If I Disappear

by Eliza Jane Brazier

  * * *

  —

  It’s just after six. The morning light reveals that the quilt is dirty, the mattress stained. The stink of rat shit is so strong that as soon as I fight my way out of the covers, I open every window, shredding the spiderwebs, mowing down the bug carcasses trapped in the runners.

  It’s cold but I’m driven out by hunger. I have half a bag of Cheetos in my car and another jacket, a pair of gloves. I couldn’t bring anything else with me. I didn’t plan ahead. Even as I got into my car early yesterday morning, I thought I would turn back around, realize all this was crazy, that I belonged somewhere, after all.

  I spent most of the past year in my bedroom. I was tired. Tired of going out. Tired of Tinder dates once I realized it was a sex app. Tired of meeting up with old friends who couldn’t get babysitters, so it was me watching their kids or me watching them watch their kids, phone calls for which they couldn’t get away, so they actually seemed annoyed that I wanted to talk to them. So we had nothing in common anymore, so the person I once knew was now just so relieved to have escaped themselves, to have moved on to something better, the magnitude of which I could never imagine, the power they feel in looking at a small version of themselves that they made.

  You never wanted kids. Never. You just didn’t understand it. How could you bring kids into a world like this? you said. Where there is evil everywhere?

  I spent the past year obsessively checking my favorite true-crime forums for six, eight, ten (fourteen?) hours a day, watching unsolved-crime episodes on YouTube, reading case files and finally listening to you over and over until I was hypnotized, pulled by your magnetism into your world, so immersed that it seemed only natural, it felt only right, that I should cross over into it, into the place that you swore I couldn’t understand unless I experienced it.

  I had always wondered what would happen if I disappeared. If I just kept driving. What if it was my choice? Instead of just allowing myself to vanish, day by day, year by year, what if I drove toward it, into the vanishing point at the end of the world, to a place where people went to disappear?

  I stepped on the gas, and I drove onto the twisty roads, into the isolation, the loneliness of my greatest, most inevitable fear. I drove toward you.

  The air outside the cabin has the exquisite, uncontained cold of the true outdoors. There are no warm pockets, no artificial respite. It soothes my aching fingers. I open my car door with care, even though your mother’s house is on the other side of the ranch. I know that sound travels mysteriously out here. I wrestle a fleece-lined denim jacket from the back of my car. It was my ex-husband’s, and it’s roomy and smells of nothing, the way he did. I find hiking gloves and the bag of Cheetos. A horse nickers.

  I have less than an hour before I’m supposed to meet your mother, and I plan to use it. I will find your yellow house. I start down the main thoroughfare, moving away from your mother’s house, away from the entrance, toward Jed’s house and the far edge of the ranch. A thin wisp of trail shoots off through the trees past the miniature train tracks, and I take that, thinking I will not be seen.

  The trail is overgrown, scattered with rocks and wet with dew. Beside me the land drops in a sheer cliff to the highway below. I pass by an empty field, and then I reach Jed’s house. There the trail dives down the cliff in switchbacks.

  I stop. There is a good sitting rock at the point of the cliff, the kind of place people go to think, gaze through the trees and across the highway, where the wide brown Klamath winds through the mountains. I sit down on the rock. There are cigarette butts scattered in a circle like a tribal stamp, glossed with spitting tobacco. I eat my Cheetos with my eyes fixed on the river.

  Where is your yellow house?

  I finish my Cheetos, stuff the empty bag in my coat pocket to throw away later. Then I take a deep breath and head down the trail. A creek runs through the bottom of the valley, bringing a primordial greenness, so it looks Jurassic, Irish, always in bloom.

  When I first notice the smell, I think I am imagining it. At first, it’s an undercurrent, like a rat in a trap, but recognition is instinctual. It’s a smell you know without anyone having to tell you what it is; it’s the smell of death.

  Episode 62: She walked into the kitchen and her sister was on the floor.

  Episode 18: She found the body.

