Wolfhunter River

by Caine, Rachel

  I let Sam and the kids go ahead of me out to the SUV; I hand Sam my duffel as he passes, and he nods. He knows that I want a more private conversation. So I shut the door and turn to Kez. “You didn’t tell me these so-called documentary filmmakers were in town when we came to see you,” I say. “Why not?”

  “I’m a servant of the public when I’m at work,” she replies. “They weren’t breaking any laws, and honestly, I didn’t see setting your temper on fire would do anybody any good. You go at them, you’ll just make their case, they’ll win a bunch of awards, and your life turns to shit. Just stay away. That’s the best thing you can do: Don’t give them anything to work with.”

  She’s right, of course. “That’s another reason why it’s good to get out of town,” I say. “Because I can’t guarantee that if they shove a camera in my face, I won’t shove it up their asses.”

  “Yeah. That’s kind of what I was afraid of.” She studies me. Sharp as broken glass, just like her father. “You still seeing that therapist?”

  “Why? Does it show?”

  “Not to most people. You went through hell, Gwen. Give yourself a break. Let yourself heal up before you get yourself into another fight.”

  “I appreciate the concern, but you know I don’t even have a choice.”

  She shakes her head. “Just try to keep out of trouble. Please. You know I’ll back your play if I can, so will Javi, but there’s a line I can’t cross, and you’re going to be way outside my jurisdiction.”

  “I know,” I tell her. We hug. Two women wearing shoulder harnesses under our jackets, which says a lot about how we view the world. “Watch your back.”

  “You too.”

  I set the alarm, lock up, and head for the SUV as Kezia walks to her boxy, city-issued sedan. She trails us down the road to where it splits, right for the exit to the highway, left to keep heading around to the other side of the lake. Her headlights disappear off the other way, and we stop at the highway. Sam looks at the navigation on the phone mounted to the dash.

  “Hour and a half out,” he says. Glances at me in the light of the dashboard. “You sure?”

  “I’m sure,” I tell him. “Let’s go.”

  As we leave Stillhouse Lake, I feel a tiny, guilty bit of relief. Like I’m running away from my problems, dumping them and escaping into the unknown, the way I had before.

  But it’s false, that feeling. Escaping was always temporary. Problems always caught up to me.

  But, I remind myself, I’m not doing this for myself.

  Not this time.

  The roads out to Wolfhunter are narrow and winding, and despite the moonlight, very dark. Headlights seem to go dim on these roads, and I’m glad Sam is driving, not me. The trees close in on either side until they’re a solid mass. It feels claustrophobic.

  We hardly see another car or truck along the way; a couple pass us flooring it past the speed limit, and a few more head in the opposite direction. An eighteen-wheeler rounds a curve swinging wide, and Sam slows down to let it clear out. This isn’t a road friendly to large trailers. It’s hard enough in a well-driven SUV.

  There aren’t any working gas stations, just a couple of spaces hacked out of the tree line with empty, weathered buildings and faded signs. We don’t see much of anything else. Lanny opts to nap, head resting against the side window behind Sam; when I check the rearview mirror, I see that Connor’s reading a book by the light of his phone. “You’ll ruin your eyes doing that,” I tell him. He doesn’t even look up.

  “That’s not even close to true,” he says.

  “Says who?”

  “Science.”

  “Hey, can you do me a favor?”

  Connor looks at me, a little frown wrinkling the skin between his eyebrows, which are now raised. “What?”

  “Look up Wolfhunter and see what you can find out about the town.”

  He puts his book down. “Seriously?”

  “Yeah, seriously. I’d like to know what we’re walking into. You’re one of the best researchers I know.”

  “Wait, one of the best?”

  “Well, okay. Maybe the best.”

  That pleases him, though he doesn’t want me to see it. He puts the book away and starts tapping on his phone at lightning speed I can’t even hope to approach with my older, broader fingers. Sam looks over and gives me a smile. I return it. Making Connor feel useful is important; he’s spent so much time second-guessing himself recently. Getting his head into something else is good.

