Find You in the Dark

by Nathan Ripley

  “You don’t need me, and I sort of made an appointment,” I said.

  “Sort of, or you did?”

  “I did.” Now I knew she was annoyed, but the idea of putting off my last dig just to have a fight with Ellen was laughable.

  “That’s that, then. Okay, no fighting all around all day, let’s try that. I’ll have a great meeting and you’ll have a great cheese-gather and then I assume you’re going to make us a meal French peasants would have climbed the walls of this place and cut our heads off over.” The elliptical did its patterned beeping thing and the whirring picked up. Ellen draped her towel over the readout so she didn’t have to look at the numbers—watching the time click by so slowly made her want to quit.

  I walked over to the machine, kissing the sweaty hair at her temple.

  “Gross!” she said, laughing a bit, more automatically than happily. “Get your cheese. See you later.” She closed her eyes and pumped her legs harder, ending the conversation by absorbing herself into her body.

  After picking up my scrapbook from the desk and my keys from the counter, I headed for the garage, getting behind the wheel and driving into a light gray, low-clouded day, the kind where the sunlight that does come through is in the form of particles, not beams. They’ll flit through holes in the clouds for long enough to make you blink when you’re accelerating or shifting lanes, but it’s still a good idea to take a Vitamin D pill or spend a few minutes staring into one of those eerie light machines, if that sort of thing boosts your mood. I wasn’t ecstatic at the prospect of doing the day’s work in the rain that looked to be inevitable in an hour or two, but at least the wetness would loosen the soil for my shovel, at the same time as it made each load heavier.

  Just off the Orillia Road exit. That’s between Seattle and Federal Way—I’d have to remember to pick up some goat cheese and to rewrap it in seedy-looking butcher paper on the ride home. The drive to the cemetery was quick, almost nonexistent, like the passage between two fictional places in a dream.

  It always gets like this when I’m near a dig, near a body. Reality sort of blurs, piles up on itself, events get closer together, like someone flicked cruise control in my brain. It was a version of the feeling I’d get in high school, before I’d gotten control of everything. Back when I followed Darla Crane or Misty Laroche home, from the store near our school where kids congregated to get smokes, first watching Darla and Misty talk and drink blue Slurpees before they parted ways. I’d get that same feeling of compression in what I was seeing and feeling, time vanishing into rushing blood and lightheadedness while I hung back a block or two and followed one of the girls home, waiting in darkness across the road for hours until the lights in her house began to click off and I could enter the halls and rooms where she walked and was now sleeping, taking a keepsake and leaving. I had infinite patience then, just the way I had when I was watching my Ellen in her window at college, when she was only Tinsley’s sister to me.

  I resisted the urge to stop for directions; the old county map that registered Dan O’Reilly’s cemetery didn’t account for the asphalt scars that had changed the landscape in the years since the early twentieth century. I wondered if Jason Shurn’s scalping job would be complete, or if there would still be a few wisps left.

  The cemetery rose up in front of my headlights. I followed the Shurn of the past through the nonexistent gates, let the Jeep’s tires roll over a few unmarked graves. The organized city of the dead in every cemetery doesn’t care about the headstones or other markers that denote their placement to the living; they know where they are, and must believe they will stay put, no matter what happens aboveground. Of course, it doesn’t always work out this way. Cemeteries get moved all the time, and the final resting place of a killing victim is all too often upset by the procedures of the police and the demands of family sentimentality.

  I talk to myself in the last stages of a dig. I know it happens, and I stopped being embarrassed about it a long time ago. Someone needs to share in the excitement, even if it is just me. It was daylight in the cemetery, and despite the light rain it was as hot as autumn days get in the Pacific Northwest. T-shirt weather, as long as you’re sure to keep a sweater tied around your waist.

  I put on latex gloves and zipped into a normal-enough-looking forensic jacket specially designed to keep the wearer’s cells from pepper-shaking all over the crime scene. Pointless precautions. No one ever came to this disused cemetery anymore. It had been hit hard by ghoulish metal-detector-wielding treasure hunters in the mid-seventies, then heavily patrolled for about a year after the Irish American Heritage Association had protested the desecration. Now, there were no visitors. The state of the grounds attested to the fact that maintenance, no matter how irregular, wasn’t something the Heritage Association or anyone else took responsibility for. The scouting I’d done last month had resulted in zero sightings of visitors, and there were no tire tracks in the deep mud leading to the cemetery.

