Ohio

by Stephen Markley

  He moved down to the Florida Panhandle to retire, and to be near his living son. His hometown, where he’d lived all sixty-seven years of his life, no longer felt like home. He planned to make yearly trips on Rick’s birthday to visit his grave and to talk to him in the quiet of Dryland Creek Cemetery. On headphones, he’d listen to songs written by his son’s friend. He would talk about the family, how he missed Rick’s mother but not enough to call her, and he felt his son’s prayers coming from somewhere—either heaven or the deepest parts of his memory, he was never so sure—while the hot, bright day passed into a sunset that hurt his eyes.

  This stupid act of cruelty, as utterly pointless as the bullet that had taken Marty’s youngest boy, set off a second, disparate chain of unwinding mystery. The way Ben Harrington once explained it in a crude early song was that love may be planned and violence may be aberrant, but both ripple outward all the same. The mostly failed massacre at Masjid Al-Amin, which garnered national attention for only a handful of days before other gruesome incidents, public political catfights, tech and finance saturnalia, and celebrity gossip swallowed it whole, set in motion a series of events that, four years later, would send a woman to Chicago in search of answers from a long-lost friend.

  * * *

  Like that bizarre night of the confluence, in the spring of 2017 an evening of unstable air and lift brought with it a mighty storm. When the rain began, the first stout drops hit the pavement similar to the way excess dew shakes free of a leaf, droplets too fat to come from the clouds. But then came the wind, tearing off Lake Michigan like the breath of God, scattering loose, abandoned sheets of newspaper down the streets, picking up trash and blasting it down city blocks, driving every pedestrian to seek shelter as the full-fledged midwestern thunderstorm barreled in: a hard, sluicing downpour the city was seeing more frequently in recent years, bursts of meteorological wrath more akin to fetal typhoons. You could only run for cover or face it like a bull rider, as a beast that flexed and bucked. The rain came sideways, from overhead, it even seemed to spring forth from the soaking macadam grid. It filled the river; it turned the surface of the lake into a foaming white-capped stew. The airports shut down, the wildlife hid, the gutters overflowed, and the streets filled with inches of dirty water. The gray-blue tint of dusk gave way to a deep midnight hue. The believers out there could squint and almost imagine this as the much talked about End of Days, the season of Noah’s flood rather than the fire next time. Many of them secretly wished for it.

  The downpour dragged on, and because it was a Sunday and past business hours, the unfortunate few caught in the deluge had little opportunity for shelter. When the storm exploded in the sky without warning, the woman made a futile gesture of putting her handbag over her head before scavenging an umbrella from a nearby Walgreens. Even with the umbrella, she ended up running, her flats slapping sharply over the roar of the rain. The bar tucked away downtown on the corner of Hubbard and Franklin was one of the few places open. She recognized the point of rendezvous from online images, all glass and warm light, an antique sign overhead advertising Phillies Cigars for five cents. She managed to get in the door before the downpour began in full fury.

  The man was not so lucky. Dressed in a suit, making the walk from his hotel, the thunderstorm whipped up, and his umbrella was inside out and flaccid within minutes. He chucked it, ran the remaining two blocks, and was soaked through to his underwear. The light from the bar cut a slice of dark from the pavement, and it was this slice that led him, his shoes beating sprays of rain into his socks. He let out a sharp breath of relief even as his hand skidded off the slick brass door handle. Three heads turned as he tore inside—a couple, twiddling straws at the bar, and a bartender in dark clothes and a bleach-white apron. And then there was Stacey Moore, waiting for him in a booth, fourteen years after Bill Ashcraft had last seen her. She thought he looked remarkably similar, but not in a good way. He’d grown a thick black beard stitched through with premature gray, like someone had shoddily aged him via computer program and wrapped him in a lousy suit and tie. From Bill’s perspective, she’d changed drastically from the girl he’d known, the one Ben Harrington had once described as “the hottest church-camp girl in the school.” Now she had a messy boy’s haircut, tattoos on her arms, on her fingers, and one peeking out from her clavicle, red and black threads that appeared to spool down her chest. She’d gained weight, and her eyes (like cirrus clouds, pale, gossamer blue) were now each surrounded by a haiku of wrinkles. He noticed a faint scar on the side of her skull, above the ear, a thin pink line where the hair no longer grew.

  Despite the ugly, uncertain reasons for this reunion, Bill couldn’t help but smile when he saw her, and she couldn’t help but return it.

  * * *

  “You don’t live here then?” she asked him.

  “No, just passing through.”

  Bill wiped the rain from his eyes and checked on the rest of the bar. A couple waited out the storm with a couple of cocktails: a sleepy-eyed black man in a sports coat and a pretty Latina in a vintage red dress. The bar had the shape of an acute triangle, and the couple sat at its shortest side. The bartender brought Bill a clean bar towel from the pile by the maraschino cherries. He thanked him and began scrubbing the rain from his hair.

  “Why Chicago?” she asked.

  “Had some work here in the city anyway. Seemed convenient with you in St. Louis.”

  “What kind of work?”

