by Shannon Kirk
Maybe I should just go to the cops. They can help.
No, I’m not ready. I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready. I’m trained in being invisible, being on the run. It’s all I know.
I understand the bare facts. I can intellectualize what I found in the metal box.
But it doesn’t mean that accepting all this is easy-peasy beautiful pie.
Hell no.
I’m mad. I’m sad. I’m scared. I want to scream-cry and hide. I’m raking my nails so hard through my scalp, I think I might wash my hair in blood.
Nobody can fix this for me. Nobody can make this easier for me.
Pacing a circle between Dali’s bed and beanbag, I try to catch my breath. I need to become an indestructible jellyfish, but with a spine, all on my own. A silver solid jelly like my pendant, which, shit, is the only thing except my bra and underwear I have from my—old? real? former? stolen?—life. While pausing to stare at Dali’s poster of the Cat’s Eye Nebula, I’m finding on some level—a little level somewhere deep inside me nobody could ever know about, and I didn’t even know about until now—I think I might have sort of known something wasn’t right in my galaxy. Truth is always crying inside us, never truly muzzled by denials.
I think this is what they call a surge of adrenaline.
Or flight or fright or fight, or whatever that saying is.
Or some other kind of delusion that allows you to power through trauma.
I don’t know.
What I know is, at some point in the last few seconds of me being trapped in the whirl of my own mind, I allowed Dali to pull me out of his above-garage bedroom, and now I’m following him to some far-off garage on his massive property.
Dali and I jump in his older sister’s black BMW, because nobody knows her car since she’s been traveling in Europe for three years and she never drove the thing anyway. I know all this because through the haze, Dali is narrating facts to me. Fortunately, his parents are off to work and think Dali brought a faceless girl home from college for the night and apparently said they’d leave him be and to have fun after handing him a six-pack. Rules seem different for boys. Dali gives me his dad’s extra-huge fishing hat with hooks and pins all over it. I stuff all my long hair inside and drag the brim over my forehead and ears.
“There’s a place at Great Katherine Lake where nobody will find us. But first we got to make a quick stop.”
We park in a shadowed spot behind the village’s hardware store, and I scrunch down real low when he insists on going inside the red Victorian library with gold shutters across the way. The BMW’s windows are tinted black, and I lock the doors. Despite being sealed in this car, I can smell the hot baking bread from Scheppard’s next to Vinet’s hardware store, which, oh yeah, of course Vinet’s, because Dr. Nathan Vinet is yet another haunting in my life. I’m getting it from all sides.
Dali returns with some papers he says he printed off microfiche and copied from a reference book; he says we can discuss what he’s found out about the Sabin property once we’re settled at Great Katherine.
At the lake, the wind is awesome and fierce. But we don’t care—we’re safe under the cement roof of an abandoned waterworks station. Dali brought along a cooler with peach iced tea, a jar of peanut butter, and a loaf of bread. When he packed this, I don’t know. Maybe I went catatonic in his bedroom after the call from the cops—I think I was literally spinning circles into his carpet for a bit. We don’t have any utensils, so Dali uses a Snapple cap to scoop the peanut butter, and he uses the Jif lid to spread, and because he’s infused the preparation with thoughtful care, my three separate sandwiches taste like a whole new world. Dali is a good friend, definite Jenny-level material. And he’s freaked out, too, but he acts super calm and lets me stare off into space.
The waterworks station is a gutted shell. What remains is a cement square in a gully with both ends open, about seven feet tall and twenty feet from the lake’s edge, nestled in a grove of saplings that’s taken over since the place was abandoned. The station reminds me of a stunted version of one of those huge cement tunnels in horror movies where psychos chase and chainsaw the morons who run there. But this is square, not a circle. Inside, Dali sits on an overturned five-gallon bucket, I sit on another, and Dali unrolls the papers he’s printed at the Milberg library. He holds the first page against a graffiti-decorated wall and lights it with his iPhone flashlight.
“The Death March cult puzzle Gretchen gave you.”
“Yeah.”
