The Gone World

by Tom Sweterlitsch

  “She’s gone,” said Brock. “I sent a team to her apartment, on your request. She hasn’t shown up to work either.”

  “Gone,” said Moss, remembering Nicole’s eyes glassy, her manhattan, the smoke of two Parliaments rising to the ceiling. But then, she might appear before too long. Nicole had continued working at the Donnell House in her IFT, had become a regular at the May’rz Inn. But the chemical weapons hadn’t been discovered in that timeline; who knows what that would change? “All right, keep looking for her,” said Moss, fearing how radically the future might already have changed from her experience of it. “We need to find her.”

  “Come over here,” said Brock. “I want you to take a look at these.”

  They wore blue nitrile gloves to study the sheaves of documents Brock had recovered from an unlocked safe in the front of the Winnebago. They sat together at the dinette table, Brock spreading out maps and sets of blueprints. The Red Line of the D.C. Metro, the Capitol Building, detailed notes on the Senate chamber.

  “And this,” said Brock, unrolling schematics of NSC launch pads in Kodiak, Alaska. There were others: the Air Force Space Division headquarters in Colorado Springs, the Naval Space Command headquarters in Dahlgren. There was information about Cape Canaveral, the military floor at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Maps of their ventilation systems, security profiles. Brock showed her similar information about the United Nations General Assembly in New York, but it was the blueprints of the FBI CJIS facility that chilled her. On some level she knew. On some level, throughout the hours of waiting here, as rumors stirred about what had been discovered in the barn, the contiguous pieces of her investigation started to meld. Moss absorbed the rich irony of Brock’s having discovered these plans—that he was preventing the attack on CJIS that one day would have destroyed his wife and daughters.

  “They’re a terrorist militia,” said Moss. “Ex-military.”

  “And these are the targets?” asked Brock.

  “Yes,” she said, “or potential targets.” These other locations hadn’t been attacked in the IFT she’d traveled to, but she wondered if other IFTs would have played out differently; she wondered about the cataclysms that might have been, or still might be. The enormity of her mistake rushed into her like water rushing into a gap: she had hurried to this house, heartbroken at the doubling of Buckhannon, hurried here in a mania to try to save the girl, but she shouldn’t have. She should have been methodical, should have called O’Connor, should have waited. Jared Bietak had been here, Cobb had been here—who else would they have found if she’d waited? Now Bietak was dead and Cobb and Miss Ashleigh had scattered, seeds to the wind. She had lost touch with the greater mission.

  “White supremacists?” asked Brock. “The Nazi paraphernalia in the bedroom here.”

  “No, I don’t think so, not primarily,” said Moss, trying to recover, to see past those missed chances. “Antigovernment for certain. Karl Hyldekrugger. He acquired blueprints for CJIS two years ago, sold by a member of the Mountaineer Militia shortly before your people arrested him.”

  “We’ll try to track these chemicals, try to track the sale of the equipment,” said Brock. “I’ll run Hyldekrugger’s name by our domestic-terror people, see what they can come up with. We’ve learned a lot since McVeigh.”

  Moss remembered the name of the CJIS suicide bomber, memorized from books that would never be written: Ryan Wrigley Torgersen. He worked at CJIS, would have reported to work with explosives sewn into his body. There were constitutional protections against pre-crime, Fourth Amendment applications that complicated NCIS investigations. She would have to talk with O’Connor, apply for special warrants through the military courts to arrest this individual.

  “Alert your colleagues at CJIS immediately,” said Moss. “I think the discovery of these blueprints is enough to suggest you search the ventilation system and the fire-suppression system. I doubt you’ll find anything. But they should increase security, they should consider CJIS an active target. There is an individual to consider a person of interest, a potential bomber. He’s an FBI employee, Ryan Wrigley Torgersen.”

  “Torgersen, I know him,” said Brock. “I’ve met him. He works in my wife’s department at CJIS. Are you sure? He’s meek, Shannon. Torgersen . . . I’ll ask for surveillance, see what we can dig up about him.”

