The Red Hunter

by Lisa Unger

  “It’s a look,” said Troy.

  “Yeah,” said Raven. “Demolition chic.”

  They had a good laugh at that, Raven and Troy, as Claudia put on the kettle for tea. They all sat at the table. It had been here, a thick wood piece and two long benches, one on either side. She’d sanded down and refinished the set, created a centerpiece with a piece of driftwood she bought at a garage sale and some bleached starfish shells.

  “There are going to be consequences,” said Claudia. “You get that, right? I’ll talk to your father and we’ll come up with something.”

  “I know,” said Raven.

  “But I’m glad you came home,” said Claudia, reaching for her daughter’s hand. “And I get that we need to have a bigger talk about the issue that’s at the root of all of this. I thought I was handling things the right way. I did my best, Raven. I’m sorry you felt like you had to do what you did to find yourself.”

  “I’m sorry, Mom,” said Raven.

  Claudia thought she might even mean it.

  She made a bed for Troy on the couch and tucked Raven in upstairs. She thought about trying Ayers again but figured it could wait until morning. Exhausted, she climbed into bed and fell asleep crying, thinking about Raven chasing after the son of Melvin Cutter. Claudia was definitely going to need a couple of hours with her therapist after this one.

  • • •

  IT WAS AFTER TWO WHEN she woke, some sound echoing in the air around her. She lay still a moment, listening. She slipped from bed and peered out her door. She could hear Troy snoring downstairs; Raven’s room was dark, the door ajar as she had left it. The floor was cold and creaky beneath her feet.

  At her window, she saw that the moon had risen high and full over the trees. That’s when she saw the shifting of shadows, a form drifting from the trees dark and silent. He moved quickly, then slipped into the hole where the door had been in the barn. She drew her breath in and stepped back, heart hammering. She saw a faint light then, maybe a flashlight beam, brighten the darkness of the barn just a little.

  She reached for the phone and called 911.

  “There’s an intruder on my property,” she said when the operator answered. She gave her address. “He’s in the barn.”

  “Stay inside the house,” said the operator. “I’m sending someone right now.”

  “Okay,” said Claudia. Her hands were shaking.

  “Do you want me to stay on the phone until they get there?” the dispatcher asked.

  “Yes,” said Claudia. “There are two children sleeping in the house. Teenagers.”

  “I’ll advise patrol,” she said. “Can you see the intruder?”

  The light inside the barn went dark, and then the form slipped out again. Claudia strained to see his face, but she couldn’t. He was too far, and even though the moon was bright, he seemed composed only of shadow. Then he was moving quickly, away from the house, across the clearing behind the barn and into the trees.

  “He’s moved from the barn into the woods,” she said.

  “I’ll advise patrol,” said the operator again. Calm, professional. Claudia was soothed by her voice.

  She heard the sirens then, and a few moments later a prowler moved quickly up the drive—lights flashing but silent. As soon as the vehicle stopped, two officers climbed out, one headed into the barn, the other toward the trees.

  “They’re here,” Claudia said, releasing a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding.

  “Okay,” said the operator. “Stay inside until the officers come to the door. Do you want me to stay on the line?”

  “No,” said Claudia even though she wanted to say yes. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome, ma’am.” The operator ended the call.

  “Mom,” said Raven from behind her. “What’s happening?”

  “There was someone in the barn,” said Claudia. She wiped away at tears—anger, fear, exhaustion. Raven moved up close to look out the window. The officers were returning to the house. Claudia hurried down to meet them.

  It was Officer Dilbert again, and another even younger looking officer, this one a female. Raven stayed inside the door, while Claudia went out into the cold, slipping on the slippers she kept by the door.

  “We didn’t see anyone, ma’am,” said Officer Dilbert. “But there were boot prints over by the trees.”

  “We’ve had a rash of vehicle and empty home break-ins lately,” said the young woman, her thick curls pulled back tight. “Some petty thefts. You said just one intruder?”