  “Politics.”

  “Like for a candidate? An issue?”

  “Something a bit different.”

  He wouldn’t say more, and this worried her. She had not found him via the standard routes, striking out with both Facebook and Google searches. He was a ghost online. She’d called his mother five months earlier, trying to track him down. Unenthused, even vacant, Joni Ashcraft simply said she had no idea where her son was. It didn’t sound like she much cared either. Other avenues proved fruitless, and she thought she might give up. Then a month ago, she’d received an e-mail that looked like junk mail. Bizarrely, it requested that she create an anonymous, encrypted e-mail address. Thus began her correspondence with Bill. They finally agreed on a date, a time, and a bar in a specific city. She and Maddy had only recently moved to St. Louis, where Maddy had a job offer after sticking it out in Michigan for the duration of Stacey’s doctoral work. She’d lied to Maddy about where she was going and who she was seeing this week.

  “This is Fitz. He’s two.” She showed him her phone. A picture of her son with his bowl haircut, slim eyes, and gaping alligator-sized smile. Bill flipped through a few and handed it back.

  “Fitz?”

  “For Fitzwilliam. You know, Mr. Darcy?”

  “Oof. That’s gonna be miserable for him in about seven years.”

  “Half the reason we did it. If he decides he’s gender fluid, he can switch to Darcy.”

  “Why’d you do it? Have a kid I mean. World’s on its way out.”

  She gave him an unpleasant look and cupped her phone as if this could protect her son.

  “My brother Patrick, he calls it ‘God,’ I call it ‘energy’—but just learning to direct your heart somewhere where it can do some honest good, Bill.”

  He nodded, uninterested in hearing about Patrick: her years of tense phone calls and avoidance on holidays, her mother’s tearful attempts to reconcile them, her father’s cancer diagnosis, and her angry confrontation with Patrick in the hospital following their dad’s surgery. How Patrick was still not all right with Maddy, and likely never would be, even though he’d promised to bury it. How she loved him all the same.

  The bartender brought their drinks, a light beer for him and a vodka and soda water for her.

  “What did you tell her? Your wife.”

  She crossed one panted leg over the other and played with her ring finger tattoo as though it were a real wedding band. The Latin: manibus. To grasp hands. “I told her I was going to see an old friend.”

  “So pret
ty much true.”

  “In Ohio.”

  He nodded carefully. “Thank you for agreeing to that.”

  “Can I ask then? Why we’re meeting like spies.”

  He still had that calm, cold gaze beneath dangerous black eyebrows. There was less playfulness in his face now. The beard made him look like a killer. Finally, he said, “I was surprised by how good it was to hear from you. I haven’t spoken to anyone from New Canaan in what feels like millennia.” Not for a beat did he take his eyes off her. “Still. Maybe we start with why you’re here.”

  Her eyes went sideways to the couple and the handsome silver-haired bartender. He smirked at something the couple said to him, grabbed a stack of dirty glasses, and disappeared into the back. It was a nice joint: polished oak walls with pictures of the city throughout its history. There were the stockyards at the turn of the century, State Street teeming with horses in the growth years after the Civil War, the first Model Ts rattling along streets still lit by gas lamp, speakeasies crowded with flirting men and women during Al Capone’s reign. Lights with the dim authority of candles lined the walls, and the stools at the bar were bolted down with a nice metal bar on which to rest one’s tired, soaking feet. She recognized the music playing softly in the background: Miles Davis, Kind of Blue.

  He watched as she reached into her handbag and withdrew a battered spiral-bound notebook with a large coffee stain melting through the lower right-hand corner of every page. She opened it to a place marked with a paper clip. The edges of the paper curled from too much flipping. She set it on the wood, clasped her hands.

  “I came all this way because you’re one of the last people who might be able to help me.” She took a breath. “A while back—years ago now—I decided to track down Lisa.”

  And she told him the story of what had happened between her and Lisa Han. They’d fallen in love, she claimed. Bill searched his memory of his high school girlfriend to decide if he’d seen this in her but came up empty. Then again, he had never anticipated she’d leave home the way she did. No one could know anyone that young.

  “Bill, when was the last time you saw her?”

  “I was in Cambodia actually. This must’ve been 2010 or so. I got in touch with her so we could meet up. Not for anything hanky-panky-like,” he quickly added. “I just wanted to catch up. We couldn’t make it work out, though.”

  “You talked to her while you were there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You sure?”

  “Of course.”

  “I mean did you hear her voice?”

  “No. We traded Facebook messages.”

  Stacey sat back, her eyes hot and knowing. “When I decided to try to find her again, it was the summer of 2013. We e-mailed back and forth for a few months, and then suddenly she stopped replying. All her social media accounts went idle. She hasn’t used them since. So almost a whole year goes by, and I go see her mother because she’s the one who asked me to help find her in the first place. And she shows me the postcards Lisa’s sent her over the years. And I’m looking at these postcards, and I don’t know—they bothered me.”

  She pulled a postcard, paper-clipped onto a page, and set it in front of him.

