The Ophelia Killer

by Valerie Geary

  When Jimmy opens the passenger door, Trixie leaps from the car, darts toward a clump of bushes, and begins sniffing in circles. He whistles for her, and she hurries to his side. Once she gets a sense of where they’re headed, though, she takes off ahead of him, her nose pressed to the ground, snorting and snuffling, chasing down the faded scents of whatever creatures were here before her.

  Jimmy finds Danny Cyrus about a quarter-mile from the parking lot, standing on a peninsula of uneven rocks that juts into the lake. Trixie runs up to him first, her tongue slopping from the side of her mouth as she wags her whole body, bumping against Danny’s legs hard enough he loses his balance. Regaining his footing, he bends to pet Trixie. He looks up at the sound of Jimmy crunching through the underbrush.

  “This your dog?”

  “Sure is,” Jimmy says, adopting a laid-back but slightly apologetic tone. “Sorry about that. Come here, girl. Trixie, come.”

  She returns to Jimmy’s side, then catches the scent of something in the trees and wanders off.

  “I always did like beagles,” Danny says and dips his hand into a white cup. “Loyal dogs, so long as they don’t smell a rabbit.”

  He spears a wriggling worm on the end of a hook.

  “What kind of fish do you catch out here?” Jimmy squints across the water where the mid-afternoon sun glints like diamonds off the lake’s smooth surface.

  “Trout, mostly. Some smallmouth bass. Perch.”

  A fish leaps from the water about twenty feet from where Danny’s standing. It’s a flash of silver that makes the smallest of splashes before disappearing. Ripples roll across the water’s surface.

  Danny turns away from Jimmy and flicks his rod. The reel makes a whirring sound as the line’s cast. The baited hook drops into the water a few inches from where the fish jumped. Danny keeps his eyes fixed on the red and white bobber floating on the surface, his body language warning off any further conversation.

  Jimmy ignores it and steps onto the peninsula. “You’re Danny Cyrus, aren’t you?”

  A muscle in the other man’s jaw tenses. With one hand keeping hold of the fishing rod, he dips the other down, takes a beer from a small cooler on the ground beside him, and cracks it open with one hand.

  “I guess that depends on who’s asking.” Danny takes a long drink, then wipes the back of his hand across his mouth and belches.

  “I heard that if I’m looking for someone, you’re the guy I should talk to.”

  Danny swings his head around. “Who told you that?”

  Jimmy shrugs. “Just people.”

  “In my experience, people don’t know what the hell they’re talking about most of the time.” Danny takes another drink and tugs on the fishing rod, repositioning the hook, bait, and bobber.

  The bushes along the shoreline rustle as Trixie emerges from the trees, apparently losing or growing bored with whatever scent she was tracking. There are a few pine needles in her fur and mud splatters on her white socks. She joins Jimmy and Danny on the peninsula, finds a flat rock in the sun, and lies down with a dramatic sigh.

  “So, you wouldn’t know where I could find this man?” Jimmy steps close enough to Danny to show him the sketch.

  Danny glances at the paper, then squints out over the lake. “What’s he done?”

  “Nothing.”

  Danny snorts in disbelief. “He owe you money or something?”

  “Sure, let’s say he does.”

  “I don’t know him.” But when he says it, his shoulders stiffen. He stares into the distance and tugs on the fishing line as if it’s the most interesting thing in the world. If Jimmy were a betting man, he’d put all his money on Danny being a liar.

  “You know what else people told me?” Jimmy tucks the picture away in his pocket. “They told me I should stay away from you. That you’re dangerous.”

  “Like I said…people don’t know what the hell they’re talking about most of the time.”

  “So when they told me you killed a girl out here seventeen years ago, I shouldn’t believe that either?” Jimmy gestures to the pines edging the lake. They spread for miles in every direction.

  Jimmy remembers reading in Margot Buchanan’s police file that there are hiking trails throughout this whole area. Somewhere near here, her body was discovered.

  Danny tenses. The beer can in his hand crumples as he squeezes it in his fist. He tosses the empty can to the ground and whirls to face Jimmy. Sensing the sudden change in emotions, Trixie rises to her feet and presses herself against Jimmy’s leg.

