The Blackbird Season

by Kate Moretti

  “The thing is, no one will care. I’m not looking for a pity party, it’s a fact.” She sat up straight, her shoulders back, strung tight like a violin string. Like she might snap.

  “Well, I care,” Nate said, but then remembered the kiss, the way her fingertips brushed against his skin, his visceral reaction, and it sent his heart racing. Careful, here. He heard Bridget’s voice, her admonishment in his head.

  She stood up, crossed the room, and stood at the window, her arms across her waist, rocking from side to side, slightly, gently. Something told him to let her be. The sun was setting, the sky streaked with orange and pink, a deep red at the horizon like a warning, tucked behind the billowing Pocono Mountains.

  Finally, after minutes, what seemed like hours, she spoke. “I might have been raped.”

  He was not prepared for that.

  “Might have been?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure. I can’t remember it all. I didn’t want it. And . . .” She wouldn’t look at him; her hair escaped the ponytail and fell over her eyes. She pushed her palm into the bowl of her belly, low between her hip bones. “I hurt. All over.” She shook her head. “Should I go to the police? No one will believe me. Will you come with me?”

  “What happened? When?”

  “I went to a party at Josh’s. I drank something red, but it tasted like nothing. Like sugar. It’s possible . . .” Her breathing was ragged, the twilight on her face. “It’s possible there was something in it. But, I don’t know. Maybe not. Just booze.” She wouldn’t look at him, just stared out the window, her face in profile. “Then it was my fault, maybe.”

  “Was it Josh?”

  She shook her head. “It’s a serious accusation. Could ruin lives. Right?”

  Nate nodded, then remembered she wasn’t looking at him. “Yes.”

  “A life more than mine. I could ruin another someone’s life. But then again, so could he. If he did it again.” She shrugged.

  “What about your life?” Nate asked.

  She let out a laugh, or what sounded like a laugh. “That’s not worth all that much.” He clucked with his tongue, his hand out to touch her shoulder, and she held up her hand. “No pity, just the truth.”

  “I can take you to the police. I know a cop,” Nate said. “Just tell me what happened.”

  “It was Andrew. And maybe Porter. He was there, but I don’t know if he . . .” Her voice was a whisper; he barely heard her.

  His Andrew. He thought of Marnie Evans, her face pinked and gleaming, watching Andrew whip pitches across the plate.

  She pulled out her phone, the shitty, slow cheap phone with the cracked screen. She hit play, her fingers flying across the screen like she’d done it a million times. He realized yes, she’d done it a million times.

  She moved the slider to the end, the last three minutes, and pressed play, handing it to him. Put her fist between her teeth and waited, watching him with those water-blue eyes.

  When it was done, he blinked, the room and the world both a tiny bit darker.

  “Are you sure?” he said.

  Then, “Were you drunk?” he said. And the worst one, “But you said yes,” he said.

  CHAPTER 35

  Bridget, Thursday, May 14, 2015

  Lucia had been missing for one week and two days. If you read the paper, you knew that the statistics on finding a missing person after a week were grim. Bridget had little hope.

  But she had some.

  First of all, Lucia wasn’t most people. And Bridget suspected she’d run away. She was hiding, waiting—for what, Bridget didn’t know—but she wasn’t being held captive by some kind of Buffalo Bill copycat killer.

  This was Bridget’s theory, anyway; not that she could tell anyone. They’d all think she was crazy. It was also possible that no one would care. She broached the subject with Jane Blue in the hallway, her voice dropped to a whisper, and Jane shook her head.

  “I don’t know what to think, but I’ll tell you this. I’ve never been Nate Winters’s biggest fan. That guy thinks he owns the school, the town, and everyone in it. He flirts with women, students, and teachers alike. He’s a bro to everyone, all while subtly putting down the guys like Dale. He’s got Bachman and the superintendent wrapped around his finger, and the parents think he hung the moon in the sky.” Jane rocked up on the balls of her feet as she spoke, her small hands wringing in front of her. She was a head shorter than Bridget, her voice low and gravelly, grating on Bridget’s ears.

