The War for Gloria: A Novel

by Atticus Lish

  The next night, upon returning from Texas, Kershaw led her fellow coaches and her athletes out to the residence houses to request volunteers for a campus-wide search of the university in conjunction with the UMass police. Their search failed to turn up any sign of the missing athlete.

  Corey heard about Molly’s disappearance when it was reported by the news. He thought of the last time he had uttered her full name—when he had claimed he was going to marry her—to his father.

  * * *

  —

  Detectives with the UMass police went to Molly’s residence and searched through her belongings. They learned her class schedule, her track and field events. They bagged up her toiletries and makeup. They learned she had a work-study job at the Sylvan Snack Bar. She was an America Reads tutor for kids sixteen and under. She had student athlete financial aid, which depended on her grade-point average. Her major was psychology. She had taken Social Psychology, the Psychology of Sensation, Child Behavior, Primate Psychology, Development and Personality. Detectives looked for evidence of sadness, stress, drug and alcohol abuse, a boyfriend. They asked about her friends and grades, her followers on Facebook.

  * * *

  —

  Investigators spoke to Heather and Danielle. Molly’s roommates described her as a responsible person who liked to joke about being irresponsible and wild. She had joked about making money as a high-priced prostitute—or, with her luck, a low-priced one! Her roommates had been in stitches. She was very funny. She didn’t joke about her sports performance. Where men were concerned, she had been vexed. Earlier in the winter, after an unhappy one-night stand, she had forsworn them altogether.

  Her swearing-off had been tongue-in-cheek of course. Afterwards, she had started getting weird phone calls, her roommates said, from a blocked number.

  Investigators located her one-night stand, a Minuteman football player with a pigeon-toed walk and bisonlike legs whose shoulders were humps of muscle. He came from New Haven, Connecticut (“the hood”); was white, rough, of below-average intelligence. On weekends, he got drunk (“You know how it is”); on the night in question, he and Molly had both been drunk to the point of madness. He did not like to learn that she had been upset afterwards, especially when the detectives made it clear that she was missing now. And he got angry when it dawned on him that he might have let his team down through this stupid drunken conquest. But he readily gave them permission to check his phone records. The police verified that he had never called her.

  Amherst, like everywhere, is a somewhat divided town. It’s situated on the Connecticut River, near Mount Holyoke Range State Park, a short distance north of Springfield and roughly thirty miles east of the border of New York State.

  One of the most attractive features of the town of Amherst is the loveliness of the state park, which offers grand views of the valley from its promontories—a hiker’s paradise.

  It may be thought that the individual—and women perhaps especially—can find themselves in nature here. There’s a flavor of benign mystery in the air in Amherst—in the postcards of long-haired girls holding hands on forest paths among old stones, by a creek, their leafy natural temple graced by a beam of dreamy sunlight. There’s the Emily Dickinson Museum in a yellow house, the high ground of Holyoke, the trees on the edge of the Connecticut River like a rolled seam in green velvet, sown fields radiating laterally in serried rows away from the banks.

  At the Beneski Museum of Natural History, the dinosaur skeletons look like devils—tusks, ribs, huge skulls with teeth, big crouched leg bones, claws, leather wings. Next door, there’s a café with salmon salad.

  There’s free Wi-Fi in downtown Amherst. The title of a lecture at a local bookstore: “How Not to Think in Terms of Race, Gender, and Class.” On the college website, we see, first and foremost, a young black woman, seated in a coffeehouse, working at her laptop, partaking of a cappuccino—she is slim and elegant—and she is first—and everything around her, everyone but her, is out of focus. The next image is a pair of young white women, laughing over coffee. Links include Student Life; Our Community; Health, Wellness & Safety; Federal Policies; Transgender Rights; Queer Resource Center—Proud, Vibrant, Caring. In “Housing,” we see two women in a dorm room; a white girl is sitting in a chair looking up, a black girl is sitting on a desk above her, laughing down at her. It cannot be but that these tableaux have been artfully designed with the humane ambition of correcting the historical past by symbolically humbling the descendants of the Anglo-European colonizers of the Americas.

