The Possession

by Michael Rutger

  Chapter

  22

  Kristy took a roundabout route back to Birchlake, driving empty roads that wound apparently aimlessly through miles of forest, and—when presented with a choice—selecting routes to make the journey even longer, hoping that a period in movement might help her reset. It rained for a while, stopped, then started again. Eventually she came upon a barely there town, realized she was hungry, pulled over in front of a diner. She ate a sandwich slowly, staring out the window across the highway into the trees. Got out her phone. Scant data signal. She used the website she’d previously employed to find Gina Wright’s address to locate another.

  But then put the phone down.

  She knew from both writing and life that nothing ends and nothing begins. Everything is structured and textured by what’s come before—and will pass on a diluted version of this foreshadowing, along with its own flavor, to everything after. What your grandfather or great-grandmother did and experienced will influence your choices far more than you’ll ever know or could bear to believe. A trick Kristy had learned long ago, when she finished a piece, was to go back and cut the entire first paragraph. It might need tweaking afterward, but generally you found little of substance had been lost and the result felt more direct. Less mediated. More like life.

  The length of our stories is arbitrary. You choose where they begin and when they have ended. Alaina’s story was done, on any rational level. All Kristy had to do was accept this and be grateful, and get back to her own life.

  So that’s what she was going to do.

  The phone buzzed. A notification popped up to say Nolan had emailed her. She flicked up the screen, assuming that it would be an invitation to join them in the Stone Mountain Tap and contain enough autocorrect errors to suggest they’d already been there a while.

  Instead Nolan explained he and the team were considering changing the focus of their show from the walls to Alaina’s story. He wondered how she’d feel about presenting it.

  No, she emailed back. It’s done. Leave it.

  But by the time she got back in the car, she knew his email had arrived at exactly the wrong time.

  It was midafternoon by the time she got back to Birchlake. She drove to the address she’d tracked down and parked outside. Walked up a short path and knocked on the door. It was answered by a woman in middle age, whose hands were covered in flour.

  “Hi,” Kristy said. “Sorry to disturb you. I wondered if I could have a word with your husband?”

  “Well, that’d be up to him,” the woman said, cheerfully. “He’s with his lover.”

  “Oh,” Kristy said.

  The woman laughed. Down the corridor behind her, a boy in his mid-teens was at the kitchen table, apparently doing homework. He smirked at his mother’s remark.

  “I’m kidding,” the woman said. “Well, maybe not. He’s at the school. There are principals who manage to keep it to a weekday affair, I’ve heard. Dan’s not one of them. What did you want to talk to him about?”

  “Alaina Hixon. You know she’s been found?”

  “Thank God.”

  Her son looked up. “Maddy’s going to be on YouTube about it,” he said. “Maybe even TV.”

  Mrs. Broecker frowned at him. “Says who?”

  “Some people interviewed her and Naddy this morning,” he said. “They have a show about mysteries and stuff.”

  Oh for God’s sake, Kristy thought. “Exciting. Okay, well, I guess I’ll go to the school.”

  “Are you with the TV people?”

  “No,” Kristy said. “And tell your friend not to get her hopes up.”

  Before the principal’s wife closed the door, she gave Kristy a look. “If you see Dan, do me a favor.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Tell him I’m cooking something he likes, and he should come home.”

  A single car sat in the school lot, a tired-looking Subaru. Kristy parked next to it and walked to the main door. It was unlocked.

  “Hello?”

  The lobby was lit only by light coming through the glass wall and door to the yard beyond. It felt the way the kitchen does when you can’t sleep and come down in the middle of the night. Artificial light was coming from the open door of an office at the end of the corridor.

  Principal Broecker was behind his desk there, surrounded by papers and peering at his computer screen.

  “Hey.”

  He jumped, looking caught out. “Christ.”

  “Sorry. I called out earlier. You look absorbed.”

  Broecker pushed his hand through his hair. “I never seem to get the time for this stuff during the week.”

  “You can’t do it at home?”

  “Too many distractions.”

  Real life, you mean, Kristy thought, but knew that she was no one to talk. “Great news about Alaina.”

  “Oh, God, isn’t it? Part of why I’m here. Everything’s been so out of kilter that I’d got behind. There’s a fundraiser for…well, you don’t need to know about that, but the point is life can get back to normal. I suppose this means your ‘vacation’ is over?”

  Kristy smiled. “Yes. But my mind doesn’t stop working on the weekend, either. Wanted to check something.”

  “Sure.”

  “What’s the story with Alaina’s mother?”

  “Not a happy one,” Broecker said, sitting back behind his desk. “She was out driving, late. And drunk. Jenny—Jenny Hixon, that is—was one of the people who’d been most welcoming to our family, too. I have to admit we maybe didn’t do enough to try to keep the connection going. I’m not sure why. She drove off the road a few miles from here. The car plummeted into the river. She died instantly. Extremely sad.”

  “There was never any question that there was anything suspicious about it?”

  “Not at all. At least, not in the sense of third parties, which I assume is what you’re getting at. The local grapevine suggested she’d been depressed for some time. Personally I never saw any sign of it, but I guess often you don’t.”