  Episode 43: They were hidden in the walls, stuffed in garbage bags, hidden in the closet.

  Episode 33: Their bones were buried in the garden.

  I hear your story, in your voice: She found her in the woods, like she was meant to find her all along. Murder, she spoke. And I’m thrilled-attending-terror.

  The flies come next; it’s their turn. I hear the buzz, feel the warmth of the swarm, and then I see one, two zip, sail past, busy in their fly work. My muscles seize, tendons wind tight. It’s harder than it looks, finding a body, stumbling upon a body. It’s not all fun and games playing detective, and I cover my nose and my mouth with my gloves and I gasp into the worn leather and I wonder what I will do if I find your body. There’s no cell service. The police station is open only four hours a day but which hours? Your mother is expecting me. She told me not to leave. How will I preserve the evidence? Or should I just run? Should I leave you behind?

  I grip my phone, as if it might start working suddenly, if I really, really need it.

  The flies collect. The body appears: small, hairy and dark. The vultures are circling overhead, but they’re not here for you or me; they’re here for the cat.

  I stand over the body as the threads of bugs travel in and out of the caves its bones create. The cat is black with white spots, and I recognize it immediately. It’s your cat. It’s Bumby. I remember the pictures and videos: Bumby walking on the piano, Bumby watching you with his silvery yellow eyes, Bumby accidentally pooping on the wood floor, then scratching at nothing to bury it.

  I feel a deep, impossible sadness. I feel the loss for you and for me, and I don’t turn away until I know I’m a good person for looking.

  I will tell your mother. I wish I could do more, and I hate to leave it there but I know better than to touch a crime scene, to tamper with evidence. There is nothing I can do to save him.

  I pass Jed’s house and I start to breathe again. But I feel guilty, complicit, as if by being here I am party to the crime, party to the act. As if your cat died because I came here looking for you.

  * * *

  —

  I knock on the front door of your mother’s house. The house is surrounded by crushed roses as if it was dropped on a garden by a tornado. No one answers the door. I step back and gaze up into the eaves. I see in one of the upper windows the gold telescope trained down at the ranch.

  I hear the spit of a motor; then I see your mother speeding up a hillside trail on her ATV. She flies to another white house, smaller than the big house but with the same red accents, surrounded by a chicken wire pen.

  I start up the hill toward her, past the cave of the miniature train station, past the swimming pool, which bleeds its chemical smell. I meet your mother at the door of the little white house.

  “Follow me. I’ll show you the animals.”

  “I have to tell you something,” I say. She scowls, unimpressed by my earnestness, as I follow her into the little barn. “I found a cat, over by Jed’s house. I found a dead cat. It was black with white spots.”

  “It’s not Jed’s house.” She hands me a bucket. “These are the rabbits.” She opens a door onto a pen with a hill of rabbits piled in the far corner. “We make their feed ourselves. It’s all organic. Everything we give the animals and plants here, we make ourselves.” She scatters it across the ground. The rabbits don’t move. For a second, I think they’re dead too. Then a whisker quivers. An eyelid flickers.

  “Was it your cat? Was it Jed’s?” Was it Rachel’s? I want to say but don’t.

  She frowns a
warning and leads me out another door, into the chicken coop. “These are the chickens.” They peck around our feet and she reaches into the bucket and she spreads their food. “We have two goats.” She points to their pen.

  That is when I notice them, threading through the chickens and goats like grim illusions. They are all the same color: black with white patches. The same color as Bumby. They all move with the same jerky gait, an undomesticated crackle of energy. I am used to seeing cats on the Internet: plump and spoiled. I have never seen them this way: wiry, feral, activated.

  She sees me noticing, and she beckons me toward the chicken hutch. It’s a narrow room lined with white egg-laying cabinets like tiny spaceships, and they are filled, the room is crawling, with cats. They drip down from the ceiling. They pool on the floor. They crowd in the cupboards, on top of tiny kittens, all that same patchy color, mewling like mice.

