Rath began to enlarge each photo as he selected them. Some of the photos were of birds. Others were of raccoons and skunks foraging at night. There were images of the neighbor coming and going. Images of Test and Larkin coming and going. Images of Rath and Test and the troopers and forensics. Images of Preacher. Images of Rath setting up the trail camera, and of him from hunting and fishing trips when he’d used the SD card in his regular camera.
And still other images of someone else entering Preacher’s house.
Rath sat staring at those images for a long time. Checked the time code.
The time right before the estimated time of death for Preacher. The same person left an hour later.
Rath took a drink of beer.
The woman in the pictures had her hat pulled down and a scarf around her chin, but it was her.
It came clear now.
Sheldon’s tattoos of his daughter’s name on his chest.
The pain of his daughter’s death. Preacher’s own crimes were of the same ilk as had been exacted on Sheldon’s daughter. Remorseless, guiltless Preacher. Somehow, over sixteen years, Sheldon had forged a fake bond with Preacher. Gained Preacher’s confidence. Perhaps feigned an affinity for such cruelty. Or been so desperate he’d lied and told Preacher he, Sheldon, had been the one to rape and kill his own daughter. One way or another, he’d won Preacher’s trust and stolen or traded the truck for the Polaroids.
The gray hair in the tub may not have been Dana Clark’s, but Dana had been the woman the motel manager had seen at the North Star. Had she gone there with Sheldon, distraught and sobbing from shock so she appeared drunk to the manager? Had she perhaps even fought Sheldon on the Wayside steps, enough to cut herself before he calmed her and convinced her he was not her attacker, but Preacher was, and that he, Sheldon, had a plan?
Rath could not figure the specifics. They didn’t matter. He’d seen Dana Clark with her granddaughter and her daughter. She loved life. Her life. She’d done what she’d done because it was what she needed to do, to do more than survive, but to live.
She’d done what Rath had not dared to do.
But. It did not make what she’d done right, legal, or moral.
He of all people understood this.
She’d almost gotten away with it.
She’d left no proof behind and had the perfect alibi of being wrecked in the trees and fog at the time of Preacher’s killing. As of yet, there was no evidence whatsoever to link Preacher and Dana Clark. No reason at all to suspect her, except for the images on the SD card and computer screen.
Rath thought about Preacher in the interview room. People got away with murder. How many went to their grave with a murder on their conscience? Most of them heinous, stupid people who somehow managed, in the only respect that mattered, to commit the perfect murder. Mean, merciless, cruel people who deserved to pay, yet didn’t.
While girls like Jamie Drake and Lucille Forte and Mandy Wilks lay in their graves, and people like Dana Clark slipped up and now faced prison for the rest of her life if discovered.
There was nothing anyone could do to right that sad balance sheet.
Almost nothing.
Rath studied the photos of Dana Clark coming and going from Preacher’s house.
He glanced at the hairs on the blank sheet of paper. Blew on them lightly. The hairs shivered, lifted on his breath, danced in the air, and were gone.
He looked at the photos of Dana Clark on the laptop screen until his vision blurred and the images of her seemed to be dissolving in a fog.
Then, he hit Delete and went down the hall, checked on his sleeping daughter, climbed into his bed, and slept like a man with no regrets.
Author’s Note
Hello, readers. I often get asked where I get my ideas, or how the idea for the Canaan Crime series came to be. It’s a long story. This is the short version. But I hope it explains in part how I came to write novels such as The Silent Girls, Lie in Wait, and The Names of Dead Girls.
I grew up in Vermont, and as a kid I was drawn to the desolate, beautiful, and bucolic woods of the northeast corner of the state known as the Northeast Kingdom, where Canada borders the north and the Connecticut River and New Hampshire border the east. I fished, hunted, camped, and explored the woods. They were full of wild mystery and majesty.
I saw the woods as an escape to a place of ultimate tranquility, where nothing bad happened.
I was wrong. Naive. There is no such place.
