A Map of the Dark

by Karen Ellis

  Elsa doesn’t like working missing-kid cases, she decides for the hundredth time. She doesn’t like it at all. She doesn’t know how she’s tolerated it all these years and then realizes she hasn’t.

  Two rows behind the Haverstocks, Ruby’s friends cluster tightly together, talking, crying, glancing at their phones as if some vital piece of information might appear at any moment. Ruby, maybe, texting, jk lol i’m not really dead. Elsa knows not to underestimate magical thinking in the face of death, but these kids, they’re just learning. Allie and Charlie sit at a distance from each other, and if they interact at all, she doesn’t see it. People are scattered in the pews, waiting for someone to get up and speak.

  No one can, not even Ruby’s stricken parents, especially not them.

  Finally, a bald man with a trimmed goatee ascends the platform, tripping on his long black robes, revealing Converse sneakers. He rights himself, stands behind the podium, and introduces himself in a soft voice as a “nondenominational pastor.” He speaks long enough to put a few words to the overwhelming grief that has silenced everyone else. Both parents weeping now. Allie, among the gaggle of teenagers, heaves forward. Elsa takes another deep breath and doesn’t cry.

  Later, they follow the procession through a maze of headstones, up a grassy slope to a plot of freshly dug soil. Beside it, a mound of dirt with a shovel poking out. The family sits in folding chairs lined up near the gaping mouth of the grave. Everyone else scatters, watching, as Ruby in her casket is lowered slowly into the earth. There is no marker for her, not yet; it all happened too fast. Elsa and Lex stand side by side, in silence, and watch from a distance.

  The pastor pulls out the shovel, digs it into the mound, and holds out the first offering of soil to the family. After a moment of hesitation, Ginnie comes forward and takes it from him. She averts her eyes when he smiles at her, and Elsa wants to slap him for trying to cheer her up. Shaking, she carries the shovel in front of her, dirt raining in her wake. When she reaches the grave, she stands there, looking down. Her face seems to gather inward, like someone’s pulled a string at the top of a sack, closing her off. A woman, a mother, finished. She tilts the shovel and the dirt falls in, thumps against the top of the casket. Quickly, she turns and hands the shovel to her husband, who has come up behind her. She makes her way across the lawn, back to her seat, where she hunches, cocooned in a private grief.

  Peter stabs the mound, hard, provoking an avalanche of dirt.

  Beside her, Elsa feels Lex’s warmth. She steps away so she won’t cry.

  Reading her, he whispers, “Let’s go.”

  They don’t speak until they’re sealed into the quiet of her car. Only then does she breathe. “That was awful.”

  “Yup.”

  “Poor Ruby.” She starts the engine, steers onto the road that winds through the cemetery. Lex, beside her, checks his phone.

  “Wow—Elsa, we just got an e-mail from Oregon.”

  “We?” Thinking: Oregon. Where Sammy Nelson officially lived.

  “The task force, all of us. The local PD went back to his place. There’s a video attached.”

  She pulls the car up to the curb and parks, still inside the cemetery. “Open it.”

  He props his phone horizontally, and they wait while a two-minute file loads. A hearse with its headlights on enters from the street, moving slowly, leading a procession that snakes slowly past. Elsa stares at the small screen. Lex clicks the arrow and the video begins.

  A man, young enough to still have a telltale crack in his voice, speaks over shaky footage that sweeps slowly left to right. “This is Officer Lloyd Bass, Winston, Oregon. I’m at the home of your perp. I was told to show you what I see, as you’re on the other coast, so here goes. The outside of the building where he lived.”

  A low-rise apartment complex clad in beige siding, fringed with parking spots, half of them unoccupied. The lens rests on a windowless van, forest green, with a jagged scratch across the rear bumper, an Oregon license plate.

  “This is Sammy Nelson’s vehicle. Neighbors told us he has two vans, this green one and also a white one with New York plates. He takes up two spots, and some people don’t like it, but occupancy here is low so management let it slide.”

