by Blake Crouch
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.
At dusk I pulled over at an abandoned gas station in Farson where 28 crosses 191 and runs northeast around the southern terminus of the Wind River Mountains for seventy miles to the city of Lander, my destination. Stepping out of the car, I walked across broken faded pavement into the middle of 191 and gazed north and west into the evening redness.
I wondered if my brother’s cabin still stood in this wasted country. Just thirty miles north I imagined I could feel it, a dark presence on the horizon exhuming memories I would not acknowledge. The wind was calm, the highway empty. The silence and loneliness of the desert bore down on me, matching my spirit.
At an elevation of 7,550 feet I crested South Pass. Through the driver side window I could see the lavender foothills of the Winds. When I swallowed my ears popped.
The highway descended at a gentle grade. A brown sign informed me that I was now in grizzly bear country.
The moon came up, lit the hills.
I drove through downtown Lander, a small town that in the summer months served as a port of entry to the eastside of the Winds. But now that the range was snowmantled and inaccessible most businesses had closed for the winter leaving the streets of Lander forlorn and listless.
Brawley’s Self-Storage Co. was located off 287, two miles north of town. I pulled up to the gate several minutes past eight o’clock and punched in the access code. The facility was dark and deserted. As I entered and the gate rolled shut behin
d me, I recalled the last time I’d come here, after fleeing the cabin seven years back, in that state of shock and dread. At the time I didn’t think I’d last through Christmas. My life was over in every way imaginable and the first enticing whispers of self-destruction had begun to germinate in the weakened tissue of my psyche.
I drove through the empty rows of storage buildings for five minutes until I located mine.
It was colder when I stepped outside, the moon still rising, the snowfields glowing high on the distant peaks. I unlocked the door and stepped into the hallway of small storage lockers. Mine was a 3’ by 4’ on the bottom row. I’d rented the space for nine years at a cost of $1,200.
Kneeling down, I removed the padlock and pulled open the door.
Dust plumed.
I coughed.
The overhead light had burned out in the corridor and the moonlight that streamed in through the doorway did not provide adequate illumination. So I dragged the filthy suitcase out of the locker. I walked back outside, set it down on the hood of the Buick.
I unzipped the suitcase.
They moved me in a terrible way, these artifacts of Orson. Sitting down on the hood, I lifted a manila folder and a notebook from the stash. Despite what I would have to pay for looking at his photographs and reading his words, I intended to examine everything, to immerse myself once more in my brother’s depraved world, to learn what I could of his accomplice, Luther Kite, and where he might possibly be.
27
THE starting gun for the girls’ race fired as Vi opened the back hatch of the Cherokee and grabbed the folded blanket she always brought to Max’s cross-country meets.
She followed the trail to the start/finish line, staring through the tall limbless loblollies of MacAnderson Park at the field of runners dashing up the first hill of the 3.1 mile course. The cheers of the spectators faded as the runners moved out of sight.
It was the first Monday of November, a mild one, the sky unblemished and sapphire, the leaves a week beyond peak—red into crimson, gold into russet. The air stank of pine needles and exhaust from the tailpipes of the yellow buses that had carried the six cross-country teams of the Foothills Athletic Conference to this championship meet.
Vi walked over a footbridge and made her way toward the circle of blue and white uniforms near the start line. Max stood in running shorts and a tank top amid eight lanky boys, charging them for this last race of the season. He’d woken her this morning practicing his pep talk as he shaved in the bathroom.
Stepping out of her heels and spreading the blanket across the grass, she listened to Max, tickled at his excitement.
“This is a special day, gentlemen. You each have the opportunity to make history for your school. Now I know we aren’t favored. I know ya’ll think the Raiders over there are an awesome squad—and they are—but anything can happen at a conference championship. What’s the most important thing? Somebody tell me.”
“Having fun?” offered the smallest boy on the team.
“Well, yeah. But after having fun.”
“Breathing,” said Patrick Mullins, truest athlete of the bunch and oldest son of Barry Mullins, Vi’s sergeant in Criminal Investigations Division. Patrick would be attending Davidson next year on a track scholarship.
“That’s it,” Max said. “Breathe, gentlemen. That’s all I want you to think about out there. Filling your lungs with sweet oxygen. Now it’s thirty minutes till the gun. Go warm up.” As the boys took off from the start line Max jogged over to Vi’s blanket.
“You came,” he said.
“Wouldn’t have missed it.”
That wasn’t entirely true. She would’ve missed it had Sgt. Mullins not left a message on her cell phone saying he needed to see her at the cross-country meet to “discuss things.”
“You look cute, honey,” she said. “Just don’t let your package hang out of those itsy bitsy shorts.”
Max grinned, said, “Violet King, you better watch that mouth.” He leaned down, kissed her, and ran off toward the footbridge to rejoin the team. As Vi watched him go, someone called her name.
“Violet! Hey, sweetie, how are you?”
