by Jeremy Bates
“So tell us what you know, Rexy,” Tony said.
Rex clenched his jaw. “I told you—”
“Out of all the families that have been attacked and gone missing, nine people in total, you’re the only one to have been part of that and survived. You want us to believe that’s just one big coinky-dink?”
Rex was incredulous. “You think I killed my own family when I was seven and have been coming back here to murder other unsuspecting families ever since? You’re a fucking lunatic.”
“I never said it was you. But I reckon you know who’s responsible.” Tony took a step closer and said in a threatening tone, “What did your pop say to you the night he killed your family?”
Rex was too shocked to speak.
“Come on, Rexy,” Tony pressed. “You were there. Your hair turned white. That didn’t happen ’cause you witnessed people drowning. You watched your pop kill your mom and brother, didn’t you? Then he made you swear to never tell anyone what happened.”
“Get the fuck off my property.”
“It’s the only thing that makes sense—”
Rex shoved Tony, hard. The bigger man shuffled backward two steps before regaining his balance. Rage flashed in his eyes, and he made to lunge for Rex, when Daisy grabbed his arm.
“Tony!” she cried. “Stop it!”
He tried to shake her off, but she held on.
“I’m sorry,” she said to Rex, tugging at Tony. “We shouldn’t have come.”
Rex had balled his hands into fists. They were trembling.
Finally Tony let himself be led limping away, casting a final, furious glance back at Rex, who remained where he stood, sick to his stomach, his world suddenly turned upside down.
***
Holding up an apple cider-scented glass candle she’d brought from home, Tabitha peeked out the attic window and recognized the people speaking to Rex as the man and woman from the pickup truck that had passed them during their walk in. She felt relieved. She didn’t know what had made her so skittish at the sight of the flashlight earlier. She supposed it had something to do with the fact it was after dark, and they were in a very isolated place.
Tabitha crossed the room to the two beds. Ellie was in the closest one, on her back, a white wool cover with candy cane stripes pulled to her chin. She’d folded her hands behind her head so she resembled a sunbather soaking up rays on a beach.
Bobby, in the adjacent bed, was scrunching his eyes shut the way he always did whenever Tabitha tucked them in.
She sat on the floor next to Ellie’s bed so she was at eye level with her daughter. “Did you pick a story for me to read?” she asked.
Ellie produced a book from behind her head with a flourish. “This one!” she said.
“Were you hiding that?”
“Yes!”
“I was wondering why you were in such a silly position.” She took the book and studied the cover. “…I Love You, Broom Hilda,” she said, reading the title doubtfully. She thumbed through the pages of the thin paperback. “This isn’t a novel, sweetie. It’s a comic strip.”
“But she’s a green witch!”
“Who chain-smokes cigars and drinks whiskey, by the looks of it.”
“Please?”
“We’ll give it a shot, I guess. Can’t be too bad if it was up here in the first place.”
Tabitha spent the next twenty minutes reading to Ellie, and admittedly developing a soft spot for the cantankerous chubby witch and her eccentric friends.
When she closed the book, Ellie asked, “Can I be a witch like her when I grow up?”
“Absolutely not.”
“How come?”
“Do you have a bent hat and striped socks?”
“No…”
“Well, that’s why then.” Tabitha kissed her daughter on the forehead. “Now try to sleep.”
“Do I have to go fishing tomorrow?” she asked as she rested her head on the lumpy pillow.
“Not if you don’t want to.”
“T-Rex isn’t going to make me?”
“When has Rex ever made you do anything you didn’t want to do?”
“He made me come to this house.”
“He did not. I asked him if we could come. You don’t like it here?”
“It’s okay.”
“Just okay?”
“It would be better if I was allowed my iPad.”
Sighing, Tabitha stood. “Good night, sweetie. I love you.”
“I love me too.”
“Goodnight, Bobby.”
At the sound of his name, Bobby scrunched his eyes together even more tightly, no doubt convinced he was pulling off an Oscar-worthy performance.
Tabitha returned downstairs and found Rex on the sofa in the front room. He’d lit the other three jar candles they’d brought, and the small flames filled the room with warm light and jittery shadows.
“That was a short visit,” she said, referring to their company.
“Oh, hi,” he said. He had been deep enough in thought he hadn’t seemed to notice her standing there.
“Everything okay?” she asked.
“Yeah, sure,” he said, and although she couldn’t read his expression in the poor light, his voice sounded uncharacteristically melancholic.
“Did they want something?”
“Who?”
She frowned. “The couple you were talking to outside.”
“No. They were just saying hi.”
Tabitha wasn’t sure she believed this, but Rex had always been very open with her, which meant there was likely a good reason for his reticence. She wasn’t going to pry. “I’m going to get changed,” she said. “Be back out shortly.”
“Sure,” he said.
Tabitha retrieved her shoulder bag and carried it to the small bathroom. Setting the jar candle and bag on the counter, she stripped down to her underwear and bra, unzipped the bag, and withdrew the pieces of her neatly folded flight attendant uniform. She pulled on the fitted navy skirt and matching jacket, and tied the colorful scarf around her neck, fussing with each end to perfect the bow. She studied her candle-lit reflection in the mirror and thought she looked pretty darn good for a forty-year-old mom of two. Despite the fact Rex was a pilot, and she a flight attendant, they rarely saw each other in their uniforms because they neither lived together nor worked at the same airport. She hoped he appreciated this little surprise.