  The camera jerks away from the van, back to the apartment building. Eight concrete paths connect the parking lot to a series of identical front doors, each leading to a downstairs and an upstairs. Two buzzers per door, two apartments per unit.

  “He lived in unit three, apartment B.”

  The officer’s hand reaches into the shot to open the door. Hairless, not a wrinkle, a wedding ring.

  “Up the stairs.”

  The image rocking with the officer’s steps, the slaps of his shoes on cracked linoleum. His hand appears again to push open an interior door with 3B stenciled in black. “I unlocked it before, figured it would make a better shot, so you wouldn’t have to watch the whole rigmarole with the landlord. Here we go.”

  Foot by foot, yard by yard, a living room takes shape. A room with off-white walls, brown carpeting, a low ceiling, two perfectly symmetrical windows with closed venetian blinds. On the wall above a long blue couch hangs, in pride of place, a poster-size enlargement of little Zoe—same as the button, but in this larger version a likeness to her father is evident around the eyes. Between the couch and the windows, a pair of tall bookcases lean into each other. Books, lots of books, and almost as many DVD cases, most with library stickers on their spines. Ordinary People, Kramer vs. Kramer, Rain Man, Beginners. The camera pans quickly past the windows: a large-screen television mounted on an otherwise blank wall, the inside of the front door on which a fringed macramé hanging is attached by a pushpin.

  The lens makes a sudden dip to the floor, where, at the seam of living room and hall, an empty eBay box sits with its flaps open, a box just larger than the twenty-inch toolbox Nelson favored. With a shiver Elsa wonders if he’d been all ready to go, waiting for the package to arrive, if he’d opened it immediately and extracted the shiny red toolbox and filled it with his goodies and hit the road.

  “Okay. Now the kitchen.”

  A small square room, windowless, with plain wood cabinets and the cheapest appliances you can buy. A round table fills up most of the space; it holds a red floral place mat, a saltshaker with an S and pepper shaker with a P, a plastic takeout cup with a lid and a straw and an inch of murky water at the bottom. A single chair. Inside the small sink sits a clear glass vase with a bouquet of dead coneflowers, bulbous black middles haloed with desiccated petals that might once have been purple. The camera lingers a moment on the front of the refrigerator, crowded with photos: people in pairs, trios, groups of picnickers, on boats and rooftops and swimming in lakes, smiling and laughing, a beaming couple with their arms around each other, a family raising their glasses at a holiday table laden with food. Every single photograph cut out of a magazine.

  Loneliness punches Elsa in the gut. She blinks, and the lens turns away.

  Bass announces, “Bedroom now. That’s the last room. Well, and the bathroom.”

  The double bed is clumsily made with an Indian spread; two pillows hold the indentation of a person’s weight—an empty space left by Sammy Nelson’s body in repose. On a bedside table sits a short stack of books, titles turned to the wall, and one of those small clip-on reading lights—as if when he read, alone in his room, he wanted to make the smallest possible impact on the darkness.

  “Enough,” Elsa says, “I can’t—I don’t want to see any more.” She turns to look out the car window, where just then a woman on a white bicycle whizzes toward the graves, a potted yellow begonia in the wire basket above her front tire.

  Friday

  37

  The FOR SALE sign on the lawn in front of the Martin-Creech house is gone. A pair of small boy’s bikes is tangled together, tossed down by the front steps. Half a dozen camera-slung reporters stand at the edge of the property, talking casually, waiting out the family’s reticence. As far
as Elsa understands, Hope’s parents have managed to keep the press at bay, practically a miracle, given the raging hunger of the news cycle.

  The reporters come alive when Elsa and Lex take the path to the front door. Elsa rings the bell, sees a curtain part on a downstairs window, hears a voice say something and then footsteps. The father, Gary—gray-faced, dark swaths beneath his eyes—cracks open the door just enough to let Elsa and Lex inside. Behind them, cameras click and flash. He slams the door and locks it.

  “They’ve been here since we got her home,” Gary says. Three days.

  He leads them to the living room, where all the curtains are drawn against prying eyes, blotting out daylight. Hope and Becky sit close together in the bend of a sectional couch. On a low round coffee table, a pitcher of iced tea and five glasses have been set out, along with a plate heaped with clusters of green grapes.