I read a lot of dark tales, even then. Perhaps it was the works by the likes of Poe, King, and Washington Irving that made me start to see the beauty as a mask for something more ominous. Or perhaps the woods and wilderness have always frightened humans, which is why we write about them and why they play such a large role in our psyches and our lore of dark tales. Tales like “Hansel and Gretel” come to mind. “Little Red Riding Hood.” “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” The Blair Witch Project. The woods in the Kingdom can grow dark in the day just from the density of the boreal forest, the cedars and spruce and hemlocks that hem in the rivers and swamps grow so thick and tall they blot out the sun. When dusk fell, or the skies darkened with storm clouds, or fog settled in thick as cobwebs, the woods took on a threatening, haunted air.
But it was a certain fishing trip with a cousin when something bad, and unforgettable, happened to me.
I was fourteen. I stood all of 5’6”, weighed a whopping 115 pounds. Pipe-cleaner arms. Skin and bones. My cousin was seventeen. We’d taken his old Jeep CJ5 up to the most remote spot we could find to fish a hidden trout stream. The road was dirt, not a house in sight except for an old dilapidated shack that looked like a chicken coop backed up to an outhouse. There were no other houses for miles. We pulled the Jeep into a field by the stream and set up our tent, readying it for when we returned from fishing that evening. We’d found the spot just in time. The Jeep was overheating. We’d had to stop and fill the radiator a while back and we knew the Jeep likely would not have gotten us much farther and would likely not start again until it cooled over several hours.
I was fishing down in a ravine and came to the culvert that took the stream under the dirt road by the broken-down house. I climbed the bank to the road as my cousin continued to fish, out of earshot.
Up on the road, crossing to the other side, I saw two men lumbering toward me from the old house. One man was maybe thirty-five, the other maybe fifty-five. A father and son, I imagined. Unshaven and grizzled, they each wore greasy overalls and sported thick Coke-bottle glasses with florescent orange tape at the bridges of their noses. And they each carried a single-shot, break-action shotgun.
I said hello as they approached.
They said nothing.
Until they were upon me. Close.
Close enough for me to smell their reek of B.O.
Close enough for me to pick up the sense of something sinister vibrating off of them.
The son snarled, “That your fuckin’ Jeep up there?”
I was about to say it was my cousin’s, who was in the stream, out of sight, out of earshot.
I didn’t get a chance. “Move it the fuck now,” he hollered. He stepped closer. He and the father. Real close. In my face. So I could smell and feel their breath on me, and see the spittle foaming at the corner of their mouths. They had twenty and forty years on me, at least. Each had seventy-five pounds and a half foot on me. And each carried a shotgun. We stood in the middle of a dirt road in the middle of nowhere, miles from another house. No cars were going to be coming along. No one was coming along. It was me and them.
I looked back toward the creek, for my cousin.
“What the fuck din’t you understand?” the son yelled. “Move your fucking Jeep now!”
I tried to tell them I couldn’t. I didn’t know how to drive. It wasn’t my Jeep. My cousin would be up soon and we’d leave. We would. If we could. The Jeep might not start. It was overheating, and it might not start for hours.
Before I could say any of
that, the son howled: “Move that fucking Jeep. Who the fuck do you think you are parking in our field? Move it!”
My cousin was clambering up the bank now, oblivious. “Hey,” he said. Then he saw how close the two men were to me. Their guns. My fear.
“That your fucking Jeep?” The son screamed. “Move it the fuck now. Get the fuck off our property. Who the fuck do you think you are?”
My cousin, shaken, tried to explain. To apologize.
The father handed his shotgun to the son. The son now held a shotgun in each hand and, his face a foot from mine, held them with one barrel beside my left ear and one beside my right.
“Move! Now!” he roared. And he fired a shotgun.
I went deaf. No ringing of the ears. No vacuum roar of silence. Just. Nothing. The men were yelling and my cousin was explaining, but I heard nothing. Just saw the son’s jaw yawning open and snapping shut like the jaws of a wolf, his face red and contorted with rage, spittle flying.
We backed away.
Slowly. Instinctively. We did not dare put our backs to them.
My ears started to ring. They hurt with the ringing, as if a sharp sonic needle were piercing my eardrums.
