The Night We Burned

by S. F. Kosa

  Then I realize how stupid I’m being. How paranoid. How pathetic. I know how to survive. I know how to keep moving forward, even when guilt threatens to crush me. I’ve built a good life, a little lonely but mine to control. Am I really going to run at the first sign of trouble?

  I exit the bathroom stall, rinse my mouth, and smooth my hair. Stare at myself in the mirror and assess. The first thing I need to do is understand what I’m dealing with.

  By the time I leave the bathroom, the editorial meeting is over. Valentina’s in the conference room talking to Freya, but she looks up as I pass. “You okay, Dora?”

  “Yeah—but I shouldn’t take ibuprofen on an empty stomach. Did you approve Miles’s story?”

  Valentina nods before returning to her conversation with Freya, a nonchalant confirmation of all my worst fears. I head for the cubicles, my heart speeding as I catch sight of Miles’s curls over the top of a partition. He’s on the phone, his head bowed over his laptop. I slip into the conference room and retrieve my own computer. Then I veer toward my own cubicle as my nausea returns. I have to get control of myself and think.

  I spend a half hour copyediting Heidi’s latest piece on the heir to an East Coast fortune—a long-lost child who turned out to be an impostor. By the time I’m done, I can feel the ground beneath my feet again.

  I have a few options for how to deal with this mess. I could bury my head in the sand and hope Miles won’t figure out my involvement. I’ve covered my tracks. Severed any link I might have had to my past self. It’s possible even Miles couldn’t figure it out, but I’ve seen him when he gets a nose for a story—he’s relentless. So the passive approach is risky.

  I could go back to Valentina and do my best to stab Miles in the back. Last month, I heard her yelling at him for running up too many expenses for his SoCal story. She might be willing to clip his wings after a few well-timed comments about the costs of a treasure hunt. I’ve been present for more than one lecture about expense reports and ad blockers and subscription programs and the woes of internet business models in the age of recession. After years at the Chicago Tribune, Valentina managed to gather some backers and start Hatchet on a shoestring. Over ten years, she grew it into the fifty-person juggernaut it is today, but the margin has always been razor thin, and other online mags have been dropping like flies. There are two copy editors at Hatchet, and I’m the newest, out of my ninety-day probationary period just a month ago, so if our finances go south, I’ll be the first to walk the plank. Maybe I don’t want to remind her of that. And…she brought in Miles with the promise of latitude, and I’m just the new fact-checker, not the finance director.

  My only remaining option is to try to get myself into a position where I can understand this. And maybe even control it. I glance over at Miles again. He’s finally off the phone, so I head over there.

  “Hey,” I say when I reach his space. “I missed the end of your pitch.”

  He looks up from his laptop—the Bend Bulletin site is up on his screen, and the headline reads “Trailer Fire Leaves One Dead in ‘Mysterious’ Circumstances”—and his expression softens with concern and relief. “Are you okay? I couldn’t tell if you were choking or if I just grossed you out. I thought you went home.”

  “Nah, I’m fine. I actually wanted to hear more about the story,” I say, my toes curling in my shoes. “I was only a teenager when the massacre happened and totally caught up in my own life, but I do remember it—it was all anyone could talk about for months afterward. Do you really think it’s connected to this one guy’s murder, just because he’s one of the survivors?”

  “I know it is,” he says, pushing his glasses up his nose. “That rock that was shoved into his mouth? It’s connected to the cult. I looked it up—painted rocks were found all over that cult compound after the fire twenty years ago. The killer’s sending a message.”

  I force a skeptical eyebrow raise, even though sharp prickles are blooming in my chest. “Are you sure it’s not just part of the mobile home that burned down around him? A chunk of the ceiling or something could have fallen into his…” I trail off, my words shriveling as his mouth twists into a condescending smirk.

  “I just talked to the morgue attendant,” he informs me. “He’s nervous as hell about losing his job, but he was freaked out enough to talk to me. That rock in Moore’s mouth was painted. Blue, apparently. Had symbols on it and shit. That’s no chunk of ceiling.”