  “They’re supposed to keep the rats down.” Your mother folds her arms.

  “There must be a hundred of them.”

  “Yes, well.” She moves away from the door and I step back. “They breed like crazy.”

  I am disgusted. She should have them neutered. It’s cruel. It’s creepy, the way they share the same color, the same unseeing glare.

  “They’re not pets,” she says. “You can’t pet them. Especially not the kittens. The mother will reject them. They’re here to work, like everybody else. Where did you say the body was?”

  “Over by . . . your son’s house.” The cats crisscross our path as we leave, like cloning errors in a video game.

  “I’ll take care of it. The trash collector comes once a week—he’s supposed to come once a week. Sometimes he misses a week in the summer and we end up buried in it.”

  “You’re not going to put the cat in the trash?”

  “Of course not.” She smiles. “We have a pet cemetery, above the lake.” I don’t know if I believe burying the cat there was her intention, but I do believe I have shamed her into changing her mind.

  “You should have the cats neutered.”

  Her smile drops. “Who’s going to pay for that?”

  I want to point out that there is clearly a lot of money going through this place, with the tractor and the ATVs and the pool and the miniature train, but I can see that I am skating on thin ice with your mother. I need to find you. Then I will call animal control.

  She puts the bucket back in the little barn, and we walk out to the ATV. She claps imaginary dust from her hands. “We have horses and cleaning today. I’m guessing you want to start with horses?”

  * * *

  —

  Your mother leads me to the tack room. It is dark and dank, and the big, cracked leather saddles are piled in rows with tarps over them.

  “It’s a mess in here.” She lifts a tarp and sneers at the damp. “You’ll organize it. Every horse has its own saddle and bridle. The names are stamped into the leather.” She shows me the curved script carved into the leather. “My daughter thought of that. Isn’t it cute?”

  My breath whooshes in. “Your daughter?” Little sparks break out all over my skin. “Where is she?”

  She turns abruptly toward the door, and her pupils expand and contract in the light. She sets her mouth in a frown.

  But I can’t turn back now; I can’t let this stop. I have to get her talking. I have to talk about you. “Did she work with the horses?”

  “I like quiet when I work.” She likes me to be quiet. She selects a saddle. “We’ll put you on Angel Two.” I wonder what happened to Angel One. She nudges the saddle onto her hip and points at one for me to take.

  “What about Belle Star?”

  “No one rides Belle Star.” It’s like something out of a movie.

  “If no one rides her, why do you keep her?” I say before I can stop myself.

  Her eyes register surprise; then she smiles. “You ask a lot of questions.” A pause. “I don’t like it.”

  We catch the horses, brush and tack them up. I am nervous but it comes back to me. The way you currycomb in a circle, avoiding the legs and the face and the underbelly. The way you run your hand down the back of the horse’s leg and squeeze to get them to pick up their hoof. When I go to pick up Angel Two’s back hoof, she curls her leg and strikes suddenly. I jump back.

  Your mother laughs. “I forgot to tell you; she does that.”

  “Is there anything else I should know?” I try again more gingerly. She strikes even quicker.

  Your mom laughs again. “You have to whack her.” She hands me a whip.

  Angel Two offers her hoof up perfectly. She’s smart.

  We mount up and ride along the perimeter. The trail hasn’t been cleared, so it’s littered with piles of fallen wood, speckled with poison ivy. At one point, we pass under a widow-maker, a fallen tree suspended directly over our heads.

  Your mother explains that there is only one guest trail. It goes up to Eagle Rock on one side and down to the Klamath on the other. “But don’t tell the guests that! They like to think they’re going somewhere new every day. Anyway, they never notice. It all looks the same out here.”

  “What about the trail by Jed’s house?”

  She pinches her nose. “What do you mean?”

  “Where I found the cat. Where does that trail lead?”

  “There’s no trail there,” she says like she can talk it out of existence. Suddenly I’m sure that trail is exactly where I want to start my search.

