Anna and I are on our back porch holding hands and looking at the lake when the doorbell rings.
She lifts the baby monitor to her ear to see if the sound has awakened the angels as I jump up and step inside the house to answer it.
When I open the door, Sam is standing there with an evidence bag in her hand.
“Sorry,” she says. “I tried calling but . . .”
“Come in. Phone’s chargin’. We’re out back. Join us. Whatcha drinkin’?”
“Whatta you got?”
“Red, white, or Bud Light.”
“Nothing a wee bit stronger?”
“That’s what I drink,” I say.
Her expression says, And?
“Which is why we don’t keep it in the house.”
“Oh, sorry. Didn’t know you were a friend of Bill W’s.”
“Good friends and glad you didn’t know,” I say. “Think that’s a good sign.”
“Bud Light,” she says. “In a bottle if you’ve got it.”
“Coming up.”
I grab a Bud out of the fridge and follow her through the living room and out the partially open French doors onto the back porch.
“Sorry to crash,” Sam says.
“Don’t be,” Anna says, standing to welcome her, towering over her as she does. “Happy to have you. Cheers.”
They clink glass and bottle, Sam hands me the clear plastic evidence bag, and we all sit down.
“Sorry again about this morning,” Sam says. “Feel so bad for that poor girl. Have they found her yet?”
“Not yet. What’s this?”
“Recovered from inside one of the crossbars in Apalach,” she says.
Inside the bag are two small pieces of green-sheathed electrical wire and a fragment of aluminum with tiny indentations in it.
“Know you’re trying to figure out what the bars are from,” she says. “Thought this might help.”
“What is it?” Anna asks.
“Two small wires and a tiny piece of aluminum,” I say.
“Two more bodies were found this evening,” she says to Anna. “Like Tampa and Apalach, they appear to be the same as ours.”
“Where?”
“That’s the thing,” she says. “One in Biscayne Bay—which is the other end of the state from us, and one not even in our state—a lake in Eufaula, Georgia.”
“Our guy gets around,” I say.
“He certainly does. So what’s he doing in all those places? Besides abducting, raping, killing, and crucifying young girls?”
“What if he has or works for a moving company?” Anna says. “Said he was seen in a white delivery truck.”
“Damn,” Sam says. “That’s good. I like that. That fits. Wow.”
“Oh,” I say, “you thought my girl was just another pretty face, didn’t you?”
“Not at all. I just didn’t know she was quite that quick.”
“Give good head too,” Anna says.
Sam laughs hard.
“Sorry to just blurt that out. Too much wine.”
“Don’t be,” Sam says. “That’s exactly like something I would say. It’d only be too far if you felt like you had to do a demonstration to prove it.”
Merrick sits alone at his desk, his fingers floating atop the keyboard before him.
His heart is hurting. His head is full.
He’s working on his “Battin’ the Breeze” column, his editorial in the Gulf County Breeze.
He has a lot to say, but how can he convey what he feels he must without alienating his readers, his subscribers, his friends and family?
Taking in a deep breath, releasing it slowly, he begins—the fingers floating above the keyboard tapping rhythmically, as if it’s a percussion instrument instead of the interface between his thoughts and the word processor.
“Battin’ the Breeze”
By Merrick McKnight
One of the aspects of our small community I’ve always appreciated the most is its compassion, its sense of community. When someone is in need, we step up. We pitch in. We rally around.
When one among our small number passes from this life to the next one, the family he or she leaves behind is inundated with outpourings of condolences in the form of food and visits and assistance. More food, in fact, than the family can actually eat. I know. It happened to me when I lost my wife and son.
That’s who we are. That’s what we do.
Or that’s who I thought we were, what I thought we did.
But we have failed someone among us in need. We did not step up. We did not pitch in. We did not rally around.
Instead, we rallied against her.
We took to the barber shop and the coffee shop and the auto parts store and, this time too, to social media, and we spread rumors and innuendo and gossip about one of our own—a vulnerable teenage girl.
An innocent girl. A girl who should have received our compassion and understanding even if she hadn’t been.
We failed someone in need.
Is that who we are now? Is that what we now do?
Post hate on social media platforms instead of practicing kindness in person?
Spread rumors instead of sharing concern?
Gossip instead of giving compassion?
Have we gotten to the place where we only show love and share kindnesses when someone dies?
I realize how seductive social media is. I know the feeling of anonymity and impunity we can feel when sitting alone in the dim light of our small screens.
I know how communal gossiping and sharing news about others among us can feel.
And in spite of seeing how well we practice this dark form of community, this small-minded form of small-town life, I still believe we’re better than this. Or that we can be.
We let Megan Stripling down. Let’s don’t do the same to her mom or the kids swimming with Shane McMillan when he went missing or anyone else among us ever again.
It’s a commitment I’m making.
Will you join me?
49
Recently I’ve been studying how the mind works in regard to enlightenment, inspiration, and problem solving.
