Names of Dead Girls, The

by Eric Rickstad

  The car, an ’80s rust heap, slowed as it came alongside them. Its muffler growled. Rath tensed. The two cops hurried down the stairs from the landing.

  The vehicle’s license plate was crusted with road salt, the number obliterated.

  The car stopped.

  Rachel and Felix, arms locked at the elbow like Dorothy and the Scarecrow, leaned toward it.

  “No!” Rath shouted, a hand going to his revolver.

  Rachel looked up at Rath.

  The car’s tires spun as the car slung past Rath. He drew his revolver and stooped to get a look inside the vehicle. But the windows were fogged, and the car dark inside as it climbed around the bend. Was it Preacher? Or were fear and paranoia distorting reality?

  The couple picked their way along the road toward Rath.

  “Who was in that car?” he asked.

  “Someone asking directions. What’s going on?” Rachel eyed the cops. “Why are they here?”

  “Let’s get inside,” Rath said.

  He let the kids get by him and go up the stairs, Rachel pausing on the landing in the fog lit beneath the floodlight: “What happened to our door? What’s going on?”

  “Inside,” Rath said.

  “Stay out here, if you would, miss,” the trooper said.

  “I’m not staying out here. I’m freezing and it’s dark. I’m going inside my home.”

  “Then don’t disturb anything.”

  “I just want to be inside my place. Our place.” Rachel glanced at Felix.

  Inside, the canaries piped up.

  Rath despised the birds more with each chirp.

  He shut the door as best as it would shut. Rachel leaned with her back against the counter dividing the living room from the kitchen. Felix moved next to her, but her look—give me space—halted him, and he sat on an arm of the futon, stooped to accommodate the pitched ceiling.

  The deputy brandished his notepad as the trooper clasped his hands behind his back.

  There were too many people in the cramped space. It made Rath itchy and claustrophobic. He took a breath and told Rachel only what he felt she absolutely needed to know about Preacher’s phone call.

  “I heard the canaries, birds,” he finished. “So I thought Preacher was here, with you and—”

  “Canaries?” Rachel looked at Felix.

  They both looked at Rath.

  “We were at the pet shop,” Felix said.

  Rachel’s fingers worried the buttons on her coat. “Browsing, comforting puppies, and getting birdseed.”

  The cops eyed each other.

  “And?” Rath said.

  “There was this guy, looking at me,” Rachel said.

  “What guy?” Felix said just as Rath said it: “What guy?”

  “The creep outside Lovin’ Cup?” Felix said.

  “You saw him, too?” Rath said.

  “I didn’t get a close look. And Rachel didn’t tell me about a guy in the shop. So I don’t know if it was the same guy.”

  “Stop,” Rachel said, her voice measured, calm. “Please. Stop talking. I didn’t say anything because I’m used to weird looks, all women are used to it. And I barely glimpsed his eyes, really, through the birdcages.”

  Rath knew she was downplaying the encounter. The more reasonable her tone, the more emotion she hid. She’d done it all her life. And in this case the emotion she tried to hide was fear. It grieved, but did not surprise, Rath to see her hide it, try to battle it alone. She was just like him, a true case for nurture over nature.

  She glanced at Felix to invite him back to her side. He knew to smother her would drive her away, being by her side was enough. Smart kid.

  While it irked Rath that Rachel and Felix could not describe the man, it didn’t matter. He knew who it was.

  “You need to interview the pet shop’s employees, check CCTV footage,” Rath said to the trooper.

  “Let’s go outside.” The trooper nodded at the deputy. “Have the kids look around the place, see if anything’s out of place. Besides the door.”

  9

  Outside, the trooper stood with his back to the broken door. His voice was low and authoritative. “I understand from what I read in the paper, a lot of stress was put on you. But I can’t be going to pet shops asking about Preacher.”

  Rath didn’t want to hear the legal, procedural rationale, not while Preacher was following Rachel. For now, Rachel needed to leave this apartment. She could live back home, for a while; Felix, too. If they slept in separate rooms. Rath was not naive, but he wasn’t prepared for Rachel to share a bed with her boyfriend under his roof just yet.

