PRAISE FOR
FIND YOU IN THE DARK
“A well-crafted crime novel that proves utterly absorbing . . . with vivid scenes and complex psychology, Find You in the Dark lingers long after the last page has been devoured. And Ripley proves a stellar addition to the Canadian crime novel scene. An addictive debut.”
Toronto Star
“Engrossing. . . . This debut thriller by the pseudonymous Ripley (Journey Prize winner Naben Ruthnum) is highly recommended for fans of Lee Child and C. J. Box.”
Library Journal
“A fast-paced book . . . akin to dark British crime TV dramas such as Broadchurch or Luther, satisfyingly sinister and unsettling in their explorations of the violent possibilities of humanity.”
The Globe and Mail
“Ripley . . . has come up with a fresh angle to the serial murder game . . . clever and diabolical . . . This unusual debut thriller has a lot going for it.”
Kirkus Reviews
“[A] gripping debut thriller . . . Dexter fans will enjoy the creepy vibe.”
Publishers Weekly
“A fast-paced, morbidly addictive novel of chilling infatuation. Ripley’s impressive debut is a rich and innovative thriller.”
IAIN REID, bestselling author of Foe and I’m Thinking of Ending Things
“A wickedly smart thriller that manages to be both chilling and wry. The page-turning plot . . . is thickened by a great cast of characters and Nathan Ripley’s fantastic eye for detail and dialogue. Just when you think you’ve got a grasp on it, the story twists to new and darker places.”
AMY STUART, bestselling author of Still Water and Still Mine
“An unsettling exploration of obsession you won’t soon forget . . . a first novel that fans of Patricia Highsmith’s psychological thrillers and Thomas Harris’s cat-and-mouse suspense will devour. I certainly did.”
ANDREW PYPER, bestselling author of The Only Child and The Demonologist
“Crafty and dark, Nathan Ripley’s novel toys with the lines between predator and prey, his sentences as careful and considered as the crimes he depicts . . . a truly exciting new voice in the thriller world.”
ROZ NAY, bestselling author of Our Little Secret
“Ripley’s debut offers a twist on the typical serial-killer story . . . a unique spin with just enough creepy details to keep suspense readers interested.”
Booklist
“It’s not always easy diving into the mind of an obsessive protagonist, but Martin Reese’s fixation on finding dead bodies makes for one heck of an addictive thriller . . . an original, inventive take on what happens when you go looking where you shouldn’t.”
JENNIFER HILLIER, author of Jar of Hearts and Wonderland
To Rudrapriya Rathore
BEFORE A SHOOTER is a shooter, he’s just a man in a room.
It’s what follows that brings the background to the scene, to the way we remember it. The domestic dispute reports, the spotty employment record, the legal and illegal firearms history, the I-always-knew neighbors. Before all of that, he comes into the room with his gun, hidden or not, and he is just a man, and not the kind that anyone is used to noticing. Not remarkably handsome, and remarkably ugly only in retrospect. After what he’s done.
On August 17, 1996, Chuck Varner walked into the Harlow Mall in Stilford, California, with a Beretta 92FS in his waistband holster. I was there, too.
Chuck owned an AR-10 with an expensive, post-manufacture scope, and had used it on the highway earlier that afternoon, but it wasn’t suited to this final step. The radio—it was just the radio and television then, no digital feeds to warn us or lull us with repetitive news of imminent mass death—had said that there was a shooter, that death had come to some already and was likely headed to others soon. But the radio hadn’t been able to say anything useful, anything actionable. The shooter was a man in a truck with a rifle. He’d shot from an overpass, and people had died. It wasn’t the radio’s job to guess what would happen when he parked the truck, when he set the rifle down and picked up a different gun. When he picked a building to use it in.
