Wolfhunter River

by Caine, Rachel

  Then that hesitant female voice continues, “Please, I’m begging you. Please answer me. I don’t know where else I’m supposed to turn.”

  And I know it’s one of those calls.

  It started with a random call, the distant friend of a cop who had my number. A woman crying months ago, begging me to tell her what to do because she didn’t know how to stay alive. She was the mother of a fourteen-year-old boy who’d abducted, raped, and killed a neighbor’s five-year-old. Who’d hidden the body under his bed for three days. She’d found it. Reported it. Turned in her own son to the police.

  She hadn’t been prepared for the terrifying truth: people blamed her too. Blamed her for raising a killer. Blamed her for not knowing. Not stopping him.

  I’d spent an hour trying to help her find ways to deal with what she was going through. In the end I looked up a domestic violence shelter where she could at least hide out for a while. I don’t know what happened to her. But she told someone else who’d contacted her about me, and how I’d helped. And so on.

  For the past three months I’ve been getting these tragic, disembodied voices begging me for help and answers I don’t have. The best I could give most of them was understanding and the cold comfort of knowing they weren’t alone in this nightmare.

  Sam’s watching me, and his expression says don’t. And he’s right, of course. We don’t need more trouble. I almost let it go. I can hear her breathing. Hear her choking back a sob.

  “Okay, then,” she says, and I hear the dull defeat in it. “Sorry I bothered you. I’ll hang up now—”

  I grab the receiver. “This is Gwen,” I say. “What’s the problem?”

  There’s a deeply indrawn breath on the other end of the line. “Sorry,” the woman says. “I figured I could get through this without being such a . . . a damn mess. I guess I’m not like you. You seem pretty near made of steel, from what I’m told.”

  I still have no idea who this is, or what it’s about, but I have an instinct that I should listen. “Oh, I’m not, believe me,” I tell her. “It’s all right. Take your time. What’s your name?”

  “M-Marlene,” she says. “Marlene Crockett. From Wolfhunter.” Her accent is pure rural-Tennessee drawl. “It’s up around—well, up ’round the backside of nowhere, I guess.” She laughs nervously. It sounds like cracking glass. “Never heard of it, right?”

  She makes it a question, so I’m honest. “I haven’t. What do you need from me, Marlene?”

  She doesn’t get right to the point. I recognize the tendency; she wants to circle around the point, work up her courage. She tells me about her town, about her frustrations with her job, about the patch of grease she just can’t scrub off her wood floor. I wait her out. Sam finishes the dishes. He writes me a note and slides it over. Got some work to do. He heads back toward our shared office. We have partner desks in there now, set a decent space away from each other. Sam’s both working freelance as a laborer on construction projects, and running a couple of small commercial jobs for a firm out of Knoxville; I’m maintaining an online accounting business that takes a few hours a day, with some graphic design on the side. I’d be more financially secure with a day job, but then again, I like being home with my kids, especially during these epic long, hot summers. And I like the idea that I can—even now—drop everything and run at a moment’s notice. It’ll take a while for me to gear down from that impulse. If I ever can.

  I finally judge that she’s winding down, so I cut in. “Marlene? How did you get this number, exactly?”

  “A lady said on social media about how you weren’t no monster like some say, and you helped her. I asked her if you might help me too. She said you might and gave me your number.”

  “In the open? On her social media?”

  “By email,” Marlene says. She sounds even more nervous. “Was that wrong?”

  At least it wasn’t posted on the internet, but still: I need to change this number. Or get rid of the landline completely. “Who was it?”

  “Don’t know her real name, but she goes by Melissa Thorn.”

  Melissa and I are going to have a talk. “Okay,” I say. “Can you tell me what’s wrong?”

  I expect her to say something about her boyfriend, her husband, someone else in her family. Even a friend. But she says, “It ain’t wrong with me exactly. It’s more . . . it’s more like it’s this whole damn town. Well, some people in it, I guess. Though this place here has never been good land. Got blood soaked in it from the jump.”

