Names of Dead Girls, The

by Eric Rickstad

  She knew.

  The porch floor seemed to buckle beneath her as she became aware of an odor coming off the man. A funk that reminded her of a time she’d been working the emergency room midnight shift and tended to an old farmer’s gashed foot, septic with gangrene; its hot, putrid odor of seeping flesh mixed with the bright metallic bite of blood.

  Dana cupped her hand around her phone. “Don’t hang up,” she whispered into the phone to her daughter. She dug her other hand deeper into her bag, fingers crawling like a spider around the bottom, searching for that damned pepper spray.

  “What?” Tammy said.

  “Someone’s behind me,” Dana whispered.

  “What?” Tammy said again.

  The man did not say a word, did not move, kept his head down, not lifting it to face her image in the window. Hiding it. Just standing there in his putrid stink, the air vibrating.

  Dana’s fingers crept along the bottom of her bag. Where was that damned pepper spray?

  “There’s a man behind me,” Dana whispered, mustering all of her willpower not to scream Help! Get help!

  “What?” Tammy said.

  There. Dana’s fingers seized the pepper spray.

  The Pepsi sign screeched on its corroded metal chains.

  “There’s a man and he won’t lift his head, he won’t—”

  As if he’d heard Dana, the man lifted his head, but her damned glasses were too fogged, and the man’s face too hidden in the dark shadows of his hood for her to see his face. Where his face ought to have been was a dark hole that seemed to glow an eerie swamp-gas green, the vague hint of what should have been the white of his eyes the same ghastly green.

  Dana tried to speak, but her voice was gone.

  The man lifted his arm.

  Dana spun around, clutched the pepper spray, tried to extract it from her bag and wield it. She would not let what had happened so long ago ever happen again.

  She would die first.

  Her hand was stuck at an odd angle in her bag, elbow trapped under the strap. It slowed her. Just enough.

  The man held up his hand. An object glowed in the dark.

  A cell phone. That was what had made his face seem to glow so eerily, not some spooky aura. And the funky smell . . . Was it coming off the farm fields nearby, simply the familiar, sour fermented scent of manure churned up by rain?

  There was nothing remarkable about the stranger’s face, certainly nothing threatening, at least from what little Dana could make out through her misted glasses and the shadows that shrouded his face. But it was clear the man was not intentionally hiding his face.

  Dana let out a sob of relief. A distant voice called to her. Tammy’s voice, from the cell phone dangling in Dana’s hand. Dana put the phone to her ear. “Lost you for a sec,” she said to Tammy.

  “What the hell is going on, Ma? Are you all right? Did you say something about a man? Do you need help?”

  “I’m sorry,” the man said, his voice calm and natural, almost familiar. “Sorry I frightened you.”

  “Ma?” Tammy said, “are you all right? Did you say something about a man?”

  The stranger slipped his hood back off his head. He looked to be in his fifties. A handsome fifties. He smiled and stepped away to stand by himself on the top step, clearly, courteously permitting Dana her privacy as he looked off into the night as though debating whether he wanted to make a break in the rain for his vehicle just yet.

  “I—” Dana said into her phone. “It’s nothing.”

  “You sure?” Tammy said.

  Dana sighed again. This damned storm. It had triggered her darkest imagination. After so many years, she was still so easily put on edge.

  What had happened once could happen again.

  Now though, she relaxed, the slightest. All she wanted was to see her daughter and granddaughter. Have a mug of Sleepytime tea and maybe stay the night, get under the covers and read a chapter of The Wizard of OZ to her granddaughter. The sooner she put the phone away to protect it from this monsoon and got in her dry, safe car, the better. “I’m sure,” she said. “Really.”

  “OK, drive safe, see you soon,” Tammy said and was gone.

  The man smiled, and a sense of déjà vu slipped like a silverfish through Dana’s bloodstream. Did she know him? He seemed vaguely familiar. Someone from the hospital maybe.

  The fog whorled around him.

  “Again,” the man said. “I apologize for scaring you.”

