by Ronald Malfi
It was this notion that consumed me as I drove home from West Virginia and my meeting with Hercel Lovering. It caused a throbbing bolt of anger to temporarily replace my grief. I welcomed it, because since your death, I’d felt as if I’d died, too, and it was becoming a permanent state for me. Yet anger makes us feel alive. So I let it fuel me for as long as it would, which turned out not to be very long at all. Because when I stepped into our townhome that night, I broke down all over again.
As if I needed corroboration, I fired up my laptop in the kitchen and googled “Holly Renfrow” and “Das Hillyard” and the town of Furnace, West Virginia. I found the news stories from January detailing Hillyard’s death, and his conviction in absentia of the murder of Holly Renfrow. The articles confirmed what Lovering had told me—that Hillyard had spent over a decade in prison for molesting two young boys. There was a color photo of Hillyard alongside one of the articles, a conspiracy of soulless black eyes, sunken, pockmarked cheeks, and an air of profound apathy that possessed not even the slightest modicum of humanity.
This prompted me to question the status of the other murders. Had they been solved at some point, too? I started from the earliest case—Margot Idelson, killed in 2006—and worked my way forward. From what I could tell, none of these other cases had been solved. In fact, there existed very little information on the older cases, and nothing current. The exception to this was the 2016 murder of a teenage girl named Gabrielle Colson-Howe, from Port Tobacco, Maryland. There were some current stories written about her, keeping her in the public consciousness, and even mention of her on some message boards. Perhaps this was because her death was still relatively recent; it was the second most recent murder in your files, behind Holly Renfrow’s death last fall. Yet on closer inspection, I realized—or, more accurately, other-Aaron realized—that the articles and the posts on message boards all shared a single commonality: the same author.
Roberta Negri’s name appeared as the byline to the newspaper articles written about Gabrielle Colson-Howe’s death back in 2016. She had also authored the more recent articles, posted on various blogs and social justice websites instead of online newspapers. These newer articles had nothing more to add regarding Colson-Howe’s murder, but merely served, as far as I could tell, to keep the dead girl from being forgotten. “Still No Justice for Murdered Teen,” said one headline. A grainy photo of Colson-Howe—the same one as in your files—accompanied the article. Another was headlined, “Colson-Howe Murder Remains Unsolved—Police Have No Leads,” and showed a photo of a grief-stricken woman holding a stuffed bear to her chest; the caption identified her as the murdered girl’s mother. I had come across the reporter’s name, Roberta Negri, in your files, too.
The accordion folder was on the kitchen table beside my laptop. I opened it and slid out the file on Gabrielle Colson-Howe’s murder. I opened it, roved through the pages, and saw that I was correct: Roberta Negri was also the author of the newspaper articles you had printed from the internet and tucked away in here. On one of the printouts, you’d scribbled a phone number beside Negri’s name. It wasn’t the phone number that gave me pause; it was the sketch of six rectangular bars beside the phone number that caused an icy disquietude to surge through my body. It was the same design, albeit more hastily rendered, that you’d drawn on the sheet of legal paper, among the repeated Gas Head phrase.
A breathy, soundless exhalation in my left ear caused a chill to ripple down my spine. I whirled around in my chair, my heart ratcheting up into my throat. The sensation that someone had been standing directly behind me, whispering in my ear, echoed throughout my consciousness with unwavering certainty…
But the kitchen was empty. Beyond, the living room was dark, the windows that faced the backyard shuttered against the night. I heard the distant ticking of a clock echoing from somewhere in the house.
I closed the laptop then slid the file back into the accordion folder. After some hesitation, I took out Holly Renfrow’s file. I opened it to the last page of your notes and, with a pen that I had scrounged from a junk drawer, wrote Das Hillyard’s name right there on the bottom. Underlined it. Circled it. Closed the file.
“Case closed, Allison,” I said to the empty kitchen.
I’d never been much of a drinker, but I knocked back two shots of bourbon before heading upstairs to bed. The alcohol seared down my throat. At the top of the stairs, I reached for the hallway light switch, but the light would not go on. I stood there in the darkness, feeling as insubstantial as dandelion fluff, and I might have just curled up right there at the top of the landing had I not turned my head and peered down to the opposite end of the hallway.
A figure stood in the open doorway of our office.
My breath snared in my throat. I couldn’t move. A chill rippled through my body.
“Allison?” I said, my voice cracking.
The figure did not move.
Snapping from my paralysis, I advanced down the hallway toward the open office door. As I drew nearer, the figure—black as pitch—receded into the darkness of the room.
“Allison!”
I struck the doorframe and fumbled for the light switch. Braced myself. The lights came on, stinging my eyes. It revealed nothing but an unoccupied office, my neatly kept desk against one wall, your cluttered one against the other.
