The Gone World

by Tom Sweterlitsch

  “Rum and Cherry Coke.”

  She bought our next round. She proved chatty, eager to talk, filling my ear with the details of her routine, the grind of working in hospice care. I pushed her toward her past, blunt questions about old boyfriends, hoping she would mention something about Patrick Mursult that I could pry into, but I learned the minutiae of the Donnell House instead, the staff there, the joys of helping people and the guilty relief that flooded Nicole whenever one of her more difficult residents finally succumbed—occurrences she celebrated with a shot of Jägermeister.

  I saw Nicole nearly every night at May’rz, some nights just enjoying the bar, the atmosphere, enjoying her company, her chatter. Some nights I let myself forget all about Shannon Moss and lived as Courtney Gimm. Easy to adopt a new life and let my old life dissolve—nothing was urgent here, no matter how long I lived here I would return to the present in the moment I had left. I could let time pass here, live whatever life I wanted. I could forget myself here, so I reminded myself often of why I’d come. Every night before I slept, I looked at a photograph of Marian Mursult I kept on my writing desk. You’re alive, I’d whisper. You’re still alive. I placed a sheet of Red Roof stationery beside the picture and wrote in black Sharpie, LIFE IS GREATER THAN TIME.

  TWO

  Signs lined Old William Penn Highway, GUNS AND AMMO—THIS WEEKEND. I found the convention center out by the Monroeville Mall, next to a Babies “R” Us, the lot full, spillover parking in the lot of the abandoned big box across the street. Nine-dollar tickets to get into the show, the ticket taker asking if I was carrying a weapon.

  No need for pretense, fake IDs, as Nestor might recognize me anyway. I showed my badge. “Naval Criminal Investigative Service.”

  “Are you with Gibbs?” he asked.

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “From the TV show,” he said, tearing my ticket, stamping my hand with an eagle.

  “I’m a federal agent.”

  “You know, the TV show,” he said.

  Snaking lines of folding tables filled out the convention hall. I looked through the crowds for Nestor. Ammo and beef-jerky vendors, some tables like a flea market of random junk, old AK-47 banana clips and rusted-out Winchesters. Tables of blades—switchblade knives with jewel-colored handles. Neon-green axes labeled for hunting and killing zombies, I wondered if that was actually a thing. Someone asked if I needed a canister of mace to keep in my purse.

  “You’d look good in this one,” one of the sellers said, a woman with platinum curls, holding up the skimpiest pink tank top, Hello Kitty with an AK-47: KALASHNIKITTY.

  Other T-shirts, the Pillsbury Doughboy in a Nazi armband WHITE FLOUR, shirts for the USMC, the Screaming Eagles. Browsing guns, I liked the feel of weapons with wooden stocks, the warmth and heft, rather than the plasticky feel of some semiautomatic rifles. My attention caught on pink camo shotguns meant for gun babes, I figured, but there were only a half dozen other women here, and they didn’t look like the pink-camo type to me.

  “My God, Shannon Moss—is that you?”

  “Nestor?”

  In his thirties then, he’d be in his fifties now. Handsome still. His eyes were still stunning—I’d almost forgotten how brilliant. Powder blue, lit from within. His hair had grown a shade darker, and his mustache and scruffy beard had gone gray at the tips. He’d been thin before, but even so he’d lost weight—wiry, like a long-distance runner. Flannel, blue jeans. His table was called the Eagle’s Nest, a pickers’ table. Nazi gear, almost all of it—antique rifles, bayonets, a glass case of pistols, P38s and Lugers, matched with patches from the officers who’d carried them, letters of authenticity. Some American stuff, an autographed picture of Patton. Nestor came around from behind his table.

  “It is you,” he said, and he hugged me. Pipe smoke. It felt good to put my arms around him. “You haven’t changed,” he said. “I mean, you haven’t changed—you look just like I remember you. Look at you. How long has it been?”

  “Nineteen years, about,” I said.

  “Nineteen,” he said. “You know, when I first saw you coming up the aisle, I thought I recognized you, but my first thought was you might be your daughter.”