  “Sorry we’re late,” Elsa says.

  Lex adds, “Traffic.”

  “No worries,” Becky assures them. “We’re happy as clams just sitting here.”

  They look it too. Even Hope, with her spectrum of bruises and bandages and sprained arm hoisted in a sling…even Hope looks relaxed.

  Becky rises to greet them, kisses Elsa on the cheek. When a case ends well, the gratitude you receive is almost enough to remind you why you do the job. The real satisfaction, though, is in Hope’s eyes. She doesn’t get up or even smile. She doesn’t really know them, after all; they were told that her memory of her rescue is dim. But the clarity of her eyes, the aliveness of them, is enough for Elsa. Despite popular belief, she feels that there’s something elementally optimistic about teenagers, the way their bodies can operate as adults’ while their minds still have a direct line into the good kind of wishful thinking, when you don’t question the gumption of racing forward into life. Mel has that too. Elsa isn’t sure if she herself has ever really been that confident. Sitting down across from the couch, looking at Hope, she wonders if the girls will take fewer risks now, and a renegade impulse rises up with optimism that the trauma may not necessarily distort their ability to trust people…but what’s the likelihood of that?

  “Are you guys, like, real FBI agents?” Hope asks.

  Elsa smiles at the sound of Hope’s voice, which she has never heard before: light and scratchy, as if she’s recovering from a sore throat. “I am. My friend here is a police detective.”

  “Cool.”

  “So,” Elsa gently probes, “how are you doing?” and elicits a sly grin from Hope.

  “Seriously?”

  “You don’t have to talk about anything you don’t want to.”

  Hope nods, her eyes darting to her mother.

  “We’ve explained that to her,” Becky says. “She understands.”

  “Okay, then.” Elsa takes a breath. “What can you tell us about what happened to you?”

  “He’s dead, though, right?” Shifting in her seat, Hope winces.

  Elsa answers, “One thousand percent.”

  “Are you the one who killed him?” Hope asks tentatively, like a child peering into forbidden dark corners, even though the time has passed to protect her from those.

  Elsa nods.

  “He was such a freak.”

  “You can say that again.”

  “I wish I could have helped Ruby.”

  “I know you do—but there’s nothing you could have done to change the way things turned out. You had no control over him. None of this is your fault, honey.”

  Hope’s eyes flash at the endearment coming from a stranger. Elsa regrets it. This isn’t Mel, and it isn’t a younger version of herself. She has no power to comfort the girl outside the reason for this visit: an exit interview, as it were, so that they can officially close the case file.

  “He, like, came out of nowhere,” Hope says quietly. “I missed the bus, so I was walking to school instead, and I was thinking about my biology test, and all of a sudden there’s this guy in front of me.” She sips her iced tea. Eats two grapes, slowly. “He kept wanting to talk, like we were friends or something. It was so weird. But then he also hit me. I didn’t understand what was happening. And he had all these tools. And then he brought in this other girl, and I was so scared because the first girl, she was—” She slams shut her eyes.

  “It’s enough, angel,” Becky says softly. “You don’t have to say anything else.” She lays a reassuring hand on her daughter’s arm and glances sharply at their visitors.

  Elsa and Lex stand and say their good-byes. Gary walks them to the door. At the last minute, Becky jumps up to join them.

  “I didn’t want to start crying in front of Hope,” Becky says, “there’s been too much of that around here lately—but I just have to tell you how grateful we are.” She opens her arms to Elsa, envelops her in a maternal hug that feels familiar and foreign, comforting and off-putting, somehow right and somehow wrong.

  “You have an amazing daughter,” Elsa says. “I’ve never seen such a will to survive.”

  “If you hadn’t—” Becky’s words choke to a stop.

  Elsa shakes her head emphatically—“Don’t go there”—refusing to revisit the many ways in which they might not have found Hope and Mel alive.

  “If you need us for anything,” Lex says, “even to talk things through, give us a call. But if you never want to hear from us again, believe me, we’ll understand.”