  “Fine,” I say, dread and memory dancing in my thoughts. “It was a painted rock. And let’s say the killer put it there—what do you think motive is?”

  He nods like he was waiting for me to ask. “I’d just about forgotten about the Oracles massacre until I got this tip, but then it all came back. All those people, trapped inside that temple or whatever, and the door was barred from the outside. We all know that part. But did you know a lot of them were stabbed? Like, some of them were dead even before the fire. It had to have been absolute mayhem in there.”

  It was. The scars on my legs tingle with memory. The guilt rises up, threatening to choke me. “I remember reading something like that,” I mumble.

  “I realized something when I looked the whole thing up, though.” He turns back to his laptop and clicks another tab—this one is the Wikipedia page for the Oracles of Innocence. “Three adult survivors, right? Along with something like a dozen little kids, all of them really young, like toddlers and babies. But one of those three adults”—he squints at the screen and reads off bits and pieces—“Shari Redmond—she went by the name Ladonna, apparently—she was sentenced to nine years for manslaughter. But…here it is: Marie Heckender.” He gives me a triumphant look. “She’s the one who barred the door, and she was only sentenced to ten years. She gave investigators names of who was inside the building as part of the deal that got her a shorter sentence.”

  “That’s helpful,” I say in a strangled voice. I should have paid closer attention to the trials. But by the time they started, three years after the fire, I’d left the state, off to start a new life with a new name, desperate to leave all of it behind.

  “She gave investigators thirty-five names,” Miles continues, oblivious to the terror that is melting my brain. “But they were all cult names. Things like Darius—that was the leader—and Basir and Goli. Not birth names, which would have made it easier. In the end, only twenty-nine of those thirty-five names were matched up with remains. That leaves six bodies that must have been too charred to be identified or that belonged to people who were off the radar, no families or friends to notice they were gone.”

  “That’s a tragedy, but I’m not getting how it connects to the Bend murder.”

  His brown eyes crinkle at the corners. “I think the key here is in the bad math.”

  “Bad…math?”

  “Thirty-five names. Twenty-nine matches. But only four bodies were never identified. Not six. To me, this looks like a revenge killing, you know? The killer went to a lot of trouble to send a message. Could have been a family member of one of the victims. Or it could be Shari Redmond or Marie Heckender, one of the two other adult survivors. Or it could be one of the unknown survivors. The two who got out without anyone knowing. Those two might have a deep reason to kill.”

  Stomach roiling, I say, “You just took about five leaps of logic to get to that, Miles. Let’s start with this—how do you even know there were only four charred bodies and not six? Wikipedia isn’t exactly known for its accuracy—”

  He opens the Kindle app on his phone, summons up a book I recognize immediately. Utopia on Fire: The Oracles of Innocence Cult by Siobhan Culpepper. The cover image is black with flames that lick at the white lettering. When it first came out eighteen years ago, I checked out a copy from the library in downtown Bend and pored over every word, every name, terrified. But the author chose to focus on Darius and his financial crimes, leaving the rest of us in shadow.

  Still
, it was the reason I chose to formally change my name. Just in case.

  I give Miles a vague smile, even as a glance at my watch lets me know my heart rate is skittering toward 120. “Are you going to interview the author?”

  “I would have, but she died last year of ovarian cancer. It gives me some jumping-off points, though. Apparently, the cult was based in Portland before they moved down to Bend. I’m wondering about who got left behind and if they might talk. It happens when cults make that leap to craziness—they shed members. Like when Jim Jones took his people to Guyana, some stayed in California. Turned out they were the lucky ones, right?”

