The Weight of Night

by Christine Carbo

  “Correct. Lucy might have a different way of studying it with the soil and determining how it has affected the surface area.”

  Wendy inspected it through the plastic, turning it from side to side. “I’m guessing at one time it was shiny black: a durable nickel plating. And you know what I think it says?”

  “What?”

  “Well, I’ve been looking at it with a magnifying glass, and in this lower left corner I can make out the bottom of a red letter in that kind of curlicue writing. I can make out the same on the right side as well.”

  “And?”

  “I could be wrong, but I think the first letter is an A and the last, an H. And here in the middle, I can make out part of an O.”

  “And that means?”

  “I think it says Aerosmith. You know, the band.”

  I held out my hand. She passed it to me, and I studied it through the plastic. My heart sank; there was no way to be sure until Lucy soaked it and let us know exactly what it said, but it did look like maybe Wendy could be correct. Of course, even if she was, it proved nothing, but my hunch that this belonged to a young person was now stronger than ever.

  “It’s a rock band from the seventies all the way through to the nineties,” Wendy said. “Huge in America for several decades.”

  I smiled. “I’ve heard of Aerosmith. They were world-famous. ‘Janie’s Got a Gun,’ right?”

  “Of course that would be the song you’d recall.” Wendy smiled.

  “Anything to do with ballistics,” I shrugged, trying to resist the flash of memory that stung me. I would never forget the song. After my incident with Per, I ran into two boys I knew from school and they taunted me, singing, “Gretchen’s got a gun / Her whole world’s come undone.” Of course, I didn’t actually use a gun. Gun control laws were very strict in Norway, and my family didn’t own one. It was a fire iron that I used on Figment Man. That’s what I called him in order to be able to talk to my counselors about that night long ago in Norway. Figment Man was the one in my nightmare.

  One time I saw a self-styled medium on TV talking about people who received visits from the dead. He said that you knew when you’d been visited by someone from the afterlife because you’d recall every detail about them, and with regular dreams or nightmares, you didn’t. The figments eventually faded away. I call bullshit on that. I recall every detail about Figment Man, and as much as I wish he had, he’s never faded away.

  He was stocky, no more than five-nine. He wore a red face mask and a black leather jacket turned up at the collar. He slunk into my brother’s room with a glinting fat knife with a serrated edge poised above his right shoulder, his beefy arm held at a rigid right angle, poised to slice Per’s peaceful, still body.

  I was petrified, and I froze for a moment. I yelled at Per to wake up, to get up and run, but he didn’t. He just kept sleeping serenely. He’d always been a deep sleeper, the kind who could doze on the train sitting straight up and surrounded by strangers. I scurried down the dark hallway into the shadowy parlor and it felt like it took me forever—that surely the knife has already been plunged into him. I frantically grabbed a fire iron from the living room and ran as fast as I could back into the bedroom. I screamed for him to stop, my voice moving like water through my own head.

  He didn’t listen to me, only continued to repeatedly stab Per, who made awful grunting sounds. I went over to the invader, to his broad, hunched back. There was something demonic in the way his dark shoulders angled over Per, about the way he didn’t even bother to look at me when I yelled. With all my force, I hit the man on the back of his shoulder . . . once, twice, three times, then switched to his arm and struck it again and again.

  Or at least I thought that’s what I was doing. Until I woke after my dad tackled me and began to slowly make out the room again. I was confused and asked what happened. “Hva hendre? Hva hendre?”

  Lights flicked on and my mom’s yells pierced the room. My father was holding me on the floor, restraining me. He yelled, “Du er gal; du er gal,” You’re crazy. You’re crazy. My mom kept shrieking for my dad to grab me—grab henne, hindre henne—grab her, restrain her, then she ran to Per, to the bed.

  He held me tight, and I tried to wriggle away, yelling, “What happened? What happened?”

  “Oh, gud, oh, gud. I need my phone. Fonen min,” she cried frantically. “We need an ambulance.” She ran to find a phone, and when she moved away, I saw Per—bloody and lying still in his bed. Too still.

