by Gian Sardar
Yes, she thinks. She should leave Minnesota. Everything here is dangerous. But then she stands up and asks what time to be ready.
To think of something other than the trip with Abby, Aidan once more looks up the rapes in Marshall and vicinity, starting five years prior to the first linked case. Serial killers and rapists tend to start with one that’s personal, one that gives an intense psychological arousal, as the victim is usually someone they know. However, that first foray is often different in countless ways, so Aidan isn’t quite sure what he’s looking for. Still, he’s looking for something, anything to stand out. Schultz thinks the first was the store manager in Marshall, but instinct tells Aidan there was something before.
His phone rings—Brittany.
“You called my mom’s house.”
Shit. “Force of habit, I guess. The number just came back to me.”
“Well, the message busted my sister, and yes, she is smoking again.”
A deep breath. “Good. Okay. The same brand you found?”
“She smokes whatever her friends have because she’s broke. And I don’t know that any of that’s good. This is seriously why you called? What’s going on?”
“Just checking everything. She smokes on the side of the house?”
“That’s her spot, so it doesn’t get in the house. My mom would kill her.”
Hanging up is a relief, both to be off the phone and for the easing of his mind. Though the worry is not completely gone, the explanation has rendered it faint, removed it from the spotlight.
Back to the older rape cases. They’ve pored through these before, but now, for some reason, one stands out. There’s something about her face. He looks at the date—two years prior to the first serial rape in Marshall. He calls Haakstad, staring at the photo—nineteen years old, disordered brown hair, a short forehead, and arched eyebrows far too thin. Even in the photo, taken before the rape and provided by the family, she looks reluctantly wise, someone forced to make decisions and pay bills from a young age. “Tell me about Becky Cox.”
“Who? No hello?”
“Sorry, cramming before I duck out for twenty-four.”
“Good. You need it. You ask Hardt about her?”
“Hardt doesn’t have a desk. Man works out of his hotel room—easier to call you. And nicer.”
“Gimme a sec.”
Rather than put the call on hold—a modern feature Haakstad has shunned—he sets the receiver on his desk, and Aidan listens to the sound of the Marshall station. Someone yells that the water tastes like dirt.
“This was long ago,” Haakstad says as he picks up. “Got DNA, been running cold hits for years. No matches. You’re liking her for the first?”
“I don’t know. Just looking.”
“Complete file’s in storage—I’ll get it pulled. I see her picture. She’s cute. But man, who gave this girl tweezers? No one wants that. Or, well, I guess someone did.” He laughs, then stops himself. “I shouldn’t have said that. Now I feel bad.”
Even after hanging up Aidan looks into her eyes. Blue eyes, almost aquamarine, he wonders if they’re contacts.
Schultz is standing in the doorway. “Alan Breining’s cleared. Motel footage. Definitely him there, definitely didn’t leave.”
“We need to revisit our lists,” Aidan says. “Widen our vicinity.”
Schultz nods, flipping the bottom of his tie over, pulling at a small thread. “Got police presence on our side now. But it’s been too long. He’s gonna get comfortable again.”
“He’s waiting. Some moment when we’re not looking.”
A knock on the doorframe, Schultz disappears back into his office.
“That’s it,” says an officer. “Finally. You didn’t notice this smell?”
Aidan turns to him; in the man’s hand is the vase of roses Ashley sent, when it all began. Leaves shatter with movement and the necks of the flowers are all broken, petals so faded they look burned.
22
Then
EVA RETURNS TO LUVEN as a visitor, her life here already long ago. Everything is different, brushed with nostalgia, seen with the careless freedom of a passerby. The town seems harmless, quaint almost. No longer is there threat in the patchwork fields that reach steadily and mercilessly to the horizon, or frustration in the undulations of the land, those shallow, desperate breaths. No longer is there danger in the thick stands of trees that hide houses and barns and old trucks with no tires, everything rusted. Rather, everything is touched with beautiful simplicity. Even the boring clusters of mailboxes at the base of roads shine like rows of silver teeth in smiling, laughing mouths.