  Bill used the opportunity to look past this simple tourist’s communication and steal a glance at Stacey’s notebook: honey-yellow paper scrawled full with dates and locations (“New Canaan,” “Hanoi,” “Alliance, Ohio”) in messy but cordoned chunks.

  “It took forever—and I’ll be totally up-front with you: I got a little obsessed. Here I am getting married, working my ass off on my doctorate, and beginning the process of Maddy getting pregnant with Fitz, and I basically have another fucking life I’m living, Bill. I’m lying to everybody because I think there’s something wrong about all of it.”

  “Wrong about what?”

  The bartender returned with a crate of clean glasses, which he put in a stack next to the sink, and glanced at them. Bill noticed his gaze. Ever since he realized what it was he’d carried north four years ago, he now noticed everyone who noticed him. The rain’s fury surely covered their conversation.

  “Bethany told me that when Lisa left home, she wrote a note. Bethany doesn’t have it anymore, but she remembered the note saying that I drove her to the airport, that I helped her pack and leave.”

  “Did you?”

  “No.”

  Bill pressed forward in the booth, staring at the postcard and its looping cursive.

  “Did you follow the sentencing for those guys from New Canaan? The ones who killed that little girl.”

  He continued to stare at the postcard, and Stacey read only five percent of what went through him at that question. It was why he’d risked meeting her at all: to find out what she knew. After all, she too had been home the night of his return.

  “A little bit.”

  “The date when they killed her—it stuck with me because Lisa’s e-mails, her accounts, they all went dark at almost exactly the same time.”

  He had spent years moving the pieces of this emotional puzzle around, trying to find any way to put it together so that he would not feel the puncture wound of guilt and the rot that spread from it. He would never forgive himself for his role in what happened, but ultimately that was beside the point.

  “Between that shit and the thing with Tina, it was a hell of a year for New Canaan,” he said neutrally.

  She watched his eyes for signs and tells.

  “You know what else happened after they were arrested?”

  Bill waited for it.

  “Kaylyn. She disappeared. No one in New Canaan—not her mother, not anyone—knows what happened to her. And look at this . . .”

  She set another scrap of paper next to the postcard, a photocopied blurb: You’re a real hot bitch, Stace. Great being your friend and setting up your spikes! Stay in touch. –K.

  “That’s what Kaylyn wrote in my yearbook.”

  The two sets of handwriting were similar, but not exactly the same. Probably half the teenage girls in North America had that bubbled, loopy style.

  “You’ve lost me, Moore.” He couldn’t keep track of all the dots she expected him to connect, but he was gathering that this was not about what he’d feared. Something far weirder.

  She sat back in the booth and raised one tattooed arm, rubbed a cheek so that it looked like she was pulling the flesh from her face. The wind picked up outside, and it made Bill think of a wolf’s howl. Blue lightning streaked the sky, its tributaries like all the random jags of the rivers feeding the Mississippi. It was beautiful, bright, and then it was gone. Followed by the roar of thunder.

  “I started trying to track people down—anyone who might know anything about where Lisa might be. I was back in New Canaan almost every month. To see my dad when he got sick but also . . .”

  “I might get scotch,” Bill interrupted. “I don’t know why I ordered this light crap.”

  Her face spasmed, but the irk quickly passed. “Sure.”

  When Bill returned with the glass of peat-smelling amber liquid, Stacey squeezed her notebook so that it formed an upside-down U.

  “Who did you talk to?” he asked.

  “A lot of people. It doesn’t matter. What’s important, Bill, is it all comes back to one person.”

  When the name Todd Beaufort came up, Bill couldn’t help but let loose a grim chuckle. He would never get away from this guy. At some point they had to cut these ghosts down from the trees. Couldn’t just leave them all up there swinging. He listened to this story, drowning in the noise of the storm and looked out the window to the cars cutting through the flooding streets.

  “Just listen. I know. I sound nuts. I feel nuts. Just . . . listen.” She flipped to another page in her notebook. She went through Beaufort’s history of sexual assault, this being the reason he never played a game for the Buckeyes. The young woman never pressed charges, but he had to transfer to Mount Union. His criminal record later included theft and forging prescriptions.
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  “So what?” Bill tasted his drink and enjoyed the warmth in the back of his throat and the burn in his stomach. “Beaufort was a dirtbag? If that’s what you came here to tell me, believe me, I knew that back when we were kids.”

  “You were in New Canaan that night,” she said. “When I found Tina.”

  The couple, talking in murmurs for so long, broke into laughter as bright as the woman’s dress. Bill twirled his scotch glass in clockwise circles.

  “What the hell does that have to do with Lisa?”

  She pulled a photo from her notebook and handed it to him. It was a picture of a piece of jewelry, blackened and charred, the metal clasp warped. “They found it on Tina when they arrested her that night.”

  He examined the picture and handed it back.

  “I swear to God that locket—it’s Lisa’s. I remember her wearing it. She used to keep pictures of teeny-bop idols in it. Like as a joke. Jonathan Taylor Thomas and Nick Lachey and all that Tiger Beat crap. Do you remember?”