Claude pulled Sonja in closer.
“I was thinking,” Sonja whispered.
“Yeah?” Claude whispered.
“I hear you,” George said, his voice drowsy.
“I was thinking I’d make a huge sweet potato casserole with extra brown sugar for Thanksgiving,” Sonja whispered.
“Sounds good.”
“That’s it.”
“That’s what?”
“That’s all I’m going to cook. A huge sweet potato casserole with extra brown sugar topping, served with four plastic spoons and four paper plates, out here on the coffee table while we watch movies in our pajamas. What do you think?”
“Perfect,” Claude said as both George and Elizabeth began to snore, their bodies growing warm against Test who’d be snoring in another minute, too, if she stayed here on the couch with her family.
Which is exactly what she did.
87
Rachel sat at the kitchen table, listening to the wind in the eves. It sounded musical, like birdsong, though perhaps that was the Percocet at work. She plucked an ice cube from the cereal bowl of ice cubes Felix had put out for her with the same care and pride and love he would have shown if he’d prepared an exotic gourmet dish.
She sucked on the ice cube, letting the cold water trickle down her ravaged throat.
Felix and her father sat at the table with her.
No one spoke.
Rachel’s voice was hoarse and it hurt to speak.
Besides, what was there to say?
She’d tried to sleep but was too tired and too tense.
She wished she could sleep. Her body begged for it, but her troubled mind played the foil.
Her father sipped a Labatt Blue from the bottle. Felix joined him, drinking from the bottle Rachel’s father had cracked open for him. Rachel could tell Felix didn’t have a taste for the Canadian pilsner, but he drank it anyway.
She hoped her father’s phone would ring soon, a call to tell him Boyd Pratt had been arrested.
The couple was deranged. As Rachel understood from her father, the husband had a thing for young girls. A violent, psychosexual thing that entailed luring and grooming and manipulating girls younger than Rachel. Much younger. Like his wife had been when he’d met her.
Rachel was an exception, the wife had confessed, because Boyd liked risk. And did not like to be told what to do, by anyone. Especially a cop. Boyd had targeted her for who she was, the daughter of a nosy cop making trouble for him. What better challenge than to fuck with and try to fuck a nosy cop’s daughter. It sickened Rachel.
How stupid she’d been.
How stupid she was.
No. Not stupid. Confused. An emotional and mental wreck from the Preacher business. Whoever had killed him had done the world a favor.
Sick with guilt, she looked at Felix, even though she’d, technically, done nothing wrong. All she’d done was talk to the guy. Taken a ride. Still. She did not want to live on technicalities. She’d betrayed Felix, that was the truth. She swore to herself she’d never do it again. She would never lie to him, never hide things from him again.
Drowsiness was creeping up on her.
She longed to sleep in her old bed, in her old bedroom.
Safe and sound.
Felix looked at her, smiled. He lifted the beer bottle, as if in cheers.
Her father raised his bottle toward her, too.
“I’m glad you’re here,” he said. “I’m glad you’re safe.”
Rachel let out a long sigh to stifle a sob.
“I bought a gun,” she said. “A thirty-eight revolver.”
Felix and Rachel’s father stared at her.
“It’s in my backpack,” Rachel said.
Her father and Felix nodded.
“I thought you should know,” she said. “I wanted you to know.”
88
Sunday, November 13, 2011
The driver for CV Electric Utility Company tromped on his truck’s brakes as the deer clambered out of the fog and brush and onto the dirt road in front of him.
The fog swam in the headlights.
No. Not a deer. A person.
A woman. Emaciated.
Hunched over and lurching gamely.
A woman who now collapsed in a heap on the road in front of him.
The driver jumped out of his truck and ran to kneel beside the woman.
“You’re all right. You’re going to be all right,” he said, though he did not believe it.
Her face was swollen and bruised, her forehead busted and gashed, cheeks coated in blood. The blood old, crusted black. Like creosote in an old stovepipe.
No, he did not think she’d be all right.
His work cell had no bars. He hated to leave her even for a moment, not wanting her to die alone, but he needed to do it. He hurried back to his truck, got on his radio, and called it into his company dispatch to get on 911 and tell them to bust ass, fog or not.
He went back to the woman in the road. He did not dare move her, so stayed with her as she moaned and sobbed.
It was half an hour before the ambulance reached them.
When the Bloomfield deputy sheriff took over soon after, the driver took out a flashlight from his truck and looked more closely at the woods from which the woman had scrambled. It was hard to see anything, except fog.
It looked as though a car had gone off the road. It had flown over a steep bank, so it left no swath in the trees to see from the roadside, nothing to see from the road. He hiked down the bank, and followed the now visible swath into the woods. About fifty feet in, he spotted it, an old VW Bug, crashed into the trees.
The front end was demolished.
How she had ever survived the wreck was beyond him.
Some people, he thought, are just plain survivors.
89
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
One of Dana Clark’s eyes was swollen shut, the other eye open but bloodied. The puckered skin along the black ragged zipper of stitches from between her eyes to the crown of her shaved skull was a hot, fierce red.
