by John Hart
“China…”
“Did you say something, sweetheart?”
She ignored the question and a block from the house met her father’s eyes by accident. He turned away when it happened, but not before she saw the revulsion. She was not his little girl anymore, but she kept her head up. “I killed them like I said.”
“Don’t talk like that.”
She couldn’t grasp that either, the denial and disbelief. He’d seen the autopsy photos. She’d confessed not once, but multiple times. The lawyers were making some kind of argument, she knew. Insanity maybe. But, if the judge asked, she’d say it again.
I killed them like I said.
There was comfort in that, but not the kind any man in a suit could understand. She hung on to all the things that made her different from them and kept her gaze level as they drove through the second army of reporters camped at her driveway. The car pulled around back, and even when her father opened the door and helped her out, he kept his gaze averted.
“Your mother will be happy to see you.”
She followed him inside and watched the lawyers peel off at the study. “Has she seen the photographs, too?”
“Of course not, no.” He looked at her then because it was the first thing she’d said that, in his world, felt normal. “She has a surprise for you. Why don’t you go on up?”
He stayed below as the staircase drew her from one floor to the next. Her mother was in a chair by the bedroom door. “Hello, sweetheart.”
“Hi, Mom.”
A hug died stillborn and awkward. One smelled of white wine and lotion, the other of jail.
“I did something for you. It wasn’t easy, but I think you’ll like it. Would you like to see?”
“Okay.”
Her mother turned the knob and pulled Channing into the bedroom. “Don’t you just love it? Please tell me you do.” Channing turned a circle where she stood. Everything was as it had been before she’d burned it. Posters. Pink bedding. “I knew you’d want things to be just the way they were.”
“I can’t believe you did this.”
“Do you like it?”
“Like it?” Channing was speechless and close to hysterical laughter. “How could I not?”
“That’s exactly what I told your father. ‘She’s still our little girl. How could she not?’”
Channing looked from one wall to the next. She wanted to scream and run. The pillow beneath her fingers was slick and smooth and pink as a baby’s skin.
“Now,” her mother said, “how about some hot chocolate?”
* * *
Channing’s mother floated down the stairs and into the kitchen, where she turned knobs and opened cabinets. Gas stove on, cocoa and organic milk, the frosted cookies her daughter had always liked. It was her fault: Titus Monroe, the drugs, the hollow place in her daughter’s eyes. She’d brought those horrible men into their lives. But, she could make it right. Channing would forgive her.
Finishing in the kitchen, she balanced the tray and knocked once on her daughter’s door. “Sweetheart?” The door opened to her touch, but the room was empty. “Channing?” She put the tray on the bed and checked the bathroom.
Nothing.
No one.
“Baby girl?”
She listened carefully, but there was no sound in the house, and but a single thing that moved. So, she sat on her daughter’s bed and she watched it: the curtain by an open window, and the world like a painting beyond.
* * *
Channing knew every backyard and side yard in her block, so getting past the reporters was easy. Escaping the rest was a little harder.
Hot chocolate?
Pink sheets?
She darted through a formal garden, then slipped out a driveway and onto the sidewalk. With a last look up the road, she turned her back to the reporters and kept walking. She couldn’t go back because if she did, she’d be forced to play the game. People would shy from her eyes or pretend nothing bad had happened. There’d be luncheons and teas and stolen liquor. But, her father would never take her to the range again. He’d never share a joke or treat her like an adult. The fog would spread as court dates came and went and lawyers told her not to worry. She’d nod and be polite, and then one day split wide open. Only Liz could relate, but when Channing tried her cell, it went straight to voice mail. She tried again, then hung up and walked faster. Liz lived on the other side of town. By the time she got there, it was still early. Ten o’clock, she thought, or a bit later.
No one was home.
Beyond the glass, the house was dark, the broken door wedged in its frame. For a moment Channing felt dread like a flashback, the memory of shattered doors and rifles and screaming cops. The house felt unsafe, but she had nowhere else to go. Family. Friends. They could never understand what the Monroe brothers had made of her. Was she really this cold-blooded thing?
She looked at her hands, and they were steady.
What did that mean?
Rocking the door from its frame, she checked again for Liz, then lifted a glass from the cabinet and the same bottle of vodka from the freezer. Cops wouldn’t come this time—that part was done—but what about the rest of it? She was eighteen years old and looking at real time. Maybe the lawyers could save her and maybe not. Worst case, they said, was five years or seven. But she didn’t want to be somebody’s china doll, not even for a day.
Taking the bottle onto the porch, she choked down a fast glass, then sat and slowly drank another. She told herself Liz would come, that it was only a matter of time and that she would know what to do. But that didn’t happen. Cars passed. The sun walked up the sky. The truth was hard, but in an hour seemed softer. In another, she was pleasantly drunk. That’s why she was slow to stand when a beat-up car turned into the drive, and a man climbed out. That’s why she was unafraid, and that’s why she got caught.
