Come With Me

by Ronald Malfi

  But what the file contained, of course, was a history of the dead.

  2

  Inside the accordion folder were six individual packets, each one held together by a large binder clip. Each packet had a cover page—a single white sheet of printer paper on which you’d printed a name, date, and a location:

  MARGOT IDELSON (2006) – Norfolk, Virginia

  SHELBY DAVENPORT (2008) – Bishop, North Carolina

  LAUREN CHASTAIN (2011) – Vineland, New Jersey

  MEGAN POLLOCK (2013) – Whitehall, Delaware

  GABRIELLE COLSON-HOWE (2016) – Port Tobacco, Maryland

  HOLLY RENFROW (2018) – Furnace, West Virginia

  Just seeing those names caused a serpent of dread to tighten into a coil at the center of my body. The names meant nothing to me, and I had no context for what any of this was… but some innate part of me stirred uneasily at the sight of those names.

  Inside each packet were newspaper articles and stories printed off the internet concerning the murders of these people—people who turned out to be teenage girls. Some of them contained black-and-white photos of the victims, smiling school-photo faces with ringlets of pale hair, clavicles adorned with slender necklaces, some of them with braces on their teeth. You’d printed maps from MapQuest, charting the miles to these various small towns up and down the east coast in red marker, towns whose names were unfamiliar to me and as remote as distant satellites. Most disconcerting were the pages and pages of handwritten notes you’d taken that corresponded with each specific packet—pages torn from spiral-bound notebooks, their margins frilly from the tear, or long sheets of yellow legal paper. Within your notes were names and phone numbers, people identified as law enforcement personnel from various locations, family members of the deceased, many others. I realized that some of these notes were from what appeared to be interviews you had conducted with some of these people. Most of these notes had dates written in the upper right-hand corners of the pages. Some were from the past few years, which was troubling enough—it meant you had been doing this behind the backdrop of our marriage without me ever realizing it, whatever this was—but even more disturbing were the ones from before our marriage. What was all of this and how long had you been collecting this information? The length of time you had spent in this dark world staggered me, Allison. And not just in your head, either, but in actuality. You had been traveling to these places, speaking to these people in person. You’d been doing this for years, it appeared. And, of course, all of that intel conspired to arrive at the heart of the question here—namely, what exactly had you been doing?

  And through it all, a finger of guilt edged up through the middle of my soul. My mind had jumped immediately to infidelity when I had come across that motel receipt, but Julie Sumter had been right—there were other possibilities. I’d own the guilt because it meant you’d been faithful all along, yet my confusion over this new discovery was quickly overshadowing it. Because it was true that you’d been hiding something from me.

  I spent time with these files, spent time combing cautiously through the computer printouts and all your handwritten notes. It occurred to me that these printouts may have been the reason you’d wiped your laptop’s hard drive, although I couldn’t fathom why. Whatever this was, you had graduated toward a frenzy—among the more recent files, your handwriting became even more illegible and hectic than normal. In particular, I found a loose sheet of yellow legal paper tucked between the two most recently dated folders. I slid it out and stared at it, unable to reconcile exactly what I was seeing, or how it related to the other information you had collected in the folders. Like someone writing in the throes of a fugue state or while possessed by a spirit, the same phrase had been furiously scribbled over and over again, as if screaming from the page:

  Gas Head will make you dead

  It wasn’t just the cryptic nature of the phrase or the fury with which it had been so clearly written that resonated with me, but the certainty that I had heard it somewhere before. Nonetheless, it was meaningless to me, as informative as a line cribbed from an unfamiliar poem.

  I turned the page over and saw the phrase repeated on the other side, along with a drawing that could best be described as a bar graph without any demarcations: six rectangular columns of varying size standing in a row, like someone had rearranged the tone bars of a xylophone.

  Again, the light above my head fizzled and dimmed. I stared at it, then looked away, the afterimage of the bulb radiating like a wound in the center of my vision.

  3

  “I don’t understand what the hell she was doing,” I said to Bill Duvaney one afternoon, as we sat having lunch at a restaurant in downtown Annapolis. He had been adamant about taking me out to eat for nearly two weeks now, a show of goodwill on his part, and to make sure I was getting on without you, I suppose. It was kind of him, and there was no ulterior motive that I could discern, but I’d been avoiding him because I didn’t think I had it in me to don a mask and socialize with anyone yet. Particularly not someone with whom my only connection had been you, Allison. But in the end, I finally acquiesced. And as it turned out, I was the one with the ulterior motive. If there was a person who might be able to shed some light on your morbid obsession, it might be your boss, a newspaperman to whom something like this, no matter how dark it might seem to me, might make an ounce of sense.

  “Well, it’s certainly unexpected, but I don’t know if it’s all that unusual,” Bill said. Before him on the table was the accordion file containing all your research. He had glanced at some of the newspaper articles and at your handwritten notes with all the gravitas of a heart surgeon, but the look on his face now wasn’t quite so solemn.

