The Never List

by Zan, Koethi

  He shrugged.

  “I see.” So apparently Adele thought Jack’s research was relevant to something. Relevant enough to keep people away from it.

  He went on. “Anyway, it’s too bad it didn’t work out. She had a lot going on, especially with that group she was in.” He was obviously trying to change the subject.

  “What group?” Now I was really interested. A group, I thought to myself, or a secret society?

  “I don’t really know. Some kind of Skull and Bones–type of thing at the school. Mysterious, but that’s how she was. Maybe that was the appeal. The challenge.” He seemed to be getting lost in his self-revelatory moment, his look drifting off behind me into the distance.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, loudly enough to get his attention again.

  He snapped back into the present. He looked at me, apparently trying to decide whether to go on, perhaps realizing that confiding in me might not be his fastest track back into her heart.

  Finally, he shrugged and continued. “I mean, I’d ask questions about her family, her past, even simple things like where she’d grown up, where she’d gone to school, but she always managed to deflect me.”

  He shifted in his seat, and his face reddened the way only a ruddy complexion can. I wondered exactly what he was remembering about Adele Hinton, especially because there was surely plenty to recall.

  “Any idea who else was in that group of hers?”

  “I don’t know. All I know is they met at odd times—all hours of the night, and sometimes on short notice. She took it very seriously, and if she had a meeting of that club, there was nothing I could do to keep her from it. That was her top priority.”

  I thanked him and stood up to leave. Once again he looked confused.

  “But wait, we only talked about Adele. Don’t you want to talk more about Jack Derber? For your paper?”

  I had what I needed from him already.

  “Let’s set up a call. I’m late for class right now, but I really appreciate this,” I uttered awkwardly as I eased away backward, waving to him.

  “Oh, okay. Well, say hi to Adele for me. And, you know, if she wanted to get together … we could talk about your research or something. I can probably dig up some old notes …”

  “Yes, I definitely will,” I called out as I walked quickly over to my car.

  Of one thing I was now certain. Adele was a crucial piece of the puzzle. She was right there in it. And she knew more than she was letting on.

  CHAPTER 26

  I had been in the cellar nearly one thousand days when Jennifer went upstairs for the last time.

  During each of the days she was there, I had spent hours just staring at that box, trying to imagine what she was going through. She maintained her absolute silence to the end, even though she was not gagged all the time, and even when he was not around. His control over her was total and absolute, her terror complete.

  Early on I had listened for her, thinking that eventually she would try to communicate with me again secretly, as she had in those first days. I’d thought that somehow, surely she would break free of his control enough to try again, if only for the sake of her sanity.

  When I’d hear her scratching inside the box, like a trapped animal, I’d listen for patterns, for anything that sounded remotely like a code. I’d drive myself insane wondering why I couldn’t make sense of the random noises that would occasionally emanate from in there.

  And I kept listening for a long time. If the rest of us were quiet, I could sometimes hear her chewing her food, slowly savoring whatever scraps he’d left for her that day. I would even wake up at night if she shifted suddenly in her sleep. Once I thought I heard her sigh, and I sat still as a stone for an hour afterward, waiting for her to repeat it.

  But she never did.

  In a way, she might have been better equipped than most for such solitude and reflection. She had always been pensive, hard to read, withdrawn. Always thinking and daydreaming, never focused. She had hardly ever paid attention in high school, her gaze drifting out the window to the clouds above, her mind floating somewhere out there with them, thinking God knows what. But we managed to make it through our classes together, just as we’d made it through everything else. At the end of each day she would copy my class notes down into her own impossibly neat script, and we’d use her version for studying.

  I yearned for those days, when we had not been separated by ten feet of cold cellar space, a wooden box, and whatever impenetrable psychological force Jack held over her. Now I wondered if she even had enough good memories left to sustain her, or if, like mine, her very imagination had been invaded by the horrors we were living through, and her mind could produce only nightmares. I wondered if she sometimes wished she had died in that car accident along with her mother, all those years ago. I know I often wished I had.

  It must have been that same day—at least it is in my memory—that Tracy was brought down early in the morning after a full night upstairs with Jack. She seemed to be unconscious as he half-dragged her limp body down the stairs. He threw her up against the wall. She scowled and opened her eyes briefly, just long enough for me to see them rolling back in her head.

  She wasn’t dead, anyway.

  He leaned over and chained her, careful to check the lock twice, then turned to me and Christine.

  I know Christine did the same thing I did. We tried not to look away from him, cowering in fear, as our bodies naturally wanted to do. He hated that. But at the same time we both managed to shrink our thin frames into the tiniest possible space, hoping he wouldn’t pick us next. He stood over us, laughing softly, allowing his eyes to soak us in, to absorb the sight of his own private menagerie.

  The room was utterly silent. We watched him, our hearts seizing with fear. I was willing him away from me with all my might. Not me, not me, not me. Please.

  Finally, he turned slowly and stomped back up the stairs, whistling as he reached the top.

  He had just been fucking with us this time.

