The Forgotten Girl

by Rio Youers

  “I’ll drag him to the lake,” I said. “It’s deep and still. I’ll put rocks in his pockets—”

  “It’s two miles away,” Sally cut in. “Up steep inclines, over boulders, through thick woods. He weighs two hundred and sixteen pounds. You’d never make it.”

  “So you want me to dig a grave with my bare fucking hands?” I picked up a stick with a pointed end. “Or with this? You think that would be quicker?”

  Sally approached Corvino’s body. She dropped to her knees, dug into his pants pocket, and threw a set of keys at me.

  “His car is parked close to where we got off the bus,” she said. “Take it. Get a shovel. Be quick.”

  “How do you know where he parked his car?”

  “I know everything about him. Where he went to school. The first person he killed. How he found me.” She lowered her eyes, as if disappointed in herself. “All of his memories are in my mind. I can tap into them as if they were my own.”

  I started to say something, then recalled the way the light—the essence—had been blown from his eyes.

  This was real. Terrifyingly real.

  Corvino’s cell phone started to rumble. Sally and I both leapt backward, but it was Sally who reached into his pocket and pulled it free. She tapped the screen twice, read what was displayed there, then flipped the phone so I could read it, too.

  It was a text from someone called Mr. L: I just got another signal. Bitch is in North Jersey. TELL ME YOU’RE ON TOP OF THIS!!!

  “Who’s Mr. L?” I asked.

  “Dominic Lang,” she said. “He’s the worse man I was telling you about. And he knows where I am.”

  “He’ll send more guys after you?”

  “Yeah, but I might be able to throw him off the scent.”

  I read over Sally’s shoulder as she replied to the text: One step ahead of you. Target tracked to Morristown NJ. Hang tight, Mr. Lang.

  She hit send and closed her eyes. I felt the energy pounding off her. It made me feel very small.

  “Shovel,” she said. “Now, Harvey.”

  “I don’t know you,” I said distantly.

  “You know my heart, Harvey. You just don’t know my history.” She swept toward me and planted a firm kiss on my cheek. I felt her body trembling, and despite everything, all the fear and confusion, I wanted to wrap my arms around her—fly upward, through the canopy, and away.

  “I want to help you,” I said. “Whoever you are.”

  “I’ll tell you everything,” she said. “Whatever you want to know. But first you need to dig a hole. A deep one.”

  * * *

  So that’s how I ended up buying a shovel on the day Sally disappeared. I went home first, washed the blood from my face, and changed my T-shirt, then stepped across the road and made the purchase at Cramp Hardware. It was the quickest way to get one, better than stealing from someone’s garage or driving out to Newton, and I didn’t think it would come back to haunt me. I was buying a shovel, for God’s sake, not a Tec-9.

  I made it back to Sally within an hour. She had covered Corvino’s body with branches and leaves and was hiding in a tree. She leapt down beside me, landing silently, like a cat.

  I started to dig.

  I had buried a rabbit once, when I was thirteen. I found it in our garden one morning, stiff and crow-pecked, and decided to make it a grave. I thought that burying a human would be sort of the same. A bigger hole, that’s all. I was wrong. Each swoop of the blade was darker and more damning than the last. I kept glancing at the mound of branches covering the corpse. He was a bad man, no doubt about that, but I imagined his life in kinder colors—a life of love, laughter, and achievement. It added weight to every shovelful of earth I tossed over my shoulder. The depth of the hole mirrored the darkness in my soul.

  I knotted my T-shirt around the handle to keep from getting blisters. My back, shoulders, and neck throbbed with pain. “Deep enough,” I said when the grave was up to my waist, then Sally took the shovel and made it a foot deeper. She emerged smeared with dirt and tears. I absorbed some of her strength, jumped into the grave, and dug for another thirty minutes. Water pooled around my sneakers. I struck flint, fossils, and roots as thick as my forearms. I kept digging.

  The woods dimmed, full of shadows and fiery light.

  “Okay,” Sally said.

  I scrabbled from the grave—it was as deep as my chest—and lay panting on the ground. Sally had located the tranquilizer pistol when I went for the shovel and she threw this into the hole first (I didn’t see her remove the dart and slip it into her pocket). The .45 was next. I got wearily to my feet and helped her strip the branches from Corvino’s body, then we dragged him by the legs and rolled him into the grave. He hit the bottom face-first and settled with his legs splayed and one shoe hanging off. It was as far from repose as I could imagine.

