by Nick Lake
Then, I saw movement a little farther out, where you get that sheen of thin water between the surf and the dry sand. I realized there were more crabs down there, and one or two were making their way from the gull to something else. As if it was more tempting.
You know when someone has left a door open and you feel the draft? I felt something like that, only inside. I knew whatever it was the crabs were interested in, half-submerged, washed up on shore, could not be anything good.
The water was making a soft sound, like it was hushing me because it had something important to say.
I turned and squinted at the sun. A cloud was just passing over it, and it was turning orange already, low above the buildings of town, nearly sunset. Then I walked a little closer. It sounds stupid, but I remember having a very conscious thought, which was, oh, so this is what people mean when they use the word “dread.”
But it wasn’t so bad—I saw as I approached that it was just a sneaker, one of those ankle-high basketball shoes. It was standing upright in the shallow, foamy water.
I took another step.
Gulls swooped in the air above me, calling, calling my name it almost seemed, Cassie, Cassie, Cassie.
I saw bone, glowing white, inside the shoe.
There was a foot in there.
An actual, severed foot. I could see a glimpse of flesh, purple as canned cat food, the bone protruding from it. You heard about the foot, of course, everyone did, but I don’t think I ever told you it was me who found it.
In a movie, I would have gagged or shrieked. I don’t think I did either of those things: I just stood there, staring.
And at first, I didn’t even think about the Houdini Killer, I didn’t see that it might be connected. The truth is that the first word that crossed my mind was an ancient Greek one:
Sparagmos.
It means: the act of tearing a person or an animal to pieces, usually for sacrificial purposes. The followers of Dionysus were big on it. The reason this word crossed my mind is that I am a weirdo and a freak and the public library is like my second home. But then, knowing you, I didn’t need to tell you any of that.
So I looked at the man’s foot, in the shoe, on the beach, and I thought of sparagmos. I was remembering Orpheus, being ripped to shreds by furious Thracian women.
You know the story, probably. Orpheus could charm all creatures and even objects with his music, and because of this and his beauty, he was much desired by almost all women he encountered. Yet after his wife, Eurydice, died, he forswore all others, and this so incensed the women who surrounded him that they began to throw rocks and stones at him. But the rocks and stones loved Orpheus’s music, and they would not harm him; they turned away at the last. And so the women took him with their hands, and tore his body apart.
That’s the version I like best anyway.
I looked at the foot in the sneaker, thinking of that story, like, here was the Chuck Taylor shoe of a vacationer who was just too good at karaoke and his friends had ripped him apart. I figured it was very unlikely that whoever it came from had been torn to pieces by Thracian women. I was thinking lucidly and crazily at the same time, and the weird thing was that I knew it—it was like there was a part of me standing outside myself, observing me.
I took out my cell phone, and I dialed 911. I said, “There’s a human foot on the beach and I don’t think it belongs to Orpheus.” At least, that’s what they told me I said, later. I don’t remember doing it.
Then I guess I must have fainted—which is exactly what would happen in a movie—because the next thing I can remember I was in a squad car. They took me to the station and asked me questions and gave me very sweet coffee with lots of sugar and cream in it, and I’ll get to all that later because it’s important. But, for now, two observations:
1. Looking back, I think maybe seeing the severed foot, plus some associated memories to do with blood and bone, caused some kind of psychotic break pretty much straight away. The clue is that I was looking at a body part and all I could think about was Greek myth. Which probably partly explains all the really terrible things that happened soon after.
2. I assumed it was a man’s foot in the sneaker. Because of the style, because it was relatively large, I don’t know. That was why I was thinking about Orpheus. But perhaps if it had crossed my mind it might be a woman’s, then I would have thought about that other famous victim of sparagmos: Echo, and the way she was torn to pieces by Pan’s followers, leaving only her voice in the rocks and trees. And if I’d thought about her, then maybe I’d have gotten to voices sooner, and the idea of a murdered woman. And maybe things would have turned out differently, or at least I would have been more prepared for what happened afterward.