She was missing two teeth, but Rath only knew this because she smiled at him as her daughter led him into the living room of her home.
Dressed in a terrycloth bathrobe, Dana lay propped on pillows on her daughter’s couch, her granddaughter snuggled in carefully next to her so as not to hurt her bruised ribs.
Dana gave her daughter a look and her granddaughter a pat on the thigh. Her daughter said, “Let’s let Grammy talk to her friend,” and the two left the room.
Dana sat up a bit, slipping her hands into her robe pockets. She brought out a tissue, dabbed at a scab under her nose.
“We were worried,” Rath said. “I was.”
“I’m all right now,” she said and smiled, though Rath saw it pained her.
“How’s the pain?” Rath said.
“I’ve known a lot worse.”
Rath nodded. “You mentioned a man on the porch of the Wayside.”
She looked confused as she slipped her hands back in her robe pockets. “I did?”
“When you were on the phone with your daughter.”
“I don’t remember being on the phone.”
“A strange man. He had you worried.”
“Oh?” She seemed to be thinking hard, trying to conjure up memory from the depths. “Maybe. It’s. Cloudy.”
“He had nothing to do with your accident?”
“How could he?”
“Maybe he frightened you and you drove off too fast. Or he followed you.”
“No. It was the fog.”
“You’re certain?”
“How could he have anything to do with it?”
“I guess only you can answer that.”
“You make it sound mysterious.”
“It’s the cop in me.”
“You’re a detective again, I hear?”
“Was. It doesn’t suit me. I never wanted it to begin with, honestly, but it involved you a
nd— After what happened before. We thought you’d been taken. There was a man, a Clay Sheldon. We thought he’d done something to you. He did time with Ned Preacher, a suspect in your attack. Sheldon had photos of you.”
She sat up more, gritting her teeth and wheezing. “Photos?”
“Polaroids.”
“Oh,” Dana said in an exhale of breath. “Was it him then, who attacked me?”
“It was.”
“And because I mentioned a man, you thought it was him who was on the store porch? And he’d—”
“Something like that.”
“And where is he now?”
Rath could see she was scared.
“He was found in his bathtub in his motel unit yesterday. His wrists slit. What I can’t get my head around is the coincidence.”
“Coincidence?”
“We investigated your disappearance and another unconnected murder. A thread led us to him. And he had those Polaroids. Of you. From your attack. Like the one your daughter found. It was him. He was your attacker. Had to be.”
Her eyes welled up, she took another tissue from her pocket and blew her nose, tucked her hand back in the pocket.
“The odds just seem, unbelievable,” Rath said. “He was seen with a drunk woman who fit your description and we believe she was bleeding and that he’d hurt her or—”
“It wasn’t me.”
“Of course. Still, it’s hard for me to make sense of it all.”
“Stop trying. I have. I mean, you can’t make sense of everything. Sometimes, there is no sense to be made. A coincidence is a coincidence. A horrific act happens for no reason good enough to answer why?”
She closed her good eye and seemed about to nod off, but the eye fluttered open again.
“I should let you rest,” Rath said. He leaned over and kissed Dana’s cheek lightly.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“For what?”
“For telling you he was dead. For your pain.”
“I’m sorry for your pain, too.”
90
On the way home, Rath stopped by Preacher’s old place.
The night was dark. The duplex, too. No cars.
The fog persisted in the trees.
He barely noticed, had grown used to it the way one gets used to anything when it refuses to go away.
The neighbor woman had moved out. Who would possibly stay after what had happened? Who would possibly want to ever live here again? They should burn the place down, Rath thought. Start over. Or better yet, let the woods reclaim the plot.
He walked into the trees, the beam of his flashlight illuminating the fog.
He’d not been able to get here sooner. There had been police and media and the neighbor’s family in and out for days.
Now, finally, in the night, he was here. Alone.
The birdhouse was gone.
“Fuck,” he said in the dark. “Fuck.”
He searched the ground with his flashlight.
There it was. The birdhouse.
It had fallen.
He opened its lid.
The trail camera was inside.
The SD card inside it.
He took them both and drove home.
91
After Frank Rath left, Dana took the letter out of her robe pocket. The pink letter soiled with blood.
Her daughter and granddaughter came into the room and Dana waved them off. “Give me a minute?” she said.
Alone again, she unfolded the letter and read it.
Dear Mr. Preacher,
Many have said you are a monster. An animal. A beast. The Lord knows this is not true. I know this is not true. No man is a monster. You are a man. A human. Made in his image. With the beast inside you. I followed your story. I learned you have found the Lord, and through him, found your release to freedom. I hope you have also found forgiveness and peace through Christ. As you enter the world from prison, you will still be seen as a beast by others. But not by me. If no one else forgives you, know I forgive you. Know I, though a woman, know, as you do, how women can be. They are not free of sin themselves. They lust. They tempt. I confess, I am not without sin. Only love can rid you, or me, of the beast. Know that Christ loves you. And that I love you too. My love can rid you of the beast, if you’ll have it. If you’ll have me. Will you? Will you have me? If so, bring this flower I’ve given you, this rose, back to the end of your road and place it on the rock. Then I will know you’ll have me. That you will receive me. Receive my love. Take my love. I will come to you soon, if the flower is placed on the rock. I will come for you.
