The Gone World

by Tom Sweterlitsch

  “Excuse me,” said Moss.

  “Sorry,” said the young woman. “I should be at the desk.”

  “Are you in charge here?” asked Moss.

  “Checking in?” she asked. “We should have rooms available.”

  Maybe in her early twenties, just out of college, or maybe this was a student job. Fine features and dark, lovely eyes. Moss held out her identification.

  “NCIS,” she said. “I’m wondering if you can answer a few questions for me, maybe help me out.”

  “Are you, like, a cop?” the young woman asked.

  “Naval Criminal Investigative Service,” said Moss. “I’m a federal agent investigating crimes relating to the Navy.”

  That explanation often calmed people who might otherwise have feared becoming entangled in police business—NCIS something remote, harmless-seeming to people with no connection to the armed forces.

  “Like the FBI?” she asked. “Someone just called here a little bit ago.”

  “I’m not the FBI,” said Moss.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” said the young woman. “I can serve alcohol, if you want a drink. Or coffee. I just brewed a fresh pot.”

  “Coffee, thank you. I don’t normally keep these hours.”

  “I feel like a vampire sometimes,” she said, heading behind the bar to pour Moss’s cup. She set out sugar and a carton of half-and-half. “Petal, by the way.”

  “Petal?” said Moss. “That’s beautiful. Shannon.”

  “Skeleton crew tonight,” said Petal. “Got the lobby to myself. More staff will show up closer to breakfast.”

  “You work here regularly?” asked Moss.

  “Most nights,” said Petal. “Two nights off a week, not necessarily together. Hard to plan a life with no real weekends. And it’s boring. I’m glad you showed up, gives me something to do.”

  “Do you know someone named Marian Mursult? Or Patrick Mursult?” asked Moss.

  “They aren’t familiar names,” she said.

  “I believe Patrick Mursult may have stayed here frequently,” said Moss. “What kind of information do you keep on file about your guests?”

  “Basic stuff,” said Petal. “Name, how many people are checking in. That sort of thing. Credit-card number, unless they pay with cash.”

  “Phone calls from the room? Incidental costs, damages?”

  “Sure,” said Petal.

  Moss showed Petal a photograph of Mursult. “Do you recognize him?” she asked.

  Petal scrutinized the picture. “No,” she said. “But I don’t have a lot of contact with our guests at my hours. Most people check in before I’m here, check out after I leave—and most of the time they’re out through the forest, hiking. I see people occasionally at breakfast if I stick around to eat.”

  “I have dates this man would have stayed here over the past year or so,” said Moss, “and the phone number he used to make the reservations.”

  “The phone number wouldn’t be much help,” said Petal. “The dates, though—we could try to cross-check by date.”

  “You can run a search like that on the computer?”

  “Oh, no,” said Petal. “Our computer system is nonexistent. Ever play Memory?”

  They set up in the lounge on either side of a glass table, sitting by a fire that Petal had kindled in the stone fireplace, several file folders arranged between them by date. Each folder contained a stack of receipts from past occupants, some handwritten—Moss started with the lightest folder, flipping through names, credit-card numbers, room numbers—information blurring together as she read. No “Patrick Mursult.”

  “Read the names out loud so I can hear them,” said Petal. “Or—don’t bother with the names, let’s stick to credit-card numbers. I have an idea. Give me the last four numbers, and I’ll write them down, we’ll check for duplicates.”

  “All right,” said Moss, unaccustomed to receiving this level of engagement, but Petal seemed particularly game, readying her notebook, starting a new column next to a poem she’d been writing. Moss read out the credit-card numbers, and Petal checked each number against her list, looking for repeats. They worked for nearly forty minutes, taking a break only to refill their coffee.

  “Wait, wait—can you give me that last one again?” asked Petal.

  Moss repeated the number and Petal said, “Here we go. Yes. I found a match, here. Patrick Gannon.”

  “Patrick Gannon,” said Moss.

  Moss jotted down the credit-card number that “Patrick Gannon” had used to make his reservation. He hadn’t reserved a room in the lodge but rather one of the cabins along the south rim of the gorge: Cabin number 22, the same number as the code on his pager. She had him. She checked all the past receipts—the number of guests was listed as two, though there was no information on the second guest.

