by Lou Berney
“You there,” Mr. Bingham said at one point in the afternoon, scowling. “What’s wrong with you? Are you sick?”
In the parking lot behind the theater, after their shift ended, Theresa paused by her car and asked Wyatt if he wanted a ride. He didn’t understand. He never needed a ride home. He lived only six blocks from the Pheasant Run, just off Villa Avenue. Theresa knew that.
“I always just walk home,” he told her. “It’s not far.”
She shook her head and pressed two salty fingers to his lips. Shush.
Her mother worked evenings. Theresa had led him by the hand into her bedroom. When she’d unhooked his bow tie and dropped it to the floor, when she’d tugged his belt free and it curled to the floor, when she’d taken him in her hand and squeezed, Wyatt had felt like he was going to break apart into individual atoms.
Now, so far away from that night, so far away and so near, Wyatt just needed a drink. He returned to the playground swing and opened another beer. He was halfway through the first long drink when he heard a scuff behind him. Footsteps, moving quickly. Before he could turn, something hard hammered him between the shoulder blades. He dropped the beer bottle and staggered, the breath knocked out of him. Another blow caught him flush in the ribs. He dropped to his hands and knees, holding on for dear life as the earth tried to spin away from beneath him.
He turned and caught just a glimpse of his attacker—sunglasses, a hoodie drawn tight to hide the rest of the face. And then a club of some kind was whistling at him, a baseball bat or a two-by-four, and Wyatt rolled to his right. Wood cracked against the asphalt, as sharp as a gunshot. He still couldn’t breathe. Each breath made him feel like he was being yanked inside out.
He tried to get his bearings. His empty beer bottle had broken when he dropped it. Wyatt grabbed the biggest, sharpest shard he could reach and lurched to his feet, slashing wildly out. He hit nothing, lost his balance, and stumbled into his attacker. The hoodie, the sunglasses—it was too dark for him to see more than that—everything was moving too fast. The attacker kneed him in the groin. Wyatt dropped the shard and stumbled away.
He saw that the attacker’s weapon was a wooden board, long and wide and flat. It whipped around again and nailed Wyatt’s knee. He fell again.
He knew that his most dangerous enemy was panic. He found the ballpoint pen in his pocket. When he heard the attacker move toward him again, he pivoted and made a backhand stab.
His attacker grunted with pain. Wyatt didn’t know what part of the body he’d hit. The attacker’s leg, he thought. Wyatt was curled on his side. His kneecap felt like it had been snapped in half.
He heard more scuffs. His attacker moving toward him. Or away?
Wyatt was out of ballpoint pens. Out of ideas. When in doubt, O’Malley had told him once, bluff. Wyatt managed to lift his head.
“Bring it on!” he yelled, and then threw up.
He waited. The scuffs became fainter. The attacker was running across the street, through the parking lot behind the Burlington Coat Factory. Was he limping? Wyatt couldn’t be sure. The attacker disappeared around the corner of the building.
He’d dropped his weapon a few feet away. Wyatt realized that the board looked familiar—a six-inch cedar plank from a stockade fence—but for an instant he couldn’t figure out why.
He heard an engine growl. Tires squealed. And then the squeal died, the growl faded. The night once more was as peaceful as it could possibly be, just the wind humming, just the chirr of cicadas in the park’s trees.
Wyatt relaxed and threw up again.
Julianna
CHAPTER 16
Julianna woke early, the birds in her backyard silent and just a smudge of gray light between the trees. She’d not slept well. The few times she managed to go under, harrowing dreams had jolted her back awake. This morning she remembered none of the dreams, not a single detail.
She felt both exhausted and wired: about to collapse, about to come out of her own skin. She took a long, scalding shower. Crowley was gone, but she could still smell him on her, even after the shower.
He’d put a finger beneath her chin and tipped her head back.
“Bet you’d like to know,” he’d said. “Wouldn’t you?”
Julianna had stared up at him and refused to back down. Come what may. His finger against her skin was rough, callused, warm. She knew he could feel her heart racing.
