My eyes expand. “You were the ones harassing her.” In the big black trucks. In their husbands’ trucks.
“I’d hardly call it harassment.” Tasia frowns. “And we didn’t wear masks. I can’t believe Addy told you that. She had to make sure nothing pointed back to Rachel.”
“We used to listen to her podcast,” Clementine volunteers.
“You’re kidding,” I say.
“For research,” Tasia says, like she wants it to be clear she’s not a fan. “We chased a couple of leads but they didn’t go anywhere. The women she picked, nobody really cared about, y’know? And it was hard to believe—it was hard to keep believing—when everyone acted like there was nothing wrong.” Her eyes flit to Clementine, who nods. “Even with Jed, I asked him about Grace and he said that they talked, that she was back in Texas. We didn’t think Rachel would touch her. She never touched a woman with a man. We had no idea Grace was in that house.” She sits back, stunned. “And now talking to Grace is like talking to a jukebox in a country bar.”
“You talked to Grace?”
“Tried to. One minute she’s telling us how she met Jed in a church. The next he’s coming home drunk with lipstick on his collar. Do you know she thought he was dead?”
“He is dead.”
“No. I mean, before that. She had her believing Jed was murdered and she was in danger.”
“Jed was murdered and Grace was in danger.”
“Do you know how Grace ended up in that house? Because neither does she. She woke up chained to the wall. And then Rachel appeared, said she was just sneaking in to help her. Told her these wild stories about murder and mayhem. Had her believing everyone was out to get her, that Rachel was the only person she could trust.
“We sat Grace down. We tried to talk to her. We tried to convince her to leave. But she thinks we’re the bad guys, because Homer was the bad guy. Because Rachel is the only one who understands.” But you’re the only one who understands me.
“This is crazy.” I push deeper into my chair. Outside the window, Happy Camp is a portrait in pink morning light. The streets are deserted. Everything is deserted and I wonder how I got here, like it was all an accident.
“You don’t believe us,” Clementine says. In some ways, this whole thing seems to have breezed right by her. She still sits with the same passive rigidity, and I realize she will probably marry again; she will probably find someone else. She is too perfect not to be someone’s wife. Thirteen bodies were unearthed, an entire ranch was decimated, her own husband poisoned himself, and she still sits there like she’s waiting for the oven timer to go off. She is exactly the wife every man wants.
I shake my head. “If all this is true, why didn’t you just tell me? Why didn’t you tell me that Rachel was a murderer?”
“Because we thought she was dead,” Tasia says.
“Not dead,” Clementine corrects.
“Whatever. We thought she’d been dealt with. We went to Addy. It was almost summer, which meant they were about to start hiring again, and Rachel would have a new pool of applicants. And we said that all these women were disappearing and it couldn’t be a coincidence and we were going to the police. Addy said she would take care of it.”
Clementine clasps her hands. “We never should have done that.”
“No, we should have killed the bitch ourselves.” I cringe at the word.
“I don’t think Addy believed us,” Clementine says.
“Really? Because I don’t think she cared. Rachel’s been in Willow Creek this entire time.” Tasia turns to me. “Isn’t that true?” You told me you were in Willow Creek. “Don’t try to tell me Addy didn’t know that.”
“Why go to Addy at all? Why not go straight to the police?” I don’t think the police would have had any qualms about putting you behind bars.
“We did.” Tasia exhales slowly. “Addy didn’t know that, but we did.” Tasia worries her fist. “We didn’t have proof. Officer Hardy thought we were crazy.” I shiver. Our stories intersect so much, it’s like Tasia and Clementine are mirroring me and I feel tricked and seen at the same time.
