Ohio

by Stephen Markley

  He shook his head.

  “So how did Tina have it? Because Todd must have had it. When she did whatever she did to him.”

  “So you believe she did it?”

  Because they’d never found much of Todd Beaufort, new ghost stories erupted in New Canaan. Tina was currently incarcerated and received mental health treatment at the Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville, and kids wandered the woods trying to randomly dig up the supposed grave of the ex-football star who’d vanished one warm summer night, whose insane ex-girlfriend chopped him up and buried him there, according to legend. Because a storm had come blasting through in the early-morning hours, similar in size and ferocity to the one blanketing Chicago as they spoke, the police had to call off the search until it passed. Then the Cattawa overflowed its banks, spilling into the nearby woods. In the mud they found fragments of melted plastic, a gas can, DNA that matched Todd Beaufort’s, traces of his blood and hair in Tina’s car, but never a body. Tina Ross never told where she’d left him and all the search dogs and high-tech equipment proved useless. The flood had carried it all away.

  “She did something to him,” said Stacey. “I’ve got no clue about the circumstances, but when I found her, Jesus . . .” On that night of the vortex, she’d seen Todd get into that same car, and when she found Tina alone, reeking of smoke, with a frantic misery in her voice, face, and eyes, she knew something terrible had happened. When Tina swung the tire iron at her head, Stacey had almost been ready for it. Like she’d been forewarned in a forgotten dream. “No, she wasn’t making fuck-all up.”

  “So what the hell are you even saying?”

  “Christ, Bill . . .” She picked up the postcard and thwapped it against her fingers. “How hard would this be to fake? For someone who knew Lisa? How hard would it be to buy postcards from Vietnam or Thailand online, ship them to one of those countries already written, and pay someone a few bucks to send them back? That same night, the night with Tina, I got a message from Lisa. How hard would it be to get into her e-mail? She only ever had one password, I know that: Romans58. And then, right around 2006, when it got to be a thing, start a few social media accounts for her? I found someone to check the IP addresses on all her e-mails to me. They all originated in Ohio. Mostly in New Canaan, but a few in—”

  Bill began to laugh. He was no longer sure if he should be nervous because of what Stacey was saying or if the girl was just batshit.

  “Don’t fucking laugh at me,” she snapped.

  He immediately clipped himself, turning a final errant chuckle to a cough.

  “Lisa didn’t leave. She didn’t go on some romantic fantasy jaunt, never to return. Todd killed her. I’m sure of it. And I think Kaylyn helped him. I don’t know what it was about or why or how it went down, but she was clever about it. She catfished Lisa back into existence before anyone had even heard of that word.”

  * * *

  How close she was and yet how far. She and Bill were both missing a few pieces, beginning with the videotape, the old camcorder kind, which Lisa found hidden in Kaylyn’s drawer of thefts and petty revenge. She was missing how Lisa agonized over what to do with it, who to tell, and just how gut churning it was to watch and then to own a secret like that. How it had eaten her up until it was all she could think about day and night. How she couldn’t go to the person she really wanted to tell because that girl’s brother was among the videotape’s demons. How she’d gone to Kaylyn, who she still had love for, and demanded she turn those boys in. How after hearing this, Kaylyn had lured her out to Jericho Lake under a pretense of explanation. How Todd was only supposed to scare her into handing over the tape.

  Bill watched the bartender chat with the couple about the midwestern fury beyond the windows. “Like a fist smacking the city,” said the bartender, and he poured them another round. They toasted the storm that had brought them together for this fleeting evening.

  “Bill.” Stacey stared at him until he looked at her. “Do you have any idea where Kaylyn is?”

