Black Out: A Novel

by Lisa Unger

  Gray told me how he found me in the corner of the hotel room, just sitting there rocking. The television was on, and I stared at the screen. My arms were covered with bruises, my lip was split. I was so thin he could see my collarbone straining against the skin, the knobs of my elbows. For a second he wasn’t sure I was the girl in the photograph he carried in his pocket.

  “I pulled you to your feet and was moving you to the door when Geary returned.”

  He told me how he and Marlowe fought, tore the room apart.

  “Marlowe knocked me unconscious with a lamp by the bed. When I came to, you were long gone. I didn’t catch up with you again until nearly a year later in New Mexico.”

  “You’re leaving something out.”

  “No.”

  “I can handle it.”

  He sighed. Then, “You shot me. In the shoulder. Though you were probably aiming to kill me and weren’t strong enough to handle the gun.”

  I thought of the star-shaped scar on his shoulder. I closed my eyes and tried hard to remember shooting him. But there was nothing there.

  “I don’t remember,” I said, looking out the window. I should have felt worse about it, but I couldn’t connect at all to the memory. I felt bad that he’d been shot, but I didn’t feel guilty. “I’m sorry.”

  “I know,” he said. “It wasn’t you.”

  He put his hand on my leg. And I rested my hand on his. Three days later we were married on the beach at Vivian’s house. I remembered Drew standing on the edge of it all like a gargoyle. Who could blame him? I’d tried to kill his son.

  I lose Gray because I sit stunned in my car for too long. I don’t know what to do: try to catch up or just go home? I find myself driving back to the underpass where Simon Briggs is facedown on the concrete. In a moment of monumental stupidity, I exit my car and walk over to the body. There’s a terrible ringing in my ears as I reach him.

  A dark pool of blood is growing from beneath him. His van is still running. And in a flash that feels like a blow to the head, I remember where I’ve seen him before. I lean against the van. Another bad motel somewhere out west. I had just come out of the shower, was wrapped in one of the tiny, cheap towels. He was sitting on the bed, smoking a big cigar. He was a dirty guy, stains on his clothes, something black under his nails. I saw a bit of wax in his outer ear. I’m sure he smelled, but the stench of his cigar covered it up.

  “I’ve got no problem with you,” he said, as if continuing a conversation we’d already been having. “It’s him I need. Help me, I’ll give you ten percent and turn my back while you run.”

  But that’s all I remember. The memory fades into nothing. Did I help him? Did I get away from him somehow? I look down at his body now. The stillness of death is unmistakable. My rational mind is screaming for me to get out of there. But something stronger compels me to move toward the cab of the van. Traffic races above me, the tires on asphalt sounding like whispering voices. The driver’s side door is wide open. On the passenger seat, a cardboard box of cheap cigars, a purple lighter in the shape of a naked woman’s body, an empty can of diet soda, a half-eaten Philly cheese steak. The inside of the vehicle reeks of onions, stale smoke, and body odor. The world will be a cleaner place without Simon Briggs.

  Beneath the detritus I see a large, worn manila envelope bulging with its contents. I want it, but I don’t want to touch anything in the car. I snake my arm in carefully and grab the edge of the envelope with my fingertips without touching anything else. As I lift it carefully, the garbage littered on top of it falls to the floor of the van.

  The envelope is thick and heavy, and I don’t pause to peer inside, just move quickly back to my car. I slide the envelope under the passenger seat, start the engine, and get out of there. As I pull back on to the highway to start toward home, I wonder why Gray didn’t search the van. He knew that Simon Briggs was looking for me, that Detective Harrison was all over me, but he left everything there for the police to find. It doesn’t make any sense.

  My cell phone rings. It’s Detective Harrison again. This time I answer.

  “What do you want, Detective? Is it money? Just tell me what you need to leave me alone and it’s yours.”

  “Yesterday it was money. Today I’m not so sure.”

  I’m driving too fast. I change lanes carelessly, and the Toyota behind me honks in protest. I lift a hand.