Chuck Varner chose the Harlow Mall months, even years before, seeing this panorama of waiting bodies and vivid lights in his fantasies and behind the paper targets in his practice drills. It was 2:30 p.m.—no one with a day job would be there, unless they were taking a too-late lunch, or a lazily long break. The adults were mostly stay-at-home parents or the unemployed, Chuck told me. As always, I listened, absorbed, knowing I would be tested later. And because it never occurred to me that he could be anything but absolutely right. The mall was also full of kids, retirees. Night workers like Chuck himself, but ones who drank heavily as part of their bat-hanging flipped schedules and therefore looked worn. Chuck collected conversations, speculated about potential future disciples, and made ambitious plans for his followers, until he realized that he didn’t especially care to carry any of them out. He cared about killing.
Chuck never turned up anywhere in public looking strung out, haggard, anything but the upright leader of men that he aimed to be. He slept six hours every morning. Drank two cocktails max, no beer. Calisthenics, runs. At home, his family nurtured his routine with the full knowledge that it was the best way they could love him. That and listening to his gospel, following his drills and instilling his philosophy into the essence of their daily lives. Chuck could always count on his family. If Chuck read, or even if he watched documentaries about people like himself, he would know this made him an outlier, remarkable in a certain way: he was happy at home.
But that day, he didn’t let happiness distract him from his purpose. From what he was there in the mall to do, looking tidy if casual in a black T-shirt with an unreadable band name overtop a skull logo, a costume that news outlets discussed in depth in the following weeks and months.
Even I wasn’t a distraction for him: he’d brought me as a witness. It was my reward.
Because it was such a common sight in this mall, in any mall, it wasn’t reported that the man who later held only a gun had come in holding a girl by the hand. Me. No one noted that Chuck Varner, before he became the shooter, had patted her on the shoulder, and gone up the escalator with her.
When I sat on one of the food court chairs that ran the length of the atrium railing, he left me and descended. When the first shot came, when the running, ducking, and panicking came a thick few seconds of disbelief and processing later, I didn’t move. I didn’t exactly watch, but I didn’t look away. I knew that I was the only person in that building who had nothing to fear from Chuck Varner.
Chuck Varner was holding his daughter’s hand when he walked into the mall. My hand. He took me up that escalator and told me that he loved me. He told me to walk away from the mall and go back to my mom once he was done. That everyone would be screaming and running, that no one would get in my way. He also said that if I didn’t do just as Dad said, he would be very disappointed. That I should listen to him and trust that he was about to become everything that we’d ever talked about. He nodded at me as he went down the escalator, smiling and trying to do something with his eyes, achieving a look I’d never seen from him before. Then he got distracted and started touching the holstered Beretta through the thin fabric of his T-shirt, and by the time he reached the killing floor, I knew he’d forgotten about me absolutely.
I was seven years old. And I thought that Chuck won, that he did exactly what he said, that he updated the Bible in cordite and blood, and that no one would ever be the same. For my mother and me, that was true. Nothing was ever the same.
* * *
The night I left her forever, my mother, Crissy Varner, stayed in the trailer while I left with Chuck’s AR-10, promising to return. After Harlow Mall, we’d
kept it hidden. The cops had the Beretta, but we had this—he’d dropped it off at home before his last run, and Crissy had buried it at the base of a hollow tree trunk. I’d shown the tree to Crissy myself: it was where I hid my little toys, the dolls that I’d pulled the hair out of and given waterproof clothing of my own devising, working mainly in ziplock and candy-wrapper fabrics. She hadn’t taken the rifle out again until she, until both of us, thought we were ready to use it again as Chuck intended.
Almost ten years after Harlow Mall, I took the rifle from Crissy and hid it in pieces, each of them scraped and scrubbed clean. I was sixteen and doing what I thought I had always had to do: my duty, for my parents, the living one and the dead one. Crissy, alive. Chuck in the ground except for his words and his Great Act, the shooting that had ruled our lives—mine and Crissy’s—until I buried the sections of the rifle in deep, widely spaced miniature graves across Stilford, each burial another step away from the trailer I’d shared with Crissy and Chuck’s ghost in the vacuum that was my entire life. Until Crissy finally made me realize that I never wanted to kill, or control, anyone. Ever.
