Knife Creek

by Paul Doiron

  Stacey insisted I wear sunglasses even though it was past dark as we drove home.

  “Did you talk with her afterward?” she asked.

  “Casey? No.”

  “They brought her in to the hospital in an ambulance before you arrived. I only got a glimpse of her. She looked wretched.”

  “Nisbet had been injecting her with heroin for years to keep her docile. It’s probably what killed her baby. But it’s not like the medical examiner could have picked up traces of heroin from the infant’s bones and half-eaten flesh. The poor woman is going to be in detox for a long time. She’s going to be an addict for the rest of her life.”

  Stacey’s face was lit by the dashboard. “In the waiting room I heard a cop say she killed that Becky woman.”

  “There’s no way the prosecutors are going to press charges. The details might not even make it into the news.”

  “The radio is crediting Dani Tate with rescuing her. They never even mentioned you.”

  “In a way, she did rescue her.”

  “I hate it when you don’t get the praise you deserve, Mike.”

  “They ambushed me and took me hostage. I don’t deserve any praise. I failed, Stacey. I let myself get cocky and overconfident.”

  She reached over to squeeze my hand, then remembered how tender it was. “Nisbet is dead. How is that a failure?”

  In my memory I heard him crowing in those last seconds about how he’d won because he was still controlling us. From the moment Dani had first driven into his dooryard, he’d known he had only one final power play. He had forced us to kill him. Our distress would be his postmortem triumph.

  The last remaining question was whether he’d been lying about Eileen Lafferty. With Nisbet and Becky both dead, we might never know. I thought of that woman’s poor family. There might have been a chance for them to receive closure, but Tate and I had robbed them of the opportunity.

  At last we pulled into the driveway of our home. Outwardly, it looked the same as always. My Scout was in the garage. Lights were on in the upstairs windows. But somehow it seemed like a memory from the distant past; like a place where I had lived once and was visiting again after an interval of many years. I felt nostalgic for a moment that hadn’t even passed.

  Or maybe this strange line of thought was the effect of having been beaten senseless.

  “This is your second concussion, right?” Stacey guided me into the living room and my favorite chair. “If you keep this up, you’re going to end up like one of those boxers with Parkinson’s.”

  “You have a lousy bedside manner, Stevens. Has anyone ever told you that?”

  “Do you want a glass of water?”

  “I’d prefer a glass of whiskey, but I suppose that’s out of the question.”

  She returned from the kitchen with a tall glass of water from the tap. She pulled an ottoman over to the foot of my chair and perched on it. Her skin was even more tanned from her day of exercise on the Burnt Meadows highland. She looked vital and clear-eyed and beautiful.

  “The doctor said you shouldn’t go to sleep for a while.”

  “So you want me to tell you everything that happened?”

  “Only if you feel up to it.”

  “All right,” I said. “But I have a question for you first. What did you decide today up on your mountain?”

  “About my future?”

  “Yes.”

  “I won’t leave Maine if you won’t come with me. I don’t think I could bear it, Mike.”

  “Well, here’s a complication, Stace. Before any of the shit happened today, I got a call from DeFord. He and the colonel had wanted me to come into the headquarters tomorrow. But I suppose our appointment will be rescheduled. They’re offering me the investigator’s job. And I’m pretty sure I am going to take it.”

  She leaned away from me on the ottoman. Then a tear slid down her cheek. “I’m really proud of you, Mike.”

  * * *

  The next day, Pomerleau and Finch drove out to the house to take my official statement. We sat at the picnic table in the backyard listening to the cicadas droning in the trees. Stacey brought us some lemonade, which in turn attracted yellow jackets eager to sip sugar from the lips of our glasses. The stubborn presence of the stinging insects seemed to disturb Finch, who kept waving at them to the point where he ceased to hear anything I said.

  “How’s Menario doing?” I asked.

  “Physically or otherwise?” said Pomerleau.

