by Kara Thomas
Callie unscrews the cap and takes a whiff. “What is this?”
“Stronger than whatever you have,” Nick says. Callie tosses back half the bottle. He reaches and pulls it out of her mouth.
“Whoa, easy,” he says.
Callie wipes her lips with the back of her hand. “You brought the good stuff.”
“Yeah, well, not every day your ex gets killed,” he mutters. The bitterness in his voice unnerves me. Nick winds up and kicks the oak tree. “Fuck.”
Callie flinches. The two other guys—one I recognize from the bonfire last night—glance at each other and mumble something about getting inside. Callie hangs back with Nick. “I need a minute,” she says.
I wait for her, stiffly, instead of going into the gym alone. A minute or so later she trots up to me. Her body seems looser. I catch her popping a piece of Trident into her mouth as we wade through the throng of people in the entrance.
At the gym doors, someone has set up an easel with an oak tag poster. It’s covered in several pictures of Ariel—I’m surprised to see that I’m in a couple of the old ones. My fingers itch to tear them down and slip them into my pocket. We never owned a camera, and any family photos we’d managed to scrounge up were thrown out when my mother and I were evicted.
In the middle of Ariel’s poster, someone’s written a quote in silver Sharpie. It’s better to burn out than to fade away. —Kurt Cobain. Next to me, Callie stares at it, silent.
I touch the edge of the poster. “Actually, that’s from a Neil Young song,” I say. “Kurt Cobain just borrowed it in his suicide note.”
“God, what does it matter who the hell said it?” Callie snaps. She stalks off, and I’m reminded why I don’t talk much. People don’t seem to like what I have to say.
Someone nudges my shoulder, and I move so the girls behind me can get a look at the poster. There’s already a collection of dollar-store teddy bears and flameless candles in votive jars at my feet. I step to the side of the gym and scan the crowd for Callie, but it seems she’s disappeared.
I expected more of the people here to notice me, because I guess I’m a narcissistic little sociopath. But instead, I’m a ghost hanging in the corner, pretending I don’t notice the occasional confused glance thrown my way.
I was always good at blending into the social strata of Fayette. My grades were high enough that I didn’t get any notes sent home, and low enough that I was never singled out. I wore Jos’s hand-me-downs, but almost all the kids at school with older siblings wore hand-me-downs. One girl in our class even wore things that had belonged to her brother.
I dig the stubs of my nails into my palms. If I don’t stop biting them, the skin underneath will split and bleed. As I’m looking down at my fist, a thin, gnarled, hand covers it.
“It is you!” Watery blue eyes meet mine. “RAY. Come over here. It’s her!”
I snatch my hand away. Who the hell is this old woman, and why is she touching me?
“It’s you,” the woman wheezes again as a thin old man with a cane hobbles over to us. There’s powdered sugar at the corner of his mouth. Cookies from the table stuffed into his pocket, probably.
“It’s me.” I give the woman a thin-lipped smile.
“Well, don’t this beat all. Tessa Lowell, in Fayette!” She peers at me. “You don’t remember us, do you? It’s me, Marie Durels. Marie and Ray. Your old neighbors.”
“Oh.” I force out the pleasantries—“Yes, how are you?…Rheumatoid arthritis? That sounds awful….Going to college in the fall”—but my mind is elsewhere. It’s on Sycamore Street, on the lawn of my old house. I’m six, in my Little Mermaid bikini, drinking water out of the hose Joslin sprayed in my face as if I were a golden retriever. Marie Durels, watching from her porch, disapproving.
“It’s terrible, isn’t it?” Marie clutches my shoulder and nods to the group of crying girls by the makeshift memorial for Ariel.
I nod. “I hope they find who did this to her.”
“Oh, they will.” Marie’s grip on me tightens. “They’ll find him, and they’ll put him down like that animal who hurt all those other girls.”
Ray bobs his head in agreement, oblivious to the smear of sugar on his face. I have to look away. I have to get away—out of this stifling hot gym filled with grief I have no business being a part of. Away from these people with the power to send me straight back to the brown house with the broken porch steps on Sycamore Street.
