In the Waning Light

by Loreth Anne White

  “What are you going to do, Geoff?”

  “Leave. Get out of this hellhole. Go to California.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know. Tomorrow. Next month. As soon as I get my shit together.”

  Blake exits the boathouse. Heavy heart, thudding adrenaline. Anxiety churns through him. It’ll be just him and his dad now. The sense of looming loss is profound. Tears mix with the water running down his face as he stomps up through the rain and enters the office. He fiddles with the radio channels, listening to the crackle and hiss of the calls out on the bay. Then he hears a snatch that thumps the wind out of him. They’ve found Sherry.

  She’s dead. Police have been called. The death sounds suspicious. Then there’s an order to cut radio chatter on the subject.

  Raw chill slices through him. Meg? Where’s Meg? Frantically he scans through the other channels.

  No sign of the other girl.

  Blake can’t stand it. His brain screams. Sweat pools under his arms, drenching his shirt. He paces, up and down, up and down, up and down, hitting his fist into his palm, the radio crackling, his mind racing. What happened to Sherry? Where’s Meg? What was Geoff doing on the spit today? He explodes suddenly like a volcano—manning the fort be damned—he grabs his weather gear, a flashlight, headlamp, first aid kit, a portable radio of his own, and makes his way through the slashing rain down the gangway to his small boat.

  He casts off the lines, motors into the storm wearing his tiny headlamp. Tossing like a little cork upon a boiling sea, he gooses his engine, setting his prow dead center of the incoming waves, slapping into the crests as they break and crash into whitecaps around him, spraying his face. He’s watchful of the rebound surge coming off the dike that could hit him broadside. He keeps an eye on the backwash from the cliff side of the point. He knows the vagaries of the tidal currents in this bay, how they swirl when high tide pushes in, and he compensates, running his craft up the far left of the channel, knowing that even going full power into the surge, it will still carry him at least fifty yards over to the right, where he’ll run into trouble against the rocks. Blake knows exactly where each painted cairn stands along the dike, marking where sailors have drowned. He has no intention of having his life marked by a cairn. Salt water driven by wind stings his face, leaks from his squinting eyes.

  He aims for the flare of the lighthouse at the mouth, aims toward the boom of the waves against the riprap reef—the dangerous maw of the point and the south beach. He’s a young Odysseus navigating between the treachery of a Scylla and Charybdis to rescue his redheaded little goddess. For he knows Meg’s secret place. Their secret place. A small cave to which access is cut off at high tide. But if you know where to go, you can still get into the cave during high water, if you dive under and swim up inside the grotto, from where you can climb to higher ground and stay dry even at top watermark. If … just if Meggie ran into trouble, that’s where she would go, that’s where she might try to hide.

  CHAPTER 12

  Like the tides, the February fogs that rolled in off the Pacific had rhythms of their own. On this night, the crawling, creeping wall of wet stole into the Forest End subdivision around 1:00 a.m. It moved under streetlights in thick, soupy tatters, reaching, sifting into crevices, between trees, behind hedges, touching wet fingers to leaves, cars, dampening the road to a shining black. It trapped sound, light, and cast it sideways and bounced it back, a sentient presence trying to trick the innocent down the wrong alley.

  The houses in Forest Lane, the last street that ran along the woods, were dark, the residents all asleep, save for one. The fog thickened as the clock ticked inexorably down toward 4:00 a.m., a time when the biorhythmic ebb of the human cycle dipped to its lowest, a time of night when it was most likely for a death to occur in the very old, or very ill. A time when temperatures fell to their lowest, just before dawn, and currents of air stirred across the earth, and it became easy for the grim reaper to reach through that fragile membrane that separates life from death, and crook a finger to softly summon a soul.

  It was at this time a vehicle crept slowly up the dark street. Cutting lights, it came to a stop under the bare branches of an old cherry, just out of the sight line of the one lighted living room window in the street, yet the position still afforded a good view of the Brogan house.

  A light burned softly downstairs. A lamp perhaps. The window had been replaced, but no blinds as yet. Drapes were drawn upstairs. The walls of the double-story had been cleansed of graffiti, scraped down, and sported a fresh coat of paint. A blank slate upon which to rewrite fate.

