by Blake Crouch
"Hey, guys."
Her sergeant looked down at her and shook his head.
"You sure caught it this time, Viking," he said as though it were her fault. "I’m gonna go talk with Chip and the boys. Bruce can tell you what you got."
"You been in yet, Barry?" she asked.
"No. We just got the search warrant. Bobby’s executing it right now."
"CSI ready to start videotaping?"
"I think so."
"Would you ask them to hold off a sec? After I talk with Bruce, I’d like to do a quick walkthrough."
Sgt. Mullins gazed down at her for a moment. He rarely smiled. Standing under his undecipherable scowl always made her feel eight years old again. She knew exactly what he was thinking because she’d thought it too: she was incapable of handling this.
As Sgt. Mullins lumbered off toward the white-jacketed CSI techs, Violet glanced over her shoulder at a woman who stood weeping in the street at the edge of the Worthingtons’ lawn.
She turned back to Bruce.
He was a year younger than Violet, just a year out of the academy on uniformed patrol. They’d attended the same high school though they hadn’t known each other then. But Violet remembered him. He looked much the same—tall, slender, slightly bugeyed, with a fearful nervous mien.
She pulled a notepad and pencil from her purse as Bruce stared at the woman crying in the street.
"Bruce?" His large eyes came to Violet. "You all right?" Bruce took a deep breath. "Tell me what I got." They were standing by the Worthingtons’ minivan and Bruce leaned against the back hatch. "No, Bruce, don’t."
He stood back up, pointed toward the street, said, "That woman up there crying—name’s Brenda Moorefield. She lives three houses down. Earlier this afternoon—"
"’Bout what time?"
"Between three-thirty and four. She came over and knocked on the Worthingtons’ door. Apparently their children play together, and Mrs. Moorefield hadn’t seen the Worthington kids in two days. She had a key to the house and since their cars were in the driveway but they weren’t answering the phone or getting the mail, she decided to go in.
"She was halfway through the foyer when she smelled them. Came right out, called nine-one-one. I arrived a little after five.
"You’ve got one boy under the breakfast table in the kitchen. The other kid’s in his bed. I didn’t see any blood near the children. Zach and Theresa Worthington are in their bed…it’s bad. I couldn’t stay in that room very long, Vi. I’m sorry, I just—"
"It’s okay, Bruce. Not your job. What are the kids’ names?"
"Hank and Ben. They were eleven and seven. Ben’s the one under the table."
"Okay, mobile command should be here any minute. Reuben’s got the perimeter. I want you to go over and calm Mrs. Moorefield down. I’m gonna go in, see what I got before CSI starts taping. I’d like to talk with Mrs. Moorefield while they’re doing their thing, so make sure she doesn’t leave."
As Bruce headed back up the driveway, Violet rubbed her arms. She’d left her Barbour coat in the fellowship hall at church and a chilly breeze was blowing in off the lake, dislodging dead leaves from the enormous oaks in the front yard.
She took a moment to gather herself, then started toward the front porch where a gaggle of noisy lawmen awaited her on the steps. They intimidated her but she could handle them.
What troubled her more was what waited for her inside the house.
22
VIOLET kicked off her heels and slipped her tiny feet into the cloth bootees. Then she squeezed her hands into a pair of latex gloves and stood up.
Standing by the Worthingtons’ front door, the officer in charge of the scribe list wrote down her name and time of entry. Since this would be a cursory walkthrough she was going in alone. A crime scene is a delicate ecosystem and the more people come and go, the more evidence they disturb.
"I’ll be quick, guys," she said.
"Hey, Viking, want some Vicks?" one of the techs asked her. "From what Bruce says, they’re pretty juicy in there."
"No, I’ll be fine."
Sgt. Mullins said, "I’ve called Rick and Don. They’re gonna come out first thing in the morning."
"Good. That’ll move things along. We can each take a room."
Armed only with a flashlight, a notepad, and a pencil, Vi entered the home of Zach, Theresa, Hank, and Ben Worthington and closed the door behind her. Standing in the foyer, she noted two sounds: the rush of central heating and the voices of the lawmen standing on the front porch. It felt good to be out of the cold though she knew the warm air would only magnify the smell.
The house was dark, in the exact condition Bruce had found it.
Vi walked into the dining room. She hadn’t breathed yet and her eyes made slow progress adjusting to the darkness. At the dining room table she stopped, letting form and detail vivify in the shadows.
Then she took an unflinching breath.
Sweet. Rich. Rot.
Some putrid aberration of macaroni and cheese.
So keen she could taste it.
