by Blake Crouch
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.
I parked in front of the cabin and turned off the Jeep. Staring through the cracked windshield, I thought of Luther Kite, recalled standing over him holding a twelve gauge to his chest, my finger grazing the double triggers. But I hadn’t killed him. I’d thrown the shotgun across the room and left him to die
on that cold front porch, severely wounded and miles from the nearest town with no mode of transportation. He could not have survived. He was dying when I left him. Please God, You would not have let that monster survive. And then this piercing thought: What if my unwillingness to pull that trigger has cost six people, including an entire family, their lives?
I wasn’t ready to accept that. Luther Kite died with Orson in that snowy Wyoming desert. The Worthingtons’ and Karen’s killer—whoever had blazed that gory trail across North Carolina—was a copycat. It’s not my fault.
I opened the door, stepped out of the Jeep, the woods cold and still.
Walking toward the porch, I wondered, But why kill in Davidson across the lake from my old home? And why kidnap Beth Lancing? As I thought her name, my self-interest evaporated and it registered for the first time that she’d been taken, that if she weren’t dead now she was in the company of a madman.
Halfway up the porch steps, a sob spurted out of me. I sat down and wept like I hadn’t wept in years, hanging blame around my neck for everything that had befallen that ill-starred family. The Lancings would’ve been better off never to have known me. I’d taken everything from them. Everything. And now, seven years after the death of Walter, their association with me continued to produce suffering. How could I not try to help Beth?
I stood up and walked into the cabin, aware that the defense mechanisms in my brain were attempting to unplug me. The immense pain I’d endured through those dark years had nearly turned me into a stoic. The tears surprised me. I’d wondered recently if I had it in me to ever cry again.
Between the time I closed the door and set the news article on the breakfast table, the decision was made and I’d acknowledged that it could only be Luther.
So I walked over to my bed and dragged a suitcase out from underneath it, shaking as I began to pack.
I was rummaging the bottom drawer of a dresser in search of an envelope of hundred-dollar bills when I heard a car approaching down my drive. Closing the drawer, I came to my feet in pure astonishment. In the five years I’d lived in this cabin I rarely received visitors and was not expecting one now.
Though only three in the afternoon, the sun had slipped back behind the peaks, the forest draped in an eerie twilight. I heard a door slam and through the window watched a figure step onto the porch.
There was a knock.
Taking the subcompact .40 caliber Glock from the top dresser drawer, I slipped it into the pocket of my fleece pullover and went to greet my guest.
When I opened the front door, firelight from inside the cabin streamed across the gaunt visage of a young man I’d seen around the village these last few weeks, a small kid with an acne-cratered face, swallowed in a huge down jacket. The moment we made eye contact he looked away.
“Help you?” I asked. He found my eyes again, his hands fidgeting behind his back.
“Mr. Carmichael?” he said.
“Yes?” I sensed a frightened innocence behind those twentysomething eyes.
“May I come in for a moment?”
“Why?”
“There was something I wanted to talk to you about.”
He was letting in the cold so I stepped back and ushered him inside.
The young man stood beside the breakfast table, took a good long look at me. His Adam’s apple rolled in his throat and his hands shook.
I said, “Well, do I have to guess?”
“What? Oh, no.”
As he leaned against the breakfast table, our eyes fixed simultaneously on the article which lay face-up, its headline in large black font:
FAMILY SLAYING LINKED TO ANDREW THOMAS
He looked up quickly and said, “Julie Ashburn sent me out to see if you could work tomorrow night. The Curling Club is having a dinner.”
I reached back, pulled my hair into a ponytail.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Horace. I just started helping her out. Sort of a gofer. Lucky to get the job.”
“Well, you’ll have to tell her that I can’t do it this time, Horace.”
“Oh, okay. That’s fine, I mean…” He glanced once more at the article, then back at me, becoming breathless. “I’ll let her know. Should I tell her you’re going on vacation? That that’s why you can’t?” I just stared at him and slid my hands into my pockets, fingering the cold metal of the handgun, trying to talk myself down from the paranoia. He doesn’t suspect anything. He’s acting strange because he’s strange. World’s full of strange people. Nothing more than that. He doesn’t know who I am.
“The reason I say vacation,” he continued, “you know is just cause I notice you have a suitcase out over on the uh, the thing over there.”
“Yes, I’m going away for a little while.”
“Well, okay, then I’ll uh, I’ll tell Julie.”
He couldn’t help himself. For the third time he looked at the article.
