“It’s okay, kitty.” I lower the gun and I run for the door. I am outside and no one is following me; everything is quiet as I pound down the steps toward my car. I open the door, and then I hear a whinny of alarm across the ranch. I recognize it immediately. Belle Star.
I keep hold of the gun and I run across the property. A loud mechanical sound scares me sideways and then the sprinkler system comes on, hissing, firing spinning pumps. I stop in the middle of the dirt path, avoiding the water. It’s strangely beautiful, the way the air glistens in the pale outdoor lights, all the way out to the edge of the property. Are they trying to scare me? Are they trying to trap me? I inhale and my nostrils burn.
And then there is a scream, and I can’t tell if it’s horse or human, and the sprinklers hiss and switch off. I take a shortcut past the greenhouse to get to Belle Star, but pull up short when I reach the garden. Someone has been digging. Your mother’s work on the blackberry bushes has left them dried and leached of color. The doll I plucked from beneath the bushes has no face, just an empty plastic cavern. And someone has scraped the bushes back.
My heart is snapping like fingers inside my chest—am I alone? Am I ever really alone, even all the way out here? I start toward it, shoulders crawling with nerves like bugs. I hold the gun against my hip.
The bushes have receded and now I can finally see what’s underneath. Episode 33: There were twenty-two girls buried in the church garden.
All my plans vanish because there is only one thing to do now. I dig. The water burns my fingers and tingles on my tongue. I have my phone out, flashlight engaged, ready to take a picture, as soon as whatever it is reveals itself—ready to take a picture before I run.
It’s hard to dig up a body in real life. Even turned earth is heavy, littered with rocks. I can sense the vultures circling overhead. Sweat drags a cold finger down my back and my lungs are screaming and I keep digging. I dig harder. So hard that when I hit something soft, it feels like a pillow, as one Manson Murderer described it; like butter, the murderer crowed in Episode 38; like it was meant to be, said the killer in the Horoscope Homicide.
I can see her now, coated in moss and rot and smelling of old death. I have my body.
I force the bushes back, ignoring the thorns as they poke my skin, the roots that weigh anchor against me. I dig again. I don’t even have to dig that deep. And I have another body, this one flesh clinging to the bone, coated in a mosslike substance. Maggots burrow in an eye socket.
I am sick on the lawn, am so shaken that it radiates through me, and I fall to my knees and I think, Evidence, evidence, don’t leave evidence, but I can’t help myself. I feel like I am dying. I feel like I have been poisoned. I am those bodies. Those bodies are me. I am every woman who has ever disappeared.
I am on my knees, gasping for breath, when I hear footsteps lumbering toward me. I see her feet first, the way they stagger toward me, as if they too are dying.
The gun slips in my fingers and I fumble to adjust it.
“Rachel,” she says, and her eyes burn, but they are out of focus; they glare somewhere above me, like Rachel is a spirit floating just over our heads, haunting us. “You destroyed my garden!” There are dark stains on her hands, leaking from her lips, and at first, I think it’s mud. I have to remind myself that it’s blood.
“There are bodies!” I say. “There are bodies under there!”
“This is all your fault!” But it’s not and it never was, and before I can stop her, before I can say anything, she lunges toward me, her arms outstretched, and a gun goes off but it can’t be mine. I don’t know how to shoot a gun. And that is the last thing I remember.
Episode 84:
The Killer Comes Home
The guesthouse was the only place in the derelict thirty-acre ranch that wasn’t falling apart. The bar was fully stocked. And the dining room was decorated, with human-sized mannequins in Halloween masks that were dressed and organized so they looked like guests at a grand party. The last party the victims would ever attend.
I wake up on the kitchen floor. I know it’s the kitchen because I can see the oven. And I think I’m at home, that my entire life has all been one big “it’s all a dream” sequence and I am home with my parents and then the dream dissipates, and I don’t know where I am. I am not in Addy’s kitchen. Addy, I remind myself, has been shot. I don’t know where I am.
