by Blake Crouch
Daniel curses, the toilet paper dispenser barely audible over the babble of running water and rushing air. The blackness is complete except for a razorthin line of light along the base of the door.
Luther stands beside the light switch stroking himself.
He inhales deeply, at home in darkness.
Daniel’s toilet flushes and as the zipper on his jeans ascends Luther grips the knife.
He would have preferred to spread Daniel’s brains across the wall with a Louisville Slugger, one judicious thwack. But the blade will do. In the car he settled on a name for his knife: Zig, short for Ziegler, Andrew Thomas’s middle name.
Luther hears the creak of the stall door swinging open.
Hesitant footsteps approach and eddies of Daniel’s cologne sweep over him.
He feels Daniel beside him now, the clerk’s hand on the cinderblock wall, groping for the light switch.
The knife feels coldly sublime in his palm.
Suddenly the restroom is awash in hard fluorescent light.
Daniel’s eyes register first bewilderment, then terror.
The blade moving, two graceful strokes—one to silence, one to open.
Daniel sits in a warm expanding puddle, fingering the gorge in his abdomen, unable to make utterance.
"Now you sit there and think about what customer service means."
Luther reenters the stall and quickly dresses.
Then he hits the light and is out the door, one more cairn for this trail he’s blazing.
18
UPON regaining consciousness, Karen’s first thought was that she was no longer in the trunk. Though she couldn’t see, her present blindness owed to the blindfold tied around her head. She felt a cold wind in her face and an erratic source of light struggled through the oily-smelling cloth that masked her eyes.
Karen did not remember being moved. For all she knew she was dreaming again though the chill metal against her cheek seemed convincingly real. She tried to move but could not, her hands and feet now bound with thick rope. The numbing grogginess of thirst weighed down her head.
Footsteps approached, the tip of a boot now inches from her face. She smelled the grass and dirt that clung to it—raw and earthy.
"You’re conscious, I see."
The voice contained no reverberation. She was outside.
"Where am I? Please take off the blindfold."
"We better leave that on for now. I tell you, you’re a heavy gal. If I sound winded, it’s because I just carried you up two hundred fourteen steps."
A prickling crawled through Karen’s spine. "Where is this?" she asked.
"Don’t you see the light? Even through the blindfold I don’t know how you could miss it."
"I don’t under—"
"That light is magnified by a First Order Fresnel Lens, operational since October First, Eighteen Seventy-two. Karen, let me quell your fear." The man sat down beside her. "I brought you here to let you go." Karen began to cry, filling with the purest relief. "But I have to hold on to the Widow Lancing. You remember her from the trunk?"
"Yessir."
"See, the only reason you’re being released is because I flipped a coin. You were heads, it landed on heads, you get to live."
"Why are you doing this?"
She smelled his lemony breath in her face and his words came very even and very quiet.
"You think this is all about you you arrogant twat?"
"No, I—"
"I only took you and Elizabeth Lancing to get someone’s attention. Can you guess who it is?"
"I don’t know."
"You should know. You’ve fucked him. Well, I’m just making an assumption there but—"
"I don’t know who you’re—"
"Andrew Thomas."
"What do you want with him?"
"Seven years ago, Andrew shot me, left me to die in a snowy desert."
"I’m so sorry."
"No, don’t be. What I’ve got planned for him is going to make it all worthwhile. One last thing. Think hard before you answer. Do you believe you’re an evil person?"
"No, I’m—"
"Why not?"
Her captor’s breath warmed her mouth as she thought of all the charitable acts she’d performed in the last year—Wednesdays in the soup kitchen on 54th, the new writers she’d guided to publication, the angel tree at Ice Blink.
"I’m a decent person," she said.
"And me? From what little you’ve seen. Am I evil?"
"No sir. I don’t believe you are. I don’t know you. I don’t know what sort of parents you come from. I don’t know if tragedies have happened to you. I’m sure things have caused you to behave…"
"Destructively."
"Yes."
"Is anyone evil, Karen?"
"People get damaged. They malfunction. But no, I don’t believe in evil."
"I see. Thank you for talking so candidly with me."
The blindfold was removed.
Karen stared through iron bars across a half mile of pines and marshland and dunes to the Atlantic. From this height and distance the ocean was mute though in the light of the yellow moon she could make out the ragged thread of surf extending for miles down the coastline.
Her captor was gone.
She managed to sit up and saw that she occupied a small observation deck encircled by iron railing. At her back a ladder climbed the last six feet of the tower up to the lantern room of the Bodie Island Lighthouse.
Its beam was blinding. It flashed on for 2.5 seconds. Off 2.5 seconds. On 2.5 seconds. Off 22.5 seconds. This rhythm repeated, dusk to dawn, and she could not behold the mighty lens as it magnified its 160,000 candlepower beacon out to sea.
