Find You in the Dark

by Nathan Ripley

  “You’re just talking to yourself, pal, don’t worry. Makes sense with what you’ve been going through. Your fantasies coming to life.”

  “They’re not my fantasies. I haven’t fantasized about having my life ruined. I was helping families, helping them get past what animals like you did to them. You, not me.” Shurn’s boots had vanished into the dirt, and the next shovelful covered about halfway up his shin. The legs didn’t move, but Shurn did lean back a little, making sure no pebbles caught him in the eyes.

  “Nobody buys that. You are me, Marty. You even have the same dance partner now, and Frank’s the best anyone could hope for, believe me. Everyone’s going to know exactly what you are unless you follow Frank’s rules real close.

  “The cops have always thought you’re a roving pervert, a psycho in the making. See how quickly that lady detective saw the real you when you went down to ask about Tinsley? You should have begged off and sent the wife down to the precinct, or at least taken her with you. Lone wolf creep like you in there, looking into the eyes of natural police like that lady? You flipped every instinct switch she had. Miracle she hasn’t arrested you for your lil’ girl’s vanishing already. That cop sees you, knows you, the same way we recognize each other. The way Ragman knew you were the guy messing with our track record. You’ve got the stink on you, son, and now you’ve finally drawn blood. Dead cop, dead girl, whatever happens to your daughter on your head—”

  “I didn’t kill any girl.”

  “But God, have you ever wanted to, for so long, right? Secretary Rochelle would have kept living her life just fine—fun nights in bars, watching TV, meeting someone she liked, settling into a nice house, some kids, a business of her own—if it hadn’t been for your hobby, or am I wrong?” I considered swinging the shovel at his head, but kept burying him. Layering and padding the earth. I jumped up and down on it across the length of the half-filled grave, compacting the dirt, doing my best to make sure the filled hole wouldn’t plump up into a small mound.

  “I didn’t kill any girl,” I said. “Your friend, your Ragman, Frank, killed her. He fucked up and killed her.”

  “Ragman Frank. You make him sound like an old blues song, Martin. He’s not quaint, you know that by now. The Ragman is the real truth. And you’re going to have another kill of your own soon enough. That’s the only way to follow the rules and stop this. To get Kylie back in the swimming pool instead of in a hole just like that one. You heard the man. The Ragman. He’ll clean it all up, guaranteed, if you just give him what he wants. One kill, the two of you.”

  “I can’t do it.” I kept shoveling, not sure if I was saying words or just thinking them.

  “You already have, buddy.” Jason Shurn, now covered to the knees, and flickering a little in my vision, yawned, impatient to get back to oblivion. “You killed the cop, real easy. This would be just the same, maybe more satisfying, even. You could do whatever you wanted to whatever girl you choose. You know, follow through on what you wanted to do to Tinsley Schultz, killer. What you wanted to do to her sister before you went all conservative sweetheart and tamped down your fire.

  “Think on it. You could pick any woman you want from off the street, follow her, watch her, take her to Frank, and make whatever you wanted come true and trust him to vanish everything that’s left of her out of the world.”

  I looked away from the vision and focused on the filled grave, working to camouflage it, to make it look just the way it had before the Ragman and I came up here to disrupt what had been lying still for more than a decade. Doing my best in the light I had.

  “I’m not going to kill any girl,” I said. “I’m going to kill him.” There was no answer. Because there was no one there.

  I had to end the Ragman, Frank Connell. No one was going to help me. If I did it his way, the police would come for me, by which time he’d be hanging from a beam in his house while I filled a cell for the rest of my life, and Ellen lived out a ruined existence on the outside, spending my money to get far away from the city, from the monster the courts would tell her she’d slept next to for two decades. I had to kill him.

  “I’d kill him and the world to get Kylie back.” The grave I was working on was finished. Erased. I looked at the field around me, seeing no Jason Shurn to answer me, just the blank loneliness of the outdoors. I slept until dawn, and a little more, curled up in the cold dirt. I picked up the shovel, the rest of my gear, and started to walk back to the Jeep.