I feel a hand on my shoulder. “Hey.” I hear the twang of a West Texas accent.
I start, but my head is so thick that I barely move. I have to drag myself up off the floor piece by piece. The kitchen is similar to Addy’s, but like a fun-house version, everything is slightly off. There is a computer and a generator in the opposite corner, jugs of water lined along the floor, and in the far room there are bodies standing upright. I shake my head to clear it and I realize they are mannequins, life-sized dolls in tattered clothing. And the windows are covered, the curtains drawn shut.
“Are you all right?” the blond woman says, helping me up. She is pregnant. Her stomach swells beneath her shirt. She presses me back against the cupboards with gentle hands. There is a cuff around her wrist, a long chain that stretches somewhere invisible.
My head wobbles. “Grace?”
She smiles. “You know who I am.” Like nobody would.
“Where are we?”
“We’re safe now.” She strokes my hair. “She saved us.”
My heartbeat fights against whatever force is holding it. I see Addy’s cold lips illuminated by the hard light of my flashlight. “What are you talking about?” I slur slightly. I feel like I have been driven through the roads at a breakneck pace. My head is swimming. My thoughts are barely afloat.
“Don’t worry.” She strokes my back. “It won’t be much longer.”
“Until what?”
“Until Rachel comes back.”
“Rachel?” You’re here, and for a moment everything else blurs, all my life refines itself on a single point: I found you. “Where is she?”
“She’ll be right back.”
My mind swirls as I lean against the cupboard, trying to piece things together. I am in your yellow house. Grace is here too. The door is shut. Your parents are dead. It’s like somebody took the world and turned it inside out.
I start to get up, but my balance swings out wildly and I hold myself against the cupboard, waiting for the waves to settle inside me. But they don’t. It’s like I am driving on that road, someplace far that I can’t reach. I am ripping around the edges. I am flying toward the turns.
“Hey, hey, just take it easy.” She speaks with Jed’s cadence and it spooks me. “It’s gonna be all right.” She reaches out to quiet me but I bat her hand away. The chain rattles. My head swells.
“How did I get here? Where is Rachel?”
“We just need to be patient.” She grasps at my hand. “She’ll tell us when it’s safe to leave. We just need to wait quietly.”
I walk toward the door, slipping dizzily. I think I have been drugged. A splash of red hits the floor in front of me. I touch my nose and find the source.
“You oughta lie down.” Grace follows me, wringing her hands. “You’ve been poisoned.”
“What?” I wipe the liquid on my shirt. It’s only peripherally that I realize it is blood. My heart races. I think of Belle Star.
“Homer poisoned the water, up at the ranch.”
“Homer?”
“He killed everything. Rachel found you passed out by the blackberry bushes.” Poisoned. I think of the sprinklers, the burning in my nostrils. My hands are bright red; my throat stings. I think of Homer, how I left him on the hillside with your mother’s ATV, your mother’s poison.
“Where is Rachel?”
“She’s gone after him.”
I reach the front door. I put my hands around the knob. I expect it to fight back, but it comes open in my
hand so fast that I stagger onto the porch.
“Sera! Wait! Just wait! Rachel’s coming back! Sera, please just wait! You’ve been poisoned!”
I flail my arms. “Stay away from me.”
“You need to calm down.”
“I need to go to a hospital.”
She can’t argue with that, and she has reached the end of her chain.
I don’t think I can make it to the hospital, but if I can just get to the turnout south of Happy Camp, the one with the phone signal, I can call the police. I have evidence, more evidence than I ever could have wished for.
I race down the steps. The motion unbalances me, and a cascade of nausea overwhelms me, so one moment I am running and the next I am vomiting violently on the ground so hard, I think I will lose everything inside me. So hard, I think I am dying.
“Just stay here.” Grace spreads her arms wide, like she can catch me from twenty feet away. “Just wait!”
But I won’t. I need to get my car and I need to drive to the turnout and I need to call the police. I can’t wait for you to save me. I need to save myself.