  “So do you really think, though, that he killed her?” Bridget pressed, wanting to know what everyone else was saying, since obviously no one was saying it to her. “Is this what everyone thinks?”

  “Gone a week? Hard to say. What are the viable alternatives?” Jane shrugged and patted Bridget’s arm. “I know you were friends. I won’t pretend to understand why. Then again, I’m in the minority. Most people love the guy. I tend to believe he made sure of that.”

  The last bell rang and Bridget motioned to her classroom. Jane gave a little shrug, just one shoulder lifted, and walked away. Bridget started in the other direction, but Jane called to her.

  “You know, it doesn’t mean anything but, he knows I don’t like him. It drives him nuts.”

  Bridget turned. “What do you mean?”

  “I just mean,” Jane put her hands up, searching for the words. “He goes after me every chance he gets. He knows I can’t stand him. I roll my eyes or tell him to go chase wind or whatever. Makes no difference. He just laughs and says things like, ‘C’mon, Janie Jane. We can be friends.’ Says he’ll win me over someday. He can’t let it lie.”

  Bridget smiled. It seemed like Nate, and frankly, made Jane look like a bitch. Maybe his intention, maybe not.

  She took a step toward Bridget and cocked her head, her eyes narrowed to a slit. “But, don’t you think it’s a little pathological? That he needs to be liked that much?”

  • • •

  There always seemed to be a cloud over the mill and its hundred feet of stacks poking holes in the sky, even on the brightest day. The faint smell of sulfur hung on the grass blades, the trees. She’d been told that while the mill was in operation, before 2005, the whole town smelled like rotten eggs, and eventually you could tell a shutdown by the odor. Clean air meant trouble at the mill.

  Nate explained once that the smell wasn’t harmful. It was called TRS—total reduced sulfur—and was the same chemical that was added to natural gas to make it detectable. If you were an Oanoker for life, you learned to like the smell. Making paper, making money, they’d say. You could hear the hum and screech of the pulper as you drove up Mill Road. Bridget couldn’t imagine it. She sometimes wondered if it was a chemical cloud that hung over the plant, low and thick, like a fog.

  She remembered what Dale said about the birds: arsenic poisoning from the mill.

  Was arsenic a by-product of paper production?

  Bridget pushed open the huge steel door, the inside unchanged from the week before. If pressed, she couldn’t have explained why she was back, just that she was. She felt like she had a flimsy, tenuous grip on the truth. That she had all the pieces, and still couldn’t assemble the puzzle.

  Rows and rows of rolled brown paper sat in the room to her left, giving off a moldy smell. The air inside the mill always felt wetter, like somehow it rained on the inside. It was the pulp room, the one they’d been stuck in last week, where the lost, squawking goose waddled his way around.

  The pulp room was littered with debris, steel machinery, cranes, and conveyors.

  Bridget cleared her throat. “Hello?”

  She didn’t know whom she was yelling for—it was just a hunch. She didn’t even tell Tripp she was coming. She felt stupid for it and certainly couldn’t have explained it. Except . . .

  This mill was the place Lucia was drawn to the first time she’d run away. If Nate was right, it was the place that ruined her father and her future in one fell swoop the day it closed its doors. Did she know h
er father was back? Or worse yet, did he have anything to do with his daughter’s disappearance?

  There was no sign of her, no gas heater. But it had been in the sixties at night and hot as Hades in the day, so that might not mean anything.

  The pulper sat in the far corner, twenty feet around, a concrete bathtub sunk into the ground. It contained a tank that went down to basement, fifteen feet deep, with a steel rotor in the middle. Bridget had seen it before.

  The mill was a destination in Mt. Oanoke.

  Years ago, before they’d known that Holden was sick, Bridget and Holden would come here with Alecia and Nate. Like kids, they brought bottles of Two Buck Chuck and sat in the pulp room throwing rocks into the pulper. Two points for each metal ting of the stones bouncing off the rotor. Alecia and Nate snuck off somewhere between the rollers, and later Alecia had told her drunkenly they’d had sex back there, up against a metal spool, a screw digging into the small of her back, her feet braced on the cylinder in front of her.

  “It’s the angle,” she’d giggled, lifting one foot to demonstrate, her hands pushing at her thighs.

