Now That She's Gone

by Gregg Olsen

  She read on about the girls’ friendship and how they’d known each other since kindergarten at Manchester Elementary. They’d been inseparable until the past year when Alyssa didn’t make the cut for the tennis team.

  AW: It bummed me out, but I didn’t think it would make much difference to our friendship, if you were thinking I was jealous of her or something.

  NM: Who said a word about jealousy?

  AW: I don’t know. I thought you did.

  NM: No. I didn’t.

  Next, Kendall read the interview with the third prong of the Katy trio, Tami Overton, also sixteen. It was recorded two days after Alyssa’s interview. Kendall wondered why the delay in getting her to sit down. That answer came a third of the way into the interview.

  TAMI OVERTON: Sorry I couldn’t come sooner. Been sick with the flu.

  NM: I’m glad you’re feeling better.

  TO: Just a little. I still might throw up, but if I do I’ll try not to make a spectacle of myself.

  NM: Can I get you a 7UP?

  TO: You have Sprite? I don’t do Pepsi products. My uncle Hank works for Coke and it’s been ingrained in us since childhood.

  NM: No, sorry. Our vending machines don’t feature Coke. Tell me about the last time you saw Katy. When was it? Where? What were you doing? What did you two talk about?

  TO: It was at school. The day she went missing. We really didn’t talk much. Like we were real close still, but not as close as we had been. I was sad about it, but she seemed to think everything was fine between us. Like she didn’t judge me because I couldn’t afford the best clothes like she and Alyssa. My parents just didn’t have the means. My dad drives a bus for Kitsap Transit and my mom is an unpublished romance novelist. I mean, there was always hope that something big would break for her and we’d be able to move closer to the beach. Like, we never could have had a house like the Frazier place, but something nicer that the tract home we have on Long Lake Road.

  NM: Did you think Katy would run away? Was there anything thing pointing to that kind of scenario?

  TO: What’s a scenario?

  NM: Situation? A possibility?

  TO: (shakes head)

  NM: Can you answer directly into the mic?

  TO: Ah yes. No, I never thought that. I mean there were times when she like acted all secretive, but, you know, I thought it was because she didn’t want to hurt me. She didn’t want to tell me something that would make me feel any worse than I already did.

  NM: Why were you feeling so bad? Was it about Alyssa and Katy and Scott having a better life than you?

  TO: How old are you, Mr. Detective?

  NM: Forty-three.

  TO: Wow, I thought you’d be older than that. You need Botox or something. My point—and I do have one—is that you can watch your life happen in front of your eyes and do absolutely nothing about it. You can see your own future and know that you’re never going to get where some of the other people around you are going to go. Port Orchard is a town full of wannabes and people who have big dreams to make it to a job in Seattle. Maybe get in on the ground floor of a dot-com. Maybe even open a Big Lots store. But for most of us, that’s never going to happen. Katy and Scott were different. Alyssa too. They were destined for something and I was going to be the girl they felt sorry for. The one who had a bald husband and a job at Walmart.

  NM: That’s a bleak picture you’ve painted.

  TO: Well, I guess it’s the truth, sir. (Starts to cry.) The thing is, I’m happy for her. I hope she escaped Port Orchard. I hope she got the F out of here and is living a better dream than the one her parents plotted for her. I loved her.

  The passage was moving. Kendall couldn’t help but think that the girl being tabbed had an undeniable sense of reality. Her assessment was simplistic and complex at the same time. Getting out of Port Orchard and doing something elsewhere was the best way back in. It was the only way to come back with an air of respect for the people and the place that depended on each other in the way that some isolated communities do.

  Kendall was about to read Scott Hilburn’s interview when she heard the familiar scuffling of Cody’s footed pajamas over the hardwood floors. He was a few years older than most kids who wear that sleep attire, but it made him feel secure, and Kendall had found a shop online that specialized in footed sleepwear and that was a godsend. Anything that made her son feel comfortable in his own skin was something worth keeping.

  “I want to talk to Dad now,” he said.

  She looked at the clock. It was after eleven.

  “It’s a little late, honey.”

  “I want to talk to Dad now,” he repeated. His tone indicated there would be an endless rehash of the same statement unless she made an attempt to reach Steven. She swallowed the bottom inch of wine in her glass with a big gulp and punched the button for his number.

  This time was met with a bit of a surprise. Steven Stark answered.

  “Hey, babe,” he said. “What’s up? Kind of late to call.”

  “I’ve tried three times today,” she said, immediately hating her tone. “Anyway, Cody got up missing his father.”

  “I miss him too. And you. Put him on.”

  “Daddy.”

  “That’s me, son. How are you doing? How is school?”

  “Legos day. Fine. I made about sixty-seven little cars.”

  “I’d like to see them when I come home. Don’t you be taking them apart until I do.”

  “Okay.”

  “What else is going on?”

  “Mommy’s sad.”

  “She is? Well, I miss Mommy too. Just so busy here, buddy, I’m trying to stay in the game here and it isn’t easy, I’ll tell you that much.”

  “Okay. Did you know there are two hundred and two tissues in a Kleenex box?”

