No Woods So Dark as These

by Randall Silvis

  “Exit 30, you said?” he asked.

  “Correct,” said Miller. “Then toward Lone Pine.”

  “Four more miles.”

  As far as DeMarco was concerned, even if they learned nothing new at Lost City, the day had already been productive. Before the two-vehicle caravan had pulled away from his house an hour earlier, Miller, Flores, and Boyd had added more brushstrokes to the criminal portraits they were assembling.

  One of the servers at the Gallery Grille had a friend who had purchased every Commodore Perry yearbook from her seventh through twelfth grades. But when the server called her friend with the information Miller supplied, the friend knew exactly who “Sylvia” was. Amber Sullivan. Smart, beautiful, daydreamy and shy. Ran cross-country until her senior year. A member of the English Club. Wrote poetry. Especially adored the work of Sylvia Plath. And now had a Facebook page under the name Sivvy en Ruine, where she posted her poetry about drug addiction and struggling to get clean and praying for the strength to commit suicide.

  Miller told them, “Sivvy was Sylvia Plath’s nickname. I already checked out Sullivan’s website; her poetry is bleak as hell. No photo, though. But my friend’s friend is going to copy Amber’s page from the yearbook. I’ll get it from her tomorrow.”

  Unfortunately, there was no known current address for Amber Sullivan. “We can start with her parents,” Jayme had said.

  Boyd and Flores had reviewed the footage from the IR camera placed on Mr. Shaner’s front porch on Linn Tyro Road in Otter Creek Township. Over the course of the previous forty-four hours, only one vehicle had entered or left Reddick’s driveway. Flores explained that the vehicle, a red Corolla, contained two passengers, one male and one female. It entered the driveway at 4:29 the previous afternoon, and, as of 8:12 that Sunday morning, had not yet exited.

  “The video gives a short but clear look at the side of the driver’s face,” Boyd had added. “And it matches the license photo of the registered owner. One Timothy Jakiella, a.k.a. Sonny. Forty-six years old, five eight, 143 pounds. Previously arrested on two separate charges of breaking and entering, once of a dentist’s office, once a Rite Aid drug store. Served a combined twenty-eight months, plus three stints in rehab, all voluntary admissions for heroin addiction. Currently employed part-time as an electrician with a general contractor by the name of Mark Heeter. Works out of Conneaut Lake. Which is also Jakiella’s home address. He lives alone, divorced, two daughters living with their mother in Linesville. Ages eleven and eight.”

  “Conneaut Lake is less than thirty minutes due north of Luthor Reddick’s address,” DeMarco had said.

  Now, alone in the car with DeMarco and Miller, a short drive and long walk from their destination, Jayme said, “So putting it all together, everything new from Chase and Boyd and Flores, Chase’s contact saw Amber Sullivan, a.k.a. Sylvia, a.k.a. Sivvy, in a vehicle with Choo Choo. The same or another contact saw a scrawny burnout of a guy with Choo Choo.”

  “Same contact,” Miller corrected her. “He saw both the scrawny guy and Sylvia on the same night.”

  “And according to Flores,” Jayme said, “Sonny Jakiella could easily be described as a scrawny burnout of a guy.”

  “Which means,” Miller said, “that both Amber Sullivan and Sonny Jakiella are known associates of the male vic.”

  Jayme finished his sentence. “And of Thomas Reddick Jr., a.k.a. Luthor Reddick. Which means,” she said, and looked straight at DeMarco, “that Joe Loughner might have hit the nail on the head.”

  But for the usual packed lanes from the Cranberry exit to the turnoff toward Pittsburgh, the Sunday morning traffic on I-79 had been conducive to reflection. DeMarco was eager to get north again to act upon the new information, and, were it not for his curiosity about the place called Lost City, he would have preferred to spend the day in Mercer County, where he and the team could maybe have things wrapped up by nightfall. It would be intense work—a lot more intense than driving. And he would welcome the distraction.

  But now he was slowing for the exit ramp. Coasting to a stop. Where he sat there staring at the stop sign.

  “Left,” Miller reminded him.

