by Blake Crouch
I parked in front of the cabin and turned off the Jeep. Staring through the cracked windshield, I thought of Luther Kite, recalled standing over him holding a twelve gauge to his chest, my finger grazing the double triggers. But I hadn’t killed him. I’d thrown the shotgun across the room and left him to die on that cold front porch, severely wounded and miles from the nearest town with no mode of transportation. He could not have survived. He was dying when I left him. Please God, You would not have let that monster survive. And then this piercing thought: What if my unwillingness to pull that trigger has cost six people, including an entire family, their lives?
I wasn’t ready to accept that. Luther Kite died with Orson in that snowy Wyoming desert. The Worthingtons’ and Karen’s killer—whoever had blazed that gory trail across North Carolina—was a copycat. It’s not my fault.
I opened the door, stepped out of the Jeep, the woods cold and still.
Walking toward the porch, I wondered, But why kill in Davidson across the lake from my old home? And why kidnap Beth Lancing? As I thought her name, my self-interest evaporated and it registered for the first time that she’d been taken, that if she weren’t dead now she was in the company of a madman.
Halfway up the porch steps, a sob spurted out of me. I sat down and wept like I hadn’t wept in years, hanging blame around my neck for everything that had befallen that ill-starred family. The Lancings would’ve been better off never to have known me. I’d taken everything from them. Everything. And now, seven years after the death of Walter, their association with me continued to produce suffering. How could I not try to help Beth?
I stood up and walked into the cabin, aware that the defense mechanisms in my brain were attempting to unplug me. The immense pain I’d endured through those dark years had nearly turned me into a stoic. The tears surprised me. I’d wondered recently if I had it in me to ever cry again.
Between the time I closed the door and set the news article on the breakfast table, the decision was made and I’d acknowledged that it could only be Luther.
So I walked over to my bed and dragged a suitcase out from underneath it, shaking as I began to pack.
I was rummaging the bottom drawer of a dresser in search of an envelope of hundred-dollar bills when I heard a car approaching down my drive. Closing the drawer, I came to my feet in pure astonishment. In the five years I’d lived in this cabin I rarely received visitors and was not expecting one now.
Though only three in the afternoon, the sun had slipped back behind the peaks, the forest draped in an eerie twilight. I heard a door slam and through the window watched a figure step onto the porch.
There was a knock.
Taking the subcompact .40 caliber Glock from the top dresser drawer, I slipped it into the pocket of my fleece pullover and went to greet my guest.
When I opened the front door, firelight from inside the cabin streamed across the gaunt visage of a young man I’d seen around the village these last few weeks, a small kid with an acne-cratered face, swallowed in a huge down jacket. The moment we made eye contact he looked away.
"Help you?" I asked. He found my eyes again, his hands fidgeting behind his back.
"Mr. Carmichael?" he said.
"Yes?" I sensed a frightened innocence behind those twentysomething eyes.
"May I come in for a moment?"
"Why?"
"There was something I wanted to talk to you about."
He was letting in the cold so I stepped back and ushered him inside.
The young man stood beside the breakfast table, took a good long look at me. His Adam’s apple rolled in his throat and his hands shook.
I said, "Well, do I have to guess?"
"What? Oh, no."
As he leaned against the breakfast table, our eyes fixed simultaneously on the article which lay face-up, its headline in large black font:
FAMILY SLAYING LINKED TO ANDREW THOMAS
He looked up quickly and said, "Julie Ashburn sent me out to see if you could work tomorrow night. The Curling Club is having a dinner."
I reached back, pulled my hair into a ponytail.
"What’s your name?" I asked.
"Horace. I just started helping her out. Sort of a gofer. Lucky to get the job."
"Well, you’ll have to tell her that I can’t do it this time, Horace."
"Oh, okay. That’s fine, I mean…" He glanced once more at the article, then back at me, becoming breathless. "I’ll let her know. Should I tell her you’re going on vacation? That that’s why you can’t?" I just stared at him and slid my hands into my pockets, fingering the cold metal of the handgun, trying to talk myself down from the paranoia. He doesn’t suspect anything. He’s acting strange because he’s strange. World’s full of strange people. Nothing more than that. He doesn’t know who I am.
"The reason I say vacation," he continued, "you know is just cause I notice you have a suitcase out over on the uh, the thing over there."
"Yes, I’m going away for a little while."
"Well, okay, then I’ll uh, I’ll tell Julie."
He couldn’t help himself. For the third time he looked at the article.
"Why don’t you take it with you?" I said. "I’m finished with it. Crazy stuff, huh?"
"Yeah. It’s…wow. Well, look, I’ll uh, I’ll let Julie know." He picked up the article, then said, "I’m very sorry to bother you."
As Horace walked by and opened the front door, I realized how paranoid I’d become. He stepped out into the afternoon darkness and I lingered in the doorway, watching him climb into a Land Cruiser and head back up the driveway. The noise of its engine soon faded into woodland silence and there was nothing but the whisper of wind in the firs.
