“Where? When?”
“I used to go down to the coffee shop to see Tasia.” He clears his throat, seeing how that sounds. “They have Wi-Fi there. I messaged her a couple times, offered to send her money. She told me she met someone. I mean, she more or less told me to fuck off.”
“How do you know it was her?”
I can feel his frustration as he says, “I told you, it was her Facebook.”
“Jed, anyone can access a Facebook account. All they need is the password.”
I can see the floor drop out from under him and he sways slightly, but still he doesn’t want to believe, still he can’t let himself. And maybe that is the difference between you and me and everybody else. We never struggle to believe the worst, you and I.
“Where is all this coming from?”
“Rachel was looking for Grace. She was making an episode about her. Right before Rachel disappeared.”
He shakes his head, fast. “Rachel’s a lunatic.” That’s what they say about us. That’s what they need to think, because the alternative is too much for them to take. We have to be disturbed. We have to be wrong so the world can be right.
“Maybe her family thinks she’s out here with you. Maybe whoever’s been messaging you has been messaging them too.”
He backs away, like I have created the truth just by speaking it. “All right, all right, you’re scaring me now.”
“You should be scared. You need to wake the hell up.”
* * *
—
Jed promises to call Grace’s family during his lunch break, so I know he doesn’t quite believe me yet. Or else he is involved, and he will spend the next four hours plotting some way to get rid of me. That is the risk I have to take. But if Jed wasn’t involved, then who was?
I think of your mysterious gang. I was so distracted by Grace’s disappearance, by forcing Jed out of apathy, that I completely forgot about the attack. Jed was attacked, and you were attacked. Who attacked you? Your parents claim it was the people in this town, but there aren’t many to choose from, and I have spent so much time on the ranch, I don’t know many. I think of the Moronis in church. They look like they could put the hurt on someone, but why? And then I think, Homer. I remember him hovering in the dark when I spoke to Clementine, the way she wouldn’t talk about Rachel in front of him. Homer seems like a nice guy, but isn’t that a role he has cultivated? By becoming the leader of the church, by flashing those dimples, by preaching forgiveness. You taught me never to trust outward appearances, that sometimes the people who appear to have everything together are the ones who have everything to hide.
And then there are your parents: controlling, manipulative, punishing. They don’t like Jed. And they seem strangely untroubled by your disappearance. Your mother claims to believe you’re dead and yet she never seems to mourn you. Maybe she wanted you gone.
And I still can’t discount Jed as a suspect. I have chosen to trust him, and soon I’ll know if that was the right choice. Either he will contact Grace’s family, or he won’t. And then I will know who he is. And then I will have to decide what to do with that information.
Suddenly I can’t stay still; I can’t stay here. The trees are closing in. Up until now I have been playing on the edge of something, but if Grace was murdered . . .
My nerves tighten under my skin. Run. I am in danger. I should leave. I should get into my car and drive to Eureka, or Yreka, or Trinidad or the Redwoods. I think how close they are but how far they feel, how much longer the drive feels on hairpin turns at twenty miles an hour. My hands feel weak and my stomach shudders and I feel trapped. I feel it building up inside me but with nowhere to go, nothing to do. No way out.
I start across the field, faster and faster, until I am almost running. I reach the pasture and I grab the halter reserved for Belle Star. I halter her up and brush her quickly, check her feet as she dances back and forth, curious, dangerous. I find a saddle and a bridle that will fit her. She hesitates over the bit, but I insert my thumb and get her to open her mouth. She won’t hold still long enough for me to mount her, so I make a running leap and she canters off with me on her back.
I rein her in and she dances in place. I wonder where to go. I look at your parents’ house, then up the hill at Eagle Rock, way out to Fountain Creek, and I decide to head across the highway to the beach. My heart pounds as Belle, still surprised to be under saddle, dances unsteadily underneath me. As we trot across the highway, a massive semitruck appears, blowing smoke. Belle half rears. I cling to her mane to keep my balance. My heart is pounding in my ears as the truck passes behind us and we reach the other side.