  “That I saw.”

  “Also, ma’am?” said Officer Dilbert, seeming more like a teenager than ever. “You know with the history of the property and how long it has stood empty, there are rumors that the place is haunted. So local kids sometimes sneak out here on a dare.”

  Something about the way he said it, she wondered if he had been one of those kids once.

  “You know,” said Claudia, “folks keep alluding to the history of this house. But I don’t know what you mean. What history?”

  The two officers exchanged a look. “Sorry, ma’am,” said Officer Dilbert. “I thought you knew.”

  She shook her head, wrapped her robe tight around her. Dread dug a pit in her stomach. She could feel Raven vibrating behind her.

  “Maybe ten years ago now, longer, I guess,” he said. “A man—a police officer and his wife were murdered here. They had a young daughter; she survived.”

  “Murdered?” said Claudia. The word shredded her. How could she not have known this? “How? Why?”

  “The perpetrators were never caught,” said Officer Dilbert. “But they were allegedly looking for some money that had been stolen. They tortured the family in an attempt to recover it, but as far as anyone knows, that money was never found.”

  “Some folks think it’s out here,” said Officer Williams. “They come looking sometimes.”

  “Of course, it’s not,” said Officer Dilbert. “Someone would have found it long ago if it was.”

  Claudia couldn’t believe what she was hearing. How could she not have known this? Wouldn’t her father have said something if his tenants were murdered on the property he owned? But maybe not. The guy barely ever talked; her most vivid memories of him were of him blanked out in front of some game or reading the paper. She thought back. Ten years—Raven had been small. Maybe it happened when Claudia had been at Martha’s place in New Mexico, trying to figure out her life, her marriage. Or maybe news of a murder in the tiny burg of Lost Valley, New Jersey, didn’t make it to the city.

  She turned back to the house. Raven looked stricken in the doorway, and Troy had come to stand behind her, his mouth hanging open. The house, so full of promise and possibility, suddenly seemed to radiate menace.

  “We can request that your house is put on regular patrol, have a squad car loop the drive once or twice a night. When I’m on duty, I’ll be sure to come by. I work graveyard—midnight to eight.”

  Claudia felt herself nodding.

  “Now that you’re here, fixing the place up, I bet kids’ll stop coming after a while. And if someone’s casing the place, a regular patrol might act as a deterrent.”

  Claudia was still nodding, but she felt like the ground beneath her feet was shifting and shaking. She leaned against the porch step banister to support herself.

  “I thought you must have known, Mrs. Bishop.”

  “No,” she said.

  “My friend Seth Murphy was the one who called the police that night. We went to school with the girl who lived here—Zoey Drake.”

  “She lived,” Claudia said. The words seemed to float from her lips.

  “Are you alright, Mrs. Bishop?” asked Officer Williams. Her deep, black eyes were kind, concerned. Just the sight of her young, sweet face made Claudia want to weep. Again. Some more.

  “I’m just—really shocked by this,” she said. She let herself sit on the top step. Raven came out to sit beside her. How much worse was this night going to get?
Her life? How many shitty, wrongheaded decisions could one person make? It was one thing to be a flaky dreamer when you were young, with a million possibilities ahead. As a forty-year-old mother of a teenager, it was downright dangerous and sad.

  “Seth Murphy knows all about the case if you’re interested,” said Officer Dilbert. “You’ll find him in town—or just Google him. He’s our local PI.”

  “A private investigator,” she said.

  “It was a long time ago, Mrs. Bishop,” said Officer Williams. “I don’t believe in ghosts. Do you?”

  No, she didn’t believe in ghosts. The living did far more harm than the dead. After her rape, she’d found herself wondering if violence like that left its mark on you. If it opened a hole in your life where other dark things could crawl through. If after something like that you were a magnet for more ugliness. Her shrink had talked her out of that kind of thinking. And she believed, had to, that she created her life, wasn’t just a victim. But sometimes, just sometimes, when she was feeling very sorry for herself, she imagined that she’d stepped into quicksand fifteen years ago and all this time, she’d just been very slowly, a millimeter at a time, sinking beneath the surface.

  twenty-one

  I’ve had a family emergency. I can ask the night doorman to look in on the cats until I return. I understand if you need to replace me.