Karen strained against the rope but the knots held. As she dragged herself around the platform, her eyes followed the ribbon of Highway 12 as it skirted beach and marsh and finally, three miles south, traversed the troubled waters of Oregon Inlet onto Pea Island. From there it would be sixty miles of desolate sound and seashore and tiny beach communities and then Cape Hatteras and Ocracoke and the Core Banks.
But she didn’t know place-names.
She didn’t even know she was in North Carolina or that her captor had cut two locks with a bolt cutter in the oil room and carried her up a rickety spiral staircase to the top of this 131-year-old lighthouse.
How the hell am I gonna get down from here? Fuck it, I’ll find a way. Flag down a car. Get to an airport. Call Scott Boylin, have him wire some money. It will feel so sweet to be back in my apartment again. First thing I’ll do is listen to Ashley Chambliss and drink an entire bottle of that chardonnay and I won’t even feel guilty about it. Everything will be different now. I’ll be a better person. Publish better books. Stop living on autopilot. This experience might actually turn out to be a—
Rounding the base of the lantern room, she froze.
Oh God, why is he still here and squatting over a pile of rope?
The man with long black hair looked over his shoulder and smiled.
"Be right with you, Karen."
When he turned and stood she saw that he held a noose by its coil.
He came forward as she tried to crawl the other way and slipped the noose around her neck. Then he hoisted her up over his shoulder and set her down on top of the railing facing him.
Unable to muster a scream, Karen glanced over her shoulder, felt a needling in her stomach. Far below she saw the adjoining oil room at the granite foundation of the lighthouse. She saw the roof of the nearby Keeper’s Quarters and the visitor parking lot. Westward beyond the marsh, she took in the waters of the Pamlico Sound and further on, the blinking red lights of radio towers on the mainland.
"This is a black and white banded lighthouse," the man said. "I’ve measured out the rope so you’ll hang in the middle white band facing the visitor’s center. Imagine the face of whoever finds you first. Maybe some minivan family from the Midwest, with lots of little ones."
He laughed.
Karen looked
at the skein of climbing rope at his feet and the bulky knot he’d tied to the railing. He held her by the waist belt of the bathrobe she’d worn since her abduction.
She sought out reason in his eyes and found it. They were not wild or impassioned but black and serene. And if they burned, it was a smoldering like embers.
Now only clutching her with one hand, he brushed his black hair from his eyes.
Karen felt gravity pining for her, a waterless undertow.
She upchucked on his windbreaker but he did not let go.
"Karen," he said. "Now do you believe?"
He released the belt of her robe, watched her fall.
She screamed for two seconds, then the rope silenced her.
Back and forth she swung, still fifty feet above the lawn, a pendulum for the lighthouse.
19
AT two in the morning the Impala streaks south on Ocracoke Island, a ribbon of land less than a half mile wide. To the west the Pamlico Sound yawns out into darkness. Oceanside the Atlantic shines like black blood under the jaundiced October moon.
In the trunk, Elizabeth Lancing sleeps and she does not dream.
Behind the wheel the smiling driver is tired and happy, the window down, his hair whipping across his pale face. He inhales deeply, the tepid air redolent of kelp and saltwater and driftwood and the carcasses of fish on tidesmoothed sand.
At last he sees it beyond the dunes that now hide the sea—his hometown, a faint incandescence on the black horizon.
And he wonders, Old Andrew, since I’ve shown you the way, will you come?
V I O L E T
20
THE last Wednesday of each month is unfailingly baked spaghetti night at Lighthouse Baptist Church. It is tradition, a comforting inevitability for this Christian community.
The congregation slowly progressed from the kitchen into the fellowship hall much as it had done every Wednesday evening for the past twenty-two years. Each churchgoer carried a paper plate laden with baked spaghetti, a yeast roll, a salad of wet lettuce and shredded carrots, and a Styrofoam cup of sweet tea.
They dined with their brothers and sisters in Christ at the circular foldaway tables, happily consuming the insipid meals, the fellowship hall resounding with myriad conversations and rampant children, while praise music flowed from speakers on the stage, an auditory warmth. Through tall windows the dying sun funneled weaker and weaker, now only a suggestion of purple in the late October sky.
Violet King sat at a table with her parents, Ebert and Evelyn, and a friend of her parents named Charles. Charles was thirty, single, and on fire for Jesus. Violet disliked the way he looked at and spoke to her, as though he were privy to some secret she had not disclosed, as though he were something more than a shallow acquaintance.
Charles had been monopolizing the conversation for the last five minutes, narrating his attempt to witness to a "troubled black youth."
