I cut her off. “Okay. But what was the upshot?”
The Peters woman looked around her yard vaguely, then shrugged as though she’d suddenly lost interest in the conversation. “Nothing.”
“Nothing.”
Suddenly the switch went back on, and she snarled at me. “That Link woman said I’d put her up to it! That’s the upshot.”
My eyes met Lt. Gooch’s briefly. “Ma’am,” he said, “you mind if we talk with your little girl?”
“She’s not back from school.”
As soon as she’d spoken, however, a yellow school bus swung around the corner, pulled to a stop in front of the house. The doors opened, and a little girl came out. She was carrying a large bag of books, grunting and swaying with theatrical effort, across the yard. Her tongue hung out the side of her mouth and a small yellow bead of snot bobbed at the edge of her left nostril. The little girl stopped, looked up at me. I don’t like speaking ill of children, but she was surely one of the dumbest-looking kids I’ve ever seen, with a blank, cowlike expression in her protuberant eyes.
“Who are y’all?” she said.
“I’m a policeman,” I said.
She kept staring, then finally grinned at me. “I talked to a police lady once. She was fuuuuuunny!” She screwed up her face in a way that was probably intended to be cute, and a high, idiotic laugh came out of her mouth.
“Is that right?”
“Yeah. We played undress with the dollies.” She wrinkled her nose and whispered mischievously. “One dolly had a hairy pee-pee on it. Like my daddy.” She made the idiotic laugh again.
“Is that right?”
She nodded. “Do you like dollies?”
“Yes, I do,” I said. “My favorite dolly when I was a kid was named Lady Blacula. She had this cool black suit, and superpowers that came out of her head, and a cape and everything.”
Kelli Lynn stared at me for a while, then her tongue came out and felt around for the snot bead on her lip. She sucked loudly on it, and then her mother slapped her hard on the side of the head.
“Kelli Lynn! Cut that out.”
“Can I ask you a question, Kelli Lynn?”
“Wahhhnnn!” Kelli Lynn said. She was not really crying, just pretending.
“Kelli Lynn! Go inside.”
I put my hand on Kelli Lynn’s shoulder. “Hey, sweetie, it’s okay.” She stopped her fake crying and stared at me again with her dull eyes. I continued, “Do you remember the things you told that police lady? About Vale.”
She brightened suddenly. “Vale! Vale!”
“Did Vale touch you?”
She nodded vigorously. “Yeah. Yeah, he touched me ina-ina-ina. . .” She looked at her mother for help.”
“Inappropriately.”
“Yeah. She touch me in my podlia.” The little girl’s tongue came back out, explored her lip again. “Mommy, can I have a Ding Dong?”
“Yes, honey. Go inside. Go get a Ding Dong.”
The little girl ran up the stairs and into the house.
“I will not put her through that again,” Kelli Lynn’s mother said loudly. “I will not.”
“Okay, but—”
“No buts.” She narrowed her eyes. “Is this about some kind of lawsuit? Is the city going to sue me? Just because some incompetent person fails to see what’s right in front of her, with all her Gestapo methods and brutal . . . Well, I can see this picture. You’re trying to dig something up you can use against us, aren’t you?”
“No, no. Even if we were, that’s just not possible. The city can’t sue you for falsely accusing somebody, even if that was what happened.”
“It wasn’t false. He put his finger...” She glared at Gooch and lowered her voice, moved closer to me. “That man put his finger in her . . . in her . . . pardon me . . .” Her voice went all the way down to a whisper. “In her patootie.”
“Her patootie.”
She nodded soberly, her eyes getting very wide. “Right smack in her patootie.”
“And she told this to the police officer. Detective Wink.”
“Link. Her name was Link. Yes. She told this to Detective Link, and that woman just ignored her. The whole interrogation, it was like something right out of the KGB. Right out of the Nazi Germany. Right out of, out of, out of—” She flailed the air with her hand.
“Midnight Express?” Lt. Gooch said.
