Names of Dead Girls, The

by Eric Rickstad

  Rath needed Preacher’s address. Test would have access to it. She’d want to know why he needed it. He had an angle worked out. Rath pulled his cell phone from his pocket. It was close to 4:30 a.m. Test had young kids. While she may not be up yet, she would be soon.

  Test answered on the second ring, her voice hoarse, beleaguered. “You can’t sleep either, huh? I haven’t heard anything; Dana’s still missing.” She thought he was calling about Dana. Good. She was dedicated. Obsessive. Sleepless nights were status quo for a successful detective. Rath didn’t know how she managed it with two kids. A spouse helped, Rath imagined, and Test’s husband struck Rath as a solid guy.

  “You’ve heard nothing at all?” Rath said, playing along.

  “Not a thing.”

  “Where’s he living?”

  “Who?”

  “Preacher.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s clearly a person of interest. If not the primary.”

  “I know. I looked into it. He’s out at the end of Forgotten Gorge Road.”

  “Way out there.”

  “It is odd. It’s not so far from the Wayside Country Store, either. In the fog, thirty minutes tops. I want to speak to him, but, right now, Clark isn’t even officially missing. So we can’t. You can’t.”

  Rath knew Forgotten Gorge Wilderness well. He’d deer hunted and foraged for morel mushrooms in those woods numerous times. It was equidistant to Johnson to the west and the Wayside to the east. Preacher could have easily been at the Wayside after leaving the pet shop in Johnson. But how would he know Dana would be there? Had he been watching her? Had he patterned her travel after work?

  “Let me know if you get news about Dana.”

  “First chance.”

  They hung up.

  A brook trout whirled on top of the water, devouring baitfish at the surface. Monsters lurked here, in the deep cold pond, waiting for the precise moment to strike as they took advantage of the cloak of darkness.

  Part II

  The fog is an accomplice as the girl appears from it like an apparition, as if she is already half gone from this world, scuffing her boots on her way to the mailbox across the road from the driveway; the mailbox, the only one for miles on this lost country road, hidden from the house by the fog.

  Look at her, oblivious. The stupid, betraying child.

  She looks both ways at the roadside; there is nothing to see or hear approaching in the fog. No vehicle is coming. No one is coming. Not that she knows.

  Look at her.

  Did she think she would not be found out? That she could keep it a secret?

  She crosses the road, toward the mailbox. Toward the trees behind it. Toward the end of her.

  Closer.

  That’s it.

  That’s it.

  Closer.

  Come, stupid child. Come.

  She does not see me. I am engulfed in wrath’s flames. If she were to look up, she would see a hot, white, incandescent light illuminating the fog around me.

  But, the fool, she does not look up.

  She crosses to the mailbox and opens it.

  So close.

  The melting rags of snow are wet and slippery. But oh so quiet. Steps soundless in the chorus of rain in the trees.

  She turns.

  Away from the mailbox.

  She drops an envelope and stoops to pick it up from the muddy road.

  She stands upright again, brushing the soiled envelope against her fleece jacket.

  The heart is a wild panther lunging at the bars of its cage.

  She is in reach.

  She looks one way down the road she cannot see in the fog, listening.

  Looks the other way, listening.

  No vehicle is coming.

  No one is coming.

  Nothing is coming.

  Except her end.

  Her end is coming.

  Her end is here.

  The loop swings over her head and is pulled tight to her throat.

  The envelopes drop to the snow as her legs drum.

  She is no match.

  She is easy.

  Now, she will confess what she knows, what she has done.

  Now, she will confess her sins.

  18

  Saturday, November 5, 2011

  The Gihon River Inn stood in the center of Johnson, between Sheer Deelite Hair Salon and a stationery shop whose window display of Crane résumé paper and fountain pens made the establishment seem like it had not been touched since CDs rendered vinyl obsolete. It made Rath wonder if the place was a front.

  The inn was not ideal, but all except the seediest apartments in town had been rented back in August, before the start of school. At least the inn was on Main Street, and people would be around at all times.

  Carrying the birdcage with the two canaries, Rath followed Felix and Rachel up the narrow stairs and down a hall to room 217, the birds quiet under the cloth draped over the cage.

  Rath noted there was no peephole in the door to Rachel’s room, no way for her to peer out into the hall. He’d insist one be installed, or put one in himself.

