Palindrome

by E. Z. Rinsky

  And then, out of the corner of my eye, I see something yellow. Something glowing. I jerk to face it, but it seems to move, staying only in my periphery.

  “Hello?” My voice shaking. I’m shivering with cold. The light dancing in the corner of my eye. Freezing wet dirt between my toes. I jerk again to face the light, and this time it stays put. My heart stops.

  It’s a girl, dressed in an amber sundress. Blond and short. Beautiful clear skin. I recognize that sad face. It’s Savannah Kanter, without the horrible tattoos.

  I try to speak but my mouth won’t cooperate. She’s looking at me, eyes wide with urgency. I take a step toward her, but she takes a step backwards. Again I step toward her, and again she steps backwards.

  “Savannah?” I whisper.

  She responds with a word I can’t understand. It’s warbled. Reminds me of someone speaking underwater.

  “Why are you here?” I ask.

  She makes a pleading sound, words that mean nothing to me.

  “Do you want to tell me something?” I ask.

  She nods fervently, but there’s something wrong with the motion. It’s glitchy or jerky, like she’s coming through on a bad internet connection. She seems frustrated. Desperate.

  “Tell me,” I whisper.

  She starts speaking, but again it’s indecipherable.

  “I can’t understand,” I say, but she doesn’t seem to hear.

  Her brown eyes are wide, imploring. Hands wrapped in tight fists. She’s telling me something important, but I can’t understand a word. It’s not quite gibberish though. It’s real words, but almost like another language. Another language spoken underwater.

  And it’s only as I start feeling very tired, and this glowing girl begins to fade beneath the weight of my heavy eyelids, that I realize she’s speaking backwards.

  MY BACK ACHES when I open my eyes. There’s sun behind the thick white curtains of the motel room. I blink a few times. On the wall across from me is a painting of the most drab landscape I could imagine. Whoever plopped down their easel in that marshland should have kept driving.

  I sit up slowly. Courtney’s bed is empty.

  I try the bedside lamp. Lightbulb switches on.

  I draw a hot shower and replay what I saw last night. The details seem too vivid to be a dream: the soft contours of Savannah’s cheeks, the grit of cold dirt between my toes. I remember them clearly, as if the dream has been seared onto a cross section of my brain. I shudder, thinking how real the cold, stale air felt in my lungs . . . her wide, pleading eyes.

  I linger in the shower, as if the water will wash away the image of Savannah. I’ve never been a vivid dreamer and am just fine with that. Could always count on six hours a day off the clock. If my clients start regularly intruding on my nightly headspace, I might have to raise my rates.

  I dry off and make it down to the cramped dining room of the Howard Johnson. Hard plastic chairs. Cheap, coffee-­stained foldout tables. Courtney is the only person here, sitting in front of my laptop, a half-­eaten apple in one hand.

  “How long have you been up?” I ask, sliding in across from him.

  “All night. Couldn’t sleep,” he says, his eyes scanning the screen.

  “Did the power go off last night?” I ask.

  Courtney looks up from the monitor. “No,” he says, frowning. “Why?”

  “Nothing. Never mind.”

  He stares seriously at me for a moment, like to let me know that he knows I’m lying to him, then lets it go.

  “So I guess I’ll drive today,” I say. “You can nap in the car.”

  “No need. I have plenty of energy. Found a market around the corner that sells kale. I ate like two pounds of it.”

  I snort and drag myself over to the dreary continental breakfast station. Minimuffins, Froot Loops and Apple Jacks. I fill up a bowl with Apple Jacks and skim milk, drown a flimsy paper cup in a torrent of weak black coffee, and return to Courtney.

  “What you looking at?” I feel like an impatient kid nagging are we there yet? Courtney finally looks up from his computer.

  “Read every article I could find about the murder, about Silas. Everything Greta told us seems to be true. Silas turned himself in and was committed to the institution she mentioned. And I found a mention of the tape. Just one. Check this out.”