  I used the shovel to scoop up the pinkish-gray matter that had spilled from his skull—tossed this into the hole, too. Sally threw Corvino’s cell phone in, but not before I saw that he had six missed calls and nine unread messages. I guessed all of them were from Mr. L. The alarm bells were ringing.

  “I’m sorry I got you into this, Harvey,” she said.

  “I don’t understand any of it.”

  She replied by wiping her eyes. She’d been crying for so long. I held her until she said, “Let’s fill it in,” then I grabbed the shovel and pushed the dirt into the hole. Sally took her turn, working quickly, and with angry little grunts. I finished the job. It took us an hour. I dispersed the excess earth around the area and covered it all with pine needles, leaves, sticks. It was full dark by the time I’d finished.

  * * *

  We used the traffic sounds to navigate back to Buckhorn Road. Corvino’s car was parked where I’d left it. My blood was on the steering wheel and driver’s seat and we used a bottle of water we found in the cup holder to clean it off. I drove us back to Green Ridge, stopping briefly on Firefly Bridge to ditch the shovel in the deepest part of Green River.

  Sally sat in the back the whole way, ducked low, out of sight. She had me check the apartment and give the all-clear by flashing the living room lights twice. Once the door was double-locked and the security chain in place, she peeled off her muddy clothes and stepped into the shower. I joined her. I washed her and she washed me. The water ran brown to begin with, then clear.

  I sat on the edge of the bed afterward with a towel around my waist, another around my dreads. It was my turn to cry. Sally sat beside me, her head on my shoulder.

  “Help me,” I sobbed.

  She did.

  * * *

  I didn’t see the tranquilizer dart in her hand. There was just a flash of something bright—I actually thought it was her fingernails—then I felt it puncture my throat.

  “I’m sorry, baby,” she said.

  I once read that it can take minutes for a tranquilizer dart to take effect, depending on the drug used and the physical makeup of the person being immobilized. That wasn’t the case here; I instantly felt my muscles grow numb. Sally swam in and out of focus. I tried to touch her—to cup her exquisitely shaped face—but my hand only trembled.

  “Oh…” I said, and blinked tears from my eyes.

  Sally removed the empty dart from my throat, kissed me sweetly. My lips were too heavy to respond.

  “I love you, Harvey.”

  “Oh…”

  She let go. I tried holding on. I fell.

  * * *

  While I “slept,” Sally removed herself from my mind (deliberately leaving a partial memory of her dancing on the boardwalk at Asbury Park), from my computer, and from my apartment. She then drove Corvino’s car to Frederick, Maryland, where she hopped on the Greyhound and made her way to Abilene.

  I woke up late the following morning with my reality skewed. I ached all over and there was blood crusted around the inside of one nostril. I rolled out of bed feeling like I’d been drugged or hit by a train. My reflection in the bathroom mirror was gray
and bloodshot. I recognized only half of myself.

  I tried calling Dad, if only to hear a familiar voice, but of course he didn’t answer the phone. I then spent an hour rearranging the furniture in my apartment, trying to alleviate the feeling that something was missing.

  The daylight hurt my eyes. I went back to bed.

  Jackhammer and the remaining hunt dogs were in Green Ridge by the end of the day. They could have knocked down my door at any time but favored a more cunning approach. They watched from the periphery, waiting to see if I would contact Sally.

  When after a few days I didn’t, they made their move.

  Twenty-Seven

  Steve-O emptied the wallet and arranged the contents on the table. Credit cards. Driver’s license. Social security card. There were a few other cards along with a wad of sales receipts and $190 in cash—which he and Tatum made disappear in a hurry.

  “Can’t buy shit-all at the bottom of a hole,” he declared, stuffing the rolled-up bills into the front pocket of his jeans. He looked at me and grinned. “Boy, you’re full of surprises.”

  Tatum pocketed her share of the money, then picked up Corvino’s driver’s license and spat at the photo. “This nasty bastard took my face.” Tears welled in her eyes. She used the sodden washcloth to dab them, then flipped the license onto the table. Steve-O folded one of his tattooed hands over hers.