* * *
He knew about Channing Shore. She’d been in the papers and on TV, so everyone did. More important, she mattered to Elizabeth, Liz, Detective Black. The names tripped through his mind as if a single word, and images followed: Liz when she was younger, then as she was today. Channing had a lot of Liz in her face. There was a connection, and he believed in connections. Mostly, though, it was the eyes, and the eyes were the windows to the soul. That wasn’t speculation or poetic fancy. He knew how to do it, to break a person down and hold them so long the eyes became windows, in fact. That was the moment that mattered. Breath fails; the heart slows. What rises then is the innocence, the soul.
He thought about that as he stared at the girl, alone on the porch. The first time he’d passed by, her eyes were downcast, so he’d driven past a second time and then a third. Eventually, he’d parked two houses away, where he could watch and wait and think about it. He’d allowed the cops to find the last two bodies, and that was part of the plan—because Adrian, too, should suffer. But, they’d found the bodies under the church. That was his fault because he’d not thought things all the way through. He’d been overconfident, and now the church was lost.
“I can still make this work.”
But it was simpler before: rise from bed, smile, say normal things. When the time came, he’d go to other towns, find other women. That kept things clean.
But this …
It was the media and the attention, all the cops and cop theories, and how big it all was. They were using words like serial killer and psychopath and insane. No one could understand the truth of it—that it wasn’t about hate, that he didn’t have to do it.
So, why was he looking at the girl and thinking of white linen?
Because God was like that sometimes.
Complicated.
* * *
Channing knew more than most rich girls did about junk cars, and the reasons for that were simple. She liked working-class boys. At school, the clubs. Even when she snuck out to college parties, she tried to find the part-timers and the scholarship kids. She didn’t like the buff-nailed, pale-skin
ned players who were like every boy she’d known growing up rich. She preferred the tattooed and rough-handed ones, those too raw and ready to care if her family had money or not. All those boys wanted were the good times, the escape; and she was the same way. That was before the basement, but she still knew the cars: the slick rubber and throaty engines, the rust buckets and the beaters.
“Do I know you?” He was backlit by the sun, a grown man in cap and dark glasses. Something about him was familiar, but she was deep in the vodka, and the world was a comfortable blur.
“I don’t know.” He stopped five feet away, the car behind him still running. “Do you?”
A bell was ringing in the back of her mind. He was confident. She didn’t like confident.
“Are you alone here?”
She looked at his car, a thirty-year-old Dodge spitting blue smoke. Nothing was right. She felt it, now. The burble under the hood. The man who looked familiar but not really. “This is a cop’s house.”
“I know who lives here. I don’t believe she’s home.”
He wore work boots and a flannel shirt. The bell was ringing louder. Ninety-five degrees and a flannel shirt. “I can call her.”
“Go ahead.”
Channing dug the cell phone from her back pocket and managed six digits before the stun gun appeared in his hand.
“What’s that?”
“This?” He tilted it. “This is nothing.”
She saw dull teeth when his lips twitched, then a hint of profile as he checked the street on either side. Channing pushed another button. “It’s ringing.”
He took the bottom step.
She stood. “Don’t come any closer.”
“I’m afraid I must.”
She turned for the door, caught her foot on the last step, and went down hard. She touched her head and the fingers came back bloody.
“You have beautiful eyes.”
He took the final step and leaned above her.
“Very expressive.”
* * *
Channing woke in a car that smelled of gasoline and pee and dried-out rubber. It was the same car, the Dodge. She was beneath a tarp in the back, but recognized it from other cars she’d known, the way it ran rough and tilted on the curves, brakes grinding like metal on metal. Her head was jammed against gasoline cans, a greasy floor jack, and what felt like a cardboard box full of rocks. She tried to move, but plastic ties cut her wrists and ankles. That terror was sharp and real because she understood what that kind of helplessness meant.
Not the theory of it.
The reality.
It wasn’t supposed to happen again. She’d promised herself a million times. Never again. I’ll die first. But truth was different. It was hard plastic and gasoline, her blood in the carpet of a filthy car.
Then there was the crazy.
No church, no church …
He said it over and over, loud and soft and loud again. Springs crunched as he rocked on the seat, and she pictured hands pulling on the wheel, his back striking split vinyl hard enough to make the car rock. He was familiar, somehow. Had she seen him somewhere? The television? The newspaper?
She didn’t know; couldn’t think.
She twisted her wrists, and the plastic cut. She worked harder and felt pain sharp enough to slice her open. It felt exactly the same.
The wires …
The plastic …
Before she knew it, she was thrashing against the cardboard, the sides of the car. She felt as if she were screaming, but was not. In her mouth, she tasted blood.
“Please, don’t do that.” The craziness fell out of his voice. The words were soft.
She stopped. “What do you want? Why are you doing this?”
“Ours is not to wonder why.”
“Please…”
“Hush, now.”
“Let me go.”
“I don’t want to hurt you, but I will.”
She believed him. It was the voice, the sudden, crazy calm. She held still as the car turned right, rose up, and thumped over railroad tracks. Metal rattled behind her, as the car angled back down. The tarp shifted, and through a crack she saw tree limbs and phone poles and arcs of black cable.
