The Stranger Inside

by Lisa Unger

  “I called to you that day.”

  The older woman tapped her ear. “I’m a little deaf, I’m afraid. Which is convenient as I’m not one for chitchat.”

  Somewhere in the house a clock ticked, then prettily struck the ten o’clock hour. Rain’s mind drifted to Lily…time for snack, and maybe a jog to the park.

  “So, when Kreskey attacked us, and brought my friends Tess Barker and Hank Reams here that day, where were you?”

  “I was overseas, working on my MFA at Oxford,” she said. “I didn’t hear about it until much later. My mother kept it from me.”

  “And when he was killed?”

  “I was living here,” she said, bowing her head a moment. “The police questioned me. But our properties are separated by acres. It’s a good twenty-minute walk on trails from that place to here.”

  Greta’s body had taken on a kind of careful tension. She’d averted her direct gaze to something off in the distance. Her shoulders had hiked. Rain felt her pulse quicken; the old woman had something to say.

  “It’s okay,” Rain said easily. “Everyone’s gone.”

  “Not everyone.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The people who killed Kreskey were never caught.”

  “People?”

  “My mother thinks I should tell you.”

  “Oh,” said Rain, looking around. “Is she here?”

  That would make a great layer to the story, the older woman telling her perspective of the day, just a few miles from where it was all happening. But Greta shook her head.

  “She died about ten years ago now,” she said. “But I still hear her.”

  Rain nodded, pretended to adjust the recorder. “I see. You said she was an empath.”

  Oh, perfect. A crazy bird lady who spoke to the dead.

  “She loved birds, took so much pleasure in my work. When I was a girl we used to hike through the woods. She knew every bird, every call. She knew where the owls nested, where the hawks perched. Love of nature was her gift to me. We used to go out at night quite often.”

  Rain took and released a breath, waited. Then, “Were you out the night that Kreskey was killed?”

  “I was,” she said. “I was looking for the nightjar. A rare sighting. But some birder friends claimed to have seen one.”

  The name sent a jolt through Rain. Was it a coincidence, or had Agent Brower already been here? She made a note to ask, not wanting to interrupt.

  “What did you see, Greta?”

  “I’d already seen Eugene,” she said. “A few nights earlier, I saw him on the property. Just standing there, staring at the house. Naturally, I didn’t confront him. I just got away as fast as I could.”

  “And on that night?”

  “There were two people there. The moonlight was diffused by thick cloud cover, and they both wore masks. They entered the house. A while later, he showed up, went inside.”

  Rain felt a dump of excitement mingled with dread.

  “What kind of masks?” The words came out wobbly.

  “Bird masks of some kind—with beaks and feathers. I think that’s why I stayed to watch at first. I just couldn’t figure out what was happening.”

  “Greta,” said Rain carefully. “Did you take pictures?”

  She nodded. “They didn’t turn out. I was set for a full moon. But, like I said, it was obscured.”

  “Can I see?”

  Greta considered a moment, then got up and left the room. Rain looked around at the birds in their glass cages. All their dead eyes were on her. She fought the urge to gather her things and leave.

  When Greta returned with the pictures, they were grainy and indistinct. A large figure, a smaller one, both in black, wearing masks and hoods, one carrying a pack. They walked toward the house.

  “Since the first murder, that house has been overrun with vandals, kids looking to party, homeless, drunks and people on drugs. So after I snapped those pictures, I waited in the brush awhile, to see who else would show up. I thought I’d get some more pictures and call the police. Not sure why I bothered, they never did a thing about the way that property had gone to seed. But when I saw Eugene, I left as fast as possible.”

  “Did the police come when you called that night?”

  Mentally, she thought back to the reports she’d read, those that Henry had sent, the documents in Greg’s research. She didn’t remember a logged 911 call.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I called, said there were trespassers on the adjacent property at the abandoned structure.”

