The Gone World

by Tom Sweterlitsch

  “We’re figuring Mursult stayed here,” said Nestor. “That this is his stuff.”

  The contents of a black duffel bag were spread out across the mattress. A few thousand dollars in stacks of twenties, clothes, toiletries, a pager. Twenty-four Polaroids were laid out in a grid—graphic in their portrayal of a woman. A black woman, thin. Her face was never shown. Her breasts were beautiful, thought Moss, her belly taut—Moss studied the smooth, dark lines of the woman’s thighs, the images of her genitals, how she spread herself pink. Intimate rather than pornographic—pictures no one other than the photographer and the subject were ever meant to see. They had been taken in a cabin, it looked like, not here. A rental cabin, maybe. The walls were exposed lumber, a glimpse of a bedside table, a pad of paper, a phone.

  “Can you ID the woman?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “What makes you think Mursult?” she asked.

  “The first few numbers we recovered from the pager are Mursult’s home phone number,” said Nestor. “I’m thinking he called himself a couple of times, made sure the pager was working.”

  They stepped outside. Nestor was staying to oversee the evidence collection, but he made an arrangement with one of the sheriff’s deputies to ride Moss back to Canonsburg. Late afternoon, the day bleeding away from them.

  “Did you catch the picture of the boat?” asked Moss.

  “The fingernails? Yeah,” said Nestor. “We’ll have our guys test the fingernails, see if any of them are from the Mursult family—it will take a while. I don’t see this guy Fleece being able to kill three people without using a gun, though, do you? Out of shape—he didn’t look like he could have caught them or defend himself if any of them fought back. The wife, Damaris Mursult, was athletic. The son—”

  “I’ll bet the autopsy says he’s been dead too long to be our guy anyway,” said Moss.

  “What was that he wrote on the picture? A ship of nails?”

  “A ship of nails to carry the dead,” said Moss. “I don’t know. Jesus Christ, we’ve seen a lot of death today.”

  “Are you religious?” asked Nestor.

  “What?” she said—she realized she’d blasphemed, was worried she might have offended him. Several men she’d met in law enforcement were Christians, evangelicals. “I’m sorry, I—”

  “My faith is the only thing that sustains me,” said Nestor. “Thinking about the boy and girl, thinking about Marian. It breaks me, but I believe in eternal life, I think of how God will care for these victims, and it helps me—it helps me stay focused. I imagine a new life for them. Do you believe in the resurrection of the body?”

  Moss thought of all of humanity in a funnel leading to a singular point.

  “No,” she said.

  THREE

  Her mother still lived in Canonsburg, in the same house Moss had grown up in, a little blue house on the steep hills northeast of East Pike, just a few blocks up from the Sarris candy factory. Her childhood had been scented with chocolate. Moss popped two wheels onto the sidewalk whenever she parked, angling the wheels, setting the brake. She made her way along the weedy path to the side door and unlocked the dead bolt with the same key she’d used since middle school.

  “Mom?” she said.

  “Up here,” said her mother.

  Surprised to find her mother home, figuring she might be at McGrogan’s—almost every night after her shift at the call center, her mother changed into stone-washed jeans and a tight top and rambled downhill to the bar, walking so she wouldn’t have to worry about driving home. Everyone knew her mother to see her, she was always ambling about the neighborhood to find cigarettes, to find a drink, a forty-four-year-old often lit after last call, bumming in empty lots with other barflies too stoned to want to go home. A character, a regular. McGrogan’s was an off-and-on bar, some nights quiet with nothing to do but watch the news on the TVs and chat up the bartenders, other nights so full you had to shuffle sideways just to get to the bathrooms. Her mother had her usual stool, at the corner of the bar where she could relax with her back to the wall and see what developed. Her hands were rippled with veins, and her natural hair had dulled to the color of wheat bread, but she could still turn heads if she wore the right outfit and the lights were dim. Moss looked at her mother and saw herself in a few years. The irony of traveling to IFTs was that Moss’s body aged in these futures even if the terra firma of the present had seemed to pause, waiting for her. Chronologically, Moss was only twenty-seven, born in 1970 when her mother was seventeen. Biologically, though, Moss was almost forty, just a few years shy of her mother. Moss and her mother never mentioned their ages to each other, however, even though Moss was certain her mother must have noticed the contracting gap between them—a sibling more than a daughter, a weirdness too disturbing to discuss or even acknowledge. No intimacy had ever developed between them, though, no sense of equal footing—their experiences too divergent, their lives lived in such different places. Moss was taller, toned, serious, while her mother was brassy—people invariably figured they were sisters the rare times they went drinking together.