Belle dives down the steep hill and I lean back, swaying to keep my balance, and then we reach the beach, the long stretch of sand, and I ask her to run. She needs no encouragement and she splits out under me, little hooves pounding frantically in the sand, so fast my throat goes dry and I choke, so reckless I imagine her falling a dozen ways, tripping over a rock, flipping forward on top of me, sliding sideways on the sand, spooking at the birds as they fling themselves up from the river, but she doesn’t fall and I hang on to her mane as she runs across the sand, all the way to the end of the beach, where I pull her up at the edge of the water as it rushes by, so heavy and so fast that they don’t find the bodies until they hit the ocean.
Belle prances in place, so I follow a little wisp of trail to cool her out. We pass over brush and fallen logs, through a copse of trees. Until we reach one tree, the one tree of many, where everyone has chosen to carve their names and initials, their secret messages and their hearts’ desires.
And my fingers go numb and my elbow locks so tight that Belle stops on a dime, as I see plugged deep into the tree inside a roughly carved heart:
HOMER LOVES FLORENCE
Your brother was in love with Florence. You wrote, I knew she was meeting someone but she wouldn’t tell me who. On July 23, August 5, September 19, she told her parents she was staying with me. Maybe he was the one she was sneaking off to see. And then she slept with Moroni. And then she disappeared.
* * *
—
Belle and I make it back in one piece. I slip off her tack and she races back into the pen, kicking her hindquarters up. I rest the tack on the hitching post and look out after her; then my eyes open up and I look over everything, and I wonder if it’s a trick of the light or if things really do look worse. There is a rotten smell in the air. There is a murkiness, a quality of sinking, as if the land itself is cursed.
This is a place you loved, and I wish I could save it, the way maybe you could have, if only you hadn’t disappeared. You never left, not at eighteen, or twenty-one or twenty-five. You stayed here. And I wonder if you were hoping, the way I almost do, that one day all of this would be yours.
I need to confront Homer, but I need to be careful. I will go to Clementine first. I go to the lodge to use the phone, which isn’t ringing for once. I pick it up and press it to my ear. I hear only silence but I still dial Homer’s number, which is posted on the wall under “Emergency Contacts.” Nothing. The line is dead.
This morning I told Jed to call Texas, to make sure his wife was alive, and now the line is dead.
I track your mother down in the garden, where she is on her hands and knees with her red spray bottle, pulling up plant after plant and tossing them in a wheelbarrow. The dogs are heaving on the lawn, ribs popping like bellows. Either I am imagining things, or one is missing, maybe two.
“Dead,” she says. “They’re all dead! Have you ever seen anything like this?” She motions to the corpselike pile in the wheelbarrow. “We’re going to have to start over!”
“The phone line is down.”
She sits back on her butt, puts her muddy hands on her knees. There are marks on her skin, all the way up to her elbows, that look like chemical burns. “Do you think I have time for that? Do you think I have tim
e for that right now?” It is the first time she has ever been angry at me, and I feel myself recoil. She turns on me, glares with her dark, beady eyes. “Don’t you have work to be doing? Instead of chasing after some boy?” I think she means Jed and I want to tell her she’s wrong, but I don’t want to argue with her. “I think you have better things to do with your time—I’m drowning here!” She motions to her dead garden.
“What would you like me to do?” I try to be polite.
“I would like you to do your job.”
* * *
—
I don’t see Jed all morning. I contrive my tasks to search for him: cleaning the windows in the upper-level cabins, cleaning the lower-level bathrooms, driving an ATV up to the far pasture on some phantom errand I am too desperate even to define. I don’t see him anywhere. It’s possible that your father has stationed him somewhere hidden, knowing he is in no state to work. It’s also very possible they sent him home sick. Although I feel safe shooting up and down the ranch looking for him, I don’t feel safe going to his house. I’m supposed to be working, and the enforced normality of it, the knowledge that I need to act as if nothing has changed, keeps me tethered to at least the appearance of work.