  “Ha, no—no kids—”

  “Let me look at you,” he said. “God. You look . . . you look damn good, I’m telling you. You took care of yourself.”

  “Well, I don’t feel so young,” I said. “Dying my hair now.”

  “I noticed, it looks good,” said Nestor. “I like the dark hair.”

  “All the gray, I had to do something.”

  “I’ll be honest, I’m happy to see you. You just left,” he said. “And then, I thought you might have, you know, with CJIS. When CJIS was attacked. Your office was in CJIS, wasn’t it? I’m remembering that right?”

  “It was,” I said. “But I was at sea. I’ve been at sea.”

  “You know about Brock?” he asked. “I mean about his wife? Lost his wife at CJIS, his two daughters also.”

  “Rashonda,” I said. “I haven’t seen Brock since Canonsburg. How is he?”

  “They used the day care at that building,” said Nestor. “He lost everyone. And never really got over it, never remarried or anything, just buried himself in his work, kept busy. He’s all right, last time we talked—you know, he got all those promotions. He’s at Quantico now. I used to ask him if he knew what happened with you, but he didn’t know. No one seemed to know. We figured you might have been caught up in the attack, too—but you’re here. I used to look through the names of everyone that was killed, all those memorials they televised. But you’re here. My God, Shannon. It’s good to see you.”

  His demeanor had changed, chattier, a man used to patter, but his voice had the warmth I remembered.

  “How about you?” I asked him. “What is all this stuff?”

  “The Eagle’s Nest, takes up all my time. This was my dad’s collection. He was a hoarder—anything military. World War I or II. I was just going to sell all this stuff off at once, but a buddy of mine convinced me to do gun shows, and I’ve been at this . . . almost six years, I guess. I do American memorabilia, British, but the Nazi pieces are the big sellers here. It beats a desk job.”

  “You aren’t with the Bureau anymore?”

  “Not for a long time,” he said. “I’ll tell you what, let me get my neighbor over here to watch my table for a while. Do you have a few minutes? I’ll buy you some lunch. Their chicken fingers aren’t bad.”

  I accepted a cup of coffee. The convention center’s café was near the bathrooms, a few tables set out. The coffee Nestor handed me smelled a little like barbecue sauce, and I barely sipped it but was happy to hold something warm. Nestor’s forehead wrinkled as he talked, just like I remembered, only the creases were deeper. His eyebrows were bushier, softer.

  “It’s good to see you,” I told him.

  A familiarity between us—I had barely known him in 1997, and even though the years were a gulf between us, I felt like no time had passed at all, like we were resuming a conversation neither one of us had wanted to end.

  “What brings you around?” he asked.

  “You,” I said. “What have you been up to?”

  “I quit the Bureau—2008. Did some freelance photography for a while. The work I do now suits me. I travel the circuit, meet people. It’s all right. I’ve always been interested in history.”

  “You’ve lost weight,” I said. “You’re just a skinny thing, look at you.”

  “Yeah, well,” he said.

  “Moved back to West Virginia?” I asked. “You grew up in Twilight?”

  “Always been my home. I have a house just outside this little town called Buckhannon,” he said. “Quiet. Away from everything. They have a good strawberry festival every year.”

  “I used to go there as a kid,” I said. Strawberry parfaits and idolizing the Strawberry Pageant queen in the parade. I imagined Nestor with his camera, snaps of Americana. “I haven’t been in yea
rs.”

  “Sure, you grew up around here,” he said. “You grew up in Canonsburg, right? You grew up in our crime scene—”

  “Why Buckhannon?” I asked.

  “Things just came together. I needed a place with a garage to store all my junk. The place I have has a small barn on the property. You should see it sometime. I get pickers coming through to look at the war stuff.”

  “That sounds like a nice life.”

  “It’s a better life than the one I had,” he said.

  “I don’t want to dance around something,” I said. “What happened? Why’d you leave the Bureau?”

