Suicide Woods

by Benjamin Percy

  ..

  3:01 p.m.—November 19—Steele County, Minnesota

  Laura thought—given the location, more than five miles from town—fewer people would bother her here. But they kept coming. Three visitors in one day. The doorbell would ring—a three-note chime that echoed through the house—and Laura would go still. But whoever was out there, they had to come a long way to visit this house, and that meant they were willing to wait to get inside.

  First, the deliveryman hefting a brown box and requesting an electronic signature. Then the Girl Scout hoping to sell Thin Mints for her troop, her bored mother parked in an idling minivan. Then the Mormon boys, in their ties and their short-sleeve, white-collar shirts, who asked for her name and a minute of her time and insisted she take a trifold brochure featuring a sunrise. She told them “No,” but they didn’t want to hear it. There was something about a woman saying no that struck many as offensive or unconvincing.

  That was certainly the case with the meatman, her fourth visitor. He was balding, but what hair he had was the color of corn silk. He had a sharp, elfin face that made it hard to tell whether he was twenty-five or forty. “I hope you haven’t been waiting long,” she said, not trying to hide the sarcasm in her voice, for he had rung the bell for five minutes and then peered in a window, spotting her in the kitchen.

  “You were worth waiting for,” he said. He was grossly thin. He wore khakis that were too big for him but cinched to fit his waist by a braided belt.

  “Whatever you’re selling, I don’t want it,” she said, but he made no move to leave. His company-issued shirt read Pete’s Meats across the breast in red lettering. A black truck in the driveway carried the same logo. “Are you Pete?” she said, and he said, “Sorry?”

  “Pete’s Meats,” she said.

  He had a high, shivery voice. “Oh, no. No, no, no. I’m Ron.” His forehead wrinkled in amusement. “Tell you the truth, I’m not sure there even is a Pete.”

  “But you’re here to sell meat?”

  “Yes!” His eyes were such a pale blue they appeared scrubbed of color. He didn’t blink but stared with an intensity that made her keep her hand on the doorknob. “I drive around until I empty the truck and then restock in Kansas City. This is my second day. No luck yet. But maybe my luck will change with you?” His voice rose desperately at the end of every sentence.

  She said, “That’s sort of a curious thing. To sell meat door to door.”

  “It is,” he said, “strange.” He used his teeth to peel the dry skin from his lower lip. And then his tone shifted as he remembered himself and launched into his commercial, touting the quality of his product. “USDA approved! One hundred percent grass fed, organic, delicious.” He shared a catalog with her—one that advertised their chops, steaks, tenderloins with photos and their accompanying prices. “We also have a steak-of-the-month club, if you’re interested.”

  She pushed away the catalog and said she would buy a pork chop. One. That’s it. That would get rid of him, and besides, there was nothing else in the fridge but condiments. She could use some protein. She told him—Ron, or was it Rob?—she’d be right back with the money. She did not invite him inside, yet that’s where she found him when she returned. He had collected the shrink-wrapped chop from the truck. The warmth of the house made it steam in his hand.

  “Did I say you could come in? I didn’t,” she said in a voice that made him widen his eyes, and he said, “It was cold out.”

  “You should go.”

  He seemed not to hear this. “It’s a big, old, wonderful house. Isn’t it?”

  They both looked around—at the high timbered ceiling, the shale floor, the darkly lacquered wainscoting—and she said, “Yes. It is.” The space was cavernous and yet somehow felt too full with him here.

  A DVD player, a tablet, a laptop, a desktop computer, a printer, a Bose stereo, and maybe fifty CDs were stacked on the couch in a nest of cables. He pointed to them, a question forming on his lips, and she handed over the cash and motioned to the door and said, “Go. Please.”

  He looked back at the pile of electronics and then at her. “But what are you doing all the way out here in the middle of nowhere?”

  “I like to be left alone,” she said, and started for the door as if she would leave if he didn’t.

  He started forward and, with one foot inside the house and one foot out, said, “Is it just you here?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then where’s everybody else?”