  Angel Two moseys easily behind your mother’s horse. I perch forward in my saddle. “You said Jed lives in your son’s house?”

  “Yes. We built it for his family.”

  “Why doesn’t he live in it?”

  She scowls. “You’d have to ask him that. Now this,” she says, as if realizing she’ll have to keep talking to keep me quiet, “is a mine shaft. Do you know what this area is famous for?”

  I didn’t know this area was famous. “Bigfoot?”

  “And the gold rush. They came out here in eighteen fifty-one, and they found gold. A lot of gold rush towns vanished but this place survived.” I think that’s debatable.

  “I heard it was called Murderer’s Bar.”

  “Where did you hear that? That’s a lie.”

  I don’t tell her you told me. We drop down into the valley of the mine shaft. The earth becomes a wall of clover, a palace of green. “It’s beautiful.”

  She nods. “This is the showstopper. You always want to give the guests a little history—but not that Murderer’s Bar stuff. You have to be careful what you tell people around here. Stories are contagious. Even the thoughts in your head can spread like a cold.” She pauses, like she’s lost her train of thought, then circles back. “The guests come out here and they say, ‘I don’t want to leave.’ Every year they say, ‘Addy, we never want to leave! We love it here!’ They don’t see the work. They don’t see how hard it is. And that’s what we want. We want them to come out here, see the beauty, sell the idea—we’re the real wilderness family. We don’t want them to see what it’s really like.”

  “What is it really like?”

  “It’s work.” We pass a row of blue tanks. “This is the water supply. Six cylinders. All of our water comes through here. There are separate lines: One runs to our house, another to the guest cabins—that’s yours too—and the far ones go all the way out to my son’s house and the ag lines in the pastures. In the summer, we have to space out the guest showers. If everyone showers at once, you know about it. I tell guests, ‘Two minutes.’ That’s long enough. We’re outdoors. You’re gonna get dirty.”

  We ride down a low hill. “This is the shooting range.” She points to an open swath of land with targets lined haphazardly at the far end. “We have just about every kind of gun you can imagine. Four hundred and twenty-seven.” This number alarms me, and I immediately don’t believe it.
I feel this way about a lot of what your mother says; there is something performative in every word. “Some are a hundred years old; some are the latest and greatest, tricked out with lasers, the works. We want to give our guests a chance to try everything.”

  “I’m not really into guns.”

  She touches her lower back. “I’m always carrying. Twenty-four-seven. You should be too. Out here.” Even though she has indicated it, I still can’t make out her gun. She twists in her saddle. “I better tell you it’s not too safe around. Especially down by the creek.” She points way out across the ranch below us, past Jed’s house. “You never want to go down there alone. And you oughta be armed. I can give you a gun if you don’t have one.”

  “I don’t need a gun. What’s so dangerous about the creek?”

  “There are gangs.” I find it hard to imagine a lot of gang activity out here in the middle of nowhere. Perhaps she reads my disbelief, because she insists, “Sometimes we get messages from the police: ‘Lock your doors and carry your guns. We just had another one leave San Quentin.’”

  “Isn’t San Quentin kind of far away?” I remember Episode 1, about the four girls on the Murder Line.

  “It’s close enough. And the police around here don’t do anything about anything. We had a man once, decapitated his wife. The police put out a message, asking people to call in with any tips. Well, there must’ve been about a hundred people called in. And all the time he was walking along Main Street in Happy Camp like he owned it, drinking in the Snake Pit.”

  Her horse prances and she reins him in. She is a nervous rider, crouched, ready for anything. “I wouldn’t go off this property alone. I wouldn’t go anywhere for any reason. I wouldn’t go past the perimeter trail. I don’t want to get into a lot of talk, but you want to just stay here.”

  Only then does it occur to me that she may be alluding to you, to what happened to you. Were you attacked by a gang? Is that what she’s afraid of? Are you the reason she is afraid?