  “You know, you take something like what happened out in Nevada a couple years ago,” said Nestor. “All the FBI ready to storm that man’s ranch—and for what? Over cattle grazing? What’s the point of that? Of all that violence? I just . . . couldn’t take part anymore, I guess. Couldn’t be a jackboot.” He lost himself staring out over the heads of everyone at the gun show, the clamor of the convention hall grown distant. He cleared his throat, coughed. “I was involved in a ‘use of force’ incident—I took someone’s life. That shook me, almost destroyed me. I was having trouble handling what happened and just couldn’t deal with all the political bullshit. All the Bureau’s bullshit,” he said. “Drank too much, I admit. For a time . . . I had to come to terms with a few things.”

  “You’re all right now?” I asked.

  “I’m all right,” he said. “So you tracked me down. Came all the way out to Monroeville to see me.”

  “I need to talk with you about Marian Mursult,” I said.

  “Marian Mursult,” said Nestor, running his palm over his chest, reacting as if the name wounded him. “Why her?”

  “She was found,” I said.

  “We found her, long after.”

  “I read up about the investigation, but I need particulars,” I said.

  “After all this time? For what?” he asked, his forehead rippling, an expression like begging for mercy. “Why?”

  “I’ve been assigned to a review board,” I told him, a standard cover that didn’t inspire questions—vaguely administrative, the tediousness of paperwork. “She was found out near Blackwater Falls?”

  “Out in the woods, that’s right. Buried out in the Blackwater Gorge,” he said. “You, showing up here. You’re like a ghost, asking about ghosts. You really want to talk about that? Marian Mursult.”

  “I need to know what you can tell me about her,” I said.

  “Why don’t you go through the Bureau? Why track me down? Brock’s still around, out in Virginia. He can talk with you. He’d know more.”

  “I need to talk with you,” I said.

  “Not here, though,” said Nestor. “I don’t want to get into all that stuff here. Hell, most of these people, if they found out I used to work with the FBI, they’d blacklist me, they’d think I was spying on them. Can you meet up? Tonight even? This whole show closes down at four.”

  “Anywhere,” I said. “Where are you staying?”

  “I’m heading back home tonight,” he said. “You want to have dinner before I go? There’s a place over here some of us went to last night, the Wooden Nickel.”

  “You’re down in Buckhannon, that’s not too far from the Blackwater,” I said. “Can you show me where you found her?”

  “Seriously? After all these years, you track me down and want me to take you out there? Well, what the hell. It would take a few hours to get there and back,” said Nestor. “It’ll get dark. How are you with your leg? Can you hike at all?”

  “I can hike.”

  “All right. Well, why don’t we meet at the lodge, then—Blackwater Lodge. I can leave a little early from here, meet you down there, let’s say by six or six-thirty. I didn’t get a chance to buy you chicken fingers, but I’ll get you dinner after. I know a place.”

  I arrived early, twenty minutes or so, waiting in the car with the radio on, shredding the napkin that came with my Starbucks into tinier and tinier scraps of confetti, ashamed at how nervous I was. Nestor had said I was like a ghost asking about other ghosts. Waiting for him outside the Blackwater Lodge, not yet dark, but I remembered how black the woods were that night—the hemlock pines around the lodge seemed to have grown denser over the years, this whole place thick with ghosts, a feeling like I could walk back to Cabin 22 and still see Patrick Mursult slumped there, drained of life.

  Nestor pulled his F-150 beside my Camry and waved me into the cab.

  “Are you driving?” I asked.

  “We can only get one car up there.”

  We left the main roads, taking narrower routes that cut uphill, the towering pines cooling what little remained of the day.

  “Shannon, I don’t understand how you can still look so young.”

  “Come on,” I said.

  “I’m serious, Shannon,” said Nestor. “I turned into an old man, and you look—”

  “Thanks, but I don’t know. I work out, I eat right,” I said.

  “Well, you figured it out,” he said. “You should write a book about the fountain of youth, I’m telling you. You could be a millionaire, on the talk shows.”

  Nestor turned onto a path just wide enough for his truck, an access route or maybe a logging road, that rushed uphill at a dizzying incline. The truck wheels spun out, but Nestor gunned the gas—the tires caught and the truck lurched upward. I leaned back in the seat, holding on, imagining the truck would tip backward, like we’d fall end over end.

  “Here we are. They still have the trail marked.”