  The National Guard allowed access to the barn much later that afternoon. They had rendered safe the recovered chemicals, had eliminated the threat of explosives. The medical examiner of Upshur County had been waiting on site since the bodies were first discovered. He was a young man, a skinny doctor who wore a shirt and tie and a cowboy hat the color of calfskin that he removed and held reverently as he approached the barn doors. He’d been told there were a number of bodies, and he’d brought three men with him, older men who seemed more like ranch hands than medical techs. They wore protective suits, a precaution against chemicals that might still be trapped in the victims’ hair or might escape from the cavities of their bodies.

  Moss stood at a distance, examining the Ryder. A hole had been drilled through the passenger side of the cargo space, and a rubber tube dangled from the hole. A mobile gas chamber. The barn itself was equipped with a ventilation system and safety showers, protective suits in lockers. Moss imagined Jared Bietak and Charles Cobb in these yellow suits dispersing poison gas or acid or disease into the back of the truck, measuring their victims’ suffering.

  They would have moved Marian from the basement in the middle of the night, the barn floodlight disconnected, the house lights off. She would have been bound, gagged, and no one would have heard her anyway, not out here. A favorable wind might have carried her screams—but only so far.

  This is how my life will end, Marian would have thought. In the back of a Ryder truck, gagging on the stink of the previous dead. She might have realized she smelled her own death. She might have scratched at the walls of the truck, she might have been senseless with terror—Moss imagined Marian weeping for mercy. She would have heard the purring of an engine or the whir of a box fan pushing gas through the rubber hose. Marian’s photograph had anchored Moss to terra firma those nights when she felt adrift in her IFT. Life is greater than time, she had written. A false hope.

  The Upshur ME and his men wearing hazmat suits laid out plastic sheets, gingerly removed each body from the truck. Four males, two females—one of them Marian. All were naked, all significantly damaged by chemical or acid burns, most of the bodies bloated and glossy, facial features distorted or altogether missing. Some of the bodies fell apart like jelly in their hands.

  —

  KDKA News: Marian’s picture cycling with helicopter shots of the house and barn, maps of Buckhannon, interviews with neighbors, sound bites from Brock. Mug shots of Ashleigh Bietak and the man she had fled with, Richard Harrier, captured hiding beneath the front porch of a property three miles down 151. Harrier a Home Depot cashier, shots of the Home Depot in Bridgeport. Blanket coverage of sarin gas, reprising coverage of the Aum Shinrikyo subway attacks, of Oklahoma City, and soon the house on Cricketwood Court had become a shrine to the slain family. At first just a few bouquets wrapped in green tissue and cellophane, pops of color left on the front stoop, but within a few days the stoop was mounded with flowers, framed photographs, white crosses. Moss sat in her truck and watched as people arrived and departed from the makeshift memorial, remorseful that no memorial like this had been made for Courtney, a personal regret that she had never laid flowers here. Later that evening Moss returned and added her own bouquet, a burst of roses.

  —

  She worked the phones late that afternoon, tracking down the owners of the apple orchard where Miss Ashleigh had lived years from now, where she had hosted the memorial for Jared Bietak. Moss remembered Nicole mentioning that the place used to be owned by ceramicists and soon found that the property was still owned by Ned and Mary Stent, the proprietors of the Pot and Kettle. She tracked Ned Stent to an art fair in Atlanta, Ned speak
ing with her from his hotel room, explaining the differences between earthenware and raku, describing the ceramics classes they offered at their orchard, the dimensions of their kiln. No, they’d never met anyone named Ashleigh Bietak, had never met Jared Bietak, and no, they weren’t planning on selling their property. “Not for a few years as of yet, at least.”

  —

  There was no viewing of the Mursult family’s bodies, though their five caskets were established in separate rooms of the Salandra funeral home on West Pike for a gathering of friends and family before the funeral Mass across the street at St. Patrick’s. So many children had come to grieve. High-school and middle-school children in their nice clothes, their church clothes, outfits that would double as Easter clothes in the next few weeks. Posters covered with the Mursult family’s pictures leaned on easels next to their caskets. Moss touched the lacquered wood of Marian’s coffin. She stood with her head bowed, falsifying prayer for the sake of the other mourners in line to pay their respects.

  At the funeral Mass, Moss sat alone in the back pew while the priest blessed each of the five caskets, as the faithful took Communion and prayed. St. Patrick’s was Moss’s childhood church. She’d been raised Catholic, had memories of Sunday school here, remembered her Communion dress, the taste of the Eucharist. St. Pat’s wasn’t a stone colossus like the older churches of Pittsburgh, but rather a contemporary remodel, with ocher walls and cobalt trim, stained-glass windows of pink, green, and yellow squares. The altarpiece was a brash design of crimson and gold diamonds. The sculpture of the Crucifixion above the altar held Moss’s attention through the service, a crucifix bathed in color cast by the sunlit stained glass. Christ seemed to levitate above the altar, as if the arms of the cross were wings—if it weren’t for the pins at his ankles and wrists, she imagined he might simply float away.

  Suffocating, the agonized sound of children crying, the unbearable sorrow. Moss left the service before it had concluded—a familiar release she remembered, escaping church. News vans had set up across the street, parked where they could capture establishing shots of the funeral home, the church, probably hoping for shots of children leaving in tears.

  Chilly air but warm in the sun. She walked West Pike, to clear her head. She crossed the tracks and the busier intersection at Morganza. The parking lot of the Pizza Hut was full, families eating lunch together. A ridiculous place to mourn, between the blue dumpsters, but this is where Courtney had died, this is where Moss had found her friend’s body. One of the dumpsters had been replaced in the past several years, but the other looked like it could have been left over from 1985, nearly twelve years ago. Moss leaned against the brick wall, remembering—and she cried for Courtney, for Marian, for Marian’s family, for her own. She remembered her father in dim flashes, how he would lift her from bed, how he would lift her and spin, wintergreen on his breath and pipe smoke in his hair. She cried for every lost thing, everything gone. Chartiers Creek ran behind the Pizza Hut, a narrow trickle of water bounded on either side by weeds. Moss sat on the bench of a picnic table that the Pizza Hut kids used on their smoke breaks. She watched the murky water. Trash littered the muddy banks. Peaceful, in its way—she felt removed from Canonsburg, the noise of traffic just a background of white noise. Sunlight hit the water like a speckle of silver fire, glorious. But Moss resented the thought. This place wasn’t beautiful—it was the end of everything.

  Her cell phone rang, the sound startling her. She let it ring. A few moments of silence before it started ringing again. She checked the number: BROCK.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “Moss,” he said, his voice cracking with enthusiasm, ecstatic. “Moss, is that you?”

  “I was at their funeral,” she said. “Marian and—”

  “Shannon, I have wonderful news,” he said, overcome by emotion, ebullient. “I don’t understand this, or how it happened, Shannon, but I have truly wonderful news. We found her.”

  Moss didn’t answer, only tried to puzzle out his meaning. We found her. Trees grew like a canopy over the water. Their leaves dappled the muddy banks and swept into the creek. She watched the leaves clot in an eddy before disappearing beneath the shadows of a corrugated-steel tube that took the creek underground.

  “We found her,” said Brock. “She’s alive. We found her in the woods, but she’s alive, Shannon. We found her.”

  “Who?” said Moss.

  “Marian,” said Brock. “We found her. Marian’s alive, Shannon. She’s alive.”

  THREE

  A mistake, Moss’s first thought. A misidentification.

  But she had seen the body, had seen Marian in the back of the Ryder truck. The girl’s aunt and uncle had identified her, had traveled from Ohio to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Charleston to view the remains. Marian’s aunt had stomached a fuller study, had inspected the cadaver and spotted the dimple scar on her interior left knee, a gymnastics injury, and the scar from her removed appendix. Without a doubt her sister’s child.

  Brock must have found some other seventeen-year-old, a similar but different girl . . .

