Names of Dead Girls, The

by Eric Rickstad

  Then, she ran, tugging loose the cord.

  She stumbled in the dark and fog, falling and crashing into trees at the roadside, getting up again and carrying on.

  Her breaths came as heaving, joyous sobs as the cold rain cooled her flaming skin, the gulped oxygen miraculous as it filled her lungs.

  She ran toward the diffuse lights of the town visible ahead in the fog, until finally she came out onto pavement, crying with relief.

  She ran down the sidewalk and shoved through the doors of the inn where she ran straight into Felix.

  “Where— God. What happened?” Felix said.

  “Call my dad call my dad call my dad,” Rachel said, as she collapsed into him.

  84

  As Rath drove the Scout onto the pavement from Forgotten Gorge Road, a flurry of texts and voice messages sprang up on his phone.

  All of them from Rachel or Felix. All of them urgent, some confusing and cryptic. What alarmed him most was the photo with the text Do u know him? Boyd Pratt.

  Rath yanked the Scout to the side of the road and phoned Rachel. He got no answer, not even voice mail. He called Felix’s number. Felix picked up first ring.

  “What’s going on?” Rath said. “Why isn’t Rachel picking up, why—”

  “She’s here. With me. She’s OK. Well, not OK. Shaken. And—”

  “What are you talking about? Let me talk to her.”

  “She can’t. Her voice. Her throat is too sore, weak.”

  “What the hell happened? Tell me.”

  Rath’s blood drained as Felix explained.

  “Stay put,” Rath said. “I’ll be there as soon—”

  “No,” Felix said. “We’re borrowing a friend’s car. She wants to come home.”

  Rath let out a long breath. “OK. OK. Good. Good. But first, you need to get the police there. Call nine one one and—”

  “We did. An hour ago. We spoke to them, they got all the information. They got the woman, they got the crazy lunatic. She was right where Rachel left her. Rachel trounced her.”

  Rath wanted this news to bring him comfort, or a warped sense of pride. But it didn’t.

  “Rachel needs to see a doctor,” he said.

  “The EMTs checked her out good. Her throat looks really, really bad. And it’s raw and sore. But they found no internal damage.”

  “She needs to see a real doctor.”

  “Tomorrow. She promises. She just wants to go home.”

  “See you there.”

  He called Test. Voice mail. He texted her: PULL OVER AND PICK UP.

  He called again. She picked up first ring.

  “Listen,” Rath said, and filled her in.

  “Where’s Rachel now?” Test said.

  “Coming home.”

  “I should have never sent her the files,” Test said. “I should never have caved, even if she had every right to—”

  “That has nothing to do with what happened.”

  “Still.”

  “Go home. See your kids.”

  “God knows, I want to. I need to do one more thing.”

  85

  “Tell me who killed Mandy Wilks,” Test said.

  “I killed her,” Abby Land said from across the table.

  It had taken Test an hour to drive to the correctional facility. The public defender arrived twenty minutes later. Test had woken Blanc from her sleep and told her she had a way to get Abby Land’s charges dropped or greatly reduced. Land had not killed Mandy Wilks despite all the hard evidence against her. Despite her own claims. Now, Blanc sat to Test’s right, her black parka on the floor beside her, dressed in sweatpants and a Boston University hoodie.

  “You’re going to be tried as an adult,” Test said, firing a look at Blanc: Let me do this. For you and your client. Blanc gave Test an approving blink.

  “You’ll do long hard time as an adult,” Test said.

  Abby Land shook her head, as if trying to escape invisible hands squeezing around her throat. “He tried to scare me before. Your partner. Even my so-called attorney here won’t do her job right. Doesn’t know jack shit. I’m out when I’m eighteen. Out.”

  “You are going to be forty before you’re out. Your life will be over. Is over. Who fed you that line of about two years?”

  Land gnawed at her thumbnail, as if it she were working meat off the bone of a chicken wing. She was scared. Good. Maybe she was seeing reality. “No one fed me a line,” she said.

  “Boyd Pratt. Or his wife? Which one killed her? And why?”

