Bonfire: A Novel

by Krysten Ritter

  He doesn’t seem convinced. For a long time, he stares at me. “On the off chance you’ve forgotten, we’re working this case together,” he says.

  “I haven’t forgotten,” I say. “I don’t have anything we can use.” My heartbeat picks up. The room has gone silent, and the comfortable feeling I had earlier has vanished. “Look, if we knew where Kaycee Mitchell went—if we could just get her side of the story—”

  But Joe doesn’t let me finish. “If the Kaycee Mitchell case was legit, if she got sick, it only confirms what we think. We can’t prove it because we can’t ask her, and we can’t ask her because we don’t know where she is, and we can’t find her because that’s not why we’re here. Abby, we need to focus on what Optimal is doing now—not what they did ten years ago.”

  “Don’t tell me how to do my job,” I snap. Joe doesn’t understand that in Barrens, you can’t just peel away the present from the past. It’s like trying to get gum out of your hair: the more you try to separate it, the more strands get caught up.

  “This isn’t about Kaycee Mitchell,” he tells me in a low voice. “This isn’t about what happened back then.” Then: “We might be able to save some people, Abby. But not her. You understand that, right?”

  Despite the absurdity of storming out of my own rental, I’m out in the sunshine before I realize I have nowhere to go.

  The same thing that makes Joe a good lawyer makes him a crappy friend: he’s right almost all of the time.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  I’ve got four voicemails from my dad’s home line and half a dozen texts from TJ, a thirty-three-year-old war vet who lives down the road and spends all his time going house to house, checking the trees for signs of insect rot. TJ is the closest thing my dad has to a friend.

  His texts are borderline incoherent, all abbreviations and shattered punctuation, but I get the message clear enough: I’m late to pick up my dad for his doctor’s appointment.

  TJ is still humping around in the yard when I arrive. He lifts a hand to wave, and then turns back to his inspection, sifting the leaves of one of our crabapple trees. His left arm swings useless when he moves.

  There’s nothing wrong with TJ’s arm except, thanks to a case of PTSD, he doesn’t know it’s there.

  “Waste of time, waste of money, these so-called doctors,” my father grumbles, as he eases into the passenger seat. “All they do is take your money and fumble with a lot of doodads and in the end, what? They send you home with a prayer, a bill for five hundred dollars, and a prescription to see another doctor.”

  He stops my hand when I try to belt him in. “I can do it, dammit. I throw my back out and you act like I’m a cripple.”

  But I notice it takes him several times to work the seatbelt home. His hand is shaking.

  When I was a kid we didn’t go to the doctor. My dad said all we needed was God’s love, and when I had my first visit—nine years old, my mom whittled by sickness—I thought the doctor’s office was the cleanest, brightest place I’d ever been. By then I knew not going to the doctor was one of the things that made me a freak, so the waiting room felt like the heaven my dad always talked about, a place where nothing existed but quiet and a blinding whiteness that struck down every shadow. I got a lollipop from the receptionist, and when my mom and dad were with the doctor, I paged through magazines, rubbing perfume samples on my wrists and my shirt.

  Then it was the oncology wing of a hospital in Indianapolis, although to me it was a doctor’s office only bigger, even more miraculous. More magazines. More cold air faintly tinged with the smell of Winterfresh gum. More people in clean white coats, like angels with their wings folded around them.

  Dr. Aster spends a long time examining my dad. I make it through every magazine in the waiting room: two months-old copies of People, a Home & Garden full of smiling housewives, copies of Outdoor and Fishing. I wonder how many people are sitting here, in this waiting room, reading about smallmouth bass just before they get news that changes them forever.

  “Are you from Barrens, too?”

  I look up to see the only other woman in the waiting room watching me, rocking a quiet baby in her arms.

  “Chicago,” I say forcefully.

  “Oh. My bad. I thought I recognized you is all.” If she notices that the question has annoyed me, she doesn’t let it bother her for long. She shrugs.

  “I went to Barrens High,” I say, without elaborating or explaining that I also went to Barrens elementary and middle schools.

