59
The key fits, gliding easily in Carl’s grease.
Until then, a good part of me didn’t believe Carl knew where we were, in spite of feeling that this porch was a familiar set piece, in spite of the disturbing legend of the James Dean junkyard ravine, in spite of Carl’s last wicked remark about the little girls in the photograph as if I am about to find their skeletons with white veils tied perkily to their skulls.
The girl in the desert could be in this house. The lady in the rain. Nicole. Vickie. Violet.
My sister.
“You first,” I say to Carl. The words are sticky in my mouth.
“I’m not going in.” Carl is holding up empty hands in surrender again. Wiggling his fingers. “I’m staying here on the porch with Barfly, where there’s a breeze. I suggest you open some windows in there. Be sure to check out my aunt’s sewing cabinet. It’s a gem of carpentry. Nothing like it. Her father built it right to her specifications as a wedding present.”
I’ve nudged the door open farther with my foot, about four inches, revealing a sliver of inky black. I could wait until it’s light. My gut warns that every second counts. I keep the flashlight under my armpit and use my jeans to clean WD-40 off my hand, finger by finger. Carl must have unloaded the entire can.
I think of a picture of my sister that only I will ever see. It was two nights before she disappeared, a crisp brain shot I return to again and again.
She is fresh out of the shower, smiling, sitting cross-legged on her twin bed with wet, stringy dark hair that leaves damp spots on the shoulders of her yellow pajamas. Her face is scrubbed free of makeup. Her eyelashes are blond, lacy fringe.
There’s a faint shadow under her green eyes that she hates and can never get rid of no matter how much sleep she gets. I think it makes her look like a fairy, delicate and ethereal. My big sister was most beautiful like this, with no artifice.
“What are you scared of?” Carl asks impatiently.
That’s just it. Now that I’m at the door and he’s inviting me in, I don’t know.
* * *
—
The first thing to greet me isn’t a little girl ghost. It’s the vague smell of chemicals. Formaldehyde is my first thought. Darkroom fixer, the chemical bath that embalms an image forever, is the second.
In pitch black, with one working arm, I choose my flashlight over my gun. I shoot the beam across the room to make sure nothing is moving—that Carl hasn’t arranged some kind of trap with those two men on my tail.
I wish I’d thought to ask Carl for his more industrial flashlight. How weird and dysfunctional is our relationship that I’m certain my sister’s killer would obligingly agree to give me the better flashlight. That, minutes earlier, without a thought, I’d let him drink the last drop out of my water bottle.
The quick sweep reveals a large, open room with a living area to the left, a small kitchen to the right, and the requisite fireplace for a little house in the woods. I quietly push the door shut behind me and turn the lock. There’s a dead bolt, a good one, so I throw that, too. No way do I want Carl popping up behind me. I’ll take the chance that everything in here is dead.
I flip the switch on the wall twice. Nothing, as Carl promised.
The chemical smell is nauseating, a hint of cover to an unpleasant stink.
The swing on the porch has begun a high rhythmic whine that bleeds through the walls, harmonizing with the cicadas.
Control your physical arousal. If it isn’t a race, don’t run. I take a minute for the 4X4 exercise. I breathe in four seconds, and out four seconds. I do this exactly fifteen times. The swing still whines.
I visualize the search ahead of me. I see myself methodically investigating every room, an inch at a time. Walking out the front door into bright sunshine in about fifteen minutes without a scratch. It’s absurd, this visualization, but it has worked in the past.
I’d found my trainer on the Dark Web, where his reviews, detailed and frightening, maintained a steady five-star ranking. At the end of his insane games, he placed an icy can of Coke in my hand as a reward. I think of him now as I’m squeezed by awful silence.
He once asked if I had noticed how the long pauses in the games were the worst. The waiting for what you couldn’t see coming.
I had nodded obediently. I had sucked down his icy Coke and let it burn my throat, the most delicious thing I ever drank.