“Exactly! Right out of Midnight Express.”
“Buchenwald?” I said. “The Cultural Revolution? Stalag 13?”
She stabbed her finger at me. “Yes! Yes! Precisely. Yes!”
“Well?” I said as we drove away.
“Crazy as a shithouse rat.”
“Yeah, but do you think she put that little girl up to it?”
Gooch shook his head. “Ain’t no way to know.”
“We got enough for a warrant on his hunting shack?”
“Not a snowball’s chance.”
“What if Jenny Dial is down there right now?”
Gooch drove for about five minutes before he finally said, “Why you think I got so much trouble sleeping at night?”
“Well, suppose we just kind of drove down and looked? Nosed around a little? Maybe we could stumble across some kind of probable cause.”
Lt. Gooch pulled up at a stoplight. “Tell you what. How ’bout you go. I’ll keep poking around up here, see if I can’t turn something up.”
“Fair enough.”
He worked at the dab of tobacco under his lip with his tongue, then turned to look at me. “No joke, Mechelle. Don’t do nothing stupid. Don’t get on the property. Surveillance from a distance. Look for outbuildings, possible tunnel entrances, trails into the woods, anything that might look strange. But do not—do not!—do anything that would put this case in jeopardy. Or get yourself hurt, for that matter.”
I blinked. “Did you just call me Mechelle?”
“Huh?”
“Mechelle!” I gave him a little flirty look, but he was staring straight ahead. “You just called me by my first name! I believe you actually just expressed a certain level of camaraderie and concern and fellow feeling! Like you were actually a human being or something.”
I kept watching Lt. Gooch’s face, but I swear to God not a single muscle moved.
THIRTY
Before he sent me down to Troup County, Lt. Gooch gave me a pair of little-bitty binoculars and a compass and a topographical map. I don’t know what the hell he thought I would do with the compass if I got lost, but there it was anyway.
I am pretty much what you’d call a quintessential city girl. My father’s parents used to live way outside Valdosta, down near the Florida border—which is to say, more or less the other side of nowhere—and when I was a little girl, we used to go down there in the summers. So I can say that I’ve been out in the woods occasionally. But wandering around with your country cousins a quarter mile from your grandparents’ house is not the same as plopping yourself down in the middle of the boonies with nothing but a topo map and compass. I had a plat map that I’d photocopied at the courthouse, and that showed the dinky little county road I was on. So I found what seemed to be a distinctive bend in the road and a place where a creek crossed the road to use as reference points. According to the scale on the topo map, that gave me about half a mile of land to deal with. The plat map I’d gotten at the courthouse showed the boundaries of Vale Pleassance’s property as being 632 feet of frontage on the road and extending back in a sort of trapezoidal shape another thousand or so feet back into the woods.
But where, exactly that 632 feet lay with relation to the creek and the distinctive bend in the road was not terribly apparent to me. To me, City Girl, all I saw was a bunch of woods. I drove up and down the narrow county road and found that there were four narrow tracks leading off of it into the woods. One track was gravel, and the others were dirt. I got out of the car and looked at each one. No mailbox, no signs other than faded POSTED NO HUNTING signs, no nothing. Just woods.
<
br /> I decided, more or less at random, that the gravel track went to Vale Pleassance’s place. What Lt. Gooch had suggested I do—and it had sounded like a great idea while sitting at a desk in Atlanta—was that I find a high point from which I could look down at the medical examiner’s cabin. But there were no high points around here, at least not high enough to look down from, and even if there had been, I didn’t really know where to look.
Where did all these tracks lead? No clue. I imagined each one leading to a trailer full of rednecks with swastika tattoos on their foreheads, and shotguns surgically attached to their hands. I sat there in my car for a while, the air conditioner blasting, imagining all kinds of nasty scenarios. Finally I took a deep breath, turned off the motor, and started hiking up the dirt track. My plan was this: I’d go up the track exactly two hundred paces. That would get me to what I hoped was the middle of the property next to Pleassance’s, and from there I would take out my handy-dandy binoculars and I’d be able to see Vale’s place. If anything looked funky, I’d have my probable cause, and I could go down and check things out firsthand. Or something.