  I flicked on cruise control, in the car and in my brain. I couldn’t chance getting pulled over—I was still coming to grips with being alive and committing the everyday act of manipulating the wheel, the miniature puppeteering tugs up and down that kept me following the lazy curves of the highway. Roads not very busy. I had hours before checkout time at the Marpole Motel, which was about thirty miles and a lifetime away from the concealed hole I was leaving behind on the mountain. The sign, which mysteriously depicted a geyser erupting between two pine trees—maybe they were playing up the outdoor hot tub—rose in front of me a couple of minutes after I pulled off at the right exit. Clean the cuts, then go to sleep, I told myself, fumbling in my wallet to find the key card. There was no one outside the motel, the only car there a beige Chevy I’d noticed when I checked in. The owner’s. I could hear a circular saw going in the front office, but I didn’t stop in to say hi. I swiped my room key, entered, and flopped onto my back on the bed. Like in the grave, I told myself to close my eyes for a few seconds only.

  Minutes or hours later, a steady 4/4 knocking at the door started to pull me out of sleep. It was the side of a fist on the maroon-painted steel door, not a maid’s knock, not even a checkout-time management knock. The digital clock on my left read 10:57, still an hour to go before I had to get out of the place. Now that I’d had a chance to lie down in comfort, I could fully evaluate the damage to my body as I unkinked my limbs and slowly walked to the door, focusing on the chipped paint around the doorknob to get my eyes used to being open and in use. The drug that Ragman Frank had shot me up with still oozed around in my veins, in the cottony thickness of my tongue, the tingle in my fingers. Opening the door, I was glad for the talk I’d had with imaginary Shurn out in the woods. If not for that, I wouldn’t have spoken to anyone for hours, and was worried I might have forgotten how to do it properly.

  “Boss?” Gary Leung asked, when I had the door pulled open a slice. I forced myself to believe it was him there, not another hallucination, because it was. That tobacco/vanilla scent he wore wormed into the room.

  “How did you find me here?”

  “You texted Ellen the address, Martin. She sent me down. Your phone’s on the counter in your house, the front desk here says you didn’t sleep in the room—look, can I come in?” He was already pushing his way in, taking off his coat and shaking the moisture out before he came all the way in. It was raining, hard, a clean mist coming in along with Gary’s cologne. Up in the mountains, the empty grave was being further erased by this water and wind. I relaxed a tiny bit.

  “Is Kylie back? Did they find her?” I knew they hadn’t, that my daughter was still with the Ragman and would be until I got her back myself, but I thought it would be strange not to ask.

  “No change on that, no. Sorry. Did you sleep in that, boss? Got mud all over the—man, I hope you’re planning on leaving a pretty huge tip.” Gary leaned back against the dresser and took the room in. I saw the mud for the first time, the tracks I’d made and the dirt outline of my flopped-out body left on the bedspread.

  “Yeah, I got kind of sick up there,” I said. “Stomach bug.”

  “What were you even doing?”

  “Looking for the psycho cop who took Kylie. He told me he used to have a campsite around here, off-trail, gave me a vague description.”

  “That’s what you didn’t want Ellen telling the cops?” Gary laughed, and I stared at him with a burning in my guts that had nothing to do with the stomach bug I’d invented.

  “You shouldn’t
know anything about what I did or did not tell my wife, but yes, I am being wary about what I tell the police when. Who knows who’s feeding information to Waring?” Keith was beyond being fed anything, of course, but as a dead man he was proving to be of more use to me than he was when he was alive.

  “Makes sense, sure, sorry,” Gary said. “Look, you’ve got to come back. Now. Ellen’s freaking about something that lady cop was bugging her about, which, you’ll be happy to know, she wouldn’t tell me.” Gary was staring at my clothes, and I started to strip down automatically, taking off boots and jacket. I was going for the sweater when I remembered that my t-shirt was crusted with dry blood and would be the color of the door I’d just let Gary through.

  “It’s not about Kylie?”

  “My guess is it’s the latest. Friday night, whoever it is out there took away someone else. Rochelle Stokes, the front-of-house girl at ReeseTech. Cute, blond? Remember her?”

  “No.”

