The Darkest Corners

by Kara Thomas

  A little girl pushing around a stroller with a filthy blanket inside stops to gawk at me. She’s in a hot-pink bikini bottom and nothing else. She slips her thumb out of her mouth in order to address me. “Hi.”

  “Hi,” I say. “Is Nicki here?”

  She points to a row of lawn chairs. A girl who can’t be more than fifteen sits in one of them, her eyes glued to her phone. At her feet, a toddler in a diaper stumbles around, a dandelion clutched in a chubby fist.

  I approach Nicki, suddenly unnerved. She’s in a bikini top and denim jeans. Everything is harsh about her, from her brassy highlights to her eyeliner, but she’s pretty. It doesn’t matter that I’ve got at least three years on her. I feel two inches tall.

  “Are you Nicki?”

  She sets her phone down on her lap, annoyed. “Yeah.”

  “I’m looking for Annette Lowell,” I say. “You know her?”

  “She used to watch the kids and stuff.” Nicki shrugs. “Before me.”

  “How long ago?” I ask.

  “She was here awhile. More than a year. Phoebe got pretty attached to her.”

  Nicki’s eyes are on the little girl with the stroller, who’s adjusting the blanket with extreme care. She can’t be more than five or six. I need to get out of here, away from this child who is depressing the crap out of me with her invisible baby. Did she cry when my mom left? I can’t think about it.

  “What about a blond girl, twenty-sixish?” I loop my finger through the hole in the side of my jeans. “Did she come looking for Annette this week?”

  Nicki’s eyelids flutter as she really looks at me for the first time. Hope swells in me, but she reaches for her phone. “Nope.”

  I hate myself for being the slightest bit disappointed. “When did Annette leave?”

  “Couple months ago,” Nicki says. “Said she was moving into her family’s cabin. That’s all I know,” she adds, her eyes back on her phone. The baby at her feet crawls under the chair, and then emerges on the other side. Moving toward the music coming from the pool.

  I turn to leave, then stop myself. “You should really keep an eye on the baby. The pool gate is open.”

  I don’t wait to see Nicki’s reaction. As I’m leaving, I’m stopped by a small tug on my hand.

  “Is Nettie okay?” Phoebe, the little girl, stares up at me with wide, baby-blue eyes.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “But I’m going to try to find her.”

  Phoebe’s eyes narrow, and she pulls her hand back. I’ve said something to make her not trust me.

  “You can’t find her,” Phoebe whispers hollowly. “Because she’s hiding from the Monster.”

  I punch out the kickstand a little harder than necessary before hopping back onto Callie’s bike. I stub my toe and curse under my breath. Jos didn’t come looking for my mother here, and I’m no closer to finding either one of them.

  By the time I get back onto the main road, I’ve convinced myself that I’m starting to hear things. There’s no way Phoebe said my mother is hiding from the Monster. She must have said monsters or a monster. Some combination of the heat and my brain tricked me into hearing the Monster.

  But what kind of monster? Did my mother get mixed up with an abusive man or felon at Deer Run? Did she leave to get away from him, and told Phoebe so the little girl wouldn’t be sad?

  Or maybe Phoebe is making shit up, because she’s a kid, and that’s what kids do.

  But what if my mother really did tell Phoebe she was hiding from the Monster? Does my own mother know who really killed those girls?

  Do she and Jos both know who he is? Is that why my mom let Gram take me away—to keep me safe from the Monster too?

  My mind races, in sync with the wheels of Callie’s bike. My father knew a lot of unsavory people, some of whom he owed money to. Men with sallow cheeks and cracked leather jackets. Men with rifles and red-eyed dogs in the beds of their pickup trucks. Any one of them could have killed someone.

  Maybe the Monster did kill Lori, and Jos couldn’t stop it. She kept her mouth shut because she knew him—maybe we all knew him. She left not because she was hiding something but because he would have come after her next.

  There’s nothing to prove it, but it could still be true. I think of the empty envelope with my name on it, allowing myself to entertain the wild possibility that it contained the Monster’s identity.