  “Yep,” DeMarco said quickly, snapping out of it. “Toward Lone Pine.” He made the turn, glanced in the rearview mirror, saw Boyd’s Jeep not far behind.

  The sun was coming straight through the windshield now, hard in his eyes, nearly blinding. DeMarco flipped down the visor but still he had to squint. Jayme popped open the console, took out his sunglasses and handed them to him. “Doing okay?” she asked.

  He heard the concern in her voice. Smiled. “Let’s not waste the day on this,” he told her and Miller. “Thorough but quick.”

  She said, “You think this is inconsequential now?”

  He shrugged. Tossed another smile her way. “I hear there’s a great pizza place back in Washington. We can hit it on the way home.”

  But he knew by her look that she wasn’t fooled. He had something else on his mind, and it certainly was not pizza.

  Forty-Two

  “You look familiar,” DeMarco had said. “Do we know each other?” He nearly groaned aloud to hear the lamest pickup line of all time coming out of his mouth. But it was the only one he could think of. Besides, she did look familiar; she looked like a dream he had had a hundred times.

  And to see her here, tonight, at the first high school basketball game he had attended in years. He had come on a whim because the routine was wearing him down, the long days of manning a radar gun or breaking up domestic arguments, long nights of studying for his corporal exam. She was working the concession stand where he purchased a bottle of water. The long bob of brown hair, large eyes and long chin and full, luscious mouth.

  “I think I would remember you,” she said. “I teach here.”

  “Name’s Ryan,” he said, and switched the perspiring bottle to his left hand, quickly dried his right hand on his slacks, then extended it over the counter. “I know I’ve seen you somewhere. Your face looks so familiar to me.”

  “Do you read poetry?” she asked, with a challenging tone that said she knew what was going on here, she had dealt with jerks like him her entire life.

  “Does Willie Nelson count?”

  She straightened, lifted her chin. Then laughed. Such music in her voice! “Some people say I look like Sylvia Plath, the poet. Have you ever heard of her?”

  “Isn’t she with the Dixie Chicks?” he said, and made her laugh again, and knew suddenly that he was going to marry her, if for no other reason than the music of that laugh.

  And over the next couple of years, Laraine taught him all about Plath and Dickinson, all the great poets and fiction writers and playwrights. She took him to readings and lectures, read to him in bed nearly every night, taught him to appreciate the alchemical power of story and the even more mysterious power of love. She made him a better man, and in turn he drove her to a humiliating promiscuity that culminated in a failed suicide attempt.

  He thought he had gotten over that guilt, but it all came back to him that morning when Chase Miller first mentioned Amber Sullivan and her love for the poetry of Sylvia Plath. He hadn’t talked to Laraine since August, hadn’t called to ask how she was doing, or to ask her to file for divorce, as he had promised Jayme he would. And Amber’s story broke his heart. In his mind’s eye he pictured her as a young Laraine who had been knocked off course by drugs.

  All the way to Washington County, the guilt and sadness had been scratching at a corner of his mind. In a strange, uneasy way, all the players seemed connected, like the pieces on a three-dimensional chessboard. If he were alone with Jayme now, he might tell her about it. She would say what she always said. Just stop it, Ryan. You can’t take care of the entire world, so just stop feeling guilty about it.

  She was so sensible, so right. Such wonderful medicine. He wished he could tell her that now. But Miller was
seated two feet behind him, breathing down his neck, hanging on every word. And he resented Miller for being there, then immediately felt guilty for that resentment. The realization made him chuckle. You are so messed up, DeMarco.

  “Got a tickle?” Jayme asked.

  “Remind me to tell you later.”

  Miller leaned forward and stuck his head between them. “Up there on your right,” he said. “You’ll need to park in that pullout.”

  DeMarco flipped on the turn signal. “I thought you said you’ve never been here.”

  “Got excellent directions,” Miller answered.

  He was too glib sometimes. Too quick with a partial answer. DeMarco glanced in the mirror again. But Miller was grinning, peering out the windshield; he was loving this role he had cast himself in. Expedition leader.