Marie bends her head to mine. Her breath is hot on my neck and smells like garlic and marinara sauce. I bet she and her husband ate at the new Italian place before coming here for the free dessert. I clench my fist as she crows into my ear: “My heart just breaks for Ruth Kouchinsky. Folks are saying Ariel was up in Mason working, if you know what I mean.”
Mason is as far as my mother and I made it when she decided we needed to leave Fayette before people noticed we’d been living out of her car for two weeks. Not even Callie knew. Jos had been gone for four months, and Lori had been dead for eleven.
That night, when we got to a gas station, my mother left me in the car while she used the bathroom. I opened the glove compartment, searching for my favorite toy—one of those sticky hands you throw up at the ceiling and wait for it to fall back down. I found a handgun.
I ran across the highway, toward the lights of the truck stop. In the store, I asked to use the phone so I could call Maggie. I told her everything—that we’d been living out of the car, that my mother was scaring me—everything except the gun.
She and Rick were there in half an hour. I waited in the store and read an issue of TV Guide, praying that my mother hadn’t already called the cops when she’d found me missing.
Maggie went over to the gas station alone. I don’t know what happened, but she came back with Gram’s phone number. I haven’t seen my mother since.
Rick waited with me in the rest stop while Maggie sat on the curb outside, on the phone with her best friend, Angela. “We want to handle this without calling social services.”
While Rick and I split a bag of Doritos and talked about the comet that was supposed to pass through, because I was always into that stuff, two girls came into the store. They couldn’t have been much older than my sister. One bought a phone card while the other fiddled with the hem of her jeans skirt, trying to avoid looking at me and Rick. I was nine, and I knew exactly what they were doing at the truck stop.
Like most unpleasant things, I’d learned about the girls from my father. He used to talk about the girls who approached him at the stops along I-95, back in the eighties when he’d drifted, looking for work before settling at the steel mill. After the Monster murders, the government passed an initiative to crack down on prostitution at the rest stops; they knocked down the greasy convenience stores that sold beef jerky and porn magazines and put up McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts.
I can picture Ariel working behind the counter of a Burger King. Not in some trucker’s backseat. And Marie Durels is a real piece of crap for suggesting it now when people are here to mourn Ari.
I look over Marie’s shoulder for an escape route. I spot Ryan Elwood coming through the hallway double doors, holding a can of soda. He walks over to the bleachers where Callie is sitting. She looks like she’s going to vomit. I think of the booze in her purse and wonder if she snuck into the bathroom and finished it.
“It was nice seeing you,” I lie to Marie. I shoulder my way through the sea of bodies, stopping when I see Ryan lean in and say something into Callie’s ear. She jerks away from him, knocking her purse off the bleachers. Ryan bends to help her pick up her things; from here, I can see that he’s still talking. The color drains from Callie’s face.
I reach them as Callie stands, stumbling over her own feet. I grab her arm to stop her from face-planting. “What is wrong with you?” I hiss.
“I just need to get home,” she mumbles. “Ryan’s taking me. Us. Unless you want to call my parents for a ride.”
I’d sooner walk than
call Maggie and Rick, and I’m not about to let some guy lead Callie into his truck alone while she’s completely trashed—even if it’s only Ryan Elwood. I follow them out to the lot, where Ryan stops beside a red pickup truck. Callie stumbles for the door. I think she’s going to vomit all over the pavement, but she climbs through to the backseat and stretches out.
I bite back my annoyance at having to sit up front with a stranger. Ryan climbs into the driver’s seat and grips the wheel. After a few minutes, Callie starts snoring lightly. I relax a bit; as long as she’s making noise, I don’t have to worry she’s going to pull a Jimi Hendrix back there.
Ryan’s truck starts with a low rumble. He reaches for the radio, but pulls his hand back at the last second, probably realizing that this situation doesn’t call for music.
“What did you say to Callie?” I ask.
He lifts his eyebrows. “I didn’t—”
“I saw you,” I say quietly. “By the bleachers. You said something to her, and it freaked her out.”