  Elsa could have loved the guy for having the heart to say that. She thinks of David. She wonders how much of the brothers’ compassion comes from their late mother—the wise and affectionate Yelena—and how much comes from each other.

  “The main thing is that Hope’s safe now,” Elsa agrees. “That’s all that really counts.”

  Elsa holds a constant speed, just at the limit, as they drive through the bucolic village of Bennington in silence, past Greenberg’s lumberyard, past the Blue Benn diner filled with patrons eating lunch as if nothing happened.

  Lex says, “This town’s got a big problem with heroin—dealers, addicts, the whole bit. Couple of colleges here—maybe a good fit for Charlie.”

  Elsa laughs, stifling the remarks that flit through her mind about the surfaces of things, about how meanness can lurk in the prettiest places. “Well,” she says, “we’re not college counselors and we’re not DEA, so what do you say we get the hell out of Dodge?”

  “Dodge?”

  She explains but doesn’t think it makes much sense to him, as he presumably missed out on Gunsmoke reruns during his Russian childhood and immigrant adolescence. She stops trying when they turn in the direction of the highway.

  After a while, he surprises her with a question—or a challenge. “So, you told David you have tattoos.”

  She glances at him, speechless. Accelerating through the green-blue countryside, she grinds her teeth, wishes he weren’t here, that he didn’t know her, that he’d landed someone else for this case. But then she remembers that it wasn’t random; he chose her.

  He says, “You don’t have tattoos.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “A few days ago, in the wind.”

  She remembers. Standing outside the Martin-Creech house, a gust hit her hard. She was blinded for a moment by the swish of her hair over her eyes. She recalls the fabric lifting off her skin, how she needed to pull her sleeve back down.

  And then he says, “Yelena was a cutter—our mother.”

  A cutter. No one has ever spoken that phrase aloud to her before. The few who know about her problem—her parents and sister—always held the secret as if it were their own. Each and every lover had fled in the sobriety of daylight. Avoidance, pretending normalcy, has been her creed for a lifetime. Competence has been her shield. She has found a way, barely, to live with herself, and she does not, not, not want to talk about it with Lex Cole or anyone else.

  “Best woman I ever knew,” he says. “She had some problems in her past. But she didn’t let it stop her from loving us, or us from loving her.”

  Elsa
stares at the road ahead, lap after lap of asphalt vanishing beneath the car. Her insides wither at the thought that Lex glimpsed her skin and might have discussed it with his brother. Well—the case is over; she never has to see either of them again if she doesn’t want to. Her grip tightens on the wheel.

  “I understand your predicament,” he continues, “growing up with a tough mother. And then what happened to her. Terrible. But I’d also like to say this: Parents, they give what they can, even if it’s shit. And you, Special Agent Elsa Myers, you didn’t turn out so bad.”

  “Lex”—her voice gluey, the words difficult to force out—“I really can’t discuss this.” But the words do get out, just a few and nothing significant, and they have the desired effect of pushing him away. He’s essentially right about her. But she doesn’t need a friend; doesn’t want a friend like him who will try to open her up, to know her, maybe even to fix her.

  He nods. They sit in silence for a few minutes, and then she asks, “Would you mind if I dropped you at a train station? I’d like to go see my dad.”

  “Of course I don’t mind.” Warmly, gently, like a real friend. But he isn’t. She wishes she could, but she can’t.

  38

  Elsa walks through the white-pillared entrance of the assisted-living home where last year Roy parked himself prematurely, she’d thought at the time. But now she’s thankful that he’s here at Atria, with its genteel practical comforts. A nurse from the hospice program visits every day, like a philosopher-spa on wheels, tending his soul and rubbing out his kinks while no one pretends he isn’t dying.

  Everyone is dying, though, Elsa thinks, waving at the front-desk attendant with the pale blue coif she’d thought went out of style two generations ago. Everyone is dying, all the time. It’s just a matter of when it becomes official. For Deb, it happened twenty-four years ago, right before dinner. For Roy, it will happen soon. For Elsa, the forecast is wide open.