by David Downie
Taz listened and suddenly seemed very adult.
But I have gotten ahead of myself and behind myself all at once in the telling. Let’s go back to me at about 4:30 a.m. While I was standing alone in the dark garden trying to clear my head, Beverley appeared at the top of the hill and came tearing down toward the Ocean View cottage as I was walking up to it. “Come with me,” she whispered in that choked voice of hers, “Number Three is talking again, I swear, I’m not crazy. Come up and get a gun!”
“I will not use a gun.”
Without arguing the point or bothering to ask why I was out before dawn, she grabbed me by the sleeve and hustled me up the hill and into her bedroom. “Shhh,” she hissed, creeping and tiptoeing as if she might scare a spirit away. “Listen . . .”
Suspended somewhere between incipient, punch-drunk hilarity from extreme fatigue, and genuine alarm, I perched on the edge of her unmade bed and closed my eyes, listening. And I’ll be damned if I didn’t hear a whispering voice. I broke into a cold sweat, bolted to my feet and began tracking around the room on tiptoe, trying to find where the sound was coming from. Then I stood by the intercom near the door, my heart thumping like the distant surf, and I signaled her over. “Here,” I whispered conspiratorially. The ghostly otherworldly voice beckoned, saying, “Beverley? Beverley? Can you hear me, Beverley?” It repeated itself a little louder and sounded suspiciously familiar, though I could not place it. Beverley was quaking with fear. Then the voice went silent and a few seconds later a knock came at the door. We both gasped then froze. I felt my hair rise into a hogback of bristles. Beverley pulled out her derringer and pointed it, her hand shaking violently. The door swung open and there stood Taz, that goofy look on his face.
Beverley slumped and I barely had time to catch her and the gun before they hit the floor.
“What in god’s name,” I started to say.
“What are you doing here?” Taz asked me. “It’s so cool, I figured it out. Did you guys hear me?”
Beverley had revived by then. “Hear you?”
“Through the intercom,” he said as if we were dense. Holding up a modular clip-like device, he said, “Bluetooth retrofit to your old system. I guessed that was what they’d done. You can, like, take over anything. A friend at the computer lab hacked into his parents’ nursery intercom through the Wi-Fi and scared his little sister a bunch of times, it was pretty neat. I’ve heard of people, like, taking over those talking dolls and teddy bears you can buy . . .”
Beverley and I stared at each other, then looked at Taz with a blend of ire and admiration. “Awesome,” I said. “That’s the first time I’ve ever used that word and I hope it’s the last.”
Taz’s theory sounded like science fiction to me, but I have learned since that this kind of spying and psychological manipulation are not only possible, they have become common practice. The ingeniousness and sheer nastiness of humans never cease to amaze me. Telephone tapping has gone on for decades and everyone knows you can remotely control a smartphone or PC or other “smart device” including household appliances. But who could have imagined some hacker would devise ways to retrofit old TV sets and antiquated intercom systems, not to mention toys or alarm clocks, into Bluetooth devices not only for listening, but also for whispering or speaking to victims in the middle of the night?
Taz said that when things went back to normal and the “backhaul” for the cell network was working, he would let himself into the county sheriff’s surveillance system again and figure out what they’ve been up to. “Then maybe I can, like, take the whole system down . . .”
“Awesomely cool,” Beverley said with steely irony. “Somebody just got a death sentence from yours truly. You can’t torture the Tater with impunity.”
So, Beverley was not having aural hallucinations. Someone was trying to spook her and get her to leave. I could tell she was boiling. Her face flushed mauve, the color of her bath towels and curtains, and she began to wheeze and cough. The only way to calm her was to remind her that the connection had been disabled for the time being. They would not be talking to her in the dead of night anymore, and we could always unplug the old telephones and turn off the Wi-Fi in future if we needed to talk confidentially. “Or step into the rose garden,” she said, “with the raccoons.”
We decided to get back to our respective beds and grab another hour or two of sleep, if we could. I paddled Taz on the shoulder and told him he was amazing and there was hope for humanity after all. That seemed to go down well.