  “Anything unique about that cabin?” Moss asked. “About the name ‘Gannon’? Maybe someone you work with might have an idea about him? Might remember him?”

  “I’ll ask around when the morning shift clocks in,” said Petal, tying her bright blue hair into a loose knot. “Let me check the file for Cabin 22, see if we’ve kept any notes about it.”

  “Are you in college?” asked Moss as Petal gathered up their paperwork.

  “I’m working a few years,” said Petal, “not sure if I want to go to school. I wanted to backpack across Africa, but my dad found me this job.”

  “Consider a career in law enforcement,” said Moss. “You’re a natural. You’ve been a help tonight.”

  Petal replaced the files of room receipts in the management office before stepping behind the front desk, opening up the three-ring binder labeled CABINS. She flipped to the back, scanned a series of forms. “Wasp’s nest in Cabin 22 in 1983,” said Petal. “Looks like it was taken care of.” She opened another three-ring binder labeled CHECK-IN, said, “Oh, shit. Gannon’s checked in right now. Cabin 22.”

  “Tonight?” said Moss. A prickle of adrenaline. She thought of Marian, wondered if she was in one of the cabins, possibly held here.

  Petal checked a pegboard full of keys on the rear wall, checked again in her binder. “He made the reservation Friday night, checked in Saturday, and has the cabin through the week.”

  A Friday-night reservation—he’d booked his cabin just as Marian had been kidnapped. “I need to get there,” said Moss, no moment to spare if she might recover Marian here, now. “I can follow one of the roads that lead from the parking lot?”

  “About a mile from here,” said Petal. “It’s tricky in the dark, I can take you over.”

  Petal threw on a pea coat, brought Moss through the administrative office to the garage, where she found a golf cart spattered with mud. They left the garage and rode along the cabin path, a winding strip of concrete lit only by the dim wattage of the golf cart’s front light. Moss gripped the crossbar as Petal drove, taking the bends quickly. The stars were thick out here, without the diluting light of cities. Orion and the Dippers were clear, but the sky was dominated by the silvery flare of the comet Hale-Bopp, the cosmic ice and burning tails like a thumb smudge of light.

  Two dozen cabins were situated near the gorge rim, each private, separated by dense hemlocks. A few were booked, Moss figured, seeing cars tucked into the woods, but most of the cabins stood empty—March was still too cold for most people. Petal drove around to one of the distant cabins. “Here’s 22,” she said. A Wrangler was parked in the gravel patch, the spare tire draped with a POW*MIA cover. No lights. The cabin seemed consumed by night.

  “Petal, go ahead and wait back here, all right?” said Moss, standing from the golf cart. Petal bundled up in her coat, lit a cigarette. Marian might be here, thought Moss. She picked her way along the mulch path to the cabin. The night was so opaque she could barely see Petal and the golf cart, could see only the orange tip of her cigarette bobbing like a firefly. Moss knocked on the door, waiting a few moments. Nothing stirred inside the cabin, no lights snapped on, no movement. She knoc
ked harder.

  “Special agent, NCIS,” she said. “I need to speak with Patrick Mursult.”

  Silence. She unsnapped her holster, ready to draw. Moss knocked again, no answer. Or maybe there was no one here—the cabins were small enough she should have heard movement if someone were inside.

  “Do you have keys?” Moss called back.

  “Yeah,” said Petal. “I have to open the door for you. I can’t hand over the manager’s keys.”

  Moss watched the cigarette tip bob closer. Petal had a ring of keys, squinted to find the one marked 22. “I wish I had a flashlight,” she said, stepping around Moss, feeling for the cabin lock with her fingers. Moss heard the key slide in, heard the lock unlatch. Petal stepped inside just as Moss was smacked by the odor of blood.

