I slipped my nightgown over my head with a sigh and ran a brush through my hair as I moved to the window to draw the curtains. I froze, brush halfway through my hair, one hand on the heavy fabric of the curtain.
I stepped closer to the window, gaze sharpening. A fire pit with a ring of Adirondack chairs was half buried in the snow beside the curved bank of the river. A dusk to dawn light by the street cast a pale glow over the upper stretch of lawn, but the rest was in shadows.
I peered into the darkness, certain I had seen a quick shift of movement when I approached the window and a shadow in the shape of a man cast across the snow. Realizing I was clearly visible in the window, backlit by the lamps in my room, I retreated and quickly pulled the curtain across the window. I moved across the room and did the same with the other window.
I stood in the center of the room with my hands pressed to my chest, feeling that thundering pace begin anew. I knew this feeling, this stark jolt of fear. I had known it intimately six years ago. “Alas, my love, you do me wrong.” My whispered repetition of the song was waveringly off key.
Chad Kilgore had been there at the museum in Atlanta, somewhere in my line of sight every time I looked up from my work. Then he had been there when I turned down the aisle in the grocery store. And then he had been there in front of my grandparents’ home. Six years ago now, and the memory of that fear felt as raw as if I were still standing in my old childhood bedroom.
I left the lights on, placed my glasses on the bedside table, and crawled into bed. I whispered the lines of the old song over and over, because I knew if silence fell, I would hear that steady, heavy tread in my mind, his footfall coming ever closer to where I hid in the shadows of the museum’s basement.
The sheets were crisp and cold, and I shuddered, drawing the covers up to my chin. I rolled over and stared at the edging of silver moonlight around the edges of the curtains. Everything had remained still as I searched the night. But I could not quell the feeling that someone had been there, just out of reach of the light, watching. I recognized the feeling. I knew it well.
Seven
Murder is not about lust
and it’s not about violence.
It’s about possession.
-Ted Bundy
JEFF
She shut me out. I stared at the blackened eye of her window. She felt the connection between us. She had known I lingered here, drawn by her siren’s call. Rose had resisted at first as well.
I took a deep breath of the ice-bitten air and let it cool the rage that had begun simmering inside me. That strangeness within only sharpened its claws when I fed it with anger. Anger made it ravenous. And that was dangerous. Anger led to carelessness, and there was no one to tend my roses if I were caught.
This was an art. Carefully orchestrated, brilliantly composed, perfectly staged—it was a masterpiece. It could not be rushed, and it had to be done with painstaking attention to detail. Anger had no room here.
Of course she played coy. She was even more like Rose than I had thought. It only made her more perfect. She simply did not understand. Not yet. I was still gathering the pieces to tell her the story, but I would begin tonight. It would be a poetic beginning.
I had heard she was a new employee at the museum. The irony made me smile. That was poetic as well.
I took one last look at her darkened window and then turned and walked back through town to where my Land Rover was parked in front of Book Ends. It was too risky to use the service road that ran alongside the campground. Anyone in town could see me cross the bridge. I drove out of town and pulled off the road to install the four tracks on the tires which enabled my vehicle to traverse the deep snow. I took one of the old trails that cut into that wild borderland of the national park and the Montana-Wyoming state line. It circled back toward town but then arrowed into the heart of the wilderness.
The West suited men like me, I had discovered. It was not so much a lawlessness that thrived here. I would have to venture farther from civilization for that, and a hunter would starve if there were no prey. It was the ease with which a man could slip from society into the deep wild within a matter of miles.
I crossed the river where it was wide and shallow, frozen save for the unerring trickles under the ice that kept flowing into the vast heart of Yellowstone. It was only a few more miles before I reached the old hunting cabin I had found when I first moved to Raven’s Gap. Every predator had to have its den, and I had scoured the vast wilderness and found this lonely, ramshackle outpost. It was one of many.
I turned on the electric lantern on the table. My breath was a ghost of white vapor as I knelt by the pallet. I had not bothered with a fire in the old stove. Smoke drew attention, and she would not need it for long. The woman lay where I had left her, the heavy duty, shearling lined Velcro cuffs binding her wrists behind her back and her ankles together. She had not moved in the hours since I brought her here. The cold and the sleeping pills I had forced down her throat had rendered her as limp and malleable as a doll.
I undid the cuffs, pleased that no marks had been left on her flesh by the restraints. I stripped her with brisk movements. Pale flesh gleamed in the blue-white light of the lantern, and I felt myself stir to life at the sight of all of that helplessness. Shame twisted my gut, and I was rougher than I intended when I jerked the dress I had for her over her head. It was a tight fit, and I had to smash her breasts flat to get it over her chest.
Rage began to gnaw at me again, laced with the poisoning mixture of shame at the erection that would not subside. She moaned when I brusquely yanked the dress over the curve of her hips. The seams stretched and groaned, and it made me want to slice her flesh away to better the fit.