  “You didn’t say it was Kreskey?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  She shook her head and gazed at her fingernails. “You know, I always felt sorry for him. I used to see him sometimes when he was a boy. I’d see him in the woods. He seemed like a gentle spirit, a lost soul. Once, he brought a cardinal with an injured wing to my mother. He stammered, could barely get his words out. Then he ran off, as if he was afraid of us. I know he was a monster—he did horrible things. But once upon a time, he was an innocent. An innocent who someone damaged and twisted until he grew sharp and dangerous.”

  She didn’t share Greta’s sentiment. How could she? To Rain, he’d always be her worst nightmare come true. Rain thought of Gillian: He was a person, killed in cold blood. No one has that right.

  “He killed a child,” said Rain. “My friend.”

  “And quite likely his parents,” Greta agreed. “He was a bad man, who was aptly punished. But I still remember that skinny boy in the woods, too. Somehow they seem like two different people to me.”

  Rain saw the softness in her then, the thing that allowed Greta to capture images of such breathless beauty, light and love. Compassion.

  “You told all of this to the police?”

  “To Detective Harper, yes, back then,” she said. “I gave him the photos I took.”

  Detective Harper. He’d blown Greta off as a nut. Said he hadn’t learned anything from her. That she was crazy. He hadn’t mentioned the photographs; true they were essentially useless except to document that someone—two people—had been there the night that Kreskey died. Like the other images captured on other nights, they were indistinct. Notes from his interview were missing. The 911 call wasn’t logged.

  “Do you have any idea who those people are?” asked Rain.

  Greta turned that gaze back on Rain. “No,” she said. “I have no idea.”

  Rain watched Greta a moment; the older woman was tiny but looked as strong as a coil of wire.

  “I put in a bid at a county auction last month for the Kreskey property,” said Greta. “I won. There were some crazies there, looking to have that house for god knows what. That property belongs to my family again—even though my brother and I are all that’s left.”

  “What are you going to do with it?”

  “Raze the house for one thing,” she said. “I have a shaman friend—I’ll ask him to bless and cleanse the site. Then I’ll plant some trees, let nature do its thing.”

  Rain felt a sudden lightness. Yes, that was right. That house shouldn’t still be there.

  “So, if you need anything from that place, you have about a month. Then it’s coming down. Sometimes you have to kill the past, let the earth take the ashes away. People create damage. But nature is perfect in its design—life, death, decay, rebirth. It heals.”

  “Did you ever find it? The nightjar?”

  She shook her head. “No, I never did. Not that night.”

  “Do you have any theories on who killed Kreskey?”

  “I tend not to trouble myself with the actions of humans,” she said grimly. “Look at the world we live in. Look what we’ve done to the planet, to each other. I stay here on this property mostly and try to take care of it. I’ll try to give that ugly pi
ece of it, that bit that the Kreskey family defiled, back to the planet. Trees will grow, animals will burrow and birds will nest. When I die, all this land will be donated to the Audubon Society, and hopefully there will be peace here. Finally.”

  Digging into this story suddenly felt salacious and wrong. But separating yourself out from the world—that was easy. Trying to understand it, to survive it, to make it better through that understanding—that was the hard thing. Writers explore the world on the page, her father always said. And readers come not to escape but to understand. We don’t turn away from ugly things, we dig in. Evil thrives in the dark. If you shine the light, sometimes it just shrivels and dies.

  Greta let Rain snap photos of those pictures with her phone, and they finished talking about Greta’s work, her plans for the property. The conversation grew softer, easier, and Greta seemed lighter, less stern and grim.

  “I’m sorry for what happened to you and your friends,” Greta said. “My mother suffered terribly, so angry at her father for selling that land, at the Kreskeys for what they were. She was such a peaceful person, so loving. She couldn’t stand the thought of anyone or anything being hurt.”

  “It was a long time ago,” said Rain. “But for me it’s yesterday. I guess that’s why I’m doing this story. I’m still trying to make sense of it all, the cycle of violence—Kreskey’s parents, what they did, how it formed him, what he did. Then someone killed him.”

