The Killer in Me

by Margot Harrison

  “Probably,” I say. “Grizzly’s bigger.”

  “But they’re both bigger than people.”

  I consider explaining that even animals of the same species prey on each other, but Trixie seems too young to learn the brutal truths of the food chain. So I say, “Bears hardly ever eat people. They have to be really hungry. Anyway, these two are friends.”

  To illustrate, I make the two bears dance to a hummed version of “Don’t Stop the Music.” Trixie takes over, manipulates them through a series of sick dance moves, and giggles until she collapses. Fifteen minutes later, I creep out and close the door.

  I checked: Dylan padlocked the shed before he left. But now I know where to check for extra keys—the ceramic bowl in the hallway.

  I find three small silver keys and bring them out back with me. Sure enough, the second one fits the padlock.

  Before stepping into the wood shop, I peer up at the purple scalloped curtains of Trixie’s room. Sunset still splashes the western sky, and I hear crickets, no motors. But they said they’d be home “before ten,” which could mean any time now.

  Make it fast.

  Here are the familiar smells of wood chips and epoxy. The place is much bigger than I realized—more barn than shed, lit only by a skylight.

  I remember Dylan working on a lathe—that must be the steel monster barely visible on the central worktable. I find the main light switch, and fluorescents glare down on the plastic-wrapped bulk of the circular saw.

  All basic wood-shop stuff, sights and smells I could’ve imagined. But I knew he worked with wood. I knew he made scale models.

  Could our dad have been a carpenter, too? Maybe Becca took me into his shop, embedding these sights and smells in my preconscious mind.

  No time to wonder. Cabinets stretch all the way around, and I bend and start opening them, favoring the crannies that are darkest and hardest to reach. Hiding places.

  Here’s a blue bucket stuffed with rags—stiff and gray, not blood-dark. Rolls and rolls of duct tape, but who doesn’t have that? Stacked plastic buckets from Home Depot in two sizes, some blue and some orange, all empty.

  One drawer holds a handkerchief dusted in reddish powder. My heart thuds wildly as I unwrap it to find a Boy Scout pocket knife so rusty it crumbles in my hands.

  Was this our dad’s? I’m wrapping it again when a motor rumbles up the street.

  Shit. I shove the drawer shut, stumble to the door to cut the main lights. But the car passes the driveway and turns around in the cul-de-sac.

  When I switch the fluorescents back on, it’s harder to breathe. I mechanically open every aperture I can find; I even check behind the pegboard for secret compartments.

  The pegboard. That’s where he hangs his jumbo U.S. map and traces his routes with his index finger, tapping the paper for each kill. There are no markings, no pinpricks, but if you know where to look, you’ll see the indentations of his fingernails. Here’s the hitchhiker—it was raining buckets that night. Here’s that honky-tonk outside Amarillo—her blouse was so soft.

  Except there is no map.

  I walk every inch of the pegboard. All I find are dangling tools and taped-up postcards of sandy beaches and Mount McKinley—places the Thief’s never been, as far as I know. There are lighter marks from ripped-off tape, none in the right places.

  I stand in the center of the shed, nails digging into my palm, and turn in a slow circle. Of course he could have taken down his map. But he loves being the only soul who can read its barely visible marks. That innocent, non-incriminating object is the closest thing he has to a trophy. It matches the map I use to track him—another connection between us.

  It’s gone like it never was. Just like the cave entrance.

  And as I gaze around the shed, trying to match each piece to my memory, that memory begins to shift and sift and change like dust motes in a sunbeam.

  When Dylan and Eliana return at ten thirty, I’m sitting in the living room pretending to read a coffee table book about scale models. I refuse dessert and payment for my trouble. I’m beat, I point out, and Dylan and I will have a longish drive if we’re still going to Acoma Pueblo tomorrow.

  The truth is, I can’t stand to be with this nice, normal family for another second. Her with her silk scarf, him with his button-down. I still smell of the shed and the desert and suspicion and lies.

  Dylan walks me to the door. “That little bear cub didn’t run you ragged, did she?”