  Courtney rotates the computer to show me an archived article from a very poppy-­looking news outlet. Headline reads, Creepiest video you’ll see today. And there’s a paragraph explaining what we already know: This is the creep who turned himself in with a Polaroid of Savannah’s body. I shudder, thinking about last night. Try to put it out of my mind.

  Courtney hits play.

  It’s a video taken on a cell phone, obvious because it’s a little shaky and grainy. Must have been taken from the jury box, illegally. It takes a few seconds to recognize Silas, sitting between two men in suits, wearing a shabby suit himself. It’s more than a little surreal in light of his mutilated face, which is much more grotesque and intricate than the black-­and-­white photo Greta gave me indicated. It’s impossible to discern the precise images from this clip, but the patterns are brightly colored and deeply engraved. His face and shaven head (also tatted) look like an Oriental rug.

  Silas is talking to someone we can’t see. The judge? He’s stammering.

  “You won’t understand,” he says, shaking his head. His wrists are cuffed to the table in front of him. He’s almost writhing as he speaks, like there’s an animal inside of him trying to escape.

  A disembodied voice that we can’t discern replies, but whatever it says irks Silas into shaking his head even more adamantly.

  “You won’t understand,” he says.

  The off camera voice insists gently, “Why did you kill her, Silas?”

  Silas squirms.

  “I don’t remember,” he mutters. There’s muted shuffling in the background. It’s getting hard to hear exactly what he’s saying. Fortunately at this point someone started putting in subtitles.

  “Remember that the acceptance of your insanity plea is predicated on your full cooperation.”

  Silas licks his lips, eyes still downcast. The courtroom is pretty much silent.

  “It was an experiment,” he practically whispers.

  “What kind of experiment?”

  “Like science. Like a science experiment.”

  “What was the nature of the experiment?”

  “I . . . I wanted to see where she’d go.”

  “Can you elaborate on that?”

  Silas shakes his head.

  Someone else asks, “What did you find, Mr. Graham?”

  Silas opens his mouth to speak, but nothing comes out, like there’s an invisible hand muting him.

  “Mr. Graham? What did you find?”

  End of video.

  I sit back at the table. My stomach feels a little upset. The Apple Jacks are getting soggy, but I can’t bring myself to take a bite. I reach for the coffee but find myself looking at an empty, brown bottom. I frown at Courtney. He looks tired, kale notwithstanding.

  “Wow,” I mutter.

  “Yeah.”

  An elderly ­couple enters the dining room. They appear excited by the minimuffins.

  “I watched it almost twenty times,” Courtney says.

  “And?”

  “Well . . .” Courtney touches a thin finger to his eyebrow. “Obviously this is like a twenty-­second clip of a two-­week-­long trial. A drop in the ocean. So maybe not wise to read too much into this. Probably someone was secretly recording intermittently all day, and this was the most compelling clip, the one they thought could fetch the most if they leaked it to this site. So first thing to remember: We have no idea what comes before or after this.”

  “Greta does though,” I say. “I mean, she was there,
right?”

  “Right.” Courtney nods. “But she doesn’t seem to feel like telling us much more than she already did: Silas says that Savannah’s voice was recorded onto this tape, and on the way out of the courtroom Silas told her that he ‘got what he wanted.’ ”

  “He doesn’t seem totally nuts, as one might expect,” I say. “If you ignore the tattoos and the a priori knowledge that he strangled Savannah and killed his parents when he was ten with a hammer . . . He seems more scared, frankly, than bonkers.”

  Courtney takes a bite of apple and with a full mouth says, “I agree with you on that.”

  I lean back in my chair. Close my eyes for a moment, and there’s Savannah again, glowing, warbling at me.

  “I need more coffee.”

  Courtney closes my laptop and hands it to me. He tosses his apple core into my slimy Apple Jacks milk and strokes his raggedy cheeks.

  “Get it to go. I’m eager to get to the cabin.”

  I walk to the trash and dump out my untouched cereal. Get a refill on my coffee. It’s doing nothing for me. Might as well be drinking hot sewage water.

  We check out at the front desk and carry our bags out the back of the motel, into the parking lot.