  “You didn’t really.”

  “I did, I can see it,” the stranger said.

  Dana emitted a nervous, embarrassed grunt. The man smiled.

  “Maybe just a little,” Dana admitted.

  “Well, then, I’m doubly sorry.”

  “Please, don’t be.”

  “I should have scared you a lot more than a little. Out here in the fog and dark and no one around. A woman would be justified being more than a little scared.”

  “I really have to go.” Dana drew a deep breath and moved to edge past him. He stepped cleanly out of her way, granting more than enough room as he nodded with graciousness and played with his phone, muttered as he likely tried to figure out where on earth he was on this godforsaken night. This man is no threat, Dana thought. Just lost.

  As she was about to step into the fog, Dana said, “Where are you trying to get?”

  The man swiped a finger on his cell-phone’s screen. “You may not want to know.” The man held up his phone.

  Dana could not make out the screen, her glasses so clouded. She’d have to return them. No two ways about it. She took off her glasses, her vision worsening. She wiped the lenses on her sleeve and put the glasses back on.

  Leaned in for a better look.

  Fear sliced its icy finger into her heart.

  She wanted to back away. Couldn’t. Couldn’t peel her eyes from the image on the screen. An impossible, insane, nightmare image. An image of an old Polaroid.

  Impossible for anyone to have.

  Anyone except one person.

  HIM.

  The man who’d—

  No.

  HE was dead.

  You don’t have to worry. He’s dead. That’s what she’d been told so long ago. Promised a lifetime ago. That’s what she’d believed.

  Except now HE was standing before her. She’d never seen his face clearly all those years ago, but it had to be HIM before her now, all these years later, with no one else around for miles, her pepper spray lost again at the bottom of her purse as HE took a step closer, her daughter at home awaiting her safe return, HIS breathing deep and slow, as if HE were trying not to pant and drool.

  HE was not dead.

  HE was alive.

  She’d been lied to, all those years ago.

  Lied to by the one person she’d trusted.

  And now Frank Rath’s lie would cost her.

  12

  Detective Sonja Test needed to hurry.

  She browsed the Kids Attik of the Canaan General Store, rummaging through racks of snowsuits for Elizabeth, and had just been told by the owner that the place would close early, in twenty minutes. The torrential rain the past two hours had prompted severe flood warnings and threatened to wash out roads and knock out the power. High winds were predicted, and when the temperature plunged, the town was in for an icy hell.

  Claude had driven his Jeep separately from home to haul back the generator Test insisted they rent if the power went out, when it went out.

  Twice, the lights in the store had flickered out and left Test standing in the dark wondering if the power was out for the night.

  She cursed herself. She should never have wasted her afternoon at the White Mountain Mall across the river, in search of a bargain snowsuit. She knew better. The snowsuits in the mall fit the family budget, but the suits were no bargain. They were cheap, poorly insulated, with cuffs and collars that let in the snow and wind; and the flimsy zippers had broken on two of Elizabeth’s previous bargain suits. Yet th
e prices at the ski shops for quality snowsuits were absurd, especially since the snowsuits were good for a season, if that, with how fast the kids grew.

  So now here Test was, shopping where she should have come first instead of at home getting the kids ready for bed at a reasonable hour so tomorrow morning wouldn’t be a total catastrophe of overtired kids who resisted getting out of bed with the ferocity of one being dragged to a vat of boiling grease.

  Test hurried now while Claude occupied the kids downstairs in the Toy Korner, once a wonderland of local wooden handmade toys before kids’ sections everywhere were conquered by Melissa & Doug.

  God, she was frayed, not the least due to this mad weather, this climatic bubonic plague; twice on the way from New Hampshire to the house to get the Jeep, visibility had been so poor Claude had needed to pull over.

  As Test checked a price on a snowsuit her work cell phone rang in her coat pocket.

  Today was supposed to be her day off, though a cop, especially the temporary, sole detective and forensics-team-of-one for the Canaan Police, never had a day off. Test would have it no other way.