  This is going nowhere, and I’m starting to think I’m being played. Maybe she’s just a lonely time-waster. “I’m giving you one more minute to tell me what I can do for you. Then I’m gone and I won’t take your call again. Understand?”

  She pauses. “I understand.” But she doesn’t go on. Silence stretches. She finally says, all in a rush, “So if something bad’s happening around here, what can I do? Can’t go to the police, no way. What do you do if you don’t trust folks in town?”

  “I can help you with some state agencies to call, if that’s what you’re asking, but you’d better be ready to tell them what your problem really is,” I tell Marlene. “First, are you in any physical danger right now?”

  “I . . . I don’t think so. But it’s just . . . it’s hard. I don’t know what to do about it, or where to go. I just don’t want to get myself in worse trouble than I’m already in.” She sighs heavily. “I’m a single mother, and my girl, she’s a handful, you know? I got no people here. Nobody to help out. I got to be careful. It’s real complicated.”

  It always is complicated, from the inside. People on the outside looking in seem to think it’s simple to cut ties, walk away . . . but there are so many ropes holding a person down. Children. Extended family. Friends. Jobs. Money. Obligations. Guilt. And fear, so much fear. The most dangerous time in any woman’s life is when she’s separating from a partner, particularly an abusive one. Women instinctively know that, even if they’ve never seen the blood-drenched statistics. Sometimes it feels safer to endure the devil you know.

  “I know it can feel like you’re in a trap with no way out,” I tell her. “But that’s not true. You always hold the key to your own cage, okay? You just need to find the courage to use it. Is the problem with your husband?”

  She sniffles, as if she’s on the verge of tears. “No. He’s dead.”

  “A boyfriend? Someone you dated?”

  “No.”

  “Okay.” That’s pretty new. Most calls I get are about husbands or domestic partners. Occasionally about unknown stalkers. “So specifically, who is threatening you right now?”

  “It ain’t . . . it ain’t threats. Not exactly. And I can’t say no names,” she says. “It’s just . . . if I tell somebody, and it comes back on me and my daughter, it’ll be real bad, you know? And if I don’t tell nobody . . . I don’t know how I live with that.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say. Gently as I can. “But I’m not a therapist, or a lawyer, and whatever you tell me might cause legal problems for you in the future if you’ve been part of something illegal. Understand? If you want to talk about something that frightens you, but isn’t a crime, let me put you in touch with a psychologist or psychiatrist—”

  “I’m not going to any shrink!” She sounds offended. Small, rural towns haven’t exactly embraced talk therapy.

  “Okay, if you think it might be criminal, Marlene, why do you think you can’t go to the police?” She doesn’t answer that. Just silence on the line. “Are you afraid of them?”

  “I’m afraid of everything,” she says.

  “What about the state police?”

  She sucks in a breath, then lets it out. “Maybe. Maybe that’d be okay, I guess. Not sure if they’d believe me about this, but I could try.”

  “Then I urge you to make that call. Sometimes lives can be lost if you wait, and then you have to carry that responsibility forever.” My mind is racing to fill in the blanks: Is she talking about a neighbor under thr
eat? A friend? Something else? I can’t tell.

  “Yeah,” she says. I can hear her pacing restlessly. “Yeah, I know that. But this is a small place. Hell, half the town is related. I guess I have to figure this out myself and—” She stops on a dime, and I don’t even hear breathing. When she talks again, it’s in a hushed, rushed whisper. “I got to go. Sorry.”

  “Marlene, if you can’t tell me what’s going on, I don’t know how to help you.”

  “Come up here,” she says. “Come up here and I’ll show you everything. It ain’t far where they buried the wreck. You decide what to do about it.” The wreck? Buried? That doesn’t make any sense.

  “You mean, come to Wolfhunter? No. I can’t.” No way am I going to some isolated rural location. Armed or not, ready for a fight or not . . . No, the risk isn’t worth it. Not anymore. “Call the state police. Will you do that?”