She sniffed again, letting the scent of decay engulf her. During her second month in Criminal Investigations Division she’d caught her first suicide—two summers ago on a sweltering July afternoon, a seventy-four-year-old man suffering with Alzheimer’s had put a twelve gauge under his chin. He was found a week later in a small trailer without air-conditioning. Though his smell was horrific, she discovered surprisingly that she couldn’t shun it, that she would accept, possibly embrace that awful stench out of reverence and compassion for her dead. The visceral intimacy of it inexplicably bound her first to the victim, then to the decoding of their murder.
A bright waning moon was rising over Lake Norman, its light spilling across the linoleum floor of the Worthingtons’ kitchen.
When Vi saw the little boy under the breakfast table something twitched inside of her. She walked into the moonlit kitchen, knelt down by the table, and brushed her bangs out of her eyes. Turning on the flashlight, she shined it in the boy’s face, then down the length of his small body. There were no visible ligature marks or bruises but his head rested awkwardly on the floor.
Broken neck.
The flashlight beam passed slowly down his right arm and stopped at his hand, the fingers drawn into a tight fist. She shined the beam onto his other hand. Those fingers were loose, clutching what looked like a battery.
Vi walked to the backdoor and peered through glass panes into the moony backyard, taking in the oak, its tree house, the rope swing, the pier, the lake. Cutting off the flashlight, she walked back through the dining room into the den, her eyes now where she wanted them, accustomed to the shadows. She could’ve turned on the lights but she needed to encounter the house as he had encountered it.
The smell sharpened in the den. She stopped and looked down at a bowl of popcorn on the floor. A videotape case sat empty on top of the television. Movie night. She walked over, glanced at the title: Where the Red Fern Grows.
When the telephone rang, Vi drew a sudden breath.
The answering machine picked up after two rings: "This is Theresa."
"Zack, too."
"Hank!"
"And Ben!"
Familial laughter.
A boy’s voice continued: "We aren’t here. Leave a message if you want."
After the beep: "Hey ya’ll. It’s Janet. Hadn’t heard from you yet about next weekend, so I’m just calling to bug ya. Really hope you can make it. Jack and Susie send their love. Talk to you soon."
The silence resumed.
Stepping into the hallway, Vi glanced in the bathroom, then continued to the doorway of the older boy’s room. She saw Hank Worthington in bed under the covers. He only looked asleep and she thought, This house would feel so normal if you couldn’t smell the death.
At the end of the hall, the door to Zach and Theresa’s bedroom stood wide open. Vi approached carefully, as though she might wake them, pulse racing, a pounding in the sid
e of her neck.
She did not deny or curse the fear. Squatting down, she prayed, I don’t feel You in this house. Go with me into that bedroom. She rose, felt just as alone, but walked on until she stood in the threshold of the master bedroom, eyes watering from the smell.
Vi had no tricks for steeling herself up to see innocence eviscerated. It punched the wind out of you and then you carried on or you quit. Sgt. Mullins had told her that early on. He’d been right.
With the tip of her pencil, she flicked the light switch.
The room shrieked at her and she let slip a bated whimper. Her stomach fluttered as she took three steps forward and looked straight into the worst of it.
Mr. and Mrs. Worthington stared back at her, despoiled of any scintilla of dignity.
Vi jotted on her notepad, relieved to look away.
When she finished she walked back down the hall into the foyer and opened the front door.
It felt so good to breathe fresh air again. She wanted to wash her hands for an hour.
As she stepped onto the front porch and pulled the door closed after her, she felt Sgt. Mullins and the CSI techs studying her, reading the abhorrence on her face, reflecting it in their own.
"The parents are torn up," she said to everyone. "May be a ritual-type thing. And the boy under the table is holding something in his right hand."
One of the techs said, "You know Andrew Thomas used to live just across the lake. Bet you ten beers this was him. He’s come back out of hiding. Wanted to do it with a flourish."
As Vi stepped across the sidewalk into the grass, she saw a local news van parking in the cul-de-sac.
The patrolman stood in the street with his arm around Brenda Moorefield and as Vi walked toward them, cold again, she called her husband and told him not to wait up.
23
ON the day he planned to interview Andrew Thomas, Horace Boone woke to the frozen pitiless darkness of his singlewide shithole on the outskirts of Haines Junction. The kerosene heater had gone out again during the night and despite five layers of quilts and blankets he lay on the mattress on the floor, shivering uncontrollably. Having woken cold for the last two weeks he was beginning to realize that he would not survive a Yukon winter in this rundown shelter, when the temperature fell to minus forty and the wind howled through the thin walls.
He threw off the covers and came to his feet, already fully clothed in a camouflage bib and down hunting jacket he’d purchased last week at The Woodsman, one of the local outfitters. Moving out of the tiny bedroom, he crossed the "living room" in three steps and entered the kitchen. The refrigerator was the hotspot of the trailer this morning and he pulled open the door and grabbed a carton of orange juice. Shaking it up, he took a long sip of the acidic slush and then began foraging the kitchen cabinets for his breakfast.