“And even if we did have something, Rachel would have found a way to turn it all around. She was good at that. And she had that podcast, that stupid podcast, to paint her as a hero, to explain why she kept everything. That stinky house you live in was where she kept her evidence. That’s why she sealed all the windows and keeps the doors locked. It used to be filled with all this creepy stuff.” I think of your posts: This is where I go to find peace. I’m so lucky to have this little corner of heaven! “She probably still has it somewhere.” You do. You kept it in a shed in the woods behind the house, but recently you moved it to a room upstairs. You tell me not to go in there because you don’t want anything compromised.
“I’m sorry,” I say, and then I hate myself for apologizing. “It just doesn’t make sense. If Rachel hates men, like you all claim she does, why does she kill women?”
“Who told you she hated men?” Tasia arches an eyebrow. “A man?”
“Your husband.”
“I don’t know how much time you’ve spent with Moroni, but he’s about as clueless as they come.” And I like her more, and I wish I knew her better. I wish I hadn’t jumped to conclusions. Just because she married an ass doesn’t mean she didn’t know it.
“Rachel doesn’t hate men,” she continues. “When Florence slept with Moroni, it wasn’t Moroni she was angry with. It was Florence. We think she targets women because she sees them as inferior. The patriarchy is a hell of a drug.”
I think of the notes in your homework. You said you hated being a girl, that there was no place for you. Killing women might have been a way for you to feel that you were better than them. Not like other girls, in the sickest sense of the phrase.
And it’s not just that. You knew if you wanted to kill, if you wanted to keep killing, that you should choose as your victims the people who had already disappeared—the lost, the disenfranchised, the women with nowhere else to go.
I can’t help but feel a small thrill in dissecting this—whether it’s true or not—in examining the psychology. What could make you the killer. In a way this is what I wanted all along. To sit down with a group of women and talk about a crime.
“All these women who came to the ranch, all these kind, lost women. Rachel despised them and she wanted to control them and she . . .” She blinks at her train of thought, like she still can’t take it to its conclusion, not when it’s about something real. Maybe that is why she can’t convince me. Maybe that’s why she can’t be right. Because I can think it and I can say it: Murder. “I mean, she locked Grace up in some death house while she incubated her child, and what did she do to Jed? She fucked him.” I remember how Homer said you ate into Jed at Easter dinner; your father said you called him the Slow Ranger. Did it get you off? Did it make you feel important? Did it make you feel here to sleep with a man whose wife you had made disappear?
The gun is digging into my back and I feel slightly dizzy. Everything is turning over in my head and I am trying to keep hold of it, trying to hang on to the thread of your narrative as it flips from under me.
“Didn’t Rachel poison him too?” I say. “I mean, in this narrative reconstruction, who killed Jed?” Tasia won’t meet my eyes and I wonder if she thinks Moroni did. It could have been Moroni. It could have been suicide. It could have been you.
So, let’s pretend. Let’s make it a podcast episode. Let’s build a narrative, all of the evidence against you. Let’s talk about what might have happened.
“I told him to call her family. He said he would call during lunch, but they fired him.”
“Maybe he told them what you said about Grace.” Tasia glances at Clementine, bringing her in. “Maybe Addy told Rachel.”
I think of what the man outside the Arts Center told me, how he saw you with Jed
. What if he wasn’t mistaken? “Or else Jed told Rachel.”
“And Rachel killed Jed?” Clementine scoots forward.
“Addy told me she was going to Ashland,” I say. “About an hour before Homer came over. So how did she get to the ranch before I got back from dinner?”
“She didn’t go to Ashland,” Tasia says.
“She went to Willow Creek,” Clementine adds.
“To find Rachel.” We all pause for a moment, trying to catch the threads of the story.
“But Rachel wasn’t there?” Tasia suggests.
“Someone cut the phone line,” I add. “What if Rachel was already at the ranch?” I remember seeing Jed’s ATV abandoned at the shooting range. At the time I didn’t even think of it, but there was no reason for it to be there, no reason he would have abandoned it and walked down. “Then Homer and I went up to repair the line.” Maybe Homer noticed the ATV too. What if that was why he stayed behind? What if he was looking for you? “Did Homer mention seeing her? After I left?”