  Rachel worked the key in the door.

  The caustic bite of creosote tainted the stale air; the odor likely from the fireplace, charred black with soot. The spacious room was otherwise clean. Floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked the street, facing south to allow sunlight to stream in, if the fog outside ever abated for the sun to show itself again.

  A poster bed with a quilt of geometric patterns took up the center of the room. Rath averted his eyes from the bed where his daughter would sleep with Felix. A counter beside him spared just enough room for a tray of drinking glasses which were turned upside down, a minifridge, and a microwave the size of a toaster. “Not much of a kitchen,” Rath said.

  “I use my meal card most of the time,” Rachel said.

  “I’ll grab more of your clothes first chance,” Rath said.

  “I hate all those clothes,” Rachel said. “And this stupid haircut and dye job. I look like an idiot.”

  “I love your new look,” Felix said.

  “I’m trying too hard. I feel desperate. Not myself.” She looked at Rath. “I never told you. I loved the jumper you bought me from that shop in Canaan. It was sweet. And. It was me.”

  It warmed Rath to hear Rachel say she liked what he’d picked out for her; or rather, what the store clerk had picked out for her based on Rath’s input. He’d been the one who’d felt desperate, buying Rachel the jumper on the spur of the moment a couple weeks back; desperate for a connection with her. Any connection. He’d thought she’d hated the damned thing. Now, he didn’t dare say anything, afraid his voice would falter.

  “I can buy you some new clothes from there, if you want?” he said.

  “Would you? Really?” Rachel said. “I’ll pay you back.”

  “Pay me back. I’m your father.”

  “I know.”

  Rath did not want to return to the Dress Shoppe. He’d first gone there to interview clerks who’d waited on Mandy Wilks the afternoon prior to the night she’d disappeared. He’d ended up on a date with Madeline, a clerk he’d interviewed, his first date in the sixteen years since adopting Rachel. A debacle of a date. He was as inclined to go into the store as much he was inclined to go vegan. For Rachel, though, he would risk the embarrassment.

  He offered Rachel a hug. She stepped into his arms and hugged him back, pulled away.

  “It’s clean, anyway, the room,” Rath said.

  “And right on the main drag, got a cool claw-foot tub,” Felix said, peering into the bathroom near him.

  Rath didn’t need to hear about a tub any more than he needed the bed on display, but he admired Felix’s enthusiasm under the circumstances.

  “It’ll do,” Rachel said, “until we get back to normal in our place.”

  There was only one way to get Rachel back to her place, back to normal, and as soon as Rath left here, he was going to set in motion a plan to
see to just that.

  19

  Rath inched the Scout up Forgotten Gorge Road in LOW I 4WD. At this higher elevation the rain mixed with sleet and snow. The road was a treacherous track of frozen and thawing muck edging a ravine that fell steeply away to the gorge below, no guardrails to keep a vehicle from plummeting. With Preacher’s place a half mile ahead, Rath stopped the Scout, idling in the road. He was tempted to go to Preacher’s door and face him, warn him if he ever spoke to Rachel, or came near her again, Rath would see he was arrested, or worse. But he couldn’t do it. Preacher would bask in Rath’s anger, feed on it. Rath could not afford to bait him.

  He turned the Scout onto a logging road and drove out of sight of Forgotten Gorge Road. At a clearing, he got out of the Scout and took a deep breath, letting the cold, clean air fill his lungs. He put on a knit cap and a camouflage waist pack, slung his climber tree stand over his camouflage jacket, and pulled a head net on over his face. The head net made him feel invisible, and he nearly was; it would be difficult for anyone to see him in the trees from even a few feet away, especially in the gathering fog.

  A half hour later, winded and sweating, he descended the other side of the ridge until he came to a grove of ash trees where he foraged morel mushrooms in May. The tree trunks stood straight and true and branchless for many feet, ideal for his climbing stand, and just a couple hundred feet up the ridge from Preacher’s place, granting Rath an ideal, concealed vantage.

  He strapped his tree stand to the base of a tree and cursed himself for forgetting his safety harness. With a rope from his pack he jury-rigged a harness around his torso and under his arms, and ratcheted the stand up into the tree, thirty feet, much higher than he would climb to bow hunt.