  I adjusted my sunglasses; wearing them constantly, I had begun to feel as if I should audition for a blues band. “So he’s going to pull through?”

  “He’ll recover.”

  “What about the legal ramifications?”

  Pomerleau applied a fresh coat of zinc sunscreen to her lips. “Let’s just say that I’m glad that I’m not the one investigating his case.”

  “And Dakota Rowe turned himself in?”

  “Accompanied by two criminal defense attorneys from Portland. His lawyers negotiated the surrender. They didn’t even throw him in jail for a few hours. The judge released him on bail on his own recognizance. It’s good to be rich.”

  “My sense is that none of us is going to come out of this smelling like a rose,” I said.

  “Except Tate,” said Pomerleau.

  “It’s a good story. Young female trooper rescues young female sex slave.”

  “You don’t mind not getting any credit?”

  “If I’m going into the investigation division, it’s probably better for me to stay out of the news.”

  “Son of a bitch!” Finch cried. The yellow jacket, at the limits of its own patience, had stung him on the fleshy part of his hand between his thumb and forefinger.

  47

  Six weeks later, Stacey and I sat side by side on the couch in our living room and watched the only interview Casey Donaldson had granted to an American television network. It aired in prime time, on a Sunday evening, so that the whole nation would be watching.

  The interviewer, an attractive middle-aged woman, had real journalistic credentials; she’d filed reports from Baghdad’s Green Zone before being “promoted” to the network’s morning show to chat with TV stars about their diets and sip mimosas with her vapid co-host. She seemed visibly excited to be an actual reporter again with a bonafide exclusive.

  Right off, I was struck by the change in Casey’s appearance. Her face was less bloated, leaner, and she had a glowing complexion. Her stylists had pulled her glossy black hair away from her heart-shaped face and fastened it in the back to suggest the workaday look of a pretty administrative assistant or a paralegal: a woman seeking to minimize her sexual appeal while still appearing attractive. She was meant to look like anyone’s daughter.

  Tom Donaldson sat beside her, wearing a spiffy blazer and a tie. Someone had cut and styled his thinning hair. He clutched his stepdaughter’s hand the whole time as if terrified of ever letting go again.

  The interviewer in her introduction retold Casey’s story as if anyone in the country was unaware of the sordid details. The loss of her mother at a young age. The self-discovery that came with making new friends at the University of New Hampshire. Then the fateful rafting trip down the Saco. The interviewer closed with a promise: “Tonight you will hear Casey Donaldson describe her four-year nightmare in her own words.”

  “This is so exploitive,” said Stacey. “I feel dirty watching it.”

  I put my arm around her shoulder.

  The first words Casey spoke were “Sheer terror doesn’t even begin to describe how I felt.”

  It struck me, as she began with the night of her abduction, that there was no mention of Dakota Rowe. His family’s lawyers must have succeeded in persuading the network that any mention of their client would constitute slander. I remembered Pomerleau’s words: “It’s good to be rich.”

  Casey described her fright during the lightning storm, trying to find her way out of the swamp to safety in the dark. As Charley had surmised,
she left the boat as soon as she found what looked like solid ground. But as she sank to her hips in the muck and the canoe floated away, she had already begun to doubt her judgment.

  She said she eventually found trees where she could take cover. To me it sounded as if she might have taken a different path from the one Charley and I had used, because she’d intersected the dirt road well south of John Blood’s cabin. It was sobering to realize that not all of our suppositions had been correct.

  “That was when I saw the police car,” Casey said. “He flashed his lights when he saw me so I would know who he was. All I can remember was how happy I was.”

  Nisbet was nice at first; he was Officer Friendly who had come to take her to safety. But she found it strange that he asked her to sit in the cage in the back of the cruiser where the inside doors had no handles. And instead of taking her toward civilization, they seemed to be going deeper into the woods.

  The screen showed a portrait of the dead policeman in his powder-blue uniform, his pompadour hidden beneath his trooper-style campaign hat.