  Greta nodded, stared over at the northern cardinal on her mantel. So red and still.

  “My mother is gone, Eugene Kreskey and his parents are gone, your friend, too. One day, I’ll be gone, as will you. But this land, it will still be here. Spring to summer to fall to winter—growing, changing, thriving if it’s left alone. I take comfort in that, somehow.”

  Rain thought of the tree in which she had hidden, that smell of bark, of vegetation, of decay, of life, how it sheltered her, hid her. Instead of feeling shame, for the first time she felt gratitude that whatever came, she was still here now.

  “If you let it, the earth will cover everything that happened there,” said Greta. “Nature is full of murder, you know. The soil accepts everything, recycles it. Death brings life.”

  “Greta,” said Rain. “Do you know what happened there the night that Kreskey was killed?”

  She turned owl eyes on Rain.

  “I know as much as you do, Miss Winter.”

  THIRTY

  There’s a trail behind my house and it connects to a state trail adjacent to my property. I spend hours back there, forest bathing, as the Japanese call it—shinrin-yoku, welcoming the peace of solitude, the long quiet of early mornings, or late afternoons.

  It’s odd that I would find comfort in the woods, don’t you think? It wouldn’t be surprising if the imperviousness of trees, the sound of wind, the sight of dappled sunlight on the ground triggered the memory of trauma. But I am at peace as I walk.

  These are not my trails. I trudge through the night, using the scant moonlight to see. I’ll try not to use the flashlight unless I have to.

  I lost myself after Kreskey. The boy who returned in the back of Detective Harper’s car was not the same boy who got on his bike that day—that very same day.

  The way people looked at me—did they look at you the same way? Revulsion wrapped inside pity. As if it might have been something I was, or something I did that marked me as a victim. As if I had something that they or someone they loved might catch. The words were always kind, but the eyes don’t lie.

  My dad. He couldn’t even look at me anymore. My mother wouldn’t let me out of her sight. Within months, they’d sold our house and moved us to Florida near my grandparents, to a condo on the beach. Another museum-like space with white walls and high ceilings, the jewel-green Gulf of Mexico dominating our views. Florida—land of palm trees and blazing sun, strip malls, and sugar sand, stunningly beautiful and somehow ugly, dilapidated and strange. A place that never seems to quite get it right, even though it makes no end of promises.

  The ocean is going to heal us, Hank, my mother would say as we floated in the salt water. We’re going to swim every day and wash away the past.

  Always a seeker, she dove deep into her “spiritual practice,” reading to me from the books of Deepak Chopra and Eckhart Tolle, Wayne Dyer. She’d quit her job in marketing, decided she was going to devote herself full-time to motherhood. My father’s company had an office in Tampa. We started over in Florida’s stultifying heat (my god we would just drip sweat, wilt under that brutal sun). We started over. Except that I was a ghost.

  Sometimes I wondered as I floated with my beautiful mother—whose skin turned a deep golden, whose hair faded blonder, who grew thinner and toned from daily yoga—if I had died up there at Kreskey’s place.

  If all of this was just a dream.

  I wouldn’t have had the language for it then, but I think of those years in Florida as a kind of bardo—a time between two existences. The boy I was, happy and free, a hopeless geek who loved his friends and comic books, who was in love with a girl who didn’t love him. (That hasn’t changed, Lara, as you know.) And the man I would become, the fractured, solitary misfit who nonetheless helps (or tries to help) other injured children through their vilest days.

  It was probably my grandfather who saved me, who managed to patch back together the pieces of me that survived.

  We weren’t close before; he’d always seemed odd, distant when he came to visit. We rarely went to Florida to see them. The old man knew about trauma; he was a veteran of the Vietnam War. He and my grandmother had a big old house—boxy rooms that smelled of mold, wood paneling, giant televisions in wood cabinets, my grandmother’s watercolors of sunsets and sailboats, palm trees swaying in the moonlight—tucked into a strip of land between the Gulf and the Intracoastal Waterway. The house nearly disappeared into the shadows of the giant McMansions that flanked it on either side. Though the house was barely standing, the land was worth millions. They’d never even thought of selling like so many old-timers did during the boom.

