The Watcher

by Jennifer Pashley

  Kateri laughs, not expecting the bitterness from Hurt. “She likes you,” she says.

  He looks her in the eye. “She tolerates me,” he says. “From what I hear, she likes them even younger.” He laughs.

  So Kateri puts her hand on Hurt’s arm. “Meet me at the morgue, Joel,” she singsongs, and he swats her away.

  It’s a small department. Chances are high that they’ve had some encounter, even though Diaz is fifteen or twenty years older than he is. It happens in small towns. But Kateri doesn’t know anything at all about Hurt’s personal life. She’s not even sure he’s straight.

  “How’d you leave it with the kid?” Hurt asks.

  “He’s coming in tomorrow for questioning. He submitted DNA today.”

  “Good,” Hurt says.

  “Anything new in the woods?”

  He shakes his head but answers. “Burnt wood,” he says, “that shows traces of accelerant. Nothing we didn’t expect. No further remains.”

  Kateri puts her fingertips to her lips. She and Hurt sit elbow to elbow, not facing each other, both looking at the line of bottles behind the bar, where a row of tiny white lights behind them illuminates them red, amber, gold. The slow-moving ball game continues on TV. She has teased Hurt before about gin and tonic, that it’s a summer drink and this is a winter place. But it’s the only thing he likes. She likes the way gin smells but not the way it tastes. On Hurt, the smell is fresh. Something clean, antiseptic.

  When the bartender comes back down, she orders another. And so does Hurt.

  “Whoever killed her …” Hurt says, starting a fresh drink. She almost stops him, but she lets him go, lets him say what it is they’ve been dancing around. “Knew about the girl,” he says. “And took the girl.”

  She nods into her drink.

  “Both of those murders hinge on that kid.” He points his finger down on the bar. “So, who knows about her?”

  “Shannon,” Kateri says. “And maybe people that Shannon knows.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Hurt says. “I hate when there’s a kid involved.” The way he sits with his arms on the bar, when he says it he wags his hands open and his thumb accidentally touches Kateri’s pinkie, and it’s a sudden shock, a pop of electricity. Like dragging your feet and touching the doorknob.

  “Sorry,” he says.

  “No worries,” Kateri says.

  * * *

  Whiskey has always been her drink of choice. She’s gone through other phases: cheap vodka, beer when she was younger, she’s tried wine. What she loves is good American bourbon.

  After, Hurt walks her to her car. She’s barely eaten all day, and she probably shouldn’t drive, but it’s too far to walk back to her apartment outside of town. She tells herself there’s no one even on the road in Spring Falls. The closest cabs are Mount Snow. There’s no Uber in a town this small.

  She leans against the side of her car, parked next to Hurt’s, and takes a cigarette from her purse. Hurt looks amused.

  “You want one?” she asks after she lights it. She loves the first smell of a lit cigarette, the paper burn, the raisiny sweetness of the tobacco.

  “No,” he says. He laughs and looks at his feet.

  “Did you ever?” she asks.

  “Sure,” he says.

  “When’d you quit?”

  He looks at the sky, hands in his pockets. “Fifteen years ago,” he says.

  Tonight, the sky is extra blue black, thick with stars that appear only in the country dark. Kateri feels loose in all her joints.

  “You want me to give you a ride?” Hurt asks.

  “We both had three drinks,” she says, and thinks, he knows about the accident. He knows why I’m here.

  He shrugs. “I outweigh you,” he says.

  Kateri laughs. “No, you don’t,” she says. There is no way Hurt is any more than one fifty, and Kateri is a solid one forty. He is built like a swimmer, lean, like a runner with bird bones.

  “I’m a guy?” he offers.

  “A dainty guy,” Kateri says. She tilts her head and finishes her smoke, and the light from the parking lot shines on the underside of her chin, and she sees that Hurt notices it. The slice, the scar. The place where she almost lost her own head.

  “Come on,” Hurt says. He looks like he wants to touch it, and she wants to let him.