  The sun cut in again hard through the half-naked branches. I had no shades on, but I liked it that way. Squinting brought me focus. “Dan O’Reilly,” I said, running my eyes across all the gravestones. I was hopeful that Dan’s would still be standing, hopeful because Shurn’s stepfather seemed to have had no trouble finding it when he drunkenly drove his serial killer in the making out here on weekends. The graveyard was tiny, a space about the size of a basketball half-court at an elementary school, and about one out of every three graves had a marker. Herlihy. Cassidy. Carney. O’Brian.

  “O’Reilly,” I said, barely recognizing the excited hiss my voice had become. I whipped my right hand out, extending the collapsible shovel I had taken out of the backseat without being fully conscious of doing so. Just for a moment, I wished Kylie, and maybe even Ellen, could be here to see this.

  I walked across the dead men beneath me and took a better look at the grave. Dan O’Reilly’s name was etched into the moss-traced stone, which had been chipped away by time and vandals. Even the freshest marks on the marker, the ones that looked like they’d been put there by pocketknives that had attempted graffiti then given up the task, had been worn smooth by years of weather. Grass had grown over the grave itself, over the entire cemetery. Something about the growth over O’Reilly’s grave held me back for a second, even in my rush; it looked scrappier and more bordered than the grass on the surrounding mounds.

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said to my shovel as it entered the ready earth. “That much easier to fix it up when we’re done.”

  Grave digging is serious business. Serious and hard. The cops use a backhoe, but it’s still doable by hand, if you focus and work without letting your arms and shoulders tell you how tiring it is. I never notice while I’m actually on a dig, but the ache in my body the next day reminds me of the labor. This one could be especially tough. Could be Shurn had been extra careful and gone down the whole depth of the grave, all the way to Grandpa O’Reilly’s rotting pinewood coffin. I cut the earth into rectangles and eased it off in portions, reining in my impatience during this most tender part of the task. The surface had to look perfectly unbroken when I put everything back. The other problem at the end of a dig like this is the question of where to hide the extra earth that’s always left over after a grave gets filled in. The surrounding forest here would make that job easier, as long as I was careful in scattering the dirt around evenly enough to avoid leaving suspicious piles.

  “Not that anyone’ll see it,” I said to the shovel, which had now gotten me three feet deep. The ground had been loose, not as hard-packed as old soil usually is. Old cemetery earth scoops easy, apparently. I widened the hole around me, moving more tenderly as I went deeper, gentle enough to avoid shattering bones that had lain undisturbed for such a long time. My focus became more than conscious, snuck through my entire body, made me more than myself, stronger than I could have thought possible. My pulse stayed low but blood rushed through me, draining out of my head and making me feel dizzy for a moment.

  F
our feet. The world around me darkened as another squadron of rain clouds passed over the sun. The reactions back in the city would be looks upward and grimaces, complaints about another damp day. I was already soaked with sweat. I unzipped the DNA-shielding jacket to let body heat escape and paused for a moment before zipping up again and continuing, looking down, looking at what mattered.

  Five feet. This was the real caution zone; the bones were going to be close. I was sure by now. Sure that I was right about Shurn’s deposit. To reinforce my thoughts, a plastic baggie that had no business being this deep in the dirt of a heritage graveyard poked out of the contents of my latest shovelful. One of young Shurn’s discarded cocaine vessels. I knew it with the certainty of perfect intuition.

  Six feet. I used the back of the shovel to smooth the dirt, then knelt and poked a gloved finger down into the earth, hoping to feel bone. Instead, wood. I was at the coffin. I dug more.

  The coffin had rotted, for the most part; the wood I had felt was one of the surviving, reinforced edges. I finished the dig with my gloved hands, delicately pulling earth away, and found what I wanted to find. Almost.