  “No, I didn’t. But I’m glad that I know now. Thanks for sharing. Put Mom back on, will you?”

  Kendall reached for the phone and motioned for Cody to get back to bed.

  “Our son seems to be doing pretty darn good,” Steven said.

  “He’d do better if you were here.”

  “You know I can’t be in two places at once, Kendall. I have to do this. This is my shot. You don’t understand because you’re doing what you’ve always wanted to do. Fight monsters. I just want to make money. Is that so wrong?”

  “When you put it that way, it seems a little shallow, to be honest.”

  Steven took a moment to reflect. “It is. But I don’t mind. I want to take care of you and Cody.”

  Kendall looked at the wine. Another glass beckoned. “You’re never around, Steven.”

  “I’m busy.” This time his tone shifted. She couldn’t tell if he was angry, annoyed, or maybe a little resentful. All were good bets. It was, after all, a conversation they’d had before.

  Kendall didn’t want to be the suspicious wife. She didn’t want to be any of those things she despised about the ladies at the gym who found nothing but horrendous things to say about their spouses—everything from the size of his manhood to the condition of his underwear. Yet, she found herself crossing over into that territory.

  “I called earlier in the week and you were at a trade show. You never mentioned you were going to go out of town.”

  “Last minute. I tried to call but there was no cell service. You know how bad our carrier is—works in Port Orchard but nowhere else.”

  That was true. The cell towers in Port Orchard seem to have an aversion to T-Mobile.

  “Maybe we should go back to Verizon. Maybe a landline,” he said.

  “Maybe tin cans and a string,” she said.

  Steven laughed and that was good to hear. She missed him so much. She hated that she was being so selfish when he was doing exactly what she would have done—gone for the big prize. Never settle.

  Stay golden.

  “I love you, Steven,” she said.

  “I miss you and Cody,” he said before hanging up.

  Kendall wondered for a split s
econd if missing was the same as loving. She was losing it and she knew it. She was being one of those women who dissected every word in search of a hidden meaning. Never a good one. Just the kind of meaning that was meant to stab and hurt.

  Cody was fast asleep, and she turned off his tugboat lamp. The room was still bright from the six nightlights Steven had installed when their son first said he was scared of the dark. His room smelled of rotten bananas and she retrieved the peel of one from under his pillow. There were a million things about her son’s world that she’d never understand, how at age six he knew there were 4,021 tiles in the bathroom floor. How he’d fashioned snowmen out of lint from the lint trapper of the dryer and made faces on each one that made the trio resemble his family—perfectly. The hair on his mother’s snowman was the yellow lint from a set of yellow flannel sheets. His dad’s dark hair was from a sweatshirt that he’d had since high school. Cody’s own curly blond hair was fashioned from his own hair. Not hair that he’d plucked from his head, but strands that he’d collected from his pillowcase every day for six months.

  She would never, however, even try to understand how it was that her son found it necessary or even appropriate to stick a nasty Chiquita peel under his pillow. That would never, ever happen.

  She kissed his forehead and his eyelids popped open. He didn’t say a word, but snapped them closed like the slow shutter on an old camera. A smile on his lips as he wriggled down under the covers.

  When Kendall returned to the kitchen, the raccoons were back and she did what she knew she shouldn’t do. She gave them a handful of mini-marshmallows. She justified it all by telling herself the animals were hungry and the marshmallows were stale.

  The last couple of interviews were short—and there was no transcript to accompany them. Scott Hilburn said that he and Katy were “taking some time off” by mutual agreement and he had no idea where she’d gone. She didn’t have any enemies “except those two bitches that call themselves her best friends” and “some weirdo, a security guard at the school who followed her around like a puppy dog.” In Scott’s estimation, his on-and-off-again girlfriend simply split Port Orchard because she had a “decent amount of cash” and a car of her own. Kendall wondered how much cash, where did she get it, and what kind of car, and what became of it. There was no further mention of either in the files.

  Lastly she looked at the lab results of the hair sample and blood drops. The blood didn’t belong to Katy, but the hair did. It also matched the DNA on her toothbrush, a first-generation Sonicare.

  In the morning on her way in to work she thought she’d pay Ms. Frazier a visit at the coffee place. Later, she’d check in with Mr. Frazier. Then the girls, if need be. She probably had enough for Spirit Hunters to play her part of the representative from the sheriff’s department.

  Before she climbed into bed she loaded the DVR player with the DVD that the producers had included in the press kit. It was the story of a supposedly haunted house in Ocean Park, California. Wyatt Ogilvie was his blowhard self, so puffed up with his own importance that he didn’t seem to even acknowledge that he was on the show to “uncover” the truth. The poor interview subjects had barely a moment to get a word in edgewise. He prattled on about how he’d solved this and that, how he’d bucked the system, how he was the original phoenix rising from the ashes of a life torched by haters and pointy-headed academics.

  “I’m here for one damn reason only,” he told a woman who thought that the hauntings were caused by her father’s spirit, a man who’d died in a tragic train accident. “I’m here for the damn truth! I want to put a stop to your father’s suffering and the pain that he feels every moment of eternity.”

  The woman started to cry.