  “Who the hell are you? And what do you want from me?” Danny grips the fishing rod like he might use it to smack Jimmy across the face.

  Trixie whines. Jimmy takes a small step back.

  Danny’s a big man, bigger than Jimmy by a good half a foot and one hundred pounds easy. Jimmy’s not a fighter, either. He’s never hit anything or anyone in his life. If he went fist to fist with Danny, he’d lose. He holds his hands up in the air, trying to deescalate the situation.

  “If it helps, I don’t believe them,” Jimmy says. “I don’t think you had anything to do with Margot’s death.”

  Danny flinches at the sound of her name and turns back to the water, his attention on fishing again. He reels in the line a little bit, then lets it out. The wind tugs it across the surface of the lake away from shore.

  “That man in the picture,” he says quietly, his voice unsteady. “You think he might be the one who did it?”

  “I’m looking into the possibility, yes.”

  Danny props the end of his fishing rod between two small rocks, then turns to Jimmy and holds out his hand. “Let me see it again.”

  Jimmy passes him the sketch. Danny studies it a moment before giving it back.

  “She was hanging out with a lot of guys that summer, not just me. He might have been one of ‘em.” Danny bends to pick up his rod again, reeling the line in. He plucks the worm he was using as bait off the hook and tosses it into the water. “I don’t know. It was a long time ago. His face looks familiar, but I don’t know his name or where he lives now. It’s not here. Wherever he went, I know for sure he’s not in Crestwood anymore.”

  Danny gathers his gear.

  “You know for sure?” Jimmy presses him.

  With the rod tucked under one arm, tackle box under the other, cooler strap dangling from his left hand, Danny says, “I’m not a nice man. I don’t hang out with nice people. Get told long enough that you’re a villain, and you eventually become one. I know every degenerate, dick, and Harry in this godforsaken town, and he’s not one of them.” He tips his head toward the picture still clutched in Jimmy’s hand. “I suppose he could be upper crust or keeping his head down among the nine-to-five dads and PTA moms, but something tells me probably not. Plus, I know them, too. Everyone has a little darkness in them, don’t they?”

  He flashes Jimmy a grin, and Jimmy gets the feeling he dodged a bullet today, that he could have ended up with a black eye, or worse, ended up in the lake as fish food.

  “Thanks for your help,” Jimmy says to Danny’s retreating back.

  Over his shoulder, Danny calls, “If you find him, tell him to come see me. Seems like the two of us have some unfinished business.”

  * * *

  Jimmy and Trixie spend over an hour thrashing through the woods around Lake Chastain. Some part of him hopes to find a memorial, a bench with Margot’s name on it, a plaque hammered into a nearby tree, something to commemorate her violent death. But there’s nothing. He doesn’t know if he’s in the right spot. He doesn’t even know what he’s looking for, really. It’s been almost seventeen years. Of course there’s nothing here. Tired, hungry, frustrated, Jimmy scratches at one of a hundred mosquito bites on the back of his arm and whistles for Trixie. She comes bounding out of the brush with the kind of energy that tells him she could keep doing this for as long as he let her.

  They retrace their steps back to the parkin
g lot. Twenty minutes later, he’s parked in the public lot beside the library again, under the shade of a spreading elm tree. He gives Trixie some water and treats before leaving her to go get his own food in the café across the street.

  Crumbles and Cakes is crowded even though it’s the middle of the afternoon. Jimmy orders a sandwich and coffee at the counter and manages to find a table in the corner after a retired couple leave. He takes out his notebook and scratches a few notes.

  Other boyfriends?

  Transient?

  What am I not seeing?

  Jimmy spreads the sketch of his suspect out on the table. He takes a picture of Margot from his pocket and lays it next to the sketch. Brett gave the photograph to him a few weeks ago, shortly after she told him about Margot’s murder. He asked for it, for a picture of Margot alive and smiling, so that he could remember her as more than a corpse rotting in the weeds. He wants to remember why he’s doing this and who he’s doing this for. Margot was a pretty girl with golden-blond hair and an infectious smile. In this picture, she’s sitting on a tire swing with Brett. The sisters have their arms around one another. Brett leans her head on Margot’s shoulder. Her lips are stained red from the half-melted, cherry popsicle she’s holding in her other hand.

