Secret Girl

by Terri Elliot

  I try to swallow, but my throat is dry. Instead, I just nod and follow his lead, opening up the passenger door and slipping out onto the forest floor. I shut my door softly, but he shuts his with a thud that makes me feel foolish. I fall in line behind him as we approach the aluminum trailer at the front of the makeshift community.

  He approaches the door cautiously and I catch myself copying his physicality. Light feet, hunched back. I feel like I’m on a stealth mission. I could almost pretend like we were children, on a make believe adventure. Living out the next chapter from the diary’s imaginative story. But the destitution around me is real, the gun in Geoffrey’s hand is real, and Casey Simpson is real.

  I watch with bated breath as Geoffrey reaches for the door. In one swift motion, he swings it back and aims his pistol inside. He pans the barrel of the gun back and forth before his posture loosens and something alarming sneaks into him. His mouth hangs open a little, his eyes widen, and his brows arch. The pistol lowers back into his pants as he steps inside. I reluctantly follow behind until I stand at the doorway and discovery what caused Geoffrey to sour.

  Sprawled along the floor of the tiny trailer, amongst dirtied newspapers, needles, and cigarette butts are two bodies, as though discarded like the litter surrounding them. The light through the open door shines across their emaciated forms, gray and sickly. One man, one woman. Slumped against the wall beside one another. The man is shirtless, the woman pantless. His belly is bloated, his chest looks almost concave. Her thighs show weeks of bruises, old and new. Their bare feet are covered in dirt. Both sets of limbs are stringy, both arms show track marks. A loosened belt lies draped over the crook of his elbow.

  I take a breath, but it doesn’t reach my lungs. I try again, I manage only to shriek. The air feels like a thousand tiny daggers tearing through my esophagus. Geoffrey turns to me and quickly rushes me backwards out from the trailer, gripping my forearms.

  “Take slow breaths, in through your nose,” he commands.

  I lock eyes with him and obey. I exhale the last wisp of air from my lungs and slowly suck more in through my nostrils. I feel the warmth in his grip squeezing just above my wrists.

  “That’s it,” he says. “You’re alright.”

  I nod my head while I continue to take breaths in through my nose, and exhale through pursed lips. I nod almost furiously, bobbing my head up and down. I’m psyching myself up. I can do this. I can do this. Like a fighter in the ring. I suddenly feel puny. Clear your thoughts, be empty. Horror feeds on what you offer it. I listen to the air softly whistle between my lips as I push it away from me.

  Geoffrey turns away from me, peering back into the trailer. He mutters to himself. “Fresh, probably only a few hours. For both to OD…” He shakes his head.

  I choke back some vomit and tell myself to hold myself together. I asked for this. Keep it together, Emily. I swallow some air and force myself to speak. “What about the others?” I signal with one hand towards the rest of the trailers while I keep the other against my forehead. I feel beads forming beneath my palm. I wipe them away and slide the sweat off against the end of my shirt. My eyes follow Geoffrey’s back as it recedes into the distance, stalking down towards the other decrepit units. Fresh sweat replaces what I’ve removed. Undeterred, I follow behind.

  The air feels squalid, like the forest floor, spoiled by the use of degenerate drug addicts, released toxic spores to hang suspended above it. I want to hold my breath. I want to cover my nose with my shirt, but the thought of doing so lifts red into my cheeks. I’ve never felt more out of place than this in my life. What happens to a person that they find themselves in a place like this? Is it events? Or is it innate? I’ve felt some people, not all destitute people, but certainly some people I’ve met were inexplicably destined for tragedy. I don’t believe in astrology, but something like that. Written into their cosmic fortunes. Misfortunes. No matter what they do, they can’t help sabotaging their life until its mangled remains lie tortured at rock bottom. Honestly, they seem more comfortable there. Like a good fit of person and place.

  My shoes tread over garbage, there’s so much it nearly covers the ground between trailers. We stand in their midst, a thoroughfare of sorts stretching through the center, with three trailers to either side, making a total of seven along with the first, now serving as tomb. The silence is eerie. It’s the sort of silence that reads loud to the senses. More jarring than noise, even unpleasant, loud, threatening noise. This silence is the sound of an unknown threat. It emanates from the atmosphere as much from the things around us, resting still.