  A delicate skull, cracked near the left eye socket. The former ash blonde. The former, maybe, Tinsley Schultz. I was dry-mouthed and excited, as always. The sun was back out from behind the clouds, which had begun spitting wet pellets I could feel even in the grave. I straddled the two skeletons in the grave; Tinsley, as I couldn’t stop thinking of her, had been rested upon the bones of Dan O’Reilly, his arms clasped around what had once been her breasts. I brushed the dirt off with care, making sure to keep the bones in the same position as they had been. Under the dirt for all these decades.

  With a hand on either side of the grave, feeling bigger droplets of rain on my arms, I levered myself back aboveground, scrabbling up the sides of the grave shaft with the toes of my boots. I took a look around, even though I knew there could be no one around. If there was someone, what would I do? Explain that I’d dropped my watch down there, just seeing if I could snatch it up again?

  From the back of the Jeep, I pulled out my camera and lights. I would need to anchor them to the grave, somehow, a contingency I hadn’t thought of. Most of the hasty graves I dug up were much shallower than this, three feet, maybe four. I solved the problem by half-burying them in the walls of the shaft, embedding the lit eyes that would allow my camera to pick out Tinsley’s final resting place with the proper accuracy, without the ugliness of a flash. I felt the urge to get a photo with my face next to hers, the family photo we’d never taken. I didn’t, of course.

  I zoomed, clicked. Every photo would pick out a feature of the corpse that I wouldn’t notice in the moment, not in the state I was in. The photos were as essential a part of the experience as finding the body itself; I needed to be calm when I looked at them, I needed to have the ocular proof that I’d been here, that I’d done this. The lens took in her empty eye sockets, her perfect rows of teeth.

  Zooming deep into her rib cage, past it even, into the bones of Mr. O’Reilly, I noticed something I hadn’t when I had been standing in the grave. A glint, somewhere beneath the varyingly aged bones.

  “Can’t take anything,” I reminded myself, even as I carefully laid the camera down a couple of feet from the hole in the ground. I climbed back into the grave, lowering myself with care, using the crude footholds I’d made on the way up. With my fingers, I quested through the bones, shivering when I brushed past what must have been Tinsley’s.

  The glint was silver, or something silver-colored, and it was inexplicably bright after the length of time it would have spent under the ground. I checked my glove to see if any tears had opened up while I dug, then reached down to take hold of the silver. I pulled.

  A fleshy arm and hand that were attached to the bracelet came up, and with them came the stench of meat going bad. The stink of a body when it’s just starting to go off. When it hasn’t been dead for long at all.

  THE STILL MAN IN THE forest had been watching Dan O’Reilly’s grave for the past forty hours, ever since he’d placed the slowly defrosting body of Bella Greene below the other remains in the ground. She’d been in a deep freeze since he’d taken her off the planet with a needle, ready to be on hand for his next move with Martin Reese. And she’d done her part, perfectly, even with Martin skipping ahead of schedule.

  The man straightened up, uncoiling his long limbs, feeling his calves tighten as they shifted out of rest and took on the weight of his tall, heavy body. He watched Martin Reese running toward the vehicle parked in the dirt road. Reese tossed in his digging gear—the man noted that panic wasn’t enough to make Reese completely lose his senses, as he carefully ensured the dirty gear landed on a visible sheet of plastic. Reese pulled away, driving past the man’s own truck, which had been carefully concealed with camouflage tarps and an artful scatter of evergreen boughs.

  The man walked toward his vehicle. The extremely expensive GPS bug he’d brought from his own private stock at the back of his store was magnetically bonded, with an additional black duct tape seal, to the underside of the Jeep speeding its way toward the highway. The man hoisted the tarp up, uncurtaining the passenger-side cab door and opening it. The list he’d purchased from the policeman lay on the seat. It included penned-in names, addresses, licenses, and serial numbers courtesy of the Seattle PD database, and a few paper-clipped photos he’d added himself. The pictures of Martin Reese were the most numerous, culled from newspapers and high-tech magazines. Once the man had found Keith Waring and coaxed a copied list of the sold files and call times from him, the answer had been clear. Who else could this caller, this disturber of graves and the past, be, but the man who’d been so obsessed with vanishings that he’d married Tinsley Schultz’s sister?

