Maybe DeeDee wasn’t always a ponytail-puller. Maybe Vickie wasn’t as much of a cherry pie as her mother said she was. The dead are always washed clean.
I don’t speak to Carl until DeeDee is a little stick figure in the back window. I’m certain her little stick fingers are dialing trouble, but I halt the car abruptly in the middle of the road anyway.
“Is that true? Is there a connection between these missing women? Did the prosecutor bury evidence?” The Nicole Lakinski case lives and breathes inside me more than any of the others except my sister’s. That’s because there was so much to devour: depositions, trial transcripts, newspaper and Internet stories. I bought more than a few Shiners for the cops who were the primaries. I flirted and crossed the line with men I shouldn’t have. And, still, I may have missed the biggest piece.
“Not that I know of,” Carl says. “Remind me. Who else do you think I killed?”
23
The moon is a giant orange ball playing hide-and-seek with a bank of night clouds. Soothing, if driving this pitch-black country road didn’t feel like being buried alive, if the tires weren’t moaning against the asphalt, if I didn’t think there was a serial killer sleeping beside me. I’ve tried the radio, but it’s full of deafening static.
Every now and then, I hit a surprise rut, which jolts my nerves. It’s also saving me from nodding off. Barfly is knocked out in the back with his evening painkiller. Carl swallowed his pills or at least pretended to. He’s slumped on a feather pillow propped against the door. At his feet, a small pile of rocks and pebbles he “panned” out of a Kohl’s parking lot. “Gold,” he told me.
He had insisted on buying a 100-percent-down pillow and a 500-thread-count American flag pillowcase, and another pillow and sleeping bag for Walt, which he arranged neatly across the floor of the backseat. “Like a bunk bed,” he told Walt. Or Barfly. Or both. Another $310.24, blown.
I think about all those video cameras that recorded Carl and me in the Kohl’s home goods department, at the register, in the parking lot, when all I really wanted to do in Bryan, Texas, was quietly retrieve a new rental vehicle and double-check a hotel reservation.
I’d changed clothes at the Whataburger where we stopped for a late lunch. Goodbye to the Ann Taylor sundress. My costume for the next act was a jean skirt that rides high, a tight white tank top, a red push-up bra, and four-inch cheap strappy sandals. I freed my long hair, stuck in the nose ring, circled my eyes with black liner.
At the Avis car center down the road, I had confidently flaunted my second fake driver’s license. The hair in the picture was blond and mine was still Cherry Cola but I’d decided it was worth the risk.
I giggled and flirted and lied and asked the cute guy named Mike behind the counter if he’d read the sci-fi thriller where red-haired girls are like Kryptonite to one of the main villains. My boyfriend loved that book, I told Mike. I dyed my hair red because it made him happy. We are going on a hunting trip to Oklahoma, but after that I may break up with him. He is already talking about me getting a boob job, when aren’t my breasts nice enough?
Mike had trouble keeping his eyes up after that. He did bother to make me promise I’d be the only driver, although it was clear he didn’t really care. I asked him for a four-door white pickup because there is nothing more ubiquitous on a Texas highway.
My trainer is the one who told me the story about the villain made powerless by red-haired girls. I was pounding boxing gloves into a bag at the time. He was always trying to convince me that my Achilles’ heel would be something unexpected, a blow to the mind, not the chest.
I’d paid extra for a pickup with a remote-controlled retractable bed cover and a deep tint on the windows. Play money on the credit card. I couldn’t avoid using one for a rental.
Carl stayed out of sight during the truck negotiation, missing another of my performances. They’re adding up. Rachel would be proud. For Artie the motel clerk, I’d played an annoyed wife on the way to an aunt’s funeral. For the horny car rental guy, I was a red-haired girl with a redneck boyfriend. I practically took my top off and waved it like a Confederate flag.
It was a risk, but I’d had to let Carl drive the Buick and follow me in the truck. It had been Carl’s idea to abandon the rental sedan in an enormous long-term parking lot for Texas A&M students. He’d quickly screwed the original rental plates back on and attached another set of fake ones to the pickup while I moved the boxes and suitcases from the trunk to the truck bed.
Because of the long-term rental agreement I’d signed, no one at Avis would be worried about the Buick for three weeks. They certainly wouldn’t be looking in that lot.
It was too early in the trip to be switching cars and license plates, too early to be collecting a dog or DeeDee’s wrath. It was also too early to be working in such elegant unison with Carl.
When Carl wasn’t looking, right before we abandoned the Buick, I had lifted up the console to retrieve Lolita’s scarf. It wasn’t there.
* * *
—
A shadow is limping across the dark road twenty yards ahead. I slam on the brakes. Carl bolts up. “A raccoon,” I say. He whips around to check Barfly, who hadn’t let out a peep. “What are those bug eyes behind us?” he demands.
“Is your ghost lady back?” Too flip, I know. The dementia books said to accept hallucinations because what harm does that do? Don’t provoke.
“Stop calling them ghosts,” he says, irritated. “How long has that vehicle been following us?”
I glance in the rearview mirror. “I don’t know. They’ve been way, way back, on and off, for a while. I don’t think they are always the same headlights. I’m watching.”
