The Ophelia Killer

by Valerie Geary

  “Tina, this is Jimmy. He’s here to talk to us about Cherish.” Emily sinks onto the couch beside the brunette and tucks up her feet.

  There aren’t any lights on in the living room. A sliver of daylight shines through a narrow strip where the heavy velvet curtains don’t quite meet in the middle. Both girls are pale, but the shadows in the room turn them a sickly gray. Their grief reeks of unwashed hair and Vicks VapoRub. Crumpled tissues litter the couch and carpet.

  The brunette blinks up at Jimmy like she’s blinking up at the sun. “Are you the police?”

  “He’s a reporter,” Emily says.

  Tina frowns. “I don’t think we should talk to reporters.”

  “No one else is talking to us.” Emily leans toward Jimmy, who’s still standing in the middle of the room, trying to decide where to sit.

  Besides the couch, there aren’t many options. There’s a Papasan chair covered in laundry, a fireplace hearth covered in dirty glasses and mugs, and an ottoman with a stack of textbooks piled on top. Jimmy decides to stay standing. He moves closer to the windows, pulling open the curtain a half an inch to let a little more light into the room.

  “The police haven’t come by to talk with you yet?” Jimmy asks.

  “Mr. Spalding said they would, but you’re the first person who’s actually come,” Emily says.

  Detective Rausch will be too busy fielding calls from reporters and the mayor about Jimmy’s article, how a serial murderer has been able to fly under the radar like this for so long. He’ll be dealing with Cherish’s parents, too, and trying to organize his team, dividing up who’s going to do what. Rausch will send someone to interview Emily and Tina. Maybe he’ll even come himself, but it won’t be until tomorrow at the earliest, maybe even a few days from now.

  “Do you know what happened?” Emily asks. “Mr. Spalding didn’t tell us much. He said she was murdered, but that’s all he said. Do you know who did it?”

  “No, but that’s what I’m trying to find out.”

  “You’re helping the police?” Tina asks, chewing on the skin around her fingernail.

  Jimmy nods. “And anything you can tell me about Cherish will be helping them, too.”

  “What do you want to know?” From Emily’s expression, Jimmy can tell she’s eager to contribute however she can.

  But Tina’s wary of him. “Emily,” she says, touching her friend’s knee. “Maybe we should wait and talk to an actual detective?”

  “Do you want him to come back, Tina?” Emily’s voice is shrill with panic. “Do you want him to kill us next?”

  Tina withdraws and burrows deeper into the blanket. Her gaze lingers on the window to the left of where Jimmy is standing. Fear creeps in from the shadows edging the room.

  Jimmy feels the shift, the sudden rise in tension.

  “Was someone bothering Cherish?” he asks. “Someone you were worried about?”

  The girls exchange a glance. Tina gives the slightest shake of her head, but Emily ignores her warning, gets up from the couch, and crosses to the window. She pulls the curtain all the way open and points across the street.

  “We saw him a couple times standing under that street lamp. Always at night. Always when Cherish was home. He would smoke cigarettes. We could see the embers burning red.”

  “Could you see his face? Can you describe what he looks like?”

  Emily draws the curtain closed again and shakes her head. She returns to the couch. Tina offers her half of the blanket, and Emily tucks it around her lap.

  “His face was always shadowed. Like, there’s that street lamp, right?” Emily flicks her hand at the window. “But he would stand perfectly under it, so his hat made a shadow over his face.”

  “So he wore a hat?” Jimmy prods.

  “A baseball cap, maybe?” Emily looks at Tina, who nods in agreement.

  “What else did he wear?”

  “Just a sweatshirt, pants. Everything was black.”

  “It wasn’t a sweatshirt,” Tina interjects. “It was a jacket, like a trench coat or something. He would keep his hands in his pockets, like here.” She demonstrates, holding her hands down at her sides, close to the tops of her knees.

  “Yeah, a long coat, that’s it,” Emily says.

  But that’s all they can really say about him. A man dressed head-to-toe in black lurking in the shadows in his long coat, smoking cigarettes. None of them approached him. They never thought to call the cops.