I walked back inside to finish packing, my thoughts returning to how I would find Luther Kite in this wide wide world.
Driving home through the cold Yukon darkness, Horace Boone could hardly contain his joy. Having read Andrew Thomas’s manuscript, Desert Places, he understood perfectly well what was happening: on the supposition that Andrew was telling the truth, Luther Kite had survived the desert, was now alive and wreaking havoc, and Andrew was going to find him. Though it would devour all his savings, Horace would follow.
This was as much of a story as any writer could dream of.
I lay awake in bed, the sleepless hours ticking away. My suitcase was already packed in the Jeep and when I woke in the morning I had only to walk outside, climb behind the wheel, and drive away. Whitehorse, Yukon was 158 kilometers to the east. There I’d catch a flight to Vancouver and from Vancouver, on to America. In a storage locker in Lander, Wyoming, there were things that might help me find Luther Kite—my brother’s journals containing poetry, photographs, even a record of his and Luther’s activities. I’d put it all in storage after fleeing Orson’s cabin seven years ago because some of it incriminated me.
Now something was needling me about Luther and how I would find him. It seemed I’d read somewhere in Orson’s journals that he’d grown up on an island.
There was a cracking in the distance. I knew this sound.
My first autumn in the Yukon I woke in bed one night petrified by a mysterious cracking in the forest. Unable to fall back asleep, I dressed and crept through the trees, arriving at last at a frozen pond where a bull moose was stamping his hooves into the ice. I’d watched him finally break through and dip his muzzle into the frigid water for a drink.
Hearing that sound again, I imagined it to be a goodbye of sorts and it threatened to unglue me. But I wouldn’t cry anymore tonight. I’d loosed all the tears I was going to shed and now existed in a state of shock—shock that I was willingly leaving my harbor to sail back into madness. It was the uncertainty that haunted me, mostly for Beth Lancing, selfishly for myself—as I lie in bed watching fireshadows dance along the rafters of my precious home, I couldn’t purge the thought that I would never see this place again.
25
EARLY Friday morning Vi pulled into the driveway of her
new home and turned off the car. The far left window on the façade of her house glowed and through half-drawn blinds she saw her husband rising out of bed. She climbed out, shut the door, sat down on the back bumper of the Cherokee. She glanced at her watch. It was one minute before five which meant she’d been awake now for forty-six hours.
Dawn was imminent. She gazed out across the treeless subdivision, hushed and still. The drone of the interstate reached her from beyond the field, a quarter mile distant, hidden behind a sliver of pines. There was never a moment in Arcadia Acres when the interstate fell silent. But she loved its transient undertone, found comfort in it. And she relished the ordinariness of this neighborhood. When Vi looked down Briar Lane she didn’t see a street of soulless homogeneous starter homes. She saw herself and Max earning an honest living. Because Vi wasn’t raised on entitlement she aspired to simple things—a family, comfortable home, occasional vacations to Gatlinburg and Myrtle Beach, finding an identity in her community, her church, her precinct.
In the cold misty silence of Arcadia Acres she meditated on the blessings in her life. After the crime scene she’d just processed she needed this stabilizing solace.
On the way to the front door she gathered up the broken necks of Ben and Hank Worthington, the evisceration of their parents, the shock of Jenna Lancing, and shoved it all into an insensate alcove she’d been conditioning in the back of her mind. This was the hardest part—walking into a warm peaceful home after thirty-five hours in hell. It was unbearable to Vi that such disparities could exist and she wondered, Which is the illusion?
Her husband was standing in the foyer in his briefs when she stepped inside. The aroma of newly ground coffee beans engulfed her and as the front door closed Max came forward, arms opening for an embrace. But Vi put her hand on his chest and shook her head.
"It’s all over the news," he said.
She walked past him and turned left into the hallway, still lined with unopened boxes.
"Don’t you wanna talk, sweetpie?" he called after her.
When she reached their bedroom she set her purse on the dresser and sat down on the edge of the giant waterbed, only slightly smaller than the dimensions of the bedroom.
Her eyes closed. She could’ve fallen asleep sitting up.
When she opened them Max was kneeling beneath her. He slipped off her heels, massaged her feet. Then he unbuttoned her lavender jacket, grabbed it by the cuffs, and said, "Hold your arms out." Vi closed her eyes, held out her arms. Max tossed her jacket into the corner and while he undid the buttons on her blouse she drifted off. He told her to hold her arms out again, then to stand up. Max unzipped and unclipped her skirt. It dropped to the floor. He worked her hose down her legs and pulled them off her small feet. From his shirt drawer Max took a soft gray Mooresville Cross-Country T-shirt. Then he unhooked his wife’s bra and slung it across the room onto the accumulating heap of clothes.
"Arms up."
He slipped the T-shirt over her head. Then he turned back the comforter and helped guide her legs underneath the covers. Two days without shaving had turned them imperceptibly rough like ultra fine grit sandpaper.