I had my cell phone, I had my duty weapon, I had my topo map and my compass. What could possibly go wrong?
By the time I’d gone about a hundred and fifty paces, I realized this was a straight-up loser of a strategy. What had been a dirt road wide enough for a car at the edge of the county road had become a footpath clogged with polkweed and blackberry thorns and other trashy-looking plants, barely enough room to walk. And looking though the woods with binoculars? Forget it. I couldn’t see twenty-five feet off the trail.
Plus I was nervous and pissed off and tired and sweating like a pig, sweat in my eyes, my hair probably kinking up, and I was starting to feel vaguely scared and desperate.
For a minute I thought about turning around and going home. But then I thought about telling Lt. Gooch that I’d come all the way down here and hadn’t even figured out where Pleassance’s property was, much less scouted it out. That was by far the worst of my various alternatives. I stopped counting my steps about the third time the trail split, but it had already been over two hundred and fifty by then. Which, by my guesstimate, meant I was about seven hundred feet into the woods. Of course, there had been some twisting around, and that could have thrown things off. But I didn’t want to think about that.
After a few minutes, the trail stopped. It didn’t reach anything, it wasn’t like there was some kind of destination that it had reached—a house or a barn or a creek—no, it just pooped out. One minute it was a trail, sort of, and the next minute it was scrubby, dense, nigh-on-to-impassable woods.
I stood there for a minute, looking around me. There was not a sound, not a bug, not a leaf rattling in the wind, not a bird or a squirrel, nothing but an eerie silence. It seemed darker than it had been just minutes ago. Then, in the distance, I heard the brief scree of a katydid. I had spent enough time at my grandparents to remember that when the katydids came on, it meant night was soon to follow. I was glad I’d brought my flashlight.
I opened my cell phone, just out of curiosity. The readout said: NO CARRIER. No cell towers in this neighborhood. Why I’d even thought there might be, I can’t imagine.
A feeling of hopelessness welled up in me. Maybe the thing to do was beat a quick retreat, stay at a motel, come out in the morning. Sure. I turned around and started heading back.
And heading back.
And heading back.
The light was fading fast by then, and the woods were full of the blare and clamor of katydids. And still I didn’t seem to be coming out anywhere. There had been some places where my trail joined another trail, but I was definitely moving in the right direction. I was just going left each time, because when I’d come in I’d gone right at each fork. That made sense, right? Or did it?
And still I was walking and still the night was coming down. It seemed like I’d gone an awful long way. I got a tight, balled-up sensation in my chest, and started feeling like I needed to pee. I stopped, listened for cars, or any other sign that I was close to, well, close to anything. All I could hear was the katydids.
I kept going, counting my steps again. When I got to two hundred I started getting really nervous. When I got to four hundred, I stopped. It was flat-out dim now. Not night, precisely, I told myself. But definitely dim. I took a couple of steps, cursed as I stumbled into a bunch of brambles. Brambles that I hadn’t even seen.
Okay, I decided. Time to come out with the flashlight. I’d feel better with the flashlight. Back when I was a street patrol officer, that light had always seemed pretty bright. Using it inside houses, in small urban backyards, in basements and crawl spaces, you never had to throw the light more than twenty or thirty feet. But here? I was unnerved to see that when I flashed the light into the trees, the beam just disappeared, swallowed up in the blackness. No, not blackness, I told myself. It was dimness. Grayness. Because it still wasn’t night, surely. It was dusk.
Sort of.
I kept walking, heading back, I kept saying to myself, back to the car. Every now and then I checked my cell phone, but it was hopeless. NO CARRIER every time.
