Names of Dead Girls, The

by Eric Rickstad

  “It’s good money,” Claude said. “It would take me three months to finish a painting I could sell for as much, if I even sold the painting.”

  “Your paintings sell.”

  “Some.”

  “No one bats a hundred.”

  “A thousand. No one bats a thousand.”

  “How can you bat a thousand percent?” Test said.

  “It’s not a percentage thing.”

  “That’s crazy. Look. Call UVM. Tell them yes.”

  Claude paused. There was something he wasn’t telling her.

  “It would probably lead to a full-time gig, next fall,” he said.

  “What? How long have you known this?” A two-week visiting artist gig was one thing. A full-time position was another. UVM was in Burlington, two and a half hours away. That meant moving. That meant it was impossible.

  “They just told me. Don’t get upset.”

  If there was one thing that upset Test, it was being told not to get upset. “You don’t want a full-time gig. You always said teaching is a time suck from your painting.”

  “It would pay well. Plus free tuition. Especially if we have a third.”

  As if on cue, George piped up from the other room to call into question the sanity of a third child: “Where’d you hide it!” George shrieked.

  “Get off!” Elizabeth screamed.

  “Stop it in there.” Claude deepened his voice instead of shouting, trying for authoritative instead of pleading.

  “She won’t tell where she hid my race car!” George railed.

  “And torturing her helps? Lizzy. Tell him where it is. Now.” Claude looked at Sonja. “Still want a third?”

  She did. Or thought she did. The past several months she and Claude had been “trying,” a term she disliked more than don’t get upset. But the process was, well, trying. Monitoring her ovulation and having to try even when her and Claude’s moods or bodies or schedules weren’t in sync. She wondered if a third child would allow her to perform her current job, let alone act as senior detective. She and Claude were already strained to their limits of time, energy, and money.

  “I just wonder how practical it is,” she said.

  “Practical? Having kids? It’s insane.”

  “We can’t just move to Burlington.”

  “Of course we can. Burlington has a big police department.”

  “I want more bureaucracy like you want the ivory tower. That’s why we live here.”

  “We’d be more stable.”

  “We are stable.”

  “Not if we have a third.”

  Then maybe we shouldn’t, Test thought.

  “If I got the full-time gig, I’d have time with the kids,” Claude said, “and summers and breaks to paint. And a steady income. Not the sporadic one I have now. And free tuition.”

  “You’ve really thought about this.”

  “It’s a long drive back from Burlington in the fog.”

  “You’re in a fog. I can’t just quit. Move. We can’t.”

  “We can do anything we want.”

  “I won’t,” Test said.

  Claude bristled.

  “We love this house,” Test said. “It’s home. The fields, the sledding, cutting our own Christmas tree. The kids have friends. Teach some classes locally. At Lyndon or Johnson, or—”

  “Let’s scrap it, for now. The position wouldn’t start for nearly a year anyway. Nothing would be ‘just’ move. And if Barrons passes you up for—”

  “Don’t even say that, it—”

  Test’s cell phone rang on the counter.

  Barrons. This late in the day, it had to be about Dana Clark. “Chief,” Test said as Elizabeth screamed. Claude wandered out of the kitchen, shouting, “Stop torturing your sister!”

  “I need you at the end of Pisgah Wilderness Road,” Barrons said.

  “What’s this about?”

  Barrons filled her in.

  “Shit,” Test said as she hurried for her coat and keys.

  23

  Rath awoke with a start, crying out.

  Bone cold.

  Where was he?

  He blinked, could not focus his vision.

  Outside. He was outside. In his damned tree stand.

  He’d fallen asleep.

  Jesus.

  Though his body, slumped against the makeshift harness that had kept him from falling, was clammy and cold, the air had warmed. Tendrils of fog twined around tree trunks like vaporous serpents and clung to their branches like spiderwebs.

  Preacher’s pickup truck still sat in the yard. Had Preacher been out? Rath would have heard the truck start up, the door close. Wouldn’t he have? There was no way to know. Rath’s sleep had been deep and sound.