  “Do you think I’m drunker than you?” she asks. She breathes in the cold air after the cigarette, slow, blows it out through her lips.

  “No.”

  She stares at him for a minute. Part of her wants to break open, to ask him, Do you want to see it? The mark on me from my mistakes? Part of her wants to push him at the shoulders and watch him windmill to catch his balance. Part of her wants to kiss him.

  She looks at his mouth when he relaxes it, the release of his lips and his jaw. He looks beyond her.

  “Joel,” she says, half reprimanding, half taunting.

  “Just text me when you’re home, okay?” he says.

  She drives a little too slow, and she watches every tree, every peripheral movement for deer jetting out in front of her car. She thinks she hasn’t had that much. She thinks the Subaru is a safer car. For a length of road right before her apartment, she closes her eyes and lets the road go, feels like flying, like sinking, like waiting to hit the ground.

  It’s twelve thirty when she falls into bed, still in her clothes. She wakes once, predawn, when the sky is still dark but the trees outside her window are loud with bird noise. It’s then that she remembers Joel Hurt’s warning and texts him—home—but sees above that that she sent him a text at one fifteen that reads you don’t know anything about me.

  He hasn’t answered either of them. She rolls onto her back, wide awake, her mouth dry, her pulse quickened, and thinks back at zero, and in her mind she sees the speedometer, its needle lowered all the way to the left. Slow enough to stop.

  TWELVE: SHANNON

  TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 12

  Baby Jane was gone. After I slept on his bed, my head leaning against his bony shoulder, he had disappeared. I didn’t see him at the car, and he didn’t appear to be home. There were pull shades in the house, all of them tightly drawn. I tried to peek in the back door, into the dark kitchen, but I couldn’t see anything at all, and none of the lights were on.

  I thought, he could be dead in there.

  Could he die that quickly?

  I leaned my head against the glass. It felt empty. That was the worst part.

  * * *

  I had to keep working. I couldn’t afford not to. I tried calculating in my head how long it would take me to make $1,300 to pay just the electricity and heat, and felt sick. It was too long. The refrigerator was festering. The toilet had been flushed with a bucket of water, and we had to go out to the public restroom most of the time. I hadn’t showered since Bear’s. No one else had washed at all.

  If anyone found out, they would take Birdie. If they auctioned the house from underneath us, they would take Birdie.

  Part of me struggled to believe it might be the best thing for her. But it wasn’t what I wanted.

  They would send my mother to rehab, or to jail, for keeping Birdie captive. They could send me to jail. I wouldn’t know how to fight it. My mother, however, had a talent for appearing completely normal in the face of authority. And if neither of us went to jail, we’d be stuck with each other, without a house. And without Bird.

  * * *

  The hill on Fountain Street was so steep I had to get off and walk my bike. I’d tried for the truck, but I didn’t feel like fighting. I just wanted to get out. The first thing my mother said was, “What if I need it?” It wasn’t an argument worth having. By the time I got to the top of Fountain, my back was sweaty but my face was chapped and cold, my hands dry and red. The house came into view like a giant looming hotel.

  I felt like a bomb that was about to go off. I leaned over on the bike in the driveway, the Land Rover parked in the middle spot again, the field out back just a bla
ck sea of cattails and brush. I blew out to catch my breath. Second shift, I thought. I hoped there was enough to do to warrant more pay. I kept the money in my pocket. It was the safest place.

  Inside, Buddy bounded on me in the hallway. Licked my face, pushed his paws into my arms, jumped on his back feet. Bear nodded his head toward the shower. “Before you get started,” he said.

  It caught me off guard. I’d always had a job where you had to shower after, a job that made you dirty, where you came home tired and sore and sweaty and smelling like grease or smoke.

  He was clearly in the other camp. The shower-before-work crowd. A job where you flexed nothing but your influence.

  “If you want,” he said, when I didn’t answer.

  “I left the clothes you gave me at home,” I said.

  “I have more,” Bear said. He grinned.