  “Petal, don’t—”

  Petal flipped on the lights, and when she registered the wash of blood, she screamed, her cigarette dropping from her mouth. Moss took the girl by her shoulders, held her, led her from the cabin, “It’s okay, it’s okay—go back to the office, call 911—”

  “I’m all right,” said Petal, her voice bubbling with hysteria. “I’m all right, it’s fine, I didn’t see it, I didn’t see—”

  Moss put her hands to Petal’s cheeks, steadied her. “Listen to me, listen,” she said, and registered the moment when Petal regained herself. “Go back to the office, call 911,” said Moss. “My cell won’t work out here. I need you to do this for me, okay? Call 911.”

  Moss waited until she heard the sound of the golf cart’s motor diminish before returning to the cabin. She crushed out Petal’s cigarette, smoldering on the floor. She closed the door behind her. The cabin’s interior was wood, with exposed ceiling beams. Patrick Mursult’s body was beside the bed, his head resting on the mattress, his wrists tied behind him with a belt. Someone had shot him through the back of the head, an execution. Blood had sprayed from the exit wound, dousing the headboard with blood that glistened in the room lights.

  She checked the rest of the cabin. There was no one else here, no sign of Marian. Mursult had been staying here alone. She spotted a gun on the floor, a Beretta M9. Could be a service weapon, she thought, wondering if the Beretta had been Mursult’s or if his killer had left it here. But even if it was his service weapon, the NSC SEALs she worked with strongly preferred the SIG Sauer P226. The M9 might have been the weapon Mursult was originally issued back in the mid-eighties. An older gun.

  She heard sirens piercing the silence long before they arrived. The first on scene was an ambulance from the Broaddus Hospital, Moss waiting outside the cabin, waiving off the EMTs so they wouldn’t contaminate the crime scene. When the Tucker County sheriff arrived, Moss asked him to radio in, ask for the FBI. Deputies woke the few others in the cabins, taking their names, contact information, asking them what they might have heard, what they might have seen. An FBI unit from the Clarksburg field office arrived, already in contact with Brock, who was on his way down from Pittsburgh.

  No cell reception here, but Petal let Moss use the office telephone. The lodge office was stuffy, with a minuscule metal writing desk and a calendar of the Blackwater Falls photographed in different seasons. Moss dialed for an out line—at this hour O’Connor must be asleep, she figured, so she tried his home number rather than NCIS headquarters. She thought of him now, wisps of white hair, sandpaper stubble, sitting up in bed and shuffling through his vast house in Virginia, chasing down the ringing telephone before his younger wife’s sleep was disturbed.

  “O’Connor,” he said.

  “Moss,” she said. “I located him. Patrick Mursult’s dead. I’m calling from the Blackwater Falls Lodge, in West Virginia. He had a cabin here.”

  “Homicide?” O’Connor asked.

  “He was shot through the back of the head,” said Moss. “Wrists tied behind him. An execution. I don’t think Mursult killed his family—someone hunted him down, killed them all. We still have no leads about his daughter.”

  “The FBI will handle the search for Marian,” said O’Connor. “Our primary concern remains Patrick Mursult—and Elric Fleece. I spoke with Special Agent Nestor earlier, pulled Fleece’s record. Navy, Electrician’s Mate—submarines in the late seventies, NSC in ’81. Zodiac.”

  “Libra?” asked Moss.

  “That’s right. We need to find out what these men were involved in, why they weren’t on the ship. We need to know about Libra. I’m meeting with the NSC director tomorrow, Admiral Annesley.”

  “There’s something else,” said Moss. “Fleece had seen the Terminus, or knew about it, his place was . . . his property was decorated with sculptures of the hanged men. I think he had seen the future. Remember when I lost my leg, I had that confusion about the reflections? Do you remember, I thought I’d seen myself—”

  “Of course,” said O’Connor, that time of her life delicate between them—how what should have been a routine training exercise in the Canaan Valley had resulted in the loss of her limb. He’d been inconsolable when the medical staff of the William McKinley mentioned amputation as the only way to save Moss from gangrene and had been present during the two surgeries needed to remove her leg at the thigh.

  “This man, Fleece, had made a sculpture of the reflections,” she said. “I can’t explain it, but he knew. I’d been thinking Mursult never sailed on Libra, never made the assignment, but if Fleece knows the Terminus . . .”

