Find You in the Dark

by Nathan Ripley

  “We’ll have a good dinner and good talk, okay? And I have no plans of going anywhere for the rest of the week. Honestly, I’m pretty run down, but you know how Keith is. Feels like a bad idea to put off meeting him when he’s in one of his urgent moods.”

  “I don’t feel like fighting with you and Kylie at the same time, so I’m going to pretend I’m fine with it until I actually feel that way.”

  “I am sorry, Ellen, really.”

  Ellen only knew about Keith at all because she’d spotted us having coffee a few years ago, across town from her work. She’d taken a half-day off to look for new curtains, and instead came across her husband having a nice midafternoon date with a policeman. I’d invented an elaborate but tight lie about meeting Keith in a long lineup at the post office one day: I talked him through various personal issues sometimes, in exchange for exciting cop-life stories. Ellen seemed to like the idea of me having a pal I helped out, since my social time was mostly spent with her, Kylie, or alone at home. Or in the woods.

  I slid-walked over to her in my socks—we’d only put in the slick hardwood floors four months earlier, and I didn’t think I’d ever get sick of doing that Risky Business drift or rolling across the floor in my office chair when I got a beer or club soda from the fridge. When I reached Ellen, I pillowed my head on her shoulder and said, “Sorry.” She patted the back of my head, then gently pushed her fingertips against my forehead. Ellen always kept her own nails short, dispensing with what she called “manicure-bitch bullshit,” which she associated with a couple of loathed coworkers.

  “Everyone will be in a much more forgiving mood if you take a shower. Immediately,” she said.

  “Okay.” I took the stairs two at a time. Kylie’s bedroom door was closed, and a Drake song that had grown on me despite deep resistance pulsed through loud enough to be heard in the bathroom. I hummed and showered off the dirt and sweat, then took out as much of the muscle tension as I could with the high-pressure showerhead. When I came out the music was off and Kylie was standing at the head of the stairway.

  “If you ever sing along to anything I love again, I’m going to move out,” she said.

  “Be my guest. I’ll donate your trust fund to a chimp sanctuary if you do.”

  “I love chimps.”

  “It’s a deal, then, sure.”

  Ellen was going for her purse, the delivery guy at the door, by the time we got downstairs. I pulled the wallet out of the inside pocket of my jacket, hanging on the rack by the door, and paid him off. He looked relieved to see me, the customary giver of the extra twenty.

  “I was going to pay,” Ellen said when the door was closed.

  “I know, I just got there first.”

  “I was going to give your stupid huge tip, too. I hate it when you’re fiddly about money stuff, Martin.” She’d pulled on a U of W sweater, one she’d owned since I met her in class back when we were both in college. She barely looked older than Kylie, adrift in the enormous garment. I could remember seeing that sweater for the first time, an October afternoon two decades ago, when I followed Ellen back to her apartment building from class after I found out who she was, who her sister was. The fabric was rich purple then, not the grayed-out blue it was now. I was a professional at following, back then—Ellen didn’t see me, even when I was directly across the street, or right behind her, close enough to pluck the scrunchie out of her hair if I wanted to.

  I did want to, but I controlled myself. And it paid off.

  “Obviously you could have paid, I didn’t mean—”

  “Don’t soothe me like a child, Mart.” She sighed, a short one, seemed to reorient herself. She did this sometimes, a sort of thinking-in-real-time thing that ran counter to the calculated way I had to do everything. I admired it. “Forget it. We have to talk about some bigger things this week. Along with whatever you want to float about Kylie, I need to talk to you about my career. I was going to do it tonight but I guess that’s not possible anymore.” We could hear Kylie clattering plates in the other room. She liked to undo the takeout containers and use them as the serving plates, but knew that when her mom or I dished out the food we used proper bowls. She set the takeout-table up much more quickly than she’d perform any other kitchen task.

  “Yes. Soon. Whenever you want, just when I can give you my full attention.”