  “Come on, Bill. You don’t think it’s unusual that my wife was going to all these places, talking to all these people, these cops and whoever else? Asking questions about unsolved murders? And the whole time, she never said anything about it to me. She was sneaking around behind my back and keeping this a secret like some… I don’t know…”

  “Like some reporter,” Bill finished.

  “Yeah, but nothing you were paying her to do. It had nothing to do with her work.”

  “Maybe it was a pet project. There’s a whole breed of people out there who fancy themselves detectives. They find cold cases, try to solve them from their living rooms while surfing the internet on their laptops.”

  “She wasn’t just surfing the internet. She was going to these places. I checked the dates of her hotel stays. Some of them correspond to dates when I was out of town. She was waiting for me to leave so that she could get back out there and dig around in this stuff. Others are from before we met. And not just that, but this first murder?” I dug the packets out of the file, found the one I was looking for. “This girl Margot Idelson? She was killed in Norfolk, Virginia, in 2006. Allison would have been seventeen at the time, Bill. Seventeen. What was she doing researching some girl’s death back then?”

  “Who’s to say she took all these notes contemporaneously? Maybe she only started looking at all these murders in the past year or so.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so. The handwritten dates on some of the notes certainly don’t point to that.” The dates on the notes aside, there was something about the way they were written that conveyed an immediacy to the event you were researching, although I didn’t possess the mental acumen to figure out exactly why I felt that way. Something in my gut, perhaps.

  “Well, Aaron, whatever it is, the answer died with Allison,” Bill said. “What does it matter now?”

  Lowering my voice, I said, “She bought a gun, Bill. A revolver. She had it hidden away in a trunk in our closet with the rest of this stuff.”

  Bill’s eyebrows climbed toward his receding hairline. “A gun? Allison?”

  “Back when we were having all those break-ins in the neighborhood, I suggested the possibility of getting a gun for protection, and she wouldn’t even consider it. Started citing statistics about gun
owners accidentally shooting their spouses. Yet she goes out and buys one and hides it from me. I don’t get it.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t protection for the home,” Bill suggested. “Maybe it was protection for her, while she was on the road.”

  “Jesus,” I muttered. “It’s like I didn’t even know her, Bill.”

  “I think you’re making a big deal out of this stuff because your emotions are all over the place. Allison’s death, it was sudden, Aaron. It was cruel. Your focus on this stuff is just a way to keep your connection to her.” He picked up his ice water and frowned at what appeared to be the remnants of someone’s pink lipstick on the rim of the glass. “Hell, maybe she was writing a book,” he suggested, setting the dirty glass down. “She learned about all these random unsolved cases, these poor girls, so maybe she wanted to give them a voice. Maybe she didn’t want them to be forgotten. It’s just like what she did with her column, only on a more grandiose scale. If you ask me, that sounds just like something Allison would do.”

  It was true. I found myself thinking of our third date, and how you’d cracked that guy over the head with an ornamental oar because he was roughing up his girlfriend. It was just like you, Allison. Bill was right. You had a streak inside you that burned brightly whenever you witnessed some injustice, especially if it was perpetrated against a young girl at the hands of some perceived asshole. So… was that it, then? Had you been writing a book about these forgotten girls? Had it been your intention to give them a voice and grant them immortality on the pages of a manuscript? Or had it been something more than that?

  “If that’s what she was doing, writing a book,” I said, “then why wouldn’t she tell me about it? I would have supported her writing a book.”

  “You would have supported her running all over, doing this type of research in all these remote places, crashing in motel rooms by herself, talking to God knows who? With a gun in her purse, no less?”

  “Of course. I’m not some macho asshole, Bill.” Yet even as I said this, I wasn’t sure it was one hundred percent truth. Would I have been okay with it? “Anyway, it couldn’t be a book. If it was, what was she waiting for? These murders span over a decade. She could have published the son of a bitch by now.”

  Our waiter came by, set a Manhattan in front of Bill, a diet soda in front of me. Bill scowled at my sobriety. When the waiter left, I rummaged through the files until I found the single sheet of yellow legal paper, the one with Gas Head will make you dead printed ad nauseam across both sides of the page.

  “And then there’s this,” I said, handing the paper to Bill. “Does that phrase mean anything to you? Have you ever heard it before?”

  He scrutinized one side of the page, then the other. “‘Gas Head will make you dead.’ Means nothing to me. This was with the rest of this stuff?”

  “Wedged between the two most recent files.”

  “Maybe it’s a song lyric? Did you try googling it?”

  “I have. Zero results. It’s not a song lyric. It’s nothing that exists anywhere on the internet.”

  “It could just be some mental flotsam that had been swirling around in her head. Looks like daydream doodling. Reporters are always making little sketches in the margins of their notes. I see it every day. See?” He pointed to the thing that looked like an unlabeled bar graph. “Just doodles.” He handed the paper back to me. “Why’s this bugging you so much?”

  “Because I’ve heard this before, this ‘Gas Head’ phrase. I can’t remember where, but it’s familiar to me. It means something. I just don’t know what.”

  “Well, what can you do? You can’t ask her about it. You can’t ask her about any of this, Aaron. She’s gone.”

  I took a deep breath. My gaze clung to the files of dead girls spread out across the table, the crinkled sheet of yellow paper with that eerie phrase all over it.