“You’re going to have to pull over.”
“What?”
“When we get over this little hill and they lose our taillights for a second, look for a place to pull over.”
We’re at the bottom of a hill when he yanks the wheel sharply. “Right here.” He has thrown the truck into a half-moon patch of gravel. I squeal on the brakes. The pickup lights illuminate a cattle gate and an old-fashioned metal arch, usually the entrance to expansive family ranchland.
“Cut the lights,” he demands. “Pull through the gate, turn around to face the road, and shut the car off.”
I don’t know whether to be more scared of the bug eyes, Carl, or myself for so robotically obeying him.
We sit there in the dark, facing the road, not saying a word. The only sound is Carl’s breath. When the car rushes past, it’s a blur of shadow, now going at least eighty.
“You’ll get the hang of this.” Carl leans his head back against the pillow. “We’ll stay here for a while to be sure. They’ll pause up ahead and wait for about thirty minutes before they give up. Get some shut-eye.”
Inside, I’m protesting. But my neck feels like it can no longer prop up my head, still aching from its encounter with DeeDee. Day Three has been a very long one. I pulled over twice so Carl could pan for gold in the pebbles at the side of the road. And what if Carl’s right? The possibility of being tailed is the paranoid reason I chose to drive in circles for a while on the back roads. I know what I’m worried about. I know the laws I’ve broken, the snakes I’ve poked. But who does Carl think is following us?
Carl’s breathing is even again, his head snuggled back on the pillow. It takes everything in me not to steal the one out from under Walt’s head for myself.
The seat glides back easily when I press the button.
I feel my sister’s presence. The first time this happened was three days after she disappeared. My scalp tickled, like Rachel was back to French-braid my hair like she’d promised. Of course, when I stole a look in the mirror, my hair was still a ratty mess, full of tears and snot.
Rachel’s presence is not at all like one of Carl’s ghosts. And there’s no angel on my shoulder. No angel would agree to
what I’m willing to do. I think about the Glock. Whether, after all that training, I’ll still have the guts to use it.
I lie back and stare at the moon eyeing me through the sunroof.
It’s no longer fun and games up there.
The clouds have gathered into an ocean of rushing waves. The moon is fighting the inevitable, sinking into the depths of things no one can see.
Bright and shining, and then swallowed whole.
Like my sister.
24
I was twelve when my sister disappeared, the exact age she was when she stood laughing in that grave, reaching her hand up to me. It was the summer of Rachel’s sophomore year in college, so she was home, my family complete, what my mother referred to as “blessed chaos.” When my sister was at school, I felt like a leg on our table for four was missing. Now that table is firewood.
Despite our seven-year age difference, we had always shared a room. So when the cops asked, while my mother was inconsolable, I could name Rachel’s precise measurements (32–25–34), her dress size (4), her shoe size (7), weight (108), number of piercings (three: one in nose, two hidden), her drug use (pot, occasional), the three-quarter-inch scar on her knee from a softball slide.
I could tell them that on the morning of her disappearance, Rachel left for her summer babysitting job at exactly 8:14 A.M., a little earlier than usual. She ate Cheerios with Almond Breeze for breakfast, brushed her teeth with a purple toothbrush and Crest Whitening, dressed in jeans, a blue T-shirt, and silver heart earrings that an old boyfriend had given her.
The last thing she said to me as she was going out the door was, “Sorry, I finished off the strawberries.” She was grinning. We both loved them, and she’d already eaten her half, so I was mad. I never bit into another strawberry again, but my late-night reading included searching for them in the stomach content listings of coroners’ reports.
When Rachel disappeared, it had been years since my twin playmates were taped to the back wall of my closet. I vaguely thought of the picture, of the naive, silly little girl I was, when I began attaching new photographs to the pine paneling. This time, my secret gallery was devoted to suspects.
When I divided the clothes in the middle, between my sister’s sky-blue prom dress and her candy-cane Christmas robe, there was Mr. Eversley, her old English teacher, frowning in a picture clipped from one of my sister’s old yearbooks. He gave my sister A’s when she was a B student at best. In the beginning, that was plenty to make my suspect list.
To the right, between my favorite jeans and a rose print sweater, I’d pasted up a spread on the two boyfriends Rachel tossed back and forth in summer and winter—one at home, the other in college, where she was a theater major.
The back corner was dedicated to pictures of the three men within a mile radius of our house listed on the Texas sex offenders’ registry. I had snapped surreptitious shots of them in their yards and through their windows. One of them had chased me away with a hose. I was lucky. He was too used to a rabid group called Mothers Against Molesters bugging the crap out of him to report me.
By the time I was a junior in high school, every inch of space on my closet wall was layered with maps, notes, photos, headlines. There was an ugly beauty to the display on the days my parents were out of the house and I swept all the clothes out of the closet and laid it bare.
I was careful about my obsession. I hid things. Under the red lining of my violin case, I tucked a timeline of Rachel’s movements during her last week on earth.
By the time I was fourteen, I had stored a black T-shirt, black sneakers, a flashlight, and one of my father’s pistols under the floorboard by the window. I found a heady power in roaming at night—what predators must feel when they stare at sleeping houses.