  Behind their house was a rickety old dock that wound through the mangroves and let out at the Intracoastal, offering views of Caladesi State Park and a smattering of islands. We’d lower the Boston Whaler from its creaking davits, and head out just as the sun was peeking over the horizon. We’d fish, pulling snook, sheepshead, hogfish, the occasional baby shark or grouper. The rays flopped around, jumping out of the water—dolphins would sometimes crowd around the boat. Egrets stood in the shoals, fishing just like us. In the summer, piles of cumulus clouds towered above us like distant mountains. I’d heard that bald eagles nested on Caladesi. There was a big nest, but I never saw the birds.

  “It’s this, too, you know.”

  “What?”

  The old man didn’t talk much, that’s why I liked him, could not wait for our weekend mornings on the boat. Didn’t it seem like, after Kreskey, no one could shut the fuck up? My mother, the legion of therapists, teachers, counselors—all well-meaning and kind—but their words meant very little to me then. (Words, the language of healing and understanding, would mean everything later. But not to that broken kid who had no idea how to piece himself back together, how to understand the world again.)

  “There’s chaos and pain, son. War. There’s evil in this world. We’ve both seen it, what people can do to each other. What happens to the body, or can,” he said that morning. “But there’s this, too. Always.”

  I looked around at the peaceful water, the electric-blue sky, and knew he was right. It was everything, all of it, good and bad. It made a kind of sense; I figured I could live with it.

  Now, hiking on this strange property, I am breathless. And this search has yielded nothing; I am back at the house where Angel was fostered, having failed to find the other structure she claimed was there. I am beginning to wonder if she might be wrong, or lying, or exaggerating. All this tim
e, I’ve seen no one in the house. But tonight, there’s a light on inside. I find a perch inside the tree line and watch. I think about those days when we were together again.

  You agreed to meet me at Café Orlin in the East Village. You wouldn’t come to my place, and who could blame you? You’d seen something in me that I had been able to hide from most others. And it scared you, as it should.

  Always, even as kids, I felt like you were behind glass. A butterfly pinned to velvet, beautiful and untouchable. For the briefest moment, I had been able to touch you—heart to heart, skin to skin. (In fact, I can still feel you. Can you still feel me?) But when you showed up at the café that night, you were out of reach again.

  Even at the small table, you kept your distance. Your movements were small and protective, your face still and unsmiling. It had been a few weeks; I thought you might have forgiven me. I’d hoped that the distance had softened our encounter in your mind, that your affection for me had washed over it, as sometimes happens. I’m sorry to admit that, even now, I don’t remember that night in my apartment, exactly. Blurry flashes, moments, words. I know I made you cry.

  You ordered a double espresso—with steamed almond milk on the side. Your go-to order. When the waitress left us, you said quietly, “I don’t want to see you again after this, Hank.”

  You and Tess had that in common, you were always direct and to the point.

  I could feel him raging inside, clanging around.

  I was surprised when I noticed that your hands were shaking. That’s when I saw Greg lingering outside. You have good taste; he was a handsome guy. He leaned against a lamppost reading the Post (a lowbrow choice for him, no?) like a character in a noir film. I realized with shock and shame that you were physically afraid of me. That he was there to step in if things got out of hand.

  “The messages you left, the things you’ve said. They’ve hurt me deeply. And you’re wrong. I’m not to blame for what happened to us, to Tess.”

  The quaver in your voice cut me. I could see how much he’d hurt and frightened you. How much I had. Because I can’t divorce myself from him. I want to, but I can’t. I understand too much about the mind to give the healthy self a free pass. He and I, we’re not integrated. But we’re not totally apart either. Still I had to wonder: What messages? What did I say to you? Honestly, I was too ashamed to ask.