  The vehicle door opened. Boots touched gravel, carefully, quietly. The door snicked shut. Gravel crunched as a hunched shape moved through mist. A black balaclava covered skin. Only eyes showed through the slits, and those eyes glinted black and wet in the gloam.

  From directly across the street, Meg Brogan could be seen at a table, working by the light of a lamp and surrounded by papers, her hair piled into a tangled knot on top of her head, reading glasses slipping down her nose as she typed into a laptop. A mug sat beside her.

  Wind gusted. Fog swirled in glee. Dead leaves clattered. A cat spooked with a meow into the street, stopped, as if taking note of the SUV beneath the cherry, then skittered under a hedge.

  Meg got up from the table and stretched, arcing her spine slowly, and pressing her hands to the back of her hips. She picked up her mug and moved across the lighted window. For a moment, sight of her was lost.

  But she returned with her mug again, steam coming from the top. Must have gone for a refill.

  Several more minutes ticked by. She turned off one of the living room lamps, as if prepping for sleep, but she wavered, went back to her table, and slowly sat down to read more, as if something had snared her interest and would not allow her to go to bed.

  The shadow moved across the street and slipped into Meg Brogan’s driveway.

  Seating herself at the table, a mug of tea at her side, Meg opened the file with the crime scene photos. Outside the night had grown cold and was choked with mist that pressed up against her new windows. The blinds she’d ordered had yet to arrive but her house was now spotless, and the exterior walls had been cleaned of graffiti and given a first coat of cream paint. Order was gradually being restored around her, and she was beginning to feel whole. More whole than … since she could remember.

  But the first photo shut her down instantly. She closed her eyes, swallowed, and breathed deep.

  Just another job. Treat it like all the others … you’ve looked at countless crime photos and postmortem reports … use the same tools you always use to distance yourself, intellectualize …

  She reached over, clicked on her recorder. The little red light glowed. But her voice tightened in her throat as she stared at the image of her sister’s body. Sherry’s skin was paper-white under the harsh flash, stark against the black mud. Her head was wrenched sideways at an unnatural angle, her tongue, fat, protruding. Her legs were splayed, her crotch exposed, and there was black blood down her inner thighs. White lace panties were balled like a dirty wet rag near her left foot. Her shorts and blouse had been ripped and cast aside. A lone sandal stuck out of dead pine needles. Twigs matted her tangled hair. Her eyes were open wide and blank, and her skin glistened with rain. The glimmering essence that was her sister, gone. Meg’s gaze lit upon the birthmark on Sherry’s left breast, and a small noise escaped her mouth. Her own sound startled her. Blood beat in her head.

  Focus.

  The photographer had captured the small butterfly tattoo on Sherry’s hip bone, one she’d kept hidden from Mom and Dad, now exposed to the world. No dignity in death. No secrets. No modesty. When you relinquished life, you relinquished your own story, the ability to tell it, shape it the way you wanted the world to see it.

  The next photo showed discarded beer tins, used condoms in mud, and pine needles. All awash with rain and rising, muddy water.

  “What happened, Sherry?” sh
e whispered into her microphone. “I came looking for you late that afternoon. I beached my boat, pulled it up high so that the tide wouldn’t steal it away, then I ran up the dune. A steep dune. Soft, white sand, which slipped out under my shoes. I used my hands, like I was crawling uphill. Then … I stopped. Why? …” Meg closed her eyes, her heart skipping faster. “A sound. I heard something that halted me in my tracks. A terrible sound. Part of my brain said it was one thing while another thought it had to be something else, and … then I heard it again. My muscles exploded as I forced my way through the scrub, and …”

  Meg jabbed off her recorder and lurched to her feet. She paced, clenching and unclenching her hands, palms damp. From that point her memory was blank. She’d slammed right back up against that black hole again, but this was the farthest she had gone into it. And she felt a sense of several shapes moving, like shadow puppets, evil silhouettes, just beyond her mental reach. “How late was I, Sherry? Were you still alive? Were you struggling, calling for my help? What did I do? Who was there? What did I see, dammit—”

  Wait. Stop! Don’t run, Meggie, don’t run!