  They’ll be okay. I’ll connect with Charlie. How long?

  Not sure.

  Keep me posted.

  WHY DIDN’T I JUST QUIT? Maybe I would. I was surprised to find that I didn’t really want to. The truth was that I had grown to like Nate Shelby’s place, his energy, his cats. I actually wanted to go back there, sleep in his white bedroom, watch the cats. Maybe he’d fire me and make it easy.

  “You need your own place,” said my father in the passenger seat of Paul’s Suburban. He had a single bullet hole wound in his forehead tonight. I had never seen him like that, but I knew from the files that I read that it was finally how he died. A bullet in the brain. I remembered the sound of it, the cracking report. It’s a distinctive sound. Once you’ve heard gunfire, you never mistake anything else for it.

  “You have to move on and build a real life. You can’t keep on like this. You’re a ghost.”

  “You should talk,” I said.

  “Very funny.”

  I took the key out of my pocket and looked at it.

  “What’s this key for, Dad?”

  But he was gone, and I was parked outside Seth Murphy’s office on Main Street. Seth was into his identity as PI, even had a door with an old-timey cloudy glass window. Seth Murphy Investigations. Background checks. Insurance claims. Missing persons and pets. I actually felt a little bad for Seth, as much as I could feel anything for anyone other than Paul. That night—I think it unstitched him a little bit. Even though he’d just grazed the edges of what happened, it got its hooks in.

  He couldn’t get out of his house that night; his dad had stayed up later than usual. That’s why he was late meeting me. An hour late. He’d run the whole way, arrived breathless at the bridge only to find me gone. He could see footprints in the soft earth leading up the bridge, Catcher’s, too. He could tell by the pacing nature of our tracks that maybe we’d waited awhile. He figured that he’d just missed me. So he took off running after us through the woods.

  What if he hadn’t been late? How long would I have stayed out there with him? Would I have been spared the things that happened to me? Would I have returned home to find my parents murdered, never understanding why? Or would my parents be alive? Probably not. They—those men—they were always going to kill everyone in that house. I wonder if they would have found what they were looking for if it weren’t for that siren? Maybe my dad did know. Maybe he finally would have relented and they would have gone. Maybemaybemaybewhatififonlyonandonandon, that terrible spaceless run-on into nothing and nowhere.

  Seth followed me that night, saw Catcher lying lifeless on the ground. Saw the parked car, the fourth man inside, sitting still in the passenger seat. He watched as I was dragged out of the barn window and across the clearing, screaming, to the house. He said a kind of shock settled, a paralysis. Then he slipped back, backward into the darkness, turned, and with every ounce of strength and speed, he ran for help. It took him just under twelve minutes to reach the Jacob home, two minutes of frantic pounding and screaming to rouse them from sleep, two minutes to dial 911. It took the police six minutes to race to our house and arrive at the scene. Twenty-two minutes. Within that span of time, I was tortured, and both my parents were killed. Still, he probably saved my life.

  Seth was kind of a nerd, which was why I had liked him. I was never into jocks or bad boys. He was sweet, smart, curious—a great lab partner. He had soft hands, a shy smile. I always thought he’d do something more with his life. Maybe he would have—if he hadn’t asked to meet me that night.

  I got out of the car and walked through the chill night to knock on the door, the glass cold beneath my knuckles, then again. The street was quiet, deserted—all the businesses shuttered for the night or empty. The recession hit this town hard, and it had not recovered. The coffee shop, the bookstore, the hardware store, all closed. Only the liquor and convenience stores still thrived. There was a pawnshop, too. A store that sold uniforms . . . which survived because most people around here were employed by the hospital two towns over, or the bottle factory just a few miles away. There was a lumber storage warehouse, too, down at the end of the street. Off in the distance, there was nothing but trees. There’s always a conflict here, between the lumber companies and all the environmentalists trying to preserve the forest.