  Holden and Bridget stayed near the pulper, throwing stones at the rotor and intermittently talking, but mostly each thinking about the things they weren’t talking about—the conference, the fingernail, Watercress 6:30, and why Holden was being so different. Bridget remembered looking off toward the big rollers, to the sound of Alecia’s giggle, and feeling a pang. Wishing she’d had that love, wishing she had someone else. Wishing they’d come back. Nate made things between them all bearable.

  Bridget pushed past the conveyor, the rubberized mat that she remembered walking on like a balance beam, drunk on the Chuck, her hands out to her sides, Holden holding one arm and Nate the other and Alecia in the back protesting, you guys, get down, someone is going to get hurt, we’re too adult for this bullshit, and they’d all laughed, their voices mimicking her. When she hopped off the end and stumbled, her ankle twisting, it was Nate she grabbed, not Holden.

  Now, next to the pulper was a new thing. A stepladder. It wasn’t there years ago, and she didn’t remember it being there a week ago. Bridget pushed past the old control panel, under the pipes that had moved the pulp from the tank to the sheeter. She pressed her hand up against the flat expanse of steel, dusty and rough with rust.

  The sun gleamed through the windows, dust sparking and dancing in the air. She’d never been in the mill in this kind of daylight; she’d always come at night.

  She stood next to the tank, open on the top, the concrete coming to her chin. With one foot, she tested the stepladder and found it sturdy. She climbed to the top and looked down. It was empty, the rotor shining, leaves curled around the smooth edges, but the center, around the rotor, smooth and bare. Except for a small black backpack with a rainbow zipper.

  Lucia’s.

  CHAPTER 36

  Bridget, Thursday, May 14, 2015

  “Lucia!” Bridget’s voice echoed off the brick walls, the floor. The inside of the pulper, along the rear wall, contained a maintenance ladder, steel pipe and thin. Bridget wound her way around the concrete casing and tested the ladder. It was about a fifteen-foot drop to the floor, but the ladder felt solid. She dropped her foot down on the first rung, her moccasin slipping, and then caught herself. She climbed down, her throat closed and heart thudding with every creak.

  At the bottom, there was a smooth concrete ledge around the rotor that held Lucia’s backpack and a small rolled blanket. Bridget picked it up and called Lucia! one more time to make sure. She gingerly pulled the zipper open, pawed through contents, all black fabric. She felt a sweatshirt. A few pairs of underwear. She felt dirty pawing through Lucia’s most private possessions; her skin crawled. She hoisted the backpack onto her back and climbed the ladder on shaky legs.

  Back on solid ground, in better light, she could see the contents more clearly. Underneath everything, a spiral-bound notebook, a cracked paperback: Modern and Ancient Philosophy. She fanned through the paperback. Words so tiny you could barely read them, the warm smell of sweat on aging paper. She put it aside and flipped through the journal. More of the same. Pencil sketches, ramblings about Jung and Nietzsche, letters and poetry. Something fluttered out, beautiful and thin, like a butterfly. Bridget bent down, picked it up. A tarot card.

  A crumbling brick steeple, the top aflame. A jagged branch holding a keen one-eyed raven. The falling jester, the twining king. The tower.

  She’d only ever drawn it once. Years ago, before she’d met Holden, when Aunt Nadine’s husband had run their pickup into a swamp, drowning himself and their pastor, both of them drunker than Cooter Brown off Father Noone’s moonshine. Unlike many other cards, it only had one meaning: impending disaster.

  Bridget’s hands shook as she tucked the card into her purse, her mind flashing on the bird’s one sharp eye.

  With the backpack in one hand, Bridget found her way back outside, the sun fiery above the horizon, twilight looming.

  “Lucccccciiiiiiaaaaaaaa!” she yelled again, her voice cracking at the end, her head thick, her pulse beating behind her eyes.

  To everyone else, the draw of the mill was the building itself—dark corners and endless industrial hideouts. The floor littered with broken beer bottles, the delicious danger of the pulper, like it could suck you down and just start pulping again, all by itself. Teenage horror stories, fueled by hooch and weed. Plus, it’s the place that ruined many of their lives. Before, they had family dinners, blue-collar fathers with short commutes, storefronts without soaped and broken windows. After—well, it was all different after. There was something satisfying about ruining small parts of the place that ruined you.

