Crossed

by Meredith Doench

  Marci’s leaving. With my next breath I finally break through the water’s thin, elastic sheath that has quietly and patiently shielded me for so long. Water drains from my ears and hair, drips from my face and shoulders. As the water loosens its embrace and puddles at my feet, I can now let Marci go. I watch in the rearview mirror as plumes of exhaust twirl behind the car in the cold air, and I press that Jeep on toward Rowan like I could bust right on through that burning horizon.

  Epilogue

  Friday, March 7

  Weaving through the rows of gravestones, three wreaths of fresh flowers drape over one of my arms while Rowan’s hand clasps the other. It has been years since I visited the grave site. The cold spell has passed, bathing the outskirts of Willow’s Ridge in warm sunlight that works hard to get rid of all the dirty snow and ice left behind. Rivulets of water run down the edges of the drive for the nearest sewer. Spring will come, the sunlight promises. Spring will finally come.

  Rowan lets go of my hand and walks ahead to examine a large monument, an eagle on the verge of taking flight. There is a skip in her step, a lightness as her A-line belted coat twirls around her knees. It’s the same coat she was wearing the day we met, a geometric pattern that features every color under the sun. It will be some time before she recovers fully—physically or emotionally—from the ordeal, but it could have been so much worse. For both of us.

  “Here, Ro.” She stands at my side and we take in the weather-worn stone before us.

  Careful not to step on the hallowed ground, Rowan kneels beside the length of the grave, her hair a tumbling river of curls scattered about her. As she speaks, she rests her right palm on the ground. “Marci Tucker. I’ve waited a long time to meet you.”

  The Tucker family had chosen an intricately designed Irish Catholic cross for Marci’s headstone. I kneel at the stone, letting my fingertips trace the engraving:

  Our loving angel,

  Watch over us with a peaceful heart.

  Marci Ann Tucker

  August 18, 1973–July 27, 1989

  “Marci,” I whisper, using my gloved hands to wipe away the dead leaves that have collected, the dirt and splatters of dried rain and snow on the stone. “I’ve missed you so much.” I work slow and steady, my eyes blurred with tears. When I finish cleaning the cross, I scoop away some of the remaining snow from around the stone. Soon, as the sun moves across the sky, Marci’s grave will be in the full light and will finally let go of these clinging pockets of snow and ice. My Frye boots sink into the spongy brown grass as I ring one of the wreaths over the top of the cross. Out of nowhere I hear the high lilt of Marci’s laughter, and the image of her smiling face fills my mind. A circle, she says. You remembered!

  Rowan wraps a strong arm around my shivering shoulders, her quiet presence grounding me.

  “You can finally rest now,” I tell Marci. “You are safe from Eldridge. And this”—I hook a thumb beside me—“is Rowan. You’d love her, Marce. She’s made me so happy.” I can almost hear Rowan’s smile spread from ear to ear. Soon she stands and moves away from the grave to give me a minute.

  I kiss the tips of my fingers, holding them a moment to my lips while I picture Marci’s blue eyes once again. Then I touch my fingertips to the ground over the area I imagine Marci’s face to be. “I love you, Marci. Always have. Always will.” The gentle breeze picks up my words and carries them through the trees. “You’ll always be my first love. I’ve missed you so much that sometimes I thought my heart might split.” I speak softly to the stone. Tears spill onto my cheeks. “We got him. It’s finally over.”

  Marci’s Irish cross pendant hangs from my neck and I hold it tight inside my fist. Once her case was solved, all of her belongings were released to the Tuckers. The missing journal was located tucked away inside the Tucker’s attic with mementoes of their dead daughter. Ainsley had released it to her parents so that no one would see Marci’s fantasies about girls. Still, I couldn’t believe it when Martin Tucker came through my door while I was recovering from the arrow wound in the Willow’s Ridge Hospital.

  “It’s been a long time,” he said, almost apologetically. “I didn’t recognize you at the restaurant that morning.” He stood at my bedside. The emotions tangled his words on his tongue until he could only say, “Thank you.”