  Someone bumps Jimmy’s chair. He jostles, and his pen drops to the floor. He reaches to grab it at the same time as the woman who bumped into him does. Their hands brush, and her eyes flicker to his. They’re a bright blue but hard as flint. Her lips tighten over her teeth, and she looks like she’s about to say something cruel to him.

  A young girl’s voice interrupts, “Mom? Hurry up. We’re going to be late.”

  The woman lets go of the pen and straightens. She smooths her hands down her skirt, and her gaze flicks to the sketch and photograph lying together on the table. It’s subtle, the way her fingers curl against her leg, the slight flare of her nostrils, how she jerks her head back like she’s been slapped. She recognizes him, Jimmy realizes. The man in the sketch is someone she knows.

  “Mom?” A girl around ten or eleven and wearing a soccer jersey comes up behind the woman and touches her elbow. Her brown hair is pulled into a high ponytail.

  The woman’s expression shifts again, turning neutral and unbothered. Whatever she was thinking a few seconds ago, it’s gone now, sunk beneath the surface of her pale, smooth skin and vacant, blue eyes.

  “Yes, Elizabeth, I heard you the first time.” She grabs her daughter’s hand and drags her from the café.

  Jimmy is about to go after her when another woman appears beside the table with his sandwich and cup of coffee. She’s older, her auburn hair dusted white. He can’t tell if it’s flour in her hair or if she’s going gray. When she smiles at him, wrinkles crease her face in a pleasing way. Tied around her waist is an apron printed with the name of the café.

  “Just moved in or just visiting?” she asks, her voice a warm hug. She sets his order on the corner of the table and, seeing the sketch, lets out a hum of surprise. With her fingertips, she moves the paper to see it better. “Funny, that looks like my sister’s boy.”

  Jimmy’s whole body goes tense. “You know him?”

  The woman lifts her hand off the sketch and takes a small step back. “I’m sure it’s a coincidence. There are plenty of men around here and all over the place who look like that.”

  But she can’t take her eyes off the picture, her gaze tracing down the slender line of his nose, the mouth that’s pinched in a grimace, his uneven eyes. “It’s a pretty good likeness, though, isn’t it. Of course, my eyesight isn’t what it used to be, and I haven’t seen him in so long…but I suppose it could be Archer. I’m sorry. Why do you have that picture? Are you an artist or…?”

  “I’m a reporter,” he says. “I’m looking for him. For this man. Archer, you said? He’s your nephew?”

  “Well, Archer’s my nephew, yes, but I don’t know if that picture you have is of him or not.” She points at the sketch. “Why are you looking for him? Has he done something wrong?”

  “When was the last time you saw your nephew?”

  She thinks for a minute, then says, “Oh, it’s been a long time. He stayed with us one summer. Now, when was that? Nearly seventeen years ago. Hard to believe, but yes, it was the summer of 1964. The same summer that Anita Wilson’s granddaughter was killed.”

  A chill runs through Jimmy. Cold, then hot, then cold again. The woman frowns and shakes her head as if she’s remembering something she’d rather not, as if she can feel it, too—the secrets of the past rising to the surface. Someone calls to her from behind the counter. She wipes her hands on her apron and flashes Jimmy a polite smile.

  “I’m sorry. I can’t really talk about this right now. One of my cooks called in sick today, and we’re running behind in the kitchen. But if you want, please come back this evening. We close up at six. My son will be here by then, too, and he can have a look at that picture of yours. He’ll know for sure if that’s Archer or not. He’s got a better memory than me.” Her smile brightens at the mention of her son. Then she gestures to the sandwich, which is a grilled pastrami and Swiss on rye, and says, “Better eat up before it gets soggy.”

  Chapter 17

  Jimmy checks out of the motel room a day earlier than planned. The entire drive back to Salem, the name Mary Andress gave him turns to an incantation.

  Archer French.

  Archer French.

  It beats a rhythm in his head that matches the pulse of headlights going the opposite direction on the freeway.

  Archer French.