“Why don’t you take it with you?” I said. “I’m finished with it. Crazy stuff, huh?”
“Yeah. It’s…wow. Well, look, I’ll uh, I’ll let Julie know.” He picked up the article, then said, “I’m very sorry to bother you.”
As Horace walked by and opened the front door, I realized how paranoid I’d become. He stepped out into the afternoon darkness and I lingered in the doorway, watching him climb into a Land Cruiser and head back up the driveway. The noise of its engine soon faded into woodland silence and there was nothing but the whisper of wind in the firs.
I walked back inside to finish packing, my thoughts returning to how I would find Luther Kite in this wide wide world.
Driving home through the cold Yukon darkness, Horace Boone could hardly contain his joy. Having read Andrew Thomas’s manuscript, Desert Places, he understood perfectly well what was happening: on the supposition that Andrew was telling the truth, Luther Kite had survived the desert, was now alive and wreaking havoc, and Andrew was going to find him. Though it would devour all his savings, Horace would follow.
This was as much of a story as any writer could dream of.
I lay awake in bed, the sleepless hours ticking away. My suitcase was already packed in the Jeep and when I woke in the morning I had only to walk outside, climb behind the wheel, and drive away. Whitehorse, Yukon was 158 kilometers to the east. There I’d catch a flight to Vancouver and from Vancouver, on to America. In a storage locker in Lander, Wyoming, there were things that might help me find Luther Kite—my brother’s journals containing poetry, photographs, even a record of his and Luther’s activities. I’d put it all in storage after fleeing Orson’s cabin seven years ago because some of it incriminated me.
Now something was needling me about Luther and how I would find him. It seemed I’d read somewhere in Orson’s journals that he’d grown up on an island.
There was a cracking in the distance. I knew this sound.
My first autumn in the Yukon I woke in bed one night petrified by a mysterious cracking in the forest. Unable to fall back asleep, I dressed and crept through the trees, arriving at last at a frozen pond where a bull moose was stamping his hooves into the ice. I’d watched him finally break through and dip his muzzle into the frigid water for a drink.
Hearing that sound again, I imagined it to be a goodbye of sorts and it threatened to unglue me. But I wouldn’t cry anymore tonight. I’d loosed all the tears I was going to shed and now existed in a state of shock—shock that I was willingly leaving my harbor to sail back into madness. It was the uncertainty that haunted me, mostly for Beth Lancing, selfishly for myself—as I lie in bed watching fireshadows dance along the rafters of my precious home, I couldn’t purge the thought that I would never see this place again.
25
EARLY Friday morning Vi pulled into the driveway of her new home and turned off the car. The far left window on the façade of her house glowed and through half-drawn blinds she saw her husband rising out of bed. She climbed out, shut the door, sat down on the back bumper of the Cherokee. She glanced
at her watch. It was one minute before five which meant she’d been awake now for forty-six hours.
Dawn was imminent. She gazed out across the treeless subdivision, hushed and still. The drone of the interstate reached her from beyond the field, a quarter mile distant, hidden behind a sliver of pines. There was never a moment in Arcadia Acres when the interstate fell silent. But she loved its transient undertone, found comfort in it. And she relished the ordinariness of this neighborhood. When Vi looked down Briar Lane she didn’t see a street of soulless homogeneous starter homes. She saw herself and Max earning an honest living. Because Vi wasn’t raised on entitlement she aspired to simple things—a family, comfortable home, occasional vacations to Gatlinburg and Myrtle Beach, finding an identity in her community, her church, her precinct.
In the cold misty silence of Arcadia Acres she meditated on the blessings in her life. After the crime scene she’d just processed she needed this stabilizing solace.
On the way to the front door she gathered up the broken necks of Ben and Hank Worthington, the evisceration of their parents, the shock of Jenna Lancing, and shoved it all into an insensate alcove she’d been conditioning in the back of her mind. This was the hardest part—walking into a warm peaceful home after thirty-five hours in hell. It was unbearable to Vi that such disparities could exist and she wondered, Which is the illusion?
Her husband was standing in the foyer in his briefs when she stepped inside. The aroma of newly ground coffee beans engulfed her and as the front door closed Max came forward, arms opening for an embrace. But Vi put her hand on his chest and shook her head.
“It’s all over the news,” he said.
She walked past him and turned left into the hallway, still lined with unopened boxes.
“Don’t you wanna talk, sweetpie?” he called after her.
When she reached their bedroom she set her purse on the dresser and sat down on the edge of the giant waterbed, only slightly smaller than the dimensions of the bedroom.