My mind would be the thing to kill me, he’d warned. He could train my body. But my mind? That is where even soldiers fail.
“You will never die on my watch,” he’d insist. I never believed him. Maybe that’s why he was so good at the game. Why Carl is so good. There is an established lack of trust.
I drip the light more judiciously around the room, clockwise. Blackout shades. That’s why it feels like an underwater cave.
A pine-framed couch with cushions and two oversize chairs, all obviously handmade. Photography books neatly arranged in a semicircle on a large glass coffee table. Paul Strand, Keith Carter, Diane Arbus, Robert Frank. Great photographers. The best. Henri Cartier-Bresson, master of the candid, the Hemingway of them all.
There’s no TV, no stereo, no shelves, no magazines with dates. There is a worn wooden floor. A thick layer of dust that sits on everything. A charred log in a filthy grate. A stunning desert landscape over the fireplace, rich in rusty color, empty of life. Carl’s mark is in the right bottom corner, a tiny, black clf. A rare photo from Carl not in black and white.
I scan the kitchen from where I stand. Gas stove, refrigerator, microwave, dishwasher. As soon as I step into the hallway, the smell burns and catches in my throat like airborne Tabasco.
I count three doors, all firmly closed, two to the left, one to the right.
My light flashes next on the cabinet at the end of the hall—a floor-to-ceiling behemoth of pine riddled with little doors and drawers of every size. The sewing cabinet Carl was talking about, presumably.
I couldn’t have missed it. It’s enormous, running all the way to the ceiling. Daisies are hand-painted on the porcelain knobs.
As I get closer, I see that almost every single drawer, every single cabinet, bears a white label with a name, written in Carl’s strong, artistic hand.
Elizabeth Ann. Mary Louise. Jean. Sandy. Clara. Betty. Little Boo.
Respectful, I think, just like the Waco memorial.
I shakily skim the light over the cabinet.
Searching for my sister’s name.
Eleanor, Belle, Sophia, Poppy. Vivian. Dixie. Lulu. Sadie.
Cinderella, Big Bertha, Gertrude, Scarlett, Penelope, Fiona, Tina.
I’ve been saying their names out loud.
When I stop, I can’t hear the porch swing anymore.
60
Rachel’s name isn’t here. Neither are the names of the other girls I’ve linked to Carl, three little red dots on the map, or any of the others who were runners-up. I don’t know what this means, or if it means anything.
I’ve counted. Twelve drawers and ten small doors. My imagination is roaming all over the place. I can’t bear to open even one of them.
I’m going to make Carl open this fucking sewing cabinet. Let him explain while I point a gun at his head. Make him touch whatever is in there.
My pain and fury are drowning out everything else—the fact that he instructed me to stop and admire the carpentry.
Maybe his brain only lets him see the things his aunt stored there in the past—the rainbows of fabric and thread; the pointy needles with invisible eyes; the mix of old buttons trapped like tumbled memories in old mayonnaise jars.
It doesn’t matter. Some part of him knows. He didn’t bring me here to knit him socks from his aunt’s yarn.
I have no idea if Carl has somehow sneaked into the house. I think I’d know. I think I’d feel him. I travel swiftly back to the living room. Slide the dead bolt. Open the front door a crack, and listen.
The moon’s bulb is on. As soon as I step outside,
it shows me everything.
A lifeless swing.
An empty porch.
No Carl. No Barfly.
The saucer to an old clay pot lies on the ground near the rickety porch trellis, half-filled with water. Carl has turned it into a makeshift dog bowl.
On the swing, he’s neatly lined up a collection of things removed from my backpack.
A result of a bizarre sense of fair play or a way to push me ever so politely into madness? Both?
I see the pain pills with the lid considerately removed. The water bottle. Three Tampax. One granola bar. A Ziploc bag stuffed with rocks and pebbles. The tiny key to nothing with the chain that hung around his neck.
