Black Out: A Novel

by Lisa Unger

  “I have reason to believe the past is about to catch up with me,” I write. “I need an escape hatch.”

  I send the message and wait, sip on my latte. It’s weak and foamy; I wish for New York City coffee, coffee that’s like a punch in the face. There’s a television mounted in the corner of the café tuned to CNN. On the screen: a gallery of murdered women and a caption that reads, COPYCAT? The sound is down, and white closed captions scroll across the screen. “…similar to the murders that took place nearly ten years ago, less than fifty miles from here. But the man accused and convicted of those crimes was killed when…” I look away, my heart racing for some reason, a deafening rushing sound in my ears. I don’t want to see any more.

  I check the e-mail in-box. There’s already a message waiting.

  “I’ll consider myself on standby,” it reads. “In the meantime start telling people you’re taking up a new hobby. Tell people you want your scuba certification. When you’re sure you’re ready, you know what to do. Don’t be hasty. This is for keeps.”

  I finish my coffee and reflect on his words. Sitting in the café watching the old man try his game with the surfer chick, everything takes on a nebulous unreality, as though I’m waking from one of my dreams. I remind myself that nothing is done yet. I’m still okay. I’m still Annie Powers.

  After a while I leave the café and walk toward my car. I have a terrible headache behind my right eye. As I put the key in the lock, I see the girl I noticed at Ella’s party. She’s standing over by the entrance to the café I didn’t see her when I first came out. She’s leaning against the masonry wall, staring at me with that same expression, looking more unkempt than I remembered but still waifishly pretty. As I move toward her, she turns and starts to walk away quickly. I follow.

  “Hey,” I call after her, though why I am following her or what I’ll say when I catch up to her, I have no idea. I just feel this desperation to know her name. She takes a left, is out of sight, and I pick up my pace almost to a run. But when I make the turn, she’s gone. I look up and down the street. She’s nowhere to be seen. My heart is pounding as though I’ve just run a marathon; a familiar panic is blooming in my chest. I get back to my car, shut and lock the door. My airways are constricting, and there’s a dance of white spots before my eyes. It’s a full-blown panic attack. I try to breathe my way through it, like my shrink has taught me. I turn on the car and blast the A/C; the air is hot at first, then chill. I start to calm down. I catch sight of myself in the rearview mirror. My face is a mask of terror.

  “What is wrong with you?” I say aloud. “Pull yourself together.”

  After a while, when I can breathe again and the inner quake has subsided, I drive home. My headache has reached operatic proportions.

  Gray is waiting for me at the kitchen table when I return home.

  “Where’d you go?” he asks with false lightness.

  I’m sure he knows I moved the things under our bed. I sense he’s worried about me and what I might do. What I love about him is that he always gives me my space, gives me the benefit of the doubt.

  “To the store,” I say, putting a plastic grocery bag filled with things I didn’t need on the counter—moisturizer, shampoo, nail polish. He gets up and comes over to me. He sifts through the bag, and I know he’s not fooled by my pointless purchases. He takes my hand.

  “Sit down a second,” he says, indicating a chair.

  As I take a seat, he slides a poor-quality photograph printed from a color printer onto the table in front of me. The man in it has a pocked, fleshy face, with a bent nose and dead, mean eyes.

  “Do you know who this is?” he asks.

  My headache is so bad now it’s making me sick to my stomach. Something black starts to spread across the inside of my brain.

  I rub my head. “No,” I say.

  “Are you sure?”

  I look again, but I feel like I can’t focus on the face. “I don’t think so.”

  He sits down next to me and rests his eyes on the photograph, taps it with his finger.

  “I went to the office and called your father from a secure line. I got a description of the guy who came to see him. Turns out he also left a name and phone number. The name is a fake, of course. The number is just a pager. But the name, Buddy Starr, is on a list of aliases for a guy called Simon Briggs. He’s a bounty hunter. Not as in bail bondsman, more like a private contractor. He’s the guy you hire when you want to find someone and aren’t necessarily worried in what condition. His list of criminal associations is long and colorful.”

  “Why would he be looking for Ophelia?” I ask. The sun streaming in through the windows is way too bright. I cover my eyes.

  “That’s what we need to find out,” he says. “The point is, though, that he’s likely working for someone.”

  I stare at the picture, then close and rub my eyes again.

  “Hey, you okay?” Gray says after a minute. “You look pale.” He puts his hand on my arm.

  “I just have a headache.” I feel his gaze, but I don’t meet his eyes.

  “Maybe you’ve seen this guy before and you don’t remember?”

  “No,” I say, not wanting to admit that it’s not only possible but even likely, given my reaction to the photo. I put my head down in my arms. They come on hard and fast like this for me. If it gets any worse, I could be lying in a cocoon of pain for hours.

  “I don’t know,” I admit.

  I let Gray lead me upstairs. He puts me into bed and closes the shades. I hear him take my migraine medication from the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, run water into the glass by the sink. When he returns to me, I sit up and swallow the pills. He’s very good at taking care of me.

  That afternoon Detective Harrison finally got lucky. A few telephone calls to the records office in the Kentucky town where Annie Fowler was born yielded a faxed copy of her death certificate. She and her infant son had been killed in a road accident when she was just twenty-one years old.