  As he left, I counted the steps in my head, the sound of the creaks echoing in the colorless space. Christine whimpered with relief. I let out a deep breath, slowly. Overhead we heard him moving about easily in the kitchen, going about his usual routine apparently. As if he’d just been checking the basement for water after a heavy rain.

  Tracy slept most of that day, huddled in a ball, looking enough like a corpse that I had to watch closely to tell if her chest was still rising and falling.

  In the early evening, marked for us only by the dimming of our precious crease of light from the window, she woke with a start. Without so much as a glance in my direction, she crawled back to the bathroom, her chain barely reaching, and I heard her retching violently into the toilet.

  She stayed gone a long time after that. I listened as hard as I could and thought I heard a muffled sob from her. I nodded to myself, knowingly. Tracy would never let us see her cry. She must’ve been waiting back there for the tears to stop.

  I watched for her, tortured as usual by the slow ticking of time, waiting to see what she would do next.

  Looking back, it’s shameful that I didn’t feel anything for her then. No pity. No concern. It had all been stripped right out of me. The only variables I could register at that point were whether something caused me physical pain, or whether it alleviated the soul-crushing boredom of my day-to-day existence. By then I didn’t have much of an emotional range beyond that.

  Tracy finally scraped her way back over to her mattress, sprawled out on it, and turned her face to the wall. At first I didn’t think she was going to say anything, that she wasn’t even aware of my presence just a few feet away.

  Christine was asleep again.

  “Stop looking at me,” Tracy finally said, in a stronger voice than I would have anticipated given how weak she was.

  I looked away. Finally, she rolled over. I sat, leaning against the wall, on my own mattress, steadfastly staring in the opposite direction. Des
pite my fear of her, though, after a few minutes I couldn’t keep my eyes from darting over to see what she was doing. I was too curious.

  She noticed, of course, and snarled at me viciously like a rabid dog. Instinctively I shrank away, my chain rattling loudly.

  Christine stirred, opened one eye for a second, and went back to sleep.

  I was always awed by Christine’s capacity for sleep. In a way it was the most perfect example of the power of human adaptability. She was able to shut out this experience in a way the rest of us couldn’t, and in the end, maybe that saved her. Maybe that was the key to it all. Sleep.

  But I could manage it for only ten hours at a stretch, max, no matter how hard I tried. And that was on a good day. Perversely, my regimen of near-total physical inertia resulted in bouts of insomnia. I had to make up the rest of the hours either by losing myself in my imagination or by trying to lure one of the others into conversation. Either way was painful.

  But there were times when talking definitely helped. When we all got along, in a manner of speaking. When even Christine pulled herself away from her dark private place and we talked almost like normal people. Times when I supposed the others were every bit as bored as I was, as tired of fighting against their own interior torments, and we were able to put our own issues aside to keep our minds functioning, if only at a bare minimum.

  We told each other stories, about our past, both real and embellished, anything to keep time moving forward, though toward what, none of us knew.

  That was the kicker. We were waiting. Always waiting. As though we wanted something new to happen. Often wishing it would, because the boredom made you even crazier. But when something new did happen, it usually hurt, and then we ended up taking all our wishes back.

  That day, though, Tracy clearly didn’t want to talk. She was pale and sweaty, despite the cold of the cellar. She closed her eyes again. She usually didn’t sleep so much. Something was wrong.

  I waited until her breathing became even and regular, and then, convinced she was truly out, I pulled myself over to her. It must have taken me a full fifteen minutes to make it there without my chains giving me away. I carried as much of the metal strand as I could, carefully placing a few links onto the cold cement a little ahead of me each time, so they wouldn’t make a telltale scraping sound when they dragged. When I finally made it to where she lay sleeping, I looked her over, scanning her flesh for some sign of life.

  And then I saw them.

  There on her arm, faint but distinct, were track marks. Seven small spots in a perfectly even line on her pale skin. I could see where the needle had gone in, and I could even identify today’s fresh mark by its slightly reddened outer rim.

  He was giving her heroin. Not out of pity. Not as an escape. No, he was punishing her. Making her an addict so he could gain even more control over her.

  He would not have chosen this particular form of torture randomly. There was always a method to his madness. Somehow he must have discovered what that drug meant to her, the significance it held in her life. He must have known that almost nothing would be more painful to her than the pleasure and release offered by that particular poison.

  But how? Tracy was so steadfastly resolved to keep him away from her memories and out of her mind. He must have pushed her very hard. Had she had a moment of weakness and told him about her mother, about that night at the club?

  After I saw the marks, I returned to my spot as fast as I could manage without making noise and waited for her to wake up.

  It was several hours before she rose and made her way slowly to the bathroom again. I heard her vomit some more, and then watched her haltingly drag herself back to her mattress. By then she seemed to be feeling a little better. Well enough to glower at me, at least, and tell me to leave her the fuck alone. I said nothing, knowing it was safer to wait and see what she did next.

  She sat staring at the box, wrapped up in her own misery, and I wondered if she was telling herself that things could be worse.

  I managed to keep from looking at her for a good ten minutes, but then I couldn’t help it. I had to catch another glimpse of her arm. That second time she saw me looking, and our eyes met. She immediately turned her arm away, covering the marks with her hands.