  She dug around in her coat pockets, retrieving her phone.

  Chief Barrons. Test’s spirits were buoyed, believing the chief had decided to promote her to the senior detective position vacated by Detective Grout.

  “Chief,” Test said.

  “Where are you?” he said, skipping the pleasantries.

  This was not a call about a promotion. Bad news was coming.

  Then again, when did a chief of police call an officer bearing good news?

  “The Kids Attik,” Test said.

  “The what?”

  “Canaan General Store.”

  “I need you over at the home of Tammy Gates.”

  “Who? What’s going on?”

  “I’m not sure. She called dispatch, frantic. Something about her mother. She fears something’s happened.”

  “An Alzheimer’s thing?” Test imagined an elderly woman lost in this fog. It happened too often, the aged wandering off. A dangerous scenario that could prove fatal fast in this weather.

  “If that were the case, I’d get Larkin on it and not bother you. Dispatch said the daughter was talking about a strange man.”

  “What man?”

  “I’m sending Frank Rath out there to help.”

  “Rath?” Test stared at the phone as if it had spoken in place of Barrons. She put the phone back to her ear. “Why?”

  Barrons did not answer. The chief did not have to justify his decisions.

  Test respected Frank Rath. His consultant work had broken two recent, horrific cases, but he’d done it ad hoc while investigating a missing girl as a favor to Detective Grout. In the end, Rath, taciturn as he was, had handed Test the arrest of the girl’s killer when he could just as easily, and more understandably, handed it to Grout. A friend. A man.

  Test owed Rath.

  But Rath wasn’t on the payroll, consultant or otherwise, as far as Test knew—and she should have known.

  “Why Rath?” Test pressed. If Barrons was even considering Rath for the senior detective position, Test deserved—

  “I’ll call Rath and get him over,” he said and hung up.

  Test aborted her shopping mission; hopefully Elizabeth wouldn’t need a snowsuit for a while if this crazy rain kept up.

  Test took the stairs down from the Kids Attik, ducked under the beam at the bottom. Canaan General was housed in an 1800s converted barn, the Kids Attik the old haymow, the stairs’ risers hand-painted with “Caution, steep stairs” and “Watch your head.”

  Test found Claude and the kids in the Toy Korner, Elizabeth playing with plush stuffies on a turnstile rack, George sacked out on a beanbag chair in the corner, a Great Brain book splayed on his lap, his open mouth drooling.

  “Why’d you let George doze?” Test said. “He’s going to be a nightmare when he wakes up and never go down tonight.”

  Claude glanced at George. “He must have just fallen asleep.”

  Test rolled her eyes. “With that drool? Well, he’ll be your nightmare. We have to go.”

  “We just got here!” Elizabeth complained.

  “Mama has to go, OK?” Test knelt and kissed her daughter’s forehead. “The store is going to close in ten minutes and you’ll have to leave then. Leave nicely. Be good for Daddy.”

  She stood, kissed Claude on the cheek.

  “What is it, car wreck, flooded roads?” Claude asked.

  “Not sure. Nothing good.”

  “I don’t know how you do it.”

  “It’s not how. It’s why.”

  “What time do you expect to be back?” Claude said, though he knew estimates were pointless when Test was called out.

  “Could be an hour, could be all night,” she said.

  “I’ve got to be on the road by five a.m. tomorrow to make it to Burlington on time in this weather.”

  Test had forgotten about Claude’s interview for a two-week visiting artist position the next spring at the University of Vermont in Burlington. Not because it wasn’t important. It was. It would give Claude clout, and the stipend was generous, though the two weeks would be a slog for Test alone with the kids. Test had forgotten because it had created no conflict until now. It was possible she wouldn’t make it home in time for Claude to hit the road, and there was nothing she could do about it.

  She had to see events to their conclusion if she wanted the vacant senior detective position. Especially as a female detective. A mother.

  “I have to be there,” Claude said.