  Rath stood, stretching, peered through the trees at the house. The fog would soon obscure his view of Preacher’s house entirely and he’d have to climb down to observe the place from the hemlocks at the yard edge.

  There was no cell service here, but Rath turned on his phone to check the time.

  He’d been asleep for nearly three hours.

  Fuck it all.

  The woman’s Subaru had not returned. Or if it had, the woman had driven off again.

  Rath heard an engine as a mail Jeep drove into the yard. A mailman hopped out and stuffed mail into each of the metal mailboxes outside the doors. He picked up the shovel that had fallen earlier and leaned it against the house.

  Then, he drove back toward civilization.

  Preacher’s door opened and Preacher stepped out onto the porch.

  Just like that.

  There he was.

  The man who’d raped and murdered Rath’s sister, in the flesh. Free.

  At Preacher’s last parole hearing, Rath had been forced to endure Preacher’s lawyer heaping praise on the murderer for all the good he had done in prison. To deepen Rath’s rage and humiliation, Rath had needed to testify against Preacher’s release, as if Preacher’s record didn’t speak loudly enough. Which, apparently, it did not.

  It had taken all of Rath’s resolve not to charge at Preacher and beat him as he sat smirking. Preacher had been lucky there were armed officers at the hearing.

  There was no one out here now except Rath and Preacher. Just the two of them. Alone.

  Rath dialed Preacher in on his binoculars.

  Black jeans hugged Preacher’s long legs, and his white shirt was buttoned to his throat as he stepped out in brown slippers. He was impeccably shaved, his hair trim and wet.

  As at the parole hearing, Rath noted that Preacher, now in his fifties, looked younger than he had when he’d gone to prison sixteen years ago. He appeared in better shape than Rath, like a man who had lived well, without regrets.

  From his mailbox, Preacher dug a cache of mail bound with a red rubber band. It seemed like a lot of mail for a man just freed after sixteen years and barely settled. A man with no friends or family who bothered to attend his hearing.

  With a folding knife he fished from his pocket he sliced open a large envelope and took from it a pink piece of paper.

  He read the letter. Smiled. His two overlapping front teeth exposed as his upper lip curled upward.

  He looked in the envelope and sniffed. Smiled wider.

  He turned, his back to Rath, face to the sky and arms slung back as if offering himself to abduction by aliens.

  Rath made a pistol of his finger and thumb and aimed it at the back of Preacher’s head.

  Preacher spun on his heel and looked toward the woods, directly at Rath.

  His eyes seemed to lock on Rath’s, look into them.

  Impossible. Preacher could not see Rath, not with the naked eye, not with this fog and drizzle, and with Rath in full camouflage.

  Rath kept perfectly still, as if he were watching a deer approach his stand, a deer so keyed to each scent and sound and movement in the woods that Rath dared not blink or swallow for fear of being given away.

  Preacher stared.

  Wate
r dripped from the snow melting in the branches.

  Preacher squinted. Licked his lips.

  Finally, he turned away and disappeared inside the house, the door shutting behind him and shutting Rath out.

  Rath exhaled and scanned the trees near the house, spotted a grove of birch trees at the edge of the hemlocks, an old wooden birdhouse nailed to one of the birches.

  Unhurried, methodically, Rath worked the stand to the ground and, shrouded in mist, sneaked toward Preacher’s dwelling.

  24

  The boy trembled.

  In the fog, he sat on the rear bumper of an ambulance parked on the dirt road a mile from where the road ended at the gateway to the Pisgah Wilderness.

  The boy could not have been more than ten years old, thin as a sapling, bangs flopped in his eyes from beneath his camouflage Red Sox cap. Other than the Red Sox logo on the cap, and a blaze orange vest, the boy was dressed head to toe in camouflage. Even his rubber boots sported a camouflage pattern.

  A man stood beside the boy, his hand resting on the boy’s shoulder in a comforting, protective manner that moved Test. It was as if the man were trying to draw the boy’s terror from him and take it on as his own. The man dressed identically to the boy, down to the camouflage Red Sox cap and orange vest. No doubt, the boy’s father.