“So here, that jogged something for me. Nobody ever talks about the Sabin property all that much anymore. I mean, yeah. Agree. There are rumors. But the place has been off-limits for so long, it’s old news, and nobody can breach the electric fence, and nobody wants to be hung up in those tree traps. So. Look. And with all the changes in town with the tourism, nobody talks about the Sabin place anymore. But.” Dali holds up one of the pages. “Look.”
“What am I looking at?”
“This was an article in the Milberg Times in 1952. I think that’s a picture of a pyramid rock trap that a hunter tripped on, again in 1952, and broke his leg. But they didn’t call it a pyramid rock trap. Read it.”
Sure enough, the picture, albeit grainy, shows a one-foot-wide hole filled with toppled rocks. In the forest. I read the lead paragraph:
Gary Musterson, visiting from Rhode Island, broke his leg in a one-foot-wide hole full of rocks while hunting the Taylor property. He claims the hole is a “dangerous trap, unfairly placed there by the property owner.”
I looked up to Dali. “Taylor property?”
“The Sabin property was owned by the Taylors then.”
“Right.”
I kept reading below a picture of this Gary Musterson with his broken leg.
Mr. Musterson had in his Peterman knapsack a brand-new Kodak Brownie 127 and was able to take this picture of the hole with rocks, and several others in his vicinity, while he waited for his hunting partner to find him. The hunting partner was a Miss Sarah Felmore, an unmarried woman, who was carrying a loaded Remington rifle she received for Christmas from a male family member. When Miss Felmore came upon Mr. Musterson, they were disturbed by Alton Sams Taylor, current owner of the Taylor property, who threatened to shoot Mr. Musterson “in the face” and Miss Felmore in her “[female body part]” if they, as Mr. Musterson averred in a police report, didn’t “crawl off Taylor grounds [in the direction Mr. Taylor pointed] stat.”
Standing on his front stoop, smoking an Old Gold cigarette, Mr. Taylor would not permit this reporter to enter his secluded home or inspect the woods surrounding it to document Mr. Musterson’s and Miss Felmore’s account. However, Mr. Taylor offered this statement: “Everybody knows to stay off my property or they’ll get hurt or dead or shot in their privates. This [expletive] Mr. Musterson and his unnatural woman with her own gun are fool out-of-towners come to hunt on land they don’t own, cause (sic) they got no sense, and to kill God’s creatures, because they got no respect. They weaseled in cause (sic) the storm knocked the power off my electrical boundary fence. Well it’s back up now, so all your [expletive] readers should be reminded to not come near my property ’less (sic) they want to fry. I know the law. I can protect what’s mine.”
When asked about the holes filled with rocks, Mr. Taylor stated, “You’re all a bunch of nosebleed cubes with your poppycock. Rocks and leaves in a forest, good grief. You gonna get a Pulitzer for this one?” Mr. Taylor then asked this reporter to leave his property.
“They used to write articles like this?” I ask.
“Yeah, I know. I did a paper once for school on the town’s history, and some of the old articles are hilarious. So much weird specificity and seemingly irrelevant facts and embedded judgment and weird quotes and weird redactions of things we wouldn’t redact now. Anyway, see what I mean? The fences were always there. I mean, they’ve certainly been upgraded over time, sure. Seems to me your Jerry Sabin stole this hunter’s story, changed some things, fast-forwarded in
time, and made it his own. Right?”
“I mean, yeah, I guess.”
“But what sticks out to me is the date of the article, and that’s what got me to thinking it’s connected to your cult puzzle. Look at this.”
Dali holds another document to the graffiti wall. “I copied this out of a reference book I remembered some kid in school mentioned when he did an oral report on cults. Look. I paid an extra two bucks to copy this page in color.”
The color print has much better clarity. This shows another one-foot-wide hole in the ground, but with an intact rock pyramid inside—not the fallen jumble as in the grainy 1952 Musterson black-and-white. Page 345 out of a book titled American Cults, Truth & Lore.
Dali interrupts my reading. “This page is from the chapter titled ‘Rumored Sects and Mysterious Vanishings.’ Go ahead, read it.”