Gently, I reminded myself. It was not perfect, because this whore was not perfection. She was just a substitute. They had all been substitutes for Rose. Now she was a substitute for a different woman. Unlike some who responded to that urge within, I understood my own psychology, and I did not bother to delude myself about it.
A tear slid from the corner of her eye when I drew a wipe from the packet in my coat and cleaned her face of the smudged makeup. Another tear and a whimper escaped her when I combed the tangles from her hair and fashioned two neat braids. A gasp of air left her as I cupped the back of her skull in one hand, her chin in the other, and with a quick upward twist snapped her neck.
I sat back and smoothed the dress over her knees. It was not about pain and fear. It never had been. I was pleased that there was no terror stamped on her lax features. She looked peaceful and pure.
I let out the breath I had not realized I held. The erection was gone, the shame and anger with it. Now there was only peace left for me as well. Peace and purpose.
Evelyn could resist the pull all she wanted. In the end, she would be mine. Just as Rose was. And I had the perfect way to remind her of that.
Eight
48% of all missing persons in the US are female
HECTOR
I did not get away from the department until four hours after my shift ended. I stopped by the diner. One of the waitresses remembered a group of young women who had come in for dinner last night, but none of them had been local to Raven’s Gap. It was likely they were visitors to Yellowstone, and I left it to the rangers to inquire with visitors about the girl’s identity.
Even so, as Frank and I headed home, I cut through town. I tapped my horn as I passed the diner again, and Maggie looked up from pouring coffee. She spotted me through the window and lifted the coffee carafe in greeting. I drove through town and slowed as I passed the hardware store. The second floor was dark, and I had not spotted his vehicle parked on Main Street or here along the side street.
I idled in the middle of the empty street, staring at the dark windows, until Frank rested his chin on my knee. I drew my gaze away, put a hand on his back, and drove on.
I lived between Raven’s Gap and Gardiner in the rugged northern reaches of the Black Ca
nyon of the Yellowstone. I grabbed the remote control from the cupholder and lowered the plow attached to the front of the truck as I turned off the state road onto the two mile stretch of drive that led to my place.
I had purchased fifty acres of land to suit Winona when we first moved here from Cody. She had dreams of horses and alpacas, and my dreams had been crushed on the dirt floor of the arena beneath a bull’s horns and hooves. I had let my bitterness over my own loss delay fulfilling the promise to her until it had been too late to give her horses, alpacas, or the house on the ridge.
I still had not built the house, and I never planned to. My headlights illuminated the old Airstream trailer I called home. I had a tin can of a house with water, power, and sewage and a wide swath of empty, open space that reminded me I had been a selfish prick. If she had left me, I deserved it.
That had been the speculation in town in the beginning. That she had grown tired of me and finally moved on to find someone who was more deserving of her. But Winona was not one for elaborate gestures or manipulation. She was blunt and straightforward. She would have told me she was leaving me. She would have packed her bags and made no secret of the fact. I had known something was terribly wrong from the beginning.
I cut the engine and let out a ragged breath. I knew she was gone from this earth, and I knew it had been at someone else’s hand. She and the baby both.
The evidence of a struggle today on the trail made my gut churn. Because I could easily imagine Winona in a similar situation. Fighting with everything she had. Desperate to save our daughter.
The headlights illuminated the remnants of the graffiti on the Airstream. I had scrubbed and scraped, but the red MURDERER scrawled across the aluminum exterior had never fully disappeared. Vandalism had been commonplace in the first few years. It was more often than not that I came home to a ransacked trailer. The worst instance had been walking in to find the blood of some slaughtered creature smeared on the floors and walls and poured across my bed. Sometimes in the summer, I thought I could still smell that sickly sweet metallic odor.
I flicked off the headlights. It had been a relief when the people in town grew tired of trying to drive me away. I knew Jack was the main culprit, and after seven years, the man eventually developed hobbies that did not involve desecrating my home on a regular basis.
Exhaustion settled heavily over me as I exited the truck and leaned against the tailgate as Frank did a circuit around the clearing to mark his territory. A wolf howled in the distance, its haunting, ancient call soon joined by his brothers and sisters. Frank lifted his head and added his voice to their song.
I straightened and whistled for him, and he beat me to the front door. I scooped kibble into his food bowl, gave him fresh water, and headed into the closet of a bathroom to shower. Once out of the shower, I heated up a bowl of rabbit stew for dinner and grabbed a longneck from the refrigerator. I stood as I ate, leaning against the narrow countertop.
Frank’s head came up, ears pricked, alerting me to the approaching vehicle before I heard it and before headlights cut across the interior of the trailer. I knew who it was; I had seen the ginger way she moved earlier. I went to the fridge to grab another beer.
I opened the front door and ducked out, waiting on my cinder block front step as she parked and climbed down from her vehicle. I popped the top off the beer on the doorjamb and extended it to her as she approached. She accepted it with a sweet smile and then drained the bottle in three long gulps.
She sighed and pressed the back of her wrist to her lips. “Were you expecting me?”
“I thought you might be along tonight.” I extended a hand to her, and she slipped her smaller, softer, paler fingers into mine. “Come inside, Joan.”