“You’re lying,” she said.
“Your sister was fixing to leave, already walking away. But then I asked her where she was headed to, and she stopped. I thought maybe she’d changed her mind. You know, ’bout wanting to come inside and hear me play my guitar. Hopeful young man that I was. But no. No, she didn’t even turn all the way back round. Just looked over her shoulder at me and said what she did.”
Crowley was lying. Julianna knew it. He’d planned all this. He’d been manipulating her since the night began. Genevieve had said nothing to Crowley that would shed light on her disappearance. There was only one chance in a thousand that he was telling the truth.
In other words: There was one chance in a thousand he was telling the truth.
Julianna could see Genevieve pausing, glancing back over her shoulder at Crowley. Her lips moved, but Julianna couldn’t hear what she was saying.
“What do you want?” Julianna had asked Crowley.
He’d lifted her chin higher. He leaned down, his face so close that Julianna could almost feel the wiry prickle of his goatee. She waited, every muscle tensed, for his other hand to settle on her hip, to lock around her wrist.
Instead, though, he straightened back up and laughed. He pulled his finger from beneath her chin. A soft stroke, a flick.
He turned. Julianna, surprised, realized he was leaving. She grabbed for his arm again, and this time Crowley shot an elbow up and out, quick and sharp, knocking her hand away. He gave her one last innocent, blue-eyed smile.
“Don’t worry, darlin’,” he’d said. “I’ll be in touch. I ain’t done with you yet.”
Over breakfast this morning, Julianna tried to clear her mind. She had no appetite but forced herself to eat a few spoonfuls of vanilla yogurt, a slice of wheat toast. She made tea. Clearing the mind, however, was easier said than done. If she didn’t know what Genevieve had said outside Crowley’s trailer on that night so long ago, she knew exactly what Genevieve would be saying now.
Juli! You are such a dumb-ass!
Because of course Crowley was lying. This—last night, now—was precisely why DeMars had warned Julianna to stay away from him.
So. Yes. She resolved to have nothing more to do with him whatsoever. As she stared at her phone. After half an hour of that, she grabbed her keys and got into her car. She needed to know what Crowley knew. She needed to know what he wanted in exchange for that information.
Oh, Juli. You’re breaking my heart, what a dumb-ass you are!
Crowley’s truck wasn’t in the driveway. Julianna parked anyhow, on the street, and climbed the cracked concrete stairs to the porch. She knocked on the door, waited, knocked again. An old bedsheet covered the front window, so she couldn’t peek inside.
She was so pissed at herself. Of course Crowley was lying, and of course he wasn’t home. He’d stayed two steps ahead of her since the beginning, so why not now? Crowley knew she knew where he lived. The last place he’d be, if he didn’t want her to find him, was here. And he didn’t want her to find him. What fun would that be?
She tested the knob. Unlocked. She opened the door and stepped inside. It was, just as people said, like being outside her own body, like watching herself from a distance. All the while wondering, with mild curiosity, What the hell are you doing?
The light from the open door cut through the gloom and fell across a sofa, a coffee table, an old-fashioned big-screen TV, as big as a refrigerator. On the coffe
e table, there was an empty pizza box and an empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s. A knitted afghan—alternating bands of pale spring colors, blue and green and pink—was folded neatly over the back of the sofa.
Julianna shut the door behind her. The smell, musty but floral, surprised her. On the wall closest to her hung a painted tin retable: a sinking boat, a drowning swimmer, a school of fish. The Virgin Mary gazed down from the sky above, but you could tell from her expression that her mind was elsewhere.
A light burned weakly in the hallway. Julianna moved toward it, past the kitchen. The gloom was oppressive, the temperature ten degrees warmer inside than out. It was like being in a cave, or a coffin.
There were three closed doors. One on the left, one on the right, and one directly ahead, at the far end of the hallway. Julianna picked the door at the far end of the hallway and opened it. Inside was an unmade bed. Another empty bottle of whiskey sat on the table next to the bed, next to a bunch of dusty glass grapes and a box of matches.
She pulled open the drawer in the bedside table. Empty. She was looking for . . . what, exactly? She didn’t know.
She still felt both exhausted and wired. But more exhausted than wired now, the equilibrium upset by the gloom, by the heat so thick it was an effort just to breathe. The unmade bed looked alarmingly inviting. She tried to remember which fairy tale it was where the little girl snuck into a house, curled up in the bed, and then fell asleep. Goldilocks?
The wind outside blew. The little house creaked and groaned. It sounded like footsteps. Julianna waited. When the wind stopped blowing, the creaking stopped, too. She stepped back out into the hallway.
A ghost hovered at the other end of the hall, staring at Julianna with pale, empty eyes.
An old woman in a shapeless housedress, the lenses of her glasses catching the light from the one overhead bulb.
“¿Quién es usted?” the old woman said.
“Hello,” Julianna said. Her high-school Spanish was gone, long forgotten. Their mother, who had married a half-Mexican man, had not wanted Julianna or Genevieve to even learn it in the first place. “I’m looking for a friend.”
The ghost shook her head. “He is gone. Christopher. He just rent.”
Christopher. Christopher Wayne Crowley.
“Do you know when he’ll be back?” Julianna said.
The ghost shook her head again. The lenses of her glasses flashed. She mimed something—picking up something from the floor. A suitcase.
“He is gone. Yesterday.”
Of course. He wasn’t two steps ahead of her, he was three.
In her car, driving home, Julianna wondered how long Crowley would keep her waiting, suffering. It depended, she supposed, on how much pleasure he took from this part of the game. And how much pleasure he anticipated taking from the next part.
It was only ten o’clock in the morning when she got back to her house. That left her a full twelve hours before her overnight shift at the ER started to stare at her phone and go slowly out of her mind. And then she remembered the phone number DeMars had given her last night, just before Crowley showed up. Julianna had forgotten all about it.
She called the number. A woman with a breathless, Betty Boop voice answered. Julianna introduced herself. She wasn’t sure how much DeMars had told Mary Hilger Hall about her. Enough, apparently.
“Oh, hon,” Mary Hilger Hall said, “I’m so, so sorry about your sister.”
“Thank you,” Julianna said.
“It’s just so, so sad.”
Mary Hilger Hall explained she hadn’t seen the message that Julianna sent her because it had gone to a certain kind of mailbox on Facebook versus the regular kind of mailbox, one that she’d never even known to check. Her outrage was lengthy and detailed. Julianna waited for her to take a breath.
“Do you think it would be possible for me to see the other photos you took?”
“Oh, of course!”
They made plans to meet at noon, at the Nichols Hills Starbucks. Julianna arrived a few minutes early. A woman at a table near the door waved to her.
“Julianna?” she said.
Julianna sat down across from her. Mary Hilger Hall was a large woman—not fat but broad-shouldered, thick-necked. Her chiffon flutter-sleeve top, pink, was assertively feminine. And the Betty Boop voice: a lifetime spent trying to convince people she really was a girl.
She had a yellow Kodak envelope in front of her, one hand laid protectively over it, as if she thought Julianna might make a sudden snatch for it.
“Thank you for meeting me,” Julianna said.
“Do you want something to drink?” Mary Hilger Hall said. “I love their iced caramel macchiato, but I’ve already had too much caffeine today. And it’s only noon!”
“No,” Julianna said. And then, in case a stronger hint was necessary, “I can’t wait to see the photos.”
The hand on top of the envelope didn’t move.
“So you think— Oh, my gosh. So you think your sister might be in one of my pictures?”
“I don’t know.”
“I remember we ate dinner at the Chinese place. The one you saw in the one picture I put on Facebook? My friend Sandy and I. It was around eight-thirty, I think. I’m almost positive we ate dinner around eight-thirty or so. A little later, maybe.”