  UMass has 23,373 students. A Division One party school, its nickname is Zoo Mass. The football team is called the Minutemen. They play Coastal Carolina, Georgia Southern, Brigham Young, FIU and Temple.

  After games, UMass students have rioted, clashing with police.

  The Amherst police log is public record. Typical arrests are for speeding, unlicensed operation of a motor vehicle, DUI, destruction of property, unlawful noise, liquor possession by a person under 21, open container, no seatbelt, Class C drug possession, trafficking in marijuana.

  Less typically, a man who might have been in the Latin Kings was shot in the townhouses on Route 116. He was helicoptered to Springfield and died at a trauma center there.

  Cops, courts, social services publicize efforts to keep at-risk kids off the streets and out of gangs. Around Amherst, the backbone of these efforts seems to be a team of women in pantsuits with tired faces—judging by photos on the district attorney’s website. Topics of current concern are the opioid crisis and sexual assault on campus.

  The bars in town include Rafters, Bistro 65, the Olde Town Tavern, The Spoke, and Stackers: “Watch Every Game Here.” The patrons—townies, college kids, and those just passing through—come for the pitchers and pool tables. They come for the Rolling Rock and Rubinoff.

  Besides beer and pot, the drugs are 2C-T-7, also known as Lucky 7, Beautiful, Blue Mystic, PT-DM-PEA, Red Raspberry, T7, Tripstasy, Tweety Bird Mescaline, 7th Heaven, 7-Up; AMT (or Spirals); BZP (also known as Nemesis or Frenzy); Foxy; Fentanyl; DXM; GHB (code-named Great Household Bargains); Jimsonweed; khat; ketamine; OxyContin; Rohypnol (Circles, Forget-Me Pill, Lunch Money, Pingus, R-2, Roachies, Reynolds, Wolfie); Salvia divinorum; Soma (or Soma Coma); Triple C; Yaba (which means “crazy” in Thai, a mixture of caffeine and methamphetamine); synthetic marijuana, a.k.a. Spice, K2, Blaze, Red X. Dawn, Blizz, Bombay Blue, Genie, Zohai, Black Mamba, Cloud 9, Yucatan Fire, “incense,” “potpourri”; and bath salts or Flakka.

  Even in an enlightened place like Amherst, it’s possible to see surveillance footage of persons possessed apparently by the devil, tearing their clothes off, sprinting full speed through a parking lot and smashing headfirst into a car, shattering the window, falling down—and jumping up again and running away like a werewolf—naked, berserk and impervious to pain.

  To qualify for the nationals, Molly’s track team had beaten Rhode Island, a victory they’d celebrated on Saturday. After morning practice and a team meeting at which the coach reminded them how to approach the upcoming national competition—by fighting their utmost to win, hardening their collective will, banishing the thought of failure while remaining ever ready to learn from their mistakes—the girls went out for beer and pizza despite the rain in Amherst. The weather was going west to east.

  As they set off, the coach enjoined them not to eat or drink too much or do anything that would take away from their performance in Texas. They mustn’t drink and drive. She expected the more self-disciplined girls to lead by example. There would be time later for unchecked celebration if and when they won the national trophy, which she expected them to do. Outside the coach’s earshot, some girls voiced dissatisfaction with her advice. In a parody of her warning, someone said: “Go have a good time! Make sure you don’t have fun!”

  The team broke apart into several groups, because they had different notions about where to g
o in town. A line of girls linked their arms together and began trooping along past the clapboard houses, singing Rihanna songs, loosely followed by a cluster of others laughingly and loudly declaring, “We don’t know you!”

  Amanda Fiorelli would tell police that she was standing next to Molly when they disowned their exuberant teammates. Both she and Molly were in this more cynical faction, which was bringing up the rear.

  At 6:55 p.m., the sun set. The moon, which was in its first quarter and waxing, had risen earlier but had remained invisible behind cloud cover until now. It would reach its zenith in three more hours. The temperature was in the mid-fifties. There was a hole in the rain. Fog was coming in at midnight. Then the moon would set.