  Everyone else in my family has secrets. Why wouldn’t my father have had them?

  Callie is still gone when I get back to the house. I take the stairs two at a time up to the guest room, wiping the sweat from my face with the collar of my T-shirt. I smell like I slept in a barn.

  The bag of my father’s things is on the bed where I left it after sneaking up here earlier, before Deer Run. I sit and dump the contents onto the quilt in front of me, pick out the torn envelope.

  My father had something to tell me; the envelope had my name on it. Not Jos’s, and not Annette’s. Maybe he figured I wouldn’t come to say goodbye, so he wrote me a letter. I think of my mother standing over the woodstove in our old living room, the flames reaching hungrily toward the letter in her hand. My letter.

  My chest constricts.

  My mother can’t be the one who opened the envelope. According to the guard, she hadn’t visited my father in years. Whoever opened it had a reason. Maybe a wayward guard who thought there might be cash inside.

  Or someone who didn’t want me to find out what the letter said.

  My mother didn’t visit my dad on his deathbed. But Joslin did.

  I push the envelope away so I don’t have to look at it.

  I always loved my sister the most. I knew it drove my mother insane to see Jos holding me at her hip, spinning in circles around the living room, and swinging me airplane-style. Whenever my mother snapped “Put her down,” there was a layer of venom in her voice; she cared less about me getting hurt than seeing Jos make me giggle until I was in hysterics.

  I was afraid of my mother, that she’d one day take my sister, the person I loved more than anything else, away from me.

  There was only one time I was afraid of Jos. She and my mother were arguing—once Jos turned sixteen, they fought all the time. Ugly fights that made me hide in my closet.

  The biggest ones were because my mother wouldn’t let Jos get her driver’s license. A few months earlier, there had been a horrific accident not far from the high school. Two boys on their way home from football practice—seniors, one with a full ride to Penn State—were split open like squirrels on the pavement, the driver’s truck nearly torn in two by a telephone pole. He’d been speeding. There’s still a wooden cross with their names on it on the side of the road where it happened.

  My mother always talked about the boys—Rob McQueen and Tyrone Williams—as if Joslin hadn’t walked the same hallways as they had, hadn’t cheered for them at home games. They were ghosts, cautionary tales. The reason Jos wasn’t allowed behind a wheel until she turned eighteen.

  I ran down the stairs that night when I heard something shatter.

  I found Jos in the kitchen, holding a shard of a drinking glass in front of her, a manic look in her eyes. Like she needed an exorcism, my father used to joke whenever he was around to break them up. Jos was holding the shard like a weapon and shrieking, “Just back the hell away!”

  When she saw me crying in the doorway, it was as if someone had flipped a switch. Jos dropped the glass and ran to comfort me. “I would never, ever hurt you, Tessa.”

  I hate how I always circle back to that moment when I’m trying to convince myself that Joslin never could have let anyone hurt Lori. I hate how I have to wonder what Joslin would have done with the glass in her hand if I hadn’t been in the doorway to stop her.

  My stomach is groaning, so I dig out of my backpack the last granola bar Gram packed me. I tear the wrapper off with my teeth as I start to sort through my dad’s drawings.

  I have to admit, he’s pretty good. Was pretty good. I wonder if
it’s a skill he honed in prison, or if he was always a natural and I just never knew. There’s a portrait of a waterfall, sketched with such detail that I can almost point out each drop of its spray.

  There’s something scribbled in the bottom corner. Rattling Run, 1986.

  I sift through the other pictures—mostly scenery, portraits of nature. Except there’s something oddly specific about them; the window looking out over a backyard, two girls piled onto an Adirondack chair.

  Jos’s birthday, summer of ’01.

  They’re not portraits. They’re memories.

  I hate myself for how quickly I fly through the drawings trying to find it. I have to know if he remembered it too. Our trip to Laurel Caverns when I was five. The only trip we ever took as a family.

  Halfway through the stack, I pause at a sketch of a cabin.

  I hold it up to the ceiling light to get a better look, my hands trembling in spite of myself. Shack might be a better word for the house; it’s propped up on a raised wooden foundation. There’s an enclosed porch. My father even drew a tear in one of the screen windows.