But Violet wasn’t listening. She just stared at the cube of baked spaghetti on her plate.
"…and I told him, ‘Jesus died for you, little fella.’" Charles’s bottom lip had begun to quiver, his voice gone soft and earnest with emotion. "And you know what he said to me? It’ll break your heart, Ebert. He said ‘How come God loves me?’ And I told him, I said… You with me, Violet?"
Violet looked up into those small lonely eyes across the table.
"Yes, I’m with you, Charles."
"I told him, ‘God loves little black boys just as much as He loves little white boys.’"
A four-year-old boy ran over and stopped in front of Violet, a chocolate icing ring around his smiling little mouth.
"You’re pretty," he said, then ran away shouting, "I did it, guys! I did it!"
The young woman laughed.
"Where’s Max, Violet?" Charles asked.
"Same place he was when you asked me a week ago," Violet responded but she did not say it bitterly. "He’s coaching cross-country this fall. They had another meet today."
Is that all right with you you freaking weirdo?
"Just don’t want to see him backsliding on us. You start skipping Wednesday nights, what’s next?"
"My son-in-law ain’t no backslider, Charles," Ebert said. "You know I wouldn’t tolerate that. Ain’t that right, baby?"
"Yes, Daddy."
Violet smiled at her father, a big brawny man, whitebearded and baldheaded. He’d earned that shiny red dome working his dairy farm. Their table smelled faintly of manure.
As Violet sipped her tea she felt Charles eyeing her. She often caught him staring, especially during Sunday sermons. He was always chiding her about her "boy haircut," said women were supposed to have long and flowing hair, encouraged Violet to let her blond locks grow out.
Her pager buzzed against her hip and she glanced down at her lavender skirt.
When she saw the number she stood up.
"Mom, if Max comes, tell him I’ll be right back."
"Everything all right, Vi?"
Evelyn stared up at Violet through cloudyblue eyes that picked up the gray in her hair.
How can you sit here with this whacko? "Yes ma’am."
Violet walked out of the fellowship hall into the corridor of classrooms. At the end of the hallway, the double doors had been thrown open and she could see into the new sanctuary where the music director was furiously arranging chairs in the choir loft in preparation of the practice that would immediately follow the fellowship dinner. She didn’t feel up to singing tonight. She wanted to go home, crawl into bed with a pint of Cherry Garcia, and watch television, preferably a Ken Burns documentary on PBS.
With the commotion of the feasting congregation now a whisper, Violet stepped into a dark classroom and closed the door behind her.
The pager vibrated again.
She rummaged her purse for the cell phone.
21
VIOLET turned around in the cul-de-sac and parked her Jeep Cherokee on the curb. The dashboard clock read 7:15. There was no tinge of luminosity in the sky excepting the blurry pinpoints of starlight that obscured when you looked straight at them. Turning off the engine, she stared at the chaos in the distance, filtering out the dazzle of flashing lights so she could imagine this hysterical street as it must’ve seemed that night.
Tranquil.
Ordinary.
Safe.
She absorbed her surroundings—the young pine forest across the street from the lakefront houses, the cul-de-sacs at each end, the road that dead-ended into Shortleaf Drive, the number of houses between cul-de-sacs (eleven) and that serene black lake.
Violet did not speculate or theorize. With the investigation only in its infancy it wasn’t useful to do so. All she knew was that a family of four had been slain in that brick ranch forty yards down the street. Coupled with the other murders—the clerk knifed to death in a Rocky Mount Wal-Mart and the woman hanged from the Bodie Island Lighthouse—this had been one of the bloodiest weeks in North Carolina since the Civil War.
As she opened the door and stepped out into the autumn evening she couldn’t help thinking, Most investigators never encounter anything like this. And then: You are not equipped to handle it.
Her legs gave out and she leaned against the Jeep.
Closing her eyes, she took a long calming breath, whispered a prayer, and started walking toward the flashing blue lights.
The perimeter of the Worthingtons’ half-acre lot had already been roped off with crime scene tape. Violet counted three police cruisers, an ambulance, a van, and two unmarked cars parked along the curb across the street.
A uniformed patrolman stood at the foot of the driveway, guarding the perimeter.
"Hi, Reuben," she said.
"Viking? You were on-call for this one?"
"Yep."
"Lucky you. That house next door is where we had the kidnapping on Monday. These are the neighbors we could never get to answer the door or the phone."
"You’re kidding me. You were first car?"
; "No, Bruce was. He’s over talking to Barry."
Violet stepped under the tape and walked down the driveway toward her sergeant, a wide massive man with the girth of an oak tree and a voice as deep as her daddy’s. He was talking to a patrolman when she walked up between them.