But then again, maybe not.
Like I said, they took me to the police station and we sat in what looked surprisingly like a normal office. They asked me a bunch of questions, what I’d been doing, whether I’d moved the foot, how long I’d been there, that kind of thing. They gave me sweet coffee, I already said that didn’t I? I was there an hour or more.
There were two guys, one in a suit and one in uniform. Agent Horowitz, who was clearly some kind of Fed, and Sergeant Kennedy or Officer Kennedy or something, I don’t know, I don’t remember. Kennedy was big and fitted badly into his blue shirt; Horowitz was skinny and young, with wire-framed glasses and a smile that actually seemed genuine. Though he was younger, he was clearly the one in charge—you would have known even if he weren’t in plain clothes.
Eventually, my dad turned up.
He came into the room and said, “Do you really need to keep my daughter here?”
“We’re not detaining her,” said Kennedy. “We’re just asking some questions.”
Horowitz nodded. “But I think we’re done here. You can take Cassandra home. She’s had a shock—I’d prescribe sugar if I were a doctor. Ben & Jerry’s, M&M’S. You know, chocolate.”
“She has a peanut allergy,” said Dad. “A severe one. Most chocolate could kill her.”
Kennedy slapped the side of his head. “Oh yeah. The guys from the squad car saw the bracelet when they were reviving her. Almost dosed her with epinephrine before they realized she’d just fainted. Candy, then.”
“My daughter found a human foot on the beach and you’re suggesting candy?” said Dad.
Horowitz shrugged and gave that slight smile. I noticed his cheeks dimpled and fine lines appeared around his eyes; it made me like him even more. “It works,” he said. He turned to me. “Also, we can offer counseling. Put you in touch with someone. Something to think about.”
“I don’t think so,” said Dad. He hated counselors—he said the ones in the Navy were worse than the people shooting at you, that they just wanted you to write down what happened to you over and over again so that you were always reliving it, always scared, always in pain. Yeah, I sometimes felt like saying. Because pushing it all down and basically going around with untreated PTSD is working so well for you.
“Well, Cassie, you call me if you’d like to talk to someone,” said Horowitz, gliding over Dad’s death stare, which made me think there was steel underneath his smiles.
Dad blinked and took my hand to lead me out of there.
Kennedy passed Dad a card with his pudgy fingers. “Call us if she thinks of anything else.”
I thought: I’m right here.
As I was thinking it, Horowitz caught my eye and rolled his, mocking his colleague, it seemed like. I laughed.
“What?” said Dad.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Shock,” said Horowitz, straight-faced. “A tub of Ben & Jerry’s. Helps every time. Take it from me.”
I’ve just realized I never told you my real name is Cassandra. You probably figured I was just Cassie.
It’s kind of a screwed-up name, isn’t it? I mean, if you know your Greek myths, which of course you do.
Cassandra: doomed to give true prophecies about the future but have no one ever believe her.
It’s not a name, it’s a curse.
Me, I have never been able to see the future. If I could, I would have left Oakwood that day, for sure.
Deep breath.
So this is when something really important happened, and I need you to bear with me with all this stuff because, not to sound overdramatic or anything, but what we’re getting to now is pretty much the whole reason I hurt you and the whole reason I’m having to write this e-mail to explain what I did.
To explain what I am.
I was alone in the police station bathroom, the stall doors all open. I looked at myself in the mirror, hating my freckles and dinky nose.
That was when I heard the voice.
It was a woman with a New Jersey accent, and this is what she said:
“You’re disgusting. You leave the house like that?”
This time I did do exactly what a person in a film would do: I whirled around to see who was behind me. There was no one. Nor beside me, nor in the stalls—I checked. No one standing on the toilets or hiding behind the main door or anything.