  In the morning, Quincy would wake up to rain. For Molly’s father, the day would pass without a call from her. She had spoken to him a few days earlier to confirm that she was going with her teammates to the nationals. They had talked about money—he was helping pay her credit card this month. Their conversation had been tense, Tom told investigators. She had accused him of being angry about money, which he had denied. When she didn’t call him, Tom said, he was not alarmed.

  Law enforcement concluded that no one had seen or heard from Molly after the night of the twenty-first. Somewhere in the course of that night, the girls had gotten separated. Everyone was drinking. At around nine o’clock, a witness saw Molly in Stackers Pub with a drink in her hand, talking with someone at the bar. The witness was looking through a crowd and couldn’t see this other person. An hour later, a local woman, who had stopped in to ask about a waitressing job, may have seen Molly in the parking lot. She had noticed a tall, well-built girl with reddish-blonde hair, wearing jeans and a short down parka, staggering, as if heavily intoxicated, away from the raucous noise of the pub and out into the darkness.

  * * *

  —

  Ten days after Molly was declared missing, News Four reported that a clerk at a Mobil station off Route 116 some miles north of Amherst had found a pair of woman’s jeans rolled up in the dumpster behind the bathrooms. The clothing had been thrown out before the police could secure it as evidence.

  * * *

  —

  Tom thought back to the last time he had seen his daughter in person. He’d been asleep when he’d heard her coming home late one night from college. This had been many weeks ago, back when the winter had felt like it would never end. Through the wall, he had heard her talking on the phone, getting ready for bed. In the morning, he had gotten up, fixed a cup of coffee, seen her Uggs outside the door of her room. Her laundry basket had been resting on top of the washing machine. He had gone to the garage, fired up the truck, gone to work. It had been a good day. He’d seen her in the afternoon. She’d sat next to him on the couch, manipulating her smartphone, figuring out her evening. The next morning, she’d made eggs and bacon and pancakes—the bowl smeared with raw batter in the sink, eggshells in the sink, batter dripped on the stovetop, a tray full of hot scrambled eggs, thick-cut bacon done in the oven, grease in the paper towels, the sticky syrup bottle, a real feast washed down with orange juice. Father and daughter drank black coffee together afterwards—two big individuals in a sunny house in their pajamas. Then she’d disappeared into her room while he’d sat on the couch and watched TV. He’d heard the shower. She’d come out an hour later, a new person, a woman dressed and in makeup, her travel bag on her shoulder, heeled boots clopping the floor, and she’d gone back to school. Somehow before leaving, she’d magically done all the dishes: His old-man’s kitchen was clean and bright.

  The weekend before she went to Texas, when she hadn’t called, he’d gone to work as usual and put in his eight. After work, the yellow sun had painted the trees and houses and the road beneath him in shades of gold when he was heading home. He’d had a Sam Adams in front of the TV. He’d seen a reality TV show about a father and his sons living in the wild. The father sent the boys off to spend the night alone. They built a shelter in the snowy woods and slept with their .22. At twilight, he crept up on them, like a hunter. The boys heard a twig break but failed to take action. Their father stepped out in the open, revealing himself. He warned them: “Next time, trust your gut. I could have been a predator.”

  Tom had woken up. He had fallen asleep. His empty beer was in the cup holder on the arm of the couch. The house was dark, but the sky was light—a strange effect. A slice of blue-gray illumination cut across his wall. The TV continued to warp and ripple and flash and implode with advertisements. A truck chugged uphill like a rhinoceros against a scene of brilliant skies and tall trees. The intimate chummy TV voices cajoled him to come on down to his local Chevy dealer. He muted them. The house was empty. His daughter was at school. Then the sun went down completely.

  He hadn’t worried until Kershaw had called from Texas. Now, as his worry turned to dread, he looked back on that moment on a Saturday night at dusk, when his only act had been to mute the TV and get himself a fistful of pretzels from the cupboard, and wonder—what had been happening to his daughter at the same time he had been eating pretzels in the dark?