  He set down his scotch, and released a long, careful breath. He’d heard conspiracy theories before. You can’t really traffic in left-of-the-left-wing politics and not hear about the thermite charges that brought down the WTC towers or the Bilderberg Group engineering the entire global economy for its benefit. He’d suffered so many disappointments and defeats in his life. He’d lost so many people he cared about. He had no friends, no network, no family he could ever safely return to. He had only his compatriots in this underground experiment and the constant paranoia they shared. He’d battled depression, drug abuse, and so many notions of suicide that he’d forgotten some of the most bizarre ones. (Once, while driving through the Cumberland Mountains he’d noted a guardrail that, if busted through properly, would allow him to die in a kamikaze crash into a piece of dragline machinery currently taking that mountain apart.) He had no patience for fantasy anymore—not his or anyone else’s. And yet, when Stacey reached the part about Kaylyn, he returned to his night with her. That night. And he heard her story again and recalled all the holes, odd ends, and blank spaces, which, despite his fog, had seemed eerie and bottomless even then.

  As the light outside dimmed and night crept in, the city’s skyscrapers looked to him like an infrastructure built from the skeletons of gargantuan monsters and then the marrow set ablaze.

  “Kaylyn,” said Stacey. “She managed to somehow vanish. I know she was mixed up with Kirk, Frank, and Amos. Kaylyn ran, and when she ran, she had to give up the game. She couldn’t risk keeping up the fiction of Lisa.”

  “And you think I know where she is?” Bill asked.

  “Do you?”

  “No.”

  One of the people Stacey spoke to, who provided her with no leads, no clues, no viable information, was Hailey Kowalczyk. She’d cornered Hailey at the retirement home during her trip back to see Bethany Kline (lying to Maddy that she was visiting Patrick and his family so that she’d want no part of the trip). Stacey finagled her old classmate Hailey into inviting her over for a beer. She caught up with Hailey and Eric, got an offer to stay for dinner, and demurred. It wasn’t until she asked Hailey to walk her to her car that she managed to ask about Kaylyn. For her part, Hailey thought she acted the role perfectly. Rolled her eyes, crossed her arms, and told Stacey the only story she told anyone: the last time she spoke to Kay was when she drove her back from rehab in 2013. When Stacey pressed her, Hailey explained that she’d wanted nothing more to do with her childhood friend from Rainrock. The girl was either clean or she wasn’t. When she gave Kaylyn $1,100 from her savings account and drove her to the bus station in Mansfield, Hailey justified it as she always did: she was her friend’s protector, her guardian. Because she was the only person who truly knew Kay, knew every last devil inside her. She had to help Kaylyn because as a girl, she’d been robbed of something, hurt in a way that she could shield from view but never control. It fell to Hailey, time after time, to save her. And she would. Unconditionally.

  Hailey volunteered no other information, and Lisa’s name never came up.

  Stacey had watched Kowalczyk carefully, unable to decide if she believed her. She considered spilling her theory about Lisa, but it still felt outrageous, paranoid, and seeing this version of Hailey, a heavyset wife and mother with bags under her eyes, dressed in nursing garb as she prepared for the late shift, quashed any will to articulate her deepest fear. They embraced before she left, and it amazed Stacey how old they all were. Back home in St. Louis, she and Maddy would fight more than they would fuck, argue more than they would say “I love you,” dote over their son, worry about every sharp table corner, wall socket, and fever, and she would remember they were adults. Hugging Hailey, she did not feel like an adult, but perpetually cast back through time. An awkward teenager, jealous and horny and sad and buoyant, forevermore.

  Eric, who listened to all this from the kitchen window, knew his wife was lying. Because Hailey had left the house in the middle of the night in October 2013, say
ing only that Kaylyn had done something stupid and needed her help. Eric, who loathed this junkie woman his wife could never get away from, demanded an explanation. All Hailey had to say about the matter was that it was the final, absolute last time she’d ever help Kay. They’d had a blowout fight about it. He’d suspected things about Hailey their entire marriage. She was secretive, private. When they’d been in financial jams (so very many times) she’d always have a stash of money to ease them through. He didn’t understand why Hailey lied to Stacey Moore, but he also didn’t care. After that fall night in 2013, it turned out Kaylyn really was gone. Eric Frye pretended to be putting away dishes when his wife came back inside, and neither of them brought up Stacey’s unsettling, probing visit ever again.