“I’m talking to you, ugly ****,” said the voice. “You ever think of coordinating? Or brushing your hair?”
“What? Who are you? Where are you?”
Silence.
In the mirror, my eyes were liquid with fear. “Your little prank isn’t funny,” I said. “Wherever you are.”
Still nothing. My heartbeat started to slow again. I figured there was a camera or something, one with a speaker that enabled someone in another location to speak to me.
“Hello?” I said.
No voice.
I glanced at the mirror again before leaving the bathroom. Here’s the thing: the voice wasn’t wrong. I’d left the house without thinking about what I was wearing; I had on old, saggy sweatpants and one of my dad’s T-shirts, the green of which really did not go with the pink of the pants. I hadn’t brushed my hair.
Stupid kids, I said to myself. Though right at the back of my mind was the thought, already, that it was weird they had somehow managed to get a woman to join in with the prank. I mean, it was definitely a woman’s voice, not a girl’s. Anyway, I didn’t want to give them any satisfaction, whoever they were, so I smiled at myself and walked out, trying to make my gait casual, though of course that’s impossible to do when you’re thinking about it.
That was the first time I heard the voice, but even though it made me angry, it didn’t scare me. That came afterward in the car with my dad.
We were in the black Dodge Ram, Dad’s pride and joy. I had been almost surprised to see that it was dark out when I left the station through the revolving doors. The lights on the instrument panel were glowing as Dad drove, and there were goose bumps on my skin. I wished I had a sweater.
Thinking about that brought back an echo, not the voice, but the memory of it. “You ever think of coordinating?”
I shivered, and tried to think of something else. I don’t think I was aware of how badly my mind had been—and this is the proper word—disturbed by finding the foot. Tilted, like a spinning top, gyrating wildly, wobbling from side to side.
“You should be at the restaurant,” I said to Dad. Everything, the inside of the car, the signs—24/7 LIQUOR ASK ABOUT OUR WINE BOXES—seemed so there, so present, that it shimmered. A white seagull flashed past in the dark sky, like a comet.
“I get a call saying my daughter’s with the cops, I’m gonna come.”
“I’m okay,” I said.
He didn’t answer that. “You shouldn’t have gone out,” he said, his eyes on the road over the steering wheel, driving past what seemed like the same streetlights we had already passed a block back, this faceless chain-store sprawl on the outskirts of town like a cartoon background the animators were recycling, using the same frames again and again. “I can’t keep you safe out there.”
“It’s the beach,” I said. “In daytime.”
“Dusk.”
“Daytime, dusk, whatever. It’s safe.”
“It’s a murdered young woman is what it is.”
“What is?” I asked.
“The foot, genius.”
“They said that?” I was surprised. Like I said, I assumed it was a man’s foot.
“Those guys? No. But I spoke to Mastrangelo.” This is a cop who eats in our pizza place all the time. “One of the victims was wearing Air Jordans when she went missing.”
I had been watching the wide road going past, as we crossed from the copied-and-pasted strip-mall wasteland into the first layer of “real” Oakwood, the poor part, apartment blocks and smaller stores, the closed-down entertainment places, BASEBALL LANES 24/7 over shuttered-up windows, endless stop signs. “Someone cut her up? Ugh.”
He shook his head. “I don’t think so. I think she was whole when she was dumped out at sea.”
“What?”
“Thing about shoes that come up over the ankle—they protect the foot inside. The ocean’s violent. It throws the body around, takes it to pieces. At the joints, you know. Knee, ankle, elbow. Like pulling apart a chicken.”
“Dad …”
“Yeah, sorry. Anyway, the ankle separates and other parts disintegrate, or whatever. Clothes don’t help at all. But the foot in the shoe, it’s kept intact, and eventually it washes up.”
“How do you know this?”
He looked at me, then tapped his shoulder.
Oh.