  “And since then it’s just Alaina and her dad?”

  “Far as I know. Why?”

  “I went to their house a couple days ago. And encountered him again this morning. He seemed a little…controlling.”

  Broecker’s eyes were wandering back toward his computer, and he still hadn’t offered Kristy a seat. “He’s sole-parenting a teenage girl. And he’s just got her back, after thinking he’d lost her forever. He’s bound to be a little possessive for a while, don’t you think? If that happened to my son, I’d be locking him in his bedroom until he’s thirty.”

  They said goodbye, and he wished her a safe journey home. But at the door, Kristy turned back.

  “Did you manage to speak to her?”

  The principal was halfway through moving a sheaf of papers and didn’t look up. “Speak? To whom?”

  “I was at the hospital in Chico this morning.”

  Broecker didn’t say anything, but his hands stopped moving. “As I left,” Kristy continued, “I passed a Subaru. Same color as the one in the lot. There was a guy by it, smoking. Head down and turned away, as if he wanted to make sure he wasn’t seen. Pretty sure I know who it was, though.”

  The principal finally looked up.

  They sat on opposite sides of one of the picnic tables in the schoolyard, sheltered by a tree.

  The principal pulled his cigarettes from his jacket. “It’ll be two, today.”

  “You didn’t drive thirty miles for a covert smoke,” Kristy said. “So?”

  “It’s inconceivable I might simply have gone to check on a student who’d been missing? To see how she was?”

  “No. Though I would have thought it could have waited until Monday, and you’re considerate to have given the family space unless there was compelling reason to talk to her.”

  Broecker smoked in silence for a moment.

  “Was it what I showed you on her Instagram account?”

  He grunted. “You ar
e sharp.”

  “I had a conversation with someone a couple days ago. They suggested bullying is a big deal for you. And not just because how it might reflect on a school.”

  “Who was this person?”

  Kristy didn’t answer. “Protect your sources,” he said, with a wry smile. “I get it. But I have moments of acuity, too. I’m quite capable of working it out for myself.”

  Kristy saw in his face that he already had. “I hope you won’t make it a problem for her.”

  “No. And Gina’s right. I was a narrow-shouldered and unbecoming child, remarkably untalented at sports. So I spent a certain amount of time being shoved around. It happens. I survived. More relevant is what happened to my sister, Melissa. She’s three years older and three times as smart, and I looked up to her enormously. I still do. In high school she went to a party one night—secretly, against our parents’ wishes. She was sexually assaulted. She couldn’t tell our parents, or thought she couldn’t. I didn’t know how to help her. Didn’t think I could. I thought that was the grown-ups’ job. That was bad enough.”

  He knocked off the end of his cigarette. Ground the ash to invisibility with his shoe. “Ten years later she applied for a prestigious, career-defining job. When she arrived for the interview, one of the men in the room was the boy who’d assaulted her. She didn’t get the position. And she couldn’t explain that to our parents, either. I remember sitting there while my mother, trying to be kind, gently suggested to Melissa that she should set her sights a little lower.”

  “Christ,” Kristy said.

  “This, or something like it, happens all the time. Not necessarily assault. Being sidelined, spoken over, interrupted, overruled. Bullied, effectively. But I’m sure you don’t need me to mansplain mansplaining to you.”

  “I do not,” Kristy said. “But how does this relate to…”

  “My history class. It’s outside the core curriculum and purely for students who might find it interesting. A cultural overview of early American settlement. One topic tends to be quite popular. Alaina in particular appeared taken with it.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Witchcraft.”

  “Huh.”

  “Specifically I deal with how accusations of witchcraft have been used as an instrument of social control. Of gender control, especially—a way of dealing with uppity women. Of disempowering. Conversely, it’s certainly true that taking on that mantle, claiming witch-like abilities, was for some women a means of asserting control, of coming into their powers. And sometimes that happened when girls were arriving into early womanhood. Girls of precisely Alaina’s age.”

  “And when you saw the picture on Instagram, and the comments, you were worried she might have taken your elective to heart. And run with it.”

  “Exactly. And as a result come into contact with people online who do not have a teenage girl’s interests in mind. There are strange people out there. Strange, bad people, invisible to the rest of us, lying in wait.”

  “Yes, there are.”

  “And so that’s why I went. It was dumb, and I didn’t get to see Alaina anyway. But after two days of feeling guilty and worried, I had to try. There’s something not right about her disappearance. Over and above the obvious.”

  “Thank you,” Kristy said. “I, too, have been saying this, to universal disregard.”

  “From whom?”

  “The cops. Alaina’s father. My ex-husband.”

  The principal stood. “The world is full of secrets. The question is whether it’s a good idea to know them. Sometimes doors are better left closed. For the individual, for everybody concerned.”

  “I’m not good at that.”

  “I could tell that the first time I met you. And it’s just as well there are people like you—though of course you take responsibility for whatever you release. I’m sure you recall the story of Pandora’s box. It does not end well. Are we done?”

  “Yes. Except your wife said you should come home for dinner. She said it’s something you like.”

  “I like everything she cooks,” he said. “Maybe one day she’ll realize that.”

