There were pages and pages of him speaking of the crime scene, always returning back to the baby. To her. To Rachel.
Rachel took a drink. The beer had warmed some and warmed Rachel. She had to admit, it tasted pretty good. She picked up a cache of Xeroxed photos of her mother’s and her father’s bodies. There was more blood than she’d ever believed could be inside a person. And. The wounds. Shown in alarming close-ups, uglier and meaner than she’d imagined. If she’d imagined anything, she’d imagined slices, punctures, clean wounds. These were not that. The flesh was gouged and torn, flayed, as if her mother had been attacked by a prehistoric bird, a pterodactyl with fierce talons and a ragged beak. Her mother’s head was cocked at a sick, macabre angle, head cranked around so it almost faced backward.
The profound and profane violence did not crush Rachel; the photo of her parents alive, beaming, coddling their swaddled baby between them, did. They were radiant. They were young. In their twenties. Scarcely older than Rachel.
Rachel forced herself to memorize the photos. She would never look at them again, but she wanted her blood to absorb and her mind to be tattooed with the images.
It wouldn’t prove difficult. The images would never let her forget.
She stared. The body of her birth father—for how else could she think of him, a man she’d never known—lay draped over the body of her mother, a woman she’d never known, at the foot of the stairs of a house that held no memories. Her parents made strangers by murder.
The white carpet on which the bodies lay was black with their blood. An orgy of blood slung in furious strings across the walls and furniture. The bodies had been photographed from every conceivable angle and distance. From above and from each side, down low, so it appeared the photographer must have lain on her side on the bloody carpet with them, nearly nose to nose with the corpses. In most photos Rachel’s mother’s face was mercifully turned away, hidden from Rachel and the camera’s eye.
Rachel’s birth father’s face was visible in most photos, the eyes wide open with what looked like amazement, the mouth hung open in grief or agony. His tongue lolled out of one corner of his mouth, cartoonish and mortifying. Rachel wanted to tuck his tongue back into his mouth, close his mouth and his eyes. Grant him dignity.
Rachel took another drink of beer.
It tasted bitter again.
She read the medical examiner’s report. The clinical, scientific language that described her parents’ wounds seemed cruel and uncaring.
The murder file told of Preacher’s backstory. In 1989, he’d sodomized a twelve-year-old girl in upstate New York. Then, showing “a kindness,” he released her naked and bleeding into the Adirondack wilderness, saying in the police interview: “If God wanted her to live, she would.” He’d destroyed this girl for perverted pleasure, but “cooperated,” pleaded down from aggravated first-degree rape and kidnapping to third-degree sexual assault. Five thousand dollars bail, which he’d jumped. Within months he’d kidnapped a fifteen-year-old girl in Maine; took her to a forest and raped her while he’d told her how he was going to kill her. The girl escaped while Preacher slept. He was caught. Pleaded. Again. Got a lesser sentence. Again. Served five years, minimum security, and underwent behavior modification. “Mr. Preacher,” a social worker said in court documents, “and society will profit from behavior modification. He accepts blame for his role.” As if someone else, his victims, had played a role in his savagery.
He was paroled. Again. Moved to Vermont to work as a handyman for local residents, including . . . Rachel’s parents.
He knew them? The revelation shocked Rachel. It made his crime more odious. More mystifying. The report showed that while he’d worked for them in Vermont, his time there had been short. He’d left abruptly to live back in Maine for nearly a year and a half, until he became a suspect in an attempted kidnapping of a mother and daughter.
When he’d fled to Vermont, he’d headed straight for Rachel’s parents’ home.
Rachel felt vomit churning and rising in her. She breathed deeply and put her head down between her knees, her arms wrapped behind it. After a spell, she sat up again. Why had Preacher killed her parents? And why a knife? Why had he suddenly escalated to such a savage double murder? It was an act of outsized rage, almost personal. Was he jealous of them? Did he feel slighted? There had to be a reason, in his sick mind. Until the mother and daughter he was suspected of trying to kidnap in Maine, all his prior victims had been girls. He’d never chosen women, or a male of any age. He’d never used a knife, as he’d used on Rachel’s parents. A knife he’d bought that morning at the local hardware store, knowing in less than an hour he’d butcher two people with it. The store cashier said there was “nothing out of the ordinary with his behavior. In fact, he’d seemed jovial.”
Jovial.
And now he was out, because he’d behaved inside, found Jesus.
Rachel read another of Barrons’s notes: It appears the male victim was not planned, but killed when he entered the house unexpectedly.
There was another note from Barrons: Is he the CRVK?
Rachel knew from her fixation with serial killers that violence was an addiction for them. The lust for the adrenaline rush often intensified, and more extreme acts were needed to reach the same endorphin high. Perhaps that explained the knife. The rage. But was there something else at work to explain the departure in his MO both in choice of victim and the acts?
Rachel’s mind felt splintered into a thousand shards of broken glass. It hurt to think of what Preacher had done. Physically ached. Sorrow burrowed in her like an injured animal seeking a place to die. She’d read and watched dozens of biographies of sadistic killers, been sickened and disturbed and titillated. But she’d never felt sorrow.