His shoulder is where he has a shiny, puckered scar—a bullet went through from one side to the other, in the caves at Zhawar Kili, fired from a Taliban AK-47 when I was three years old. Dad was a Navy SEAL, until he got shot anyway. The other bullet pretty much vaporized his knee. They rebuilt it—the Navy has good doctors—but he wasn’t going to be jumping off a landing vessel again, or diving from a Zodiac to check for mines, so he was discharged.
But his tapping his shoulder, that was also code for the Marines. As in: I know that when people drown at sea their feet often wash up in their shoes because I have seen it in the Navy.
Weirdly, it made me feel close to him that we had both seen the same thing. Even if that same thing was a rotting foot in a shoe. I know, it’s not exactly a sitcom bonding moment.
“You told them?” I said. “The cops, I mean?”
“Yup,” he said. “Told Officer Fat and Agent Thin when you were in the bathroom. I think they knew already though. Oh, this is hush-hush, by the way. They don’t want publicity yet. Till now they’ve never had a body; all the women have just disappeared.”
I was silent for a moment.
Then …
I mean, we take what we can, right? Life is not a sitcom; life is not a movie.
“So … Dad … You’ve seen … what I saw?” A foot in a shoe, washed up on shore.
“I’ve seen a lot worse than that.”
He didn’t say this proudly or anything. Just straight. Ex-military guys can be jerks, I’ve met plenty of them, but he wasn’t like that.
He didn’t speak much about the things he saw, or the things he did. I only knew the name Zhawar Kili because Mom mentioned it once, when he wasn’t around. And since she died, I don’t have any way of knowing more about it.
“Were you scared?” I asked.
“Back then? Yeah. I was scared a lot.”
“Dad—” I started, but then I stopped.
“Yeah?”
I wanted to ask him, Did you kill people? It was something I was always wanting to ask him. But how do you ask a person something like that?
And also: What would be the point?
Because I knew the answer already.
The answer was:
Yes. A lot.
So instead I just shut up. We were turning onto our street, cruising past the lights from the front windows, all of them identical. Slowing as we reached the drive into the garage. Turning, our headlights briefly illuminated the mobile home in the front yard of the neighbor’s house, on its cinder blocks, rusting. It takes up the whole space and has
been there forever; you would think the garden had been planted around it.
That was when the voice spoke again. The voice of the woman I couldn’t see. It said:
“Ask me if I was scared.”
I must have jumped in my seat because Dad hit the brakes and grabbed my arm, hard. “What the ****?” he said.
“N-nothing,” I managed to stammer out. It was like the voice was in the car with me. “Just the shock, I think.” I sensed it right away: that this wasn’t something I could tell him about. Dad frowned and eased the car into motion again.
“There’s Coke in the garage,” he said. “Bad for your teeth, but I guess you need it.”
I nodded.
“Ask me if I was scared when he killed me.”
That was the voice again, not Dad.
I tried to control myself so Dad wouldn’t freak out. Kept myself very still. But inside it was like I was falling from a building, gravity lifting my organs into my mouth.
I gripped the door handle very tightly as Dad pulled up. There is no woman in this car, I told myself. There is no woman in this car. I even took a peek at the backseats, and it was true: there was no woman in the car.
“I’m dead and you did nothing. Are you happy now?”
Take deep breaths, I told myself.
Take deep breaths.
The world narrowed, became something looked at through the wrong end of a telescope.
Please, I told the voice silently. Please, leave me alone.
Dad was standing outside the car, opening the door for me. I hadn’t even noticed him getting out.
“Inside,” he said. He took my arm and led me to the house. “Jesus, I thought I’d die with worry,” he said as we crossed the porch. His fingers were biting into my forearm, bone deep. “You know there’s someone killing women in this town, or did that not occur to you? Seriously, Cass. Never ****** do that to me again. And clean your ******* room.”
I told you: 0–60 anger in four seconds flat, my dad.
IMPORTANT CAPS-LOCK SPOILER:
