Names of Dead Girls, The

by Eric Rickstad

  She stared at laptop screen, took a deep breath, and clicked Search.

  14

  Rachel felt ill as she stared at the image on her laptop screen. Not just sick to her stomach; sick in her blood, as if she were infected with malaria, her face sticky and feverish with cold sweat, limbs weak and ponderous, fingertips numb.

  She glanced at the shut door behind her, listened for the shower running.

  The photo on the laptop showed Ned Preacher being escorted from the courthouse in shackles following his arrest for the murder of Rachel’s parents.

  Rachel zoomed in on his face. His look was smug—satisfied. It said: I did it. So what? She had it coming. They all have it coming.

  Rachel leaned in closer.

  Was this the man from the pet shop? Yes, her gut told her. It was Preacher. She’d only seen his eyes, but that was enough. His eyes alone had chilled her, but it wasn’t the photo of Preacher that sickened her most. It was the headline: suspect in vicious double slaying pleads to lesser charges.

  She read how Preacher had “sexually assaulted” her mother. Sexually assaulted? She despised the weak euphemism for rape. Why did the press and judicial system insist on not calling rape rape? Why did they sanitize it, to make it more palatable, less brutal, less real?

  In many articles the baby, Rachel, was mentioned, though never by name.

  There was mention of Preacher’s previous murders and sexual assault convictions. His entire life, he’d preyed on women and girls, then gamed the system, over and over, serving less time by pleading to lesser charges to save the state time and money, to gain him a freedom he did not deserve.

  He never should have breathed fresh air again after his first rape and murder of a girl barely in her teens, let alone been free to kill Rachel’s parents. Now, he was out again.

  Free.

  The idea was lunacy.

  The reality incomprehensible.

  The old newspaper articles glossed over Preacher’s atrocities. Rachel needed to know details. Real details. She did not want to know just that her mother and father had been stabbed; she suddenly wanted to know everything as it had actually happened. She wanted to know exactly how many times her parents were stabbed, the type of knife used, the precise location of their wounds, how deep or shallow they were. How hard her parents had fought against Preacher. How long they had suffered. Had they even been given a chance? She wanted the unvarnished version. She wanted the truth.

  There was only one place to get the information.

  She got up and put her ear to the door. The shower was still running.

  She picked up her old landline phone and dialed.

  A woman answered: “Canaan Police.”

  “Detective Sonja Test, please.”

  “She’s just gone out on a call.”

  The sound of the shower fell quieter. Rachel listened intently. She couldn’t have Felix overhearing her. She did not want to share this with him. It was too private. Too sensitive. Family.

  Rachel gave the woman her name and number. “Can you tell her it’s important, that I want my parents’ murder file?”

  Rachel hung up and sat back with the article about her mother’s rape and murder.

  That was the worst of it: the rape. The word tore at her, a cruel onomatopoeia for the violation through force that it represented—rape: to seize prey, abduct, force. The initial R: a ripping sound. The A: long, prolonged, like a scream; like the A in pain. The P: abrupt and final. The E: as silent as so many victims.

  The word awakened an ache in Rachel’s belly in a way the word murder did not. To murder was inhuman, irreversible. But murder could be instantaneous, even painless, done without the victim ever knowing. And no matter how it was done, when it was over, it was over.

  Rape was never painless. Rape was pain. Cruelty. The victim made to endure the anguish of the act at the mercy of another. There was no end to it; even after it happened, no end to the trauma.

  How awful it must have been for her mother, made to suffer that way, knowing her own baby was upstairs, alone.

  Rachel sobbed to think of it. And of Preacher. The man who just hours earlier had stood a few feet from her, leering, making her skin feel flayed. She tried to push the thought from her mind. She looked up at the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling. How many nights had she gazed up at these stars, fantasizing about becoming the Big Girl and of all the freedom that would come with it?