The hand on top of the envelope didn’t move. Julianna took a slow breath and tried not to lose her shit. This woman, she realized, was really no different from Crowley. If Julianna wanted what Mary Hilger Hall had, Julianna would have to pay the price. She would have to get it over with.
“The last time I saw my sister was at seven-thirty P.M. A couple of people saw her on the midway a little bit after that. A girlfriend of hers and a kid working the corn-dog stand. At nine o’clock a woman from Okeene positively identified her on Food Alley. That was the last time anyone ever saw her.”
“Oh, my gosh,” Mary Hilger Hall said. “So maybe . . . oh, my gosh.”
“May I see the photos now, please?”
The woman gave a start. Like of course Julianna could see them. Like she’d been begging Julianna this entire time to let her open the Kodak envelope. She did so now, slowly, with great drama.
“This is the first one,” she said, taking the first photo out of the envelope and handing it across the table to Julianna. “I took a whole roll. Twenty-four pictures. I’ve been meaning to put them all online, but I just love that one of Sandy so much, with the egg roll. I think they’re still in order, mostly. Cameras back then, you know, they didn’t tell you the time of day. Mine didn’t, at least. It was just an old Instamatic my mother gave me. With the little cube flashbulbs?”
Julianna looked at the photo. It was a daytime shot of the International Building at the fairgrounds, with the dirty white bubble on top that had been replaced several years ago by a conventional roof. Julianna remembered the suck and whoosh when you opened the doors to the building. Special doors. The pressure inside had to be kept high or the bubble would collapse. Once in a while, the bubble did collapse, and it was big local news.
The International Building had the best free stuff at the fair: tiny plastic flags from Ghana, little jars of jelly from Wales. As a little girl, Julianna had loved when the person staffing a booth wore the costume of his or her exotic native land.
“I know what!” Genevieve had said that day when Julianna begged to go inside. “Let’s not and say we did.”
“We got to the fair around five in the afternoon,” Mary Hilger Hall said, leaning across the table to study the photo, too. “I know this is the first one because we—”
Julianna set the photo down and stood. Mary Hilger Hall looked up at her, surprised.
“Do you mind if I go over there and look at these in private?” Julianna said.
The woman frowned, befuddled, and then wo
unded, and then aggrieved. Julianna just smiled pleasantly, smiled pleasantly, smiled pleasantly—a skill she had learned at the feet of the master, Ben, at work. If Mary Hilger Hall thought Julianna was going to let her surrender only a single photo at a time, with commentary, she was out of her mind.
“Well,” Mary Hilger Hall said finally, “I suppose . . .”
Julianna carried the envelope to a table on the other side of the room. She went through the photos slowly. In several of them, the people in the crowd were so tiny and so blurred it was impossible to make out any detail—wide-angle shots of the International Building and the Space Tower and the B-52 bomber that used to be on display not far from the livestock barns. Other photos were close-ups—a lamb wearing a knit hat, a box of saltwater taffy, a much younger Mary Hilger Hall mugging for the camera—with no one in the background at all.
Nothing, nothing, nothing. Julianna had almost reached the very bottom of the stack. In the photos, day turned to dusk and dusk turned to night. And then Julianna’s heart stopped. It was a shot of the illuminated fountains outside the Made in Oklahoma Building. In the crowd stood a girl in her late teens, with stormy waves of chestnut brown hair. Blue jeans, a white T-shirt with an American flag, a pensive expression on her face as she watched the water leap and shimmer. She was hugging herself. In jeans and only a T-shirt, she looked like she was freezing.
Genevieve.
But almost before Julianna could finish that thought, she realized:
No. The girl in the photo was not Genevieve.
The resemblance was only superficial: the age, the hair, the clothes. This girl had a round face with small eyes, close together, light not dark, and she wore a pair of tacky dyed-feather earrings that Genevieve would never have worn. And the way this girl hugged herself against the chill, the way she slouched—Genevieve took great pride in her posture. She could set a book flat on her head and walk casually down the basement stairs. She could pivot at the bottom without missing a beat and walk casually back up again.