  After a moment, he spoke again. “My mom and I want you to have something.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out Marci’s cross. The chain collapsed in my hand as Martin slowly set it in my open palm. “We had the original chain fixed.”

  “I can’t. It was a gift to her from your mom. She should have it.”

  “Mom wants you to have it, Luce. Marci would want you to have it.” I couldn’t take my eyes from his face, from those navy-blue eyes he shared with his sister.

  Now, I reach into my jeans pocket and pull out the limestone pebble I’d taken from Stonehenge the day I promised Marci I’d find her killer. With the edge of my red flannel, I polish it clean and tuck the round stone into a corner of the cross gravestone. Then I place my Marci rock beside it. My pocket feels lighter without the limestone chunks, and the bubble-filled stones are where they now belong. I will those holes and the layers of limestone to hold only happy times at Stonehenge, snippets of our laughter and sliced images of the love we shared inside that cavern. I sit until it is time. My time to finally say good-bye.

  *

  We walk, Rowan and I, hand in hand across the cemetery, up the drive to the gazebo that overlooks all of Willow’s Ridge. “I’m so proud of you,” Rowan says. I can’t find the words to explain to her what it is like to have the weight of over twenty years lifted away. The bones of my past have been unearthed, exposed. Instead of feeling the shame I thought I would, I only feel stronger.

  We always want to know Why? when a murderer is caught. Why did he choose the victims he did? Why did he have the urge to kill? My training tells me we need those answers to learn from the experience and put closure on it. But with Chad Eldridge, I only have some of the answers, not nearly enough explanation. Kaitlin survived unscathed and awaits a trial on four counts of murder as well as a charge of obstructing an investigation and desecration of a corpse. She’ll face the charges alone. Since her arrest, she’s told police that she’d been sleeping with Eldridge for over two years. This statement shows me just how much we cannot trust a word Kaitlin says; everything we have found points to Eldridge’s sexual dysfunction that would have made it impossible for him to have sex. There is no doubt in my mind, however, that there was some sort of emotional relationship between them.

  While my shoulder healed and I visited the hospital for physical therapy, people asked me why I didn’t go ahead and shoot Kaitlin, too. Her involvement outraged people, this twenty-year-old woman with so much life ahead of her. How could she trick these innocent victims and drug them so they could be led to their deaths?

  I can’t speak for Kaitlin or why she did what she did. I can only say that she learned the One True Path teachings and had been a participant as well. That’s where she met Chad Eldridge. I’ve always found there’s a strong tendency in humans to recognize our own behavior in another and purely despise it. Maybe she thought killing off lesbians around her would scare off her own sexual temptation. Maybe she thought she could kill her sexuality by killing others. All I have is a bunch of maybes when it comes to Kaitlin. Still, every time I think of Kaitlin and Sambino, I only see the grand betrayal they pulled on the local gay community. If we cannot trust each other for safety and compassion, who can we trust?

  Eldridge’s biological father, the owner of the funeral home in Willow’s Ridge, divorced his mother when Chad was two. Chad moved with her to Chicago, and by the time he was three, his mother had remarried the photographer, Klosenova. He completed Crossed while traveling, taking many photos in different towns, dragging Chad and his mother along with him. All reports state that Klosenova wanted to live in the quaint town of Willow’s Ridge but felt he could not because of his wife’s ex, who’
d built a solid anchor in the town with his funeral home.

  Before he started the Crossed series, Klosenova caught Chad’s mother with another woman. He let that image simmer. He let her try to make it up to him. Once he finished the series, though, he shot her dead. Klosenova was arrested for the murder and Chad was sent back to Willow’s Ridge to live with his father above the funeral home. The very location where he eventually brought his victims and injected them with a mixture of roofies and vitamin K. Sambino got the blood—that’s all he ever wanted from the whole deal. For that desire, he’ll serve at least fifty years behind bars.