“No,” Clementine says. “But he got a call about half an hour later, before he went to the church. He wouldn’t tell me who it was, and that usually meant it was Rachel. He knew I didn’t like him talking to her. Homer believed in forgiveness, for everything. It was probably the thing we fought most about.” Her voice chips and I feel a wave of guilt and don’t know why.
“So Rachel was at the ranch,” Tasia continued. “And she poisoned the water.” The poison was in the back of Homer’s ATV. What if you took it?
“Emmett was poisoned, like all the other men,” Clementine says. “But Addy was shot.”
“That’s the key!” Tasia jumps in. “The problem is, all the evidence was contaminated, but there must be some way someone can prove Rachel shot Addy.” My back goes rigid. “Even if we can just lay one crime on her.” She turns to me, and fear slithers like an eel down my throat. “What happened when you got there?”
“It was just . . . chaos.”
Clementine reaches over and squeezes my hand. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.” Tasia shoots her a look.
“It’s all kind of a blur.”
I found Emmett in the armory. I found Addy in the garden. And then you found me.
I always thought it was strange how you left me in the house with Grace, how there was no sign of you at the ranch when I ran to my car. Where did you go? Grace said you went to stop Homer, but he was with Clementine. Maybe you called Homer from Jed’s house, from Homer’s house on the ranch, and asked him to meet you at the church. Then you poisoned him too. And then you drove back to me.
Or worse, I think with a jolt, that was Jed’s truck I saw barreling toward me before the accident.
In this made-up series of events, you left me in the yellow house with Grace and drove Jed’s truck to Happy Camp to pin the murder on Homer, then accidentally caught me on the way back. You were in a rush; you were trying to get back before I woke up. We were playing a game of chicken, and you ran me off the road.
And then I think, That’s not all. That’s not the end of the evidence, the case against you. Because Jed spent almost every weekend in Willow Creek. He spent a whole week there when he was supposed to be in Texas. Jed said he liked any bad thing; what if you were a bad thing? What if he came home with your lipstick on his collar a week after he and Grace moved here?
The eyewitness claimed he saw you all the time, claimed he saw you with Jed. And Addy used to hate Jed, but did she also know, or at least suspect, that you were sleeping with him? While you were supposed to be in hiding, not seen by or known to anyone, but still close enough to visit the ranch, to take the journal and throw the rock and use your parents’ computer to message Grace’s friends through her account, assuring them that she was fine.
And close enough to look after Grace. You told her she was in danger. You told her a story of murder and madness where you were the savior, where you were the hero of the heroless stories, the only one who understood what it is to be a woman in a world that wants you to disappear.
You kept Grace alive because she was pregnant, and maybe you had scruples or you wanted her baby, or Jed’s baby, or you were afraid of what might happen if you murdered one more person. Maybe you knew you would lose the ranch. And then you would have to get rid of everyone, everyone who had shielded you, your mother and your father and your brother.
That burn book I found in my cabin—it could have been about you.
The headlights I saw outside your yellow house could have been you pulling away.
You could have thrown the rock. You could have told me to run, because then you could chase me.
The reason Grace didn’t make a sound when I pounded on the door.
The reason Jed kept such a close eye on my investigation.
The reason his dog died, a week after he moved here, because she would have known where to find Grace.
The reason Addy told me not to leave the ranch, why she tried to control me, keep an eye on me. She was protecting me from you.
The reason I felt watched. You were watching. It could all point back to you.
Isn’t that a crazy story? Isn’t it fun? To connect a narrative, to build a case, to investigate a murder without the burden of ever having to solve it?
I don’t offer Tasia and Clementine this version of events. After all, I don’t really know, not for sure. How can I? It’s all just a story I put together, a mental game, an exercise in “true” crime.