  She thought about the boxes hidden beneath her bed: boxes of DVDs and books about appalling murders and the fiends who’d committed them. She felt ashamed now for ever having enjoyed them. Not just enjoyed them, but been titillated by them. Tales of depravity had been an opiate for her: intoxicated and damaged her.

  How could she ever have been drawn to it?

  Why?

  She had been an infant in a crib upstairs when her parents were stabbed to death, her mother raped. Had she heard the sounds of their last moments? Had they remained with her, germinated inside her and manifested themselves as a prurient interest in acts macabre and violent?

  Since grade school, she’d helped her father with his private investigation into tame, nonviolent local crimes of town treasurer embezzlement and the like. She’d helped him sift through evidence and form theories. It was a way, she realized, for him to share time with her, keep her close, safe. When she’d asked why the town treasurer had humiliated himself and his family, risked jail to steal money he didn’t need, her father had put forth a theory. He believed people who committed crimes were not addicted to the act, or to the money or the power, but to the secrecy. The deeper and darker the secret—the more individuals had to protect their secret crimes, their secret lives, at all costs—the more singular and exceptional those people felt. In the mind of the criminal, secrets sharpened the edge of dull lives, elevated the common to significance.

  Her fascination with violent crime, however, had not taken root until she’d found a disturbing case hidden in her father’s files. A seventy-eight-year-old farmer, Leonard Stikes, had killed his granddaughter’s boyfriend with a shovel and hidden the corpse in a manure pile. When the boy’s body was found, the old man had broken down and confessed he’d done it in a fit of rage to protect his granddaughter from the boy’s abuse. I didn’t know what else to do! he’d cried. His despair was believed to bring on the stroke that slayed him in his holding cell. The boyfriend had a record of abuse, and many witnesses, including his mother, attested to their fear of the boy, his cruelty, and his threats to kill them for the slightest insult.

  The incident was seen as a tragedy all around, until a year later when the old man’s barn was razed by his two surviving sons, and the remains of eleven boys were found in various stages of decomposition, one skeleton having been beneath the barn for forty years, that of the old man’s first son who had disappeared in 1967, when he was ten. Each skull had been busted by a shovel. The same shovel.

  Rachel had wondered about that farmer ever since. How he’d done what he’d done, hidden his savagery from family and friends for five decades. A man so dark he’d murdered his own son, yet so devious he’d kept his lust for murder a secret until almost the very last. Everyone had believed the old man had killed his granddaughter’s boyfriend because he feared for his granddaughter and “didn’t know what else to do!” They had felt pity and empathy for him.

  He had tricked them all.

  He had gotten away with murder.

  Had he been driven by an addiction to secrecy?

  Ever since she’d learned of that farmer, she’d been fascinated with sordid murders that left her blood cold but her heart hot, snared in a warren of madness and bloodlust. Her addiction had crept up on her with a slow yet steady and unrelenting progression. She’d kept it secret.

  Now her obsession with murder felt dirty, criminal in its disrespect toward her parents’ memories, and all victims.

  She pushed herself up off the mattress and peered under the bed at the boxes of books and DVDs. She
’d burn them first chance she got. Purge by way of fire.

  She stood.

  She had to get out of here. She should never have let her father and Felix talk her into coming here, against her will, let herself be hidden away.

  I can’t be the one imprisoned, she thought. I won’t be. I refuse.

  She’d meant what she’d said about Preacher back at their apartment: she’d cut out Preacher’s heart if she got the chance. And, she realized, even after reading the articles, she wanted that chance. Welcomed it. The violence in her surprised and emboldened her. If she were back at her apartment, she could wait for him. Make him pay. She’d get a big knife. Or better, a gun. This was Vermont, she could buy a gun anywhere. She’d get a gun and she’d wait for him. She’d let him come, lure him even. And when he took the bait—

  Her blood sang with the idea of exacting pain from him.

  Staying here at home accomplished nothing.

  This place was no secret compound. This address could be found in two seconds on the Internet.