West, she thought. They were moving west.
But what did that matter? They were moving faster, now. No sounds of other cars, no billboards or signs. When the car slowed, it made another turn, then jolted over broken ground for what felt like miles. They were off the road, deep in the green. More metal clanked, and her head felt too small for the truth spinning inside it, that God had made this special hell for her, to be taken not once, but again. It couldn’t be coincidence, not twice. So swaying in the back of the car, lying horrified in the stink of it, Channing made herself a promise that, live or die, scared or not, it wasn’t going to be like the last time. She would kill first, or she would die. She swore it twice, and then a dozen times.
Two minutes later, a silo blotted out the sun.
27
Elizabeth drove through the morning fog and felt as stretched and thin as a character in an old movie. Everything was black and gray, the trees ghostly in the mist, and only the road gritty enough to be real. Everything else seemed impossible: the man beside her and the way she felt, the cool, damp air, and hints of swamp beyond the road. Maybe it was the silence or the invisible dawn, the sleeplessness and uncertainty, or the delusory nature of what she was doing.
“This is very hard for me.”
Elizabeth glanced right and knew Adrian was speaking of trust. They’d slept in separate rooms and woken to awkwardness and unexpected silence. He was embarrassed by what she’d learned, and she was undone by the memory of his skin. It wasn’t the tactile nature of it that haunted her dreams, not the ridged scars or the hard planes or even the resilience of it. She’d dreamed of minute tremors, and of the will it took to force that kind of stillness. She’d seen so many victims over the years, people ready to break or run or simply fold. But he’d stood perfectly still, only his eyes moving as she’d asked him to trust and then touched the most damaged parts of him. Those were the dreams that held her down, long visions of nakedness and heat and reluctant faith.
A fever dream, she thought. That’s what Adrian had always been.
Only, now he was not. He watched the water beside them, the glimpses that were black and slick beyond the trees.
Elizabeth asked, “Can you tell me why we’re here?”
He didn’t say anything at first. Tires hummed, and sudden ripples stirred the water. She thought it was a snake, the way it moved, or the spined back of some enormous fish.
“This is an old swamp,” he said. “Half a million acres of cypress and black water, of alligators and pine and plants you won’t find anywhere else in the world. There’re small islands if you know how to find them, and families that go back three hundred years, hard people descended from escaped convicts and runaway slaves. Eli Lawrence was one of them. This was his home.”
“Eli Lawrence is someone you knew in prison?”
“Knew? Yes. But it was more than that.”
“What do you mean?”
Adrian watched the forest for a long minute. “Have you ever been in prison?”
“You know I haven’t.”
“Then, imagine you’re a soldier behind enemy lines. You’re alone and cut off, but you can see others out there in the mist and the dark, all the people that want to hurt or kill you. You’re so cold and scared you can’t sleep or eat—you can barely breathe. But maybe you hurt a few of them first, and maybe you get lucky enough to survive the first day, the first night. But everything piles up, the sleeplessness and the cold and the goddamn, awful fear. Because nothing you’ve ever known could prepare you for being so utterly alone. It drains you from the inside out, renders you down to something you don’t even recognize. But, you manage a few days, maybe even a week. There’s blood on your hands by then, and you’ve done things, maybe terrible things. But you cling to hope because you know the
re’s a line out there somewhere, and that everything you’ve ever loved is on the other side of it. All you have to do is get there, and then it’s over. You’re home and you’re alive, and you think that before long it’ll be as if the horror was a dream, and not your life.”
“I can see that.”
“Being a cop on the inside is the same thing, but there’s no line anywhere, and it’s not days but years.”
“And Eli Lawrence helped you?”
“Helped me. Saved me. Even after they killed him.”
Adrian’s voice broke, but Elizabeth thought she saw parts of it. “When you say they killed him?”
“Preston and the warden, Olivet and two others named Jacks and Woods.”
“Guards?”
“Yes.”
The road curved left. Elizabeth downshifted, then accelerated through the back of it.
“Eli was my friend. And they killed him for what he knew, not for being a thief or a killer, but for this thing that he alone could tell them. They came on a Sunday and took him. I didn’t see him for nine days after that, and when he did come back, it was only to die.” Adrian kept his eyes on the swamp, on stalking birds and black lilies. “They broke half the bones in his body, then brought him back thinking he’d tell me the secret he’d refused to tell them. I watched him drown in his own blood and held him as it happened. After that, I was next.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said; but he didn’t care for her pity.
“I wanted them to pay for what they did. I’ve had dreams of killing them.”
“But, you let Olivet live.”
“That was Eli, too. That mercy.”
“What about William Preston?”
Adrian looked at his swollen hands and nodded once. “I’m fine with that, too.”
He said nothing else for twenty minutes. He pointed left or right, and she made the turns as the road dwindled to broken pavement, then gravel and soft, black earth. Elizabeth wanted to know more, but was patient. Besides, broken as it was, the road into the swamp was his confessional, not hers.
“Do you know where we are?”
“Yes.”