The water bottle is now filled to the brim. Where did Carl find water? I screw off the lid and take a sniff. From a stream? I sweep my light into the corner where I had tucked my backpack for safekeeping when Carl’s eyes were closed.
It’s gone. My laptop, a travel kit of tools, a compass, the burner phones—all of it traveled into the night with Carl. He has successfully broken my other arm.
I toss two more pain pills down my throat and chase them with a sip of water. I jam the granola bar in my mouth and chew it until the dank taste goes away.
My trainer wouldn’t like these moves. Drinking from a bottle filled for me by a serial killer from an unknown water source. Dulling the edges of the pulsing pain in my arm that may be the single thing keeping me alert.
I stroll to the middle of the yard and stare up at the cemetery of stars.
“Carl!” I yell his name at the top of my lungs, in every direction.
There’s no echo. Here, the sound just disappears.
61
I start with the first hallway door on the left.
A small bedroom. One window. Blackout shade drawn and undisturbed, an old pine double bed with a wildly colored quilt of mismatched squares and nothing underneath but rodent droppings. A chest of empty drawers. A closet that holds six bare hangers and a man’s flowered Hawaiian shirt circa I-don’t-know-when.
I rip the shirt off the hanger and throw it over my shoulder. It might be useful. A door that leads into a cramped, dank bathroom indicates this is the master suite. A beveled, clouded mirror reveals a deranged girl out of focus.
I almost miss the old bookshelf by the side of the bed. Black-and-white photographs are grouped in simple frames. I shine the light on the first picture.
A middle-aged man leans on a spade in a garden. The woman standing next to him is equally somber, face cast down. Carl’s aunt and uncle? There’s no skill involved in the framing or lighting of these shots. I rove the light to the next photograph.
I stop breathing.
The Marys are sitting primly on a flowered couch like they are waiting for me. Maybe a year or two older than in the shot in the forest. Hands impatient in their laps, legs on the brink of escaping, faces busting with grins. Since the first time I saw them, I’d been almost certain they were twins.
In fact, they are two very separate girls. And now that they are sitting still, side by side, I can make distinctions. The more delicate nose on one, the wider eyes on the other.
Their silky hair is identically styled in short blond bobs, not straggly and free like in the forest. I lay the flashlight on the shelf so it casts a spotlight and pull the back off the frame. The glass falls out with it, drawing a trickle of blood on my thumb. I suck its metallic taste and read.
In memory of neighbor girls Mary Fortson and Mary Cheetham, age 11, Piney Woods. Last picture. Both born on same day May 5, 1935. Died Nov 6 and 7, 1946, one day apart.
It doesn’t say why they died. It doesn’t matter. When they died, Carl wasn’t born yet.
The critic was right—Carl was an illusionist. He never took his own picture of the Marys. He must have discovered old negatives. Stole someone else’s work. Created something new out of something old.
Made up the story about the girls in his book even though the real one seems more morbid and interesting.
All this proves is that Carl’s a liar. A thief. I already knew that.
I don’t have time to mourn my playmates. I place the Marys back in the frame, shut the door, and leave them dead. I think I always knew they were.
* * *
—
The sweep of the second bedroom takes no time. A blue futon sits on naked white tile. The closet is empty except for a broom. Blackout shades smother the two windows in here, too.
I’m guessing this is where Carl slept every night after his trial. I don’t have the whole picture, but I’m arranging pieces of it.
I stop at the third and final door.
The smell is worst here. I can hold my breath for ten minutes underwater, five times the average person who is in good shape and relaxed in a pool.
I can hold it with my hands and feet tied, while a Texas snake of undetermined heritage circles me. I’ve spent three hours in a loaded garbage dumpster on a 98-degree night with a ripe dead raccoon. I am my own lonely reality show.
I turn the knob, and my flashlight beam flies in the dark. The walls and the window are painted pitch black. Linoleum sticks to my shoes. The pink porcelain sink has a terrible, peeling sunburn. A pink toilet sits in the corner, lid down. I rake my neck on a cord that runs double across the old bathroom like a clothesline.