She saw Judy Hardin walking toward her from the scoring station. Judy was a magpie, the loquacious mother of Josh Hardin, a junior, and the second fastest runner on the team behind Patrick. As Vi rose and met Judy in the grass, the tall redhead bent down and hugged her crushingly around the neck.
She wore a sweatshirt with “MOORESVILLE MAMA” in block letters across the front. “Go Blue Devils!” was stenciled on each cheek with glittery blue face paint.
“So you finally came to a meet,” Judy said. “Big day for the Blue Devils, huh?”
“Sure is. You know Max is—”
“Josh could hardly sleep last night. You know he’s got a pretty good shot at making all-conference today. That’s what everyone keeps telling me. Yeah, I’m so nervous for him. I feel like I’m running, you know? Isn’t that crazy?”
“It is nerve-racking being a—”
“Well, don’t you look darling in your suit?” Judy took the cuff of Vi’s black blazer and rubbed the wool between her fingers. “Is this like official detective ware?”
“Oh, no, it’s just—”
“So tell me, does it just totally blow your mind that you’re chasing Andrew Thomas? I mean, whoever thought that you, little Violet King, would be mixed up with that monster? I taught you in Sunday school for heaven’s sake, and you could be famous when this is all said and done! You better not forget me when you write your book and movie and do the whole—”
“I don’t really think of it like that, Judy.”
“And I see you on the news every night. I mean, you never talk or anything, but they always show you at that poor family’s house.” Judy winked and nudged Vi with her elbow. “So can you give me some inside scoop? Oh, you know I’m only kidding! You thought I was serious! Ha-ha! I know you can’t talk about the details of the case! I’m not naïve!”
Vi saw Barry Mullins coming toward them. She wished he would walk faster.
“Judy, I’m sorry, I have to—”
“And Max is so good with the boys. Josh was telling me the other day that he liked “Coach King” so much better than that weirdo who coached last year. I mean—”
“Hello, ladies,” Sgt. Mullins rumbled. It was the first time Vi had felt relieved to see her boss. “Sorry to bust up your conversation, but Judy I need to speak with Violet privately.”
“Uh-oh. Gotta have a powwow about the big case?”
Sgt. Mullins only smiled and Vi smiled and Judy’s smile mutated into chagrin.
She slunk back toward the scoring station.
“Walk with me, Viking.”
The sergeant and his investigator strolled through the grass beyond the start line. The leaders in the girls’ championship were coming down off the first mile of the course and Vi listened as someone called out the mile-split for each runner.
In a fatherly fashion, Sgt. Mullins took hold of her arm above the elbow.
“I just talked to Bradley,” Sgt. Mullins said. “We got an AFIS hit off that partial.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Came back with a Luther Kite. White male. Thirty-two years old. Last known address is his parents’ house, Thirteen Kill Devil Road, Ocracoke, North Carolina. Ever been to Ocracoke?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, we’re going tomorrow.”
“We?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“I’ll go beat out a search warrant. I mean we’ve got probable cause just with the partial. Then we show Jenna and John David Lancing the AFIS photograph, maybe get an ID. That right there’s the foundation of our case.”
“Ease down, Viking. We just want to talk to the parents. For all we know, they haven’t seen their son in years. Last thing we need to do is bust in there with a SWAT team and tear the place apart. You could forget any help from them after that.”
They walked
again. Vi smiled at the flushed face of each high school girl who ran by.
“Great job,” she said to a Mooresville runner named Holly.
“So how you holding up, Vi?” Sgt. Mullins asked. It took her aback. She’d never discerned anything approaching concern from her sergeant. For the two and a half years she’d worked in CID he’d maintained a hard unreadable veneer. This shred of kindness moved her and she stopped and looked up at him.
“I’m all right, sir. Thank you for asking.” Sgt. Mullins stared down at her, stroking his thick dark mustache. She saw the doubt resurfacing in his eyes.
“You want to take it away from me, don’t you?” she said. “You don’t think I can—”
“Viking, I wouldn’t take you off this case if you begged me. Now don’t make me regret letting a woman handle this.”
Sgt. Mullins walked away and Vi stood watching the race.
Across the creek, Max led the team in jumping jacks.
A runner limped by, stricken with cramps, red-faced and crying.
Vi wished Sgt. Mullins had taken her off the case and she burned with self-hate and shame.
28
IN a manila folder entitled “THE MINUTES” I came at last to the following string of journal entries.
It was 1:30 a.m. and my eyes burned with strain.
With the moon directly overhead I lay back against the cold windshield and read Orson’s scrawl in the minor light.
Woodside, Vermont: November 1, 1992
Sat in my booth at the pub all afternoon, read the most atrocious collection of papers I’ve ever had the misfortune to grade (coffee better today). Highlight was the piece on gladiators. Curious amount of detail on the lunch interlude executions. Well researched. Author thoroughly interested in his subject matter. Hmm. Awarded him a C+, because, let’s face it, it was still a real piece of shit.
Woodside, Vermont: November 6, 1992