  “Oh, Potato,” he cooed. “Sumbitch is Jersey worm-food now.”

  “Get owf me,” she hissed, pulling her hand back. She popped a light to a cigarette and speared smoke across the table. “Dead don’t bring the prettiness back.”

  They had listened to my story with expanded eyes and slack mouths. Neither uttered a word. I’m sure the bar—in all its blue-collar splendor—faded around them, and they traveled with me to the heart of the North Jersey woods. There was even a moment’s silence after I’d finished, which lasted until Steve-O cracked the wallet open and shook the moldering tens and twenties across the table.

  “I guess those presidents were too dead for you,” he said to me, angling his head from Tatum’s stream of smoke.

  “I didn’t dig him up for his money,” I replied. “I wanted information, and that’s what I got.”

  It had been easier the second time around. The earth was looser, for one thing, and I didn’t have to dig as big a hole. I just needed to uncover the ass pocket of Corvino’s pants, where I recalled seeing the shape of his wallet when Sally and I had thrown him facedown in the grave. Also, I grabbed the tools from Dad’s shed—a shovel, a pickaxe, the battery-powered lamp we’d used the night we went UFO spotting, and some work gloves to prevent blistering. My saving grace was a deep-seeking metal detector which Dad employed to search for alien relics, and which I used to make sure I dug in exactly the right spot. It located Corvino’s .45, cell phone, and tranquilizer pistol five-and-a-half feet underground.

  After a solid hour, the shovel’s blade thudded into Corvino’s spine. I dropped to my knees and dug the rest of the way by hand, retrieving the wallet quickly and clambering from the hole. It took twenty minutes to fill it again and blend the area. I returned the tools to Dad’s shed, then changed into clean clothes and took a cab to my apartment. I touched down in Memphis fourteen hours later.

  “So what’ve we got?” Steve-O asked, indicating the contents of the wallet. “MasterCard. Amex. Driver’s license. Could be worth checking out the address.”

  “I already did,” I said. “It’s a rented house. I called the owner to see if it would be available anytime soon. She told me that a young family had recently moved in.”

  “No hunt dogs there,” Tatum said.

  “No, but this…” I pointed at a white card with a magnetic stripe on one side and a plain company logo on the other. “It’s a keycard, the same as you get in a hotel. But what’s it for? There’s no company name or telephone number, right?”

  Steve-O flipped the card both ways and shrugged.

  “I figured there’s a reason it’s in Corvino’s wallet,” I said. “So I photographed the logo using the camera on my laptop, then ran a reverse image search on Google.”

  “Lookit you,” Steve-O said. “Bill fucking Gates.”

  “It’s actually very simple,” I assured him. “And it works; the search results revealed that the logo is for Lyon Security. That’s Lyon with a Y. They’re a private security firm out of Nashville.”

  “Lang’s private security firm,” Tatum ventured. “That was his boyfriend’s name, right? Gene Lyon. With a Y.”

  I held my hand up over the table and she slapped me five (or three, to be precise). Even Steve-O nodded, acknowledging the speed at which she made the connection.

  “The office is by the airport,” I said. “This card gives us access to the building, but we don’t know what we’re looking for or how many hunt dogs will be there. My preference is to stake it out, wait until someone leaves, and follow him. Tatum can use her power to steer him to an isolated location, then we’ll grab and interrogate him.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Steve-O said.

  “If I can get a latch,” Tatum said.

  “You will,” I assured her. “You have to.”

  “So we wait, we follow, we interrogate.” Steve-O grinned and spread his hands. “What can possibly go wrong?”

  I didn’t want to answer that question, but Tatum had no such reservation.

  “Every goddamn thing,” she said.

  * * *

  I’d learned a few things from Sally about being invisible, and knew that driving to Nashville in a pink Chevy Malibu and parking it across the street from the Lyon Security office was not the smartest move. This meant renting a car—something suitably nondescript, I thought with a wry smile—which in turn meant waiting until morning.

  “I’ll see you both tomorrow,” Steve-O said as Tatum and I stood to leave. “Meantime, I’ll hit up Rusty for some firepower. Whatever he can spare.”