Main Street, the graveyard, all the small houses filled with people Eva has known forever—it’s all oddly pleasant in a way that only emotional detachment can provide. The world viewed in remembrance, train tracks gleaming with long-ago crushed pennies. Hudson’s Pond, a world of white as she tests the ice with her friends, back in the days when she was young enough not to be excluded, when a reputation hadn’t been crafted for her regardless of truth, and when fun was fun and it didn’t matter with whom you had it. Flying across the frozen, bumpy ice. Cheeks red. On the count of three: one, two, three. Falling, sliding toward branches frozen at the edges. Another flip and the snow is gone. The pond now for Saturdays spent floating on their backs, staring at cloudless blue skies while their ears hummed with the sounds of the water and the earth and maybe even the whole universe.
Yes, everything is different now.
And she’ll be the talk of the town, that’s for sure. No longer will people be blabbering on about the new cribbed wooden grain elevator—new, despite the fact that it’s been around for over a year. They’ll be chattering about her, they’ll fall silent when she passes, and at last she won’t mind. The dresses she wears won’t be questioned, no longer just Eva Marten putting on airs. They’ll regret having said things they shouldn’t have in the past. Maybe they’ll be resentful, she thinks, maybe they still won’t like her. But that’s okay. People in Luven hating her even more will mean she’s done all right.
She goes to her father and lies beside him in the grass. Everything’s worked out, she tells him. They love each other, and that love has won. She’ll be leaving. That’s the only thing that upsets her, that her father stays here, anchored to the earth. No longer will she be able to drop by when she misses who she figures he would have been. No longer will all she’s ever known of him be just down the street, always there, always listening.
After a while, when the temperature of the day begins to dip, she stands. It’s time to go home, to tell her mother and her sister. Walking through the gates, she looks back once more, and realizes that when she’s in the ground she’ll be with William, in the Lakewood Cemetery with his parents. She’d never thought of that before, that she’d not get her chance to finally be nestled in beside her father and sister and mother, the family at last complete. And in a hundred years, people passing by this graveyard won’t know. To them, it would be as if Eva just simply never existed.
—
“Well, I knew you were lying,” Margaret says when Eva delightedly spills the news at supper.
“Yes, I was.” Eva smiles.
Nothing will upset her. Never has she felt this happy, this justified and impenetrable. Let her mother try to ruin this, just let her try, because it won’t work. The lines in Margaret’s face all seem to droop downward as the conversation continues, and only Anna asks questions—when do we meet him, how tall is he, he’s in construction?—as she herself is in love, and thus tolerant of its existence.
Only on Tuesday does she feel a slight yank of panic, a nauseating portent, a stabbing worry that thrusts her straight from sleep to consciousness. Her eyes open, vision clear, the sloped ceiling above her stable despite a feeling of pressure, of something terribly, terribly wrong. She lies there for a good ten minutes, waiting fo
r her heart to settle, and it’s from this position—in bed, still and struggling to be calm—that she hears his car pull up. She knows the sound. She’s spent months learning to recognize it, waiting for it. Maybe, she thinks, maybe she’d even heard his car from a great distance, passing the Parkses’ farm, then the Bulckes’, then turning onto Main Street. He’s here. William is here, in Luven, at her house.
It’s nine AM. She has the late shift today. There are boxes by her door, packed with clothes and toiletries. She hears his car shut off. He must have left Minneapolis around six to be here now. The car door shuts. Four creaks on the front steps. Two raps on the door.
She’s sitting up in bed when he knocks on her bedroom door, and that her mother must’ve let him in upsets her because Margaret would’ve known first. Eva calls to him to come in and hears him start up the attic stairs; then she sees the top of his head, then his face, then the whole of him, dressed in a suit, looking more handsome than she ever thought possible, the painful attraction of a last glimpse. He doesn’t smile. Understanding is thick.