  Casey described her arrival at John Blood’s cabin as a moment of utter confusion. She wanted to know where they were. Nisbet answered, “Your new home.”

  He was too strong for her to fight him. He dragged her to the cabin. A woman was waiting in the doorway. She was wearing a platinum wig.

  “I know it sounds weird, but the woman scared me more than the man. She gave me a hug. It was a hug that was strong and domineering. It was saying, ‘Don’t you dare do anything I don’t tell you to do.’ That was Becky.”

  The screen showed the medical examiner’s photograph of Becky’s face as she lay on his steel table, about to be bisected. Her skin was as gray as meat gone bad, and she looked halfway to becoming a skeleton. Mercifully, her exploded eyes were closed.

  “It seems like they should have warned people they were going to show that,” Stacey said. “What if kids are watching?”

  “This kind of stuff is family viewing now.”

  The scene returned to the studio. Casey said that when they were all inside the cabin, Nisbet told her, “I will kill you if you try to escape. I will kill you if you make a noise. I will kill whoever comes here to find you.”

  His breath was foul, she said, and twitched her nose as if she could still smell it. He chewed gum all the time. He said cinnamon was good for covering all sorts of odors. But it never made a difference. The disgusting odor seemed to be coming from his insides.

  “I said, ‘If you’re going to kill me, please leave my body where it can be found. I want my dad to know that he can stop worrying about me.’”

  Her voice was steady, but Tom Donaldson was blinking back tears.

  Becky helped Nisbet take his clothes off, like a servant helping a king disrobe. When Casey screamed, Becky said they would duct-tape her mouth shut if she didn’t stop.

  Nisbet said he had a better idea. He injected her with heroin. The drug, unfortunately, didn’t render her unconscious. She remembered Becky stripping her naked and then standing by while Nisbet raped her.

  “After he was done, I closed my eyes and curled up into a tight ball. I felt broken beyond all repair. The first thing I felt, when I awoke, was the needle in my arm again—and then there was this warm wave that washed through me, as if nothing mattered.”

  Whenever the drugs began to wear off, she would begin to sweat and shiver and feel sick. It sounded as if they were detoxing her deliberately—forcing her to go cold turkey—to demonstrate their control.

  “Every time I thought this cannot get worse, but it always did. At a certain point, I stopped even feeling human.”

  Casey described the endless blur of days that followed. Nisbet would leave her alone with Becky, whose job it was to train her to be his chosen wife. Becky told Casey that she had a new married name: Kendall Cobb. They would watch DVDs. Becky loved horror movies. They would cook elaborate meals for Nisbet, who always returned with loads of groceries. After dinner, he would have sex with them both or watch them have sex together. Sleep became Casey’s only oasis. Sleep and heroin. Whenever she began to feel a sensation, the next shot would dull it.

  “I don’t know when I stopped thinking of myself as Casey and started thinking of myself as Kendall.”

  The interviewer wanted to know how it was possible that they were never found out.

  “They moved me around a few times,” Casey explained. “It was always a different rental house—but always the same house, if that makes any sense. I knew I couldn’t escape because I was afraid of becoming sick. I’d feel so awful when I didn’t get the injections. Eventually, Becky let me wander free inside the house because she knew I was their slave.”

  The interviewer said she needed to turn to a painful subject: the birth and death of Casey’s daughter.

  “He never used birth control because Becky couldn’t have kids,” Casey said. “But I got pregnant.”

  Her daughter—whom Casey had decided to name Kylie—wasn’t stillborn. “I heard her cry when Becky took her out of me,” Casey said. “It was only later that she told me Kylie had strangled on the umbilical cord. I knew it was a lie because I’d heard her crying.”

  Going up the mountain later was a test. They had seen the feral pigs go by from the window, and Nisbet had followed them, and that’s when he must have gotten the idea to bury the infant in the wallow. Becky had watched a movie once about killers disposing of corpses by feeding them to pigs. They wanted Casey to dig the grave, but she was too wasted to hold the shovel. Eventually Becky took over.