  Bear Creek, 1986.

  I rack my brain for any memory of a place called Bear Creek, and fail. For all I know, Bear Creek isn’t even in Pennsylvania. Did my father stay at the cabin as a child? Why wouldn’t he have mentioned it if his family owned a house? But wait…didn’t Nicki say Annette was moving into a cabin her family owned?

  I stuff everything back into the bag and put it under the bed. A quick look out to the garage from the guest room window tells me Callie still isn’t home yet. I poke my head out into the hall; her door is open a crack.

  I glance into Maggie’s room to confirm she isn’t in there, before I slip inside Callie’s. The laminated blue card is on her dresser, where I spotted it earlier. FAYETTE LIBRARY.

  Downstairs, Maggie is in the kitchen, starting dinner. She’s on the phone, but she doesn’t have her Rick voice on this time. I slip past her, through the side door leading to the garage, where I left Callie’s bike earlier.

  Hey, Maggie, I need to use the computer for a sec to check flights. It would be that easy. Of course she’d say yes. But I can’t take the chance of her seeing all the stuff I’ve been Googling. I can’t answer the questions she’d be bound to ask.

  •••

  The library is around the corner from Decker’s house, down the road from the elementary school. When I get there, I leave the bike in a rack outside, even though I don’t have a lock. There’s no one around to steal it, and I’m not about to drag it inside with me.

  The sliding doors open with a whoosh, and a blast of cold air hits my face. When I was really young, my mother used to bring us here on oppressively hot days for the free AC.

  There are a lot of people here doing just that. In the aisles of the main stacks, I have to step over a toddler smacking a naked Barbie against the carpet by its hair. There’s one shelf marked NEW RELEASES, boasting a James Patterson book that came out last year. I know because Gram needed my help downloading it to her e-reader.

  I round the corner into the study room, where the computers are. I log on to the Internet using the bar code on the back of Callie’s card.

  The first thing I do is search for Bear Creek. The auto-fill asks me if I meant Bear Mountain, which is a two-and-a-half-hour drive, according to the map. Apparently, Bear Mountain used to be a ski resort before it shut down in the eighties. The town of Bear Creek had a few restaurants for skiers, but they’re all closed now too.

  There aren’t any population statistics for the town. In fact, there’s nothing to suggest that Bear Creek is even a town where actual people live. Most likely, the picture my father drew means he went skiing on the mountain and stayed in a cabin for a weekend.

  My family never owned shit. I accept it now, with a small wave of disappointment. People who own shit don’t steal other people’s shit.

  I lean back in my chair, a bit overwhelmed by the prospect of unfettered Internet access. I wind up doing what I always end up doing when I’m by a computer, and search for Wyatt Stokes.

  There’s a new article from this morning, matching what I saw on the TV at the prison. The judge has set a preliminary hearing for October to decide whether the new evidence is strong enough to let Stokes’s appeal move forward. No mention of what the evidence is. I rub my eyes and peer at the last paragraph.

  While attorneys for Stokes have not disclosed what evidence they will be bringing to the state supreme court, many have speculated that forensic evidence omitted from the original trial will come into play. Investigators found an incomplete DNA profile under the fingernails of two of the victims, but were unable to determine conclusively whether or not the profile was a potential match for Stokes’s. Rachel Steinhoff, a professor of criminal justice at Northeastern University, says that if the DNA is someday entered into CODIS, the FBI database for DNA from violent offenders, it is a strong possibility that investigators could have a new suspect on hand.

  I click out of the article. I read about the DNA profile years ago, and knew that Kristal Davis and Lori Cawley didn’t have the killer’s DNA under their nails. Just another minor inconsistency that the prosecution explained away: Kristal and Lori didn’t have any DNA under their nails because they didn’t fight back.

  I close my eyes and I see her. Joslin and the shard of glass.

  Sometimes I think that I’ve inflated the gravity of that phone call over the years. Friends argue. Jos and Lori seemed like they were inseparable, but they were teenage girls. They were bound to get into an argument at some point, probably about something completely stupid. In this case they just never got a chance to make up.