  “You should come by the office more. Rochelle was having a dinner party with her roommate on Friday, out-of-town guests and family coming in, and she didn’t show. Just didn’t turn up, after having worked the full day. Vanished somewhere between the ReeseTech lobby and her apartment. Cops got on it right away, because of Kylie. And that dead chick, the whore.”

  “I don’t think Bella Greene was a prostitute,” I said.

  “She was a typical victim-type, and Rochelle wasn’t, for something like this. Ellen figures they want to talk over every possible link between her sister and these two Reese-related kidnappings. They want to talk to you, and Ellen has no real good answer as to why you left your house without your cell phone on an overnight trip while your daughter’s missing.”

  “Is it the cops who are curious, or you, Gary? Got something you want to chat about?” I said, sitting up. “I’m barely at the company, and I haven’t been in for, what, two weeks. I’ve never talked to the girl. And I love my daughter enough that I’m going crazy every second that I’m not actively doing something to bring her back. Putting up Missing posters isn’t my idea of getting proactive.”

  “No one thinks you’ve got anything to do with this, Martin. Come on.” Gary’s eyes told a slightly different story, but he brushed at his hairline and hid them from me with his right hand. “This lady cop just wants to follow up every angle. Doing her job.” I got up and headed toward the bathroom, pulling my socks off.

  “The cop asked Ellen if she knew you had a juvenile record. Ellen faked that she did.”

  “Fuck, she told you all this?” What would have been a lava bubble of panic a few weeks ago, Ellen finding out about my past, was just a ripple of annoyance now, an added pain under the agony of getting Kylie back.

  “You weren’t around, pal. You aren’t around for a lot of stuff nowadays, Ellen says. Not me, her. Here, look at these,” Gary said, fooling with his iPhone for a second and handing it over to me at a series of texts from Ellen.

  You know anything about Martin, juvenile record?

  What

  What I said. Does he talk about having gone to prison as a kid? What did he do?

  Cant tell if you’re kidding, but no, nothing like that, he hasn’t said anything

  “I gotta shower,” I said, sniffing my left armpit and using the motion to distract Gary from what I was doing with my right hand: slipping his phone into my pocket, tapping and swiping at it to prevent it from password-locking before I could have a good look at it in the bathroom.

  “Sure. I’m going to get coffee from that crap-looking diner next door.” Gary pulled on his jacket and walked out.

  I pulled the small duffel bag from the dresser into the bathroom with me, and also took the tiny, complimentary hotel sewing kit in with me. I flicked through the phone, finding nothing interesting in the texts between Gary and Ellen, just endless clothing and business talk, followed by that brief exchange about me. Telling Ellen about the stupid break-ins and little thefts that had gotten me that short jail term, long erased from my record, was something I’d tried to do a couple of times in our first year of going out. But she was still too close to Tinsley’s vanishing, to suspicion. I didn’t want her picturing me, even as a kid, standing in the bedrooms of girls I’d gone to high school with, taking items of theirs while they were at school, or lacrosse practice. Bracelets, souvenir coins, even a sweater, once. Misty Laroche’s forest-green sweater. I used to stare at the back of it in English class for the whole period. Eventually I wanted to have it, too badly to resist crawling into her room and taking it out of her closet. That was the one that got me caught—a retired city planner named Marvin Khan had spotted me, and was waiting in the yard under the window when I swung a leg over to jump down. He sat on my back until the cops came.

  I set Gary’s phone down and got into the shower, thinking back to the one I’d taken at ReeseTech after finding Bella Greene and the girl who wasn’t Tinsley. I was much dirtier this time, each pore clogged with grave filth and my own blood, which started to flow again under the high-pressure stream from the showerhead. I stepped out of the shower with the water still running, and got to work on the next part of my normalization process. I dried my fingers and wiped steam off the mirror, sticking a hand back into the shower to turn the knob to cold, so the steam would stop. I’d learned to sew in my brief stint in juvenile, working a slack job stitching uniforms for local factories. I’d never stitched myself, though.

  “It’s going to keep opening up,” I muttered. Not exactly in a place to explain this at an ER, either. I threaded the needle with white thread from the sewing kit, put on my best Rambo face, and put the needle into the opening the Ragman had made in me. I started to sew that long, flat grin in my chest shut with widely spaced pricks of the needle in and out of my flesh, the thread dragging through each new tiny hole I made. I stopped a quarter of the way through when the pain and stupidity got to me, looking hard in the mirror at what I was doing.