  Sam’s smile fades, and he turns his attention quickly back to the road. I know he’s hurting inside, not just from what’s between the two of us, but from that damn journal. Melvin wouldn’t have arranged for it to be sent if it hadn’t been a time bomb designed to harm, even destroy. And I don’t know what it said.

  I suddenly wonder if Sam brought it with him. The thought actually frightens me, that something Melvin’s defiled might be traveling with us right now, like a parasite waiting to take hold inside us.

  I can’t ask. I can’t start this conversation here with the kids.

  Motel 6 looms out of the darkness like a neon oasis to the left; it’s not in Wolfhunter, but it’s close, a couple of miles from what looks like the center of town, such as that might be. We make the turn, and Sam parks in front of the office. “Two rooms?” he asks. I nod.

  “Preferably with connecting doors,” I tell him. “For sure next to each other.”

  “I don’t think that’ll be a problem,” he says. There are only four cars in the parking lot, and most likely one of them belongs to whoever’s working the front desk. It’s a modest-size place, just one level and no more than fifteen or sixteen rooms set in an L shape around the lot. No swimming pool, but I think most motels have done away with them for liability reasons, and I don’t want my kids attracted to lounging around one anyway. “Be right back.”

  He slides out and walks into the office. I wait, watching him inside through the dim glass, and I’m startled when Connor suddenly leans forward and says, too loudly, “Mom!”

  “Oh come on, volume control!” Lanny moans, and pulls her hoodie over her face. “What the hell.”

  I turn to look at my son. He’s ignoring his sister completely, totally focused on me. He holds out his phone, and I take it.

  He’s pulled up a blog. True Crime something, I don’t really pay much attention to the site’s title once I recognize I’m going to be dealing with an amateur’s opinions . . . until I read the headline on the blog entry.

  SECOND WOMAN MISSING IN WOLFHUNTER, TN. COVERUP?

  Okay. It has my attention. I start reading.

  As you might recall, late last year I covered the case of Tarla Dawes, an eighteen-year-old woman who left her trailer in the sticks outside of Wolfhunter, Tennessee, to get groceries . . . and vanished into thin air. Dawes had a history of drug abuse and more than a little tension at home; the police were quick to dismiss it as a voluntary departure, though how she departed with just a secondhand purse and no extra clothes is a question the Wolfhunter PD (such as it is) seems to want to avoid. Tarla’s mother doesn’t believe that Tarla would have left of her own accord, even though there are plenty of reasons to believe that Tarla and her unemployed nineteen-year-old husband were on the verge of divorce. At least one domestic violence call is on record.

  But what eighteen-year-old disappears without posting or texting a friend? At least calling her mother?

  Now we have a second young woman gone. Bethany Wardrip, twenty-one. Another one with a troubled history, some arrests, nothing unusual for around Wolfhunter: drug possession, public intoxication, disturbing the peace. She griped to a coworker that night that she wanted to leave this town and never come back. Did she? Bethany didn’t own her own car; she often walked or hitchhiked with friends and neighbors. But no one reports seeing her that night, or giving her a ride out of town. Bethany, like Tarla, left with only a purse. Her clothes still hang in her closet. Her three extra pairs of shoes—an old pair o
f Converse high-tops, a heavy pair of hiking boots, and a pair of worn black high heels—were all left behind. More significantly, so was a coffee can found in her small kitchen cupboard with a roll of cash inside: $462.

  That’s a decent amount for a woman who works for minimum wage. The careful savings of a woman who bought little, and according to those who knew her, rarely went out with her old crowd.

  Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like something’s rotten in Wolfhunter.

  I read through it twice, and feel my heart rate speed up. This blogger could be onto something. Maybe it’s the same thing that Marlene felt she needed help with. I don’t know how or why that might have led to this horror show with the daughter, but this feels like something. “Thanks, baby,” I tell him. “This is good information.”

  “I know it is,” he says, with not a small amount of smugness. “Told you I could find stuff.”