  We sat down and started to eat, hard, the three of us. Kylie was refueling after a no doubt brutal swim practice, her coach screaming something about nationals and hustle no matter how far away they were. My heart rate was still up from the energy slugs and caffeine, and I needed the food to start flattening out again. Ellen chewed with quiet purpose, a little anger, and the suspense of the conversation we were about to have. I was going to start but Kylie did instead, with a little less elegance than I would have hoped.

  “Mom still thinks I’m going to get murdered anytime I’m out of the house past ten.”

  “Oh,” Ellen said, with an authentic pain that made Kylie wince, as her newly braces-free teeth nipped a piece of beef off her chopsticks. She’d been going for a fight, not an injury.

  “Never say that again, Kylie. That would be past the line in any house, let alone this one,” I said.

  “You’re right, Martin,” Ellen said. She’d put down her sticks, and looked like she was reaching for Kylie’s hand, then thought better of it and grabbed the bottle of Sriracha, making a red pool of the sauce at the edge of her plate. “I can’t believe you, Kylie. Yes, I do worry more than a normal mom would. I ask you to understand that, Kylie. My anxiety creeps up. And it’s not something pills can take care of. It’s a real leftover from a real thing that happened.”

  “Tinsley,” Kylie said. Ellen had wanted to name Kylie after the vanished sister, but I’d asked her not to. It would just make things worse, I’d said, back when we found out she was pregnant, a little after I started ReeseTech and began digging seriously.

  “Yes, Tinsley,” Ellen said. “Noises from the street talk to me when neither of you are here. Even when it’s totally quiet. I think about my sister, how strong and bulletproof she seemed, and then I think about you, and how no matter how strong I think you are or you think you are, there are men out there who want exactly that. A strong girl to hurt and crush and kill. I wonder if you get that.”

  Kylie was quiet, so I winced for us both. I couldn’t bring myself to interrupt, but I hunched over my noodles, shoveling them in and listening closely. Ellen had never spoken this graphically about Tinsley to our daughter, at least not when I was around. At her most serious, Ellen could talk to you and make it seem like she was talking to herself, like you’d intruded on a truth she hadn’t intended to share.

  “That fear I have when you’re out, when we haven’t planned where you are, when I don’t know where you are, Kylie? It’s a pretty legitimate way to feel, I think. Even if it was twenty years ago.” Ellen looked at me and I nodded, then looked at Kylie.

  Twenty years. She had it right: next week would be the anniversary of Tinsley Schultz’s disappearance. I understood what Ellen lived with, the emotional intensity of her days and years after that vanishing. I still had my own leftovers to deal with when I saw a woman with a certain kind of hair or neck, or heard a laugh that had the right combination of unashamed enjoyment and elegance. I made a point of never looking for too long—I had to concentrate to make sure I never went back to the person I was in college, when I was following Ellen. But I kept every one of those impulses stored up for my digs.

  “But we need to find a way that you can have a normal teenage life and that I can feel comfortable, is what your father is about to say, right, Martin?”

  “I was gearing up for that. Look, can you two start eating so we can do this without knowing that the reward at the end is cold Chinese food?” This didn’t get a laugh, but there was a hairline crack in the tension, and chopsticks started moving again.

  “The thing we need, all of us, is to talk in advance, premeditate, stay in touch. No last
-minute plans for you, Kylie, and you have to make sure your phone is charged up and you text your mom back as quickly as you text Ramona back.”

  “You can’t talk, Dad. We never hear from you when you’re out camping or whatever.”

  “No one’s worried about me. We worry about you, okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m not insane,” said Ellen. “Your aunt was kidnapped and murdered.”

  “We don’t know that,” I said.

  “I do. I know that. She would never have left us without saying why, and she would have come back to us by now. I just fucking worry about my daughter, okay?” For a second Ellen seemed to have forgotten that said daughter was at the table, because she never swore in front of Kylie.

  “Mom. Mommy. I know. I just need to—we can organize it, I can make sure you know where I am when I’m not here. But someday I’ll be at college and then someday maybe in another city, so we have to start to find a way to make us both feel good about this, alright?”