On the way back to the cottage, while trying to puzzle out why Harvey was persecuting and intimidating Beverley, I suddenly recalled our bizarre conversation in the SUV about genetics, and his absurd claim that I was Taz’s grandfather. If true, Taz must have inherited his geek genes from Maggie’s side of the family, unless my mother, the straight-laced historian, was a computer or math whizz without anyone knowing it.
The thought of my mother made me think next of the buddleia, and on an irrational impulse, I decided to go back down to see if it had survived the storm. As I picked my way there I somehow remembered the plastic tankards I’d seen earlier and detoured to them. Kicking one free of the branches and tangled muddy mess, I punted it out to where I could inspect it. Down on my hands and knees, I got my eyes to the proper focal distance and was able to read the beginning of the word “Glyph—.” Puzzled, I found a stick and slid it through the handle, hoisted the tankard and brought it up to Ocean View. Leaving the thing on the porch, I took off my boots and snuck inside to get the flashlight and my reading glasses. By then it must have been nearly five a.m.
“Who’s there?” I heard Maggie bark in the same kind of choked, hoarse voice Beverley had used. I told her it was me and she sighed. I heard her fumbling around, putting something back in her purse. “I might have shot you,” she said. The Virginian drawl of her youth resurfaced, as it often did in moments of tension or passion. I was too startled to summon repartee. “Maybe now’s the time to talk,” she added, “seeing that you’re awake and you woke me, too.”
“All right,” I said, “I’m sorry, I couldn’t sleep. Just give me a second.” I got the flashlight and my reading glasses and went back out on the porch and read the label off the tankard. “Glyphosate” was the word. Herbicide. Domestic Agent Orange. “Well,” I said with weary irony, stepping inside and stripping off my clothes, then climbing back into bed, “at least I know why there’s no poison oak on the property. Another big mystery solved.”
Maggie stared at me, blinking her eyes in the flashlight beam. “Who told you?”
“Told me what?”
“Told you they killed the poison oak so they could use the property without getting a rash.”
“I don’t understand.”
Maggie stared hard then relented. “No, you don’t. So, now I’m going to tell you. Let’s make some of that drip coffee first,” she said, getting up and climbing into several layers of mismatched pants, sweaters, and a coat. “It’s freezing and damp . . .”
“I was about to try to get some sleep,” I protested.
“Who can sleep?”
“Beverley can sleep easy now,” I said, yawning. “We figured out what those voices were. I mean Taz did.”
“Alex? What did he do?”
I explained what had happened and Maggie listened so attentively that she kept spooning out the coffee and filled the whole filter. I watched her spoon half of it back into the can. “Okay,” she said, putting the machine in motion. “Now this is starting to make sense. Let’s try to join some dots.”
The first dot, she suggested, as the coffee spluttered and dripped, was the convenient existence of an isolated, abandoned motel with various outbuildings, direct beach access, and a pier or dock.
We grabbed our mugs of coffee and went out onto the porch, watching the sky begin to lighten. “So, you remember how there used to be a ramp and a dock?” Maggie asked. I said I did, that I’d often gone fishing with Egmont. “Well, the ramp was washed
out about three and a half years ago, and the dock went right afterward. Then the county put the place up for auction. In other words, Beverley and Ron Rossi got the motel once there was no more ramp or dock, and it was of no use anymore.”
“Of no use for what and to whom?” I asked, letting her do the explaining.
That’s when Maggie said here was dot number two. If you wanted to do something like smuggle drugs or people in and out, it was the ideal place to own. She repeated in her own words the outlandish theory about the disappearances Beverley had propounded to me as we stood in the rose garden. It was sounding less and less outlandish, but I still could not see why Harvey and his patriot posse of white-bread cowboys would run the risk of forcing undesirables into old feral hog traps, drag them down a ramp, load them on a boat, and dump them overboard once out to sea. Why not just shoot them in the woods and bury them in a mass grave? Why not fill a bus with them and drive them off a cliff and make it look like an accident? Why not expose them to lethal doses of carfentanil or another opioid or alpha-PVP? And why were they knocking off so many people in the first place? All they had to do was arrest and incarcerate or deport them.