  Her mother was at the kitchen table tonight, already in her pajamas, flipping through a Reader’s Digest.

  “Not at McGrogan’s?” asked Moss.

  “I saved you some chicken if you’re hungry,” said her mother.

  “I already ate.”

  “Eat more,” her mother said. “Shiner’s been going around with that girl from . . . wherever the hell she’s from—South Fayette or somewhere. I don’t want to drink with them tonight. Deb wants to start going to that new place I told you about—what’s it called? I tried to call you. Anyway, I made the chicken.”

  “I’ve been working,” said Moss.

  “Trying to find that girl? I couldn’t believe it, the news made it seem like that family was killed over in Courtney Gimm’s old house,” said her mother.

  “Yeah,” said Moss.

  “The same house? Is that what you’re working on?”

  “Looked like that family was already trying to sell the place. They couldn’t have been the people who bought the house from the Gimms, right? Someone named Mursult?”

  “No, no—they must have been renting,” said her mother. “Her brother, what’s his name?”

  “Davy.”

  “He’s the one that enlisted? I think he started renting out the place after his dad moved to Arizona. I ran into Davy—must have been a few years ago—’93 maybe? ’94? I think he said he wanted to hold on to the place, draw some income if he could. I’m so nebby but can’t never remember what I’ve nebbed about.”

  “They use a referral service to find housing for one another,” said Moss. “Military families.” She had been rattled at finding the crime scene at Courtney’s house, the chilling synchronicity of her present and past braiding, but it was just a coincidence, she reminded herself. Davy Gimm had listed the house for rent, and another Navy family had moved in—a referral service. Talking with her mom settled things, made her feel like she was rousing from an unpleasant dream to find the waking world as normal as it ever was.

  “What happened?” said her mother.

  “I don’t know,” said Moss. “Domestic abuse, I think.”

  “Awful,” said her mother. “I’ve been following the missing girl’s story on the news because of Courtney—made me think of Courtney.”

  “Marian Mursult,” said Moss. “Reminded me of Courtney, too. The hair.”

  “I was going to mention her hair,” said her mother. “Courtney had that beautiful hair, all those curls.”

  Growing up, Moss thought of her mother as just another Guntown drunk, a wreck, but now she saw her mother was wounded, a perspective that came with age, when everyone settled into the same slew of adulthood, when everyone was wounded and could more easily overlook the wounds of others. Moss picked at the Shake ’n Bake, tough and dry. She found rum in the liquor cupboard, mixed it with Cherry Coke. Her mother poured herself vodka.

&n
bsp; “Anyway, I’m meeting Cheryl down at McGrogan’s tomorrow night,” her mother went on.

  “Cheryl from work?” said Moss. “I thought you were over each other.”

  “I sold the most subscriptions this past month, so I promised I’d take Cheryl out with the gift certificate they’re giving me, fifty bucks. By the way, I saw your subscription to Homemaker’s Companion lapsed, so I signed you up for a renewal. Helped push me over the top.”

  “I hate those things.”

  “That ain’t the point.”