  I couldn’t help but think Eldridge would still be out killing if it hadn’t been for Emma Parks’s strength and the young kid out four-wheeling that morning. The rumbling sounds of the bike spooked Eldridge, made him run and not finish with Emma Parks. Was it simply luck? Or something much more?

  We also uncovered that Eldridge had been an active supporter of One True Path, donating large amounts to the national group every year. He provided the Jamesons the funds to move their meetings out of their basement and into the strip-mall space. He never got over his mother’s sexuality—not a single photograph of her was found within his belongings.

  Why Marci? This is the question I most want an answer to. What did she ever do to catch his attention?

  “He must have been watching,” Rowan said. “Waiting and watching in the forest. He saw you together. God, Luce, if you had been there on time to meet Marci, he would have killed you both.” I escaped his twisted form of justice twice now, two blessings I couldn’t let myself forget.

  Near the top of the hill, through the statues and soldiers, we cross a line of old graves that leads to where Captain Davis took me two months ago. Freshly turned earth lies beside Tim Ainsley now; fresh bunches of flowers and planters cover the graves of Tim and his father. Cole’s funeral was a hero’s ceremony for a fallen officer. I’d taken part, even been a pallbearer for the man who saved my life with his own. One of the American flags from the ceremony still remains at the side of Cole’s gravestone.

  “Why did he do it, Ro? Why did he give his life for me?”

  I don’t really expect an answer from her, but she has one when her arm wraps around my waist. “He understood,” she says.

  “Understood what?”

  “Life. The danger you were in. That his wounds were severe. He saw you, so able and healthy and with so many years ahead. It was an offering, really, an offering to his profession or a higher power so that both of you wouldn’t die inside that quarry.” Rowan kisses my cheek.

  I place the remaining two wreaths of flowers on Cole’s and Tim’s graves, hidden among the mounds of others, while Rowan walks a few steps away.

  I kneel at Cole’s side, the way I had with Marci. The tears swim in my eyes again when I think of the good man below me, the one I doubted and fought with so fervently those last couple of days of the investigation. There’s nothing left for me to say except: “Thank you a million times over.”

  When Rowan and I finally make it back to the truck, the sun has settled over the lot, spreading its warmth like a comforting blanket. Rowan pulls herself up and sits on the hood. “The sun!” She squeals, throwing her arms out to her sides, tossing her head back. “It really does exist in Willow’s Ridge!”

  I laugh and step toward Rowan, using my hands to spread her knees apart. As I pull her close, Rowan wraps her legs around my waist, clutching me in a strong hug. She buries her face against my neck, nuzzling close. We hold each other for quite some time, clinging to each other the way lovers do who’ve almost lost each other.

  “Let’s go home,” Rowan says. When I say nothing, Rowan leans in for a kiss. “Think the kids have missed us?”

  I laugh. “Actually, the real question is, do you think Dan is still talking to us after this enormous stint of dog sitting?” Rowan lets out a howl of laughter. She jumps down and opens the truck door.

  I stand for a second longer and breathe in the quiet comfort of the graveyard. I can sense its welcome to the end of the storm, inviting the change, the growth of new life. I hear it whisper in the space all around me, Change is finally coming.

  “You ready?” Rowan calls to me for a second time through the hushed glass of the windshield.

  I consider Rowan’s smile, her eagerness to get on our way. Sometimes I wonder why she is still by my side even after the threat to her life and my steadfast, though diminishing, Berlin Wall. She tells me this is love. She tells me this is what we do for those we love. I hope someday I’ll get to the place where I can actually give back the full-throttle love Rowan so deserves. Maybe people really are like the consistency of limestone, just as Marci told me so long ago—able to change and shift with our surroundings and experiences.

  Most of all, though, we survive.

  About the Author

  Meredith Doench’s short fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in literary journals such as Hayden’s Ferry Review, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and Gertrude. She earned a Ph.D. in creative writing from Texas Tech University and served as a fiction editor at Camera Obscura: Journal of Literature and Photography. She teaches writing and literature at a university in southern Ohio. Crossed is her first novel.

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