Ryan massages his jaw. Unnecessarily adjusts his rearview mirror. “I didn’t realize. I forgot about her cousin.”
My heart goes still in my chest. “Her cousin Lori?”
“Yeah.”
Ryan hits the speed bump at the parking lot exit. Callie rolls forward and lets out a small “Oof.”
“Sorry,” Ryan mutters. I stare at his profile until he turns his head and notices me.
“What did you say to her?” I ask.
Ryan scratches his nose with his thumb. Drums his fingers on the steering wheel. “I told her how Ari was killed.”
Killed, not died. It feels like a punch to the stomach. Died means that maybe Ari got into her car in the rest stop parking lot, closed her eyes, and that was that. A heart murmur, maybe, or one of those migraines you never wake up from.
Killed means she knew exactly what was happening to her. I swallow hard, trying to shut down the sounds in my head. Ari begging for her life. Ari screaming, trying to fight back.
“How do you know how she was killed?” I ask Ryan. “They’re not…No one’s said yet how it happened.”
Ryan’s quiet; I think back to last night, of how he said his uncle would know if someone had reported Ari missing. His uncle, the cop. Cold sweat breaks out on my forehead, and I know whatever Ryan says is going to be true.
Ryan taps his pinky against the steering wheel, steady like a metronome. I’m going to explode.
“I was her friend,” I say.
The tapping stops. Ryan hesitates. “You can’t tell anybody, all right?”
“I don’t have anybody to tell,” I say, even though it’s probably not the response he was looking for. Ryan exhales.
“She was strangled,” he says. “And naked.”
I swallow. That can’t mean what I think it means—but obviously Ryan’s noticed the connection too, or he wouldn’t have said anything to Callie in the first place.
“Where did they find her?” I ask, even though I already suspect the answer.
“Off 74, not far from the truck stop. Guy pulled over to pee and saw her clothes…called it in, and they found her a few miles away.” He swallows. “She was by the river.”
Just like the other girls. I brush my hand against the side of the seat and find a space where the filling from the cushion is leaking. I imagine tearing it open and climbing inside. Never coming out.
I should never have come back here at all.
“I don’t know. It just made me sick, thinking of Ari like that.” Ryan’s eyes flick to the rearview mirror, pointed down to reflect Callie’s still face. “I don’t know why I told Cal….They haven’t even told Ari’s family yet. So please don’t say anything.”
I stare out the window, the streetlights zipping past the truck in rhythm, as if punctuating the names in my head. Marisa Perez. Rae Felice. Kristal Davis. Lori Cawley. And now, Ariel Kouchinsky.
“They obviously don’t want the news to find out how she died,” Ryan rambles on. “They’ll try to spin it like there’s another serial killer out here.”
The pause that follows feels so long, I’m surprised Callie doesn’t feel the tension and wake up.
“You don’t think it’s weird that she was killed the same way and in the same place that Callie’s cousin was?” I ask.
Ryan runs a thumb down the side of his jaw. His mouth hangs open for a moment before he says, “The guy who killed all those girls is in jail. It’s gotta be a coincidence. Or some sick fuck obsessed with the murders, maybe.”
A coincidence.
A copycat.
Or a third explanation. One I don’t dare say with Callie in the car, because of what it means for us.
Everything is all wrong. The police were wrong about who killed Lori and those other girls—they were wrong, and the Monster’s still out there.
We helped them get the wrong guy, and Ari could be dead because of it.
From the backseat, Callie mutters something that’s barely audible, but I can just make it out.
“I never got to tell her I’m sorry.”
Ryan helps me get Callie into bed. Once he leaves, I slip her phone out of her pocket and text Maggie. Didn’t feel well. Tessa and I got a ride home. I open her bedroom window to air out the room. She’s starting to sweat out the poison she put into her body earlier. Outside, thick summer rain begins to fall in sheets.
I close Callie’s door and shut myself in the guest room. After I change into my pajamas, I crawl under the bed and stick my earbuds in. My fingers are trembling so hard that it takes me three tries to find the song I’m looking for—Peter Gabriel’s “Red Rain.”