I’ve learned that the key to breakthroughs in insight and answers is to fill the mind with as much information as possible, work on figuring it out, but then stop and do something else so that the subconscious can solve it. The lightning bolt and eureka moments don’t happen in a vacuum, don’t come out of nowhere. They are birthed out of the practice of study and observation and processing information and then letting go—going for a walk, doing another task, sleeping on it—and allowing the subconscious to do its brilliant best.
This is why I went to sleep with pictures of the crossbars and the evidence bag Sam had brought over on my chest and cascading down onto the floor beside the bed.
Thinking. Figuring. Reasoning. Connecting. Deducing.
Then sleeping.
Dreams seemingly unrelated to the problem of the cross. Seemingly random and unrelated to anything—including each other. The mysteries of the subconscious mind.
I wake the next morning and tell Anna, then Sam and Reggie by phone.
The fragment of aluminum is part of a light bulb socket, the wire what was left of what carried electricity to the socket. The metal bars are the lighted support braces of a Ferris wheel.
The high school football team had brought a carnival to town as part of a fundraiser. It took place the weekend prior to the Tupelo Festival. Amber had gone. I had seen pictures of her and Rain there on his phone.
“You slick son of a bitch,” Sam says. “You smart fuckin’ bastard. Wow.”
“I bet we’ll find that the carnival has traveled to every town where a body was found,” I say. “And we’ll need to drag the rivers, lakes, bays, and beaches of every town it has been to.”
“Oh my God,” she says. “There will be so many. There could be so many more poor girls on crosses in watery graves out there right now. Rotting.”
“Not rotting. Not as far as
he’s concerned. Waiting for the resurrection.”
“You’re so good at what you do,” Anna says. “At both things you do for work. You’re very good at other things too, but I’m just talking about work right now.”
My eyes sting and I blink several times.
I’ve just gotten off the phone with Sam to find her looking at me lovingly.
We are still in bed and she is still ravishingly, devastatingly, sleepily sexy.
“Thank you,” I say. “That’s so . . . that means so much.”
“Think of how many parents will have their young daughters come home because of you. Think about all the young girls who won’t be raped and tortured and murdered.”
I think about that very thing for a moment, praying it’s the case.
My phone rings as I’m getting ready.
“Morning,” Reggie says.
“Morning.”
“Nice work on the crossbars,” she says.
“Thanks. Sam’s tracking down info on the carnival that was here weekend before last when Amber disappeared. Then we’ll pay them a visit.”
“Love having FDLE involved,” she says. “Takes care of all the jurisdictional bullshit. Let me know what y’all find out and what you need. As soon as you have something, I’ll help with the warrant.”
“Will do.”
“Heard back from the investigator who interviewed Kayden Reynolds.”
I told her yesterday what Tommy told me about Kayden being the beneficiary of Shane’s life insurance policy, and she’d had a detective with the Columbus Police Department interview her last night.
“Yeah?”
“Said she was so distraught he had a very difficult time getting anything out of her.”
“Distraught?”
“In the extreme,” she says. “Crying uncontrollably. Cussin’ Shane one minute, saying she just wants him back the next.”
“She wasn’t anything like that when I saw her,” I say. “She didn’t even really seem sad.”
“Delayed grief?” she asks.
“Could be,” I say, “but . . . I don’t know. Seems off.”
“Maybe she was just trying to cock block his interview. Anyway, she has an alibi for when Shane went missing. He’s gonna double check it, but it seems legit. For what it’s worth, he said her grief seemed legit to him too. And he’s a seasoned professional who expects everybody to be lying.”
I think about it, trying to make the pieces fit, but am unable to do it.
“She said she and Shane had been together for quite a while, said they met right after he finished basic and have been together ever since. Says it was his idea to put her on his life insurance. Says she’ll take a polygraph if we want her to. Says we wouldn’t be suspicious if we knew the reason he just changed it recently.”
“Let me guess,” I say. “She’s pregnant.”
“Bingo. Give that man a prize. She also said that was the reason he came down here to break up with Megan face to face. Said he planned to marry her.”
50
I pick up Sam in Tallahassee and we hop on I-10 East toward I-75 South.
We are headed to Gibsonton, the carnival capital of the world, just below Tampa.
Ten miles south of Tampa, Gibsonton, Florida was once where carnies from circuses, carnivals, sideshows, and fairs wintered in the off season. In its golden age all carnie roads led to Gib-town. Back then it was said that carnies met twice—once on the road and once in Gibsonton.
Though not much is left of what was once called Freaktown, Gibsonton has always been and will always be a sanctuary for fading carnival culture. Human oddities and shocking sideshow attractions have all but disappeared in America—and with them Gibsonton’s most famous freaks, the eight-and-a-half-foot Giant Al and his two-foot-tall wife, Jeanie; Grace McDaniels, the mule-faced woman; Dotty, the fat lady. Gone are the glory days when Gibsonton had the nation’s only low post office counter to accommodate midgets, and of the famed Hilton sisters, the Siamese twins who operated a fruit stand.
But rusting remnants remain and occasionally you see a huge man in full clown costume riding his electric wheelchair to the grocery store.