  “I thought so! You were two years above me! My name’s Shariah Dobbs,” she says. Then, indicating the baby in her arms, “I would stand up, but…”

  “That’s all right. Abby.” I’m suddenly ashamed of my bag sitting on the seat next to me—four hundred dollars, bought at Neiman Marcus with my first paycheck and way more than I could afford, but still—and of my boots and jeans. All of it is chosen to armor me precisely against the question she first asked. Are you from Barrens, too?

  But seeing her moon-shaped face, her cheap skirt and knockoff sneakers, and the unselfconscious way she looks me over—both cheerful and sympathetic, as if she knows exactly what I think of her and doesn’t hold it against me—makes me curdle with guilt.

  I stand up and come closer to coo over her baby, so swaddled that from a distance it might be a folded T-shirt. “Boy or girl? How old?”

  “Boy. His name is Grayson. Twelve months.” She starts to peel the blanket back from his face and then, unexpectedly, her face clouds. “The doctors at the clinic have been so helpful. At first everyone told me he would just grow into it…”

  I’m about to ask her what she means when she flips back the blanket and I suck in a breath. The baby is small, way too small, and his skull looks soft and malformed. His forehead is barely there at all. It’s as if his eyebrows run straight into his scalp.

  “No one knows if he’ll be able to talk, even,” she says, in a quiet voice. “Bad luck, I guess. But he’s a good baby,” she adds quickly. “He’s my baby boy, and I don’t care what anyone says. I did everything like they told me to, I quit smoking and even took those vitamins they gave me…” She covers his face again and looks at me sideways, as if she expects me to accuse her of something.

  “You still live in Barrens?” I ask, and she nods.

  “Over in Creekside.” Her face flushes. Creekside is a trailer park—directly on the lip of the reservoir, within sight of the plant. “I’m still with my mom. My sister and her husband just moved back, right next door, so they help a lot.” Her face clears and she smiles. “My sister’s pregnant, too. So Grayson’ll have a little cousin soon enough.”

  Before I can respond, the door opens and Dr. Aster appears with one hand hooked around my father’s elbow. My dad stumps forward, digging his cane into the carpet, looking more like his old self than at any time since I’ve been home.

  “Sorry for the delay,” Dr. Aster says. “It’s been a while. I thought we should do the whole detail.”

  “Tests, tests, and more tests,” my father says. “Is that all you people know how to do?” The best measure of my dad’s health is how rude he is.

  “Is everything okay?” I ask, turning away from Shariah.

  Dr. Aster’s eyes flicker.

  “We’ll know in a few days, when all the test results come back,” he says. “Meantime, he should take it easy. Rest. Using a heating pad and ibuprofen should be fine.”

  My father shakes his head, rolls his eyes to the ceiling. “Five hundred dollars,” he mumbles, “and a prayer.”

  Even as I help my father toward the door, Shariah Dobbs calls out to me, “Nice to see you, Abby. Take care of yourself.”

  “You too,” I say. I can’t bring myself to meet her eyes, though. I can’t breathe through a burst of sudden fear at the thought of babies with soft skulls and brains that won’t grow. Weak spots.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  A sleek Lincoln Town Car is parked at the curb by the time I get home—I’ve k
ept it waiting. A crow is pecking in the dirt. I can’t stop seeing little baby Grayson, his furry eyebrows and the scalp drawn too close.

  One for sorrow.

  Hannah is kneeling on the sidewalk in front of Condor’s place, shading a gigantic chalk flower, which blooms next to a clutter of smiley faces, all of them pink or green. She has only two nubs of chalk left. I wave. She sits back on her heels to stare, wrapping her arms around her legs.

  “Is that your car?” she asks.

  “Just for the night. Pretty sweet, huh?”

  Her eyes go from me, to the driver, back to me. “Are you famous?”

  That makes me laugh. “Not even close.”

  “I’m going to be famous someday.” She returns to her drawing, pushing hard on the chalk to scrape color onto the sidewalk.

  “Oh yeah? For what?”

  She shrugs. “Maybe dancing,” she says. “Or drawing. Or maybe for discovering aliens.”