I am Love.
She folded the letter and reached into her other pocket and took out the Polaroid.
Not the one her daughter found that day.
The other one.
The one Clay Sheldon had taken a picture of and shown to her on his phone that night on the Wayside porch.
It had pained Dana to lie to Frank Rath, but she’d done what she needed to do. She remembered everything on the store porch that night.
She remembered fighting and screaming and kicking at Sheldon, terror splitting her in two it seemed, a nightmare awakened.
Finally, he’d calmed her. Explained. About Ned Preacher being his prison mate, about Ned Preacher being the Great Pretender, not a lick of remorse for his crimes. The crimes he’d bragged about inside. Not a drop of regret. As if he’d never committed them. Never caused pain. Like the pain Sheldon’s daughter had felt, and the pain Sheldon had felt on behalf of his daughter. Preacher had not committed the crime against Sheldon’s daughter, but he bragged about much worse. Bragged.
It was what had happened to Sheldon’s daughter that decided it for Dana, that and the dozens of photos Sheldon had shown her. Dozens of photos Preacher had kept hidden in a metal box in the woods, behind Dana’s old house where Preacher had originally attacked her. Behind her home. Photos that Preacher had traded for a lousy old truck. A truck he planned to use to get around in, once the dust settled.
Preacher would deny the photos were his if Sheldon ever designed to use them against him. Preacher. Who’d killed that kind Frank Rath’s sister and brother-in-law. And others. Girls. Preacher, who was out of prison. Alive and living. Without regret or remorse. Waiting to start again.
So close.
Too close.
She’d seen it in his eyes the night at his house. Seen what he had in mind for her.
After Sheldon found her at the Wayside, she and Sheldon had hidden her and her car in an old, abandoned barn in New Hampshire. She’d written the letter and mailed it to Preacher. Sheldon had driven past Forgotten Gorge Road and seen the rose out on the rock. A second letter, which she also now had in her robe pocket, was sent. The date set for a few days later, so Dana could prepare herself, and she and Sheldon could plan it perfectly.
The night of her date, she and Sheldon had crashed her car into the trees using a barbell to weigh down the gas pedal. Straight over the bank, on a curve, where the car would never be seen, even if there was no fog. She’d eaten almost nothing since that first night at the Wayside. Couldn’t eat out of nervousness and fear and trauma. It was a good thing she hadn’t. She’d appeared weaker when found, like a woman trapped in a car for days.
Preacher had not recognized her. Had looked her in the eye, the gaze of his dead black eyes crawling all over her body, and not known who she was. Not until she had undone her third button on her dress and he had begun to see her ruined and scarred flesh he’d carved.
After she’d done what she needed to do, Sheldon had picked her up on the road. Driven her to her crashed car and struck her ribs with a piece of firewood. As she’d sat in the seat, he’d cracked her forehead with a violent blow of a fiberglass ax handle, then taken her by the hair and cracked her forehead again, against the wheel.
She’d known worse pain.
The plan was to have her awaken from the blow and wander out onto the road and be rescued. But Sheldon had struck her so hard s
he’d been knocked out and too weak and concussed to move for a couple days. It was for the better. The wounds were older, crusted. She’d grown even weaker and thinner. She realized now if she’d stumbled out earlier, the wounds would have been too fresh. Perhaps raised suspicion about her crash, and who knew what else. It was a good thing poor Clay Sheldon had struck her so hard. It was a good thing the utility man had come along. She may have died if she’d gone much longer without water or attention. It was a miraculous coincidence. If that was what one chose to call it.
She’d not thought of that when she’d thought the original plan was perfect. She wondered what else she and Sheldon had overlooked, but she did not worry about being caught. Not now. Even if she were caught, she’d do it all over again.
Dana got up slowly from the couch and walked to the fireplace.
She stared into it, then tossed the photo and the two letters into the flames.
“What are you doing up?” her daughter said behind her, startling her.
The photo and letter curled on themselves and were gone.
“I was cold,” Dana said.
Her daughter wrapped her arms around her from behind. “Just tell me next time and I’ll turn up the heat.”
“I’m fine now.”
92
Rachel lay asleep in her room as Rath sat at his kitchen table with the envelope. He opened it and for a long time he did nothing but stare at the two strands of hair inside it: Preacher’s and Rachel’s.
He took both hairs out and placed them side by side on a blank piece of white paper. He connected his trail cam by USB cord to Rachel’s laptop computer.
Thumbnail images from the SD card appeared on the screen.
Several dozen.
A prompt appeared on the screen: Import or Delete Images?
He needed to erase evidence of himself from the card then mail it with the remaining images to the police. It was likely moot. No doubt Sheldon’s image was on the SD card. Sheldon and Preacher had experienced a falling-out and Sheldon had done his deed.
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