“It’s fun to speculate.” My tone and my words sound off. They sit heavy in the air. There is something off about me. And it was crazy to think, even for a moment, that we could be friends. “But I’m sorry. I just don’t buy it.”
“But you might be in danger,” Clementine says, still unwilling to commit.
“So what?” Tasia says. “It’s what she deserves.”
“Excuse me, but this is the first time I’m hearing any of this. You should have told me when I asked you, instead of treating me like some crazy loner.” But didn’t I treat them like suspects? I questioned Tasia until she refused to talk to me. And I looked down on Clementine because she chose a life I rejected. How many times did I forgive Jed? And I couldn’t even forgive Clementine for being a good wife. I underestimated them. We underestimated each other.
“We never intended to treat you that way,” Clementine says. “I think we felt guilty, both of us. We felt like it was our fault.”
Tasia glowers. “It was never any of your business. Did you ever consider that? None of this was ever any of your business. And now all those women who come to your little sanctuary are in danger, all the time. All because you know Rachel is innocent.”
I turn to Clementine, the safer of the two. “If she killed all these women, why did she never kill you?”
But it’s Tasia who answers me, and her eyes swell with significance. “Because someone would care if we were gone.”
* * *
—
They leave me at the end of the drive. I expect you to meet me there, to confront me. To ask me what happened. I am surprised when you don’t. You are everywhere, and suddenly you’re gone.
As I approach the house, I hear Hope crying. She is really wailing, her voice dry, like she has been left for a long time, and my heart skips a beat. I rush up the porch and up the stairs, where we keep jugs of water stockpiled on every single step.
I sweep into Hope’s bedroom and the window is open; the curtains feather with a breeze off the creek but the crib is empty.
“Hello?” I shout. “Hello? Is anyone here?”
I follow the sounds of her wails out into the hall, toward your bedroom. I try not to think about what Tasia and Clementine said. Or that this is the first time I’ve let you out of my sight.
I step gingerly into your bedroom. I recognize the cross on your wall from Jed’s house,
and I wonder how it got there. Hope is crying herself hoarse in the evidence room.
“Hello?” I say. “I’m coming in to get the baby.” I feel the comforting dig of the gun on my back.
What if I was set up by Clementine and Tasia? What if they wanted to get me out of the house so someone could take care of you? Moroni? The police? We are running out of suspects.
My palm closes around the knob and I twist, but it’s locked. The door of the evidence room is locked with the baby inside. I scan your room, panicked now, heartbeat ratcheting up my chest. Where are you? Where is Grace?
I pull the gun out of my holster. I could shoot the door down, I think crazily. I try to calm myself and then, without thinking, without even knowing where it is coming from, I am kicking the door, harder and harder, again and again, like I can make something true if I hurt myself bad enough.
The door cracks. You built this house yourself and it splinters and breaks. Hope cries louder and then I shove, I force myself against the door and I am inside your evidence room.
The baby is on the floor like a discarded doll and I pick her up, inspect her for wounds as my heartbeat scatters like applause. I hold her against me, with the gun still in my hands, and she stops crying, that easy.
“Rachel,” I say, but my voice is a whisper. My leg aches all the way to my groin. I feel the beginnings of a cramp. I am inside your evidence room and I am surprised at how many things I recognize: the rock you threw at me, the red glass bottle still half full of poison, the journal from the staff cabin, Bumby’s collar, the gun I used to shoot your mother, Jed’s pale blue boxer briefs. And then there are the things I don’t recognize, as I hold Hope tight against me, bouncing inanely: the dirty, tangled friendship bracelets, the used lipsticks, the tampons, and, spattered with dried blood, two tickets headed south on the Murder Line.
You would have to be stupid to keep these things. You would have to be crazy with confidence, but why wouldn’t you be? You were being watched, you were being followed all the time and you didn’t stop. Nothing and no one could stop you out here, where there were so few people, and the people you knew were protecting you, or afraid of you, or didn’t care.
If I Disappear Page 25