  “We were having some problems in the past few months, just before she died,” I said in a low voice. “Allison had become cold, distant. She wasn’t sleeping. Something was bothering her and it resonated through our marriage, but she wouldn’t talk to me about it. If it had something to do with this stuff”—I waved a hand over the files—“then I want to know. If something here was what was pulling her away from me in the end, Bill, then I want to know what it was.”

  “That’s a lofty expectation,” Bill said. His eyes looked sad.

  I felt anxious and unsettled. I told Bill I was going outside for a smoke, then excused myself from the table. My campaign from the rear of the restaurant to the sidewalk felt like a mountaineering expedition. The afternoon was chilly, the skies terminally gray and clustered with storm clouds. I smoked while watching the traffic. A group of tourists meandered up the block at the far end of the street; I kept expecting you to appear among them, your eyes bright, your smile radiant, your dark hair curling and framing your face. By the time I’d smoked my cigarette down to the filter, a pattern of raindrops had collected on the windshields of the cars parked along the curb.

  Back at our table, Bill Duvaney had the files opened again. It was not your notes he was studying, nor the newspaper articles you’d printed off the internet. All six faces of the murdered girls stared up from their respective files, a lineup so tragic that I paused beside Bill’s chair and just stared down at them from over his shoulder.

  Bill looked up at me. “What do you see?” he asked me.

  “Tragedy,” I said.

  “Look more closely.”

  I looked at the pictures but didn’t understand what it was he wanted me to see.

  “A pattern,” Bill said. “A type.”

  “A type of what?”

  “A type of victim.”

  I looked at him.

  “Sit,” he said.

  I pulled my chair around to his side of the table and sat down.

  “All of them young, blonde, pretty,” Bill said. “Could be these murders are actually connected.”

  “Connected,” I said, and looked at him. “You’re talking about a serial killer?”

  “I’m no police detective,” he said. “If the articles were more specific regarding how each girl was killed—and they’re not—then maybe the connection would be even clearer. But look at them. Look at their faces.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I muttered, my gaze volleying from photograph to photograph. It was true—the similarity between each victim was uncanny. How had I missed this before? “Jesus Christ, Bill. What do I do with this?”

  “Who’s the most recent murder victim?”

  I pointed to one of the photographs. “Holly Renfrow, killed last fall,” I said. “Seventeen years old, from a town called Furnace, West Virginia. The newspaper articles Allison collected about her death are vague as to the specific cause, just like you said, only that police suspected foul play. In Allison’s notes, though, she listed Renfrow’s cause of death as a drowning.”

  Bill was watching me, grinning.

  “What?” I said.

  “You’ve really studied this stuff,” he said. “Perhaps it’s transference. Allison’s obsession becoming yours.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “Every obsession needs a home,” he said. “Anyway, if I were you, I’d take this stuff to the police out there in Furnace, show them what you’ve got. Let them piece it all together.”

  I considered this. My gaze hung on the photo of Holly Renfrow. There was a better picture of her included in the file, a color photo you had gotten from someone—a relative of Holly’s?—at some point. But something about this black-and-white one caused my throat to tighten.

  “What’s wrong?” Bill said from some great distance.

  “You think that’s what Allison would want me to do? Take this stuff to the police, I mean.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because as far as I can tell, she didn’t.”

  “What do you mean? In all six cases Allison’s got notes in there from conversations with police.”

  “Yeah, but
about each individual murder,” I said… or was it other-Aaron speaking through me now, translating the documents laid out before us? “There’s no evidence here that she took this serial-killer hypothesis to the cops. She clearly kept these files for herself. Hidden. Hidden even from me.” I looked at Bill. “What if there was a reason for that?”

  “Well,” Bill said, “you can’t ask her, so you’ve only got your gut to go on, I suppose. Do what you think is right, Aaron.”

  I didn’t say anything to that. What I was thinking of was the closet light, blinking on and off, on and off, as I sat on the floor poring over the contents of your hidden files. Inside the nerve center of my consciousness, other-Aaron opened his eyes and did the math. I was temporarily comforted by the familiar sound of his sleek machinery rolling away inside my head once again. And just like that, it became suddenly, transcendently clear: a memory of something you’d showed me, something silly and futile, something that might prove a way for a haunted man to commune with a ghost and find the answer he seeks. Other-Aaron retreated, bowing like a sensei as he vanished into the shadows of my brain.

  4

  There was a thing you showed me early on in our courtship that I’d never forgotten, Allison. A game, really. What would you call it? A silly thing that you showed me only once, but that had resonated in the back of my mind since your death. A symbol of you and of everything you’d left behind in your wake.

  You had driven us that night, out to some raucous dinner with colleagues of yours, and we kept making faces at each other from across the room to make each other laugh. It was at Bill and Maureen Duvaney’s house, a handsome brick Tudor perched above the Chesapeake Bay. The more inebriated everyone got, the louder their voices and the looser their tongues became. I had watched these people in awe, trying to reconcile your relationship with them, how your introversion and cavernous depths functioned alongside their boisterous natures.