Maggie listened, nodding, shaking her head, frowning, and sucking her lower lip. “That’s lots of other dots,” she said. The sky was pinking and I could see the property and her face clearly now. “What if,” she said, “you aren’t taking into account several items you don’t have information about?” I asked what she meant and she asked rhetorically, “What if the undesirables, as you call them, came individually or in small batches, and what if they were people Harvey knew and had worked with? What if you were interested in making money by milking the dealers and growers and the human traffickers before getting rid of them? There are only so many drug deaths you can explain or justify, and large numbers of deaths don’t look good on the books. And what if you wanted to make sure the bodies would never be found? Shooting people in the forest and digging graves is harder than you think, JP, and so is staging an accident. You know that better than I do. There’s always evidence. Dogs smell the graves. Investigators spot them from the air.”
“Well,” I said, “a cage or trap can always wash up and one has.”
“True,” she countered, “but who can identify the remains? Who can prove who the perpetrators were?”
“The perpetuators, you mean?”
Maggie laughed despite herself. “He is a sick, dangerous man,” she said, “a malign narcissist and worse, a mass murderer, sadist, and serial rapist. He’s also greedy and he’s gotten very rich. Have you seen his house?”
I shook my head. Taken aback by the vehemence in her voice, I had to wonder out loud, “Why haven’t they just bumped off Beverley or us?”
“Who says they haven’t tried?” Maggie finished her coffee and added, “It’s easier to scare people like us away than jail or kill us. You know that, too. It’s messy disposing of bodies and lives. Bev and I know too many people, and people can talk. You can bump off iffy outsiders who have no business being here, but you can’t kill everyone in Carverville. Harvey may be the FBI and ICE’s point man up here, and they like it when he gets rid of ‘undesirables.’ But I’m not sure how many good white folks he can kill without being canned or killed himself.”
I am not a natural conspiracy theorist and everything Maggie had said sounded so improbable that I couldn’t help frowning and grunting with incredulity. I swallowed the rest of my coffee and, without meaning to seem impatient, stretched my arms and legs, feeling stiff in the chill wind. “All right,” I said. “Here’s another dot for you, since we’re playing this game. Assuming your theory is correct, they abandon this place when the ramp and dock are out of commission and where do they go to continue their nefarious activities?”
“It isn’t a game, JP.”
“I know, I know but . . .” I paused. “Look, what scares me is I think you and Beverley might be right. Have you been to the Headlands?” Maggie shook her head and said she hadn’t gone inside since we had, together, in the good old days. I told her what I thought, what I had tried not to believe. “They moved operations up there and used a helicopter instead of a boat. It was even neater. You build or repair the cages out in an abandoned hangar, you trap your hogs and force your victims inside, the helicopter hovers overhead and lifts the cage, and you’re right on the beach in a spot no one goes to, and who could possibly know what was in the cage other than the pig, even if they saw it heading out to sea swinging under the helicopter? They might be delivering something to one of the offshore rigs or just dumping a feral hog in the ocean to get rid of it.”
Maggie’s smile was bitter. “I knew there was a reason I kept on loving you all these years,” she said. “I’m glad you figured it out for yourself, so I don’t have to convince you. Why else would they put up a surveillance camera on the highway by the old mill entrance? Alex showed you, didn’t he?”
Thinking of Taz and how he had hacked the surveillance camera system, I realized now he was deeply involved in the cell. They could easily call it treason and, given his looks and possible birthplace, invent some link to radical Islamic terrorism. “Look, this is seriously dangerous stuff for professionals and it’s suicidal for amateur sleuths,” I said. “We’ve got to get out of here while we can.”
“And abandon everyone else? And let Harvey and his posse get away with this? I don’t think so.”