  Waiting for Reese at this site had been a slight risk. He seemed to enjoy doing things at a slow pace, not rushing his digs, reporting the bodies in order, forcing himself to space the finds out by time and likelihood of discovery. Keith Waring’s presentation of the final Jason Shurn interview was the timely element that assured Martin Reese’s hurried presence at this site—coming to the grave almost immediately would be irresistible to someone like Reese. The man removed another branch from his truck. He had purchased a copy of the Shurn recording a few days before Reese did. He’d known Martin Reese would eagerly buy a copy as well, and the surveillance he was running on Keith Waring (very easy, with the cop’s dull and regimented habits) confirmed the meeting and sale.

  The man walked back to the forest to gather his tenting materials, glad he would be back in his bed that night. When he threw the camping gear into the truck bed, he removed a shovel and his leather bag of solvents, and carried them toward the grave Martin Reese had filled in untidily. The man began to dig the whole works up again with strength and care.

  THIS STARTED WHEN I FOUND my first body at twenty-one years old, the same age Jason Shurn was when he started murdering Seattle college girls in the mid-1990s. By the time he was finished, the papers had his body count set at six, though there was evidence suggesting he’d killed more. Shurn was safely in prison, beginning the trial, conviction, and wait that would end in lethal injection, when I came across what must have been his last victim.

  It wasn’t pure chance that led me to that body, the final Shurn kill. It was a dropped clue. A throwaway comment he’d made to a reporter as he was being pushed toward the back door of the precinct by a flanking guard of cops, someone’s windbreaker covering most of his face. Only his left cheek, a chin scabbed from being ground into the pavement during arrest, and half of his smile were visible. The question that had washed out of that sea of chattering reporters, was, of course, “Why did you do it?”

  “Torland’s didn’t have any shifts. Got bored and started hiking instead,” Shurn had said, from under his Gore-Tex cowl. The words barely came through on the news footage I saw at six, before the anchor cut in with his inane commentary. The reporters had listened to Shurn’s response in a state as near
to silence as they ever got, but immediately took it as a chilly joke and bombarded him with more moral puzzlers before the cops got him inside.

  “The gravel plant,” I said, sitting on pillows in front of my tiny television. I flicked it off a second later, when I heard Ellen’s keys in the door of my shitty bachelor pad. I’d just given her that set of keys the week before, and she’d been coming over right after her last class every day since. I didn’t mind.

  “They caught him,” I said, as Ellen shed her jacket and bag and settled into the floral couch I’d rescued from an alley.

  “I know,” she said. She started folding her body in on itself, gripping her shoulder blades with her fingertips as she locked herself off from hearing anything else.

  “That’s all I was going to say.”

  “Good.” There had been more than a few theories about Tinsley Schultz being Shurn’s first, the kill that kicked off the other six. I got up to make some tea for Ellen, hoping she’d uncoil from her defensive posture by the time I got back.

  Ellen and I had only been going together for seven months. It had started a little oddly. Unexpectedly, for me, at least. When I’d heard that Tinsley Schultz’s sister attended the same college as I did, I switched into a couple of her classes. Thorny poli-sci ones that I hated. I sat a few rows back from Ellen, staring at her ponytail, which was indistinguishable from the one her sister wore in the picture all the newspapers reprinted. I ventured as close as one row behind her, one seat over, once dropping my pen so I could brush the back of her sweater as I recovered it.

  I watched Ellen around campus, too. Followed her home a couple of times, coming right up to the edge of a bad habit I’d tried hard to get rid of after the Darla and Misty months in high school. I watched the window of the apartment she shared with a constantly naked human kinetics student named Maria Sunestra. Ellen wiped down the chairs and couch every time Maria stepped out. I was able to see it all from the stakeout point I’d chosen, a cluster of pines on a slow-rising hill across from her building. Standing within those trees, I was invisible, even in daylight, the thick boughs shutting out the sky but allowing me a clear view of Tinsley Schultz’s sister. I spread my coat out on fallen pine needles and watched her cook dinner, eat, watch television, read. I always put the binoculars down when Ellen entered her bedroom. I didn’t allow myself to go too far.