She had ten minutes to catch the shuttle back to campus to meet Felix. If she missed it, she’d have to wait another twenty minutes or hike up the long hill. Felix would freak if she wasn’t on time. He was letting fear get the best of him, too. Fear that emerged as concern and protectiveness, but fear nonetheless.
Preacher. What he’d done by following her at the pet store was seeping into her blood. Consuming her thoughts. It had to stop.
She understood now why her father had not told her the truth about her parents’ murders. It was to spare her this anguish and confusion. What better reason was there to lie than to save a loved one pain? She’d have done the same, she realized, because she wished now she’d never laid eyes on these hideous files. It was too late. There was no undoing what she’d done any more than there was undoing what Preacher had done, had started, sixteen years ago.
She felt a deep compulsion to harm him. She could not let this man, this beast, who’d rewritten so many lives sixteen years ago with a knife, author her or her father’s future. Could not allow it. Or allow him to keep her trapped here, in need of a chaperone, her movement limited as she hid out in a musty inn with doilies and quilts, and do it in fear.
A plan formulated. Detestable. Abhorrent. Necessary.
A thump came at the window. Rachel let out a sharp cry. She was on the second floor. No one could reach the window; besides it was sealed so tight with decades of paint it might as well have been nailed shut.
Rain streaked the pane. Outside, the fog lent the day an aura of a failing silvery dusk, as if Rachel were looking at an antique negative gel plate of the town from an earlier era. Dark shapes scuttled in the fog, trailing swirls of mist as they retreated to warm, dry havens.
Except for one shape.
A dark figure under an awning across the street.
Still as stone.
Rachel could not tell if the figure—a man, by height and size—stood facing her or facing the shop window on his side of the street.
Even if he were staring up at her window, he couldn’t possibly see her well enough to know who she was.
She considered drawing the curtain, but if it were him, she wanted him to know she saw him; she wasn’t going to shrink from him.
>
Fuck him.
Her germinating plan was to do anything but shrink.
It was the opposite.
She’d go out there now, cross the street and—
The figure moved.
Was he pointing?
At her?
It was hard to tell.
Another figure approached him out of the fog.
The man lowered his arm and embraced the person, and the two figures walked away, though Rachel was nearly certain the figure looked back at her as it slipped into the fog.
She stuffed the papers in their envelope, crammed the envelopes in her backpack, and put on her coat and hat. God, her peacoat was soaked, heavy as a suit of armor. Cold.
As she unlocked the door’s bolt and made to leave, the doorknob turned in her hand, from the other side.
21
Rachel grabbed the doorknob with both hands. She made to look out the peephole but there was no peephole.
The knob cranked in her hand.
She looked around wildly, for a knife, a solid object. Nothing presented itself, except the beer bottle, thick and heavy, on the window table.
She sprang for it, knocking the table and sending the bottle to the floor. Scrambling for the bottle, she heard the door open, then close, behind her. She clutched the bottle by its neck and stood wielding it.
“What are you doing?” Felix stood in the doorway, wet hair plastered to his face. “I’ve been texting for twenty minutes. I was going to call the police if you weren’t here.” Rainwater dripped from his duster jacket.
Rachel remained disoriented with panic. How long had she stared out the window at the figure?
She dug her phone from her coat pocket. “I turned my phone off in the library.”
“What’s going on? Why didn’t you meet me? You’re freaked, I can see that.”
“I felt sick and didn’t feel like waiting—”
“You should have texted me, with everything that’s going on, you should have—”
Rachel cringed. Should did not sit well with her. It was presumptuous and condescending, even when it wasn’t meant that way. Even from Felix.
“I just wanted to get home and not hurl on the shuttle,” Rachel said.
She did not want to share details about her parents’ murders with Felix, with anyone. Felix would want to know everything; that’s how their relationship operated. They shared everything. Just, not this. This was hers alone. And if Felix knew everything she was planning, he’d want to change her mind, stop her.
“Smells like a brewery in here,” Felix said, forcing a smile. “Not that I’m complaining.”
He noticed the beer bottle in Rachel’s hand. “You cracked open my Susan?”
“I wanted to relax.”
“Susan will relax you. Good, huh?”
“It’s beer.”
Felix struggled out of his dripping wet coat and hung it in the closet. He was good at putting stuff where it belonged, keeping things neat. Rachel slung clothes over the nearest object or dropped them on the floor if the floor proved most handy.
Felix kissed her forehead. It was sweet, though she wished he’d kiss her in a way to distract her. Knowing Felix, he feared taking advantage of her emotional state. She wished he’d realize she wanted to be taken advantage of, distracted. If he could not help her forget, then who?
“You don’t seem like yourself,” Felix said. “Even with everything, with this weirdo, you seem. Off.”
“I’m fine,” she said.
“It’s OK not to be fine.”
Of course it’s OK. Of course it is.
What was wrong with her. Normally she’d appreciate his questions and tender concern. Normally. Now, she felt poked and scrutinized.