  “Wouldn’t he probably bring it with him?” I’m dismayed to find that it’s still drizzling outside, and the sky is the color of dirty glass. The Howard Johnson sits just off the highway. Across the highway is a sad system of low, industrial-­looking buildings and what looks like a mini-­golf course. “Why would he leave it at the cabin, then go turn himself in? Doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Well why he turned himself in is itself confounding.” Courtney picks what looks like kale remnants from his teeth. “But assuming that he knew he would, it makes sense that he’d stash the tape somewhere rather than have it be seized and put in an evidence warehouse forever.”

  “He’s not in a proper penitentiary though. They might let you bring some personal possessions in with you.”

  “Yeah, but he didn’t know he was gonna end up there.”

  “Fine. So why does he turn himself in?”

  “Maybe it’s like he told Greta.” Courtney shrugs. “He got what he wanted.”

  We’re a few feet from the Honda. I stop suddenly and look at Courtney. I don’t like the way I’m feeling right now. This whole morning—­since waking up from that too-­vivid dream—­I’ve been gripped by a distinctly unpleasant sort of foggy-­headedness. If I had to describe the feeling more precisely, I would call it the sensation of impermanence.

  “You don’t really believe that—­you know—­that this guy Silas actually found something, do you? If there is a tape, it’s just gonna be Savannah talking. It’s not like . . . You don’t actually believe what you said yesterday at Orange’s, do you, about it being a palindrome, proving something about an afterlife?”

  Courtney frowns and scratches his head. “I’m keeping an open mind. I don’t see why you’d dismiss anything out of hand.”

  “Well,” I snort. “Can’t we dismiss the outcomes that are impossible? I’ve already dismissed the possibility that Silas is a Martian. Is that too closed-­minded for you?”

  Courtney narrows his eyes. “A lot of ­people believe in life after death, you know.”

  “Do you?” I ask.

  “Undecided. Like any good detective, I’m waiting for more evidence before I make my assessment.”

  I shake my head and walk to the car. Courtney tries to take the driver’s seat, and I snatch the keys from him.

  “You’re tired. Plus, you believe in heaven. So you don’t have an incentive to drive safely.”

  Courtney heads around to the passenger’s side.

  “Maybe we’ll find something at the cabin to change your mind, Frank.”

  FINDING THE CABIN where Savannah was killed takes longer than we expected. I can’t help feeling relieved by this. Driving around is helping me wake up a little, shake off the images from my encounter last night.

  We start at the boardwalk that Greta described, the one where she’d last seen her sister walk to the bathroom and never return. It’s off season, and the boardwalk is empty. All the shops are shut down for the winter, metal grates pulled down over their facades. We linger on a soaked wooden bench in silence for a few minutes, staring at the angry sea, letting the frigid, wet wind sting our cheeks.

  Behind the cluster of closed shops, we walk past the bathrooms, back to our Honda. It’s the only car in the parking lot. Gravel. Just like Greta said. I get in the car and turn on the heat. Courtney stands outside, scanning like a hawk. He kneels, and I watch him comb a boney hand through the gravel. He winces as a gust nearly whips his scarf off, then hurries into the passenger seat.

  After we’ve gone another hour north on I-­95 and taken the exit prescribed by the built-­in GPS, our technology fails us. The cell reception gets so spotty that Google Maps on my phone is an exercise in masochism, and the car’s GPS is either thrown off by same, or these roads are just too poorly mapped for it to navigate. We have to pull over and ask directions to the cabin—­33 Rutgers Lane—­four times. Nobody has heard of Savannah Kanter, or maybe they just don’t want to talk about it. We don’t say much as we drive. I know Courtney is also imagining Silas driving down this road with Savannah in the backseat, probably tied up and shrieking. Or was she already unconscious by then?

  Outside of a Texaco, we find someone who remembers the crime: a yellow-­toothed woman built like a bear, filling up her rust-­colored pickup. She tells us that she, like most ­people who live around here, went to check out the cabin once all the fuss died down. Turns out we’ve overshot the place by a mile and a half.