  “And get some sleep,” I said, then pointed to the fresh Bud in Steve-O’s hand. “No hangover, either. You’ll need your A game.”

  “Roger that,” Steve-O said, saluting me with the neck of the bottle.

  We left the bar. Tatum struck a light to another cigarette the moment she was behind the wheel of Lou’s Malibu, then drove us through the deep Tennessee night. She didn’t turn the stereo on, and we spoke very little. After thirty minutes or so, she left the Interstate and navigated an overgrown trail that wound first through sparse forest, then into a clearing beside some nameless, noisy river. She killed the engine and shut off the headlights.

  “We’re parking?” I asked.

  “Don’t get your hopes up, bucko.” Tatum popped the door open, then sat on the hood, cigarette in one hand, damp washcloth in the other.

  I joined her.

  “No light pollution here,” she said. “Look up.”

  I did. The stars were spilled across the night sky, outrageous in number, cooling on the eye. I sat beside Tatum on the hood, then reclined against the windshield and lost myself for a moment. It was edifying, to feel both vital and insignificant. I was just another ball of gas—a shimmering fusion of fear, anger, guilt, and love.

  “I know why you brought me here,” I said to Tatum. “You think this is the last time we’ll see the stars, don’t you?”

  “I take back what I said about you being stupid,” she said, and opened her arms. “Drink it in.”

  “You don’t think we can do this?”

  “Honey,” she said. “I know what Lang can do.”

  “So do I.” His evils—those I knew about, or had experienced—flashed through my mind. One image lingered: my old man, slumped against the wall of his bunker with that jagged exit wound in the rear of his skull. The flame burned inside me, as brightly as any star above. “It’s the reason we’re doing this.”

  She didn’t respond. Her eyes glimmered. We looked at the stars and listened to the river roll. It was so serene—or maybe I was just so tired—that I drifted alo
ng the edges of sleep, then Tatum elbowed me to full alertness. We got in the car and rumbled back down the trail to the Interstate. There was no more conversation, and that was fine by me. Twenty-five minutes later, she dropped me outside a Days Inn in Dyersburg. I exited the vehicle, breathed air that wasn’t ruined by secondhand smoke, then leaned toward the open window.

  “I’ll pick you up tomorrow morning,” I said. “Before ten. Then we’ll get Steve-O.”

  Tatum nodded. She pumped the accelerator and the Malibu’s engine made a shrill sound. No doubt she wanted to get back to her trailer, to Lou, to her normal, if lowly, redneck life.

  “We can do this,” I said to her. “I’m not going to pretend it’ll be easy, but we can do it.”

  “You going to tell me we just need a little self-belief?”

  “Wouldn’t hurt,” I said. “Self-belief, and a lot of luck.”

  She nodded, pumped the accelerator again.

  “We have to try.”

  “Yeah, we do.” Tatum ran the washcloth across her chin and I saw how she trembled. “But I’ll keep my grip on reality, if it’s all the same to you.”

  “Whatever gets you through.”

  “We saw the stars tonight,” she said. “Tomorrow, I’m going to wake up early to watch the sunrise. I suggest you do the same.”

  I nodded and she pulled away. Her taillights blended with the city lights, and I wondered how tempted she was to keep driving—to stop in some faraway place where the night sky wasn’t filled with the last stars she’d ever see. I imagined rolling up outside her trailer the following morning, Elvis answering the door dressed in nothing but gold-rimmed sunglasses and dirty underpants. She didn’t come home last night, he’d say, then break into a hip-shaking rendition of “Heartbreak Hotel.” While the image was somewhat amusing, it didn’t make me smile.

  I checked into the Days Inn and slept until a nightmare shook me out of bed at close to 5 a.m. I showered for an hour, trying not to consider the possibility that this would be the day that I die. Just in case, though, I slipped into my jeans and went outside to watch the sun come up.

  I would have chosen a more appealing vista for my final sunrise: Uluru, perhaps, in all its spiritual wonder, or the ancient ruins of Machu Picchu, teasingly revealed as the sun rose over the Andes. You take what you can get, though, and I stood with my heart locked in my throat as the sky above the Walmart Supercenter turned from mauve to deep crimson. It was exactly the same color as the bloodstain on Dad’s bunker wall.