  “Yes, you can,” I tell him. “That’s your job from now on, okay? Head researcher. Tomorrow I want you to find out if there’s any more posted about either of these two ladies, okay? Tomorrow, not tonight. Don’t stay up. Promise?”

  “I promise,” he says. “Can I borrow Lanny’s laptop?”

  “Ask Lanny,” my daughter says without taking the hoodie off her face. “I’m right here, doofus.”

  “Okay,” he immediately says, and turns to her. “Can I borrow your laptop tomorrow?”

  “No.”

  “Mom?”

  “It’s your sister’s laptop,” I say. “If she doesn’t want to help finding missing young women who might be in trouble, that’s her business.”

  That brings Lanny bolt upright, clawing the hoodie back and glaring at me. “Mom. That’s not fair!”

  “If the two of you work together, you can get things done. You always do,” I say. “I’m going to have to be at the police station tomorrow. Sam will stay with you guys. I know he’d appreciate the two of you getting along for a day.”

  “We get along,” Lanny says. “Mostly.”

  “Work together.”

  That pleases neither of them on the outside, and both of them on the inside. Lanny rolls her eyes. Connor sighs.

  I know they’ll seize the chance to do something useful for me.

  Sam comes out of the office, gets back in the SUV, and moves it into place in the parking lot. The headlights shine directly on two doors: numbers five and six.

  “Okay,” Sam says, and holds out a key to Lanny. Wolfhunter hasn’t progressed to modern electronic key cards; it’s an elongated plastic tab with the room number on it. “Lanny is the keeper of the key. Lose it, you both chip in for the fine. Got it?”

  “We won’t lose it,” Connor says. “Why does she get the key?”

  “I’m older,” she says, and takes it. “We’re in six. So you’re—”

  “We’ll be in five,” he says. “Breakfast at eight a.m., okay?”

  “Do we have to hunt for it out in the woods?” Lanny sighs. “Bring home a squirrel or something?”

  “There’s a McDonald’s half a mile down. But if you want squirrel bacon . . .”

  “Ew. No. Gross, Sam.”

  We make sure the kids are stowed away, and locked in, before we take the room next door. It does have a connecting door, and I make sure it works before I can relax. At least there’s no arguing from the other side.

  “Two beds,” he says. “Romance isn’t dead.” There’s nothing familiar about the room, and yet it reminds me strongly of one we shared many months back, after Melvin’s escape from prison, before things ended in the green hell of a tumbledown mansion. This one is clean, neat, utterly plain. I put my duffel bag down with my purse. Sam has tossed his bag on one of the beds, and is unzipping it to get out his toiletry kit.

  I sit in the single, stiff armchair crowded in the corner next to the air conditioner. It’s just blowing out barely cool air. “Do you want me to ask?” I keep the question calm, and soft. “I won’t if you don’t.”

  He freezes, and is suddenly intent on the kit he’s holding. “About what?”

  “Jesus, Sam, really?” I keep my voice low. My kids are right next door, and I definitely do not want them to hear any of this. “You know exactly what I mean.”

  “Yeah,” he says. It sounds grim.

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning I want you to ask. But I don’t.”

  I stand up, take the leather bag from his hands, and put it on the bed. Then I put my hands on his cheeks. The stubble’s sharp against my palms. No space between us. “What did he write in her journal?” I swore I’d never want to know anything else about Melvin Royal, especially when he was dead and buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave, but Sam needs to get this out like an infection from a wound. I’ve got the name of the person who might have sent it, and we’ll put a stop to any more of Melvin’s posthumous torture.

  He pulls me into an embrace, as if he wants to keep me sheltered from what he’s about to say. “He gave me the whole story,” he says. “How he abducted her. How she fought back. How he—how long she—”

  My mouth goes dry, because it’s as if Melvin knows, even dead, what will hurt us most. What destroys us. “Stop,” I tell him, and turn my head so that my lips are resting on the soft skin just beneath his ear. “Sam, this is what he wanted. Did I tell you that one of the detectives who interrogated him committed suicide six months later? That’s how toxic Melvin was, like breathing nerve gas. You can’t let him inside, Sam, you can’t. Everything he wrote down could have been just his sick, lurid fantasy. We can’t know. We shouldn’t know. And I wish to God you hadn’t read it.”