  Test glanced at a rifle leaning against a nearby tree, an old lever action .30-.30. Iron sights. The barrel pitted from bouts of rust.

  “That loaded, sir?” Test said.

  “No,” the father said, emphatic. “As soon as we— As soon as we finished hunting, I unloaded it. What’s the rule?” The man looked at his boy.

  “As soon as you’re done, unload your gun,” the boy said.

  “And?” the father said.

  “The only place a loaded gun is good is when you’re hunting in the woods.”

  An EMT shined a light in the boy’s eyes as the boy shed his cap and squeezed its brim so it curled into a tube.

  “Where are the state police?” Test said to the EMT, a woman in her twenties with a pierced nose and eyebrow. Test knew her from a few car crash scenes, but could not place her name. Sally. Or Sarah. Or Sue. “We often beat them to a call. We’re local. Like you,” the EMT said. “Nearest state cruiser could be an hour away. More in this fog.”

  It was to Test’s advantage to be the first law enforcement on the scene. If she examined the scene first, the state police would need to defer to her for initial information, instead of her having to peck for scraps in a supportive, ancillary role should they have arrived first. If it were a homicide, or even a suspicious death or a deer hunting accident, Barrons would have the state police take lead on the case, but they’d need Test for input. Right now, it was unclear what she was dealing with out in the woods.

  If the weather weren’t so terrible, she might have been forced to stand down until the state police arrived. But with the cold rain and temps hovering at thirty-eight degrees, Test was losing evidence in the way of boot tracks and other indicators that might be left in what little slushy snow remained of the nearly two feet they’d received in the recent blizzard. She needed to act.

  She hit her radio to get dispatch. “I’m ten-twenty-three at the possible ten-sixty-three. I need an ETA on the state police for Pisgah Wilderness.”

  “Roger ten-twelve.”

  Test glanced at the boy.

  The dispatcher came back. “Forty to fifty minutes on the state police’s ETA.”

  “Ten-four. Can you ten-five my husband, my ten-twenty-one A is unknown. Late. He’ll have to manage.”

  “Ten-four.”

  The EMT looked the boy in the eye as the boy leaned into his father’s shoulder.

  The fog here seemed to be lit eerily by a silvery, translucent light, like a spider’s web damp with dew in the early dawn.

  “I’m sorry for your shock,” Test said to the boy who looked at her with eyes clear and bright and attentive. A respect there, not just for authority, not the kind drummed into a kid, not a forced respect sticky with resentment and trepidation, but a genuine, easy respect. A goodness.

  This was a good kid.

  Who’d stumbled onto something very, very bad.

  “I’ll need you to show me,” Test said. “And to try to tell me every detail you remember as best you can. Can you do that for me?”

  The boy nodded. Wrung his hat brim more tightly.

  “If it’s necessary,” the father said.

  “It is,” Test said. Despite what the boy and father presented to Test, she could not dismiss the possibility that they were involved in what took place in the woods, however unlikely. The quicker she could reach the site, the quicker she could dismiss the father and the boy. She needed to do it officially. Otherwise the state police would be in her face and up her backside for being slack.

  “You might wanna see this.” The father showed her an image on his cell phone.

  The image was blurred, in part from the fog and rain, in part due to the photographer shaking and standing at a good distance from the subject.

  One thing was clear: the photo was of a female’s body. She lay on the ground, on her back in the wet leaves and sloppy snow, face turned from the camera. Near where she lay on the ground lay a boot, laces undone as if the boot had been yanked on quickly as one does when going out quickly to snatch an armload of firewood off the porch or take the dog out for a morning pee. The foot without the boot was bare.

  Was the body that of Dana Clark? It was impossible to tell, but other details, blurred as they were, startled Test. The hair peeking out from under the knit toque was so blond it looked white. Platinum. The coat dark. A peacoat? Perhaps. Test had met Rachel Rath a few times in the past months. Her hair was dyed platinum. Her coat a peacoat.