  It becomes a spell, a wish. Say it enough times and the monster will be made flesh, and Jimmy might finally have his answers.

  When Jimmy returned to the café earlier this evening, the final customers were on their way out the door. A young man with thinning hair and a scraggly beard moved between the tables with a dishrag, swiping crumbs onto the floor, re-centering the small vases with plastic flowers. He glanced up when Jimmy walked in and said, “We’re closed.”

  Before Jimmy could explain himself, the woman he spoke with before swept from the back of the café. “It’s all right, Nathan,” she said. “He’s here to talk to me.”

  She smiled at Jimmy and held her hand out. “I don’t think I properly introduced myself earlier. Mary Andress. I own this place.” There was pride in her voice as she swept her gaze around the café. “Do you want anything to drink? Coffee? Tea? On the house.” Mary flapped her hand at the man wiping tables. “Nathan, be a dear and get us a fresh pot of coffee. That’s my son,” she said to Jimmy.

  When Nathan returned with the coffee, Mary pulled a chair out from one of the tables and sat down. “Show him the picture,” she said. And when Jimmy gave the sketch to Nathan, she asked, “Who does that look like to you?”

  It’s almost midnight by the time Jimmy takes the freeway off-ramp into Salem. He spent all of one day in Crestwood. He could have stayed another night, he’d already paid for the motel room, but he didn’t want to waste any more time. The hotel manager seemed more than happy to have him check out early.

  When Jimmy pulls into his apartment complex, Trixie lifts her head from where she’s been curled in a ball on the passenger seat and yawns. The entire two minutes it takes to walk upstairs to his apartment, Jimmy worries he’s going to find the door hanging open, the place ransacked again. But luck continues to be on his side. The door is locked. The apartment is in the same condition as how he left it yesterday afternoon. He dumps his duffel bag by the door and walks straight to the living room. Trixie’s toenails click across the linoleum as she makes her way into the kitchen to check her empty food dish.

  There’s nothing left on the living room wall but a couple of thumbtacks and ripped pieces of tape. Rausch took everything else as evidence. It’s evidence, all right, even if they’re trying to use it against the wrong man.

  No matter. Jimmy doesn’t need it.

  He takes the photograph Mar
y Andress gave him before he left Crestwood and pins it to the center of the wall. He works from memory, scribbling dates, cities, and names onto scraps of paper and tacking those scraps to the wall. Piece by piece, he recreates what was there before. A timeline for the August girls, a way to track the Ophelia Killer and connect him to Archer French, to see if it all fits the way Jimmy hopes it will.

  According to what Mary told him, her nephew was a smart boy but was constantly getting in trouble. He’d talk back to his teachers at school and harass girls in the hallways, pushing them down, taking their books and ripping out the pages, trying to see under their skirts. He was a wild boy, an angry boy who lashed out at anyone who got in his way. Even, and sometimes especially, his own mother, a woman who Mary admitted should probably have never been a mother in the first place. She could be cold and distant, cruel, too. But the biggest problem, Mary said, was her inconsistency. She was loving to Archer one minute, ignoring him the next, and didn’t have the first clue about what it meant to discipline an unruly child.

  What Archer needed, Mary said, was a steady schedule and a good, hard whooping. What Archer needed was structure and discipline and responsible men to look up to, not the strangers his mother was bringing in and out of the house, a new man every week. Wanting to help, Mary secured Archer a job on a fishing boat for the summer after he graduated high school. He was in Crestwood from the end of May to the beginning of September in 1964 when he went back to Eugene to start his freshman year at the University of Oregon.

  Jimmy studies the wall. In 1967, a young woman was killed in Medford. The very same year Archer French dropped out of school. Though, forced out might be a better description.

  Something happened, Mary told Jimmy, pouring them all another cup of coffee. She wasn’t sure of the details, having only heard the story secondhand from her sister. It seemed Archer got into some trouble over a young woman who claimed she’d been attacked outside the library. She fought him off, kicking and spitting and screaming for help. When the police came to talk to Archer, he denied having any involvement. He worked in the library, yes, but claimed he had never seen the girl before in his life. The police apparently believed him because no one was arrested. The young woman never pressed charges, and that was the end of that.