  Annoyed that Kylie had found a better way to put this than I had, but proud enough to mask it, I ate while they talked, checking my watch. I had an hour and ten. I was meeting Keith to get more files, ones he’d been hyping up for days as being the best ones yet. He said that every time, but I couldn’t resist being excited, anticipating what he’d have for me, who’d be inside those scanned pages. Ellen and Kylie were still talking when I left, about swimming, about a celebrity divorce, about an upcoming break from the rain, not about kidnapping and murder. Our greasy plates were still on the table, and my goodbyes were barely noticed.

  I couldn’t stay patient about looking at my scrapbook any longer, though. I had to go back to my desk before I left. Leaving my family talking, I moved down the hallway, quietly keyed the drawer open and slid the scrapbook out. It powered up in a few seconds, the old software rustling to life, aided by the processor and the rest of the new parts I’d swapped into the machine, and I clicked open the ancient version of iPhoto where I’d dumped yesterday’s pictures before wiping my camera. I sat and rotated my chair so I could see both screen and kitchen doorway at once. It would just be a quick flip-through—I couldn’t allow myself to lose my grip on time, not with Kylie and Ellen so close by.

  The first shot was of my shovel, as it always was, the blade of this tool I’d only use once before laying it to a dishonorable dumpster rest like its predecessors. My left hand had been just outside of the frame of this photo, gloved, ready to start, to seek her out in the earth that had hidden her for decades.

  Then: the dig site unspoiled, if dirty with highway trash, shots of the markers I’d laid out, of the evidence of a small mound only a few feet away from where I’d estimated it would be from the case files. I looked up at the kitchen door and counted out five seconds with my right index finger on my left wrist, a trick I had to slow my pulse. I flicked through the rest of the pictures quicker, wanting to get to the end before the voices in the kitchen slowed and I had to stow the scrapbook and leave. I made it through the digging, the carefully arranged dirt, until I finally hit the first bone: an ulna, the thin forearm bone of a woman in her early twenties. The next few pictures uncovered the rest of her, showing how carefully I’d taken the dirt off her yesterday evening.

  I DROVE MY JEEP THROUGH the narrow, sloped streets around my home before surrendering to the traffic leading downtown. It wasn’t quite rush hour thick, and I was heading in the right direction, but progress was still slow. At least Seattle drivers can handle rain; throw more than three days of snow at the roads, and it begins to look like the least-fun bumper cars ride you can conceive of. I was heading for a 7-Eleven near the Pemberton, where I’d be meeting Sergeant Keith Waring after I finished what I had to do.

  I’d gone to California to find the bones of Winnie Mae Friedkin, a hitchhiker who’d vanished in 1976. She’d been one of the many (fourteen, give-or-take) victims of Horace Marks, the dull truck driver who’d spent a year doing conventional pick-up-and-kills along the Pacific Coast Highway. If he had a refrigerated load, he picked up young women in Cali, did what he did, then threw them in the back and waited until reaching Washington State to get rid of them. Not exactly a brilliant strategy, but spreading the distance between kill and burial was a sure way of keeping some of those bodies in the ground forever.

  Marks had supposedly forgotten most of the burial sites by the time he was arrested in a nearly botched operation that had eleven plainclothes female cops nervously extending their thumbs along that highway in 1977, trolling truck stops for rides from likely psychos, or just pretending to be lot lizards. Marks had picked up Officer Dana Brant just north of Newbury Park, and when he reached his strangling hands toward her, she took a Beretta out of her cowboy boot and shot him in the stomach. He’s still in jail, and still suffers from major digestive issues.

  I parked a couple blocks away from the 7-Eleven and started putting on my non-disguise. No facial putty, no wig. Just a toque, glasses, and a hooded rain slicker over the top of my perfectly adequate Barbour jacket. The cut of the jacket was too good: expensive stuff looks expensive, even on a closed-circuit camera. The cops didn’t have the time to put much legwork into tracking the calls I made, but if they ever decided to dedicate hundreds of hours to scanning security footage at the stores that sold these phones, I wanted to be more or less covered.

  I made a rainy dodge through alleys where a couple of bums were setting up lean-tos with their shopping carts and lengths of blue tarp, the construction-site discount versions of the expensive forensic plastics I used when I was out on my digs.