  I stood outside the big white square of the bathroom, my shoulders low. Exhausted, nervous, shamed. I felt so dirty that I needed to be cleaned before I could get dirty again. Like I needed to be decontaminated just to be here.

  Bear leaned on the doorjamb, waiting. I wondered if he would stay to watch me. There were clean white towels rolled into a basket on a table. Then he said, “Are you telling me that a hot shower and a cold beer at the end of a workday doesn’t sound good?”

  “No,” I said. “It definitely does. It’s just also the beginning of work.” I laughed a little.

  “It’s just prep work,” he said.

  He shut the door behind him when he left. And when I locked it, I covered my face and thought, I’m never going to get paid. I’m going to keep him company, I thought, and never actually catch up. I looked in the mirror and then opened the medicine cabinet, the way I had at Baby Jane’s, but I was acutely afraid of getting caught, of things falling out, of a trap having been laid for me. There was aspirin. Aleve. Hydrogen peroxide. Allergy tablets. Rubbing alcohol. Q-tips. Tom’s of Maine natural toothpaste in cinnamon. A silver razor blade and a tube of shaving cream. There were no drugs.

  I used the shampoo that was in the shower, which smelled like mint, and a body wash that was a light clear green and smelled like rosemary. The towels were as big as bedsheets, deep and soft. I thought about walking out naked, but on the bed, Bear had left me a pair of forest-green corduroys that were big in the waist and too long, a plain gray T-shirt, and a flannel that, when I checked the tag, was blended with cashmere.

  Bear was on his knees in the living room, getting a fire started, blowing with the hand bellows into the big fireplace. Outside the giant windows, it had started to rain, the sky a deep slate gray and the panes slashed with sideways drops.

  I didn’t want to go home.

  I wanted to disappear. Run as fast as I could without looking back. Change my name. Become something else. Become this. I wished he was even farther away. That we were out of Spring Falls. Out of state even.

  I wished there was a way to check on Birdie. She’d been fine when I stopped home. Bored, hungry. I made her a peanut butter sandwich, took her to the bathroom, and put her on the bed with my mother, who was sweaty and sleeping, with a book and a few dolls. Birdie gave me a look.

  “Why do you get to go somewhere?” she asked.

  I kissed her forehead. “I have to take care of some things,” I said, which was true. “And I’m an adult,” I said. She wrinkled her nose at me.

  If my mother died, I thought, would they let me keep her? Could we do it? The two of us alone? It already felt that way sometimes. I didn’t want a kid, though. I wanted what was right in front of me.

  “Better?” Bear asked, jarring me out of my downward spiral of thoughts.

  “Sure,” I said. I sank into the understuffed leather couch, which felt like a cocoon I never wanted to get out of. Buddy made himself a space next to me, curled into a spot that was too small for his bulky body but that he insisted on getting into, grunting, turning circles, until he finally settled with a low groan and his chin on my thigh.

  Bear came and sat facing me, his leg crooked on the seat, one foot dangling over the edge.

  “Tell me what’s going on,” he said.

  The fire cracked and hissed, a roar of energy rising up the chimney. The flannel already smelled like wood smoke and something else, spicy and exotic, like maybe Bear had worn it and not washed it when he left it for me.

  He waited, and I felt a nervous laughter creeping up on me. It was too much. Way too much to explain.

  There was maybe a hairbreadth between his knee and mine. In that space, a field of electricity. I wondered if he’d pick up my hand again. It was hard to look him in the eye, and he was watching very intently.

  “Um,” I said, and laughed a little. “Sorry, bad habit,” I said.

  “I’ve noticed,” Bear said.

  “We’re losing our house for taxes,” I said, stroking Buddy’s head, just to have someplace else to look. “And the power and the water are turned off right now.”

  “Is it just you and your mom?” he asked.

  I looked out the window. It was dark and wet out there, and nothing was visible in the trees or the sky. Like there was no world at all out there.