They say nothing. For a few moments he looks around the room and she feels shame—the ragged and stained hooked throw rug at the base of her bed, dingy walls, cracks spreading from the window like crow’s-feet from the eyes of someone who’s seen too much. Everything is cluttered and small and unnecessary—and yet she also feels pleasure. Let him see her life. Let him get a good look at where he’s leaving her.
Then his eyes settle on her sewing machine, not yet packed, and the three batches of fabric she planned to use, feed sack fabric with blue and red and white flowers against a storm of blue dots. The labels, Johnson Flour, have not yet been removed. The fabric is bags, and he must be realizing that now. In their original form, not turned into a dress she’d wear to dinner, one he’d admire and compliment and ask about. This exposure grabs at something deep within her, a sharp yank, as with it comes a revisit of the past. How many of her dresses, he must wonder, once held flour or grain? How many times had she crossed her legs demurely, the fabric that draped gracefully actually from a bag of chicken feed? The beauty he’d seen, everything is undone, come loose by this one moment. She’d always been a farm girl. He was seeing that now. When at last he turns, she can’t meet his eyes.
He moves to her bed, crouching beneath the gradual slope of the attic, and takes a seat on the corner. She stares at the space between them.
“Why,” she finally says.
His hands are folded in his lap. “She’s expecting.”
His words are like a slap, her cheeks left red. “You were having sex with her.”
“Eva,” he says, surprised and uncomfortable, “she’s my wife.”
“But you love me.”
He meets her gaze. “Yes.”
“So that’s it?”
“I can’t leave her. Not when she’s going to have a baby.”
She nods. The whole of her is numb.
“Eva, the way things were, you couldn’t live like that. It would be worse now. You’d have less of me. I’d have less of you. That’s not right, not for you. Not for anyone.”
She says nothing, because in her mind she’s already wondering if this is the last time she’d ever hear him say her name.
He waits for a moment and then continues. “I won’t be in Rochester anymore. I didn’t want to say anything until it was settled, but I’m selling the company. Everything’s arranged. The last two days have been—well, there are a lot of details I had to figure out. None of it is what I want. But there’s no reason for her to raise a baby alone. Not when financially it’s not necessary. The choices in my life—” He pauses. “It’s not fair, what I’ve done to people. To you. To her. I need to be a better person. I need to be a good father.”
No more Rochester. No more Eva. They love each other—it’s ending and they love each other. Somehow she’d always thought that couldn’t happen.
When he leaves, he doesn’t kiss her. He stands at the top of her attic stairs and touches her cheek. “It’s so we don’t remember this as the last time,” he says when she looks up at him expectantly.
She laughs, suddenly feeling everything inside her compress. “But I don’t remember the last time.”
And so he raises her hand instead, and presses it to his lips.
When at last he’s gone, she opens the drawer to her nightstand, and quickly, before she can read the words, scoops up his notes and places them inside the decoupage box by her dresser, the repository of things that hurt.
—
At work Eva can barely move. Everyday objects no longer make sense. For a full minute she stares at a grease jar, trying to understand why she is where she is. “Roger Bulcke needs salt,” Gerry says, nudging her from behind. “And his food’s up.”
Still she stares at the grease jar, and when at last she goes to Roger, she gives him the pepper instead, and has forgotten the food. As she promises him his food she turns and sees Eddie Parks.
“Same place, same time,” he says with a smile.
It’s too much. With her hand she signals him to wait, and then heads to the cook’s counter and places Roger’s food on her tray. She tries to breathe. William has left her. Eddie is here. Never before has she felt so strongly that she’s at a crossroads, that this, this very moment is when she must pick a path. She grabs her tray and quickly slides the plates before Roger, who’s got his fork in his hand, ready.
“You don’t look happy,” Eddie says, when at last she returns to him. “You look like you could use some cheering up.”
“I might.”
“What time are you free?”
She glances at the clock on the wall. “Not for a while.”