  29

  Girl of the Long White Limbs

  In the black hours of the night, a little south of Amherst, a park ranger was patrolling a seldom-traveled road that penetrated into Mount Holyoke State Park. The forest here was very tall. The land swelled like a giant wave in the misting darkness. The unpaved road led uphill into the high land. He drove slowly, bumping over rocks. His headlights picked up something white at the base of a tree. He approached, then stopped and backed away and called the police. A state trooper drove to the scene at midnight. The ranger in his green coat stood by, holding his radio. The oceanic darkness contained the glow of their flashlights, revealing the profound massiveness of the landscape as it unfolded around them, miles of trees, descending in tiers and waves. The ranger said, “There,” and pointed at the naked white form that lay beneath the leafing tree.

  * * *

  —

  It was the kind of instant frame you could get at CVS—a translucent plastic cube into which she had slipped her pictures. The cube rested on the dresser in her room at home along with makeup she no longer used and an old hair dryer whose cord was wrapped around the handle. Tom picked it up, felt its weight and scrutinized it. The photograph she had put beneath the plastic glass was one that he had taken. It dated back to her time in junior high, when he’d been unemployed. It showed his daughter running track with a number on her chest. She was in motion, coming out of the woods, mud on her socks, one knee rising, the other foot kicking off the sod—a competitive moment. She was in a thinning herd of other runners, all young.

  When the call ended, he put the Lucite block down on the dresser. He texted one of his crew and told them what he needed them to do today. He would not be coming in. Then he drove to Boston Medical Center. He found himself in a desolate area of unoccupied brownstones with boarded windows and no stores but liquor stores and a soul food restaurant. The hospital lobby was a vast modern cavern of soft gray light and quiet sounds.

  The detective put a hand on Tom’s arm—“Let’s go down here”—and guided him to the silver elevator. They went downstairs. He told him to stand outside the window of the morgue while the orderly, a tan quick-moving man with a lined, sun-spotted forehead, on the other side of the glass lifted up the sheet and displayed the girl, her reddish-gold hair cascading over her white shoulders on the steel table and her mouth open.

  Tom identified his daughter. The detective took him back upstairs. The father went outside and sat in his truck and looked at the Grateful Dead skull she had given him, a plastic skull glued to his dashboard—while the city traffic fled by, car after car after car.

  * * *

  —

  Corey watched the breaking news on the minimart’s TV. A wooded mountainside filmed from a helicopter, a winding dirt road cutting uphill through the trees, strewn with chunks o
f tumbled rock: The missing student had been found. His mind asked, Can that really be her, the person that I know? How can she have flown away from here and alighted on that mountain?

  * * *

  —

  The victim’s body was processed in the gleamingly modern Boston Medical Center. An orderly took the white-sheet-covered cadaver downstairs in a freight elevator and rolled it into a tiled room in the basement. There, a forensic pathologist, wearing a wet green rubber butcher’s smock, scrubs, goggles, gloves and face mask to protect him from flying infectious biomatter, his torso crossed by straps holding his air tank and bone saw, hoisted the woman from the woods onto an inclined stainless steel table with a drain in the footwell. It was a loud dirty setting that more resembled an auto body shop than one’s image of a hospital.

  Her body was 5 feet 10 inches tall. Her rigor mortis had broken. The skin on her face looked granular, yellowish, crusted, infused with a flush, which was turning purple—a mixture of human clay and blood. Her tongue was grayish purple. The papillae stood out like the grit on heavyweight sandpaper. Purple stippling showed on her cheeks. The pathologist folded down her eyelids and discovered bright red bleeding—a common sign of strangulation. He noted severe contusions encircling her throat. The bruises overlapped, as if the same hands had let her go and repositioned—almost as if she had been strangled by many hands. She had bleeding in her eyeballs. Her eyes were cloudy. The pupils had turned black in the air. She had what looked like a sprinkling of parmesan cheese at the corner of her mouth: blowfly eggs. On her lower belly a greenish blue streak was beginning to spread. Her intestines were liquefying. Her cadaver gave off the smell of methane, putrescine and cadaverine.