“The whole thing is sketchy as fuck,” Sam says. “The company is called Abiding Joy Amusements. Evidently it’s some sort of Evangelical organization that employs at-risk young people and ex-offenders. Their website is just one page that says, ‘Do you want a carnival to come to your town for a fundraiser for your church or school?’ And has a form you fill out. There’s no contact info. No phone number or email. Only an address in Gibsonton.”
I shake my head. “Anna and I and the girls went to it when it was in town,” I say. “It was small but fun. Seemed well run—clean, neat, up-to-date equipment.”
“Reggie’s following up with the athletic director at the high school who dealt with them, but the basic deal is, you provide the place and do the promotion and they give your organization thirty percent of the profit.”
“How’d he find them?”
“The football program where he was a coach before he came here had them in for a fundraiser. He remembered it being popular and raising a good bit of money for the program. Went online. Filled out the form. Had them here. They’ve traveled to everywhere we’ve found a victim so far. Won’t be able to check everywhere they’ve been until we have more on them, but the website says they only travel in Florida, Alabama, and Georgia.”
We are quiet a moment and I wonder how many bodies on crosses are in how many bodies of water in those three states.
“Think about the carnival coming to town,” she says. “You don’t know anything about them, but trust your kids’ safety to them, eat their food, ride their portable popup rides.”
“We give a lot of people and organizations like that our trust,” I say. “Because we think someone is watching them, someone is making sure the food is good and the rides are safe, but like so many things in our country since the eighties when so much became deregulated, no one is really watching and no one does anything until there’s a problem.”
“By which time it’s too late,” she says. “Fuckin’ greedy motherfuckers are poisoning our drinking water and tainting our meat and destroying the only planet we have, and their little lapdogs who are supposed to be our elected officials are giving them tax incentives to do it.”
“You ever been to Gibsonton before?” I ask.
“As a kid,” she says. “You?”
“Heard about it for a long time but’ve never been.”
“Not much to it anymore,” she says. “Just sort of the remains of what it once was. A special town for freakshow freaks, a place of acceptance and community for people like Percilla the Monkey Girl, Grady Stiles the Lobster Boy, and that couple billed as the weirdest in the world . . .what was . . . he was eight feet four and she was a two-foot-tall woman with no legs—Al Tomaini, I think. And Jeanie.”
What remains of those people and the culture they were part of are memories, monuments, markers, and memorabilia. Which can also be said of the town itself.
My phone vibrates. It’s Reggie.
“Where are y’all? How’s it going?”
“Getting on 75,” I say. “You find out anything else about the carnival?”
“Not yet. I’m calling to bounce something off of you.”
“Okay.”
“You know how all the crazy theories about Shane have been flying around?”
“Yeah?”
“What if they’re not that farfetched after all?”
“Which?”
“The ones about somebody coming to take him out or about him faking his death to go AWOL?”
“I’ve been thinking about it,” I say. “Might be something to it. Definitely don’t want to ignore any possibilities—not until we have a body and know more.”
“I’m wondering if we might not ought to broaden our investigation. Our search.”
“Maybe,” I say. “But—”
“We found a b
oot print farther up the path behind the houseboat,” she says. “Like a military-style boot print.”
I think about it.
“I was thinking . . .” she says, “if Shane faked his own death and wound up over there on that path, he’d be barefooted, so it’s probably not his. But what if someone—like a mercenary or black ops . . . something like that—came down there to . . . take him out. They’d have those kinds of boots on.”
“Lots of people wear boots on the river,” I say. “Hunting boots, snake boots, work boots. They probably all leave a similar print.”
“Sound crazy, don’t I?”
“No. Not at all. We have to consider everything.”
“You know I’d’ve never suggested anything like this if we’d’ve found his body. We just need to find his body.”
“I know. How about Megan’s?”
“Nothing yet. Hers too. We need to find them both. Okay. Letting you go now. Going to hang my head in shame for being so susceptible to wild theories and unsubstantiated rumors. Appreciate it if you’d keep this just between us.”
“You got it, boss.”
“What was that about?” Sam asks.
“Nothing. I mean it amounted to nothing. Just Reggie wanting to make sure we don’t think too narrowly about Shane’s disappearance.”
“Listen to this,” she says, reading from her phone. “Lobster Boy was a violent little prick.”
“What?” I say. “No. Say it ain’t so.”
“He was a bad alcoholic and used to beat the shit out of his family. He had a lot of upper body strength from the way he got around. He actually killed his oldest daughter’s fiancé the night before their wedding. Admitted to it on the stand and was charged with third-degree murder, but because no prison at the time could accommodate an inmate with ectrodactyly, he was given probation instead. He stopped drinking during that time and remarried his first wife. But soon he was back to beating her and the kids again. Finally, he was shot and killed in 1992 when his wife and her son from a previous marriage hired a seventeen-year-old sideshow performer named Chris Wyant to kill Stiles for fifteen hundred bucks.”
“Who knew the value of the life of Lobster Boy was so low,” I say.
Blood Cries; Blood Oath; Blood Work Page 37