I stood there in the doorway for an unknowable length of time, as if my stillness and dedication might lure you back into existence. Finally, I rerouted to our bedroom and slithered beneath the sheets. Sleep hit me like a wall, but my lingering angst caused me to wake up several times in the middle of the night, certain that some enigmatic monster with a skull swollen with hot air and splitting down the seams had been hovering over my sleeping body in the moments before I opened my eyes. Other times, I’d wake up to see the shape of Robert Vols, your murderer, crouched in one darkened corner of our bedroom. His hood up over his head and a pistol tucked into the waistband of his pants, he’d nod casually in my direction then saunter out into the hallway where he’d vanish within a panel of moonlight.
CHAPTER SIX
1
In 2016, in the early part of August, the body of a teenage girl who had been missing for the better part of two weeks eventually turned up along the shore of the Potomac River in southern Maryland, directly beneath the expanse of the Harry W. Nice Memorial Bridge. Her body had swelled and purpled, and some of her clothes had been sloughed away in the river’s current. When she was found, her blonde hair was already green with algae. Her fingertips and some of her toes were missing, having been scavenged by crabs, and she was ultimately identified by her dental records as the missing girl: Gabrielle Colson-Howe, sixteen years old, from nearby Port Tobacco. The tiny Maryland village of Port Tobacco was home to just a mere half-dozen families, so the disappearance and subsequent death of the girl hit everyone who lived there very hard.
The body was most likely carried by the river’s current for several miles, the pale and naked arms ghosting through underwater fronds, a sneaker coming loose and gradually climbing toward the surface where it bobbed and rocked, unnoticed by anyone, like a tiny seagoing vessel. The glint of a gold ankle bracelet may have attracted the attention of curious fish. The girl’s body thumped against the occasional underwater rock formation, maneuvered through tangles of submerged tree limbs, wove between the taut lines of crab pots like an actor weaving between cables backstage in a theater.
Two wanton boys lurking about the embankment shooting at gulls with a BB gun discovered Colson-Howe’s body beneath the bridge, where garbage tended to collect and where the discarded camps of homeless people—moldy nylon tents and damp sleeping bags—stood like tiny evacuated villages. The boys had vanished beneath the bridge to smoke cigarettes that they had purloined from a nearby construction barge, grateful to have a respite from the blazing summer sun, and that was when they saw it. The pale nakedness of it seemed to radiate with a dull internal light beneath the dark shadow of the bridge. They did not know wh
at it was at first. Surely, they did not suspect it was the corpse of a teenage girl. They approached it, their sneakers squelching in the muck and their cigarettes dangling from their lips as they advanced toward the pale white shape. The nearer they drew, the more the thing began to take on the likeness of a human being. Facedown, motionless. Maybe a homeless person who’d gotten drunk and drowned in the river? It had happened before. But the twinkle of that ankle bracelet seemed wrong. Not a homeless person.
Both boys stopped advancing when they realized it was a dead girl. Her shirt, wet and streaked with mud, torn in places to expose marbled flesh, was partially twisted about her throat, and the river had stripped her black tights down so that they trailed like a comet’s streak from the one sneaker that remained on her foot. The other foot—the one with the ankle bracelet—was bare. The toes had been nibbled down to the knucklebones.
The boys—ages eleven and twelve, friends since they were in training pants—stood there beneath the bridge while vehicles thundered overhead and the stink of diesel exhaust clouded around them like a funk. They studied the girl while they finished their cigarettes. The corpse’s bare buttocks were bruise-gray and networked with blue-black veins. Large bottlenose flies crawled over the exposed flesh, and a cloud of them clotted in the air above the corpse’s head like a halo. One of the boys—the more brazen of the two—grabbed a stick and poked at the mottled, graying flesh along the body’s left flank, where the ribs stood out, clearly defined. The flesh yielded like dough. The boy pushed the tip of the stick more firmly against the body until it left behind a dime-sized puncture wound that did not so much bleed as drool out a thread of gray river water.
The boys smoked another cigarette each while contemplating whether to plant a BB in one of the exposed buttocks of the corpse. In the end they decided against it, and when they’d finished their smokes, they headed home to tell their parents what they had found.
2
I learned this story about how the two boys discovered Gabrielle Colson-Howe’s body beneath the bridge from Roberta Negri, the author of the newspaper articles in your file. Negri had interviewed both boys extensively back in 2016, immediately after the police had spoken with them. There was no evidence in your notes suggesting you had spoken to the boys yourself, but you had certainly met with Roberta Negri—“Call me Bobbi”—and discussed the particulars of it.
When I called Negri’s number to request that she meet with me, I thought I’d have to refresh her memory of you—it had been almost three years since you’d been out to Port Tobacco, from what I could discern from your handwritten notes, Allison—but she cut me off midway through my explanation.
“Allison Decker. Jesus Christ, yes. Mr. Decker—Aaron?—I recognized your wife on the news back in December. I wrote a piece on it. Of course I remember her. I was heartbroken to hear about it. I remembered meeting with her.”