  She doesn’t answer. With a quiet click, she’s gone. Call ended. I shake my head as I hang up. It’s unsettling, but I don’t know what I could have said or done differently. Whatever’s going on with her, it’s strange, and I can’t help but be suspicious. I just found a snake in my mailbox. Now a mysterious caller is trying her best to get me to drive off into the lonely hills.

  I’m not getting drawn into a trap. I’ve got enemies.

  Today only confirmed that.

  I linger near the phone, waiting for a callback, but it doesn’t come. I finally head toward the office. I stop along the way and pop my head into Connor’s room; he’s reading, which is exactly what I expected, and I don’t bother him. It’s hardly a surprise to find that Lanny is texting, and she barely glances up when I knock on her open door.

  “Hey,” she says, “who was it calling?”

  “Someone who wanted advice,” I say.

  Her fingers stumble and pause, and she transfers her attention to me. My daughter’s pretty, but more than that, there is character in her face, and strength. A fair bit of sharp stubbornness too. Can’t imagine where she gets it. “What did she want?”

  “Honestly? I’m really not even sure. She doesn’t seem to be in too much trouble, though. Not in fear of her life, at least not enough to really accept help.”

  “K.” She goes back to her glowing screen, thumbs working with furious precision. I love the way she attacks things, with all the intensity of a life-and-death situation. My beautiful Atlanta, never moving at less than full speed. “I hate this, you know.” She’s talking about the danger, the restrictions, the way her life keeps drawing inward.

  “I know,” I tell her. “We’ll try to make it better.”

  When I get to the office, I find an open bottle of wine, and a full glass on my desk. Sam’s got one of his own. He’s got his cell phone cradled between his neck and shoulder as he searches in a drawer for paperwork. I take the glass and mouth Thank you as I slip into my own chair. I check my email box.

  It’s a damn disaster. I suppose I should have expected that, in the wake of the Howie Hamlin debacle, but I hadn’t, and seeing the huge increase in abusive, anonymous emails makes me regret having dinner first. I ignore those for now; most are repetitive anyway, like they passed around a script. Kill yourself, you ugly bitch. Do everybody a favor and join your husband in hell. Start a barbecue and crawl inside. That kind of thing.

  Once I clear those out and into a FOR EVALUATION folder, I get rid of the flood of reporters wanting me to comment on the upcoming documentary. Someone’s helpfully signed me up for a Lost Angels newsletter. How nice.

  Apart from those, there are four more messages, each containing automated web searches that I’ve programmed to archive monthly to my in-box. I’ve slacked off the Sicko Patrol for too long. Obviously. At first I was recovering, and then . . . then I convinced myself that with Melvin gone, Absalom gone, things would just . . . get better. That I didn’t need to worry as much anymore.

  I was an idiot. And I’m paying for that brief, stupid burst of overconfidence.

  I start as far back as I can find and open the report. It’s just an archived list of links mentioning either Gwen Proctor, Gina Royal, or any of the other briefly used false names I’d hidden out under. The date is soon after the events at Killman Creek.

  Seems normal enough. If you can call mutilation, rape, and death threats normal. And of course, there are a lot of them. Hundreds.

  What’s more ominous is that when I open each of the reports, I can see the cancerous growth, charted out in ever-proliferating links to videos, discussion boards, new Facebook groups dedicated to stalking me, Twitter hashtags. And that’s just on the public side. The dark web is mostly inaccessible to me now; I have a Tor browser that grants me anonymity, but the dark web is a who-do-you-know network, full of shadowy contacts and hidden agendas. I used to rely on the hacker collective known as Absalom to navigate that world, but back then I didn’t know who—what—Absalom really was, and really wanted. Without that easy access, the searches I can run in the deeper levels of the internet are very limited.