  He removed his pack, worked his makeshift harness around the tree trunk, tied it off, minding his footing on the stand’s platform. One slip without a harness and he’d plunge three stories to the rocks below. He sat on the stand’s padded seat, his heart pounding. Now that he was seated he realized how bone-tired he was. The past two nights he’d slept all of a few fitful hours. If he closed his eyes, he’d be asleep in an instant.

  The air stirred near his ear as a chickadee lighted on his shoulder, hopped onto his knee. The bird peered into his eyes with its own glassy black eyes, cocked its head, and flitted away on a breeze. Down the ridge two hundred feet, a 1970s duplex sat just visible amid dark hemlocks. Preacher’s lair. Dark vertical boards faced the bottom half of the place, the upper floor horizontal Masonite clapboard, both painted a deep forest green. If Preacher left the house, Rath would have to hike back to his Scout, giving Preacher a head start. But Rath would catch up. He knew the road well, far better than Preacher, and could drive it at a speed Preacher couldn’t.

  Two vehicles sat parked on the plowed area of yard; a dented, gray Subaru Impreza and a late ’90s Ford Ranger pickup. Rath wondered which vehicle belonged to Preacher and which to the tenant in the adjacent unit. If he were still a cop, he’d have run the plates. Instead, he’d observe. Sooner or later, someone had to leave the premises.

  He took his binoculars from his pack and focused them on Preacher’s entrance—number 1, on the left. He zoomed the binoculars to a meticulous clarity able to make out rust flakes on the nail on which Preacher’s mailbox hung by the door. The dark green was not paint. It was moss. The house was diseased with a dark, fungal moss.

  Rain pattered the dead leaves. Rath yawned and stretched, his mind turgid with thoughts of Dana Clark, the CRVK, Preacher, and Rachel. The duplex sat quiet.

  Snow melted, slipped free of the branches above, cascaded in clots to stamp protozoan imprints into the soggy snow below. Rath pulled his collar up against the strengthening rain. From his pack, he took out one of the cheddar cheese sandwiches he’d made, ate it in a few bites, washed it down with black coffee from his thermos. He’d spent many days bow hunting from a tree stand, from dark to dark, watching the woods and waiting for a good whitetail buck to appear, a creature far more cautious than any man could hope to be.

  He pulled his coat collar tighter to his neck and hunched against the rain, fatigue settling deeper into his bones. The sandwich had done more to tire him than the coffee had to waken him. A door to the duplex opened. Not Preacher’s door. Rath trained his binoculars on the person on the porch. A woman, a dark ski cap pulled down so low it framed her face, her dark hair peeking out at the edges. Her black satin parka, the back emblazoned with a Harley Davidson logo, was unzipped and hung to her knees. She took a shovel from where it leaned against the duplex on the porch and scraped at the slush that had fallen from the branches of the overhanging trees.

  Rath wondered if the woman knew that just one thin wall separated her from a man who had raped and murdered girls and women. She has a right to know. To be warned, Rath thought. The woman set the shovel back against the duplex and tromped across the slushy snow to get into the Subaru.

  The Ford Ranger belonged to Preacher.

  The faint sound of the Subaru engine turning over was followed by the loud thump of bass music playing inside the car as the car drove away.

  The shovel slid and fell to the porch.

  The house remained still as the dead.

  Rath leaned back, worked his jaw and rubbed his face to ward off sleep, closed his eyes.

  20

  On the steps of Willey Library, Rachel glanced at her phone to check a text message from Detective Test. Finally, the detective had gotten back after Rachel had sent several texts with her new mailing address, so Test could send the reports.

  “What is it?” Felix said.

  “My dad, checking in,” Rachel lied.

  “He’s a good dad.” Felix kissed Rachel’s cheek, then pulled the hood of his duster over his head. “Meet me back here after we’re done with work-study?”

  Rachel nodded. Felix made a mad dash in the fog and rain toward the Dibden Center for the Arts where he helped catalog the college’s art archives.

  When the fog finally claimed Felix, Rachel reread Detective Test’s text: Had an officer drop your “material” at the desk at the inn on his way to a training seminar. Good luck. Rachel broke for the off-campus shuttle, leaping onto it just as the doors sucked shut behind her. The rain fell ludicrous. It sounded like the drumbeat of the apocalypse on the shuttle roof.