  “No way, she was totally sweet.” I remember Trixie asking, Are bears ever scared of other bears? And my mind transforms the words into Are psychos ever scared of other psychos?

  Unless I’m the only psycho here.

  Dylan keeps on talking as I pause on the walkway, but I hardly listen. Something about how he missed knowing me as a kid, how he looks at Trixie and wonders if I loved animals, too.

  “I used to imagine your life,” he says, and that’s when my mind switches back on. “I’d stand in the backyard and imagine what you were doing right then.”

  “Me too.” But then I correct myself. “I would’ve done that, too. If I’d known about you.”

  On my way out of the cul-de-sac, I open the car window and slide Dylan’s key ring as quietly as I can into the curbside mailbox, notch it closed.

  I can’t go back to the motel and lie in bed and watch memories playing kaleidoscope tricks behind my closed eyelids. There has to be one last way to test him.

  Dark streets fly by, intersections and statues and parks. Before long I’m on the ramp for the northbound freeway.

  I drive through Bernalillo, through Algodones, past the casino. On the dirt county road, I count two drivers passing in the opposite direction, five minutes apart.

  Darkness closes in.

  No more fast-food joints, streetlights, motels, housing developments. Just flat blackness and the occasional sign or cactus in my headlights.

  After a few miles, even the double yellow line blurs, miragelike. I could drive off the edge of the world. Every time a sign glares in the headlights—usually the name of a ranch—I feel a small stab of relief.

  Stay awake a little longer, Dylan.

  I’m going to his ridge, to his special place. If he sees me there in his sleep, he won’t be able to deny the truth any longer.

  Sometimes my eyes play tricks on me. I see taillights ahead, then nothing. The night’s turned cool, yet sweat drips from my hair and trickles down my nose.

  I drive half a mile too far and have to backtrack to the side road. Parked on the shoulder, I take deep breaths.

  There could be snakes out there. There could be vagrants or vandals in the cabin—the road is scored with tire tracks, though I see no other cars.

  But if I stay in the car, he won’t know where I am. The last thing I want is to go back to that motel bed and let sleep take me. To give myself to a dream that feels too real, and then wake to a world where it isn’t.

  I’m done with these empty challenges after tonight. I want an answer. A confirmation, no matter how terrifying.

  I count to ten, open the door, and step out.

  Dry bushes loom in the flashlight beam—sagebrush? They look like pieces of a stage set, their shadows long and haggard. I feel the flatness stretching between me and everyone else. No protective hills, just sand and these ghostly bushes. Coyotes, rattlers, tarantulas. If Dylan were in the cabin or on the ridge, he’d see my light.

  He’s not. I got here first.

  And besides, right now I don’t care.

  Last night when I slept, I was inside his sleep again. No dreaming, just slow and gentle breaths. Who knows if it was him or me?

  Then I dreamed, but it was not his dream. It was mine.

  I hike toward the base of the ridge, giving the cabin a wide berth. The moon’s not up yet, so I use my flashlight, trying to keep it low and tight.

  I dreamed I was in a cabin, not this one. The air was cold and moist, full of the eerie keening of spring peepers. In front of me on th
e rough boards, illuminated by a camping lantern, rested two corpses.

  Mr. and Mrs. Gustafsson, in their pj’s, laid out side by side as if for a funeral. Wrists still duct-taped. Faces pools of ghostly white in the darkness. Hair matted with gore. Eyes dead.

  I did this. And it’s not over.

  I picked up a saw with a thin, serrated blade and a red plastic handle. I bent over the man and cut his wrists free. Got to work.

  Me. Not me.

  As I reach the giant staircase of boulders that leads up the ridge, my fear of this place begins to bleed away. Up here I’ll be able to see someone coming from any direction. If he does show, I’ll be ready.

  I don’t want to think about the next part of the dream. It was confused, wet, earthy-smelling.

  All I know is that when I looked up from my work with that saw, there stood the Thief. Outside me. He saw what I’d done and nodded.

  “This is good,” he said. “You need to hide this. You need to hide what you’ve done.”