  Geoffrey stops. He looks around, his eyes sizing up his surroundings. He looks back to me, squinting.

  Then a motion past him steals and arrests my attention. Instantly, Geoffrey’s head twists to find the interruption. Out before us, some twenty feet, stands a sickly thin young man, hair encrusted, back hunched, eyes wild. He could be a creature of the forest with how filthy he is, almost wearing the earth on his skin, his tattered clothes a mangy coat shedding.

  Geoffrey stares him down, the both of them rigid in stance. Then Geoffrey slowly nods towards the man, more a boy, really. “Hello,” Geoffrey calls to him. The spoken word ripples through my tense body, my shot nerves vibrating with the sensation.

  The boy lifts his chin and gazes at the both of us down the bridge of his angular nose. “Who the fuck are you?” he asks.

  Geoffrey puts out a hand, fingers spread, palm facing the ground. Like facing down a hungry predator. “We’re here looking for someone, just an old friend.” His other hand moves behind him, towards me, as if protecting me, shielding me. Or commanding me to remain calm. I’m not calm. I also have no intention of interjecting myself.

  “Uh uh,” says the boy. “You’re the ones with the bad shit!”

  Geoffrey turns his head and narrows his eyes. “I don’t know what you mean. We just came to talk to Casey.”

  A thin line of mucous twinkles in a ray of sunshine that breaks through the leaves. The boy swipes it away in a fidgety, manic motion. “No fucking Casey here, man. Uh uh, you--you’re the ones, you brought that bad shit!”

  Goeffrey extends both arms to his sides and I watch anxiously as the hand meant to protect me drifts away. He makes several cautious steps towards the boy with his hands to his side in a nonthreatening stance. The boy puts one leg behind him. “Listen, we didn’t bring bad shit, whatever got your friends didn’t come from us. We just got here, you probably didn’t notice while you were sleeping. Is anyone else sleeping?”

  The boy lowers his head, doesn’t answer. He stews in a silence of his own design, one that ratchets the tension in my muscles. Don’t, I think, trying desperately to somehow telepathically calm the boy.

  He leaps. I scream. His balled fists swing from his sides to collide with Geoffrey’s body, battering him left and right. Geoffrey allows two to strike him before blocking a third, and a fourth, then fifth. “Listen!” he shouts. The boy isn’t stopping, he’s not listening. He’s thrown his entirety into this attack.

  Geoffrey’s right arm extends for a brief connection, a tight fist against the side of the boy’s face. The boy stumbles back, momentarily fazed before coming back twice as hard.

  Geoffrey strikes again, with the left, harder. The boy falls onto his back. Goeffrey pushes air through his nostrils then steps over the boy. “I didn’t have to do that, but you made me.”

  A figure passes me, like a specter emerging from the forest. My breath catches as I turn to face it, a broad, tall man with long, matted hair, rough and scarred features surrounding beady eyes that fix on Geoffrey. I think to scream, but my breath catches. I push air through my lungs. Work, damnit. I have to overcome the fear locking my body. Just before the man reaches Geoffrey, I cough out, “Behind you!”

  Geoffrey swivels around to the knotty fist of the larger man pummeling his cheek. Geoffrey’s head twists on his neck and he stumbles back. In his daze, the larger man retrieves a knife from his pocket like it
was a cell phone and lifts it towards Geoffrey. “No!” I shout, though I know it does nothing. I feel so helpless, worthless in this confrontation. The man swings his arm forward with the blade gripped at its end. Geoffrey drops to a knee in time to miss, though the boy, freshly risen to his feet, catches the tip. It drags through the flesh of his neck and snaps through the artery, spurting feet out in front of him as he stammers and stares widely at the larger man. “Oh my god,” I utter breathlessly.