“Walk slow,” my cousin said. “Don’t make ’em mad.”
We backed up more.
The men stood in the road watching us, knowing no cars would be coming.
The son broke open the shotgun he’d fired. Gun smoke poured out of the breech. The empty shotgun shell ejected into the air and skittered in the dirt road.
The son took a loaded shotgun shell from his pocket, seated it in the shotgun, and snapped the shotgun shut.
“Why is he reloading?” I said.
We backed away until we were on the edge of fatal shotgun range, maybe fifty yards, then we turned and ran.
We ripped the tent up with all our gear inside and stuffed it in the Jeep. And, just like in a bad horror flick, when my cousin turned the key in the ignition, the engine did not turn over. Not at first. Finally, it did, and we drove back to the road and pulled out onto it, looking back to see the two men still standing there in the road. That is when I knew no one was safe anywhere.
Although I’d always loved dark stories and novels, that was the real genesis of the themes that would interest me in my writing.
Dark, desolate woods and landscape, suffused with beauty yet lurking with potential violence. An old story. Perhaps the oldest.
When one visits any region of sublime natural beauty, one is lulled into a sense of being safe, a dreamlike state that nothing bad could ever happen in a place so beautiful. As I wrote in The Silent Girls:
Violence lurked here as it did the world over, most often exacted between known parties. Intimate, familial, and unspeakable. [Rath] had always wondered why people in rural areas, when interviewed after horrific violence, said, “This isn’t supposed to happen here.” As if violence had forgotten to keep itself within some prescribed geographic boundary.
This is the theme I took into this Canaan Crime series. The sense that acts of malevolence can strike anywhere, anytime. It allows me to examine the nature of good and evil. Of the very real repercussions of violence and crime, and the way small communities and individuals respond to such acts when those they know are victims of it. What do you do when the law is not enough to protect you? What would my cousin have done if I was shot? What would our families have done if we’d both been killed and the Jeep hidden in an old barn and our bodies in a shallow grave? No one knew where we were. We could easily have disappeared.
It also allows me to write novels steeped in suspense, dread, and tension, play with twists and revelations in a way most of us seek and enjoy as readers.
In the last ten years, several very violent and especially cruel and merciless murders have taken place in the Kingdom that outraged me as much as any other citizen. They broke hearts. They ruined lives and undermined that sense of safety that those of us who have never experienced violence or the threat of it often have. These crimes change the trajectory of the lives and psyches of survivors, of communities. I write about them to try to understand them from every angle, and because they are timeless. The landscape’s beauty and mystery, its darkness, the old barns and abandoned skeletons of homes, old root cellars and dark attics make for a superb setting for psychological thrillers for these classic, chilling, suspenseful stories that are as old as humanity.
Two months ago, an eighty-one-year-old neighbor who lives a half mile away was murdered. She was stabbed to death when a break-in went wrong. Eighty-one years old. She’d lived a long, good life and raised a family in that house, and her life came to a terrifying end like that. For two months no one has been arrested. For two months the killer has remained at large.
How can this be? I wonder. Who does such a thing? Commits such an act? How can the killer still be out there, likely among us? One of us, yet not one of us. Not anymore. The killing separated the murderer from the rest of “us.” We in this small town of 2,300 people are held in suspense, awaiting word of an arrest. It is the stuff of horror novels and tall tales. Lore. Except it is real. I go by my murdered neighbor’s road at least four times a day to bring my daughter to kindergarten. Now. Today, as it turns out in a twist as write this, I learn that the murderer has just been arrested, at the recreation park two miles from my home where my wife and I bring our kids. He is one of us. Or was. He lived just a few miles from my house. Grew up here. He’d broken into the house and then “got scared and one thing led to another.” I don’t know how it can be. I hope he is put away for decades, not able to find release until he is infirm and unable to hurt anyone else. Except “justice” does not always work this way. Too often violent criminals, murderers, and especially sexual predators of women and children are released early to do harm again. It happens over and over. How many times have you seen a news report about a killer or rapist just being arrested, one who’d spent a lifetime in out of jail for the very same crimes only to be freed and victimize again? This, too, is part of my theme. Moral codes versus legal codes. Such events compel me to explore them, to write about them with all the darkness, suspense, mystery, dread, and outrage I can. To try to find an answer.