  “Right,” I mumble. A lot of them melted into the woodwork, too embarrassed or scared to be linked to such a disastrous and crazy cult. And fortunately, the same thing happened with the Oracles. As far as I know, no one cooperated with Ms. Culpepper as she wrote the book, including the defendants who were still gearing up for trial as the manuscript was being rushed to press, which is why the information in it relies on public records. “It’s been years, though, Miles. If no one’s come forward—and if that author didn’t find them—what makes you think any of them will give you information now?”

  “I have my ways.” His gaze is so intent. “This one’s a mile deep, Dora. I can feel it. And…” He clicks over to a bookmarked page in the ebook. “I looked it up—it says only thirty-three bodies, four that were never identified. See? Bad math! What happened to the other two?”

  “Maybe the fire just burned really hot, Miles. Didn’t they have trouble getting an accurate victim count after Waco for that reason?”

  His shoulders sag a bit. “Could be, but think about it—what if two people got out of that building? What if they’ve been underground all these years, just waiting to strike?”

  A half-hysterical laugh escapes me. “Seriously?”

  He rolls his eyes. “Fine, fine. Give me a few days, and we’ll see. But I’m telling you—the Arnold Moore case is unbelievably weird, and my conversation with that morgue attendant just now confirmed it.”

  “Okay, I’ll bite,” I say, trying to sound blandly curious rather than utterly freaked out. “You got more details?”

  He leans close, all conspiratorial. “Arnold Moore wasn’t just stabbed in the heart—he had five stab wounds. And in very specific places.”

  I need a drink. “What do you mean, specific?”

  “Well, think about this. If you’re going to stab someone, how’s that going to go?”

  “No idea where to even start with that one,” I say hoarsely.

  “I mean, if you’ve got the advantage on someone, say, you’re holding them down, you’re going to stab in just one place, yeah? Like stab-stab-stab.” He says this while jabbing his hand downward with each word.

  “Okay.” I slide a finger along the top of the partition, watch my frayed fingernail catch in a groove. “Stab-stab-stab.”

  “But if the person’s fighting back, you stab wherever you can, right?” He squirms on his chair, waving his arms like he’s fighting off an attacker. “You get the point.”

  “Literally,” I mutter. “So which was it? Was Arnie—Arnold Moore—fighting back or not?”

  Miles doesn’t seem to notice my mistake. “We’ll know more when there’s an official autopsy report, but my source told me that it doesn’t look like old Arnold was struggling much at all,” he says, scrolling through his phone. “No defensive wounds. Empty bottle of cheap gin found in the bathtub with him. He mighta been drunk out of his mind. My guy said he was practically pickled.”

  “But the stab wounds weren’t all in one place, like they would be for a person who wasn’t struggling,” I say, guessing.

  “You nailed it. He had stab wounds”—he squints down at a note page full of his scribbly handwriting—“in the lower-left quadrant, a few inches from his belly button, and one in the top right, and that one slipped between his ribs. But then there were two on the lower left side of his back…”

  My heart is running like so long ago, when I was sure it would give out before I’d covered enough distance. “That’s four. What about the fifth?” I manage to ask. And please don’t say it’s in the—

  “Fifth one was in the throat,” he concludes.

  I could be working myself up over nothing. My memory could be wrong. It must be wrong.

  “I think the killer was trying to send a message,” he concludes. “A big, elaborate message. Rock, flame retardant, tub, specific stab wounds…”

  “Why do you keep calling them ‘specific’?”

  “Because it looks like the killer marked the places he was going to stab before he stabbed them. With permanent marker. Morgue guy said he could see the faint outline of black marks around the wounds. Pretty weird, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I murmur. “Pretty weird.”

  “I’m going to try to track down the autopsy report for Stephen Millsap—that was Darius the cult leader’s real name. DA’s archive only goes back to 2018 on the web, and that’s only press releases anyway. No details. I need to file a formal request.” He pushes his dark hair off his forehead.

  “Why would you need his autopsy report specifically?”

  “Just a hunch. Wondering if there are any more similarities. Painted rock. Fire. And…premeditated stab wounds.”