  Jesus.

  Test swiped the screen to zoom in, but the pic smeared.

  Test handed the phone back to the father.

  “I have the coordinates marked exactly on my GPS,” the father said. “Perhaps you can go in on your own and—”

  “I need you to show me.”

  A Ford 150 pulled up, and the regional ME, Lloyd Jorgensen, unloaded himself.

  Jorgensen grabbed his belt with two hands and tugged, adjusted his red, white, and blue suspenders to keep his pants over his girth. He threw on a rain slicker, zipped it to his chin, pulled up the hood, grabbed a backpack from the truck. “What the devil were they even doing hunting in this crap?” he said to Test, the father and the boy apparently invisible to him.

  “It’s a tradition,” the father said to Test. “I didn’t expect we’d see deer. But we’ve hunted youth weekend every year since he was eight. It’s good for a boy to be in the woods with his father.”

  “I understand,” Test said and gestured for the boy and his father to lead the way.

  25

  The rugged terrain proved arduous hiking.

  The rain fell, a din that started in the leaves yet seemed to take residence inside Test’s head as she swam through a fog as thick as forest fire smoke, barely able to tell that the ethereal figure just ahead of her was the father, his ghost arm slung around his son’s shoulder as if he were afraid that if he let the boy out of his grasp the fog would claim him. The only evidence to suggest Test was in the deep woods were the trees that slowly crept out of the fog like fuzzy black-and-white photographs failing to fully develop before they faded again as she moved past them toward more trees.

  Anyone could be hiding a few feet away in this soup.

  The father tried to follow his earlier, quickly vanishing tracks back in toward the body. Every once in a while the old tracks stopped their linear march out of the woods and bunched up, revealing how the boy and father had stood around, likely for the boy to catch his breath. Or perhaps they’d both needed to gather their thoughts and rest their minds before they set off again.

  Jorgensen snorted and wheezed behind Test. She glanced back to see him in the mist, his hands planted on his hips as he gazed up into the white
void, his face flushed pomegranate. This was no trek for a man his age whose exercise, as far as Test knew, consisted of lifting the anchor from his boat on summer weekends on Winnipesaukee or Willoughby.

  “You OK?” Test asked Jorgensen.

  “Do I look it?”

  “No.”

  “OK then, onward.”

  They reached a bench on the ridge, a stand of oaks.

  The wind raked here, thinned the fog a bit.

  Being able to see her surroundings for more than twenty feet made Test breathe easier. Here, the father and son’s deteriorating earlier tracks told the tale. Twice, the boy had fallen as he and the father ran from the macabre scene.

  In the past year, Test had seen the bodies of two teenage girls. One being that of Mandy Wilks, curled up and frozen in a car trunk, head caved with a tire iron. The other being Jessica Cumber, the front of her skull destroyed with the blow of a hammer just an hour before Test had seen her. Still, Test needed to prepare herself for what the photo on the father’s phone showed, whether it was a hunting accident, exposure, or, with Dana missing and the peacoat and platinum hair, an act more sinister. God, if the body were Rachel Rath, how would she tell Frank?

  Test continued in the fog. As in shape as she was from years of running, she was getting it handed to her by the upheaved rocks and roots and downed trees.

  A sharp piercing cry escaped the boy.

  Test staggered backward as the boy cried again and the father shouted, “Go back!”

  The boy tripped past Test, the father at his side. Test stood stricken by the scene before her.

  It made no sense.

  What the hell was going on here?

  26

  As Rath picked his way down the ridge, he slipped on the greasy leaves and smacked his tailbone on a rock.

  He bit back the pain and crept to the edge of the woods at Preacher’s yard and stared at Preacher’s lit window. He unzipped his waist pack and from it took his motion sensor game trail camera. He set the camera to photo mode and moved quickly to the birch tree to which the old, crooked birdhouse was nailed. He opened the birdhouse lid and situated the camera inside so the lens and infrared eye faced out of the hole. He wove his hand in front of the hole to test the camera. It worked.