Maybe Crissy hadn’t known that I wasn’t going to come back to her when I left with the rifle in a battered Benetton bag. But she wasn’t stupid. That’s part of what made Chuck’s hold over us so compelling—I knew that I wasn’t stupid, and I knew that Crissy wasn’t stupid, so it wasn’t possible that Chuck’s construction of the universe could be entirely wrong. We believed it. We chose his world every day that he was gone, every day that we didn’t have to: we followed his code. The code he called Your Life Is Mine.
CHAPTER ONE
* * *
I STOOD OUTSIDE THE cinema, watching the crowd in the lobby, trying to get rid of what I’d just seen. One, then another of them, falling as they held their sides, screaming as the red started to show. Nothing like that was happening, of course. Everyone was just fine: I could see them moving, speaking. Just a crowd of people, New Orleans natives and our Los Angeles production and network team, drinking, having fun. Alive. But crowds still did this to me, twenty years after Chuck Varner let go of my hand. I saw the people falling, heard them dying.
I still didn’t quite believe it, but I was standing outside a cinema where people had just watched, cried, and clapped over what I’d made. We’d only wrapped three months before. Editing-as-we-went had resulted in a rough cut that looked so good the producers demanded we leave it untouched for a slapped-together New Orleans premiere, this miniature gala event they’d flown in key industry and press to attend. As always, it was after postproduction when all the money they’d been telling us didn’t exist happened to turn up.
“No one here knows who you really are,” said a voice behind me. “Just me.”
I pretended I wasn’t entirely keyed up with fear and turned, smiling, tapping an inch of ash off the cigarette I’d almost forgotten was in my mouth. I’d dropped some, not much, onto the green bib blouse that Jaya had made me wear to the premiere to distract from my pilling but thankfully stretch-waisted black skirt.
“Sorry to sneak up on you,” the man said. He was late twenties, like me, but built like he’d grown up with a lot more nutrition. A couple inches taller than most of the people in the lobby behind the glass, especially the crew that I’d used to shoot The Marigny Five, this historical true crime doc that was the closest I’d come, so far, to selling out. It was easy for someone to look tall compared to my crew: I liked using small men and women when I shot, a little team dressed in black who eventually vanished to the people I was talking to, began to seem like shadows in the rooms and homes where we filmed subjects telling us more than they wanted to.
“I think I can comfortably say that everyone in there knows who I am,” I said. “I made the movie they just watched and stood up there while they asked stupid questions.” He laughed, which wasn’t the response I was going for. I was good at stepping on fear before it started, and I did it here again. The lobby was full of living people, with no threat in sight. And this was just a man trying his boring best to talk to me. Then he tried it again.
“I know, I was in there. But I mean I know who you really, really are.” It wasn’t the persistence that made my instincts flick on again—it was his smile. His anticipation. Like he actually had something to say to me, and I wouldn’t want to hear it.
I turned away from him with an upward nod that I tried to make dismissive, but not a provocation.
“Whatever you say. See you inside, maybe,” I said.
Jaya was by the food table, methodically working her way through a heap of green beans that was difficult to eat with the plastic spoons left over after the prescreening run on forks. Producing involved so much talking on the phone and in-person that she tended to shut down as soon as she could, leaving her quiet on premiere nights, changing her from the person who always did the approaching into someone who needed to be approached. This was the first premiere we’d done outside of New York or Los Angeles, not counting underattended screenings at whatever little festival would accept our weird docs and that we could afford to fly to.
Jaya had found this beautiful old cinema, the Carver, which was next to the fried chicken mecca that me and the rest of the crew had been hitting twice a week for the four months of production, eating enough bird that we had the production company do an all-seafood spread for this screening.
“You still glad we did this?” I asked Jaya.