When I close my eyes, all I see is Ariel with her Rainbow Brite backpack, floating facedown in the Ohio River.
I think of Wyatt Stokes—blond ponytail, sullen, hollow eyes.
Wyatt Stokes, who strangled his victims and left them naked along the Ohio River in western Pennsylvania.
Wyatt Stokes, who couldn’t have killed Ariel, because he’s in jail.
Stokes was twenty-three around the time of the first murder—Marisa Perez, a seventeen-year-old runaway. Eight months later was Rae Felice, twenty, a truck-stop prostitute.
A year later they found the remains of Kristal Davis, nineteen, a stripper and a drug addict who’d gone missing a month earlier. Someone leaked to the media that Fayette County was dealing with a serial killer. But no one was really worried. The killer was targeting the types of girls who didn’t have anyone to worry about them.
Until Lori Cawley. A sophomore at Drexel. Second in her class at Lehigh Valley High School. The girl you noticed on the yearbook page because of her smile.
No one in Fayette really questioned that Stokes was the one who killed the girls. He was a high school dropout who’d spent a couple years in juvie for burning his stepmother’s garage down. He had stringy hair down to his shoulders and hollow eyes. The kind of guy you’d see walking alongside the road and you’d lock your car doors.
As Charlie Volk, the detective who arrested him, said in a now infamous quote, Wyatt Stokes just looked like a serial killer.
It also didn’t help that Stokes was an asshole.
He just couldn’t shut up. In the interrogation room, he smiled when he touched the crime scene photos. When the cops raided his trailer, they found disturbing sketches of girls. Dead, naked girls with the word bitch scrawled on them over and over on every inch of free space.
Stokes granted an interview after his sentencing, saying that he’d really been subjected to “trial by the media” and that if he were black, some lawyer from the NAACP or ACLU would have taken his case by now.
So yeah, most people tended to agree that even if Stokes didn’t kill those girls, he still deserved to be locked up.
The case against Stokes was never airtight. There were witnesses who placed him at the truck stops, looking for drugs or odd jobs, where the other girls had been regulars. Stokes was a creep who had threatened a slew of ex-girlfriends and ex-b
osses—anyone who didn’t give him what he wanted.
But the only real evidence linking Stokes to the murders was a denim fiber found on Kristal Davis’s body that matched a pair of Stokes’s jeans. An eyewitness placed Kristal in the Stokeses’ trailer the day she disappeared, and when the police questioned Stokes, he said he hadn’t seen Kristal in weeks, before changing his story and saying they’d done drugs together that morning.
It was me and Callie who put the final nail into his coffin, though. We testified via a closed-circuit TV feed on the second to last day of Wyatt Stokes’s trial. We described what happened that morning at the pool and identified Stokes as the man who threatened Lori. We swore that it was the same man sneaking into the Greenwoods’ yard the night Lori was murdered.
The jury deliberated for a day and found him guilty of all four murders.
Then the rest of the world forgot about Fayette, Pennsylvania, and all its dead girls.
I can’t sleep or bring myself to pack for my flight tomorrow morning, so I lie in the darkness with my music, replaying in my head my entire conversation with Marie Durels, until Ariel’s face blurs with Lori’s.
Several songs later, I lower the volume on my iPod, sensing someone else in the room. From my spot under the bed, I can see the door cracked open. I dig my nails into my thighs. Next to my ear, bare feet pad across the carpet. The toenails are painted turquoise. I let out a sigh of relief.
“Tessa?” Callie whispers.
I flatten my body and wiggle out from under the bed. Callie’s brow creases.
“Were you sleeping under there?” She looks better than she did earlier. The color has returned to her face, and she’s showered. Her hair is piled on top of her head in a bun.
“I…What are you doing here?” I get up and sit on the bed, as if she were the one acting bizarrely. The clock on the wall says it’s almost one.
“We need to talk,” she whispers. She sits at the end of the bed. Delicately tucks her feet underneath her. She looks around the room, almost like she’s in a stranger’s house and not her own.