  Jayme must have noticed DeMarco’s jaw tightening, because she reached across the console and patted his thigh. “Nice and easy today, okay, boss?” she said.

  He eased the car off the side of the road, slipped the gearshift into Park, and shut off the engine. Then turned to look at her. Smiled. Said, “Weapon, please.”

  “Just curious,” Miller said as Jayme removed both handguns and clips from the glove box, “but if I had a gun and a concealed carry permit, would you let me strap on too?”

  For the first time in over an hour, DeMarco turned to look at him directly. “Dream on,” he said.

  Forty-Three

  From the trunk of his car, DeMarco took two backpacks he had filled with bottled water and energy bars. He handed one to Boyd, then swung the other one onto his back. “Distribute as needed,” he said.

  Boyd slipped an arm through the shoulder strap. “Distribute to us or the people we talk to?”

  “Yes,” DeMarco said.

  They were all dressed in civvies, doing their best to look like day hikers. Miller hurried five yards ahead, acting as if he knew the way. Then DeMarco and Jayme, with Boyd and Flores close behind, all four wearing paddle holsters concealed beneath untucked shirts. They had all dealt with homeless people before, knew that most were docile, a few full of rage, all of them unpredictable. Jayme carried a manila file folder containing several copies of Choo Choo’s photo.

  They followed a wide, deeply rutted trail through the pines, the ruts sparsely covered with browning grass, only the hump down the center showing signs of recent foot traffic. Somebody had carved out the road many years earlier, made it wide enough for heavy equipment to pass. It reminded DeMarco of old grassy lanes up in Mercer and nearby counties that frequently led to old farmsteads where nothing remained but a foundation gradually filling in with weeds.

  The red pines on both sides of the road stood forty feet high, the ground beneath their branches matted with brown needles. Dry, broken branches and limbs lay everywhere. High in the canopy, a blue jay squawked its warning. Seed husks from a pine cone ticked down through the brittle limbs.

  The topography of southwestern Pennsylvania seemed much hillier than it was an hour north, where the Allegheny Plateau leveled out just east of Mercer County. Here, West Virginia lay twenty miles west and forty south, with not much in between but hills and hollers, softly rounded ridges and deep, ancient valleys. DeMarco’s heart soared in places like this. The sweet pine-scented air. The wide, unfettered spaces.

  After twenty minutes of silent walking, they had their first glimpse of Lost City. It lay spread out on the side of a hill long ago cleared of all timber. From the edge of the pine forest, it looked like a box of twenty or so shipping containers dumped out by a giant, petulant child. Some lay on their sides, canted dangerously toward a creek at the bottom of the rocky valley. A couple were upside down. But most of them sat upright, often with one end resting atop boulders or logs to approximate a level setting. Two Porta-Johns were stationed at the far side of the encampment, their blue plastic hulls faded and dirty. Gray smoke could be seen rising from four or five different spots, all blending into a thin cloud high above the encampment, where it drifted northeast in a languorous breeze.

  DeMarco recognized the scent of that smoke, full of sap and resin. After Iraq he had gone on several solo big two-hearted camping trips of his own, and had always looked for pine deadfalls for his fires; found the pop and snap of the burning wood comforting in the dark.

  The site laid out below, however, was anything but comforting. “It looks half-abandoned,” he said.

  “As I mentioned yesterday,” said Miller in a professorial tone, “most of the residents have headed south by now. Rumor has it that people have frozen to death here in the winter.”

  Jayme looked down upon the dented, rusted shipping containers. “I can’t imagine having to live like this.”

  And Flores said, more softly, “I can.”

  The others turned to look at her, but she stared straight ahead.

  DeMarco looked at her pretty face and the set of her jaw and the sudden hardness in her eyes. They reminded him of his own eyes when he was younger and of the eyes of fellow soldiers in Panama and Iraq. They had all been boys when they enlisted but their boyhoods hadn’t lasted long enough.

  Often back then he had heard the phrase war makes men of boys, which was said mostly by those who saw a little killing at a distance but not enough action up close to fully decimate the boy. A man grown from a decimated boy had small hope of ever outgrowing the damage. That was what war did but it was sometimes what life did too, not only to boys but also and maybe more frequently to girls. Flores’s eyes were evidence of that. The only difference between the effects of war and the effects of life were that war did it faster. There was no subtlety in war or in life and nobody apologized for the casualties afterward.