  Even if she came to live with him for a spell, she would need to get to campus daily for class, do her work-study at the library, be in public, visible.

  “Well, did he?” the trooper was saying.

  Rath forced himself to attention. “Did who what?”

  “Preacher. Did he explicitly threaten your daughter?”

  “Mentioning her name is a threat. He murdered her parents. But he’s too clever for a direct threat. He was saying sick shit.”

  “What sick shit?”

  “Lies. Meant to unnerve me.” Rath was not going to tell this trooper, or anyone else, especially not Rachel, that Preacher had claimed to have slept with Rachel’s mother several times while working as a handyman at her home, claimed he was Rachel’s father, and was going tell Rachel that. Tell Rachel how if her mother had just been with him one more time that day he’d stopped by, instead of rejecting him, she’d never have been raped or killed. She’d made him do it. Pushed him. It was her fault.

  “If he made no threat, there’s no need for action,” the trooper said.

  “I don’t take chances with my daughter.”

  “If you’re concerned for your daughter’s well-being—”

  “If,” Rath said.

  “—then do what you feel best. But unless something is out of place in their apartment, I can’t extend resources to this episode.”

  Episode. The trooper made it sound as if Rath had suffered a breakdown.

  “Let’s go see,” the trooper said. “Honestly, part of me wants there to be no reason to help, that this guy, sick as he is, was toying with you, but is harmless.”

  “You have no idea who this guy is,” Rath said.

  Inside, the deputy said, “The two young persons have noted nothing of concern in the apartment.”

  “Is that accurate?” Rath asked Rachel.

  Rachel nodded, her fingertips peeking out from her coat sleeves. Her face showed bewilderment. Her lips seemed to tremble, but Rath knew she was whispering to herself, preparing questions for him as soon as the officers left.

  “I’m sorry about the door, miss,” the deputy said. “I’m glad everything is OK otherwise.”

  The trooper surveyed the room a last time. “Do what you feel you need to keep her safe,” he said, and Rath understood the trooper believed Rachel was in danger, but was straitjacketed by the law. Unlike Rath.

  10

  As soon as Rath shut the door, Rachel found a hairband on the counter and shoved back her platinum-dyed pixie cut. Her new style was an about-face to the long, natural dark hair she’d always worn, and which Rath thought had perfectly reflected her personality. He did not know the young woman this style reflected, but was certain Rachel knew her. Rachel had always known herself; it was Rath, as Rachel’s role of adopted daughter diminished and her many roles to the outside world expanded, who knew her less as she became more of a stranger to him.

  Rath braced himself for her blitz of questions, but her lips persisted in moving silently, as they had when she slept as a child and murmured dialogues with her unconscious self, her face alternating from frowns to grins.

  There were no grins now.

  And the blitz did not arrive.

  Her eyes searched the room deliberately, her head and body remaining still, just as Rath had taught her the one autumn she’d shown interest in deer hunting. Rath had take
n her into the woods on the backside of Ice Pond, hiked up Mount Monadnock to the high ridges in search of a good buck’s track to follow. He’d taught her to look. Use just her eyes. Look. Study the woods, her surroundings. Learn it. But don’t give yourself away to your prey through movement. She’d practiced for weeks, enthused she was honing her peripheral vision.

  Then, one morning, she woke up and her interest in deer hunting was gone.

  Now, she charted the room, predator assessing her landscape. “What does he want?” she said and seemed almost in a trance. She locked eyes with Rath. Except for the radical hair color and the bobbed locks, she might have been her mother’s twin when her mother was her age. No. It was not quite her mother’s face. There was the subtle bend at the end of her nose that mimicked someone else’s DNA. Or did it?

  “It was him in the shop, wasn’t it? Preacher? The man who killed my parents. Feet from me.” She yanked the hairband off and twisted its ends opposite each other, stressing the cheap plastic.

  “I don’t know who else it could have been,” Rath said.

  “Any old creep,” Felix said.

  Rachel turned on him. “Don’t try to give me false comfort because you think it’ll make it easier.”