But I cut off early, just before noon. I drive my ATV to his house. The garage is closed, so I can’t see if his truck is inside. I head to the front door and knock, first politely, then in a panic. I ring the doorbell, again and again. I want to call his name. I scan the area for your mother or your father, but they are nowhere to be seen. They are probably back at the house waiting for me and I am so angry, angry with Jed, who for all I know is hiding behind the door, or passed out drunk, or else he is guilty, or else he has made a run for it.
“Jed,” I say, too quiet. “Goddamn it, Jed.”
I get back on my ATV and drive slowly around the property, looking up and down and into the woods, but he’s nowhere to be seen.
Your parents are waiting for me with lunch, another thick, weedy offering. We eat in silence but I am so preoccupied that I don’t realize there is something off until your mother says, “You had an exciting morning.”
My heart evacuates. My chest is a gaping hole. Jed told them. He told them what I said. They killed Grace and you. And now they’re going to kill me.
“Not too exciting.”
Your mother stamps her fork and knife down on the table. “I thought I told you not to ride that horse.”
My heart returns, peppers in my chest. “I—I’m sorry,” I say, but really I am so relieved that I nearly gasp.
“Riding around like a lunatic. You could break your neck.” She stabs her salad with her fork.
“I wasn’t thinking.”
“No. You weren’t.”
* * *
—
Jed doesn’t come find me after lunch. I don’t see him all afternoon. I keep my eyes open, but it is becoming clear that I have missed something. I go back to his house that evening, when my shift is over. This time I try the front door. It’s locked.
I bang on the door. I call his name, louder than I should. I walk to his garage and I open the door. His truck is in the garage. His motorcycle is in the garage. His ATV is in the garage. My mind takes notes, slips into evidence overdrive. Jed’s truck is here. His door is locked. He wasn’t at work. Maybe Emmett sent him home early. Maybe he locked the door and passed out drunk. I know I should just go home, maybe alert your parents, but something holds me here, something tells me not to leave.
I walk around the back of the house and try the door there. It’s locked too. I tell myself to go home, but instead I try a window. I pull the tabs and the screen snaps as I pop it out. The glass slips under my fingers but I press harder, rock it inside the frame until it judders open.
I take a deep breath and shinny inside, scraping my hip along the frame, slipping through spiderwebs. There is a dryer on the other side and I use it to drag myself inside, climb on top of it so it echoes hollowly through the space, out into the woods behind me. I push myself up, then catch my breath.
The laundry room smells sweetly of alcohol sweat and detergent. The house has a hypnotic quiet; a scrim of gray muddies the air. I stop breathing to listen for his breath, his footsteps, but I hear nothing. Still I keep my voice down.
“Jed? Jed, are you in here?” I hop down to the floor. “I’m sorry. I broke in. But I was worried about you.” I feel protective of the silence, like the house is a chapel. I move toward the front of the house, down the hall, past the guest rooms, where paintings are propped hopefully on the floor, into the kitchen, where the cupboards are open, mostly bare, where empty bottles are lined next to the trash with surprising precision. “Jed? Now you’re scaring me,” I say like our conversation is continuing without him there. “Jed?”
The gun safe is locked. There is no one here. I try to breathe relief but I can’t. There isn’t a smell, but there is something stronger, like my body instinctually is tuned to a frequency, a knowing without knowing why. So even though I tell myself I’m being paranoid, letting myself get carried away again, the way Jed warned me I do too often, I know now, in a way I only thought I knew before, that something is wrong.
I cut across the kitchen, to the far hall, toward the bedroom and the Bible and the letter I found folded inside. The hallway is dark. The bedroom door is shut.
“Jed?”