  Abby Land looked like she had just drunk gasoline.

  “If you know,” Blanc said. “For your sake, tell the detective.”

  “I know it was one of them,” Test said. “It had to be. One of them killed Jamie Drake.”

  “I told you. I killed her. She had it coming. Thinking she was so perfect. Better than everyone else, better than me. Smarter than me. Always judging. The priss. Who’s better now? Who’s smarter? If she’s so smart, how come she’s dead?”

  “Judging what?”

  “It ain’t your business just like it weren’t hers. I’m old enough, I can do what I want.”

  “Is this what you want? Prison. Because you’re going to do a lot of it. What you did, the brutality, combined with your lack of remorse—”

  “Remorse. What’s that?”

  At first Test believed Land was being sarcastic. She wasn’t. She didn’t know the word. Blanc closed her eyes in disbelief.

  “Regret,” Test said.

  “Why should I have regret when she was going to ruin—”

  “Ruin what?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You think your life isn’t ruined? This place is the Double Black Diamond compared to hard time. You’re going to maximum security in some place like Oklahoma. You want to end up in Oklahoma? Too far for friends to visit. You’ll be forgotten in a month.”

  “I am getting out of here in two years,” Land shouted.

  The guard outside took a step toward the door.

  Land stared at him bug-eyed, mocking, taunting.

  “You don’t have to protect them anymore,” Test said.

  “I’m not protecting shit.”

  “If you are, tell us, tell the detective. Help yourself, help me get you out of here,” Blanc said. “I’ve informed you, you’ll be tried as an adult.”

  “They can’t protect you anymore,” Test said. “Before the night is over, Victoria and Boyd Pratt are going to be arrested for the murder of Jamie Drake and another murder, perhaps three, in Canada. So. They also can’t help or hurt you anymore. Either way, no reason to protect them.”

  “You’re fuckin’ with me,” Land said.

  “How can I be fucking with you if I’m trying to keep you from doing hard time?”

  “Cuz that’s what people do. They fuck with you. Fuck with me. That’s all they ever done. Fuck with me. And fuck me. All my life.” She said this as if she were a fifty-five-year-old woman and not a sixteen-year-old girl. She did not say it with anger—the steel and bite emptied from her voice now—but with a quiet defeat.

  Her hands lay flat on the table, trembling.

  “You don’t have to be scared,” Test said.

  “The detective is right,” Blanc said.

  “I don’t want to do hard time,” Land said.

  “You won’t have to if you help yourself,” Blanc said.

  “Please don’t let them make me. This isn’t how it was supposed to happen. He promised me.”

  “Who?” Test and Blanc said simultaneously, each glancing at the other.

  “Boyd.”

  “What did he promise?” Test said.

  Blanc leaned in toward Land. “Tell her.”

  “I’d do two years and when I got out I’d be all set.”

  “All set?” Test said.

  “Loaded. He was going to give me ten thousand dollars so I’d never have to worry about money again.”

  “He promised you that?” Test said.<
br />
  “Who is this Pratt? Why did he tell you this?” Blanc said.

  “I’m such a loser. Mandy was right. I’m a fuckin’ loser.” Land’s eyes shimmered wetly.

  “You can still get out in two years, honey,” Test said, catching herself, feeling suddenly so horrible, so awful and sad. So homesick for her kids and husband. She felt as if she’d been away from them for years. “The D.A. can draw up new charges when you tell them the truth. That Boyd Pratt killed her and promised you money and an easy two-year ride to take the fall for him.”

  Abby Land could not stop her tears. Did not try. “I can’t. Please don’t let them. I don’t want to go to Oklahoma.”

  “Then get it off your chest. Pratt can’t hurt you or protect you now.”

  “I can’t,” she said.

  “You can,” Test said.

  “This is your chance,” Blanc said.

  “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t!” Land looked at Test. “I killed her. I killed her. For him.”

  Test sagged in her chair.

  “Don’t say another word,” Blanc said.

  “I see now how stupid I was,” Land said, perking up with the delusion of hope in the face of futility. “I see. How stupid I am. I take it back. OK? I take it back,” she said, as if this might bring Mandy Wilks back to life, make it all better.