“I can wait.”
He’d ordered oatmeal and now drizzles maple syrup on top, just like William. “It’ll be a long while.”
He says nothing at first, as if hoping a few more seconds might sway her. Then finally, “Maybe next week then.”
Eva nods and feels the weight of sadness, as if she indeed chose another path and already the sight of him is growing faint.
—
Days later, anger begins to spread its rays. Tentative at first, then stronger, shoving away sadness and casting her in an unsettling glow. Anger inspires action, and action is what will fix the situation. She’s invigorated. There is no reason this needs to end. They can still be together, they can find a way. She never should’ve told him she couldn’t live like that. She can move to Minneapolis. An apartment maybe, on a quiet block where he could come and go.
“You’re looking better,” Margaret says that Thursday, sitting at the breakfast table with a cup of coffee and a magazine.
Eva opens the refrigerator, finds the milk, and untwists the cap. She leans in to smell it, though she knows it’s always fresh. “I have to go to him.”
There’s a silence, followed by the sound of her mother sitting back in her chair, a judgmental creak of wood.
“What he’s got is a family now,” Margaret says. “That’s something you don’t mess with. Fun and games is one thing, but it’s a crime to take away a father.”
Eva says nothing, just pours a tall glass of milk and drinks it quickly. It’s cold, but feels as though it’s burning her throat. “So that’s the rule, is it?” She puts the milk back and picks up her glass, about to place it in the sink. “Because I seem to remember Uncle Lucas having a family, too. A baby as well.”
Now there’s the sound of the chair scraping against the linoleum, followed by the rough grab of Margaret’s hand pulling Eva’s chin toward her.
“Don’t you ever think you have the right to tell me about my life.” She drops her hand and steps back.
“What I don’t understand is how you could do what you’ve been doing if you really loved my father.” Eva watches her mother. “Or me.”
There’s a twitch in Margaret�
��s right eye, as if her anger is coursing in clumps. “You’re on thin ice when you tell another person how to love.”
Eva can’t stop. “Am I? I’m wondering, because maybe I need to learn. You’ve been playing mourner for twenty-two years, and best I can tell, almost ten of them were also spent with him.”
Her mother’s voice is steady as she picks up her purse. “Like I said.”
“You’ve never visited my father’s grave—that in itself I don’t understand. His death is just another excuse for you to be angry, the only way you get sympathy from anyone, and you knew that and you used that. Sure is easy to say you loved someone once they’re gone. But I don’t think you did. Not the way you claim. Or you couldn’t do what you’ve been doing.”
The glass is still in her hand. Flimsy glass. Breakable. Just squeeze a little. She takes a deep breath and places it in the sink, and the glass just sits there, all by itself. Suddenly her ears hum with a surge of everything and she realizes she’s going to cry—about William, her father, so many early endings.
But when she turns, she sees that it’s her mother’s eyes that have filled. Margaret’s standing at the back door, her fingertips resting on the doorknob as if just feeling to make sure it’s there.
“If you really must know,” Margaret says quietly, “I’ll tell you.”
Eva doesn’t move. She’d not expected anything.
Margaret hitches her purse up a bit on her shoulder and looks her daughter in the eye. “It’s so he leaves you alone.”
Eva says nothing. Just watches as her mother opens the door and steps into the searing light of a beautiful morning.
23
Now
GLACIAL LAKE COUNTRY. Past Lake Itasca, where the mighty Mississippi starts, headwaters as unflourishing and disappointing as an exposed magician’s sleeve. A cooler of snacks is by Abby’s feet and her carry-on bag is in the back of Aidan’s Grand Cherokee with his duffel bag, a thrill even in the proximity of their belongings. There’s a current she’s feeling, the white heat of uncertainty. Both of them heading in the same direction, away from everything they know, only inches apart as the scenery changes, red and white pine, balsam fir and black spruce. The irony, she thinks, is that where they’re going is safer than Makade, and yet more dangerous in so many ways.