  Pablo Neruda, one of my favorite poets, whom I learned about in Ungdomsskole, used a line in one of his poems: the blood of the children ran through the streets / without fuss, like children’s blood. Oh, I know he was talking about Spain’s civil war, but in class (it was Herr Gunderson’s class, and I was thirteen) all of my classmates had different ideas about why he’d used the image of children’s blood twice: that he was maybe giving two meanings, one referring to blameless children and the other to adults, who ultimately in war can be just as innocent and helpless as kids in the face of a violent regime. During a time of war, Tor Bjørgen, one of my friends with curly gold locks like Per, said that no one has any control over what happens during invasions. They are helpless; they are like children. I remember him saying, “Just one morning in Spain during the Civil War had the power to change everything in Pablo Neruda’s world.”

  It was like that for me. There’d been no war; there’d not even been an intruder, but just one night changed everything for me, for my family, for our friends. Only I wasn’t innocent. I had caused the pain for my parents, the emotional war that would never end. One day Per was teasing me, pulled my ponytail, and helped me with my schoolwork, and the next—gone. Untouchable, unreachable. Gone.

  Later, when I tried to describe to my counselors in the Bergen mental health facility how Per lay there, his head, pillow, and sheets bloodied from my own doing, I came to understand those two lines of the poem differently. There were no similes. There were no metaphors for how horrible it was . . . for how utterly horrific it remains. The blood of my brother ran onto his pillow, like, well, like the blood of my only brother. An older brother. A hero. That’s why Neruda wrote it twice. There were—there are—no references for the magnitude and grimness of things like that.

  “All right then.” Wendy startled me back to the present by holding out her hand to grab the Baggie back. “Back to work. We’ll see what Lucy comes up with.”

  I returned the bag to her and she left me to the quiet of my office.

  • • •

  An hour and half later my phone buzzed and startled me again, and I berated myself for being so jumpy. I saw it was my division leader, Ridgeway.

  “Good morning, sir,” I answered.

  “Morning,” he said. “You still at home?”

  “No, I’m at the office.”

  “Good. I just got off the phone with the sheriff. We need you in Glacier again.”

  I paused, wondering if he knew that I’d screwed up, that there were parts of ribs still left in the soil and if he wanted me to go back.

  “At the dig? Is the area clear already? I heard the line didn’t hold, but I definitely want to go back out since we had to leave in such a hurry.”

  “No, not where you were yesterday. Something new. A boy’s gone missing from Fish Creek Campground in West Glacier.”

  “A boy? How old?”

  “Thirteen.”

  “And for how long?”

  “I’ve been informed since yesterday around eleven.”

  “That long?”

  “I’m afraid so, and a witness recalls the kid talking to someone in a vehicle, which suggests the possibility of an abduction. So we need you to process the area where he was last seen and also take a quick look at the campground where the family was staying. Chief Smith or the lead investigator will be waiting for you at headquarters to show you the exac
t spots.”

  “Okay, will do.”

  “You decide who to take. You’re the lead.”

  I hung up and went into Wendy’s office. She cocked her head to the side, her way of saying “What’s up”?

  “Ridgeway called again,” I said.

  “Another job?”

  “Yes.”

  “Shit, these fires are like full moons or something—stirring all sorts of crazy stuff up.”

  “Yeah, I’m going to call Ray and load the van.”

  “Ray again?”

  “Paxton worked the day before with the young firefighter. Someone in his family—I believe his sister—knew the man, so he was pretty sad about the whole thing. I figured I’d give him a break.”

  “All right, good luck.” She stood up and followed me down the hall.

  “I’ve got everything wrapped and ready to go to Bozeman,” I said over my shoulder. “Can you make sure that everything makes it into the transport vehicle?”

  “Will do. And the buckle?”

  “The buckle too. Lucy might have some additional thoughts on it. She’ll send it back to us once it’s cleaned.”