  Nestor pointed ahead, and I saw an orange ribbon tied around a tree trunk. He maneuvered his truck, scraping against the pines, to where the path leveled out into a narrow clearing where he could park.

  “This was as far as any of the trucks could get,” he said. “Couldn’t get an ambulance up here, so they brought her body down in the back of a pickup.”

  Her body. Careful of my footing, climbing from the cab. The pines were silhouetted, but the sky overhead was a circle of evening, a violet eye staring down on us. Colder, here.

  “We still have to walk,” said Nestor. “A little.”

  The trail we followed was obscured by underbrush, but Nestor could still pick it out, stomping at the growth and holding back branches so I could make my way behind him, single file. We climbed a progression of naturally formed steps, clinging to trees for balance. He brought me to a runnel that might have been a creek, long dried. A bracket of five hemlock trees, black soil, emerald moss furring half-submerged stones.

  “Here,” said Nestor.

  Marian, I thought. This is where they found your body . . .

  “This place was discovered by accident,” said Nestor. “A couple ginseng diggers came through, had gotten lost higher up the elevation and figured they would hit the river if they just kept walking downhill, figured they could follow the river back to the falls. Up the hill a bit, they found the first of what we called ‘cairns’—these stacks of flat rocks. Markers. They figured maybe some other diggers were marking a patch, so they came further down and spotted another cairn, and another. The cairns seemed to lead them to this spot, where we’re standing. I don’t see the cairns anymore. Someone must have knocked them down. Do you know what I’m describing, these markers?”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” I said. “Stacks of rocks.”

  “So these guys stopped to take a look around. Well, they spotted the red berries, so they knew they actually found some ginseng here. They dug for roots but found bones instead—thought maybe an animal was buried here but knew the whole setup wasn’t quite right. They abandoned their dig and called in what they’d found.”

  “You dug her up?”

  “Park Service,” said Nestor. “Found human remains, called us in. And we figured right away, we just knew. It’s funny—I remember when Brock came into the meeting room, he said, ‘They found Marian.’ All we knew at the time was that Park Service had dug up some bones, but Brock knew it was our girl.
Instinct. Got her ID by matching against her dental records.”

  I breathed—the air rich with pine sap, the smell of damp stone. A beautiful place to rest.

  “I read what Brock said, in the newspapers,” I said. “That stuff about Mursult killing himself? He knew that Patrick Mursult was murdered. He never believed Patrick Mursult killed his own family, did he? I was told his story was a cover.”

  Nestor laughed, “Yeah, you could say that,” he said. “In fact—you asked why I quit the FBI? There were other things, but we had Patrick Mursult’s body. It was a clear homicide, but word comes down through Brock that we talk about it like a suicide. We were told a man killed his family, then killed himself, stick to the script. I couldn’t handle that, the outright lies we were supposed to live with. Then we find Marian’s body years later but hold to that same line. Patrick Mursult was killed, plain as day—he didn’t kill himself. It just didn’t wash with me.”

  “They still investigated the homicide, though, didn’t they?” I asked. “You interviewed a woman? Onyongo?”

  “Nicole,” said Nestor.

  “We found pictures of her at Fleece’s place,” I said. “I saw in the case file she was having an affair with Mursult, lasted a few years.”

  “Yeah—I remember who she is,” said Nestor. “If I remember right, the lodge kept license-plate numbers, tracked her down that way.”

  “Nothing panned out with her?”

  “No, not at all,” said Nestor. “We brought her in the day after you found Mursult, maybe a day after that. I interviewed her for two days straight, but she couldn’t tell us much.”

  “What did she tell you?”

  “Mursult picked her up in some bar,” said Nestor. “Knew that Nicole was a nurse and wanted to talk with her because he was suffering PTSD. She worked at an assisted-living facility, didn’t know how to help him, but that interaction started their relationship. They’d meet at the lodge.”

  I recognized the Nicole I knew—she inhabited that bar like a conversation piece hung in a dull room. Maybe only a trick of fate that Mursult had drifted into May’rz, but once he saw her, once he heard her speak, he wouldn’t have wanted that voice to silence. I knew nothing about Mursult but pictured him falling in love with Nicole, a quick fall.