  “They’re here.”

  “But where?”

  She pushed him with the door, forcing him onto the porch, and he lingered there and stared at her through the window and in the silence between them a train whistle sounded its banshee cry.

  ..

  10:30 a.m.—November 20—New Auburn, Wisconsin

  In any small town, the funeral director is often the coroner, and the funeral parlor is often the nicest home. This was no exception. Mildred had inherited the business—Clary Memorial Services—from her father. Three stories with a mansard roof and a wraparound porch and ivy threading the brick walls. She lived alone. She had wanted to marry, and came close several times, but the men inevitably complained about the bodies in the basement, the smell of death on her fingers. Undertaking was an odd thing for a woman to do—they said; wouldn’t she consider something else?

  She wouldn’t. If they didn’t like it, to hell with them. She committed herself to her job alone, speaking in a hushed voice, smiling kindly, a tissue never far from the hand as she spoke about grave sites and cremation receptacles and what hymns might be appropriate for the service. She always wore an ankle-length dress—black or gray or dark blue—no matter if she visited the supermarket or a Rotary fund-raiser. She was tall with a long face and kept her silvering hair tied always in a tight braid.

  She had seen the insides of too many people. The biological failures of the body and the inelegant finality of death had made her long ago give up on God. But she still went to church. It was expected of a woman in her position. And the rituals gave her some calming pleasure. This Sunday—as the organ wheezed and she took the wafer on her tongue and returned to her pew—she noted, not for the first time, the emptiness of the sanctuary.

  The few in attendance were gray haired, like herself. Supported by canes and walkers. Their skin spotted and their knuckles squared with arthritis. The church was dying. The town was dying. And she was helping it along its way. No car exited the freeway except to get gas, and no train stopped except to collect grain. Sometimes at night, from the window of the funeral home, she looked out on the town and imagined the homes as moonlit tombs.

  When the service ended, she found the sheriff waiting for her in the parking lot. He had a round belly and a thick mustache and leaned against his Bronco with his thumbs hooked into his belt. “Got a stiffie for you, Mildred,” he said. “Don’t go misconstruing that as sexual harassment.”

  “Who is it?”

  “We’re not sure,” he said. “Not sure where it came from either. Pulled off the top of a railcar. Could be it crossed state lines, and if so, might have to get the feds involved. Already got the damned railroad police on the phone.”

  “I didn’t know there was such a thing,” she said, “as railroad police.”

  She was taller than him, and whenever they were close, he stiffened his posture to compensate. He swung open the rear door so that they could see in the back, a black-bagged body like a pupa. “Yeah, well. They’re on their way. Probably in an Amtrak with rack lights and a siren.”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t do this here,” Mildred said and looked around, but the rest of the congregation remained inside the church, nibbling on cookies and sipping decaf.

  The sheriff yanked the zipper and peeled open the bag and said, “I won’t keep you from your dungeon. Just take a look at this, though, would you?”

  At first Mildred thought it was a boy, but it was a man. Blond and balding. Maybe thirty-five. She could
always tell someone’s age from their neck. The wrinkles and elasticity of the skin. His was going green and purple, the way the sky did after sunset. “Twelve hours, I’d guess,” she said.

  Mildred always kept a jar of Vicks in her purse and she smeared some beneath her nose before leaning in, masking the smell. “I can’t say for sure, not until I open him up, but I’m guessing this is what killed him.” She traced a sunken section of skull, a bit of brain poking through the seams. “Blunt force. Brick, baseball bat, rifle butt. Somebody came up behind him and let him have it.”

  His mouth appeared sunken. Mildred hooked a finger inside it. “The teeth have been removed, but the lips are relatively intact, so I’d guess pliers. Not a lot of blood staining the face, so he was already dead during the extraction.”

  The sheriff opened the bag farther to reveal arms that ended at the wrists. “Give me a hand, would you?” His teeth showed in a smile beneath his mustache. “Get it?”