  But I didn’t do it. My gaze crossed the distance between us, and suddenly there was no distance. We shared a space, our bodies overlapping like shadows.

  “No,” my brother said. “We didn’t do it.”

  I woke, his words still echoing in my head. And I thought, If we didn’t do it, who did?

  All night is a long time to wait, even in June. I sit on a sandy patch of ground, my back against a rock, and gaze into the valley, at the road.

  Waiting for headlights.

  I watch the moon rise, the stars brighten and then slowly, slowly dim as the east pales. I hear birds call, tiny creatures squeak, distant bigger ones bark and howl. Sometimes I forget my promise to myself and drift off, but I never drift far enough to leave my own mind.

  Dylan doesn’t come, in person or otherwise. When the sun finally rises over the desert—that copper disc I’ve seen through his eyes burning through a swamp of pink haze, staining the chimneylike pinnacle to my right—I’m alone.

  Maybe I always have been.

  The New Mexico sun feels like it could fry my eyelashes off. I gaze across miles of nothing.

  From the plateau of Acoma Pueblo, scrubby grass and sagebrush stretch flat until a hundred-foot-high, salmon-pink highway embankment bars the horizon. The pamphlet I snagged at the welcome center says it’s actually a mesa.

  Above hangs a gigantic cirrus cloud that looks poised to slam into the earth. Nothing has reliable weight out here. Everything is half mirage.

  Including Nina and Dylan Shadwell, who stand on the plateau’s edge, about thirty feet away from me.

  I first spotted them in the welcome center, where I’d just finished checking in with two stern guys in flannel shirts and showing them my permits to shoot in Sky City for the UNM film department. The letters requesting the permits were dated March, which gives you a sense of the place’s level of security.

  The head guy handed my documentation back when he was good and ready and asked to see the camera and monopod. When he’d inspected both, he said, “This permit is for the view from the plateau only. No shots of the residences.”

  “Got it.”

  My producer, the queen of anal, had already explained roughly a hundred times that I was to collect B-roll only from the southern and western walls, some of which I’d be allowed to reuse for my Chuckettes video. The views, she promised, were worth the hassle.

  You can’t just stroll into the city; guides bring you up to the plateau in groups. Waiting for mine to form, I listened to a guy chatting up the cute Native American chick at the gift shop counter.

  “Your first time in Sky City?” she asked.

  “I’m from another planet.”

  The girl giggled. “Where are you really from?”

  “Vermont.”

  That made me turn around. The supposed Vermonter was young, lanky but muscular, with neat hair, spacy eyes, and nervous, tapping fingers. He struck me as a cross between the kind of dude who wants to talk about your spirit animal and the kind who tailgates you in his big-ass SUV.

  A girl appeared beside him—black hair, white shorts, painfully familiar crooked smile. Nina.

  In the instant it took me to recognize her, everything else snapped together. My memory matched the online photo of Dylan Shadwell to the stranger before me. My eyes registered Nina smiling and touching his arm like they were old friends.

  My head pounded, and an emotion I couldn’t name blurred my vision. I saw Nina sitting in the cedars behind the school, insisting she didn’t know this supposed killer. I saw the text I’d received from her this morning: Going to Painted Desert. Supposed to be surreal! Can’t wait to see u tonight.

  We had plans: I’d check into our motel when I finished filming, and she’d leave Arizona late in the afternoon and meet me there. No more cinder-block dorm room reeking of gym socks. The gang was getting back together.

  The world turned to a mosaic of bright lozenges as I waited for her to spot me, my breath coming short and harsh. If she did, though, she gave no sign.

  Two can play that game. So I managed to gather my gear and drag it to the other end of the waiting area without attracting attention.

  Since then, I’ve kept my distance, making sure to keep other people between them and me while I film. I don’t know if Nina really hasn’t seen me or if she, too, is pretending. I don’t know how long she’s been lying to me.

  When I can, I watch them.

  They’ve been talking for the past twenty minutes, leaning on the barrier. Their body language is eerily similar—awkward jabbing of their long necks, scratching of noses, bouncing on balls of the feet.