  One called out “Change?” as I walked by. I passed him two loose dollar bills I had in the back pocket of my jeans. I couldn’t say what he looked like, and he couldn’t say what I looked like; he kept his eye on the cash and I kept mine straight ahead, walking in an unmemorable businessman stride through that dirty alley and then onto the suit-and-umbrella crowded pavement in front of the convenience store. I paid for a disposable cell, preloaded with the minimum number of minutes. I’d be using less than five. Maybe ten if pickup times at 911 were bad.

  Winnie May was victim number eight, one of the five Horace Marks couldn’t locate for the cops when they drove him up and down the highway in the months leading up to his trial. The files Keith provided showed that even an idiot like Marks enjoyed the concealing game; he liked having the girls out there, in the ground, a hidden monument to what he’d done. The only time he came close to dropping a hint about one of the girls he supposedly couldn’t locate, it went right past Bobby Flowers, the lieutenant who was grilling Marks with decreasing patience. The transcript likely left out a few well-deserved beatings.

  I bought Winnie ice cream. She wanted a sundae, hot fudge, only that. Not a cone. I let her finish it before I did her.

  Not much in the way of a clue, but that’s the crucial thing about digging through old files. You have to look for things that cops, smart cops, missed at the time. There’s always at least one or two keen guys in the department who look through the file, scanning for details, hoping to amp up their careers by spotting something everyone else missed. But they’re looking for something important.

  I’m looking for something so dull, so trivial and off-the-cuff, it escaped everyone’s ears at the time, and all the scanning eyes that looked at this same file until the cops stop caring about a given victim, when the perp has been in jail for long enough that he’s a memory, not a case. And the girl, the body in the ground, is remembered by barely anyone, just as a grainy picture on a true crime site. And by her parents, who won’t forget her until they’re dead as well.

  Back in the car, I shed the extra gear and stuffed it in the backseat, then set up my scrapbook, cueing the voice program. I twisted the key in the ignition and started moving, starting the Jeep in a loop of downtown. I dialed the cell.

  “911, what is your emergency?”

  I didn’t even breathe into the phone, just set it snugly on top of one of the speakers, pressed the s
pacebar, and kept driving. The automated, dull voice talked through the operator’s questions, which I couldn’t hear, but were no doubt still happening.

  That is the exact location of Ms. Winnie Mae Friedkin, lately of San Francisco, victim eight of scumbag Horace Marks, currently resident of San Quentin. I found her the way I found the others: by doing your job. She was in a cluster of trees—beech, I believe—about two hundred feet behind what used to be a Dairy Queen in 1976, and is now an out-of-business outdoor equipment shop. Glennis Camping, a victim of the recession. She was only shallowly underground. My metal detector picked up her zipper, her rings, her St. Christopher medal. It was a quick and easy dig. Tell her mother so. What you didn’t do to find her. Tell her mother that she can bury her daughter now, and it’s no thanks to you. Goodbye.

  I waited until the coordinates were read out and the message had stopped playing, then clicked the cell off and put it in one of the cupholders, still circling blocks and driving around downtown until the most paranoid frequency in my mind had calmed, was sure that not even the most cunning satellite could triangulate the short call the cops had just received.

  I pulled up to the Pemberton, an almost-dive in the lobby of one of the cheaper downtown hotels. A place I’d met Keith once before, about two years back. I got a perfect parking space right out front, but had to think for a second about which direction to angle my tires on the steep uphill incline. I got out, rain wicking off my jacket where it had beaded on the plastic piece of shit in the backseat of the Jeep. I slipped my new temp cell phone into a rain gutter by the rear tire and walked on.

  Keith would be in one of the dark back booths, so I made my way past the small crowd around the bartender. Keith got drunk somewhere or other every night, from what I’d seen, but I’d made sure he’d kept the Pemberton off his list of regular stops since our first meeting here. On the nights I met up with him, he left the station a little early so he could start drinking sooner, as I’d be picking up the tab. I’d followed him carefully before the first few times we met, flipping on those old surveillance skills. I made damn sure he wasn’t trying to set me up before I started buying his files and putting them to use.