  “Cleanly cut. Also bloodless.” Mildred pulled away from the shadowed hold and stepped into the sun. The bells began clanging in the church tower to mark the noon hour, and the sound chased some pigeons away.

  “Why the hell would somebody do something like that?” the sheriff said. “Just a sicko, I guess.”

  “No,” Mildred said. She did not see the body as sacred but as a mere envelope sacking its many parts together. Two things had been taken from it and with a clear purpose. “They wanted to buy themselves time to get away.”

  ..

  4:16 p.m.—November 24—Steele County, Minnesota

  The Templetons couldn’t believe it. After more than twenty-four hours of travel—Brussels to London to New York to Minneapolis to Sioux Falls—they wanted nothing more than to throw down their bags and collapse into bed. But the house was not as they had left it.

  Susan was the first to notice. The pan on the stove, a bit of char and grease still clinging to it, along with the dirtied plate and silverware in the sink. She hated coming home to a dirty house. She had polished the kitchen to a glow before they set off on their vacation two weeks ago. That’s when she said, “Hal?”

  He was pouring himself a short glass of whiskey. His hair mussed. His eyes swollen with fatigue. He didn’t bother saying, What? He was beyond language. He just looked at her, waiting.

  “I think someone’s been in our house.”

  The emergency dispatcher told them to leave, just to be safe, so they waited for the police at the end of their gravel driveway, among the bare apple trees, skeletal with the onset of winter. Ten minutes later a tan cruiser pulled up with two deputies in it. They walked the property, toured the house, poking under beds and in closets, before waving the Templetons inside.

  There were no open drawers or broken lamps or overturned bureaus. The house was as they had left it, except missing all of its art and jewelry and electronics. Hal’s rifle cabinet was empty. So was the drawer in the night table where he kept his 9mm and wristwatches. From the dining room the thief had even taken the Tiffany chandelier, a few wires spidering from the empty fixture.

  There were small variations between the deputies—one an inch taller, the other with thicker eyebrows—but otherwise they appeared to be the same white, twentysomething, close-shaven, broad-shouldered man. One of them showed the Templetons the rear sliding door, its broken lock. “So this appears to be where he entered,” and hardly a breath passed before the other said, “But the curious thing is, an upstairs window also appears to have been jimmied.”

  Most robberies, they explained, were crimes of opportunity. A cell phone glowing on a restaurant table. A purse dangling loosely from a shoulder. An open window. An unlocked car. These are the grab and gos. They’re sloppy, dumb, mean. “But this?” one of the deputies said. “This was a professional.”

  The professionals plan. They cover their tracks. They often begin with the phone book, making note of all the doctors, dentists, lawyers, accountants, veterinarians in an area. Even if their home address isn’t listed in the white pages, the deep Web has crawlers that can help. From there they study social media accounts. Usually someone was on vacation, posting photos of a pig roast on a beach in Hawaii or a white-humped mogul field in Colorado.

  Hal heaved a sigh, and Susan rubbed his shoulders and said, “At least no one was hurt. Thank God for that at least.”

  That was when the deputies looked at each other. “Did you have a dog, Mrs. Templeton?” one of them said. “Or perhaps a cat?” “Cats,” the other said. “It would have to be cats—plural—to account for that much blood.”

  “I’m sorry, what?” Susan said, looking back and forth between them. “What are you talking about?”

  “Do you have any pets?” the deputies said.

  “No. Hal’s allergic to dander. What’s this about blood?”

  The deputies led them to the furnace room and paused at the door. One of them said, “The good news is, there’s no body,” and the other one said, “And the bad news is, there’s a shitload of blood.”

  ..

  2:00 a.m.—November 20—Saint Paul, Minnesota

  There is a pawnshop below every pawnshop. All you have to do is ask for the secret drawer. Most of the sales go online—on the dark Web, with Bitcoins, through anonymous Tor servers—where you sell and buy an Omega wristwatch that smells like somebody else’s cologne, a smartphone with its SIM card plucked, a Beretta with the microstamping filed from the breech face and firing pin.