"Thirsty, angel? Need anything?"
"No," she whispered, nearly gone.
"Why won’t you talk to me?"
"Cause I’m so tired I can’t even think, Max. Stop it."
Max sat on the edge of the bed and stroked her hair while she fell asleep.
When Vi awoke it was dark again. Her eyes focused on the wooden cross hanging on the wall beside the doorway. It was the only adornment they’d put up since moving into the house last week. Her father had carved it from an oak branch and presented it to her three Christmases ago.
She heard Max in the kitchen. Pots clanged and the sweet warmth of baking bread flowed into the bedroom from the hallway.
Vi climbed out of bed and walked into the tiny adjoining bathroom. She stripped her shirt and panties and started the shower. She sat down in the bathtub, letting the water rain down upon her head and diverge into hot rivulets that descended the contours of her body.
Mindlessly she watched the water swirl into the drain and she did not rise until the shower had begun to cool.
Max was lying in bed when she emerged from the bathroom, towel-wrapped, her skin still steaming. Normally she’d have asked him to leave the room while she changed. The week before their wedding, Vi’s mother had advised her never to dress in front of her husband. Too many free peeks and Max would take for granted the beauty of his bride.
Vi dropped her towel and donned a pair of royal blue sweatpants and an undershirt she’d owned since high school.
"I made dinner," Max said while Vi towel-dried her hair. "I made the Irish soda bread you like."
That was a first.
Vi threw the towel into the bathroom and climbed onto the bed. She lay flat on her back beside Max without touching him. He still wore his navy sweat suit from cross-country practice and smelled of running outdoors in the cold, his plentiful curlyblack hair in a sweaty tangle.
Max sat up and said, "I’ll bring your dinner back here."
"Just lay with me."
Max laid back down. They didn’t move or speak for awhile.
"I talked to this little girl," Vi said finally, staring into the ceiling. She spoke at hardly more than a whisper. "Thirteen years old. Name’s Jenna. Wants to be an Olympic swimmer. Four days ago, in the middle of the night, Jenna watched a man with long black hair beat her mother unconscious. That man had just come from the next door neighbors where he’d broken the necks of two little boys and murdered their parents.
"While her mother lay unconscious in the hall, this thing broke into Jenna’s bedroom. She was hiding in her closet. He threw open the doors, told her to get on the bed. She said he spoke very softly. Said he was covered in blood. Thought it was her Mama’s.
"Jenna got on the bed thinking she was going to be raped and killed. You know what he did? Tucked her in. Pulled the covers up around her neck, his face just inches from hers. She said he smelled like lemons. He told her, ‘I have to take your mommy with me.’ Said it very softly. Then this monster told Jenna he’d drown her in the bathtub if she got out of bed before sunrise.
"He left her room and went and talked to her brother. Jenna stayed in bed until the sun came up. When she walked out into the hallway, her mother was gone.
"She told me all this, sitting in the Cherokee. Never cried. But she’s very worried about her brother. He won’t talk to anyone. Their father was killed by Andrew Thomas. Now the mother’s probably dead. And we may not catch this guy, Max."
"But you know it’s Andrew Thomas. I mean, who else would’ve pushed his old girlfriend off that lighthouse?"
"Of course we think it’s him, but the evidence isn’t there yet. The physical description of the perp from that terrified little girl doesn’t really fit Andrew Thomas. We got faint boot prints in the Worthingtons’ backyard. Reports of a gray Impala in the neighborhood on Sunday afternoon. The only promising piece of evidence is a laser pointer we pried out of Ben Worthington’s right hand. CSI lifted a partial and latent prints is checking it out. It’s the only hope we’ve got at this point. And even if it turns out it belongs to Andrew Thomas, we still have to find him, and he’s managed to hide for seven years."
"You gonna be able to detach from this? I mean, how long till I have my wife back? I can’t go for a week without you—"
"He murdered an entire family, Max. Children, you know? Tore up the parents something fierce. Since before we got married, my period has started every twenty-eight days between two and five o’clock in the afternoon. My body’s an atomic clock, and right now, I’m two days late. This didn’t even happen when Papaw died."
Max rolled over on top of Vi, held her face between his palms.
"I know what would take your mind off this," he whispered, planting delicate kisses along her eyebrows. "Wanna play?"
He had the long lean body of a runner and it fit perfectly
between her legs. She sensed him swelling against her through his nylon pants, felt lewd for wanting him while the slaughter of the Worthingtons consumed her.
"I still have the smell of that family in my nose," she said. "How can you even—"
Max slid her sweatpants below her knees, kissed her inner thigh, and moved up slowly with his tongue.
"You just tell me when to stop," he said, "and I’ll go get your dinner."
He went back to work. She did not tell him to stop.
26
ON Halloween I flew into Rock Springs, Wyoming, rented a car, and by sunset was cruising north up Highway 191 into the unending bleakness of the high desert plain.