  “Control,” I muttered. Mastering the pain I was putting myself through wasn’t bringing me any closer to controlling the Ragman, or that detective, or even Ellen. The entire world outside of that bathroom door was focused chaos, intent on disrupting my life. Pretending to be an action hero wasn’t going to fix that. It’d give me an infection, at best. I snipped and pulled the thread out, then opened the bathroom door a crack, expecting to see Gary sitting or lying on one of the beds. He wasn’t, so I tracked wet footprints across the carpet over to the bag I’d brought in with me. I pulled a roll of duct tape, an item I always carried with me on digs, out of the side pocket, and laid a long strip of it across the cut. I’d just have to keep my shirt on around Ellen until I could think of a decent excuse.

  I went back into the bathroom to finish dressing. I heard the heavy motel door open while I was in there—Gary must have taken the key card out with him when he went out to get coffee or whatever he was doing—and called out that I’d be done in a second.

  “No rush,” Gary’s voice came through the door, along with a metallic clanking noise.

  After drying my hair with the last fresh hand towel, I checked my fingernails. Still rimmed with dirt, which I boiled out with hot water, wondering how many of Rochelle Stokes’s cells were washing down the drain along with the earth. I was glad I’d never spoken to her. It would make this even worse.

  I came out, ready to face Gary with my best wry grin and a comment about intestinal troubles piling up alongside life troubles as we age, a joke adapted from a sitcom Ellen constantly streamed on Netflix while I cooked and talked to Kylie. All of which seemed longer ago than it really was. It hadn’t been much more than a week since I’d last cooked for the family, but the unbreakable tension of those weeks expanded the time into a geologic age.

  The grin and the joke died forever when I saw what Gary had been doing while I was in the bathroom. With his gloves on, he was tossing the keys to my Jeep from hand to hand. In front of him were two things from the back of the vehicle: a shovel and a bottle of bleach. Parts of
my dig kit, laid out like a corpse in a forensic lab. Or like the evidence it was, in a courtroom, except it was on the damp carpet of my shitty motel.

  “We don’t have to talk about this,” Gary said, smiling, before he tossed the keys back to me. “But, boy is it going to cost you, boss. Cost you big.”

  I stared at him for a moment, then looked away as my thoughts caught up. I couldn’t let Gary see me smile.

  THE RAGMAN WAS CRYING. FRANK Connell, crying, clasping his steering wheel and trying not to make weepy noises, manfully swallowing phlegm and squinting whenever the road came to a curve, forcing clear vision through the prismatic glimmer of the humiliating liquid in his eyes. Like a fucking kid stood up by a prank prom date, he thought, briefly considering holding the wheel straight and piloting the truck into the next rock face he came to.

  He’d held it together well enough in the mountains. Hadn’t lost control when he found out what he’d done, that the girl was dead and that he had no ability to plan properly. To work, to perform his basic function. Competence. All of that was apparently as much a part of the past as the women in the ground, the ones Jason and Carl had put there. But Martin Reese figuring it out, that the Ragman had fumbled his needles, had killed when he didn’t intend to—it was too much. It couldn’t be fixed except by total erasure.

  “You never did anything at all,” Frank Connell said to the Ragman. “You helped out before and after. You fucking janitor for the capable.” He wiped his face with the side of a fist.

  “Because that’s where the function is. Not in drawing out a plan, or keeping it together afterwards.” He twisted the cap off a bottle of ginger ale in the cupholder and guzzled for a few seconds, steering with one hand and closing his eyes in slow, stupid blinks. “No. No.”

  Martin was too smart to give any traction. If he stopped panicking, if he had too much time to think, to collect himself, there would be a real problem. That whole play up there, the cut on the chest, the burial, the girl covered in blood—it was just performance. That same ritual shit that was meaningless to the Ragman. Martin had his pictures, his digging, his reverence. The Ragman had his memories and his ability to do, to make murder happen and vanish. And now he had none of it. The girls gone, the talent vanished.