  “Will do. Don’t worry about a thing,” Wendy said as she started heading back to her printing station in the lab. “And Gretchen, just so you know, I’m going to take some time off today. My dad’s going to come help me look around for Kyle.”

  I turned to look at her. “That serious?” I asked.

  Her shoulder twitched slightly. “Not necessarily, just want to rein him in before it gets out of control. We know a few of the spots he and his friends like to go.”

  I felt bad for her, but was glad she had her father’s help. I had met him before—a kind-looking man, a pastor in a local church—and knew they were pretty close. I wondered what it would be like to still have a parent involved in your life that way, to be there for you or to simply ask how you were . . . what it would be like to look into their aging eyes and see love and pride instead of regret, mistrust, and blame. Don’t get me wrong: I deserved everything I got, but I couldn’t help but wonder about it anyway. “Hope you find him soon,” I said.

  “Thanks,” she starting walking away, then looked back over her shoulder at me. “And G”—she used that nickname sometimes—“don’t forget to eat today. You look tired.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said as I punched in Ray’s number and headed toward the lab’s back exit, where the CSI van was parked. “I won’t if you don’t.”

  • • •

  “I’m beginning to feel like we’re in that movie where the guy relives the same day over and over again,” I said to Monty and Ken Greeley, whom I’d met before on another case. They had just walked out of Glacier Park headquarters, a 1970s-looking Arizona brick structure about a half mile off the main road.

  “You mean Groundhog Day?” Ray asked.

  “That’s it!” I said.

  “Only it’s looking like there’s six more weeks of fire instead of six more weeks of winter,” Monty said, glancing to the smoke billowing from the east.

  “Hope not,” Ray said. Monty nodded at Ray, then introduced him to Ken.

  “Rested up from yesterday?” Monty asked us.

  “Yep,” I answered. Monty’s eyes looked tired and his shoulders slumped with a new heaviness. Ken looked less tired, but he had that shocked, faraway stare that said This kind of stuff doesn’t happen in Glacier Park. Drownings, grizzly attacks, falls to death—yes, but not child abduction. “Doesn’t look much like you are, though. I’m guessing your day just got rolling after the grueling dig.”

  “I guess you could say that.” Monty had forgotten to shave, and that alone told me just how serious the situation was. He rubbed the edge of his chin with his knuckles, making an intimate sound that embarrassed me for no good reason, as if I had been the one who’d kept him from shaving. I could see he was thinking about the boy. “It’s been almost twenty-three hours now,” he said.

  “That’s what my supervisor told me.” I motioned to the vehicles next to us. “Shall we get to it, then?”

  “Follow me.” Monty headed to his SUV, hopped in, and pulled out of the lot. He drove to the main road, in through the park entrance, where lines of cars crowded the gates and waited to pay or show their passes. Even with the smoke looming like a thick curtain in the distance, tourists stayed intent on fulfilling their vacation plans. We bypassed them on a road for authorized vehicles and headed north toward McDonald Creek. Monty and Ken had already cordoned off the area and were not allowing traffic through unless the visitors were currently staying in the Fish Creek Campground or lived up Apgar Road.

  We crossed the bridge where McDonald River flowed peacefully below, away from Lake McDonald. I could see it was lower than usual, the pebble-covered brown banks on each side wider than I’d seen in past years. Green bushes clung to the banks. Several harlequin ducks dove under the water, popped back up, flapped their wings, and shook water from white, gray, and bright red heads. I pulled off onto the shoulder of the road where Monty and Ken pointed for us to park. We both hopped out.

  “Witness claims the boy was talking to someone in a dark truck right around here. Not sure if male or female. As you can see”—he pointed to the area secured with caution tape—“there’s a bit of flattened grass that we were able to pinpoint with our flashlights, but no tread marks. Anything you can do with those?”

  “We’ll try to get what we can. We might be able to get a plaster, depending on how deeply they’re indented into the grass. Sometimes they hit the lower soil, it’s just hard to see.”