  Test rubbed her face in her hands. “Why?”

  Land shrugged. “She deserved it. I mean. I thought she did. So perfect. And I was having such a good time for once, for the first time in my stupid life, with Boyd. Until Mandy found out about us. And about Jamie, too. The three of us. Jamie, me, and Boyd. We did some serious crazy shit together at his hotels. I mean, he let us stay in a huge fuckin’ suite at the Double Black Diamond, for free. For a whole weekend. And in Montreal and Quebec. With important business men. There were some other chicks there, Euro trash, but we didn’t care. I mean, as long as everyone was into it. I mean we had some serious crazy times. Fun. But then, Mandy was going to tell. Jamie. Stupid stupid Jamie. It’s really her fault. She had all this stuff from the Double Black Diamond. Towels and shampoos and soaps. Notepads. And she brought them to school, was practically showing them off, and Mandy’s locker was next to hers. Mandy asked about them and Jamie, stupid Jamie, she told her. Almost fuckin’ everything. Like, bragged to her. She asked her to join the fun. Except Jamie was too dumb to know Mandy Wilks wasn’t fun. Mandy didn’t know how to have fun, how to party. And Mandy said we were losers. And she was going to tell.”

  “Who?” Test said, “Tell who?”

  “I don’t know. Adults. His wife. Definitely his stupid wife.”

  “And he told you to do it? Kill her?”

  “If he told you, this is a whole different matter, Abby,” Blanc said. “If he coerced or manipulated or threatened—”

  “No, no, no, nothing like that,” Land said. “He said I needed to convince her to shut up. She was a prissy know-it-all troublemaker. Of course I agreed. But you can’t shut a girl like her up. I came up with the idea. My car battery was shit, and I had one person jump-start me that day in the hotel lot already. And I knew Mandy would drive that road home after her new job. I knew it would be late and dark and no one around. It was perfect. I knew she’d stop, she was such a Goody Two-shoes.”

  “She’d stop to help jump-start you even though she hated you?” Test said.

  “She didn’t hate me. She pitied me. She treated me like her project. Like I was broken and needed fixin’. Like I needed to act a certain way. Act like her. All tra la la. Yeah, I’d act like her, if I looked like her. How hard would that be? So I knew she’d stop to help me jump-start my car. I knew it. And I was right.”

  “You planned it?” Test said.

  “Don’t answer that,” Blanc insisted. “Do not answer that.”

  Land nodded.

  “We’re done here. Abby, you’re done here,” Blanc said.

  Test felt gutted. “Why’d you keep her body in your car trunk so long? For days? You hit her with the tire iron as she bent into your trunk for battery cables and dumped her in, but—”

  “Dump her? She fell in. I was just supposed to leave her at her car. I wasn’t never supposed to take her. Why would I take her on purpose?”

  “Abby,” Blanc said.

  “If I wanna talk, I’ll fuckin’ talk,” Land spat.

  “Why leave her in the trunk for days?” Test said.

  “I couldn’t get her out. She was too heavy. I tried.”

  “So you left her?”

  She shrugged. “I couldn’t just ask someone to help me. Definitely not stupid Jamie after what she’d caused.”

  “What about Boyd?”

  Blanc got up and opened the door. “Guard,” she said and motioned.

  “That’s when he said even if I got caught it was no big deal,” Land said. “If I kept shut up and didn’t make mention of him. Our partying. I’d get out in two years after staying here, which he promised was a lot better digs than where I was living. He didn’t lie ’bout that. You should see the TV. It’s huge. I was freaking out still so he said he’d give me ten thousand bucks, too. So when I got out I wouldn’t have no worries about money.”

  “He didn’t offer to pay you beforehand?” Test said.

  “Only after I fucked up. It was pretty good of him, even if he’s a shit and lied about me doing hard time. I fucked up and he gives me ten grand? No one’s ever given me squat. Never mind a fortune. Never mind because I fucked up. Whenever else I fucked up, someone would fuck me up.”