  “A real tragedy,” the records clerk told him, over the phone. “She went to school with my son.”

  “That’s terrible. How sad,” he said, trying to keep the excitement out of his voice. “Do you mind telling me what she looked like?”

  “Red hair and freckles, sweet-faced, petite—maybe not even five foot two, and a little on the plump side. A lovely girl, though. Just really…pretty.” Nothing like the Annie Fowler he knew.

  “I come from a small town myself,” the detective told her, though that wasn’t quite the case. It was just a way he had to lube people up, get them talking. “I know how hard a tragedy like this can be for everyone.”

  “It’s true. It’s true,” the clerk said, sounding wistful and as though she were tearing up. “Her parents have never been the same.” Then, “I am curious, sir. What’s your interest?”

  “I can’t say much, ma’am,” mimicking her polite tone. “But I have reason to believe that someone might have used her information to create a false identity.” He paused when he heard the clerk gasp. “Since her death have you had any queries at your office for her birth certificate?”

  In fact, there had been. A young man came to the records office just a few months after Annie Fowler’s death, claimed that he’d been adopted, was searching for his birth family. He thought Annie might be his sister.

  “He was distraught when I told him about her death. But I was acquainted with her parents. If there had been a baby given up for adoption, I’d have known it. Anyway, he asked for copies of her birth and death certificates. I wasn’t sure why he wanted them, but he had the required information and money to pay the fee.”

  “Do you remember his name?”

  “No, I surely don’t. But I might have it somewhere. Can I call you back?”

  “I’d appreciate it.”

  That afternoon Detective Harrison didn’t know that the real Annie Fowler had died just a few months before Ophelia March was killed in a car accident in New Mexico. He didn�
�t know who I was or what I was hiding, but he knew who I wasn’t. And he felt, as all gamblers do just before they lose it all, that he was about to have the biggest win of his life.

  21

  During the awkward dinner the four of us shared on Frank’s first night home, my mother doted, Marlowe stared at the table, and I watched Frank with a kind of numb horror as he piled food onto his plate and ate with gusto.

  “We’re a real family now,” my mother said as she sat beside Frank around the cramped Formica table in our trailer.

  “That’s right,” Frank said, patting my mother on the arm. She nuzzled up to him like a house cat.

  I was too depressed even to be a smart-ass about it. All I could do was stare at Frank’s hands and think about Janet Parker’s mournful wailing, about the way her daughter had died. I’d never once believed that Frank was innocent. His trial had hinged on the charges against the investigating officer, the suppression of evidence that officer claimed to have found at Frank’s house, and the testimony of the ophthalmologist who the prosecutor claimed had been paid off. Basically, Frank got lucky. And the hands he’d used to murder an unknown number of women were now placing mashed potatoes on my plate.

  Frank was a tall, quiet man with narrow blue eyes and long, slender fingers. His blond hair was going white, and his thin lips disappeared into the flesh of his face. He spoke softly, almost in a raspy whisper. I felt him watch me as I ate.

  “I see a lot of your mother in you, girl,” he said, finally breaking the silence that hung over the table. His words sounded like a warning, and I felt the hairs rise on my arms. My mother shot me a black look. I made a mental note to draw as little attention to myself as possible.

  Outside our trailer there were a few protesters, family members of Frank’s victims. In subdued but persistent voices, they chanted, “Murderer, murderer, murderer.” We all pretended not to hear.

  “We’ll be leaving here by week’s end,” said Frank, getting up from his seat and walking over to the window. With those ghoulish fingers, he pushed the curtain back, releasing a heavy sigh as he looked out. The chanting grew louder.

  I remember thinking, If he were innocent, he’d be angry. He’d be railing against the injustice of those people chanting outside his door. But he seemed simply annoyed, perhaps even disgusted, as though he looked down on their grief and their rage. They were emotions he didn’t understand. He turned and saw me staring. His eyes were flat, empty, rimmed by dark circles. They made me think of the sinkhole where Melissa Parker’s body had floated. There was nothing in his gaze that I recognized.

  The state paid Frank some restitution money, about ten thousand dollars. And he’d used that and some other money he had to put a down payment on a horse ranch in the middle of Nowhere, Florida. True to his word, a week after he was released, we were living there. It happened so fast I didn’t even have time to protest. All we brought from the trailer were our clothes. Everything else he declared as junk to be left behind.

  Our new house sat back on twenty acres of property, fully a half mile from the road. We were completely isolated from our neighbors, flanked by orange groves to the east and a dairy to the west, a half-hour drive from the nearest town. As we rode up the long drive for the first time, my only thought was that I could scream until my head popped off and no one would hear me.

  I awoke my first morning there in my new room; outside my window, sunlight glinted on the dewy grass. I could hear the soft, slow clopping of the horses’ hooves as they milled about their pen, could hear them snuffling and neighing as if in quiet conversation. It would have been the nicest place I’d ever lived if I hadn’t been so sad and so afraid of the man sleeping in my mother’s bed.