  “A lot of people in that meeting hall died of stabbing, though,” I say in a hollow voice.

  He waggles his eyebrows. “Like I said, just a hunch. I got the all clear from Valentina to head down to Bend and do interviews with the police chief and ME, along with anyone else who’s game. And maybe I should get all the autopsy reports.” He taps a reminder into his phone, the air around him almost crackling with his energy. “And any records of who else was in that cult, from the very beginning all the way until the end. I’ll put feelers out in Portland. Maybe there’s some sort of support group? Maybe one of them is our killer or can point me to those two mystery people who escaped. I want to be the one to track them down.”

  “Wow,” I say as my watch beeps, warning me of an irregular, frantic heart rhythm. “That’s a lot of work.” But then, defiant hope sparks in me, bright as a flame. “Need some help?”

  He sits back. “Really? I thought Valentina was really piling the work on you. I heard the whole litany during stories in progress.”

  “Nothing I can’t handle. I’m a bit of a workaholic.”

  “Yeah, Valentina was urging some of us to try to get you out for happy hour or something.” He gives me a coy look. “I’d be game.”

  I wave the maybe-kinda-sorta invitation away, even though the thought sparks a rebellious kind of want inside me. A normal life, with friends and lovers. I’ve never had that—and if I want it at any point in the future, I’m going to have to fight for it. “I was thinking, actually…I mean, this happened in my hometown, and I’ve always been sort of interested in it.” I glance down the hall, where Valentina sits in her glass-walled office, talking to the air with a Bluetooth bud in her ear. If I’m going to do this, I need to be all in. A fact-checker can do most of her work from her desk. But a journalist? “Honestly, one of the reasons I took this job was that it seemed like there might be…I don’t know, potential to…write something?”

  Miles tilts his head. “Really?”

  Nope. “Yeah, really. Like, get out there and do some interviews or something? Find some leads? But if that’s a stupid idea, it’s fine. I’ll still help—”

  “I think it would be fun, actually,” he says. Our eyes meet, and I feel his gaze all the way down to my toes. “I’m leaving tomorrow morning. And no one else is on this. Not yet, I mean, except for the Bulletin, but that’s just basic—no way they have the budget for investigative; I’m guessing they’re barely hanging on, and half that rag is advertising.” He shakes his head, presumably at the creeping demise of local journalism. “So it’s all mine. I’m talking to
the police chief tomorrow.” He picks up his phone again. Checks it. “Ben Ransom. Obviously pissed off, but still agreed to a little sit-down. You really want to come?”

  Oh god. Am I really up to this? The last thing I want to do is be face-to-face with Ben Ransom again. He just so happens to be a friend of my “parents.” He was early in his career, just a detective when I met him, and I spent my three years in Bend terrified he’d figure out exactly who I was.

  “Maybe we can divide and conquer,” I suggest. “My mom’s a social worker; I swear she knows everyone in town, and she might have a few tips for who we should talk to. And I can gather records and do your background research, stuff like that?” I already know where I need to go first.

  His brow furrows. “I don’t think Valentina will spring for this, though. I’m planning to go for a week to gather all my material, and it’s near the holidays and rates are higher, and—”

  “It’s okay,” I say with a bright smile. “I’ll stay with my folks.”

  As soon as he nods, I whirl around and find Valentina. She’s skeptical at first, but in four months, I’ve beaten every deadline and taken on extra work without a single complaint, and I promise to keep doing that remotely while I help Miles. I enthuse over the story’s potential even as my stomach churns. I plead with her for a chance to do some writing, even if I don’t get a byline. I promise her that I won’t expense a thing.

  I can do this. I can manage it. There are only a few pieces of evidence tying me to what happened, and I can make sure Miles never gets his hands on any of it.

  As soon as Valentina gives me the all clear, I shut myself into the empty conference room to call a woman I’ve barely spoken to for over ten years, the person I just described to Miles as my mom.

  “Hi,” I say when she answers. “It’s Christy.”