  The boy slumps over Geoffrey before him, then falls to his side. My eyes find Geoffrey, curled inward, balled fist ready at his side. He thrusts it directly into the larg man’s knee, buckling it backwards. The man cries out and falls forward, aiming his blade downward. It cuts into Geoffrey’s back a wide gash, then slips from the man’s control. It tumbles away from the both of them as they tussle, rolling away from the boy who dies beside them in a growing puddle of blood around his face. My eyes fixate on it, until they find another weapon. Geoffrey’s gun. It lies just out of his reach while he trades blows with the man atop him. The man’s dirty hand gets beneath Geoffrey’s chin, pushing upward. Geoffrey latches onto the man’s thick arm. He appears like a sort of massive zombie, intent only on Geoffrey’s demise, little else occupying his dried out mind.

  Geoffrey’s eyes find mine and follow to the gun. They return to me, urging.

  Grab the gun, Emily.

  Grab the gun, Emily.

  Do it now. Do it now or he dies. Then you die.

  Grab the gun and shoot the man.

  The rattle settles into the bones of my forearms, a thin wisp of smoke rises from the barrel, all in the next moment where I find the pistol in hand, the trigger depressed. I can’t breath, though neither can the massive attacker. Geoffrey heaves the man’s body to the side where he coughs blood before his eyes roll back and his ribs sink on one last exhale.

  Geoffrey grunts as he gets to his feet and quickly tends to me. The gun slips out of my hands into his and my arms wrap around him. “It’s okay,” I hear through his chest, my ear pressed against it, his breastplate humming with the sound of his voice. I cling to it, push my face towards it. I will it to drown out the sound of my own terror, screeching at the forefront of my consciousness.

  “I killed him, I killed him, I killed him,” I repeat softly into Geoffrey’s shirt, wet with tears. “My life is over, I’m going to jail, it’s all over now.”

  “You defended yourself,” he tells me confidently. “You saved us.” His hands grab hold of my shoulders and pull me back to stare down at me. His blue eyes are glossy and commanding. “You saved me.”

  Something in me breaks. It’s not my sense of safety, I abandoned that. It’s not my confidence, if any remains. It’s the engine behind the sobbing, the catalyst to the fear, the hesitancy. I feel it beyond reach, replaced by a dull, almost chilling emotion I don’t have a word for. I look up at Geoffrey and feel the tears stale on my cheeks, the snot crowding my sinuses. He looks back and sees something shift behind my eyes.

  “What is it?” he asks.

  I think to answer I’m not alone, though I know it wouldn’t make much sense. This sensation doesn’t make much, but I’m not bewildered by it. Instead, I’m driven by it. The presence in this space, floating in this forest clearing is the looming ghost of Casey. Not the live one, she remains out of reach. It’s the Casey I crafted in my thoughts, the Casey that became sketched and living by my reading, given a heartbeat via my obsession. She died the day I learned she lived. Now she haunts me with the ever present notion of my own foolishness. I close my eyes to think through it. The shower fog clears around me, the mirror image in front of me shows her smiling back at me.

  My eyes open.

  “Evidence.”

  “What?” he questions.

  I walk away from him, towards the nearest trailer, though I’m mostly following a train of thought made physical by my steps. I’m wandering through the intuitive conclusions that operate to draw me in towards my goal. “I need to find something of hers, she must have left something here, something that leads back to her.”

  “Emily,” I hear him call out in the space behind me, though it softens beneath the deafening call I hear towards the trailer at the far end of the clearing. I examine it at a distance, a tan and white paneled monstrosity, something you’d find parked along a desolate street in the valley housing some scrappy, minimalist couple here from Minnesota. Like the refuse of passing cars made metal and imposing. “Emily,” I hear again, though I step towards the trailer with purpose. “Emily!” he finally shouts.

  I turn to face him.

  His mouth is open, his face perplexed. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m going to search that trailer,” I tell him.

  He gives a soft, single burst of a chuckle and lifts his left eyebrow. “Amazing.”

  He’s amazed by my turnaround. From distressed damsel to determined sleuth. It comes from experience. Not my own, but those all around me. I’m associated with murderers. I’m tainted by their actions same as my own. Henry has imposed that upon me. By introducing this into my life, he created a vacuum of knowledge that, by simple physics, brought me in. I had to know, and what was there to learn was a complacency with crime so long as a single, all-important key was also there: to know, with relative certainty, that you’d get away with it.