  “After, we’ll need you to go ahead and check out the campsite, number 23A, just in case anything unusual shows up there. You won’t need to fully process it, since we now have a third-party report that the kid got in the truck, so likely nothing happened there, but some prints would be helpful. Parents left the boy to go for a walk around the lake around ten thirty. Maybe someone visited him there, although we have no evidence to back that up. We need to be on the safe side, though.”

  “And the family?”

  “We’ve moved them to a motel down the road this morning, but everything at the site is left pretty much the same. When they returned yesterday, they cooked a few meals and stayed the night waiting for their son to come back. Their other younger kids played in the dirt and around the area. FBI is on their way, so you may be reporting to them before too long.”

  “The local guys?” There were a total of ten satellite offices, or resident agencies, in Montana under the governance of the Salt Lake City Field Office, and one of them was in Kalispell with two agents. They sometimes got involved in the cases that occurred on park territory since it was federal, but usually they were busy with other issues: fraud, cybercrimes, corruption, criminal networks, terrorism, child pornography. . . .

  “Both are trained in handling abductions. We’ve already contacted them to notify NCMEC.” He was referring to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

  “I see . . .” I studied Monty’s face for a second. I couldn’t tell whether it bothered him to have to hand the case over to some agents who would not know the park or the area as well as he did. He was hiding his emotions well. The only sentiment I detected was concern—pure worry for the boy.

  A heavy silence hung for a moment between us. “How’s Essex?” I asked, changing the subject at the risk of sounding callous when a boy was missing. But I really wanted to know what was going on.

  “From what I’ve heard, they’re still fighting hard there. They saved some structures, but don’t get your hopes up about our dig site. It’s toast at this point.”

  “It’s still worth going back to check. The few bones we left may have been low enough that the fire blew right over them and didn’t incinerate them.”

  “Possible, but we can’t get in until it’s cleared to even find out. I ha
ven’t had time to speak to Lucy with the boy missing.”

  “I spoke to her this morning. Everything is on its way to her now. She should have it all soon. Anything in particular we’re looking for at the campsite?”

  “The usual. Footprints, signs of a struggle. We didn’t see anything unusual, but you might pick up on something that we didn’t. The boy had a 3DS—a Game Boy–type thing—about yay big,” Monty made the frame of a six-by-four rectangle with the thumb and index finger of each hand. “They can’t find it anywhere, so he must have taken it with him. Had his initials on it: JRC. Jeremy Richard Corey.”

  Ray and I went right to work getting plasters. We found some shallow indentations in a small area that was bare of grass or gravel. Two reporters on their way to the campsite saw us working behind the caution tape and pulled over to snap some photos. For the most part, I kept my head down to work, but when I looked up I saw Monty addressing the reporters, his face stern, motioning for them to leave.

  When we finished with the roadside, we worked the Fish Creek Campground and took everything back to the lab again.

  8

  * * *

  Monty

  AFTER I RETURNED from speaking to Roger Kelly, Ken and I went back and questioned the parents for the third time. With the prospect of abduction, we approached the Coreys differently. We separated them and took extensive family histories of each: where they were born, who each of their parents were, who their siblings were, and so forth.

  Afterward, we asked them to relocate to a motel so that Gretchen and Ray could inventory the campsite. Linda Corey had at first refused to leave in case Jeremy wandered back, but I was able to persuade her to go by stressing that Ken would stay behind while forensics worked and would be there to greet the boy.

  Additionally, I had begun to complete the piles of paperwork associated with the missing minor. Without hard evidence, the search through the forests continued while notifications about Jeremy’s disappearance spread to all of the Montana news bulletins. Having been presented with the possibility of abduction, we drastically widened the search beyond the network of rangers and Park Police searching for him across Glacier and began to venture outside the park, with traffic cops inspecting dark trucks and keeping eyes peeled for a teenage boy. Concerned citizens who heard the news were asked to stay on the lookout for any child fitting Jeremy’s description. By joining forces with the county police and the Kalispell, Columbia Falls, and Whitefish forces, we were organizing a larger investigative team until the feds called in their agents.