  I feel the breath he takes in. It’s like a hand grasping for a life preserver. “I had to,” he says. “Everything he said feels true, Gwen. If she went through that level of pain . . . I don’t know what to do about it. He’s dead. I don’t have anywhere to put this . . . sickness.”

  I’d wept through the medical examiner’s testimony of each of Melvin’s victims at my own trial. I’d forced myself to listen, to know what they’d suffered at the hands of a man who sat at my kitchen table and slept in my bed and was the father of my beloved children. I’d forced myself to endure it the way their families must have. I already know what happened to Callie, and it had been bad enough then as a clinical report; I’ve never heard it in Melvin’s own emotionally predatory words. He’d revel in the details. In every word choice.

  “Put it on me,” I tell Sam. “Tell me.”

  We sit side by side in the blank, empty motel room, and he tries. Outside, the sky is dark over the trees, the stars blaze, and I stare at that view with tears welling up and dropping cold down my cheeks. It’s awful, listening to the quiet rage of what Sam is feeling and what Melvin did. I wish it was beyond my comprehension, but it’s so familiar. I can picture every step of it, every cut and scream and horrific detail. After he’s done talking, he’s short of breath and shaking. I wish we had drinks. I feel filthy and heavy and unspeakably sad now, but I know it was important for him to share it, and not to hold it by himself.

  Despite our best intentions, Melvin is still reaching out from the grave to hurt us. And I don’t know when that will stop. That’s probably his plan, to make us dance to his tune for as long as he can. Maybe the man in Richmond is the end of it.

  And maybe there are more of them. Melvin always did have fans.

  “The last thing he wrote,” Sam says, “was that she begged him to kill her. Begged him for hours. He recorded it. He says he’ll send me the tape.” He swallows. “I’m talking like he’s still alive. But he must have planned this out, and there’s somebody out there mailing things for him. So it’s like he is still alive.”

  I flinch, because once again Melvin’s found some unspeakable cruelty to inflict. I wait until my voice is steady, and then say, “I found the name and address in Richmond. Kez is on top of it, and we’ll stop him from doing more damage. Melvin hoped to make you his last victim. Don’t let him do that to you.”

&nbs
p; He nods slowly.

  I’m not sure he can resist.

  After a few silent moments, he stands up, gets his toiletry kit, and goes into the bathroom. I hear the shower start. I lie back on the bed and stare up at the ceiling. It’s clean, no water stains, which is a wonder. I hate this. I hate that Melvin is standing invisibly between us, grinning like a skull.

  I strip down to a light tee and panties and climb into bed; it’s so hot and humid that I toss the comforter back and leave just the top sheet. The shower runs a long, long time. It’s easier to stay in there; I remember all the times I tried to wash away the pain, the guilt, the unspoken rage. He needs to feel clean again, but I doubt he’ll find it in the bath.

  When he comes out, finally, I hear him stop for a moment. Trying to see if I’m asleep, I think. So I say, “It’s okay if you want to take the other bed. I understand.”

  He switches off the light that sits between the two beds. I feel his weight settle in next to me, then the gentle heat of his body as he moves close. I’m on my side, and I look back at him, then turn to face him. The kiss he gives me is gentle, almost regretful. I curl up against him, never mind the heat of the room, and his skin smells like the lemony motel soap that will always, from this moment on, remind me of grief and loss.

  We hold each other in the dark, and we don’t talk. I’m almost afraid to breathe. There’s something so fragile between us that the slightest tap might shatter it.

  It might be the most intimate we’ve ever been.

  After the promised morning breakfast, and an argument with my daughter about whether or not pajama pants are appropriate for McDonald’s, Sam drives us into Wolfhunter.

  It’s not much to look at, after all. The downtown—well, the whole town, really—is just about a ten-by-ten-block grid, with dirty-fronted shops along the main drag and faded clapboard houses leaning beside rusted fences.