“Let’s get a pizza,” she said, food always a good ploy to distract Felix.
“Let’s get it delivered,” Felix said. “It’s the end of days out there.”
22
Nothing. They had nothing. The state troopers had found nothing at the Wayside Country Store to shed light on Dana Clark’s disappearance. They’d found no tire tracks in the parking lot because the lot was under five inches of water that was steadily rising.
They’d found no evidence of struggle.
They’d found nothing to indicate that Dana Clark had ever been on the porch, though it was assumed she was, unless she’d lied to her daughter.
They’d found no sign of Dana’s car along the roadside for fifteen miles in either direction of the Wayside; however, the fog remained the chief hindrance to knowing outright if Dana’s car was in the trees or a field near the road, whether due to an accident or foul play. Dana herself, her body, might be out there, too, along the road, in a ditch or in the trees or a shallow grave.
The fog put it all into question. It obscured the world. Test felt as though a fungus or a degenerative disease had left a film over her eyes, blurring her vision, and if she just put in enough eyedrops or wiped her eyes well enough, she’d see clearly again. Except, there was no seeing clearly again. She’d blink back the moist air, wipe at her eyes, and still the world remained milky. She was helpless against it; there was not a thing she, or anyone else, could do to see more clearly. It grated on her, the lack of vision that impeded her job, and her lack of control over it.
If the temperature was just a few degrees colder as it normally was in early November, there would be no fog, and perhaps Dana, or at least her car, would have been found by now.
The state troopers, driving ATVs, had reached the deer camp where Tammy Clark’s husband and father were hunting. The two men had been shocked to learn Dana was missing and headed home without delay. Neither was a suspect.
Test sighed, the case stalled before it had begun.
She opened her laptop on the kitchen counter, which despite her having to prep dinner soon remained strewn with cereal boxes, dirty bowls, and scummed orange juice glasses from the kids’ breakfast in the morning. Claude would see to cleaning up. Sonja could hear the floorboards above her head creak under Claude’s feet now as he made his way to the bathroom to shower off a day of oil paints and thinner. The kids were miraculously playing peacefully in the living room.
Test browsed her laptop for Thanksgiving recipes. She needed to prepare ahead to find a fresh take on her staid, dry turkey that no one ate without drowning in her gravy, which was no great shakes, either. Claude claimed Test’s turkey was delicious, the liar. Her turkey was sawdust. Did anyone even like turkey? Or green bean casserole or canned cranberry? On her laptop, a sweet potato casserole with condensed milk and a brown sugar topping caught her eye. Maybe she’d just serve a colossal sweet potato casserole on paper plates with plastic spoons. Call it a day.
Claude entered the kitchen, barefoot in jeans and a flannel shirt, wrapped his arms around her from behind. He felt good. Strong. Warm. Smelled good. Of soap. She wondered what he wanted to tell her. He always wrapped her arms around her like this, held her in a slightly less affectionate way when he needed to tell her something rather than be amorous.
“What is it?” she said.
“Giving my wife a hug.”
“Mmm hmm. What is it?”
She could tell something weighed on his mind. She’d hardly seen him in two days as she’d worked the Clark case till past dinner. When she had come home, Claude seemed preoccupied and sequestered himself to tend to his portfolio in his studio until all hours of the night.
“It’s been two days. You’re still not curious?” he said.
“Oh, shit. Your interview.” She’d forgotten his interview with UVM. “Why didn’t you say something?”
“I didn’t want to mention until we had time to get into it.”
“So it went well? You think they’ll offer the post?”
“The question is, do you think I should accept it?”
“You got it? Of course you did.” She smiled. Breathed him in. Claude did not smile. At times, the more pleased he was by his success, the less he smiled, as if it wo
uld jinx the very reason he had to smile. His superstition was subtle, but there for his wife to notice. His detective wife. While he kept his mouth tight, he could not keep his eyes from smiling. He’d wanted this visiting artist post more than Sonja had realized.
“You didn’t tell them yes?” she said.
“It has to work for both of us.”
His two-week absence would make for an exhausting, acrobatic, but joyful two weeks alone with the kids. In some ways, when she was alone with the kids, it was easier to let go, spread out, and not worry about the dishes or state of the house, or scheduling that normally stressed her. It was as if she were on minivacation. She went with the flow. One less adult in the picture, accommodating and loving as Claude was, meant one less perspective or schedule or mood to accommodate when making meals or decisions on how to entertain the kids. She wondered what Claude would say if, upon returning home after being away, he asked how it had gone, and she told the truth: “It was so much easier.” It was a matter of practicality, not lack of appreciation. He’d probably laugh and confess he felt the same way when she was gone. Of course, if she had a case come up when he was gone, it would be a nightmare. Their babysitter was reserved for rare and random date nights, their anniversary, and Valentine’s Day. Even if she and Claude could afford it, the sitter could not cover during the day or through the night, and Test, if she held the senior position by then, could not punt her work to an underling such as Larkin and expect to hold the position for long.
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