“Of course I am. Did you see Programming Bruce’s face? He thinks you’re Errol Morris with sharper cheekbones and built-in commercial instincts. When you were doing your intro he was texting every press contact he has to set up on cameras with you.”
“How do you know who he was texting?”
“I sat over his right shoulder so I could spy. Don’t worry, I got him to turn his goddamn phone off before the lights went down.”
“Yeah,” I said. Jaya zeroed in on the ash stain over my left breast, pointing, and I shrugged. I’d smeared it in when I tried to brush it off. The blouse had already lost most of its structure from being subjected to the tonguing blast of humidity in my brief time outside, so the mark was no tragedy. Still, I worked on angling my bag strap to overlay the mark.
Before I could point out the guy across the room and ask Jaya to talk me out of my unease, one of the camera assistants we’d used came over and interrupted us. Nice kid, Maurice something. Jaya would know his last name, his parents’ names, probably his social insurance number. He was wearing a T-shirt of so many shades of neon-approaching brilliance that my eyes dropped to the food table to avoid the strain of looking at it. I half-listened to him saying something quick about how great the show had turned out, before he started a hesitant sentence that Jaya interrupted six words in.
“You want to work on our next thing? I think we’d all like that. Way lower budget, and it’s about a weirdo eccentric rich writer lady, I’m warning you in advance. Very different.”
“I just want in on anything y’all do, you know?”
I turned up from my strap-fiddling at this, looking Maurice in the eye, which was a good thing, because he was nodding earnestly at me, actually tearing up.
“I’ve never made something good before. I love how you respected this city and the people this ghastly shit happened to, Blanche. Jaya,” he added.
“Thanks, Maurice,” I said. Jaya nodded, trying to look solemn, the effect hurt by the spoon she was holding straight up in her other hand, like a magic wand.
“Don’t take this wrong,” Maurice said, the kind of phrase that usually precedes a shitty statement from a man. “But I think you have this real grip on their trauma. What these people went through, victims or family, you just get it.”
“I think that’s a compliment,” I said.
“I do, too,” Jaya said, looking down in the hope I wouldn’t notice how badly she wanted Maurice and me to keep talking. This was the kind of conversation I would have shut down before it started if it was just between her and me. It w
as why we worked together, as friends and beyond: we knew what questions not to ask.
“I would—I’d love to know how you do it. How you talk to people right,” Maurice said. His expectant gaze and the fact that he’d worked insane overtime got me to give up a little bit.
“I treat them like they’re more than the thing that happened to them,” I said. “If you go in asking them how they dealt with this horrible thing, you’ll get—every subject does this—they look at you to see if you already have an answer you’re expecting. Bo Stallins, the brother of Chianna?”
“Yeah,” said Maurice. “We shot him outside the dorms.”
“Everyone who’s asked him how he dealt with his sister being murdered wanted to hear one of two kinds of answers. Either the steps up to enlightenment he took, or the dark path down into addiction or rage or violence. And, because he’s a built black man, most idiot reporters—”
“They want to hear the drug story,” said Maurice. “The jail story. And he doesn’t have that.”
“Right. Straight arrow, has half a bachelor’s degree, does the janitor job because it’s union and part time, gives him time to write his atheist philosophical horror novels. And even those—those weird books of his, they aren’t just his trauma. They’re his imagination, his life. I get people talking about the whole thing first, their life, then the event that everyone else starts with. Right?”
Maurice nodded, and Jaya looked profoundly pleased with herself. It was clear to anyone who’d seen Marigny Five that it was mature work, despite initially seeming like my sell-out farewell to the difficult films I’d been making with Jaya since school. This was the first piece that didn’t seem at all like an audition. And I hadn’t wanted to do it, this odd, four-episode, doc-movie-show hybrid that had the camera assist in front of me tearing up, that had held the audience tonight in the best possible rapt silence. Jaya had forced me, and she’d been right.
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