  But I can see the surface, and the growing monster: day after day of commenters feeding off one another’s fear, paranoia, hate, and easy judgment. There’s a link to the Lost Angels website, finally. I click it, but I can only get to the public home page of the site, the one with all the photo montages for each of Melvin’s victims. It’s difficult for me to come here at all, looking at the calm, smiling, hopeful faces of young women just starting their lives. The innocent babies and children they once were before my ex got his hands on them. I keep scrolling. There’s usually a news section at the bottom beneath all this heartbreak where members of the Lost Angels community—families, mostly, though some close friends too—will put updates they feel are important.

  This time it isn’t just a post recalling a birthday, or a graduation; it’s a full press release, dated only a couple of weeks ago.

  It announces that filming on a Lost Angels documentary is underway. Not just about the victims, but about the killings themselves. About Melvin Royal.

  Most especially, about the woman who might have gotten away with murder: Gina Royal.

  I feel sick. I understand their pain, their rage, their need for some kind of relief, and I’ve never hated them for despising me. The one thing I can be grateful for is that at least so far, there’s no mention of Sam in connection to the making of this film.

  A significant number of people got on board for this project. Almost ten thousand of them, pledging hundreds of thousands of dollars. It’s matched by the nonprofit that Miranda Tidewell started for her murdered child. I feel even sicker, staring at the announcements. And the promise of more to come soon.

  They’re really doing this.

  They’re really coming for me.

  Sam finishes his conversation, and I hear him call my name, but I don’t immediately respond. I can’t. In an effort to get my mind off the Lost Angels, I’ve clicked another link. Now I’m staring at the message on my screen that says, OPEN SEASON ON MURDERERS, and it’s a surveillance picture of me, Lanny, and Connor laughing together in front of our cabin, unafraid. There’s a target drawn over us, and painstakingly photoshopped bullet holes in our bodies.

  Sam comes around the desk, and I quickly minimize the picture to the desktop—but not soon enough. He leans over and commandeers the mouse. Brings it up again. Studies the image. I know that silence. Sam’s currents run deep, fast, and sometimes dangerous.

  “What are you thinking?” I ask him.

  “I’m thinking this gets printed out and taken straight to the police,” he says. “And to the FBI.” We have friends in both places, thankfully. “And I’m thinking that whoever took this was right here, watching you. And I want to know who the hell that is.”

  “The original photo could have been taken by a journalist,” I tell him. “They’ve been after us from the day Melvin went down.” Since I never gave much in the way of interviews, they shot a lot of pictures, usually grainy long-lens shots like this. “It doesn’t mean this photoshop he
ro who changed it has been, or is, anywhere close to us.”

  “It doesn’t mean he isn’t either,” Sam says. “Sorry. I take this seriously.”

  “You think I don’t? This isn’t even the worst of it.”

  He doesn’t quite look at me. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  I’m going to have to let him in on all this. I’ve hesitated, because there are some particularly awful things in my Sicko Patrol file. Things that feel, even now, too intimate to share. But he needs to know. “Okay,” I say. “You want to sit down and look at the rest of what I’ve got?”

  I see the flicker of shock go through him. He pulls his chair over and leans forward, elbows on his knees. “Sure,” he says. “Let’s go.”

  He thinks he’s ready.

  But I register the revulsion and horror in his eyes as I scroll.

  Nobody’s ever really ready. Not for this.

  3

  SAM

  Just knowing that Miranda Tidewell ambushed Gwen on the show this morning was bad enough, but hearing about the documentary she’s planning sets off a storm of white noise in my head. I can’t process that Miranda Tidewell and Gwen Proctor can occupy, however briefly, the same space. I’ve held them completely separate in my head, in neat, contained boxes. Never to meet.

  But life doesn’t work like that, and now that Gwen’s told me about the Lost Angels documentary, I feel like I’m starting a slow fall down a deep, dark well. There’s an impact coming. And it’s going to be deadly.

  All I can do for now is pretend it isn’t happening. I’ll keep living my normal life, my real life, for as long as I can. Because what Miranda represents . . . it’s dead, as dead to me as Gwen’s marriage is to her. I tell myself that, even as I recognize that Melvin’s ghost has never stopped haunting either one of us. Dead doesn’t mean gone.