While he consumed a stale Poptart he leaned against the sink and glanced through the living room at the wretchedness he’d called home for the last month. The mattress, the television, and that disgusting couch comprised the furnishings of his trailer. You could only sit on the left end of the couch where the springs still held weight. And if you smacked the brown cushions on a clear day, you could watch them emit a mushrooming cloud of dust into the sunbeams from their inexhaustible store.
He’d been doing most of his writing in the village at Bill’s diner, sitting in a booth near the window, drinking obscene amounts of coffee. In the last two weeks he’d written the first three chapters of his book on lined college rule notebook paper. They chronicled his first encounter with Andrew Thomas at the bookstore in Anchorage, his journey to the Yukon, and his sneaking into Andrew’s cabin. He kept the purple notebook with him at all times during the day and stored it in the freezer while he slept so that if the trailer caught fire his manuscript might have a chance.
On October 30, the seventh anniversary of my mother’s death, I discovered that my life in Haines Junction, a life I loved madly, was over.
Just before noon I was sitting in the computer lab of the public library reading an emotional Live Journal entry from an internet friend I knew only as Tammy M. Midway through a hefty paragraph in which she analyzed her incapacity for shallow social interaction, the Champagne woman sitting at the computer beside me turned to her husband and said, "Look at that, Ralph. Andrew Thomas is back."
Adrenaline shot through me, I felt the bloodheat color my face, but when I glanced over at the couple I saw the woman pointing to a news headline on her monitor. Feeling my gaze, she looked at me.
"Horrible, isn’t it?" I couldn’t speak. "Says he slaughtered a whole family."
"Where?" I choked on the word.
"I’m not sure, let me see." She scrolled to the beginning of the article. "Here it is. Davidson, North Carolina."
Something inside of me died right there. I found the website and skimmed the article and the names of the victims. In the third paragraph I read these words:
The next door neighbor of the Worthingtons, Elizabeth Lancing, was kidnapped on Monday. Though unforthcoming with details at this time, authorities have alluded to their belief that her kidnapping is related. Her husband was Walter Lancing, a former friend of the suspected serial killer, novelist Andrew Thomas, and is believed to have been one of Mr. Thomas’s victims, though his body was never recovered.
My head ached and I feared losing consciousness so I sent the article to the network printer and logged off the computer. Taking my printout, I walked out of the library into the fierce noonday cold.
I reached my Jeep, climbed inside, pored over the rest of the article.
The description of the lighthouse and what had been done to poor sweet Karen broke me.
My safe little world had just been blown the fuck apart.
On the off chance that Andrew Thomas was in fact a psychopath, Horace Boone stopped to use a payphone on the way to his cabin.
It took him a moment to recall the number.
The phone booth stood in an alley against the building that housed The Lantern. It was a clear day, blue and very cold. He looked at his watch. There was something awfully depressing about knowing it was lunchtime when the sky shone no brighter than 9:00 a.m. and wouldn’t for months to come.
She answered, "Hello?"
"Mom?"
A brief pause and then, "Hello, Horace."
"Look, I should’ve called before. I—"
"Where are you?"
"Canada."
"Well thanks for letting me know you’re alive. I’ll pass along the good news to Dad."
"Mom, stop it, just—"
"No, you don’t get to not call me for two months and then be friends."
"Will you just stop talking for two seconds? Something very big has happened in my life. I can’t talk about it now, but it’s exciting. I just wanted to call and say I love you."
"What, are you in danger?"
"No. I don’t think so. Look, I have to go. I promise I’ll call you again soon."
"Horace—"
He hung up the phone, walked back to the Land Cruiser, where he sat behind the wheel for a moment, clearing his head, going once more over everything he would say to Andrew Thomas—the praise, the questions, the threat.
Then he cranked the engine and headed off toward the woods, trying to ignore the very real possibility that he would not be coming back.
24
HURTLING down the dirt road toward my cabin, I discovered what an enormous coward I had become. All the way home I tried to pretend I hadn’t read the news. My dream was to remain in the wilderness outside Haines Junction until the end of my days, writing for the joy of it. I’d intended to die out here, an old recluse. This last year I’d been happy for the first time since Orson and Luther ripped my life away from me. I felt at home in these woods and I had never expected to feel that again.
I reached my narrow drive and turned into the forest.
The anger subsided but fear crept in, eroding the lining of my stomach with that old familiar ache. It
conjured a parade of images I’d spent years trying to forget, and as I glimpsed my cabin through the trees something whispered, One of them is alive.
No. I’d watched my brother Orson take a full load of buckshot to the chest. I’d seen the vacancy in his eyes thirty seconds later, the life running out of him. I’d left him frozen on the porch of a remote desert cabin. My twin was dead; he wasn’t coming back.