  Stacey had tried to see Tina Ross at the Ohio Reformatory for Women, but Tina wrote her a polite letter denying the request. In the letter, Tina apologized for trying to hurt her. She was seeing a therapist now and leading a Bible study group. One thing of which Tina was certain, she knew nothing of Kaylyn nor her whereabouts, and it was best for her to stay focused on herself. Dragging up the past was not the way to go about that, she explained. She’d pled guilty to quite a few felony convictions (kidnapping, first-degree manslaughter), but she would be up for parole in just another five years. Cole or her parents visited almost every weekend, and strangely, Tina wondered if prison hadn’t changed her for the better. She could focus. She could draw breath. Her therapist told her the only thing she had left to do was to face what scared her. She sometimes thought she could feel God inside of her again, that she had somehow, against all odds, plunged into unfathomable hope.

  One of Tina’s letters of apology arrived in the mailbox of Allison Beaufort, who tried to read it with hate, but by the time she finished, it had all melted away. She’d liked Tina so much, never understood why Todd dumped her. One thing Allison knew about her son, he was angry. Had been since he was a boy, and rightfully so. Life had done him dirty from the start. She had tried her best. She kept a row of photographs on the mantel in the living room: His senior picture where he wore a blue polo and leaned against a tree. His football picture, on one knee, grinding his upside-down helmet in the grass of the field. His peewee football photo, from maybe fourth or fifth grade, a huge gap in his smile where a front tooth had come out. She took care of the rescue dogs, fed them, gave them a home, and sometimes she sat with one of the oldest and sweetest of the mutts, head on her lap, and together they’d watch the night while she prayed for her son.

  * * *

  Bill stared at the sparkling polish of the table’s surface, fixing his eyes on a knot in the wood, a black divot that could have had a map of the world carved into its depths. An uncomfortable silence descended. Stacey felt a hot flash of sweat break out on the small of her back. She’d tripped an unseen wire. She couldn’t read Bill’s serene face, showing the first ticks of deeper lines, and this infuriated her.

  “I haven’t heard from Kay. Not since high school.”

  “But you two had a thing.”

  “So to speak.” He twisted his glass, leaving spirals of moisture on the table, and remembered how he’d once actually believed he’d loved that girl. The storm raging outside reminded him of the first night they’d spent together at her grandmother’s house in Dover. “How do you know about that?”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  She’d actually learned this from Dan Eaton, who she met in the visitation room of the Crawford County Correctional Facility in Pennsylvania where he was serving a year for felony assault after beating a man in a grocery store parking lot. Stacey asked him about Kaylyn, but he had no clue. She asked him about Lisa, and he truthfully told her he hadn’t spoken to her in over a decade. Stacey pretended her visit was to see how he was doing, and Dan never volunteered the information that might have proved crucial: what Hailey told him the last night he ever saw her. He’d refused Hailey’s visit to Crawford. After his guilty plea, the judge had given him a considerably lenient sentence. One that Dan didn’t feel he deserved. What he’d done in the wars? Yeah, that didn’t go unnoticed by God. It required payback. Depression, PTSD, self-blame, these were buzzwords, he decided, jargon to describe an ancient human hurt written in the bones, sung in the sinews of muscle, ground out in the anamnesis of cells. And yet Danny still had love in him, which is a kind of bravery. He’d spent his year in prison corresponding with Melody Coyle. She’d taken a week off work and left Hanna with Greg’s folks to visit him. She so easily saw the decency and courage Greg had spoken of. Dan described the scenario, an encounter in a Neff’s grocery store parking lot with a good ole boy hassling a Mexican kid, cussing him out for putting a dent in his Tundra. The guy wore flannel and work boots but had a rich man’s haircut; he’d snatched this terrified boy by his T-shirt collar and bounced him off the hood of the kid’s decrepit car. Dan saw too many of these bullies in the world now, growing more and more sure of themselves. So Dan grabbed this man’s forearm, and brought the heel of his hand down swiftly at a high, brutish angle. How pleasing the sound of that awful crack had been. He hadn’t even realized how long he wanted to do something like that. Then he simply kept on going: broke the man’s collarbone, five of his ribs, cracked his skull, all in front of the man’s wife and two boys. He told all this to Melody in his soft student’s voice. Melody Coyle slid a warm hand over his, her eyes as bright as daybreak. How interesting, she thought, that she might very well be about to fall in love with a man who’d held her husband as he died.