  I couldn’t lie. I’d been lying for five years, and this was the first time I’d felt like I had something to lose. I’d lied to everyone. People in town. People at school, work, the grocery store. People who knew my mom. We never took Birdie out. She’d never been anywhere. Not to a doctor, never in the car. There was no record of her having been born. No hospital stay or midwife. No birth certificate. She spent time outside, but she never ever left my mother’s view. And if my mother had to leave her, on the rare occasion she went to the bank or to buy more drugs, she locked her in the closet with a dim lamp and a coloring book. It was the only safe place for her.

  “No,” I said to Bear. It felt like a dam giving way. There was something—love, guilt, relief—flooding from my heart.

  “Who else?” he said.

  “My baby sister,” I said. It came out in a whisper. I had never said it to another person other than my mom. The baby. Birdie. My sister.

  “Your mom doesn’t work?” Bear asked. The revelation of the baby was no big deal to him. Lots of people have siblings.

  “No,” I said. “My mom’s on disability. She has been, since I was little.”

  “Did she have an accident?” Bear asked.

  “We had a fire,” I said. “She was injured getting out.”

  “Yikes,” Bear said.

  “And then she went on pain meds,” I said. “And never stopped.”

  He nodded in silent understanding.

  “And your dad?” he asked.

  “Started the fire,” I said.

  I shrugged. I’d practiced my whole life at looking tough, at appearing as though I just didn’t give a fuck about the whole thing.

  “Where’s he?” Bear asked.

  “Dannemora,” I said.

  “Did anyone die?” Bear asked.

  “No.”

  “Were you there?”

  “Yeah.”

  Silence. Then, “He tried to kill you both,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “And your sister?” Bear asked. It felt like a blessing from his mouth, just the word sister, said aloud, in recognition.

  “She’s five,” I said. “She’s not his.” I couldn’t say any more. I thought this flood of truth was going to wash me away and kill me.

  He waited while I swallowed it down, while I didn’t elaborate. In the dimmed light, his eyes took on a gold glow.

  “How old are you?” he asked.

  “Nineteen,” I answered without thinking, and then wished I’d said twenty-one.

  “That’s a lot,” Bear said.

  I looked into the fire, at the flame closest to the wood, the hottest blaze, like white gold. I listened to the rush of it, burning up.

  “I don’t have a choice,” I said.

  Bear frowned. “Everyone has choices,” he said.

  * *
*

  I remembered, on the way home, how much I had wanted to tell people about her, not because I wanted to threaten my mother’s safety but because I was in awe of her. I wanted to walk her around town, show her off, take her to the farmers’ market and out for pancakes. She should go trick-or-treating and see the Christmas tree in the middle of town. Not just the black-and-white surveillance video on the huge screen in our living room. Not just my mother’s bed. And never the inside of a closet.

  I needed to make these things happen. For her. And for me.

  It didn’t feel like a choice.

  THIRTEEN: KATERI

  THURSDAY, OCTOBER 19

  It’s not like TV. Nothing in her career has been like TV—not her cubicle in Syracuse, not the slow drive through the rural suburbs at night in a patrol car, not what’s happening now in this remote mountain town, in an unassuming brick building with a small parking lot. In some other districts up north, the police stations are no more than a trailer.

  The room where she questions Shannon Jenkins is an office, with a cheap desk from Walmart and a blue overstuffed chair, the kind you’d find in an old lady’s living room. There’s a lamp, and a bookcase filled with odd reference books: a dictionary, a thesaurus, a set of World Book Encyclopedias from the 1960s, three or four different Bibles, and one Reader’s Digest Condensed that includes The Count of Monte Cristo.

  Kateri leans on the edge of the desk and lets Shannon sit in the blue chair. He juts his head toward the book and says, “Funny.”

  “Is it?” Kateri asks. “I haven’t read it.”

  “It’s about prison escape,” Shannon says, dry, as if the joke is obvious.

  “Can I get you something?” Kateri asks. “Water? Coffee?”

  He still has his shoulders hunched the way he did in the parking lot yesterday, a different sweat shirt on today with the hood closed up underneath his chin. She wonders if this is a normal posture for him. Or what he’s hiding.

  She tries again. “Pepsi?” she asks.