  “There’s a green mailbox with the number on it,” she says. But as we retreat to our car she suddenly calls out, as an afterthought, “But you shouldn’t go there.”

  Courtney and I both swivel in place. She’s staring at us, shaking her head.

  “Why not?” Courtney says.

  Her wrinkled face contorts like she’s sucking on something sour. “Just . . .” she says, then shakes her head, turns away.

  We take a few steps closer to her. A click as her tank fills up. She starts climbing into her truck, but Courtney digs into his coat and pulls out three hundred-­dollar bills, jabs them at her.

  “Tell us everything you know.”

  She turns and stares at the bills, then exhales and climbs out of the truck, leaving the door open like she might have to make a quick escape.

  “I’m not stupid or anything,” she says, “but there’s something bad happening at that cabin. Everyone around here knows it. Nobody visits anymore. Kids used to go there and party. Till one night they heard voices coming from that place. Not ­people’s voices either. Weird screaming, like a . . . spirit or something. And weird clanking and banging, flashing lights. A few nights later a ­couple men went back there with guns. From the road they heard the same shit. And then their pit bull started barking. I knew one of the guys, Jonathan Gordon was his name. It wasn’t his dog, but he saw the dog take off toward the cabin, barking like nuts. The guys didn’t follow. They were scared. I heard John talking about that night later, he said the same thing: weird voices, banging, clanging, flashing. He says he thinks it was that girl’s spirit trying to escape. The banging is her pounding on the walls.”

  The woman goes quiet. Stares at the three hundred in her palm, as if wondering if it was worth it. I see Savannah again, staring at me, desperate. My knees get a little weak. What was she trying to tell me?

  “What happened to the dog?” Courtney asks.

  She shakes her head and looks away. “Someone driving past the cabin saw him the next morning. He was cut open in the middle of the road, guts everywhere. Real, like . . . deliberate.”

  “What—­”

  “I’m done,” she says, steeling her jaw, her eyes starting to well. “You
want your money back, fine. I’m done.”

  “Keep it,” Courtney says, and we get in our car, drive in silence for a while, taking it slow so we don’t miss the cabin.

  It’s around two in the afternoon when we find what must be the spot: a dirt driveway distinguished only by a rusty green mailbox marked in fading white paint: 33 Rutgers. It’s so muddy from the persistent drizzle that we decide it’s best to park on the shoulder and walk from there. I shut off the ignition but don’t move. My butt refuses to leave the car seat.

  Courtney is glaring at me.

  “What’s going on?” he asks.

  “Nothing.”

  Courtney sniffs and stares me down with wet eyes that look as grey as the sky. I can’t help squirming under his intense gaze. Then he cracks a tiny smile of triumph.

  “You’re a terrible liar, Frank. It’s one of your better qualities.”

  I sigh and close my eyes.

  “I had a weird dream last night,” I say and recount it, omitting nothing. He can sniff out a lie anyways.

  He’s quiet for a moment. Then opens the passenger side door.

  “I wouldn’t worry about it,” he says, avoiding eye contact as he climbs out. “You were probably just processing some of the stuff you heard from Orange.”

  “You’re not saying that just to make me feel better, are you?” I ask as we walk around to the trunk.

  “Of course I am,” he says and smacks me on the back. He grabs a red acrylic satchel from the trunk that contains his forensic tools. My own bulky backpack contains the few blunt and crude implements I use in the field. He carries things like tiny screwdrivers you use for eyeglasses and makeup brushes. Most of my tools have existed since the agricultural revolution.

  When Courtney hands me a pair of latex gloves to wear, I nearly burst out laughing.

  “It’s been five years, man. I doubt we’re going to disturb any evidence.”

  But I comply, and we trudge through the thick mud, me wishing I’d worn anything but my tennis shoes, Courtney seemingly prescient in his knee-­high galoshes.

  As we get close to the cabin, I try to ignore images my brain keeps summoning of last night’s apparition. Try to think about anything else: Sadie, sports, yoga. I could probably use some fucking yoga right about now. At least it’s still light out here. If it was night, I’d be losing my shit.