According to the printed page, a Wyoming couple found this particular rock pyramid in a hole when they’d purchased an old farm and decided to build. Reading further, I learn about unsubstantiated rumors about rock pyramids in holes found in several states leading east. Some speculate, based on what amounts to a very obscure conspiracy theory—built on a significant game of telephone and bar talk with no footnotes or actual quotes—that a quickly assembled group of people started following a “charismatic minister named Jonny Guile.” With Guile in the lead, they moved east like a pack, collecting followers along the way, sometime in the 1950s. Rumor has it the followers dug holes and built rock pyramids within them in order to capture “earth breath,” which they believed was the literal breath of God. Earth breath would give them immortal life. Not one surviving member of this rumored cult has come forward to verify whether anyone named Jonny Guile ever existed or any of these accounts.
When I’m done reading, Dali says, “I had never heard of these rock pyramids in the ground before. But then you tell me what Jerry Sabin tells you, calls them rock pyramids, so I vaguely recalled this weird hunting story from the fifties involving the Taylor property. Not from the Musterson article, but something my foster grandma said once. Doesn’t matter. That’s how I knew to search for this Musterson article in microfiche. But without you saying ‘rock pyramids,’ I never would have thought the 1952 article was telling me anything other than old Mr. Alton Sams Taylor was a crazy nutjob who dug ankle twisters on his property to stop trespassers. So from there, I thought about the Death March cult puzzle, and it was a total lucky guess, but I remembered the cult book that that kid used in his oral report. And bam. Right there. I mean, it’s even in the index, ‘Rock pyramid, 1950s.’” He flicks the page in a motion of pride. Leaning back on his upturned bucket, he says, “You can call me Detective Dali.”
“So to sum up, Detective Dali. From all the vomit stew of facts I’ve been throwing on you, what you boil down to is page 345 from this weirdo cult book, and you’re saying Gretchen and Jerry Sabin are running a cult on their property, even though I didn’t see any mass of people all summer? Is that the story?”
“Well, when you put it that way.” He gathers the papers and rolls them up. “But you have to admit—”
I cut him off. “No, for real, though, it is kind of messed up. Thanks for looking up these articles. And I know you’re doing this to take my mind off the real horror in my life.”
Dali shrugs and sets the roll of printouts in his back pocket.
“Wait,” I say, as something hits me. “Wait. So do you think Gretchen was mad that Jerry mentioned the rock pyramids because those words might lead to someone like you piecing this together? Like maybe Jerry doled out that factoid as a distress call or something?”
“I don’t know. It’d be a pretty wacko distress call. And a dad needing help? What help? From a waif daughter? I mean, she wasn’t running a cult in the 1950s.”
“What the fuck.”
“Yeah, what the fuck.”
A howling train of wind whooshes through the tunnel and knocks us off our buckets. We crawl to the water station’s mouth and watch a tornado rip a path through a lake island, toppling bull pines in thundering booms. Our buckets roll out and plunk in the lake, float away.
It’s scary and magnificent all at the same time, and I’m captivated in watching, huddling next to Dali, who huddles next to me. We lie on our bellies all afternoon and theorize about Gretchen Sabin and nothing real, like my fake lie of a life.
It’s late afternoon. I’m sick of not having my own clothes. And I need Allen so bad I wish I could fly like the hawk I’m watching circling above the destruction from the tornado.
“Dali,” I say as he takes inventory of whatever food we have left in his cooler.
“Yeah?”
“Do you think we could park near the ranch in a hidden spot and I’ll sneak in and get my own clothes? And I want to get Allen too. What do you think?”
“Well. We can try. Let’s case it out. You want to go now?”
“Yeah, let’s go now.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
MOTHER
Mag waits in the Milberg station for the Milberg cops, the Boston FBI, and Detective Dick-Thumb to execute an “inquiry” at the rental house that law enforcement finally uncovered as the place where Mag’s baby girl, Laura, now called Lucy, is living with Laura, Laura from camp, meaning Laura Ingrace. The very Laura Ingrace who disappeared the day Paul Trapmore appeared at the Triple C. The exact Laura Ingrace Mag had named her baby girl after.