  I’ve tried to pinpoint even one moment before that night when it seemed that Lori was threatened by my sister—a whisper, a strange look—but trying to remember feels like searching for something in the dark.

  I’ve made zero progress today in terms of leads on Joslin—or my mother—so I refuse to leave the library without something. Even if it’s just a name. Someone who still lives in town, who I can talk to—someone who might shed light on Jos and Lori’s friendship, and if they were having any problems.

  I need someone who will talk to a girl who shows up on their doorstep like an intrusive reporter.

  Of course. Newspapers. The local paper probably interviewed people in Fayette who knew Lori, and probably Jos.

  I log out of my Internet session and make my way to the circulation desk. The librarian is a crunchy-looking woman in a poncho with dyed red hair down to her waist. When it’s my turn, she eyes my empty hands. “Whatcha need, hon?”

  “Old newspapers.”

  “We only keep the Gazette,” she says, as if this should be a deal breaker.

  “That’s fine.”

  The woman looks me up and down and frowns. She calls out to a man shelving books several feet away from us. “Darius, where do we keep the old Gazettes?”

  Darius mumbles something that would be unintelligible if we were standing right next to him. The librarian shoos me with her hand. “Darius there’ll help you.”

  “Thanks,” I say to Darius, who is now at my side and looking none too pleased to abandon his cart. He leads me down to the basement and mutters what sounds like “What you need newspapers for?”

  I shrug. “Looking for something.”

  “Ain’t we all?” Darius flips a light switch and starts back up the stairs. The fluorescent bulbs overhead hum as if a thousand bees were trapped inside them. I’m about to turn and tell Darius he didn’t say where the newspapers are, when I see them: boxes. Stacks and stacks of cardboard boxes with dates written on the outside in marker. So basically, a slight upgrade from Decker’s garage.

  I spot 2004 with two other boxes stacked on top of it and think I’m shit out of luck. There’s no way I can move these things, but I try anyway and exhale, relieved that they’re not very heavy. I arrange the boxes around me like a fort and sit inside, cross-legged.

  The Faye
tte Gazette comes out every other Friday morning. Lori was murdered late in the evening on a Thursday, her body found on Friday night, so she missed being front-page news. Instead, the cover story is about a home explosion in Arnold, the town to the south of Fayette. Some sort of meth lab gone wrong in the woods.

  I replace the paper, and I hold my place with my thumb as I remove the next issue, dated two weeks after Lori’s death.

  Lori’s senior photo stops me. It’s on the front page next to an article. The headline sends a chill down my spine.

  DREXEL UNIVERSITY STUDENT LAID TO REST BY SHANA ROSENBERG

  A funeral service was held for Lori Michelle Cawley, 19, of Chestertown. Ms. Cawley had been staying with her aunt and uncle in Fayette, who reported her missing late Thursday evening.

  The victim’s father, James Daniel Cawley, was killed in an accident during a motorcycle rally last year. His last gift to his daughter, Lori, was a sterling silver necklace bearing her name. She was laid to rest in her necklace and the late Mr. Cawley’s motorcycle jacket.

  Authorities believe that Ms. Cawley is the latest victim of “The Ohio River Monster,” a serial killer who has been stalking women in Fayette and Westmoreland counties. While the Monster has evaded capture for the past two years, police announced a break in the case this week. A Fayette resident named Wyatt Paul Stokes, 24, has been arrested in connection with the Ohio River murders. His other believed victims are Marisa Perez, 17, Rae Felice, 20, and Kristal Davis, 19.

  I wonder how Shana Rosenberg knew the detail about Lori’s name necklace. Before the funeral, Maggie had been worried about the media showing up, despite the fact that it was being held a hundred miles from Fayette, in Lori’s hometown. The local police had promised to keep reporters out. Shana Rosenberg must have lied to get in, or maybe she waited outside the church and convinced one of the mourners to talk to her.

  A whole lot of effort to work one insignificant detail into her story.

  Or at least, a detail she thought was insignificant.