  Frank’s presence in our lives was a blanket of snow—everything grew white and silent. Including my mother, who seemed brittle and frozen, following blankly in his thrall. She worked the ranch like a hired hand, cooked and cleaned as I’d never seen her do. She hardly looked at me, except to assign me chores. She touched me only when she took my hand as we said grace before meals.

  As for me, I just was numb, on autopilot. I dressed myself carefully in baggy, formless clothes so as not to attract any attention from Frank. I went to my new school during the day and, when I got home, did the work I was assigned around the ranch. I tried futilely to reach my father every night. My desire to rage and fight with my mother was drained by my fear of Frank. It was as if he emitted a noxious energy that sucked the life from all of us.

  I thought Marlowe and I would be gone before I was living under the same roof with Frank Geary. But Marlowe’s promises of rescue seemed to have evaporated. Something about Frank’s presence changed him, too; he became as unnatural as his father. There was no trace of the passion he’d claimed to have for me, except the dark looks he gave me when he thought no one was watching. I trailed him, trying to steal moments alone with him. But he avoided me until one night I awoke to find him standing in my room.

  I sat up in my bed, my center flooding with hope. “Marlowe.”

  He didn’t answer me.

  “What’s wrong with you?” I asked when he stayed in the corner of my room, unmoving. After a long minute, my hope evaporated; a dark flower of fear bloomed in its place. I wondered how long he’d stood there watching as I slept, and why.

  “He can’t know there was ever anything between us,” he said finally, moving into the light where I could see him.

  “I thought we were leaving,” I said. I kept my voice flat and unemotional. I didn’t want him to know my heart—how afraid I was, how much I needed him.

  “We can’t,” he said quietly. “He’ll find us. And when he does, he’ll kill you. I’m not allowed to love anything.”

  I was too desperate to hear the sickness in his words. I heard only that he was letting me down, like everyone else. “You promised me,” I said, my voice sounding childish even to my own ears.

  “That was before,” he said tightly. “I never thought he’d be released.”

  I’d seen the way Marlowe followed his father around, looking at him with begging eyes, waiting for scraps of attention. “You don’t want to leave him,” I said.

  “You don’t understand,” he said. He came and sat on the edge of my bed. “No one leaves him.”

  Marlowe had seemed so strong, so much wiser than anyone I’d known. Now I could see he was just a scared kid, just like me.

  “You’ll be eighteen in seven months,” he said weakly. “You can legally leave then. I’ll be eighteen next month, and I’m going to join the marines. He won’t be able to get to me there.”

  I was washed over by hopelessness, and I turned to weep into my pillow. He didn’t move to comfort me, just sat there as I cried. I thought there was no end to the well of sadness within me. I thought I didn’t have enough tears.

  Then, “There might be a way, Ophelia. I just don’t know if you’re strong enough.”

  Something in his tone chilled me, even as I felt a little lift. “What are you talking about?” I said into my pillow.

  “It’s the only way,” he said, moving into me. He rubbed my back with the flat of his hand. It was the first time he’d touched me in weeks. I sat up and moved into his arms, let him hold me. It felt so good to be close to him again, to be close to anyone.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” I said. He bent down and kissed me. My body lit up for him. He slipped beneath the covers with me, his hands roaming my skin. My mother had been wrong about me: I’d never made love to Marlowe. I was still a virgin then. We only engaged in these heavy petting sessions. Now I see I was such a child, so starved for affection. I just wanted the physical closeness of another person; this felt like love to me. After a few minutes, when I was hot and aching and alive with my need for him, he pulled away.

  “Forget it,” he said. “You’re not ready. You’re too young.”

  He got out of the bed and went back to the window. “This time next month, I’ll be gone,” he said.

 
; “I’m not too young,” I said. I curled myself up into a ball and hugged my knees to my chest. “Don’t leave me here.”

  He came back to the bed. I lifted a finger and traced the lines of his mouth.

  “I’ll do anything,” I said.

  “Say it,” he said.

  “I belong to you.”

  “Annie!”

  I awake to find Gray holding me by the shoulders. “It’s okay. Wake up.”

  I am drenched in sweat, my heart thudding. Mercifully, the pounding in my head has subsided. But I feel weak, as if I’ve just run a hundred miles.

  “What happened?” I ask, disoriented. I can’t tell if it’s day or night.

  “You were dreaming,” he says. He pushes a few damp strands of hair away from my eyes. “What were you dreaming about?”

  I try to shake the fog from my brain, to grasp at the faded images from my dream that are already slipping away. I move away from Gray and turn on the light.

  “I think I’m remembering,” I tell him. He looks at me with some odd mixture of hope and fear.

  “What? What do you remember?”

  “I don’t know,” I say after a minute. Suddenly I don’t want to tell him what I saw in my dream. I don’t want to say what I think I may have done.

  “Tell me.”

  I close my eyes and rest against him. “Gray, do you ever wonder what it would be like to be married to someone normal?”

  He laughs a little. “I’d die from boredom.”

  “Seriously.”

  “You’re normal,” he says, pulling back a little so that he can look into my face. “You’re fine.”

  I wonder how he can say that, if he really believes it to be true. I find I can’t hold his eyes; I lean against him again so that I don’t have to look away.