But when the trail disappeared again, I realized that wherever I’d been heading, it wasn’t back. It was deeper. It was farther. It was more something. More woods, more katydids, more trees, more invisible briars, more darker, more scarier, more something that was not grammatical or explicable or fun to be around.
I got out the topo map. I have had very little experience with topographical maps. What a topographical map is, is a whole bunch of concentric lines that supposedly show you where the land goes up and where it goes down, the creeks and rivers and forests and hills and valleys. When you look at a topo map in, say, the Cold Case Unit office of the Atlanta Police Department, a topographical map has a beautiful order and structure, a clarity that gives you the confidence that if you have one out there in the boonies, you will always know where you are and you’ll never ever even conceivably be lost, not for one skinny minute. I put the flash on the topo map and realized that it told me absolutely nothing. It was a tangle of lines, no more readable to me than a spider’s web.
It also told me that I should have put fresh batteries in my flashlight: the light was starting to grow pale and dim.
And then I was running. I wasn’t screaming—at least I don’t think I was—but I damn sure wasn’t on the trail, and I didn’t know where I was going, and I had no plan. I was just hauling ass, running away like some pitiful little girl in a fairy tale, lost and getting deeper and deeper in the woods, deeper and deeper into the panic and fear.
Eventually I was out of the scrubby woods I’d been in and into a stand of planted pine trees, pine trees planted in rows, the trees extending up into the air like columns holding up a black and featureless sky. And still I was running.
How long did I run? I have no idea. Might have been a minute or two, might have been fifteen. Long enough that I was out of breath by the time I finally tripped over that root or rock or whatever it was, and fell down in a heap next to one of the million or so identical tree trunks surrounding me. I looked around me, and as far as my slowly dimming flashlight beam would go, there were rows of trees, trees that seemed to go off into infinity. It was like being on the set of some nightmare science-fiction world, an infinite expanse of featureless geometrical precision.
It sounds silly, talking about it later, getting so scared out there. But when you’re actually there, a confirmed urbanite, stone-cold lost in the woods—well, it just threw me for a loop. I’d rather bust into a crack house any day than get lost in the woods in the dark.
So did I get up and pull myself together and start hiking down one long row under the assumption that this neat geometry would give me a handle on finding out where I was, a measure of predictability in the trackless woods? You bet I did. That is, after I had bawled like a baby, lying there on the ground, pushing my face into the dirt, grabbing handfuls of pine straw and pounding my f
ists on the ground like a two-year-old. Just another page in Mechelle Deakes’s Book O’Moments I’m Not Proud Of.
But I did, finally, get myself in gear. I did, finally, start walking down the row of trees under the assumption that it would lead someplace.
Which it did. It led to more woods.
I went the other way. Reached more woods.
So I turned ninety degrees, followed that row of trees for a while. Reached more woods. By now my flashlight was getting quite dim, nothing but a smear of yellow in the blackness. I decided the prudent thing to do was to turn it off and let my eyes adjust. I stood for a while, silently waiting for my eyes to adust to the light.
I had never been in a pine plantation before, but what I found was that the trees were planted so close together that their tops grow together like a roof. And, like a roof, they didn’t let in a whole lot of light. Especially when there was no moon.
I started imagining various scenarios then. Starvation. Death by exposure. What is “exposure” anyway? I’d read this article once about wolves being reintroduced in various parts of the country. Had some eco-cretin do-gooder decided it would be cool to fill Troup County with ravenous packs of wolves yet? Or bears? Did they have bears around here? That would be a whole new spin on things. City girl mauled by bears, film at eleven. Or how about irony? “In a strange turn of events, Atlanta Assistant Medical Examiner Vale Pleassance today discovered the bones of an as-yet unidentified female on his property in Troup County. Pleassance performed an ad-hoc autopsy on the desiccated body, but was unable to determine the cause of death. According to Pleassance, the female’s body was surrounded by the bones of seventeen wolves, and an empty Glock pistol was found next to her corpse.”
The Body Box Page 16