  “Perhaps she’ll realize sooner if you’re home more.”

  He smiled.

  Chapter

  ​23

  Well, it had to be her dad, right?”

  “Can’t imagine who else,” I said. “Could have been kids, I guess. But Hixon seems most likely.”

  Ken and I were in the parking lot of the abandoned tavern outside Birchlake. We were talking about the message that had been drawn on the windshield of the car the previous night. “Question is, what was it supposed to mean?”

  “Interpreting it didn’t stretch me, Nolan.”

  “But why?”

  “Let’s ask him.”

  “Let’s not,” I said. We’d come to see if we could talk to Alaina. Kristy had texted a few hours before, to say her father was bringing her home from the hospital. She hadn’t yet responded to an email I’d sent later on, raising the idea of switching the show’s focus, but the whole idea was moot if Alaina or her father were against it. Molly had declined to come along. Which was fine—we didn’t need her for this—but she was nonetheless dragging her feet in a way I’d never seen before. “At least, until we get a sense of how the land lies.”

  The oil drums were still in place—or had been placed back in position after Alaina and her father returned to the house. “Still not exactly putting out the welcome mat,” I said.

  “Unless she’ll talk to us, there’s no show. Better to know where we stand before we bother putting anybody on tape.”

  We walked through the gaps and along the drive. Followed the curve around a trio of redwoods, past the old truck, and a sagging bench, half overgrown with poison oak. In daylight—albeit a gray, weak, late-afternoon kind—it looked far more prosaic, the kind of unmaintained frontage you find with most houses in small mountain towns off the beaten track. A very ordinary nowhere-in-particular. Should have felt that way, too. But it didn’t, and when I turned to Ken, his face was looking pinched.

  “Is it just because we got spooked here last night?”

  “Dunno, mate,” he said. “But let’s get this done. And then—”

  He stopped, frowning into the trees. At first all I could see was a thicket of undergrowth, tangled around a stand of small trees, oaks or something. Then I saw it. The undergrowth was about three feet high, made up of plants that I mainly didn’t have names for. It was pretty thick, which is why you didn’t notice at first that it had achieved its height by growing over something.

  At the left end, in between the distinctively lobed leaves of poison oak burnished with fall color, was the jagged corner of a chunk of rock. Once you’d spotted it, the others became more obvious. It was a stone wall.

  “That one of yours?” Ken asked.

  I went closer. It was distantly possible it had been part of some structure related to the house, an outdoor firepit, long-ago grill, product of many weekends of some dad’s diligent labor. But the stones and manner of construction were the same as the walls we’d seen in the woods behind the motel. “I think it must be.”

  “They do get around, don’t they.”

  The wall was about five feet long, curved as though it had once been part of a larger arc that would have taken it across the driveway.

  We looked up at the sound of banging.

  We stopped ten feet short of the house. A middle-aged guy was nailing a plank of wood over the top section of the front door. It was the third piece he’d placed, and his goal seemed to be to cover the entire upper section.

  When he noticed us, he stopped—still holding the wood in position. “The hell are you?”

  “The guys who found me last night,” a girl said.

  Alaina stood up from where she’d been sitting in the ratty armchair. Her arms were tightly folded. She kept them that way. “Two of them, anyway.”

  The man gave the lower nail one more whack, put the ham
mer down. Wiped his hands on his jeans and came down the steps. “Bryan Hixon,” he said, as he shook my hand, and then Ken’s. “I need to thank you guys. Sincerely, thank you.”

  “We didn’t do much,” I said. “Went out for a smoke, and there she was.”

  “Where’s the other guy?” Alaina asked.

  “Filming,” I said.

  “Shame. I’d like to see him again.”

  “We came out here last night,” Ken told her father. “To let you know Alaina was back.”

  “Huh,” Hixon said. “That was you? I was asleep in back. Heard something. Assumed it was coyotes. Tried to go back to sleep. Then half an hour later I got a call from the cops saying somebody found my girl.”

  “The yelping was us,” I said. “Something ran past the front of the house.”

  “Coyotes,” he said again.

  “I guess,” I said. “Though it seemed big. And fast.”

  Ken nodded up at the house. “Why are you boarding up your front door?”

  “Because he’s a dumb-ass,” his daughter said.

  Hixon smiled tightly. “Alaina, go inside.”

  She didn’t move. He turned his head. She stared him down, and in that moment I saw something I recognized from my own childhood. The moment when a long-held power balance shifts, when a kid gets old enough to question whether they actually have to do what a parent tells them, and lets that doubt be known. Puts it right there on the table, where it can’t be ignored. I imagine it’s a strange and perhaps even disturbing moment for a parent, a cold wind blowing across everything that’s come before. Because yes, this is the harbinger of the adult who may one day be looking after you, but wrapped in the disguise of someone who’s still a child: poised on the boundary between one world and another.

  But then Alaina yanked open the front door, went indoors, and slammed it behind. The plank Hixon had been working on fell off with a clatter. There was a moment of silence.

  “A few of the panes were broken,” Hixon said, calmly. “Probably a couple more are now, too. I should get to finishing the job. It’s going to rain again.”