  “Cell phones kill,” says the detective. “Did you know that you’re just as impaired driving while talking on one as you would be if you got behind the wheel drunk?”

  I’ve given up talking. He’s one of those guys, the ones who won’t get to the point until they’re ready no matter what you say. He’s running an agenda; my presence in the conversation isn’t necessary.

  “Let’s get together,” he says then.

  “Really,” I say, angry now. “You know what? Fuck off, Detective.”

  “No. You fuck off, Ophelia.” He leans on the name hard.

  My stomach bottoms out. “Have you lost your mind?” I say. “Do you even know who you’re talking to? Or are you blackmailing so many people you’ve lost track?”

  He doesn’t even play the game, just tells me where to meet him, a rest stop about twenty miles south of where I am. I have no intention of meeting him. I’d have to be insane to do that.

  “I have to get home,” I tell him. “I’ll be missed. I have a family, Detective.”

  He issues a nasty little laugh. “Let me tell you something: You don’t have anything unless I say you do.”

  He ends the call. I hold the dead phone in my hand. Desperation and panic are eating an acid hole in my center. I try Gray on his cell phone and don’t get an answer. I hang up without leaving a message. After driving a few more miles, my mind racing through my various options, I exit the highway and make a turn, get back on, and head south. I’ll meet him, I tell myself. I’ll give him what he wants. Then he’ll go away. Just like Gray said. Why Gray didn’t go to see him, why he wound up killing Simon Briggs instead, I don’t know. There’s no time to think about it. I just need to finish this and get home.

  As far as I know, my mother still lives on Frank Geary’s horse ranch in Central Florida. She believes I’m dead. I know from my father that she blames me for everything that happened to Frank, to her. She has turned the farm into a safe house for women in love with death-row inmates. She helps them lobby for new trials, conducts letter-writing campaigns for the examination of old evidence with new technology, comforts them when the worst happens. She even has a website, freetheinnocent.org.

  A couple of years ago, I saw her on a talk show, defending herself against the families of murder victims. She looked old and worn, all her prettiness gone. I felt nothing when I saw her, except a slight nausea that she could have devoted so much time and feeling to this cause when she never showed a fraction of that love or concern for her own daughter. She wears a picture of Frank in a locket around her neck.

  “He was an innocent man who died for crimes he didn’t commit,” she kept repeating. She made a weird rocking motion, seemed edgy and unstable. Even the other people on stage—a woman dating a death-row inmate, a death-row appeals lawyer, the wife of a man wrongly convicted and executed—stared at her, leaned their bodies away in an effort to distance themselves.

  The show itself was sensational garbage, designed to create conflict among the participants. Families of victims were grouped on the other side of the stage—the mother of an abducted and murdered girl, the husband of a woman who was raped and murdered in their home, the sister of a young man who was the victim of a serial killer. Things started out well enough but naturally devolved into bitter tears and screaming matches. The audience jeered.

  Eventually the questions turned to me and Marlowe. I watched with rapt attention, though I knew I shouldn’t. I just couldn’t turn it off.

  “Do you think it’s something genetic or something learned?” the host asked my mother, a barely concealed look of disgust on his face. “
How do you explain your daughter’s involvement with murderer Marlowe Geary?”

  “I believe Marlowe Geary was innocent of the crimes he was accused of committing, just as his father was,” she said, jutting her chin out and blinking her eyes oddly. “He never had a trial. He was tried and convicted in the media.”

  “The evidence is overwhelming,” said the host, a gray-haired man with a chiseled, heavily made-up face.

  “Evidence lies,” she said, staring directly at the camera. “We all know that.”

  About a year after Frank died, new DNA technology proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that he had killed at least two of the women he went to jail for initially—a local waitress named Lauren Miter and Sadie Atkins, a motel maid. Their families never stopped lobbying to prove Frank’s guilt and finally succeeded. I knew it must have been cold comfort, but maybe that’s better than nothing. I wondered about Janet Parker. She didn’t need technology to prove that Frank had killed her daughter. Her body knew, and the knowledge wasted her.