I led her straight to bed, peeling her fine clothes off with my rough hands, and taking her gently. Gently was always what she liked best, had been what she needed from me the last ten years. When she lay in my arms afterward, I lightly touched the dark fingerprints on her upper arm and the discoloration on the right side of her ribcage.
Wordlessly, I got up and grabbed her another beer and a painkiller from my own stash. She took both gratefully, and when I lay back down beside her, she scooted close and rested her head on my chest.
“You know I’d kill the bastard if you wanted me to.” I had offered the same thing a number of times over the years.
She sighed and pressed her lips to my heartbeat. “I know you would.”
Love did not leave a woman bruised. I kept that thought to myself. I had tried to make her see reason when she first started showing up on my doorstep all those years ago. Now I just gave her what she asked of me.
And what did I know about love. My first memory was of cleaning up my mother’s vomit when she had returned from a bender. I had been four at the time, and in all of my memories before I left home at fourteen, I could never recall a kind word or a gentle touch from the woman.
Years later, I had been a shit husband. Winona and I met on the circuit. I had been riding bulls, and she had been chasing the cans. Truth was, it was my dick, not my heart, that took notice of her when I saw that dark banner of hair flying out behind her and watched her tits bounce when she was in the saddle barrel racing. The laughing dark eyes, high cheekbones, and full ass had sealed the deal when I saw her at the bar later and approached her.
She had loved me. I had no doubt about that. At least in the beginning. The weight of her love had left me feeling suffocated, because I had no idea how to reciprocate it. The more the years passed, the less those eyes had sparkled.
I had been even less enthused about parenthood. When she asked me to help her decide on a name, I had shrugged and said it did not matter to me. Winona had picked the name Emma after the grandmother she had been so close to as a girl.
I found the squalling infant passed into my arms more annoying than anything else. I had been ready to ask her for a divorce when she told me she was pregnant. The bald creature with a red, pinched face who cried every time I held her had seemed like a ball and chain around my neck.
But in the fifteen years that had passed since they both disappeared, I found that was my biggest regret. That I had let the only two years I had been given with Emma slip through my fingers without making her laugh or singing her to sleep or breathing in that baby smell I had been told existed but could never catch under the stench of shitty diapers and spit up.
It was her loss I felt so keenly, even though I had never bothered to be a father.
I studied the ceiling as Joan rested against me and sipped her beer, her eyes growing heavy with the aid of the pain pill. I had hung most of the material on the ceiling within the first year of their disappearance. Maps with Winona’s usual route in and out of town highlighted, memories of things she had said that might be a link scrawled on Post-It notes, receipts, photos printed from the CCTV camera footage around town in the weeks leading up to that one day. Tacks were shoved into the map at the locations she visited regularly. At the center of the web, I had pinned a photo of him.
I had not loved them well enough in life. I had not known I needed to protect them. I liked to think that if I had known, I would have been more attentive, shown more care. But I could not be sure.
I was not haunted by them now. No, it was something darker and more twisted and desperate that drove me. It was obsession.
Nine
Won’t you come into the garden?
I would like my roses to see you.
-Richard Brinsley Sheridan
EVELYN
The footprints along the edge of the woods near the fire pit were blanketed with snow, but the indentions were still visible. The shallow hollows showed a clear path, and I followed it from the spot where I thought I had seen movement in the shadows last night up the slope to the walk. Already, it had been cleared and salted, and the trail disappeared.
I turned back to the inn, gaze drawn to the second floor and my window. I had left the cu
rtains closed this morning. My stomach threatened to lurch into my throat. It felt as if ants prickled along my scalp at the confirmation indented in the snow. Someone had stood in the snow, drifted through the shadows, and watched my bedroom window last night.
I pressed my hand tight against my breast to keep my heart contained. It hammered against my palm at the memories. The deep prints in the mud around my grandmother’s azaleas. The cigarette butts on the ground amidst the fallen petals outside my bedroom window. Evelyn, his voice whispered in my ear, come out, come out, wherever you are.
I dug the heels of my hands into my ears until all I could hear was the thundering of my own blood. “Shut up, shut up,” I said, and deafened by my own hands, I could not tell if I murmured or shouted the words. I could just feel the hissing slide of the sh against the roof of my mouth.
It’s meant to be. Don’t fight it.
I fought back a sob. It had taken me five years, but I thought he was out of my head as certainly as he was out of my life. Fury warred with fear in a tumult that had my stomach roiling, my chest hot, and my face damp. I hated this. Hated that he was still there in the dark recesses of my mind. Hated that someone else had taken away my peace with a shadow slipping between the trees and a set of tracks in the snow.
A tap of a horn had me dropping my hands. I turned to find a patrol car pulled up alongside me.
“Everything okay?”
The police officer behind the wheel was not Hector. This officer looked so young I was not certain he was even of legal age himself, and his smile was too boyish to be professionally reassuring.
Nothing we can do, miss. Nothing we can do.
Hunting Ground Page 6