  Jimmy worked the register—dealing with the deadbeats trying to pawn their neighbor’s lawnmower, their grandpa’s box TV—but made most of his money online. The shop was a cinder-block bunker with barred windows that sat behind a vacant strip club called the Double Deuce. He wore a different tracksuit every day of the week and shaved his whole body every morning. He liked the way it made him feel clean.

  The query came to him through a wiki he’d set up. Suspect Zero, that was the name on the Hushmail account. After some back-and-forth—digital photos, some gentle bartering—they arranged a date and time. After hours, he waited at the door for the knock. Three times fast, one slow. He unlocked everything but the chain and blinked his surprise. A woman stood on the other side of the crack. “You’re my contact?” he said. “Suspect Zero?”

  She wore a motorcycle jacket with a belt around the middle, a blond wig, and big black sunglasses like some movie star you see in the tabloids. “That’s me.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Maybe it’s Laura. Maybe it’s Linda. Or maybe it’s mind your fucking business.”

  “Fine, fine.” He held up his Ruger, not as a threat, just to show, then tucked it in his jeans and loosed the chain and stepped outside into the chill November air. “Let’s see what you brought me.”

  The truck read Pete’s Meats across its boxy refrigerated compartment. She opened the rear doors to show off a neatly arranged space crammed not with sirloin but DVD players, laptops, flat-screens, tablets, smartphones. The spoils of how many houses? Maybe five, maybe twenty—he wasn’t asking questions. A lot of work and risk went into something like this if she was operating alone. Casing an address, timing the break-in, dealing with dogs and security and neighbors, maybe even the owners themselves. It takes time to clean out a house properly, and you’ve got to be willing to hurt anybody who gets in your way.

  He let out a long, low whistle and examined an espresso machine. To it she had adhered a sticky note carrying the agreed-upon price. “You’re a professional,” he said, and she said, “Let’s get this done with.” He took a quick inventory, and she closed the door and locked it and held out the key. “Yours, once you transfer the Bitcoins to my account.” A train cried somewhere in the night, and she tipped her head to listen to it.

  They went inside, and he split open his laptop for her to view. Jimmy logged on through Tor and readied a transfer. Just as he was about to strike the enter key, he raised his eyebrows, the only hair he kept on his body. “I could make it more, you know.”


  “Could you?”

  “Pete’s Meats,” he said with a smile curling his mouth. “You want to sell me some hams? Some thighs? Some breasts? You know what I’m saying?”

  “No.”

  “No? You sure?” He traced his lower lip with his thumb. “Another thou? You look worth it.”

  She hadn’t removed her sunglasses, though the lights were low. Her face was as expressionless as a mask. She reached out a hand for his and gripped it firmly. “Yeah?” he said. “You know what I’m saying?” She guided his hand toward the keyboard and his finger depressed the enter key, completing the transfer.

  Then she leaned in, so that his reflection warped in her sunglasses, and said, “No.”

  He didn’t like the way she said the word—like she was spitting it, like he gave her mouth a bad taste—so he said, “Maybe I’m not asking.” He wasn’t sure if he meant it or not, but he wanted to take back control. This was his shop, for fuck’s sake. “Where are your manners? You can’t even kiss the guy who bought you dinner?”

  Her hand was already in his, and he twisted it one way, then the other, trying to shake some emotion out of that dead face of hers, but nothing. She was giving him nothing.

  She looked up—he guessed at the security camera—and then back at him. “What?” Jimmy said. “You worried about who’s watching? I’m watching. Who are you, anyway? With your stupid costume. Giving me shit in my store.”

  Her other hand had remained in her pocket all this time. Now it emerged in a flash, and he realized too late she was gripping a knife. Its point bit through his wrist and jammed through the other side, lodging into the counter. He screamed and reached for his gun, but she had ripped it from his belt and knocked him across the mouth with its butt. A hot rolling ache overcame his body and made him hers.