  Boyd stepped up beside DeMarco then and asked, “How do you want to do this?”

  DeMarco blinked and brought himself back to the woods. “Same as Otter Creek,” he said. “One badge per team. Miller, you can pick your team.”

  “How about I be my own team? I work better alone.”

  “Not safe,” Jayme said, and DeMarco added, with a more somber look in Miller’s direction, “Pick a team and stay with it. Flores and I will head over to the Porta-Johns and work our way back from there. You guys work toward us from the other end. Everybody grab a pic of Choo Choo from Jayme. We need to learn everything we can about him and anybody who came here with him. If nobody mentions Reddick, ask about him.”

  Flores gathered a photo from Jayme. With that, DeMarco gave Flores a nod, and they headed off. Half a minute later he looked over his shoulder; a resentful Miller was trudging along behind Jayme and Boyd.

  Forty-Four

  On their half of the encampment, Flores and DeMarco spoke briefly with five individuals who considered themselves permanent residents. One skinny, scraggly man in his early thirties; one woman in her seventies, who bewitched DeMarco with her rosy cheeks and air of serenity; and one burly man in his fifties living with two women, one who looked old enough to be his mother, the other his daughter, though he claimed that both were his wives. Like the two solitary residents, this trio had made the shipping container their permanent home with pieces of scavenged or donated furniture and a combination furnace/stove fashioned from a metal drum and ductwork chimney.

  Jayme and Trooper Boyd encountered a man who claimed to be a retired millionaire stockbroker from Pittsburgh who had come to Lost City to “get straight with God.” A male and female couple who looked barely out of their teens—“We’re the Warblers”—and who sat side by side on a ratty love seat, each with a cheap guitar resting on their laps. And a gnarled but robust man in his sixties who claimed to be the president of Lost City. His shipping container served both as his home and workshop. Hanging neatly from the walls was an array of antique wood chisels, files, rasps, handsaws, planers, and scrapers. Lined up along the walls were twenty or so crude sculptures of dogs, cats, ducks, geese, hawks, whales and other animals, some tiny, some
as much as two feet tall, which he would sell from April through September at the craft fairs throughout Western Pennsylvania and Ohio.

  “I have a buddy who swings by and picks me up every year,” the man said. “He’s a painter, works in oils. You’d be surprised how well we do. And the damn government don’t get a penny of it.”

  When Jayme asked the man if he wouldn’t rather be somewhere warm for the winter, he smiled as if at a child. “Do I look like a man who plays shuffleboard, sweetheart?”

  Ninety minutes later, everyone but Miller met up at a doorless metal shed near the center of Lost City. Deep inside the interior was a haphazard pile of windfall branches and limbs gathered from the outlying woods, plus a few pieces of two-by-fours and other framing ripped from inside the unoccupied containers. A sawhorse and stump sat close to the open end, with an ax blade embedded in the stump. A skinny yellow dog came out from behind the wood to watch from a corner of the container, but the dog remained as soundless as the rest of the place. All that could be heard were a couple of jays squabbling in the woods.

  DeMarco nodded, eyebrows pinched, at the dull brown object Jayme held in her left hand. “It’s a duck,” she explained, and showed him the little sculpture. “A mallard, he said. I thought you might like it.” The unpainted wood showed every chisel mark and cut, with only the head and beak sanded smooth.

  He set it in the palm of his hand. Crude, but somehow beautiful. Somehow delicate. As if the rough-cut facets and the tiny drill-hole eyes gave it life.

  “Thank you,” he said, and slipped it into a pocket. Then he looked around. “Where’s Miller?”

  Boyd said, “We turned around and he was gone. We haven’t seen him since the top of the hill.”

  DeMarco told himself not to be angry. Not to be worried. He said, “Get anything we can use?”

  Boyd said, “We emptied out half of the backpack on four people, two in the same container, but it didn’t buy us much. Jayme took some notes.”