My head swims back into place and I am running. I stumble but I don’t stop.
“Don’t go up there! It’s not safe!” she screams, and I’m reminded of your mother. She told me it wasn’t safe to leave, and Grace says it’s not safe to go back, and there is no safe place and I pound up the pathway, up switchbacks in a blaze.
I catch my breath in Jed’s thinking spot. I vomit where he spit tobacco. And then I run, farther, faster, longer, along the paths and past the pastures. The horses move like marionettes on jerky, uneven strings, and I think that I am hallucinating, but when I stop to vomit again, I see them staggering, whinnying hollowly, see them snap and fight and take chunks of flesh from one another’s necks. One shudders and collapses to the ground, joints stiff, then quivering, legs in the air, pumping wildly, screaming. They’re poisoned. They’ve all been poisoned.
I think about the water supply, how easy it would be. I was just up there with Homer and I told him about Florence and he said, I’m just gonna head up the mountain, have a look, and I let him. I let him go off alone.
The entire ranch is contaminated. They’re all going to die. We’re all going to die.
I veer off course, toward the round pen and Belle Star. Part of me doesn’t want to see it, but I know that I can’t just leave her. I have to try to save her.
I veer around the tack room and the round pen comes into view. Belle is standing in a patch of moonlight illuminating her golden mane. She dips her head softly into the water bucket and I scream.
She tosses her head, then cocks it as if to chastise me. She isn’t seizing up or quivering, or biting at her side, and I realize it’s her water trough; I filled it myself from the hose days ago. She hasn’t been contaminated.
My chest hurts and my teeth are pulsing and I’m going to die. I’m going to die if I don’t get out of here.
I reach out to Belle. At first, she shies away but then she wags her chin and drops her head and I run my hand down her face.
“I’ll come back for you,” I promise, and then I run. The ranch house swims into view.
A wave of nausea overwhelms me again and I stop against a tree. The lawn seems to stretch out in front of me, and phantoms move across it: jerky, haunted, muddy black and burning. It’s the cats—all the stray cats have abandoned the petting zoo and are stalking the lawn. I can’t tell if they’ve been poisoned; they seem too clever for it. Bright eyes twitching, tails swishing back and forth. It’s as if they know the ranch is theirs now, like whatever was holding them back has gone, and they sit on the porch and they tumble from the rafters and they observe me with their quick, superior expressions and I almost smile. I almost smile because only a cat loves a nightmare, and then I run to my car.
I take my key from my pocket. I jam it in and open the door, collapse into the driver’s seat, slam the door shut behind me. My nerves sharpen, tumble into place along the back of my neck and down to my elbows, so I sit up straight, so I realize what I have to do. I have to drive along these winding roads, as fast as I can, without vomiting myself to death.
I grip the steering wheel with one hand. The sweat from my palms seals my fingers to the wheel. I can’t catch my breath. I stuff the key into the ignition. I start the car. It crackles, then roars to life. The cats on the lawn all turn at once, all stretch their necks and watch me as I swing the car into reverse, peel back along the bumpy road.
Nausea lifts in a wave, tightens my neck, bulges behind my eyes. I open the window just as I swivel my head, dive sideways and vomit in a stream down the side of my car. I’m going to die.
I put the car into drive and I tumble down the mountain toward the highway. I am picking up speed. I need to slow down but I don’t. I can’t.
I dive into the corners. I am shocked at how fast I can go and still stay on the road. I can see the turnout up ahead, wide and empty. It blinks in and out like the beam from a lighthouse as I skid through the turns.
And then it’s there, right there ahead of me, this wide, beautiful expanse on the other side of the road, clouds swollen with signal, and I speed up.
I remember how Jed used to joke about the highway, how people always showed up at the worst times, and just then his truck rises into view, swinging tight around a turn and barreling toward me. It’s going to hit me, I realize. I don’t have time to stop.