My dad knew all about the weapon in my room. That’s where he wanted it after Rachel went missing. I practiced with him at the range twice a month. He didn’t want me to hesitate to shoot in self-defense. He bought me the holster I’m wearing. More than once, I almost told him everything. If I had, I wonder if I would be different. If he would have tried harder to stay alive for me, instead of letting his heart stop.
Inside the lining of the pillow where my sister used to lay her head, I stashed the notebook with a list of girls and women from ages eighteen to twenty-eight, women who had vanished in Texas the ten years before and all the years after my sister did. I’ve never stopped adding names to the list. I used to say them in bed silently with my eyes closed, like other people count sheep. Now there are way too many to memorize.
While my mother thought I slaved over AP history at the library, I tangentially linked cases to my sister’s and eliminated others. After I got my driver’s license, I followed people. I retired suspects and added more.
For example, I eventually had Mr. Eversley for class myself.
Rachel wasn’t special to him, it turned out. Mr. Eversley gave everyone A’s.
Two of the men I suspected on the sex offenders’ registry had simply been guilty of slightly underage sex with women they married. I felt guilty for bothering them. I made oatmeal cookies and left them on their doorsteps with an anonymous note as an apology.
That was rare. A lot of the men I stalked were guilty of something. I watched them slap their wives, cheat in their own homes, sell pot and painkillers to neighborhood kids. Occasionally, I’d leave a different kind of note on the windshields of their BMWs and Toyotas. I wanted them to know someone was watching.
The nice cop who sat at my kitchen table and wrote down my sister’s measurements retired to run his father-in-law’s concrete company. After that, when I showed up at the police station once a year with my investigative collection, I was passed around. Someone always called my mother afterward and told on me.
I became smarter, leaner, sneakier. I let my hope continue to beat against all the statistics.
Still, it got harder to brace myself to meet other sad families in secret so my mother wouldn’t find out. To be hung up on and have front doors slammed on me.
To awkwardly ask families for spare copies of snapshot after snapshot so I could scour and compare every face in the background, thinking that one day I’d see a connection. I never did.
It was pure luck that I found the link to Carl, even though it had been in the back of my closet all along.
25
I pull into the parking lot of a small-town dollar store after a fitful night sleeping in the truck. Carl’s still snoring like a horse. We’re in Magnolia. Or Bellville. I’m not sure. I’ve stayed off my phone, taken a few iffy turns. The last time I looked at the map was with a flashlight.
I free Barfly from the back and lead him over to a grassy patch of dandelions to do his business. He’s barely limping.
If Barfly keeps improving at this rate, it’s more of a reason to insist we find a no-kill shelter. Practically speaking, he needs to go. People are more likely to remember a couple of people with a scruffy dog. More of a problem, Barfly makes me feel. Once that well opens, it will overflow. I have no idea what I’d do to Carl. At the back of the truck, I crank open a can of dog food and pour some bottled water into a shiny metal bowl.
Barfly and I are resettled in the truck at 8:36 A.M. when a pimply teenager drives up in a beat-up green Camry to unlock the store. The place doesn’t open until 9 but he waves me in after I show up at the door with my knees squeezed together, holding a magazine in front of my crotch.
I tell him I’m on a desperate early-morning hunt for tampons, which is part of the truth. He waits patiently at the register, where I figure he is also keeping a careful watch on the security screens as I roam the aisles.
My hair is tucked into the Hollywood, U.S.A. baseball cap Carl picked up at a gas station. My eyes are concealed behind a pair of pilot Ray-Bans. That’s really not so weird at 8:30 in the morning, because Texas sunrises are blinding, Texas hangovers a
re a bitch, and Texas women spend freely on good sunglasses.
They’re out of tampons. When I show up at the register with my basket of goodies, he seems disinterested in what I do purchase: four mini-packages of powdered-sugar donuts, two single-serving-size milks, a twenty-count box of quart-size Ziploc freezer bags, and three different shades of hair dye. It had occurred to me on Aisle Three that I shouldn’t be advertising to the dollar store cameras that I might be going blond next, so I bought a variety pack.
Carl is wide-awake when I get back to the truck.
“Everything you buy at the dollar store causes cancer,” he announces as I open the door.
I fling him a package of donuts, followed by the box of Ziplocs. He catches both, one at a time, like someone who knows how to catch.
“You remembered. Thank you.” He seems genuinely touched that I bought him the plastic bags he requested for his gold-panning enterprise.
“Where we headed?” He’s tearing open the donuts.
“Houston,” I say. “Then Galveston.”
“Which one did I kill there? Is this your last dot? Are you running out?” The powdered sugar has dusted his lips and chin.
“Violet,” I say, while the ocean drums in my ears.
26
Carl and I funnel into the fast, smoky churn of Houston.
The traffic feels gritty and forgetful of Harvey, of the deep rivers that raged on the highways, swallowed homes, and churned up heroes who transformed Houston into one of the bravest, most famous cities in the world.
Ahead, the skyline stands untouched, no holes, no missing towers. The dark clouds scudding outside the windshield are the only reminder that everything is on a timer.
Paper Ghosts Page 10