  There was no way Preacher didn’t know its location.

  For all she knew, Preacher was out there now in the fields or woods, watching.

  Biding his time.

  Waiting for the heart of night when they were all asleep, so he could slink in through a window.

  Just who did Ned Preacher think he was?

  Rachel jumped when her old landline rang.

  The shower next door had fallen silent. Felix was whistling in the bathroom.

  The phone rang again. It could only be Detective Test calling.

  Rachel answered.

  “This is Detective Test,” a woman’s harried voice, clearly on speakerphone, said. “You left—”

  “I’d like to have my parents’ murder files,” Rachel said.

  “I don’t understand.”

  There was nothing to understand. The files were public record. “I want to know what happened,” Rachel said. “Exactly what happened.”

  The detective sighed, and Rachel heard the slap of windshield wipers in the background. “Honestly, I don’t think you do,” the detective said.

  “That’s not up to you. All due respect,” Rachel said.

  “I still don’t understand—”

  “Do you need to understand?” Rachel said, riled. “Is that a prerequisite for a citizen getting public records? You understanding?” It was not Rachel’s nature to be so stony, but the detective had no right to know her motivation, was treating her like a juvenile in need of protection. Rachel was sick of being sheltered from the truth by others who “knew best.”

  “Of course I don’t need to understand,” Detective Test said. “I never could. But a murder file, it’s ugly, unimaginable stuff.”

  For a moment Rachel almost hung up, didn’t want to know the details. “I was there,” she finally said. “I was a baby, but I was there. I need to know. It sounds morbid, but it will bring me closer to my parents if I face their murders, prove there is no shame in their deaths.”

  The detective sighed again, more deeply. “If that’s what you want.”

  “It is.”

  “Normally, a citizen wanting copies has to fill out forms and come in for the public records themselves. But, look, since I know who you are, know your father, I’ll have an officer locate the files. Get copies made, mail them. Unless you plan to come into the station.”

  “My car’s kaput. Copies work.”

  “You’re sure about this?”

  Rachel wasn’t sure. She was crazy scared. But she needed to know. Not for the reason she’d given Test. That was a lie. She needed to know everything she could about Preacher and what made him tick. Know thy enemy.

  “You can’t mail them here,” Rachel said. “I’ll text you the address of wherever I end up temporarily. And. You have to promise. If you ever run into my dad, you can’t say a word about this.”

  The detective hesitated. “Of course,” she said.

  Rachel hung up, startled to find Felix standing behind her, a towel wrapped around his waist as he brushed his teeth. He extracted the toothbrush from his mouth, lips foamed with spent toothpaste.

  “Who was that?” he said.

  “The police,” Rachel blurted, unable to think of a lie fast enough. “I wanted to know about restraining orders.”

  “Why not ask your dad?”

  “I can do stuff on my own behalf. I don’t need to ask him for everything.”

  “I know.” Felix stuck the toothbrush back in his mouth.

  “You better get dressed, speaking of dads,” Rachel said. “I’ll be right out.”

  With Felix gone, Rachel rubbed her cold arms and opened the door to her room to find her father outside it, yanking on his coat, a manic look on his face.

  15

  “I have to go out,” Rachel’s father said.

  “Why? What’s happened?” However emboldened Rachel had been in her bedroom, however defiant and capable she’d felt, and knew she was, her father’s news that he had to leave the house knocked the breath out of her.

  “I have to meet Detective Test,” he said.

  What? Rachel thought. Had Test already betrayed her confidence, turned around and called her father? “I can’t believe she would—”

  “Chief Barrons called and asked me to go out to a call. I told him absolutely not. He pressed. Said he’d send Officer Larkin to park outside, lights flashing, for as long as I was gone. Larkin should be here any minute.”

  Rachel sighed, relieved Test had not violated her privacy. “It has to do with him? Preacher?”