  I say cut it all down. I hate nature. It has so many ugly secrets. It wants you back, wants to swallow your flesh, suck you back from whence you came. I like steel and concrete glass and engines, metal tracks and rebar. Things that man must wrestle into shape. We build whole cities, just to keep nature away, to show it that we’re boss—for a little while anyway.

  Seth came to the door finally, wearing a Rutgers sweatshirt, three days of stubble, and dark purple circles under his eyes. He wasn’t older than I was, but prematurely gray, he could pass for middle-aged.

  “Zoey,” he said.

  Something weird happened then, a kind of hard flash on the moment when I drove the hunting knife into John Didion’s heart. You have to be strong, purposeful to drive a knife blade through the powerful intercostal muscles of the chest. That blade was razor sharp, though—it slid right in, and he had no strength to resist me. It was easy. Didion released a soft wheeze, then slumped against me as if we were intimates. His weight, suddenly a ton, pulled us both to our knees. I pressed that knife in deeper. I felt the life leave him, a drain, a passing, something held then released. Then a strange total silence surrounded us, driving away all the noise from outside. I’d hoped for a blast of rage, or a deep surge of joy that vengeance had been delivered. Anything. Anything but the deep nothingness that followed, the yawning hollow inside me. I sat with Didion awhile, watching his blood spill, thinking of the black pool that my mother had lain in. I waited to feel something. Even remorse. Nothing. What does that make me?

  “You look horrible,” Seth said. He put on a pair of wire-rimmed glasses and inspected me. “Are you sick?”

  Maybe. Yeah. Maybe I am. I caught something that night, and it’s been wasting me slowly ever since, eating me from within.

  “I thought you might come,” he said when I didn’t say anything.

  He stepped aside, and I walked into the foyer, then followed him up a narrow flight of stairs into a large loft space. The kind of space he had—cavernous with exposed pipes and vents, wood floors—would have cost a fortune in the city. He probably paid less than a grand a month. Tall windows looked out over the other surrounding buildings, to a parking lot, to the woods beyond.

  I followed him through the room. There were several desks, all the monitors dark. Each workstation had some personal items—photos of people, kid
s, pets, a mug that read World’s Best Dad, a compact, and lipstick.

  “Expanding?” I asked.

  We walked through a doorway to his living quarters. A galley kitchen, a tossed bed, a plain gray couch, and an enormous television mounted on the wall. The set was tuned in to CNN, with the sound down. President Obama looked characteristically grim, graying, issued a condemnation of ISIS.

  “I hired a couple of people part-time,” he said. “They have their own gigs, too, pay me a percentage for office space.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought there would be so many mysteries in a small town.”

  He snorted.

  “There are as many mysteries as there are people,” he said. “Life is one big unanswered question.”

  I nodded, my eyes falling on some pictures on his round kitchen table. A woman, youngish, plain with glasses and some acne scarring, mousy hair. There was a professional portrait where she smiled stiffly, one with a friend, one where she sat awkwardly atop a horse.

  “Take Mariah Penny for instance,” he said, when he saw me sifting through the photos. “Missing forty-eight days.”

  “I didn’t hear about it.”

  “Twenty-eight years old, CPA, unmarried, lived alone, caregiver for her aging parents. She left the firm where she worked one night and didn’t come home. Somewhere between her office and her nice condo, she and her Mercedes C-Class fell into the vortex.”

  “Drugs?” I offered. “Depression? Caregiving is hard.”

  “She is a straight arrow,” he said. “A good girl. Cheerful, friendly, helpful by all accounts. No debts. No boyfriends. No secrets.”

  I sat, continued sifting through his notes and photos. “Maybe she just got sick of it all. Took off.”

  “No withdrawals or credit card usage since she went missing. Phone off the grid.”