  To my surprise, I felt my eyes fill with tears then, for the first time in months. Even though at that moment, as much as any other since I’d been down there, I felt overwhelmed by the unbearable state of our existence, as I wiped my tears away I felt relief.

  Because I was crying for Tracy.

  These tears were proof that my emotions could still penetrate the hard shell I’d grown in here. I had thought they were gone forever. But maybe I was not yet an animal. I was still a human being somewhere in there after all.

  CHAPTER 27

  The morning after I spoke to Scott Weber, Tracy and I met at the hotel restaurant. It was a beautiful June day, and it almost seemed possible to forget why we were here as we ate scrambled eggs and compared notes.

  “So. In re the matter of Adele Hinton,” Tracy began, “I am ready with my analysis. Wanna hear it?”

  I nodded.

  “Classic frustrated academic. Always the best in her class in high school, thought she was going to take the intellectual world by storm. She thinks she is a genius with a capital G. And yet here she is, stuck at a crappy state school in the middle of nowhere.”

  “It’s not a bad school, is it?”

  Tracy shook her head. “Her words. Anyway, she let it slip that she’s working on some big project for a conference a year from now. She was pretty cagey about it, but that’s normal in academia. Whatever it is, she clearly thinks it’s her ticket to a better appointment. You know, she seems so confident, but I think underneath it all, she feels like as long as she’s here, she’s a loser.”

  “Mmmm … that makes sense,” I muttered as I swallowed a mouthful of eggs. “And what do you make of the S&M bit?”

  “Who knows? Maybe, as she told you, she really wants to understand Jack. But somehow I suspect it’s just her way to be subversive, to get attention in scholarly circles by going to extremes.” Tracy was about to continue when my phone rang. I held up a finger and answered.

  “Hello?” I recognized Jim’s number, but he didn’t speak right away when I picked up.

  “Jim, are you there?” Tracy looked over at me, curious, but went back to spreading butter on her toast.

  “I’m here. Listen, I have something for you.”

  “Did you finish your research assignment?” I smiled a little, despite myself.

  “Sarah. It’s hard to say really, but there … there does seem to be a pattern. We looked at the university’s files and Jack’s personal finances, expense reports, that sort of thing. And we think we have a pretty reliable record of where he was over a large time period, both before you were in captivity and during. And there does seem to be a correspondence. It looks like there were young women who disappeared in each city he went to for each academic conference. I have a list.”

  “How many names?”

  A pause. I tried again, my voice softer this time.

  “I want to know how many names.”

  Tracy held her knife poised in midair, looking at me. Tension filled her eyes.

  “Jim, we deserve to know. We need to know.”

  He sighed. “Fifty-eight. Including the four of you.”

  Tracy saw the expression on my face and started furiously buttering her toast. When it was dripping, she put it down, swallowed hard, then stared off into the distance.

  I took a deep breath. “I want that list, Jim.”

  As I said it, I could almost picture Jim putting his hand over his face.

  “Sarah, you know I can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Technically, it’s confidential information. But more important, it’s probably not a good idea for you to see it yet. Let me look into it some more. I want to see what kind of connections we can establish.”
>
  “Has anyone else on that list been found? Any bodies been identified?”

  He paused again.

  “Only the three of you.”

  “Are all those cases open? Are there active searches going on?”

  “Sarah, you have to keep in mind that over eight hundred thousand people go missing every year in the United States. This type of case goes cold fast. And some of these cases are more than fifteen years old.”

  “Right, so if some of those other girls are alive, they’d be just a little older than I am. I’d still want to be found, Jim.”

  “The chances that—”

  “I understand the statistics perfectly well.”

  Jim was silent.

  “Where are you, Sarah? Let’s start there. I will come to you.”

  “That’s a lot of families still waiting for their daughters, Jim. I want to see their names.”

  “Where are you?” he asked again.

  I hesitated. “I’m still in Portland. With Tracy. Bring the list.”

  I hung up and looked over at Tracy.

  She was still staring out over her breakfast. “How many?”

  “Fifty-eight. Including us.”

  Tracy’s jaw dropped. “I have to tell Christine,” she said, putting down her fork and leaning forward. “She needs to understand the scope of this. This is more than just finding Jennifer.”

  “And it could be more than Jack.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Fifty-eight girls. Could Jack have really been acting alone? If there was some sort of secret society, one involved with human sacrifice like that Bataille group, for chrissakes … couldn’t that have something to do with it?”

  Tracy was still staring off into the distance. “The warehouse. We have to go back there. We have to see what it was used for, or still is,” she said.

  My stomach plummeted. “Why don’t we wait until Jim is out here? Let’s let him explore the dark old warehouse that might be a temple of human sacrifice,” I suggested hopefully.

  “Sarah, the FBI doesn’t want to open up these cold cases, even if Jim is willing. There isn’t any pressure on them. There’s no press. Things need to be stirred up—that’s how it works. Trust me, it’s what I do. We need to give them something more to go on, something that will force them to look deeper and do it now.”