Roaming and listening all day in the U-shaped, one-floor, industrial station house, Mag learned that it is rarely used for anything beyond soothing angry tourists into paying parking tickets. She’s also learned that the station’s one holding cell is typically used for station-house poker games and that the chief of police, Sandra Dyson’s husband, in fact, is proud of the interior’s mint-green cinder-block walls and Pride rainbow painted in the arch over the dispatcher window. This is that kind of town: progressive and inclusive and full of mixed-everything-paying tourists. Good tax base and good tourism dollars, given the flocks of foodies who come to the village and the people who camp and swim and water-ski at Great Katherine Lake.
Mag’s relieved Boston FBI and Detective Dick-Thumb have joined forces, because she’s pretty sure Milberg’s finest are in over their water skis.
At one point in the painstakingly long day of planning a controlled inquiry at the property in question, Mag walked with Sandra Dyson, who loves “that gahhl, Lucy,” to Dyson’s in order to collect what they already knew to be Lucy’s falsified employment record. Mag had to wait out in front of Dyson’s disguised in a heavy jacket and baseball cap, but she’d needed the air, so she begged the chief to let her walk with Sandra to the front of his wife’s store. Along the way, she saw in a boutique window Milberg’s trademark poster of a champion water skier waving to her shoreline friends while slicing a slalom on the surface of Great Katherine Lake.
Mag paced in front of Dyson’s, waiting on Sandra to collect worthless evidence, and noted how all the window-shoppers wore bright-colored Vineyard Vines T-shirts and Lilly Pulitzer dresses. In a frame store next to Dyson’s, Mag noted the display of paintings of Milberg in the fall, the next season to come, revealing the park to be a leaf peeper’s dream: a white church spire spearing the blue sky and casting a pointed shadow on a wishing well, which bubbled beside a gazebo in a park full of trees bursting in red, green, yellow, and orange.
The library across from Dyson’s was a red Victorian with glistening gold shutters. Mag studied the quaintness and considered the postcard vibe, until Sandra bumped her shoulder. A black BMW with tinted windows drove past, whooshing the air with its kitten-purr engine, anonymous in a sea of other luxury vehicles in town.
“Great little town we got here, ma’am,” Sandra Dyson said.
Mag nodded agreement.
Of course Laura Ingrace would pick a perfect town like this, Mag thought, and then shuddered to even consider such a thought. They walked back to the station, passing a hometown hardware store named Vinet’s with a giant
cardboard key in the window that said LOCKSMITH.
It’s all such a blur, every minute melded together since Dr. Nathan Vinet found her yesterday at the Triple C. After that, just last night, they flew across the country, met with the Boston FBI, and drove to Milberg. Dick-Thumb made the same trip. It was a miracle their red-eye landed at all, the region’s week of wind dying down at dawn for touchdown and resuming almost the second they landed.
At some point, an FBI counselor joined Mag in the mint-green cinder-block Milberg “multifunction” room. The doe-eyed counselor had warned Mag that her girl, Laura, would have difficulty going by any name other than Lucy, even if Lucy was a false name, so it would be best for Mag to accept Lucy as her name. Could she do that? Mag asked herself all day, Can I do that? Can I call my baby by a name that monster gave her? Her stolen name? And then she’d fist the thick cotton of her black Sarah Connor cargo pants and flat-palm the mint-green wall while commanding herself, Yes, you can do this. You will call her Lucy.
Law enforcement’s day of surveillance filtered to Mag in pieces, but she heard enough to put the puzzle of their planning together into a coherent picture in her mind:
Sandra Dyson’s confirmation that Lucy worked at Dyson’s as late as yesterday.
Some college kid named Dali, reached by cell, who sounded sketchy or high or obtuse, apparently, not wanting, at first, to divulge that he knew where Lucy lived, finally did.
Officers couldn’t drive up a dirt road to “ascertain a direct visual” of the now-identified “subject dwelling” without tipping anyone off. The secluded hilltop area concerned them as prime for a hostage situation or ambush.
A drone confirmed a brown Volvo in the property’s “parking area,” beside a dumped bike and a helmet five feet closer to a long shed.