  I have often wondered about the other women, a suspected thirteen in all. Women who went missing in a twenty-mile radius around the Geary home whose bodies were never found. What happened to them? Did they all die at the hands of Frank Geary?

  “You didn’t answer my question,” the host said when the audience quieted down. “How do you explain your daughter’s involvement with Marlowe Geary?”

  “I won’t speak ill of the dead. But my stepson was a good, good boy. I knew him to be gentle and kind. Ophelia was a very troubled young girl, headstrong and unhappy.”

  “So what are you saying?” asked the host, incredulous.

  “If he did anything wrong, she might have been the corrupting influence,” my mother said, widening her eyes and looking straight at the camera again.

  I was stunned by the injustice of her words, the absolute delusional world she lived in. But still I couldn’t turn off the television. In the oddest way, it was good to see my mother, a comfort to hear her voice. We love our parents so much, even when we hate them, even when they abuse and betray us. We want so badly to be loved in return. If they only knew their power.

  The show ended with a solitary man onstage, a representative from an organization dedicated to counseling the victims of violent crime and their families. He was a small, frail-looking man with a silky drift of strawberry-blond hair and sparkling green jewels for eyes. His voice wobbled slightly as he spoke in vagaries about how victims have to face down their fears rather than wallow in them. The techniques of his organization, he said, were “experimental and controversial but highly effective.”

  “When we’re victimized or when we lose someone to violence, it changes the way we see the world. It opens a hole in the perception of our lives, and it seems like every bad thing, every monster, can enter through that opening. Facing the fear that’s left after you or someone you love has been victimized is the hardest thing you’ll do. But if you don’t do it, the fear will kill you slowly, like the most insidious cancer, cell by cell.”

  He wouldn’t be specific about the organization’s techniques but offered a website: nomorefear.biz. I jotted it down, but when I visited it later, there was only an error page.

  For three days following, my mother’s words ate a hole in my gut. I couldn’t eat or sleep, unable to rid myself of the sight of her, used up and unstable, blaming me for Marlowe’s crimes. I made a few more attempts to visit the website, but it was down every time.

  For some reason I’m thinking about this as I pull off at the rest stop. The air is charged with bad possibilities as I drive down the access road and the highway disappears from my rearview mirror. I see Harrison’s SUV parked beyond the restrooms, in the farthest corner of the lot. I wonder if there’s anyplace more desolate and menacing than an empty rest stop in the middle of the night.

  I come to a halt at a distance from his vehicle. I’m not going to pull up to him. I’m not going to approach his car. I’m going to stay inside with the doors locked. If he wants to talk, he’ll have to come to me. I sit and wait, expecting him to call me on my cell phone. A minute passes, then five. Finally I find his number on my phone and call him. His voice mail picks up.

  “Hi, you’ve reached Ray.” His voice is bright and chipper, like a high-school cheerleader’s. “Leave a message and I’ll get right back to you.”

  I have a low opinion of Detective Harrison, and it’s getting lower. He’s taunting me, waiting to see what I’ll do. Eventually, I can’t take it anymore. I pull up alongside his vehicle. He’s sitting there, smoking a cigarette. He turns as I come to a stop. He rolls down his window.

  “I wasn’t sure how desperate you were,” he says. “Now I am.”

  “Spare me the foreplay,” I say. “Just get to the point.” The smell of his cigarette makes me want to smoke, even though I haven’t in years.

  He gives me that neighborly, “I’m nobody” smile he seems to have perfected. I see that his whole nice-guy aura is a persona he cultivates to put people at ease, to relax them. Like his voice-mail message, for example—friendly, disarming, not stern and professional, not likely to scare away the skittish.

  “I read that you watched while Marlowe Geary killed those girls. That witnesses saw you watching, doing nothing. What does that feel like?”

  I don’t answer him, just take the blow. I did ask him to get to the point. I guess the point is that he knows everything.