  “Aliens, huh?” In the house, Condor is framed perfectly in the window. It looks like he’s singing along to something on the radio. He’s shirtless. His hair is finger-combed; I imagine it still wet from a shower. I remember the pull of his lips, the way his hands felt holding on to my waist. “So long as you keep them away from me.”

  “Aliens don’t hurt people, silly!” she says. She looks up at me serenely. “Only people hurt people.”

  That’s the thing with kids: they’re way smarter than you think.

  —

  People do and say lots of crazy things in cabs, and private car services are no exception. Something about the division between the front seat and the back makes passengers think they’re invisible. And for that reason, drivers are gold mines of information. Prestige Limo shows up again and again in Optimal’s tax records. It’s a shot in the dark, but if Lilian McMann is right—if Optimal is wining, dining, and bribing politicians for favors—there must be evidence somewhere, and chances are the drivers have witnessed it, whether they realize it or not.

  The driver is a woman, which I wasn’t expecting. I’m hoping that will make her more inclined to talk, but for the first half an hour I get nothing out of her but standard, monosyllabic answers.

  You get a lot of customers back and forth to Indianapolis? Sometimes, ma’am. Where do you live? Not far, ma’am. How long have you been working the job? Four years, ma’am. You like it? Yes, ma’am. She might be a robot programmed with only a dozen replies.

  I try again to land on something, anything, that will inspire her to talk. “Are you full-time with Prestige?”

  On the subject of schedules, she warms up right away. “I do forty hours, sometimes more. But my schedule’s mine. That’s the good thing. I have a four-year-old and a six-year-old. I used to work at the Target but the day I had to leave my family on Thanksgiving to open was the day I quit.”

  “And you never feel unsafe, driving late at night?”

  “Oh, no,” she says quickly. “We don’t get that kind of customer, not at Prestige. It’s mostly repeats, especially this leg, between Optimal and Indianapolis. Can’t imagine making the commute every day myself…”

  “Big tippers, at least?”

  Finally, I’ve landed: she snorts. “Hardly. Corporate guys. You ever noticed the fatter a wallet, the less it opens?”

  “Oh, I know. I used to be a waitress,” I play along. This is sort of true. I did spend a record two months working as a hostess at a hotel bar in Chicago before I got fired for going home with one of the regulars. It wouldn’t have been a problem, except for the fact that I wasn’t going home with the manager.

  “Then you know. Some of these guys, they’re top, you know? I’m saying Washington, real movers-and-shakers, think their shit don’t stink.”

  My pulse leaps. “Anyone famous?” I ask, trying not to sound too eager. But I’ve overstepped.

  “I can’t say, ma’am.” She catches herself. “I do my job like everybody else. I get in the car, and I drive.”

  I know I won’t get anything else from her, so I turn to the window, watching the fields run into a geometry of roads and housing and strip malls that announces the outskirts of Indianapolis. Half the evil in the world, I think, must be someone just doing their job.

  Maybe it’s paranoia, but I have the driver drop me a good ten blocks from my destination and instruct her to wait. The neighborhood is nondescript, and well outside the central business district. I pass more than a handful of shuttered warehouses and storefronts boasting Available for Lease signs. A homeless woman roots around in a trash can.

  Clean Solutions Management is wedged in the dingy second floor above an office-supply warehouse, and next to a vacant office that seems to have housed a divorce attorney at one point. It has no sign, nothing to announce its presence, other than a sticker peeling from above a buzzer that goes unanswered no matter how many times I ring.

  “No one’s ever there.”

  I turn and see a goateed guy smoking in the open door of the office supply. He looks, ironically, like he’s never seen the inside of any office: you can count the patches on his skin that aren’t tattooed.

  “You know what they do up there?” I ask him.

  He shrugs. His eyes sweep over my whole body, head to toe and back again, so slowly it’s like he’s making a point. “Imports-exports, or some shit like that,” he says.

  “Imports-exports,” I say, as sweetly as I can. “Or some shit like that? Which is it?”