  Meg froze. She felt a shudder beneath her feet. The glasses in the kitchen cupboards rattled, and framed pictures on the wall slid askew. A vase crashed off the shelf, and her new windows vibrated. She stood dead still. It came again, another small tremor, the ground wobbling under her feet. She was about to run for a door frame when all went still. Meg waited another moment, then made quickly for her computer.

  She pulled up the WorldEarthquakeWatchLive profile on her Twitter feed. And as she watched, one tweet after another slipped into the stream like some old-fashioned ticker tape—people reporting tremors all the way up the Oregon coast and into Washington State. Some even coming from BC north of the border. An earthquake had occurred fifteen miles off the Oregon coast, and according to the Live Earthquakes map, it had registered 5.7 on the Richter scale. The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center had not yet issued an advisory, but was on watch. Meg paced, clenching and unclenching her hands again, nerves biting.

  It’s like you’re playing a joke on me, Sherry. That would be your style, wouldn’t it? Let’s rattle little Meggie-Peg’s cage a bit, and see if we can spook her …

  Meg forced herself to calm down, and she reseated herself at the table. Yet her world was oddly off-kilter now. It was as if looking at these photos of Sherry’s defiled body had opened some fissure between tectonic plates in the Earth’s crust, and a dark, inky evil was oozing out and creeping closer in the mist. Irritably, she clicked the television on, found the local weather channel. The reporters’ voices and light invaded the room, dissipating the weird sensation, and distracting her a little from the harshness of the crime scene photos. If there was a tsunami warning coming, she’d hear it on this channel.

  Meg slugged back the rest of her tea, and opened the postmortem report. She pressed the record button.

  “As expected,” Meg said into her recorder as she read, “the PM report obtained by my mother in March—seven months after Sherry’s murder—details trauma from violent sexual intercourse, vaginal and anal tears, traces of semen that were later proved to have come from Tyson Mack. This is all consistent with Tyson Mack’s assertions in police interview transcripts that sex with Sherry was ‘energetic’ and that his condom had ruptured.” Meg cleared her throat. “Cause of death was asphyxiation. The report details petechial hemorrhaging in the conjunctival surfaces of the eyes, cloudy corneas, ligature marks around the neck. The internal examination revealed a fractured hyoid bone. All of this is consistent with the trauma clearly evident in the crime scene photos.” Meg paused, and flipped over the page to the lab data sections. What?

  She yanked the report closer.

  Her sister’s blood at the time of her death had contained between 5 and 25 mIU/ml hCG—human chorionic gonadotropin—a hormone that supported the development of an egg in a woman’s ovary.

  Sherry was pregnant?

  Hurriedly, Meg scanned the document further. Her sister had been a few weeks pregnant when she was raped and strangled. She sat back in shock. Into her microphone she said, “Sherry was with child, barely. But according to this report, the DNA of the embryo did not match Tyson Mack’s DNA profile, a copy of which my mother also has in her files. Neither was it a match to Tommy Kessinger’s DNA profile—Tommy had voluntarily given a sample to assist with the investigation since he’d been intimate with Sherry prior to her murder.”

  Meg cleared her throat and continued speaking softly into the mic. “According to the report, several other used condoms had also been retrieved from the scene. The grove on the spit was a well-known make-out spot, so this would be expected. The DNA samples collected from these condoms were apparently in various stages of viability, due to weather exposure and the passage of time. There was also evidence of cross contamination. One of the condoms had traces of Sherry’s DNA on it; however, the report notes that this condom had been found in a pool of muddy water into which Sherry had also bled.” Meg turned the page.

  “Two more DNA samples were retrieved, one from a beer can, and another from a tequila bottle. None of these DNA profiles was a paternal match to Sherry’s embryo. However, hairs that had been found in Sherry’s pubic hair were a match to one of the unidentified profiles—the semen taken from the condom found in the muddy pool that had contained Sherry’s blood trace.”

  She paused, pulse quickening. Was it possible there could have been more than one perpetrator? Why had this angle not been explored more thoroughly? Meg quickly made a note to ask Ike Kovacs about this and the pregnancy when she interviewed him.