  “We kind of hoped he’d get bored and go away,” Emily says and starts crying again, this time doing nothing to stop the flood of tears. She leans into Tina’s shoulder, and Tina wraps her arms around her.

  “You should talk to Eric,” Tina says, her voice taking on false bravado. “He and Cherish were hanging out a lot.”

  “They were dating?”

  Tina shakes her head. “He probably had a crush on her, though.”

  Emily stops sniffling long enough to say, “Everyone had a crush on her.”

  “But she didn’t like him like that,” Tina adds. “She made it very clear they were just friends.”

  “And how did Eric feel about that?” Jimmy asks, knowing how closely feelings of love ran alongside feelings of rage. It didn’t take much for a person to switch from one to the other.

  “You think he could have killed her?” Emily stares wide-eyed at him.

  “Do you?”

  The girls exchange that secret glance again, silent words passing between them.

  “No, absolutely not,” says Tina.

  “Eric’s a nice guy,” Emily adds.

  “I’d like to talk to him all the same,” Jimmy says. “Do you know where I can find him?”

  According to the girls, Eric works weekend lunch shifts at a pizza joint near campus. Jimmy jots the name of the restaurant in his notebook.

  He spends another hour with Tina and Emily, asking them about Cherish, about the kind of person she was, how she spent her days, what made her happy, what made her sad, who she dreamed of becoming. He asks to see Cherish’s room. He doesn’t touch anything, doesn’t rummage, even though he wants to. It’s one thing talking to the roommates before Detective Rausch gets a chance; it’s another thing rifling through her belongings which may someday be gathered as evidence. The story Jimmy wants to tell isn’t going to be found in her jewelry box or under the bed anyway. It’s going to be found in the people who loved her, the people who would give anything to bring her back.

  He thanks Tina and Emily, gives them his business card, and shows himself out. Before he gets in his car, he crosses the street to where Emily said the man would stand and watch. Jimmy scans the ground, hoping for cigarette butts or other evidence someone else was here, but there’s nothing. From this spot, he can see straight into the girls’ front window.

  Chapter 6

  Jimmy is the first customer inside Antonio’s Pizza when it opens at noon on Friday. He takes one look at Eric Rhodes, reading a Wallace Stegner book behind the counter, and knows he’s not the one who killed Cherish Spalding. He didn’t kill any of the other three girls either.

  He’s young. Jimmy guesses him to be eighteen, nineteen, maybe. But he could just as easily be sixteen for how small he is—a skinny-limbed, concave-chested boy with a smooth, plump, milky-white face. The first girl turned up dead four years ago when Eric would have been all of fourteen. He looks like he can barely hold that two-hundred-page paperback for more than a few minutes, let alone subdue a terrified woman. No, Jimmy knows the second he walks into the pizza shop that Eric Rhodes is not his man.

  But maybe he’ll be able to tell Jimmy who is.

  The kid is so lost in his book, he doesn’t look up until Jimmy clears his throat and taps his fingers on the countertop. He leaps so high he almost falls off the stool. The book lands on the floor with a loud thump. Eric swoops to pick it up and mutters his apologies. He tugs on the apron tied around his waist, stretches a fake smile over his mouth
, and says, “What can I get ya?”

  “Slice of pepperoni,” Jimmy says, “and a Coke.”

  “That’ll be three dollars.”

  Jimmy slides money across the counter. “Your name’s Eric, right?”

  The button pinned to his chest tells him as much, but Jimmy asks anyway with a warm smile to break the ice. The kid nods, suspicious, as he puts the three dollars in the register. He crosses to where four already-made pizzas are waiting under warming lights, spatulas out a single slice, and puts it in the oven to reheat.

  “You go to the university?” Jimmy asks.

  Eric nods again but says nothing.

  “Did you know that girl they found? Cherish Spalding?” Jimmy watches him carefully. You can tell a lot about a person by how they react to the name of a dead friend.