  Her mother at the call center, pushing magazine subscriptions. Moss drank her rum and Cherry Coke in the living room, took her place on the leather love seat, her mother reclining on the full-size couch. Moss had almost gone to work for the call center—her mother had pulled some strings with the manager, but Moss had blown off the chance. That near miss of a career was one of the few true forks in the road she’d traveled. Fashionable to think of a “multiverse” consisting of infinite directions, infinite paths, but the forking paths weren’t truly innumerable, she knew; there were only so many options available to most people, especially girls who grew up poor. Had she taken the job at the call center, she could have turned out just like her mother. She would have made a good alcoholic, she always thought. Call centers and bars and sleeping with whoever was willing to pay her tab for the night—sometimes she thought of that lifestyle with disgust, other times she found comfort in the daydream, wishing she could have just lived a regular life of men and stress and shit jobs. A quarto-size framed picture of Moss’s father stood on the mantel above the television. His smile was more a smirk, but the glint in his eye hinted he’d keep on laughing forever, wherever he was. Moss had grown up with this strange, formal picture of her father as a young man who was younger in the photograph than her memories of him—he had been in the Navy, and in the photograph he wore his dress whites. When she thought of the call center or thought over the ways her life might have been different or wondered why she had joined NCIS, she sometimes told herself she was searching for her father—but that was a bullshit answer, she knew it. He had left the Navy before she was born; he had left the family when Moss was five.

  “We can watch The X-Files,” said her mother. “I know you like that show.”

  Sunday nights were Scully nights, but tonight’s was a repeat—“Fallen Angel,” the episode a Mulder episode, so Moss told her mother to flip channels if she wanted. Her mother a newshawk, Headline News interrupted by CNN’s BREAKING STORY banner. RAPPER DEAD was blunt enough, though they followed with a headline released from the L.A. Times: GANGSTA RAP PERFORMER NOTORIOUS B.I.G. SLAIN. Four shots fired through the side of his SUV. A black GMC Suburban roped off by police tape. Her mother sat up. “Oh, damn,” she said. “Damn it. I’ve got to call Shelly. She loves him.”

  “I think I’m heading to bed,” said Moss, her mother waving good night but staring mournfully at the screen. Moss’s old bedroom had been converted into her mother’s junk room over the years, but the spool-turned Jenny Lind bed that had once been her grandmother’s had been kept, and the bookshelves still had a few of her old books: The Black Stallion, A Wrinkle in Time, some Choose Your Own Adventure books with the death-scenes dog-eared. The rocking chair was covered with boxes of clothes. She turned out the lights, thinking she would fall immediately asleep, but the news of the rapper’s death bothered her, mixed with the heaviness already in her heart. Moss felt like the world was dissolving. She had the sensation of constellations disappearing from the sky. “Nestor,” she said, thinking of the immortality of souls, the resurrection of the body—Nestor’s naïvety, the ignorance of his faith, but still trying the sound of his name, how it started on the tip of her tongue and worked its way back.

  In the darkness of her bedroom, surrounded by familiar shadows, she imagined the world around her buried under snow and blizzard winds, the only warmth the pocket beneath her comforter where she lay curled. The muffled sound of the distant television, the sound of her mother’s voice speaking on the kitchen telephone. Sounds from her childhood. Easy enough to convince herself she was still just a child, a little girl in her bed, that her entire life was nothing but a strange dream, and if she were to wake now, she would wake years younger, everything as it was twenty-five years ago. She felt like an interloper on her own past and so reached to touch her left thigh, run her fingers along the bumps of bone and scarred skin tissue of her stump, reminding herself of who she was now. Her mother must be calling everyone about the news she was watching. Moss loved the sound of her mother’s laughter—how casually she made lasting friendships, how she gave of herself freely, unguarded. Moss too easily became entangled. She tossed in the twin bed, thinking. Thinking again of Nestor. Never able to spark casual relationships like her mother, never one for trysts—Moss’s infatuations developed suddenly, her emotions came with thistles, like a bur. Once a photographer, he had mentioned, and Moss wondered at that—she wondered who he was, if he was always so pious. Anyway, annoyed at how he’d reduced the deaths of children to Christian bathos about eternity, but nevertheless she wondered at the women in his life, wondered if there was one. She tried to remember if he had worn a ring. Nestor. The glare of headlights on her ceiling, fragmented by her window, made her remember mirrored images of Elric Fleece and skeletons in the trees. A ship named Libra disappearing into Deep Waters, lost sailors returning. A dissected black bear swathed in maggots. A trick Moss had taught herself for falling asleep was to imagine a river of black water—she would stand naked before wading into the river, the water creeping to her knees, her thighs, black as ink against her white skin, stomach, her breasts, and soon the water would be above her head, the wavering sunlight disappearing over her, falling deeper into ever expanding darkness. When she drowned, she slept.