  The dam, though, was too fast, too much. All that water striking the poured concrete wall with enough force to spray upward. In the summer, the discharge feels electric, a zinging through your face and limbs until you’re chilled. The fence along the clearing up top had long since fallen away and, maybe five years ago, a boy drowned. A middle-schooler, hanging out with his older brother, went over the edge, his head breaking on the rocks at the bottom. Bridget didn’t know the boys or the family, and they moved away shortly after. The kids still talked about it, said you could hear him scream if you stood out by the water long enough.

  Everyone said you can still smell the sulfur, feel the burn of chemicals as it mists your skin. Tripp shrugged it off as pure imagination. Sulfur dissipates, he said. No one can actually smell it. The mill has been out of operation for ten years. Nate had agreed: hydrogen sulfide is harmless at low levels. At high levels, when it can kill you, you can’t even smell it anymore.

  Bridget swore she could smell it, as thick and noxious as rotten eggs. She followed the smell, the rhythmic pounding of the water in the background; she could feel it in her feet and up her legs. A warning, like a bellow.

  The back of the mill had grown over, a single trampled path where people walked, the dirt packed down, the weeds and thistles slapping at her ankles, her calves. The backpack bumped against her back with each step. She paused before the clearing, yelled out “Lucccciiiaaaaa!” her voice straining above the whoosh of the water, the birds and the flies and the mosquitoes silenced, and all she could hear was the water, filling her ears and her head and her lungs, that chemical water in her lungs until she couldn’t breathe.

  The brush cleared right before the bank. The dirt was speckled with black, dusty birds. For a moment, Bridget panicked, eyes swung upward to the sky, looking for the swarm to fall again, and then realized no one had come back here to clean them up.

  Where were the buzzards, the crows, the vultures?

  Bridget wondered if they avoided the noxious mist like everyone else. She could feel it now, a soft rain on her forearms and her forehead. Just a haze.

  In the sun, ten feet straight ahead, right at the bank, a glint of metal caught her eye. Something reflecting the sun at exactly the right angle. Bridget dropped the backpack, dust billowing, and picked up the shining thing, turn
ing it over in her fingertips. A metal heart ring. Half a heart, the etching worn down and soft, like it’d been rubbed with a fingertip. Small enough for a child.

  She’d seen it before.

  Bridget looked back toward the mill, the parking lot hidden beyond it, then up to the sky.

  A lone vulture circled, out over the water. She thought about how you never seemed to see only one, like maybe the rest knew to stay away.

  She tucked the ring into her palm, the point of the heart digging into her skin, and crept to the edge of the bank. She looked up at the bird before she looked down to the bottom of the falls, her heart pulsing in her throat, the whoosh in her ears that matched the whoosh of the water.

  Bridget saw the white of her hair first—splayed out like an angel, at least twenty, maybe thirty feet below. She floated face-up, arms stretched to the sides, like she’d simply jumped backward and landed that way, the way you fall onto a freshly made bed. Her mouth was open, almost like she was laughing, her skin gray as the rocks. The water lapped at her forehead in a kiss.

  She’d been there awhile.

  Bridget called to her again, Lucia! But it was quieter, halfhearted, and inaudible over the thrumming drone of the water. It didn’t matter anymore. She was never going to answer.

  CHAPTER 37

  Nate, Thursday, May 14, 2015

  When Harper and Mackey came back, they banged on Tripp’s front door while Tripp was at work, yelling because they didn’t care that Tripp had nosy neighbors.

  “Come on, Winters, know you’re there. Open up, buddy. Time to chat.”

  When Nate opened the front door, he saw Harper first, leaning a bit to the side, against the door frame, and in the back, Mackey, listlessly picking at his teeth.

  “Oh, the dynamic duo. What do you have for me today?” Nate opened the door wide, letting them pass, and Harper raised his eyebrows.

  “Just some questions, Winters.” They stood in the hall. Mackey folded his arms across his chest. “We think you should come with us this time. Down to the station.”