  Eric’s shoulders slump. He seems to go limp. His arms fall to his side and hang there a moment, and then a slight shudder rolls through him from head to toe, and he lifts his hands again to take the pizza from the oven before it burns. He slides it onto a paper plate and hands the plate to Jimmy. The slice glistens with grease.

  “Yeah,” he says, a wistful sadness in his voice. “Yeah, we had a couple of classes together. We’re both in the nursing program.”

  He pours Coke into a paper cup, sets it on the counter, picks up his book, and sits back down on the stool to read.

  Later, as Jimmy’s eating his pizza, Eric comes over to his table. He’s taken off his apron and holds it in one hand. He’s on break, he says and asks if he can sit down. Jimmy gestures to the empty booth across from him.

  “Why did you ask about Cherish?” Eric asks, eying the messenger bag sitting on the bench beside Jimmy. “Are you a reporter or something?”

  “I am. Her roommates told me the two of you were friends. Maybe more than friends?”

  Eric laughs, but it’s a grief-filled sound. He glances at the clock hanging on the wall above the register. “I only have a few minutes.”

  But a few minutes is all Jimmy needs.

  They talk about Cherish, how Eric met her during a freshman mixer for the nursing department. The entire room was filled with young women except for Eric. They whispered and giggled and gaped at him because men became doctors, didn’t they? Feeling embarrassed and out of place, Eric was about to leave when he made eye contact with Cherish across the room. She smiled at him. A genuine smile. Then she waved him over and handed him a plastic cup filled with some kind of fruit punch. Instead of asking him why the hell he wanted to become a nurse—in that horrified tone everyone else used—she asked him about his favorite books and his favorite food. She asked if he had ever seen a dead body and then leaned in to whisper that after the party was over, she’d take him to where they kept the cadavers. She was part of a work-study program, and because it was her job to clean up the science buildings, she had keys that could get them inside the anatomy lab.

  “She was nice to me,” Eric says. “But we didn’t like each other like that. Everyone thought we did, and whatever, we didn’t care what everyone said. But, no, we were just friends.” His cheeks flush red, and his gaze flicks down to the table. He rubs his thumb over a small crack in the Formica. “I don’t…I’m not interested in girls like that.”

  Jimmy asks if Cherish told him about the man lurking outside the house or ever mentioned being afraid.

  Eric shakes his head. “She wasn’t afraid of anything. Not blood, not needles, not Professor Trenton, who’ll flunk you for yawning during his class.” He thinks a minute, then adds, “She had nightmares, though. She told me that once. She never said what they were about, just that sometimes she had trouble sleeping, so she’d get dressed and go walking at night, around her block as many times as it took her to feel tired again.”

  “Did she ever go farther than that? Did she ever walk out on the highway?”

  Eric shrugs. “She might have, I don’t know.” The boy’s brow furrows in thought, and he shakes his head like he disagrees with his own memories. “No, she wouldn’t do something that dangerous. She would never be that stupid.”

  He sinks his head into his hands. “I can’t believe she’s dead. When Emily called me, I laughed. Then I got mad at her. She’s always playing these pranks. And I thought that’s what this was. But then I saw it on the news, too.”

  He moves his hands, cradling his stomach like he’s going to be sick. “It’s my fault.”

  “Why would you say that?”

  “I told her I’d go to this party with her, but I backed out at the last minute. I had a paper due the next day, I couldn’t.”

  “When was the party?”

  “Sunday night. Some friends were meeting out at Minto Island. They were going to hang out and listen to music, I don’t know.” His cheeks pale. “That was the last time I talked to her. She called me a stick-in-the-mud.”

  Jimmy cranes his head to try and see behind the front counter. “Is anyone else working today, Eric?”

  “Spencer’s here. He’s in the back.”

  “Maybe you should take the rest of the day off? Your friend just died. I’m sure your boss will understand.”

  “No.” He shakes his head and sits up straighter. “No, I’m fine. This isn’t the first time I’ve lost someone close to me. Work is a good distraction.” His lip trembles, and he wipes the back of his hand across his dry cheeks. “It’s funny, isn’t it? The way the universe echoes?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My big sister ran away from home when I was eleven.” Eric’s gaze drifts out the window. “Some hiker found her a week later. She’d been strangled and left to rot in the woods. Same as Cherish. I can’t help but think that it has something to do with me.” His brown eyes have taken on a haunted look when he turns back to Jimmy and asks, “Do you believe in curses?”