“I was hoping you might have some time to meet with me, too.”
She agreed to meet me at a crab house in Newburg, which overlooked the river not too far from where Colson-Howe’s body was discovered by those two boys three years earlier. When I pulled into the parking lot and got out of my car, I saw a woman wearing a red ball cap and an army-green windbreaker that rippled in the strong wind. She was leaning against a bright blue Yaris and smoking a cigarette, a backpack slung over one shoulder. As I approached, she seemed to age before my eyes—her posture was suggestive of someone in their late twenties, insolent and carefree, but she was closer to fifty. Her face, pale and spangled with small red freckles and not unattractive, was deeply lined and worn-looking.
“Hey.” She held out a hand, and I shook it. “Aaron Decker? Call me Bobbi. I was so sorry to hear about what happened to your wife.”
“Thank you. And I appreciate you meeting with me.”
“No problem.” She sucked on her cigarette. “Just let me finish this, will you? I allow myself three a day and don’t like to cut ’em short.”
“I’ll join you,” I said, digging my own pack of smokes from my jacket. In the wind, I chased the tip of my cigarette with my lighter until Bobbi brought her hands up and cupped the flame for me. “Thank you.”
We smoked, and I watched the fog recede from the shoulder of the road and retreat back into the trees.
“You a reporter, too?” she asked.
“Me? No.”
“So you’re out here doing what?”
“Trying to find out what the hell my wife had been doing.”
Bobbi looked at me.
“I only recently learned that she came out here three years ago, after that girl died. Apparently, Allison had been looking into a bunch of murders, and I thought maybe they might be related. But now I’m not so sure what to think.”
Bobbi pulled on her smoke, then exhaled a cloud that was quickly dispatched by the wind. “That’s not the truth,” she said.
“What’s not?”
“Your wife didn’t just come out here after Gabby’s death.”
“No? What do you mean?”
“It’s the reason I remembered your wife when I saw her picture on the news after the shooting at that strip mall.” She looked at me, her eyes like steel. “It’s because she lied to me when we first met, and I never forget the face of someone who’s lied to me.”
I stared at her for the length of several heartbeats, digesting what she’d just told me. Wondering if I was misunderstanding something…
“Fuck it,” she said, pitching her half-smoked cigarette on the ground. “Go inside? I’m freezing my tits off out here.”
3
We were seated at a long wooden table beneath a plate-glass window with the image of a blue crab frosted onto the glass. I told Bobbi to order whatever she liked; lunch was my treat.
“So what do you mean she lied to you?” I asked once we’d placed our orders with the waiter.
Bobbi said, “It wasn’t Gabby’s death that prompted your wife to come out here, Aaron. Your wife came out here before Gabby’s body was ever found.”
I shook my head. “What do you mean?”
“Gabrielle had been missing for maybe a week or so by that point and the police initially thought she had run off somewhere. A runaway. Everyone assumed it, even her parents. She was a problem kid from a broken home, hung around with the wrong crowd. She’d run away before. There was a town hall thing held in Port Tobacco, where she was from, and another larger meeting out here in Newburg. Local PD got a bunch of folks together, that sort of thing. Your wife attended both events. I talked to her—I always make it a point to talk to a new face in the crowd—and when she said she’d come in from Annapolis, I thought it was very strange. Why would a reporter come all the way down from Annapolis to look into a local runaway? She told me she was a freelance reporter for some major newspapers, magazines, but I later looked her up online and saw that she worked for some community paper. Nothing else.”
“That can’t be right,” I said. “You’re sure this was before the body had been found?”
“Of course I’m sure. We were still dealing with the local PD when your wife first came down here. Once the body was found, jurisdiction went to the MDTA—Maryland Transportation Authority Police—because of the location of the body beneath the Nice Bridge. That’s their realm.”
“What was she doing out here?”
“Nothing a reporter wouldn’t normally do. Hung around, asked questions, took notes. I invited her to lunch because I was curious why she’d come here to cover a story on a local runaway. Said she was writing a larger piece on teenage runaways. I guess it made sense. To be honest, I didn’t think too much of it at the time. But then a week later, Gabby’s body was found under the bridge. That changed everything. There was a press conference with the MDTA out here in Newburg. There’s your wife again, another face in the crowd. She’d come back. And I thought, Jesus, that’s strange.”
“What was so strange about it?” I asked. “She’d already been out here once when the girl went
missing, why not return for the press conference?”
“Because it didn’t fit with her reason for being out here in the first place. This wasn’t a runaway. It had turned into a murder investigation. A bit out of scope for what your wife said she’d been out here writing about the first time I met her. And what really struck me was that she didn’t seem too surprised that Gabrielle had turned up dead.”
“Wait a minute. You’re saying she knew this girl was going to turn up dead from the beginning.” It was more of a statement than a question. I was rolling it around in my head and letting other-Aaron analyze it for authenticity. I couldn’t fathom how such a thing would be possible.