“Where’s the proof, where’s the body, where’s the smoking gun, the DNA left on the chainsaw, the fingerprints, the evidence of corruption, malfeasance, the photos or video footage, where are the eyewitnesses—other than Beverley, whose testimony wouldn’t stand up for more than two seconds?” I paused to catch my breath and realized I now knew why the dirty old McCulloch chain had disappeared. Could tiny filaments of human flesh remain lodged in a chainsaw chain even after many trees had been sawed by that chain? The thought sent a convulsion through my body.
“And what if we had all those proofs and pieces of evidence, then what?” Maggie asked, flushed. She watched me pacing, wringing my hands like Lady Macbeth and making pained faces.
“That’s the tragedy,” I said at last. Without thinking, I began drumming my fingers on the railing and this brought my mind back to Beverley and her summons last night and the interrupted conversation I was trying to have with Maggie before dinner. “Somehow we’ve strayed from the conversation we needed to have. Let’s take a walk. It’s stopped raining.”
Maggie assented and said she was about to propose the same thing. We needed to get to South Carverville, she insisted, so she could show me and tell me the rest of her tale—an “object lesson.”
TWENTY-SIX
The “object lesson,” as Maggie put it, consisted of marching me into the breaking dawn, down the rickety staircase from the Eden Resort to Graveyard Beach, then south for two meandering miles, over the Yono River embankment on the footbridge and up a looping bike lane-cum-hiking trail to a retirement home in South Carverville. It was a depressing place of sour smells and sorrowful lamentations, with views not of the ocean but of the bypass to the east. Maggie said she had to make sure a certain Jackie was all right, and check that the home hadn’t been damaged by the storm. I would understand why soon enough.
On the way, as we walked and talked battered by gusts of salty wind, she told me what she knew about the disappearances, and I gathered she had gleaned her information not only from Beverley but from other sources she still would not reveal. Her sources were either members of The Seventeen Club cell or people in officialdom who were too scared to act but whose unclean consciences required them to confess or confide in someone and come clean.
“Clean” is not a word I would use to describe the condition of the beach or the paths and trails we used. Flash flooding is a notoriously bad housekeeper. It was as if the ocean had finally had enough of us and vomited back the vileness we have been pouring down its gullet for generations. The sand was littered and piled not only with driftwood and the usual
algae-tinted plastic or Styrofoam but also with dead dogs and cats, a hog and a horse already partly decomposed, a dozen or more rusted oil drums, the corroded bent frames of old cars and stolen shopping carts, crumpled refrigerators without doors, coils of cable, car batteries, electrical transformers, an entire chicken coop, smashed crab and lobster pots, and too many tires to count, most of them encrusted with barnacles and tangled in seaweed. We both scanned the beach for animal traps and human bones and were relieved not to find any.
Though it had stopped raining hours earlier, the floodwater was still running like a stream down the hills we climbed to get from the beach up and under the bypass. The highway looked like a swimming pool dotted with floating cars and trucks. The road surface of the viaduct was too high up for us to see clearly, but I assumed the water level was still too deep for the stranded vehicles to move. We saw no sign of life. “Shoddy” was the word that came to mind, shoddily, hastily built infrastructure, jerry-rigged by the modern mafiosi who have taken over our government.
When we finally reached the retirement home, I was drenched in sweat from the climb. Maggie was obviously relieved to find that the facility had not been seriously damaged. Some windowpanes were broken, and I saw a number of shingles on the ground, but compared with the devastation we’d encountered on the way, this was nothing. We stepped inside at about seven a.m. I was surprised to see the lights on and the staff at work that early until I remembered that retirement homes and hospitals operate 24/7. Presumably they, too, had an emergency power source. The bright lights and forced cheer did nothing to hide the stench of institutional food and soiled underclothes.
Maggie introduced me to a flustered admin woman of middle years who had been forced to spend the night in the facility, she said, unable to drive home. Then we spoke to an affable orderly named Mike, with a tiny ace-of-spades tattoo on his neck, and he asked after Alex. Eventually, we arrived at the fluorescent-lit room on the third floor occupied by Jackie. She is a large, pale woman in her late thirties or early forties, I would guess. Maggie said Jackie has been in the home for the last decade and was a client of hers. Jackie seemed thrilled to see Maggie but also pleased to meet me.