It is like no office I could have imagined. Yes, I’ve seen porn. Never on purpose. Not really. There have been times when I’ve gone online and clicked the wrong link and in an instant I’m in a world of naked bodies moving and emoting in ways that indicate great pleasure but frequently make little sense.

  One time I saw something so
strange I still don’t know what they were doing. Or how many were doing it.

  And truthfully, I don’t want to know.

  The room is paneled with a dark oak wood. Using the seams in the paneling as a guide, Alex Rader has taped up photo after vile photo. These are scenes so sickening that I have to steady myself as I try to take them in without vomiting. I wouldn’t mind vomiting right now. But I don’t have the time. I move closer to a section of the wall that holds a familiar face.

  Megan Moriarty does the splits in her cheerleading uniform from Kentridge High School. It is one of the images of her that I’d seen online.

  Next is Shannon Blume’s picture, the same pretty, but sad-eyed photo that had appeared in the newspaper—the one that her parents held in their arms as they called out to the world for help in finding their daughter.

  Leanne is there too. But this photo is not familiar. It was candidly snapped when she was caught down by the marina, unaware.

  She was being stalked.

  Next, are photographs of Mom. I almost lose my breath as I have no choice but to look at them. I’m in some of these photos. One was taken last year at the Seattle Center when my family went there for a textile show Mom said she had to see. We were being watched. Hayden, Rolland and I are looking at something by the International Fountain, a big water feature that looks like a steam punk version of a sea urchin.

  But not Mom.

  She’s looking at the camera. Right at it. Her eyes look scared, pleading.

  I remember nothing about that day that suggests anything peculiar happened.

  Alex Rader was there watching us.

  I move closer. Underneath the photos taken before the various abductions are pictures of my father raping and torturing.

  And making me.

  It was possible that he’d set a timer to shoot these photos, of course, but something catches my eye in the one of him on top of Leanne, her cut-off shorts, pulled down to her ankles.

  I hear a thumping sound, but I’m so mesmerized by what I see, I ignore it.

  I look closer at the photo. A reflection. I see Marie holding a camera. It’s clear as day, on the shard of a mirror that hangs over the bed in the underground prison.