A piece of L-shaped plywood is fitted in the corner. It holds an old enlarger, a stack of pans, a row of bottles. Fixer. Stop bath. Developer. Hypo clear. The fixer has a hole bitten out of it and the liquid has stained its way through the plywood onto the floor.
The culprit, a rat, is lying dead six inches from my foot.
In a darkroom where there should be photographs pasted to the walls and clipped to the line for drying, there are no photographs.
I flip open the lid of the toilet. Dry, but reeking of sewage.
Two things happen.
The rat on the floor lets me know he isn’t dead.
My flashlight clanks into the toilet bowl and dies for good.
62
The rotting slats of the swing scrape my back.
Back, and forth. Back, and forth.
I punch the button on the flashlight in perfect timing with the push of my foot.
On, and off. On, and off.
An exercise in madness. There is no on. The light is stone cold.
The extra bulb and the batteries are in the backpack. Carl is probably using the backpack as a pillow right now. Maybe he dumped the contents twenty feet from me in the dark once he figured out how heavy it is. Hell, maybe he is twenty feet from me in the dark.
The swing is lulling me. Now that we’re acquainted, I can see it is the same swing, with the same jagged teeth, as the one in Carl’s book.
Back, and forth.
If I push off hard enough, I can see a slice of sky beyond the roofline. Down here, I’m just another one of the shadows gathering on the porch like there’s going to be a surprise party. We had a surprise birthday party for Rachel once. For a second, I saw what her face would look like scared. Thanks to Carl, that is how I almost always picture it.
The pain pills are a warm ocean lapping at my brain, a jazz singer humming under my skin. The pangs of hunger and the throb in my arm feel like they belong to someone else. The pine trees are rushing, a thunderstorm of leaves, the kind of sound that usually makes me feel like a little girl all tucked in.
I need to make a plan for the night before I can’t.
There’s no way I’m finding my way back up to the truck in the dark.
Early dawn isn’t that far away. Six hours. Maybe five.
It takes some effort to drag myself up from the swing. My whole body aches. The door is still open. I fumble in the kitchen for one of the straight-back chairs clustered around the small dining table. I scrape the chair noisily down the hall in the dark until it bumps into the sewing cabinet. Can’t think about that.
I choose the room with the futon and shut the door firmly behind me. Carl’s room.
<
br /> Still blind, I tilt the chair under the knob, cross over to the window, and rip away the shade. It clatters down, no problem. The more noise I make now, the more control I feel. A gray balm casts itself coolly over the room, not a lot of light, but enough.
I unlatch the window, shove it up, and suck in the harsh cinnamon of pine. I wonder if its tonic smell could cure cancer. There are tiny screen holes in my prison.
I leave the window open. Let bug and man come for me, I need to breathe. From my arm sling, I carefully remove the pain pills, the bag of rocks, and the tampons.
It was both considerate and disgusting of Carl to leave the tampons. I open the Ziploc bag of rocks and place eight of them in a row on the windowsill, another eight on the tilted edge of the chair seat. I scatter the rest in front of the door. It won’t be much of a warning, but it will be something.
I pull the broom out of the closet and sweep it across the futon, hoping to disturb anything nesting there. I take my gun out of the holster and place it and the broom on my good side, within easy reach.
I lay my head down on the dirty mattress and smell Carl’s scent in the fabric whether it is there or not. I feel for the key now hanging around my neck instead of Carl’s.
I see terrible things inside those drawers on the other side of the door.
I force my mind back to the trail and the scraps of napkins I’ve left waiting in the trees to guide me out.
A sudden, delicious rush floods my ears, my arms, my legs, my toes. The pills have been patient, held back by adrenaline. Not anymore.
The ocean sweeps me out and I let it.
I can see flashes. My sister’s face. The Marys. Barfly’s eyes.
I’m back at the napkins. They’re waving at me.
Paper Ghosts_A Novel of Suspense Page 23