  Felix flinched. “I’m not. There are lots of creeps, that’s all.”

  “OK.” Rachel softened her tone. “We were both freaked by some guy. And—” She faced her father. “Preacher called you to threaten me. So—” She twisted the hairband. “How can he do this? Get away with it? Why is he even out after what he did? Free to go wherever he wants and do whatever he wants, the same things we do, when we didn’t hurt anyone and he’s murdered and raped?” She bit down hard on her lower lip. “I’ll claw his eyes out,” she whispered. “If I ever see him. I hope I see him. I will claw his eyes out. Cut his heart out.” She twisted the hairband until it seemed it would break in half. “What are we going to do?” she said.

  11

  The fog was ungodly, and all the headlights of Dana Clark’s ’73 Bug did was light it up so intensely in the dark that it felt to Dana as if she were about to vanish in it forever.

  And the rain. The merciless, tyrannical rain. It was biblical, is what it was.

  The Bug’s wipers slapped at it in vain.

  There was no way Dana was going to make it to her daughter’s home before 7 p.m., forget 6 p.m., which in itself was an hour later than usual. Dana was driving 13 mph on a road she usually took at 50, even at night, for pity’s sake.

  She needed to pull over to call Tammy, let her know how late she was running, and grab a snack, too. My word, her stomach was as empty as an upside-down bucket.

  She turned up the volume on her CD player and sang along to Susan Boyle’s cover of “Don’t Dream It’s Over,” a favorite song of hers back in the day. Her teenage self would have mocked her for liking this version, but she preferred it; familiarity had long ago bled the original of its magic, and whenever she sang to pop songs from her youth these days, she felt asinine. She was a grandmother after all, like Boyle. A young grandmother, let’s be very clear about that, but a grandmother nonetheless. Whenever she told expectant mothers on the Valley Hospital maternity ward that she had a ten-year-old granddaughter, Dana got the same reaction—You’re kidding!—implying Dana must be old but looked fantastic for her age. Dana was not old; let’s be very clear about that, too. Still, she didn’t bother explaining that she’d given birth to Tammy at seventeen, and Tammy had given birth to her own daughter at seventeen. Maybe I’ll be a great-grandmother at fifty-one, Dana mused. Why not? Babies were blessings.

  Up ahead, a red glow leaked through the fog like blood through gauze.

  Dana crept the Bug into the parking lot of the Wayside Country Store, pulled up close to the porch, beneath a lighted Pepsi sign so ancient it sported the slogan a nickel drink—worth a dime!

  Dana got out and dashed for the covered porch, yanking her hood around her face to keep the rain off her glasses.

  The Pepsi sign creaked on its rusted chain.

  Rain roared on the porch’s tin roof as a nearby downspout belched a torrent of rainwater.

  Except for one light in the window’s hodgepodge display of ice melt, chain saws, and holiday cookbooks, the store was dark inside. Not a soul lurked. The place had shuttered early.

  The fog dampened her face and seeped through her jacket, under her scrubs, to chill her.

  Dana’s new glasses were fogged from the heat of her breath on the cold lenses. She took them off and wiped them with her coat sleeve, dialed Tammy on her cell phone, and gazed in the store window. She needed to get ice melt for the steps at home. Once this rain froze—and it would, count on it—the world would be glazed with ice. Martin was supposed pick up ice melt before he headed to deer camp, but Dana knew he’d forget. She was better off performing errands herself during hunting season.

  In the window’s reflection, her car, just feet away, was lost in the fog. Gone. Beyond the smudged light from the window and the Pepsi sign, the world was nightmare black. You’d think it was 3 a.m., not 5 p.m., it was so blessed dark.

  Tammy’s phone rang as Dana admired her new glasses in the window reflection. On her lunch hour, when the day had still been sunny and bright, Dana had waffled between two frame styles at LensCrafters in the White Mountain Mall, finally buying both pairs, even though it put her way over her budget. 25% Off a Second Pair! was no great shakes—she wasn’t dim—but it had lured her into forking over a hundred bucks extra, anyway. The pair she wore now was a butterfly frame, Conch Shell Pink. She liked them. They suited her.