I relax my knee, ready to smash the brake, but then my nerves twitch, and instead of loosening, I tighten; instead of giving in, I fight back. Instead of worrying about getting out of his way, I force him to accommodate me. I think of your father, how he pulled in front of that other car with no consideration, rode fast into every turn. And I am the asshole. I squeeze my eyes shut. I step on the gas.
The driver blares his horn, amplified in the river valley, with mountains all around us so it tears a hole in my head and I go fast, faster toward the turnout and he honks again. He is not backing down. He is accelerating toward me. And my head aches and my chest opens and my heart zings. He is going to kill me.
I dive into the corner. It’s too late to brake.
I am over the edge of the mountain. My stomach pops on a breeze. My eyes water. And the trees are all around me, and I’m about to drop, about to hit the ground, but somehow, I never do.
* * *
—
“Take this.” I recognize your voice immediately. You sound the same in real life as you do on your podcast.
“No.” I press my lips together. I keep my eyes shut.
“Sera, don’t you trust me?”
I open my eyes. My first impulse is to be starstruck. You have freckles on your nose; I never knew that. You have your mother’s eyes and your father’s dark smile. You look put together, even under these circumstances, with a neat flannel button-down. Your hair is brushed.
“Where are we?” It looks like a motel room, but my first thought is that it’s a room that’s designed to look like a motel room, like I can’t trust anything.
“Take this,” you repeat. “It’s diazepam. For the seizures.”
“I’m having seizures?” I shift in the bed. “I’m naked.”
“Your clothing was contaminated. We had to remove it.”
“Why aren’t I in a hospital?”
“We called an ambulance.” Your nose crinkles, in a smile or a grimace. “These things take a while out here.”
“What have I been poisoned with?”
“We don’t know. We think it was something my mother made, to kill the blackberries. The water system at the ranch was contaminated.”
“Was it an accident?” You don’t answer. Your face is a mask.
The room is quiet. I take in odd things—the red numbers on the bedside clock, the big block television set, the brown mini fridge. I am looking for clues.
>
“How did I get here?”
“Grace told me you ran away. I’m surprised you could run at all. You certainly couldn’t drive. We found your car. We got you out. Don’t you remember? You were talking a little.”
“What was I saying?” You turn to arrange the bottles on the counter. “Rachel, where were you?”
You smirk, and I can see your father in it, your mother, the disconnect. “Here.”
“Where are we?”
“Willow Creek.”
“What were you doing here?”
“My mother made me stay here.”
“Why?”
“She was trying to protect me.”
“Where is Grace? And Florence? And April? And all the other women who disappeared?”
Your eyes flit down. “Maybe you should rest.”
“I need to know.”
And you’re pleased, because you need to tell me. You scoot forward on the chair. Your voice, so familiar, washes over me. “Ever since I was a kid, I suspected. Florence was the first to disappear. Then a woman called Amelia, another called Elizabeth, April. Who knows how many others? Who knows how many got away, how many didn’t?
“They came here to disappear, to escape their lives, to start over. They came here because they had nowhere else to go. It always happened the same way. They would befriend us, become like family. We were always sure they would never leave us. Then one day, I would wake up, and they’d be gone. No explanation, just She disappeared. It became normal to me, growing up here. The people who came to work at the ranch were searching, impulsive, maybe a little lost. It made sense, on the outside, that they would just leave without saying goodbye. That was how they ended up here in the first place. But I always felt like there was something wrong.
“But I never knew for sure. Or maybe I just didn’t want to see until . . .”
“Grace.”
You lift a glass of water off the table, offer it to me, but I shake my head. “My parents were always paranoid, ‘crazy.’ Particularly my mother. The worse things got, the more she tried to control them. You know what I mean.” She smiles indulgently. “But she had a reason to be afraid. She didn’t trust anyone because her own child was a serial killer. Not that they ever knew for certain. At least I don’t think they did. But you can feel it, in your bones, when something is really wrong.”
If I Disappear Page 23