I knock lightly on the door. I shudder and clutch the knob. “Jed, I’m coming in.” I expect the door to be locked, so when the knob gives without a fight, I jump back, release it so the door swings open unaided, revealing the whole room in one great gulp.
Episode 73:
Murder on the Oregon Express
The body was uncovered at the end of the line. Time of death was estimated to be sometime around Medford.
“She only paid up to Ashland,” the bus driver said. “I thought I was doing her a favor.”
Seeing his body has an unexpected effect on me. Instead of feeling afraid, I feel fearless. I feel more alive than I ever have. I don’t scream. I don’t run. I think of you. I think: Evidence.
I slip my phone out of my pocket and I switch on my camera and I take pictures of his body from every angle. The ragged fingernails on the hand over his heart. The purpling rigor mortis along the stem of his neck. The dried brownish froth in the corner of his open mouth. The outline of his limp dick against the crotch of his Levi’s. Then I widen my scope, take in the scene. The half-empty bottle tucked against his hip. The Bible open to Luke 15. Grace’s letter, slightly crumpled on the clean floor, as if waiting to be picked up. A glass of whiskey on the table.
All evidence points to alcohol poisoning. The narrative will be easy to define: He was depressed, he was a drinker, he lost his wife. Or else: He killed his wife. He was caught.
* * *
—
Your father has to use his satellite communicator to contact the police. It takes them ten hours to arrive on the scene. They come from Yreka, and when I complain about the delay, they tell me, “He’s dead, inn’t he?” Your parents’ reaction was similarly blithe.
Your mother said, “I’m not surprised.”
Your father said, “Well, that’s what happens.”
I feel like I am holding on to something heavy, but I don’t know what. Ever since I took those pictures, my hearing has gone soft and my vision has gone blurry, as if Jed’s death is holding me underwater. I feel guilt, fear I somehow caused this, but I also feel afraid of my own reaction, the way I calibrated everything, all the evidence on my phone, the photos of his dead body. Am I an animal? Do I have no feelings?
I slept with Jed, I remind myself. I was even a little in love with him, with the broken parts we shared, the life we shared, both of us out here, hiding, quarantining ourselves from the world as if we were the bad thing in it. And now he’s gone, and all I can think about is you. What does his death say about
you?
Jed was right: I have disappeared in your disappearance. I have gone so deep, I am missing from my own life.
I watch your parents for signs that they were in some way involved, but they are as unconcerned as ever: inappropriately lighthearted and determinedly black-and-white.
We are standing in the house, where we have been banished by the police so they can “do their job” without anyone making sure they do it. Your parents are next to the window, peering out across the property, reflections contained in the neat frame.
Your father fans his face with this cowboy hat, a gesture oddly reminiscent of Jed. “Maybe I shouldn’t have fired him.”
I startle. “You fired him?”
“Well, yes, Sera,” he says like he himself didn’t just question it.
“He was a terrible worker,” your mother says. “If anything, we kept him on too long.” She scowls and pinches at a fly, trying to catch it in the air. “You can’t blame yourself. He was a drunk. And a liar. I did wonder, all those times he said he went to the Bigfoot Museum in Willow Creek. No one goes to that museum more than once—and even then, it’s by mistake.”
“It is a lousy museum,” your father agrees.
The mortuary van finally breaks the spell, driving past the ranch house to meet the police.
Your mother huffs, steps away from the window like all of this has detained her long enough. “We better get to Ashland.”
“Now?” I say.
“It will be good for us to get out. Good for the mind.” She taps her head. I have a passing vision of Jed’s body being forced into a bag but I push myself past it. “You see what happens, if you don’t get out.” Like she hasn’t been telling me all along, every day, that the only safe place is right here.
“Can I come with you?” I say without thinking. I need to stay here so I can search the ranch alone, but I can’t define what I will look for: a signpost, a conclusion, a reason for everything? The truth is, I want to leave. I am anxious and I am clouded and I can’t see the forest for the trees.
If I Disappear Page 20