  “I don’t know what Pandora is going to find here, but even I feel his presence,” he said. “He’s here roaming the halls, looking for justice.”

  “He can’t roam,” the woman said. “He has no legs. They were severed by the train.”

  “Pandora tells me that’s a lot of bunk. In the spirit world everyone is young and whole, healthy and beautiful.”

  In the next scene Pandora, her mane flowing from what had to be an electric fan, came through the house. Her face contorted and she held her hands up high.

  You’re under arrest for bad acting, Kendall thought.

  “Damn you!” she said. “I get it! You’re pissed. You’re angry! You need to leave here and go to the other side. Your legs are there. The rest of you is waiting. Go now!”

  Pandora jerked and looked at the cameraman who followed her from room to room. “Did you see that?” she asked, her eyes round and mouth painted in a red slash of lipstick, open to its widest.

  The cameraman didn’t speak. In the preamble to the show, the producers indicate that he cannot say or do anything that might affect the energy of what is occurring when Pandora is doing her job—reaching out to the other side.

  It occurred to Kendall that if the cameraman was being shown in the clip, then there was another filming him. So much for the control measures promised by the producers.

  “I want you to stop it now,” Pandora said, appearing to speak to someone right in front of her. “I don’t care what happened to you. You need to get a grip, damn it, and leave your daughter alone. She’s in pain here. You are making me really, really mad, sir. I want you gone. I want you gone right now.”

  Then she let out a scream and fell to the floor. The camera went black. A beat later, one of the producers appeared outside the house.

  “We don’t know what just happened in there,” said the young woman, who Kendall guessed was Juliana Robbins—the sound of her voice coupled with the slight impatience of a New York accent being her primary clues. “I want our viewers to know that Pandora is going to be all right. She’s being checked out by our medical team right now. And from what I’m hearing, she’s experienced only some minor scrapes and bumps. She insists that she needs to go on. She needs to fight the entity that she now feels is not the homeowner’s father, but someone else. Someone who is consumed by rage and may in fact be holding several spirits prisoner—including some children.”

  Jeesh. Is this over the top. Way over, Kendall thought. Who believes this crap anyway?

  Kendall fast-forwarded to the end.

  The screen read: The Showdown.

  Pandora stood at the top of the stairs holding a candle. The light from its flame flickered on her face as she contorted and spun around in a circle. Her breathing was either very loud, or the sound mixer had amped it up during post-production. It was all very, very dramatic.

  “You can kill me, sir. I don’t care because if you do, I will come after you with an army of spirits and you will go back into the hellhole from which you came. Take me on. I bleep dare you. I bleep bleep double dare you. You weren’t a real man in the real world and you’re a pussy in the afterlife. You don’t want me to come after you. Trust me. No one wants that. But I’m bleep ready!”

  With that the candle went out and there was a scream. A bloodcurdling scream. It was so authentic that it actually sent a chill down Kendall’s spine. She hoped Cody didn’t hear it.

  In the next scene all the principals were seated around the family’s kitchen table. Pandora looked like she’d been through hell. Her eyes were bloodshot and her hands shook as she sipped her coffee.

  Wyatt Ogilvie spoke first.

  “Spirit Hunters is about a lot of things, but not this. Not this kind of a war we had here last night. Pandy is lucky to be alive. We’re all lucky to be alive.”

  Finally Pandora spoke. “Luck has nothing to do with it, Wyatt. We’re alive because I was willing to fight to the death to get to the truth of what happened here. I’m convinced now that the evil entity in your house was your father.”

  She looked at the woman across the table. Her eyes were raining tears.

  “The children were his victims. I’m sorry to say, but your father was a child molester. He raped and murdered those babies over most of his life.�
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  “I . . . I . . .” The woman didn’t know what to say. “I thought he died in a train accident and that he was here because he needed us.”

  “No,” she said. “He was here because this is where he kept his victims, trapped for eternity. Trapped for all time. Trapped until someone—in this case me—came here to free them all and put him inside the gates of hell where he will rot and burn forever.”

  “My dad loved kids,” the woman, now in full-on cry.

  “Yes. Loved them for sex and torture,” Pandora said. “Only when you wise up and come to grips with what happened here tonight—and only if you do—will you ever find peace for yourself and your family.”

  Pandora turned to her partner in crime. “Wyatt, let’s go. This place sickens me.”

  “Me too. Nothing more to be done here.”

  Kendall was so appalled by what she saw that she got on her iPad and searched the Internet for the woman’s name. There were a lot of hits. Many were from fan sites and, of course, YouTube clips featuring bits of the show. A couple—one from a newspaper and one from a mom blogger—caught Kendall’s eye.

  ‘SPIRIT HUNTERS’ COURT CASE TOSSED OUT

  An Ocean City woman who sued a reality show for portraying her father as a child molester has been left holding the bag. Her contract with the production company for the show “Spirit Hunters” doesn’t allow any recourse for the productions they make.

  “These people are good,” Richard Button, the lawyer for the woman said. “They know how to write an ironclad contract. We didn’t think we had a shot, but my client was so upset by the turn of events and the way the show twisted everything she’d said and done into something very ugly, she wanted to at least try to have her day in court.”