  “How do you live with yourself?” he wants to know. Now I hate him. I find myself wishing that it was him and not Simon Briggs under that bridge. Or maybe both of them. I hate the way anger causes a mutiny of the body, the dry mouth, the trembling hands.

  “You’re awfully self-righteous for a dirty cop,” I say.

  He pulls his face into a mock grimace. “Ouch.”

  I rub my eyes hard, but it’s no use, the pain in my head is ratcheting up.

  “So you go from Marlowe Geary to Gray Powers. From killer to cop, or whatever he is. Actually, they’re not so different, are they? They just kill for different reasons, kill different kinds of people. I wonder what this says about you.”

  But I’m not listening to him. I’m watching a young girl approach us. She is emaciated and pale as death today. Her hair is dirty and hanging limply. Her arms are covered with bruises. She walks slowly, almost dazed, but she’s looking right at me. Detective Harrison turns to follow my gaze, puts his hand inside his jacket.

  “What are you looking at?” he asks.

  I know he can’t see her. She is shaking her head at me in disapproval. She thinks I’m weak, foolish. If it were up to her, Detective Harrison would already be dead.

  “I’m starting to wonder about you, Ophelia. I’m concerned about your stability.”

  There’s a ringing in my ears now. I close my eyes, and when I open them again, she’s gone.

  “I have money,” I say. “A lot of it. Just tell me what you want.”

  “It’s not about money anymore,” he says with a dramatic sigh. “At least it’s not about your money anymore. Let’s just say this: Ophelia March is not forgotten. Not forgiven, not forgotten. And do you know how many enemies your husband has? How many people would like to see him suffer? Do you have any idea about Powers and Powers, the things they’ve done?”

  I have no idea what he’s talking about, and more than that, my head is going to implode. I feel his eyes on me, and when I meet them, I’m surprised to see the man I saw that first night, the one I liked.

  “You know what?” he says, incredulous. “I don’t think you do know what I’m talking about. I really don’t. Because when I look at your face, I don’t see the person I read about. What’s wrong with you? How did you let your life wind up like this?”

  I close my eyes again and rest my head back. The pressure of the seat against the base of my skull feels good. I have a millisecond of relief.

  We’re both still sitting in our cars, speaking through the open windows. The streak of white hair over his ear look
s silver in the moonlight. “You’re one to talk,” I say. “Look at you. Blackmail? You don’t seem like the type.”

  He shrugs. “Like you, I’ve made some bad calls.”

  “So why don’t we just help each other out? I give you what you need to make a clean start; you leave me and my family alone.”

  I sound cool and practical, just as Gray would sound in this situation, I imagine. And I do feel calmer than I have in hours. I watch Ophelia. She’s standing right beside Harrison now on the other side of his window. I can see her breath fogging the glass. He’s staring straight ahead, oblivious to her.

  “Let me think about it,” he says. Suddenly he seems tired and sad, as if he’s taken on an enterprise he no longer has the will or the strength to finish. He puts his hand to his eyes and rubs hard. He’s conflicted, I think. Part of him wants to be the good cop, the hero. He hasn’t lost that part of himself. It hurts him to be so corrupt, to do such an obviously wrong thing. That’s why he delivered his self-righteous speech at the mall, to make it all okay for himself.

  Ophelia turns and walks away, slowly fading like a fog that’s passing. I can hear her laughing. The headache and the ringing in my ears start to fade.

  “I was seeing a doctor,” I tell him.

  “Yeah?” he says, glancing over at me. “Good. You need one.”

  “He disappeared.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “His office, everything in it, was just gone the last time I went there.” I leave out the part about his horrifically bloody murder. I don’t feel like getting into all that.

  He cocks his head to the side, gives me a quizzical look. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “I was just wondering. Would you have a way of finding out if he was ever actually there? Or if he is who he told me he was?”

  He looks at me with something like concern on his face. He’s trying to decide how crazy I really am.

  “What was his name?” he asks, his tone surprisingly gentle. Detective Harrison is a complicated man.

  “Dr. Paul Brown.”