  A pause on O’Connor’s end. “We need to get out ahead of this investigation. It’s spreading like wildfire, we have to contain it,” he said. “I have to move you to the future on this one.”

  Moss’s jaw clenched at his words, her shoulders tightened. Traveling to IFTs took a toll on her body, years of her life spent in futures. She had lost relationships the last time she was called on to travel, had a boyfriend she imagined a life with, but when she traveled, she had left her boyfriend’s bed one morning and returned within the week aged four years, distant from him, her heart and mind already long past the moment she’d been living.

  “Just give me a few more days,” she said. “We have leads. There are pictures of a woman—”

  “I’m moving you on this,” said O’Connor. “I have to. Mursult turning up like this, and now Fleece. They’re a national security risk, Shannon. We need to know about these men now. We need to know about Libra.”

  Twenty years from now, this current investigation will have concluded—everything happening here will be history; with any luck, whoever murdered Mursult and his family will have been captured, Mursult’s missing-in-action status will have been explained, his connection to Libra understood. Moss might arrive twenty years from now and be handed a folder with every question answered, every opaqueness made clear. A framed photograph of the Blackwater Lodge staff stood on the desk—Moss picked out Petal, her hair not blue in this picture, her natural color a dark shade, almost black. Marian, thought Moss. You can find Marian.

  “All right, I’ll get ahead of this thing,” she said. She was unable to slide backward through time to prevent Marian’s disappearance, the butchery to her family, but she could travel forward to learn what had happened to her or what might happen to her. Maybe I can save her, she thought. Maybe we’re not too late. “I’ll go,” she said. “I’ll leave from here, can make it to Oceana by midmorning.”

  “I’ll make arrangements,” said O’Connor.

  Moss found Petal at the front desk. The young woman had been crying, her eyes pinkish, but she had collected herself. Already this world, terra firma, seemed to Moss like a distant recollection, like it belonged to a past age, bathed in a haze of memory. Even Petal seemed like someone remembered from long ago. Moss handed her one of her business cards, said, “This is my name, here. Shannon Moss. When the sheriff’s department or someone from the FBI asks you about what happened tonight, make sure you talk with Special Agent William Brock of the FBI. Tell him everything.”

  “Brock,” said Petal. “Okay.”

  “You’ve done great,” said Moss.
“Hang in there.”

  Moss pulled away from the Blackwater Falls Lodge. She turned on the radio to drown out her thoughts, the tuner scanning, picking up static channels. Moss listened to the white noise, the night burning with stars. The vast body of heaven, the body of the woman in the Polaroid photographs. There had been a woman who’d met Mursult in the Blackwater cabin, who had known him, had been intimate with him. Who was she? Moss thought of that unknown woman, she thought of Marian. She thought about the search parties that would comb through these woods in the coming days, men and women searching tight grids, looking for a sign of the girl somewhere among the pines. Maybe they would find her, maybe they would pull Marian’s body from the soil, or maybe they would find her months from now, wasted away and desecrated by wildlife, or maybe they would never find her. The pinewoods stretched out like a vast dark sea on either side of Moss. She thought of Marian, she thought of Courtney. She imagined Courtney wandering alone, lost among the pines—her thoughts of Courtney were so vivid Moss felt she could almost see her, a blur of white among the subsuming darkness of the woods, a girl lost, lost and so far from home, lost in the eternal forest, lost forever.

  PART TWO

  2015–2016

  I will invite myself

  to this ghost supper.

  —AUGUST STRINDBERG, The Ghost Sonata

  ONE

  Grey Dove actual, on your go.”

  “Go,” I said.

  The engines fired, I was pressed into my chair, hurtling along the runway, and as the Grey Dove lifted into the night, my belly flopped at her steep ascent. The Earth rushed from me. The Grey Dove rattled around me, shaking me. I used to pass out as she climbed, the g-forces whipping blood from my brain, but I’m used to her now and grip the chair and watch the lights of cities as they recede below, turning into skeins of light as delicate as illuminated webs, as they disappear from my view, replaced by the vast blackness of the ocean at night.