I plan to write many more of this series, and many stand-alones.
Crime and violence and murder will forever intrigue me, as it does so many of us, as we try to find a way to render the inexplicable explicable.
Thank you for reading.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to all who’ve encouraged, improved, and championed my writing over the years. My lovely wife, Meridith. My daughter, Samantha, and son, Ethan, for their smiles, hugs, and joy, and for their love of books and stories. My mother. My sisters: Beth, Judy, and Susan. All of my nieces and nephews: Jaclyn, Jacob, Harrison, Emily, Bryanna, Eric, Willa, Boone, Hailey, and Poppy. Gary Martineau. Libby and Herb Levinson. Todd and Diane Levinson. Allyson Miller. Ben Wilson. Dan Myers. Dan Orseck. Tom Isham. Mark Saunders. Lailee Mendelson. Kimberly Cutter. Anya DeNiro. Rob O’Donovan. John Mero. Roger and Susan Bora. Jeff Racine. Mike and Janice Quartararo. Stephen and Carole Phillips. Eric Weissleder. Chris Champine. Andrea Diamond. Dave and Heidi Bouchard. Jim Lepage. Phil Monahan. David Huddle. Tony Magistrale. Bill and Mary Wilson. Jamie and Stephen Foreman. Bruce Coffin. Matthew Engels. Daniel Nogueira. Lucinda Jamison. Greg Cutler. Paul Doiron. David Joy. Steve Ulfelder. Roger Smith. Meg Gardiner. Hank Phillippi Ryan. Jake Hinkson. Lisa Turner. Drew Yanno. Tyler Mcmahon. Howard Mosher. Rona and Bob Long. A special thanks to my agent Philip Spitzer, and to Lukas Ortiz and Kim Lombardini. And to the wonderful and creative people at HarperCollins, especially my editor, Carrie Feron.
About the Author
Eric Rickstad is the New York Times bestselling author of Lie In Wait and The Silent Girls, a #1 bestselling Nook and #3 Mystery Kindle novel heralded as intelligent and profound, dark, disturbing, and heartbreaking. His first novel, Reap, a literary suspense novel, was a New York Times Notable Novel. He lives in his home state
of Vermont with his lovely wife and daughter.
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Praise for The Names of Dead Girls
“Beautifully written with original language and imagery, The Names of Dead Girls is a chilling page-turner. The superb cast of characters rings so very true, from the conflicted mom police detective to the troubled Rachel Rath to the anthropomorphic, wet fog. Atmospheric, empathetic, and addictive.”
—James W. Ziskin, Edgar-nominated author of the Ellie Stone Mysteries
“Eric Rickstad is the rare writer who can wrap a dark, gritty story in smooth, poetic prose. If you haven’t discovered his work yet, The Names of Dead Girls is the place to start. It’s a taut, masterful thriller and a terrific read.”
—Alafair Burke, New York Times bestselling author of The Ex
“A tour de force of unstoppable suspense drives readers deep into Rickstad’s dark and haunting world. An out-and-out bone chiller. Impossible to put down.”
—Gregg Olsen, #1 New York Times bestselling author
“Eric Rickstad has handed us a diamond of a thriller in The Names of Dead Girls. […] Rickstad is a seriously gifted writer, and trust me when I say that this book, from its explosive beginning to its startling ending, will grab you by the throat and not let go. You have been warned.”
—Mark Pryor, author of The Paris Librarian
“A complex and emotional thriller—Rickstad blurs the lines of good and evil as a detective’s desperate need to protect his daughter from a depraved killer, and his hunger for justice, distorts his obligation to the law.”
—Wendy Walker, bestselling author of Emma in the Night and All Is Not Forgotten
“The Names of Dead Girls is that brilliant, rare literary thriller: captivating in character, told with precision, and fueled by relentless, mounting terror. A compulsive page-turner that will have you racing to the end even as you dread what’s coming.”
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