  “I don’t know. I hope so. We need to catch him breaking parole, put him away, so you’re safe.”

  “What’s the call about? What’s he done?”

  “A woman’s worried about her mom being late, worried she’s in trouble.” He looked toward the window as headlights lit the darkness outside. “Larkin’s here. But lock up anyway. Keep all the lights on. You’ve got Felix.”

  Rachel saw her opportunity to speak her mind. Her father needed to do what he needed to do, even if it left him conflicted. Rachel did too.

  “I’m not staying here. This isn’t my home. Campus is,” she said, proud to speak it but saddened to see pain shadow her father’s face. “With Felix. We’ll get a motel tonight, find a different apartment, but I’m safer on campus, with all my friends around.”

  “No. I—”

  “You can’t be around twenty-four seven. Obviously.”

  Her father winced.

  “I didn’t mean that,” Rachel said. “Not like that. You need to go out. I want you to go, especially if it’s about him. On campus I’ll be around people all the time. Friends, students, teachers, Felix. I didn’t want to come here. I don’t want to be here.” The more she spoke, the deeper she cut her father. She knew, because she was cutting herself, too.

  “I’m sorry you’re scared and hurt, and—”

  “I’m not scared, or hurt. I’m furious. I want to fucking kill him.”

  “You let me handle that.” He tried a laugh, but it faltered. “How about this? I’ll help you and Felix find a new place. First thing. But you stay here tonight. Doors locked. Lights on. Officer Larkin outside. Please, give your dad peace of mind. You can watch movies with my shotgun across your lap.” Again, his laugh, forced and desperate. “Drink hot chocolate. Relax. Felix can stay in your room.” His face reddened. “Try to get a good night’s sleep you’d never get in a motel. You can’t operate from rage.”

  “Why not? You do.”

  “I don’t work from rage.”

  “Anger drives you. At least when you’re after anyone who hurts other people.”

  “That’s different. After I found your mom and dad like that—”

  “You found them?” Rachel had not known this. And, selfishly, since finding out about her parents’ murders, she’d thought of them only as her parents. Her mother. Her father. Her loss. Except, her mother was his sister. His only sibling. His loss. He’d k
nown her all his life until she’d been murdered. Rachel had never known her parents at all. They remained abstract figures to which she could not connect emotionally, as much as she willed it. “I didn’t know,” she said.

  “I didn’t want you to know.” He exhaled a long breath. “Let me help you find you a new place. But, please. Stay here until then. Give me peace of mind. Besides, this fog. No one wants to be out in that mess unless they absolutely have to be. I’ll find you a room or—”

  “OK. OK. I’ll stay,” Rachel said.

  “Follow me and lock up?”

  At the kitchen doorway, Rachel hugged her father and wanted to tell him to keep safe, but he slipped out the door before she could say it.

  She locked up and stood at the kitchen door window and watched her father get in his old heap.

  As soon as the Scout disappeared into the fog, she wanted him back.

  16

  “It’s strange,” Tammy Gates, the daughter of the missing woman, said.

  Rath wondered if the daughter were speaking about the thought he’d had since he’d first arrived: I know this woman, I’ve met her in the past, spoken at length with her. Yet, he knew this wasn’t true; he did not know this woman. Had never laid eyes on her, let alone spoken with her.

  The woman stood from the couch, unable to stay in one place. Rath couldn’t fault her. Her mother had vanished, as if dissolved by the fog.

  The woman scuffed like a sleepwalker to the window. She battled with the strings of the Venetian blind, finally drawing the blinds up enough, crooked, to stare out the window; or stare at it. The black night transformed the window into a dark mirror.

  Test readied to ask the daughter a question, but Rath begged her off with a look, wanting to let the daughter reveal in her own time whatever she was hiding, because she was hiding something. Rath knew the look.

  The daughter reached down and pinched out the flame of a purple drip candle squatting on the coffee table. A tendril of smoke spiraled from the wick.