  I can’t hear a word they say, but I could swear they have the same Ray-Bans.

  Sky City is really more of a village, or a fortress at the ass-end of nowhere. All the houses on the plateau are made of stone or adobe the same beige-pink as the dirt streets. Instead of interior stairs to the second story, rough wooden ladders poke the blue sky.

  The tour guide has taught us that the Anasazi prefer to be called “pueblo peoples,” and that they chose this desolate spot for a town so they could see enemies coming from all directions.

  I empathize.

  I adjust my focus and pan over to Nina and Shadwell, then zoom in. They’re talking too quietly for me to hear, but Nina looks up at him with the weirdest expression on her face. It’s like he’s called her out somehow, and she’s blushing. Like he makes her feel flustered and guilty. There are dark circles under her eyes.

  What’s he done to her—or what’s she done to herself?

  Shadwell shakes his head reassuringly, running a hand through his sweaty hair. He touches Nina’s shoulder, and points, calling her attention to something out on the wastes. They hold still for a few seconds, watching. She smiles, and so does he—a crooked, halfhearted smile, weirdly like hers.

  Then he raises his head to gaze along the parapet, straight at my camera.

  I hastily pan away and zoom out again to get the landscape, hiding as much of myself as I can behind the monopod, which isn’t much. Really, I remind myself, I’ve done nothing wrong. Who has the most explaining to do here?

  I focus and refocus on sand, boulders, and mesa that I no longer see, my face burning behind my shades as I wait to feel her gentle hand tap my arm, to hear her voice tense with anger or alarm or apology. “Warren, what are you doing here? Why didn’t you say something?”

  When I finally look up from the viewfinder, they’re both gone.

  Warren shouldn’t be here. Everything’s planned out: I’m supposed to meet him at the motel and tell him about Dylan, and how meeting him by chance stopped me from going to Arizona. How I need to drive out there tomorrow and ask Becca Cantillo some questions, and he can come with me. Or we can extend our trip, add a few days in Albuquerque. Whatever he wants.

  I was going to explain in careful stages how I think he was right all along and I was wrong. And yeah, maybe that does mean I’m a little crazy, but see how rational I’m being ab
out it?

  Now all that is wrecked.

  Dylan grabs my arm, steadying me. “It’s okay, Nina. Nobody lives here—it’s just storage. The real homes are on the second floor.”

  He thinks I’m upset because we’ve ducked inside one of the adobe houses, which the guide proclaimed strictly off-limits. I followed when Dylan grinned slyly and swung open the window, because I needed to get anywhere away from Warren.

  I don’t see much in the dimness—stacked boxes, a picture frame. “What if they hear us?”

  “They won’t. Trust me.” Dylan peels back the frilly curtain and peers out, his shoulder to the wall. “That kid was giving me the creeps.”

  I force myself to nod, though my next breath has died in my throat. “You mean with the camera?”

  “Yeah. Didn’t you see how he pointed that thing straight at us?”

  My whole body’s frozen. “That is creepy.”

  “Eh, maybe he just thought you were cute. Too many kids with fancy cameras these days. Anyway, now we can watch the tourists without them watching us back.” Dylan beckons me over to the window with a conspiratorial squint.

  He lifts the corner of the curtain again, and the desert sunlight bowls me over like a tiger leaping from a cave. “What’s there to see?”

  “Sometimes it’s just fun to watch people.”

  Warren is gone, thank God. A middle-aged, over-tanned couple has taken his place, both of them snapping pictures with their phones.

  “New Jersey,” Dylan says. “Or maybe California?”

  I nod, but I’m not looking at the people. The miles of flat dirt and sagebrush make me feel like I’ve reached a place where secrets and lies evaporate in the sun’s glare. The mesas and plateaus aren’t just random obstacles; their crags have collected the reverberations of religious rites, doomed expeditions, sieges, bloodshed.

  I should’ve just gone and confronted Warren. There’s no place to hide here.

  “Think they’re still into each other?” Dylan asks.

  Who does he mean? Oh. The flashy tourist couple. “How would we know?”