  * * *

  Jimmy drives straight to Eugene after leaving Eric to work the rest of his shift at Antonio’s. It takes him about an hour to get to the Register-Guard newspaper offices, where he calls in a favor with a reporter he knows who writes features. Dexter Thomas is bug-eyed behind thick coke-bottle glasses, but even half-blind, he can see a good story brewing from miles away.

  “What is it this time, Jimmy?” He has a whisper of a British accent. “Political scandal? Governor caught cheating on his wife? Shake up at the Capitol?”

  “You know I’m on the crime beat.”

  Dexter rolls his eyes and huffs. “I thought you’d have sloughed off that albatross by now. Crime’s a dead-end, Jimmy. You still working under that troglodyte Tadd? Let me talk to Paul and see if something is opening up here.”

  “I’m fine where I’m at, Dex. I just need your help digging up some old articles about a girl murdered in this area about ten years ago? Sometime in 1969? Hikers found her in McKinley Forest.”

  Dexter grimaces like he’s bitten down on something sour, but he gestures for Jimmy to follow him toward the archive room. “Let’s see what we can find, but I’m gonna need more information than that. You know how it is,” he says with a shrug. “Dead girls are a dime a dozen.”

  * * *

  Her name was Lydia Rhodes. She was barely eighteen, just two days past her birthday, and a recent graduate from North Eugene High School. She worked at a drive-thru burger joint and is survived by her parents and younger brother. The Register-Guard didn’t turn her into a big enough story for Jimmy to get more details than this. Her killer was never found.

  Jimmy drives across town to the central police precinct where, thanks to a call from Dexter, a detective waits for him in the lobby.

  “We don’t normally let just anyone come in and look at our cases like this,” the middle-aged man with a slight paunch and severe crew cut says. “But Dex vouches for you, and around here, that’s as good as gold. He says you might have some new leads for us, too.”

  He brings Jimmy into an interview room where a single cardboard box sits in the middle of the table. “You’l
l have to look at it all right here, of course. I can’t have you taking any of it out of the station.”

  He pats the lid of a cardboard box. Dust puffs into the air.

  “This is all there is?” Jimmy asks.

  The detective shrugs and glances at his watch. “How long do you think you’ll be? My shift ends soon.”

  “Are you the one working this case?” Jimmy takes the lid off the box and begins to flip through the documents.

  “No one’s working it,” the detective says. “It’s ten years old. If I remember right, the girl was initially reported as a runaway. There was no reason to suspect anything else had happened to her until her body turned up in those woods. Not much physical evidence to go off of, and all the leads we had turned out to be dead-ends anyway. There’s not much else you can do when that happens but wait until someone comes forward with new information. The original investigator retired a few years ago. We just don’t have the resources to actively work on cold cases like this one.”

  Jimmy flips through a stack of witness statements and written reports. He scans paragraph after paragraph, looking for similarities to Cherish and the other August girls. Halfway through the stack, he comes across a financial statement showing several withdrawals over the weeks leading up to Lydia’s death but no deposits. The money in the Rhodes’ checking account was hovering dangerously close to zero. In the margins, someone had written:

  Broke. Dad was a drunk. Couldn’t hold a job. Mom turning tricks in cheap hotel rooms on the weekend. Daughter doing the same?

  Jimmy sets the document aside and moves on to the next, but he feels a tension headache coming on. A sharp spike of pain in his right temple flares as knots clench down the side of his neck.

  Lydia Rhodes’ story is all too familiar. Her life and death echoing years later with the three girls killed and dumped in Salem each August in 1976, 1977, and 1978. Poor girls, young girls, angry girls, girls at the end of their ropes, girls looking for a way out, looking for someone to take them out of their wretched lives. They had found someone, all right, someone who didn’t give a damn about saving them.