  “Can I ask you something?” said Bill. “If all this is true—really true—and Todd’s the monster you say he is—what’s it matter? He’s still somewhere out in the woods back home. He got his.”

  He knew something more, Stacey was sure.

  A peal of thunder boomed through the bar, vibrating the glasses, rocking the whole city. A car alarm went off in the distance. The couple and the bartender looked at one another, eyes bugged, and then burst into laughter at how they’d flinched so simultaneously.

  “You know what I think?” said Bill. “I think the simplest explanation is usually the right one. Todd Beaufort is rotting in those woods. Kaylyn OD’d in some McDonald’s bathroom without an ID on her or tried to coat-hanger her baby out, and Lisa—Lisa just never looked back. Simple as that.”

  “I still have to know,” she said, her nerves too raw, her teeth grinding too painfully, to realize that Bill had just admitted to knowing of Kay’s pregnancy. She’d learned this during a forty-second conversation through a screen door with Mrs. Lynn (“Don’t know, don’t care,” she said when asked where her daughter was), but when Bill copped to knowing that Kaylyn had been pregnant, it blew right past her.

  Kaylyn, for her part, almost never thought of Stacey, had no idea that it wasn’t the pursuit of the authorities that she should fear but her old friend from the volleyball team now working as an adjunct professor of English. She returned from waitressing shifts to her unhappy apartment in a subdivision on the outskirts of Anchorage. She paid Blanca her pittance for watching her son, kissed Scotty in his bed, and collapsed on the couch to breathe black mold she could never quite clean entirely from the ceiling’s corners. Then she drank vodka and watched television until she passed out. It was the only way she could sleep. With Hailey’s money, she’d chosen the airline ticket that would take her the farthest she could go without a passport, and when she found herself in this land of mountains hurtled together, sheetrock sky crashing against a slate sea, a place where people really could still disappear, she at least knew she’d found something resembling a second chance. The things she had done to con her way to a new identity—she was resourceful, a survivor, and her son would be too. She ignored the passes men made at her at the bar and saved money on laundry detergent by throwing all their clothes in the bathtub with some soap. She and her little guy rolled up their pant legs and danced, and he thought it was a game. The winters were bleak, frigid, lightless, and somehow invigorating. Nothing she could do about the dreams a
nd ghosts, though. As resilient, relentless, and restless as the mold. In the drawer of her nightstand she kept the picture Bill Ashcraft had dropped in her house that night, the one of all of them at homecoming, cut into quarters by the folds. She took it out only when she woke from indissoluble nightmares. Screaming at Todd to stop, wanting to jump on his back and tear him away even as her legs felt rooted in place. Just please, stop. It was all she’d been able to say.

  * * *

  The bar could have been a sepulchre, a boneyard for their collected memories. Between them, they had stories they could never tell, and it was these moments intrinsic to their pasts that lingered in this quiet mahogany-and-brass niche of the world, creaking among the connecting joints of the bar stools or the maroon material of the booths, a place where adults would hear settling wood but children would hear spirits. When the dark fell, the pictures of the old city disappeared into shadow. The glasses hanging from a rack above the bar captured light from the street, and that fragrant blend of oil soap wood cleaner and disinfectant wormed its way into their nostrils. For the rest of their time on this earth, that specific scent would forever return them to this place. Even if it was the smell of countless taverns the world over, it would bring them back to consider and dread all these rumors and theories of scattered slag.

  “You know, I found your dissertation online.” He said it out of the blue, and her wet eyes darted back to him.

  “Why?”

  “Scared the shit out of me, I gotta say. And now I look around at what’s happening, and it’s hard not to see it. The world unraveling in this very specific, slow-rolling wave of horror and absurdity. That’s why for those of us who want to do something about it . . . To stop it. You know. Those of us who want to stop it.” He paused and looked up at her, his mouth hanging open and uncertain for a very long moment. “We now belong underground. We’re going to have to do drastic things. Unthinkable things. It’s still dawning on people how scary this all is, but it’s the only way left.”