  In town, Rachel rushed down the block from the shuttle to the inn, her peacoat drenched by the rain. Here in town, the fog grew worse, thick as steam from a hot shower in a winter cold bathroom. She could see all of ten feet. If that. The fog seemed alive, an amorphous and mindless protoplasm insinuating itself into every crevice, strangling lampposts and pedestrians, eating away at reality.

  In the inn’s lobby, Rachel asked the manager for her package. He held up three manila envelopes. “These?” he said, as if he had heaps of manila envelopes back there to dole out.

  Rachel snatched the envelopes and bounded up the stairs.

  In her room, she locked the door, tossed the envelopes on the window table. She dumped her soaked peacoat and hat in a plastic laundry basket and sat at the window table. She had fewer than forty-five minutes to get back to campus and meet Felix without raising his suspicions. She did not want to worry him. And she did not want him to find out about the murder files.

  The envelopes were so stuffed they seemed about to burst, as if unwilling to contain the contents forced inside them. Rachel thumbed the brass clasp on the top envelope, opened the seal, and took a deep breath.

  She got up and paced, trying to calm herself. She opened the minifridge, stared at amber beer bottles: Felix’s beer. He bought it at a local brewery anointed Best Brewery in the World by some geek site, attracting pilgrims worldwide in search of beers with hipster names like Uncle Floyd and Peace & Understanding. Rachel didn’t like beer. Felix was a fiend for it. He and his buddies poured it into special glasses, into which they stuck their noses like pigs rooting truffles. They commented on frothiness of head, stickiness of legs, creaminess of mouthfeel. It wa
s all vaguely pornographic and farcical. Felix wanted so badly for Rachel to appreciate beer that when he prodded her to take a sip and give her opinion, he’d await her reaction as if he’d just proposed marriage. “Looks like beer. Smells like beer. Tastes like beer. Diagnosis: beer,” she’d say without enthusiasm, though the high alcohol content gave a cozy glow. Which she now needed.

  She took a bottle from the fridge, a bottle with the kind of cork flip top that always managed to pinch her fingers.

  She sat with the bottle, worked its cork free, pinching her fingers. She didn’t use a glass. Her dad drank his beer from the bottle or can. Why let a middleman spoil things? he said. Why, indeed. She took a long sip, tasted none of the citrus and mango and biscuits and whatever the hell else Felix went on about. It tasted like bitter beer. But it calmed her.

  She slid the documents from the envelope. There must have been thirty pages. The top pages were typed up by a state police detective named Barrons. Rachel wondered if this were the same Barrons who was now Canaan’s chief of police.

  She flipped to the transcript from a recorded interview with the first person on the scene. Frank Rath. He’d been a detective in those days, but never spoke of it beyond that fact. It still numbed Rachel to know he had discovered the bodies of her mother and father. His sister. It must have shattered him. Even in the cold, objective typeface of Detective Barrons’s typewriter, her father’s pain lay bared. His sentences not sentences. But fragments. Ellipses littered the transcript.

  I was late . . . You see . . . I was late for— Because. I was with someone. A woman. No one important. A one-time thing. And . . . So . . . I was late. To see my sister. She was putting on a . . . birthday dinner, for me. I’d said I’d be there to help . . . promised. She had the baby . . . to tend to and all. Except. I was late. I said that already. Instead of being on time. Instead of helping her. I . . . found her. Her . . . body. It. At the bottom of the stairs . . . on the white carpet . . . just. Engulfed . . . by blood. An ocean. Blood. Her blood . . . her husband’s. I doubt there was any blood left in them. He was draped over her. She’d been . . . stabbed. Dozens of times. Dozens. Her . . . neck. Broken. I didn’t . . . touch her. Them. I didn’t want to contaminate the scene. I did . . . touch her wrist. For a pulse. Even though . . . I knew. I knew. Her head. It was barely hanging on to her neck. And. Then. I heard her. The baby. Upstairs. Rachel. Their daughter. And I forgot . . . all about my sister. She was dead. There . . . There is nothing we can do. For the dead. But . . . she was alive. We must do something for the living, if we can. She was what mattered. I don’t know . . . what is going to become of her? She’s a baby . . . my niece. I don’t know what’s going to become of her. What on earth is going to become of her?