  —

  A telephone ringing. The tone of her cell on her nightstand.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “This is Brock.”

  Red digits hovering in the dark, 2:47.

  “One of our guys just called about the pager you and Nestor recovered at Elric Fleece’s residence,” said Brock. “Figured something out.”

  “Tell me.”

  “We found saved pages. No phone numbers, only codes. We haven’t figured out what most of the codes are, but we did find a few that repeated—143 and 607. My guys tell me codes like these are shorthand for ‘I love you’ or ‘I miss you,’ things like that. Teenagers use them.”

  Mursult and the woman in the Polaroid photographs scheduling times to meet, maybe using codes learned from his daughters.

  “Having an affair,” said Moss. “There were twenty-four pictures of a woman.”

  “We checked Mursult’s home-phone records against the pager and found a correlation,” said Brock. “Several times when the pager received the code 22, he placed a call to the Blackwater Falls Lodge, down in Tucker County.”

  Blackwater Gorge was familiar—a section of the massive Monongahela National Forest, touristy and accessible because of the stunning waterfalls like pearls on the string of the Blackwater River. Moss had once stayed for a week in the lodge, exploring the miles of trails through the gorge, grueling treks with her prosthesis over uneven terrain, searching the Red Run branch of the Dry Fork River where she had been rescued from her near death in the Terminus. She had looked for the part of the river where she had hanged, had searched for the ashen tree she remembered, the burnt-white tree that had seemed to repeat, but she never found the site of her crucifixion. She’d returned to the cabins around Blackwater Falls often in her summers, losing herself on the trails, gazing for hours at the crashing eddies and whirlpools of the Elakala Falls—reminding herself of the beauty of the world, when it was so easy for her to remember this landscape as desolation and ice.

  “That lodge is a few hours from here, but would be a good place to meet someone,” she said. “Romantic, remote.”

  “Mursult called the lodge dozens of times, twice in the last month,” said Brock.
“I called over to the lodge, but the clerk didn’t have records for anyone named Patrick Mursult. I’ll call the Tucker County Sheriff’s Department first thing in the morning, see if they can send someone out.”

  “I’ll head over,” said Moss, doubtful she’d be able to get back to sleep. “I’m in Canonsburg. I can make it out there. I need to head home out that way.”

  Her mother snoring from across the hall. Moss crept downstairs, feeling like a teenager again, sneaking out in the middle of the night—she remembered which stairs creaked, knew where to put her weight to stay silent. She brewed a pot of coffee in the kitchen, splashed water on her face to wake up. Marian Mursult was three days gone, last seen this past Friday; Monday morning would dawn in just a few hours. A bottle of aspirin above the sink—Moss took the pills with coffee. She drove the dead-hour interstates, Canonsburg to 79 South, West Virginia, allowing images to swirl in her mind, glom together, the Challenger in the immensity of the sky, a ship for the dead built of fingernails, the forest in winter. The interstate was a river of asphalt illuminated by streetlamp light. She was aware that the mountains grew around her, but she couldn’t see them—they were gargantuan darkness, snuffing out the stars.

  A serpentine cut through pinewoods that opened into a parking lot—only a sparse few cars parked here. The lodge was built like a longhouse, red-roofed, with an exposed-stone chimney stack crowning the front entrance. Moss made her way through the vacant lobby, a dropped ceiling and a cream tile floor, the front desk the color of natural cherrywood, everything bathed in garish fluorescence. Moss lingered for a few moments at the unattended front desk, peering behind the counter into an empty manager’s office.

  “Hello?” she said.

  The murmur of a distant television. She followed the sound around to the hotel bar, where varicolored liquors lined the mirror-backed shelves. A young woman sat alone, drinking coffee, looking over a Vogue piece about the Spice Girls. She was willowy, in knee socks and a skirt embroidered with a forest scene, deer and rabbits, wildflowers, her lip and eyebrow pierced with silver rings, her hair voluminous save for the shaved sides, dyed a jolting shade of electric blue.