  His cigarette hovers halfway to his lips. “It’s like that, huh?” He smiles as if we’ve been sharing a joke, then takes one long pull, directing the smoke away from my face like he’s doing me a favor. “Dude told me imports-exports. So I guess that’s what they do.”

  “Dude?”

  He shrugs. “Some douchebag in a suit.” He smiles again. His teeth are bad. “Is he your ex or something?”

  I give him a look and his smile withers. “All right, look. He gave me his number, in case of delivery. To call when he gets a package, that kind of thing.”

  “Does he? Ever get a package?”

  “Sure,” he says. “I got one in the back right now. Haven’t brought it upstairs yet.”

  He rolls his eyes when I just stand there expectantly. “Ah, shit. You ain’t a cop, are you?”

  “Worse,” I say. I give him my best pretty-girl smile. “I’m a lawyer.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Barrens at just after eight o’clock on a Saturday is as close to hopping as it ever gets. I straighten up as we pass the Donut Hole: a handful of picketers are gathered in the parking lot, holding signs.

  WHAT’S IN OUR WATER?

  OPTIMAL POISONS, INC.

  We’re past the protest almost before I’ve had time to register it, but it gives me a small lift of confidence. Optimal hasn’t bought everybody, at least—not yet.

  Mel’s and the VFW bar spill patrons into the parking lot, keeping their doors propped open so the music flows out and the smoke flows in. A girl and her boyfriend are making out on the hood of the car. Her jean shorts hitched up where he’s grabbing her. Her arms wrapped around his neck. Laughing like crazy while their friends pelt them with bottle caps.

  Had things turned out differently, I might be standing at the bar next to Kaycee Mitchell, bitching about work and kids and husbands, slugging down a couple of vodka crans and sneaking a cigarette when we got drunk enough.

  Wherever she is now, I wonder, does she ever miss Barrens? Does she regret any of what she left behind? Somehow, I doubt it. I’m beginning to think Kaycee Mitchell may have gotten her payday after all. Maybe she did get sick. Maybe she was paid to disappear, and her family—and even her friends—was paid to lie about it.

  Leaving the VFW behind, the silence seems to flow into the car like dark water. Saturday, eight P.M., and nowhere to be, nothing to do, no one missing me, even in Chicago.

  Condor’s car is in the driveway, and the lights are on. For a second I debate going to knock on his door to apologize—but for what?
And I can’t forget the way his face hardened into anger, and the sudden leap of terror in my chest.

  A jump rope is coiled on the front stoop, and for some reason it fills me with dread. As if Hannah might have been spirited away from the middle of her game.

  Then Condor passes in front of the kitchen window and I turn away quickly, realizing I’ve been staring.

  Inside, I punch on the air conditioner and listen to it grind to life in the dark.

  Round trip, the ride to Indianapolis has taken three hours, not counting the fifteen or so minutes I spent chatting up the goateed guy. The bill from Prestige is close to two hundred and fifty dollars—nearly triple my weekly expense allowance.

  And every single dollar worth it.

  I pull out the card from Goatee and run a search for Byron Grafton.

  His LinkedIn profile lists him as a consultant and his Facebook profile mentions investment management and real estate. Nowhere is he listed as associated with Clean Solutions, or Optimal, or waste.

  But it’s the picture that nearly punches my heart through my chest.

  Byron Grafton is curly-haired, and in the handful of photos Google kicks back, dressed in the same kind of cheap, flashy suit that attracted my attention to the photograph I saw back in Brent’s house. And now I remember—Brent told me he had a cousin, Byron, who had a buddy at Optimal that took him under his wing.

  I land on a picture of Byron in the University of Indiana newspaper. Long out of college, he’s nonetheless dressed in school colors, and tailgating outside of his alma mater with a bunch of other aging frat boys. Ten to fifteen pounds overweight, thinning hair, paunchy with money, they might all be identical twins.

  Except that one of them, I recognize.

  I punch in Joe’s number, forgetting all about our fight this morning, and curse when it goes straight to voicemail.

  “Call me back,” I say. “I think I have something.”

  My phone rings almost immediately after I’ve hung up, and I pick it up without checking the number.