  “I’ll do my best. Give me the Jeep keys? By the time I get done, I’ll probably need four-wheel drive to get home.”

  13

  She did not belong here. Not anymore.

  Yet, here she was. Forced back. Feeling foreign in her childhood bedroom, as if she’d been gone decades instead of days.

  She couldn’t be here. Couldn’t stay. She had midterms to cram for before Thanksgiving break, and she needed to be around the buzz of her friends, fueled by the chaos of all-nighters to kick herself into gear; and she had to have access to campus Wi-Fi, not the sketchy DSL here in the boonies. Campus was nearly an hour drive, if the roads were good. With this damned fog, it could mean she missed exams; her GPA would plummet.

  Her dad and Felix had countered each valid point with one argument: her safety was the priority. Forget grades. Forget everything else. Forget living her life. Her father had even proposed she put her studies on hold and take a break to some place sunny, like Florida, until the situation was cleared.

  Florida? Seriously? And, the situation? How, exactly, was the situation supposed to be cleared? By divine intervention?

  Preacher wasn’t going anywhere. Just how long was Rachel supposed to take a break someplace sunny or lock herself in her old bedroom, caged like one of Felix’s canaries?

  And hadn’t her father tried to protect her throughout her childhood by not telling her the truth about her parents’ murders? How had that worked out? There was no way to guarantee her, or anyone’s, safety.

  Rachel shut her bedroom door, cutting off the low yet urgent voices of Felix and her father in the kitchen, no doubt discussing the situation. As if it didn’t concern her, as if she needed to be protected by high walls and knights in armor, unable to fend or to know what was best for herself. She did not want to be here. Yet, here she was.

  She sat on the edge of her old twin bed, seething.

  The air of the room was as fusty as a summer camp after being shuttered for the winter.

  What was she going to do? What could she do?

  She fell back on the mattress, arms out as if to make a snow angel. A part of her wished she were still the little girl who made snow angels with her father, got swept up on his shoulders afterward as he tromped through the snow, her face buzzing with cold, back to the warm house to make hot chocolate.

  But the part of her that longed for such days was a small part, smaller eac
h day. The more the future tugged her forward, and the more exhilarated she became by the unknown life awaiting her, the sharper the stab of melancholy was for the girl she was leaving behind, as if she were mourning her own death. Her fingertips fiddled with the satin edge of her blanket. The cool slippery feel of the silky material gliding between her fingertips had always soothed her. Felix found it cute, and a tad disturbing, that she bought coats with satin-lined pockets so when she got uptight or nervous she could work the satin for solace; yet what was once relief was now more of a way to reconnect with that girl fading away within her.

  She let go of the blanket and stared at the walls. She’d picked the color years ago when lilacs had been her favorite flower. Now it made her queasy. Pepto pink more than lilac; yet her father had gladly painted the room the exact color she’d wanted.

  A pink prison now.

  It was unjust. A sick, violent man could follow her, yet she was the one imprisoned. She radiated with hatred at the thought of what he’d done to her parents. Who was this man? This Ned Preacher?

  Rachel had not wanted to know anything about him when that weirdo at Family Matters had told her of her parents’ murders. Now, she wanted to know everything. Had to know. About the murders. And the murderer. Had to know the orchestrator of her imprisonment.

  She opened her laptop. She had a LexisNexis account, through the college. It would give her access to the old print articles about the murders.

  The browser loaded with all the speed of a hibernating toad’s heartbeat. Finally, she brought up the LexisNexis interface and entered her password. Typed in Laura Pritchard, murder, Ned Preacher, Vermont. May 3, 1995. She rubbed a fingertip on the track pad, stared at the Search button.

  She rose and opened her door a crack, peered out to see her dad at the kitchen stove, staring out the window.

  She did not see Felix, but as she made to shut the door, she heard the shower going on in the bathroom next door.

  Rachel could use a good shower too. After what she was about to research online, she was sure she’d need one.

  She eased the door shut and sat at her childhood desk, her back to the door but ears keen for the sound of the shower.