  Marian, Brock had said. She’s alive.

  A fuller search of the forest near the Blackwater Falls, where his men had spotted the cairns. They had fanned out through the forest at dawn, searching for other cairns, to figure out what the cairns might mark, when one of his men shouted. A frail body, pale and bluish, hair the color of the soil. Clothes stiff with frost, no shoes. She was found in the channel of a dried-up creek. Her skin was wet, her hair was damp and frozen. A resemblance to Marian, Brock had thought. Brock put his palm to her neck, and the skin was cold, but he felt her pulse . . .

  What would have happened had Brock never found her? Moss wondered. She would have died, she thought. She would have been in the forest for years, her body in that dried-up creek, decomposing, until men digging for ginseng spotted red berries and started to dig.

  “She’s traumatized,” said Brock as Moss was shown into Preston Memorial’s boardroom. Unadorned walls, a blond-wood conference table. He chewed his licorice, pulverizing the gum.

  “Talk me through this,” said Moss.

  “Either we . . . we buried the wrong girl or we’re making a mistake now,” he said. “I was staggered by the resemblance. I thought that maybe I was deceiving myself. I thought she must be someone else, but she told me her name—”

  “She’s conscious?” asked Moss.

  “She’s weak.”

  “Who else knows about her?” Moss asked.

  “Lockwood, the CEO here,” said Brock. “A small team providing care. Nurses, Dr. Schroeder. My men, there were six of us. My supervisor. They know we found a young woman.”

  “You haven’t called her relatives?”

  “No.”

  “And you talked with Marian?” she asked.

  “Shannon, she’s identical. She’s the same, but nothing makes sense,” said Brock. “She says they killed the wrong person. She’s terrified. The remains we found, they were marred by chemicals. When her aunt identified the body, she was expecting Marian, and so maybe she convinced herself that body was Marian. I think we should test this girl, compare DNA with the corpse.”

  Echoing, Moss thought. Someone would have had to travel to an IFT, would have had to find a future Marian and bring her here to terra firma. That didn’t seem likely, but it was the only way she knew.

  “What does she say happened?” she asked.

  “Fleece is the one who took her,” said Brock. “Elric Fleece picked her up from the Kmart. She knew him.”

  The name withered in Moss’s ear. Fleece, a sailor on Libra, the suicide in the mirrored room. Marian had known him, a friend of her father’s.

  “Has anyone told Marian about her family?”

  “She knows,” said Brock. “She’s been watching TV.”

  Preston Memorial’s shift supervisor, Dr. Schroeder, was heavily made up, her hair a silver sweep. An elegant woman who spoke with a southern softness, her
heels clacking like a quick-tempo metronome.

  “Cold and wet. She says she swam through a river. Extreme hypothermia when we brought her in. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t very hopeful, but she’s doing well now, all things considered. Her feet worry me. The flesh was severely damaged. The poor thing didn’t have any shoes, and it’s been cold these past few nights. She hasn’t been able to walk much without pain, though she can make it to the bathroom and back.”

  Moss’s breath caught. “Will she keep her feet?”

  “We’re not out of the woods,” said Dr. Schroeder. “No gangrene, though. She’s responding very well. Whatever happened to her out there—she hasn’t gone into much detail, which is common with people who’ve been through trauma. She’s very confused, I think. Hypothermia can affect memory, so you’ll have to be patient with her.”

  Brock had posted sentries outside Marian’s room, someone from the hospital security staff and an FBI agent whose face Moss recognized from the other night in Buckhannon. They nodded a greeting to each other.

  “She should be awake,” said Dr. Schroeder. “Her core temperature was low, so she’s been sluggish.”

  “I’d like to speak with her alone,” said Moss. “Can I find you once we’ve had a chance to talk a little?”

  “Yes, of course,” said Dr. Schroeder. “I’ll check back with your colleague, or I’ll be in my office. Let me know if you need anything. And, of course, there’s a call button on her bed if you need something from the nurse on duty.”