  “My sister had been with another man at least several weeks prior to the attack, and she was carrying his baby. So, who in the hell was he? What could this mean in terms of Ty Mack’s guilt?” She clicked off her recorder, feeling sick. She stood to ease the pain that was knotting low in her back. Arching her spine, she applied pressure with her hands to the back of her hips.

  Who were you seeing, Sherry? Did you even know that you were pregnant by this man? And if so, did you tell him? What was his reaction? Anger? Pleasure? Confusion? Did you discuss options—keeping the baby, getting rid of it? Did he pressure you?

  Meg snagged her mug and went into the kitchen to make more tea.

  As she waited in the kitchen for the kettle to boil she stared absently at her reflection in the black window, and it struck her hard—her mother had been privy to all this. How had it made her feel? Had Tara Brogan first learned of her oldest daughter’s pregnancy through this autopsy report that she’d acquired herself? If so, why had Sheriff Kovacs not told her mom as soon as he’d seen this? Meg hurried back to the living room.

  She grabbed her mother’s journal and flipped through to March, when her mom had secured this report. She found the entry she was looking for.

  I got the autopsy report today. I’d never wanted to see it until now. I wasn’t ready. The news of Sherry’s pregnancy near broke me. I drove to Ike’s house in Chillmook that same night, shaking all the way. I could not believe he hadn’t told me or Jack about the pregnancy, or the other DNA. I wanted to kill him. I could imagine how Jack felt, wanting to kill someone. Rage. It’s an emotion I never thought deeply about until Jack murdered Ty Mack. It hijacks the logical part of your brain, and I could feel it happening to me as I drove, hands clamped to the wheel, vision narrowing. I had to keep telling myself—think, Tara. Focus. You’re going to have an accident. You’re not going to be of any help with Jack in prison. Meg needs a mother.

  Meg stalled, and reread the sentence: Meg needs a mother. Shit. She sat back. Quietly she said into her mic, “Who were you, Mom? I wish you’d spoken to me. I might have been only fourteen, but if I’d known you were fighting, if I’d known … I could have perhaps helped, even if just being there for support—it could have made all the difference. It could have given me purpose. I’ve hated you for so long for giving up. For just abandoning me. But I didn’t know you at all. These wo
rds in this journal are those of a strong, valiant, intelligent, caring, determined woman, and not a grief-soaked, helpless soul who could no longer face the world. I wish I knew what made you change your mind that day, and take your own life like that … it just doesn’t make sense.”

  In her laptop she typed:

  Question for Tommy and Emma: Did you know Sherry was pregnant? Did you know if she was seeing anyone else?

  Meg returned her attention to her mother’s journal.

  When I got to the Kovacs’, Ike told me that the autopsy results, the pregnancy lab tests in particular, came in after Tyson Mack had already been shot dead by Jack. It had all happened so fast. Tyson Mack was their prime suspect—they were convinced of his guilt—but the DA advised they’d need more evidence in order to secure a solid conviction, so the police were holding off formally charging him at that point while they continued their investigation.

  But if Jack had known about the pregnancy, or the existence of the other condom with Sherry’s blood trace on it, as inconclusive as it was, he might not have been so quick to the trigger. Because to my mind, Sherry’s pregnancy and the other DNA put the possibility of another suspect, or more than one, into the picture. And the baby gave possible motive—perhaps the father was a violent man.

  Ike explained to me that the other DNA was worthless because of the high probability of cross contamination along with the heavy use of the grove as a make-out spot. The storm, he said, had created challenges in the collection of evidence. In his opinion it was unrelated to Sherry’s assault, anyway. Ty Mack was his man. He said he was simply trying to soften things for us. He felt the news of the pregnancy coming right after Ty Mack’s murder would have been too much for me and Jack to bear on top of it all. And bringing it to everyone’s attention before Jack’s trial could hurt him in sentencing. It was better, he said, that a jury believed one hundred percent that Jack had killed an evil man, that there be no doubt as to Tyson Mack’s guilt. Ike said the pregnancy did not change his conviction that Ty Mack raped, sodomized, and strangled Sherry, and he felt that when I was ready, if I wanted, I’d get the report myself, and be able to better deal with the information contained therein.