  “So it had nothing to do with Luke Montgomery?”

  “No. I mean I hated how he fawned all over Mandy and I could have killed her for that. I was glad your partner thought he was the reason. It made Boyd feel safe, that you guys had a reason worked out. I was glad too. I mean, she was still in my trunk and I didn’t know what to do and now we’ve got this warm thaw. If you guys hadn’t busted me, I mean, she would’ve unfroze and started to smell pretty sick.”

  The guard entered the room.

  “I ain’t done,” Land shouted at him.

  “You are. She is,” Blanc said.

  “You can’t decide!” Land shouted.

  “So it was your idea and you did it for free?” Test said.

  “Not for free. Money-wise, yeah. But. Fucked as it sounds, I did it cuz I loved him. Even if he is a perv. Or. Thought I did. Stupid. Stupid stupid stupid.” She struck her temples with her balled fists.

  Test stood up from her seat, put on her jacket.

  “What you doin’?” Land said.

  “Leaving.”

  “What? Wait. You can’t leave. I got remorse,” Land said. “That counts, don’t it? That will help me, right? You gotta tell them how remorse I am.”

  Test walked out the door.

  “Where you going!?” Abby Land screamed behind her, “What am I supposed to do!? What the fuck am I supposed to do now?”

  86

  Sonja Test arrived home at 11 p.m. expecting to crawl into bed beside her husband.

  Instead, she found her husband and George and Elizabeth camped on the living room floor noshing on a bowl of popcorn and watching Toy Story 3.

  “What on earth?” she said.

  “Mama!” Elizabeth cried and leapt up from the floor, knocking the bowl over and scattering popcorn, nearly knocking over Test herself as she lunged for Test’s legs and wrapped her arms around her.

  Test collapsed on the couch with exhaustion as Elizabeth climbed in her lap and wrapped her arms around her mother’s neck. “We’ve missed you! Where did you go!”

  George picked a few pieces of popcorn off the floor and ate them as he climbed up next to Test. “She was working,” he said.

  “But where?” Elizabeth said. “Why? It’s been dark so long!”

  “She was helping people,” Claude said, standing and stretching with a groan.

  Test wasn’t sure about that. Helping. It felt more and more she was simply cleaning up. Reacting instead
of acting.

  “Can I get you anything?” Claude asked her.

  “Nothing.”

  Claude sat on the other side of her and she leaned into him.

  God, her jaw and eyes ached with fatigue; even her eyelashes ached. Her head pounded as if squeezed in a vise. She tried to settle in, rid her mind of the images of Preacher in his chair, and of poor, sad, stupid Abby Land. And Mandy Wilks in the trunk of Abby’s car. And—

  The kids wrapped themselves more tightly against her to watch the video.

  “I accepted the visiting artist position,” Claude whispered in her ear.

  “Shhh,” Elizabeth said.

  “Good,” Sonja said and squeezed his hand.

  “Shhh,” George said.

  “What’d they say about the fulltime position in the fall?” Sonja said.

  “We don’t have to talk about that now.”

  “Shhh,” Elizabeth said.

  “Tell me,” Sonja said.

  “It’s available to me. To us,” Claude said.

  Sonja wondered if there were another way. To live her life. A way she could help more than she did now, where she was expected to refer to women and girls by their names, not be scolded when she did. A way to help the living instead of the dead. Perhaps become a domestic abuse advocate. Or work with disadvantaged girls who needed mentors, a woman to show them alternatives, to show them their worth, to show them not everyone wanted to fuck with them, fuck them up, or just plain fuck them. Girls who otherwise might not stand a chance. Girls like Abby Land.

  But then, who would help the dead? Who would give them the dignity they deserved by calling them by their names and remembering they’d been alive, had lives, were humans who, even if not valued as much as they ought to have been in life, were valued now, at least, in death. And how could she ever leave this house? Her home?

  She was too tired to think anymore about it tonight.

  “And only if it worked for us,” Claude whispered.

  “Shhh,” Elizabeth said but pressed closer, breathing heavily. She’d be snoring in a minute, Sonja knew.