  “Listen,” he says. “Don’t go touching things. This is a crime scene now, understand?”

  I look back at him a moment before that sinks it. In my search for evidence, I can’t leave any myself. I look around and find a stick at the edge of the clearing. I hustle towards it and pick it up, wag it in the air towards Geoffrey, then continue towards the trailer calling out to me.

  I use the end of the stick to lift the latch and open the door. A wretched odor escapes into the air, I have to choke back an urge to vomit before stepping inside. A similar mess litters the floor of this one same as the tin trailer. Wrappers, needles, three more bodies. I step over them as I investigate using the end of the stick. I poke at the cupboards, opening to find mostly nothing, save a rat carcass consumed by maggots. They wriggle in the light, nestling into the dead meat. I move onto the far end when my light dims. I turn around to find Geoffrey at the entrance watching over me with a worried expression.

  I turn back to my task, tossing a collection of stained blankets until I see a page. I pause, holding my stick in place while I kneel. Scrawled upon the top corner of the page is a date. November 13, 2018.

  The stick falls from my hand and I reach forth to snatch the book out of its place. I clutch it in both hands, a lead on the woman that continues to evade me another day, though I draw nearer.

  “What is that?” Geoffrey groans. “I told you don’t touch anything.”

  I march past him, over the bodies and out back into the forest. “This is coming with me,” I say headed back towards the truck.

  “Wait!”

  I stop and twist.

  “We can’t leave it like this,” he says.

  I lift my brows to inquire why.

  “We’ve been here too long.” He walks past me towards the truck and pulls from the glove box another pair of items I hadn’t seen before when I was mesmerized by the pistol. He comes back to me with a lighter and a pack of cigarettes. He taps the bottom of the box against the opposite palm to slide one out. He plucks it and puts it to his lips, lighting it and dragging. Then he takes it from his lips, pinched between fore and middle fingers, and offers it to me.

  “I don’t smoke,” I tell him.

  He shakes his head. Then he nods towards the trailer we just came from. I look over my shoulder at it. “No tracks,” I hear him narrate the view.

  I turn back around. “Right,” I say. I take a breath, take the cigarette, take a drag. It’s awful, but nothing compares to the pain my fear caused my throat when I tried to scream. He lights another and smokes while wiping down the gun with the end of his shirt.

  “That won’t burn,” I state.

>   “Doesn’t have to,” he replies. “But it can’t come home.”

  “They can’t trace it?”

  He shakes his head. “Not this one.” He walks off towards the far trailer, the first we visited. I head back towards the second, my incendiary device in hand.

  Inside, I find a collection of papers and bend to collect them. I hold them to the ember at the end of the cigarette, glowing orange in this grey room. They catch, a flame crosses over the words and I wield them like a torch passing over the rest of the trailer. I take individual sheets and settle them in the corners, one by the bodies, one by the bed, another in the blanket pile. I stand and watch with bated breath until the fires begin their consumption. I stand until the smoke rises, until the space is almost made impenetrable to sight. Then I flick the cigarette indiscriminately and exit the trailer. I walk back towards the truck where Geoffrey awaits me.

  I sit back into the passenger seat and see the fires are already engulfing the trailers. Reaching out through the windows, they begin to crawl along the exteriors, painting aluminum, cheap paneling in black. The fires burn trash, bodies. My reservations.

  Geoffrey reverses as he explains, “They’ll pin it on whoever brought the dirty doses. I’ll put in an anonymous call, they’ll get here before a forest fire breaks out.”

  The trailers pass out of sight when the truck turns, then accelerates forward back towards the main road. With the destruction behind me, I imagine Casey in the same position, leaving the place behind her, her own destructive act. She killed those people, I have no doubt. Now I’ve killed, too, Casey.

  Down the road, Geoffrey takes a cell phone out from the center console, a cheap flip phone belonging to the previous decade. He dials three digits and lifts it to his face. In an altered voice he says, “Yeah, there’s smoke up on the mountain. Just east of Idyllwild. Yeah, better come quick, looks like a rager.” He snaps the phone in half and returns it to the console. Our eyes meet.