  The phone on the other end of the line rang.

  Behind Dana, milky headlights leaked through the dense fog, creeping closer.

  Tammy answered the phone: “Ha! I told you! You were dreaming if you thought you’d ever make it here by six.” Tammy wasn’t upset, merely stating a fact that proved her right, a trait she’d had since she was four. “You were too optimistic, as usual.”

  “It’s not possible to be too optimistic,” Dana said.

  “Tell that to the idjits who built the Titanic.”

  Dana heard her daughter draw a deep breath. Cigarettes. The habit upset Dana to no end, all the more because Tammy had picked it up from Dana herself. It bothered Dana to have passed the deadly habit on to the person she loved most.

  In the window’s reflection, the smear of headlights encroached as the vehicle—truck, car, or SUV, Dana could not tell in this unearthly fog; it may as well have been a UFO—edged past on the road.

  “Just go straight home if you want. I’m not going out now in this mess anyway,” Tammy said. “It’s just a bowling league, it’s not like it’s Black Friday Midnight Madness.”

  Dana laughed. For years, she and Tammy had gone to the Black Friday Christmas sale at the White Mountain Mall. At first just for the savings, but over the years it had become a tradition, an excuse for mother and daughter and granddaughter to spend time together, just the girls. They’d shop from midnight till 4 a.m., eat an early-bird breakfast in the food court, then hit the outlets. Around two in the afternoon they’d drag themselves home to wrap presents while they indulged in a cooking-show marathon. The first year, the men had protested that the day after Thanksgiving was their day to hunt deer, one of very few nonholiday weekdays they took off all year from their construction business. Dana told them if they hadn’t shot a deer after two full weekends of rifle season, they were out of luck.

  Red brake lights glowed like demon eyes in the fog as the passing vehicle slowed with a plaint of brakes. The red lights blinked out, replaced with brighter white lights that seemed to throb in the fog. Reverse lights.

  “Mom,” Tammy was saying, “you there? Where are you?”

  “I’m here. At the Wayside.”

  The vehicle eased backward into the store’s dirt lot and idled behind Dana’s Bug, blocking her. Eddying fog settled back to conceal the vehicle before Dana could see what it was.

  “I’ll try to get
there by seven,” Dana said.

  A vehicle door opened and closed in the fog.

  In the window’s reflection the fog coiled around the figure of a man who walked toward the porch behind Dana.

  Dana could not make out the man’s face; her glasses were so misted, and the man, like Dana, kept his head tucked against the rain, and the snorkel hood of his jacket pulled up around his face.

  Dana shivered.

  She told herself it was the fog and the darkness that caused the trickle of fear. Why be afraid of a man who’d stopped at a store he couldn’t tell was closed until he stepped up onto the porch?

  Which the stranger did now, stepped up on the porch behind her, quite close.

  Dana had kept a can of pepper spray in her handbag ever since, well, for a long, long time. For years, she’d replaced the canister regularly, just as she’d replaced the fire extinguishers and the batteries in the smoke detectors at home. What good was it to have something meant to protect you if it didn’t work when you needed it most?

  Except, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d replaced the pepper spray. Too long. The old canister sat at the bottom of her handbag, lost among tissues and loose mints and minibottles of hand lotions. Whether it would work or not, she did not know. And she needed to know.

  “Don’t hurry in this weather,” Tammy said now on the phone. “Be safe.”

  “Right,” Dana said.

  Why was the man just standing there, looking down, his face hidden.

  Get a grip, Dana told herself.

  Over the din of the rain, Dana believed she heard another sound. Breathing. Deep and low. The breathing of someone trying hard to calm and control himself.

  The breathing of the man behind her.

  Dana wedged a hand down into her bag, trying to act casually, naturally. Except now nothing felt natural. Her throat squeezed down on itself. She had to will herself to breathe, feared any quick movement would provoke the man behind her.

  Provoke him into what? She didn’t know. But she knew what men, some men, were capable of doing to women.