  “That was when I scratched the initials in the tree,” Casey said, “because there was no tombstone. I was afraid I would forget she’d even existed if I didn’t make a mark.”

  Casey had no memory of my coming to the door. But she did recall Nisbet arriving in his pickup and telling them to gather everything up. He drove them to the house he was building at the edge of John Blood’s property.

  “He hated us being there. He preferred us being in rental homes not linked to him. He never wanted us to stay any place that could be connected to him.”

  The next day, the two of them sat her down and explained the plan. The first stage was getting Steve Nason to come to the house. Becky had been providing him with oral sex in exchange for his silence, so that was easy.

  “I had no idea they were planning to kill him,” Casey said.

  The second stage of the plan was to lure a game warden to an abandoned farm. Casey was supposed to call him and pretend to be someone named Martha Tarbox and tell him she’d seen feral pigs. When he came into the barn, she needed to spray him in the eyes with pepper spray and keep spraying until the can was empty.

  Casey looked directly into the camera, and I felt a chill. “I want to apologize, now, to the warden for what I did.”

  I forgive you, I wanted to tell her.

  I remembered the rest. I was there.

  After they’d finished discussing my session in the torture chamber, the interviewer asked how Casey had felt when she learned Nisbet was dead.

  “How do you think she felt, bitch?” Stacey said.

  But Casey said she preferred not to discuss that subject.

  Frustrated, the interviewer became pushier. She asked if Casey had signed a book or movie deal yet.

  Tom Donaldson responded with real anger, “We don’t want money. We want Casey to lead a normal life again.”

  The interviewer asked if that would ever be possible.

  “No,” Casey admitted. “I will always be the girl who vanished.”

  The interviewer then wanted to know why, if their only desire was to return to normalcy, they had agreed to come on television.

  Stacey was fuming. “Because your damn producers spent weeks badgering them!”

  Once again, Casey faced the camera. “I want other young women to know what happened to me and to answer those people who are criticizing me for not trying to escape. I don’t expect what I have to say will stop that becau
se they weren’t there. People want to think that they’ll be heroes in bad situations, but they’re just fooling themselves.”

  48

  The next morning, Stacey lay in bed watching me get dressed for my new job. As a warden investigator, I would no longer wear a uniform. I was the equivalent of a plainclothes detective now. On the prior Saturday, I’d had to drive down to the Maine Mall to buy button-down oxford-cloth shirts and dress pants because I’d never worn a business-casual outfit to an office in my life.

  I barely recognized myself in the full-length mirror attached to the bathroom door. DeFord had advised me to grow out my hair a little. He said a crew cut, let alone a buzz cut, could come off as too hard-core when I wanted to persuade a civilian to open up to me.

  Only after I’d clipped my badge to my belt and attached the holster, holding my SIG .357, did I begin to come to terms with my new self.

  I finished adjusting my knit tie and turned so that she could see me in my spiffy new clothes and I could see her half-naked on the bed. “What do you think?”

  “You look handsome.” She pushed the sheets down on the bed. August had arrived, just as hot as July. Her dark hair was spread out upon the pillow; her neck was beaded with perspiration.

  “What are you up to today?”

  “My friends and I are doing a three-mile swim out on Sebago. I told you I’m doing a triathlon in Camden in September.”

  “When I tried out for the Warden Service, they made me tread water for fifteen minutes fully clothed and then swim one hundred yards. It wasn’t hard, but it wasn’t fun, either.”

  “We don’t have to like all the same things, Mike.”

  “We like most of the same things.”

  She studied me with concern. “Are you feeling up to this? Starting a new job?”

  “The doctor said I’m cleared for duty.”

  “That’s what the NFL doctors always say, too. How many of the ex-players end up as the walking dead?” She rose up from the bed to kiss me good-bye. “Go to work, Mike. I don’t want you to be late on your first day because of my worrying.”

  * * *