She returned to the front room quietly so as not to disturb the kids. The last thing she needed was for Ellie to call for her, or worse, come downstairs.
Rex still sat on the sofa. His eyes were closed now, his feet up on the coffee table. Such a handsome man, she thought, starry-eyed. Handsome, kind, patient, gentle, caring, successful. How had she ever gotten so lucky meeting him?
It had been a chance encounter. Her friend Leena had set her up on a blind date. She was to meet the date at a popular pub in downtown Seattle. Tabitha was punctual to a fault, and she showed up early. She went to the bar and ordered a gin and tonic. Rex was a few barstools down from her, drinking water. When she overheard him mention to the bartender he was a pilot, she told him she was a flight attendant. They started talking shop. Which airline do you work for? Which flights do you fly? This quickly devolved into what pilots and flight attendants liked discussing amongst each other best: gossip. You couldn’t escape this when you worked in one of the most hardcore customer-service jobs in America. So they exchanged their favorite stories, like the time when Tabitha had to inject a passenger with a sedative after he’d dropped ecstasy and began dancing in the galleys, or when severe turbulence turned the cabin into a mosh pit, causing luggage to rain down from the overheads, or when a woman on a red-eye flight had too much to drink and vomited her dinner everywhere, which had the domino effect of causing the entire last two rows of passengers to follow suit.
Rex, however, trumped all her stories with a truly terrifying tale. When he’d been ten seconds from landing at JFK one winter, he was forced to pul
l up at the last second to avoid colliding with the tail of a Boeing 747 that had crossed into his landing path without permission. He’d told her the disaster had been averted by a matter of feet.
“My God, Rex!” she’d said. “Were you scared?”
“I would have been screaming along with everybody else, but I was pinned to my seat with such force I could scarcely breathe.”
In retrospect Tabitha didn’t believe that modest statement. Rex was too calm, collected, unflappable. More than likely he would have exhaled deeply when the danger had passed, made a wisecrack to his First Officer about air traffic controllers getting too little sleep, and apologized over the loudspeakers to the passengers for the severe maneuver.
In any event, Tabitha and Rex had been getting along so well that evening that when her blind date eventually showed up, she huddled close to Rex and pretended to be together. Her date didn’t look twice at them.
“Keep your eyes closed,” she said now, adding a good dose of huskiness to her voice.
“Huh?” Rex said, turning.
“Eyes closed!” she said.
He kept them closed.
She stopped before him and cleared her throat. Was she about to make a total fool of herself?
“Okay, you can open them,” she said.
He did—and stared in surprise.
“Well?” she said, striking a pose like a game show model and turning in a circle. “Do I compete with all those young flight attendants you work with?”
“Compete and defeat,” he said, and grinned.
“Good, because I feel like an idiot.”
“You look stunning,” he said, and she could tell he meant the compliment.
Stepping over his stretched legs, she straddled his groin. She leaned forward and nuzzled his neck, breathing in the spicy scent of his aftershave. She nibbled his earlobe. “We’re going to have to be super quiet.”
He kissed her on the cheek. She pressed her lips to his—but could tell right away he wasn’t into it, which was a first in their relationship.
“Hey?” she said softly, pulling back. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m just—I’ve got something on my mind.”
“Those people… What did they…?” She shook her head, thinking of the boating accident that had taken his family. “It doesn’t matter. Can we cuddle?”
“I’d love nothing better,” he said.
She shifted off his lap and curled up on the sofa next to him, her head resting on his shoulder. “If you want to talk,” she said. “I’m here.”
“Thanks,” he replied, but he said no more.
Tabitha closed her eyes, telling herself she would get up in a few minutes to take out her contact lenses and brush her teeth and make a proper bed on the foldout couch…but the long day quickly caught up with her, and almost immediately she drifted into a dreamless slumber.
***
In the quiet dark of the night, the only sounds were the susurrate whistle of wind on the other side of the cabin’s sturdy log walls and, barely audible, the deep and regular rhythm of Tabitha’s breathing.
Rex wrapped his right arm around her shoulder and pulled her more closely against him. She murmured but didn’t wake. He pressed his nose into her hair, which smelled faintly of pears, and kissed the top of her head.
He would tell her in the morning about the conversation he’d had with Daisy and Tony. He needed some time to first digest what he’d learned, to try to make sense of it, or to debunk it, he didn’t know which.
As he had been doing for the last while, he continued to scour his brain for memories of his father. Yet it was proving frustratingly difficult to recollect anything more than a foggy face and a few inconsequential impressions. He had been too young when his father had disappeared to conjure anything more concrete.
Which made it much easier to recast the man as a family-slaying monster.
The ease of which Rex could accept this possibility, at least theoretically, was frightening but not all that surprising. Because evil people existed in the world. They did horrible things to other people every single day. Somewhere some sick bastard was doing something unspeakable to someone right now.
So if Rex were to remain objective in the face of Tony’s allegations, and not let his emotions cloud his impartiality, there was no valid reason for him to rule out that his father could not be one such sick bastard, innocent until proven guilty be damned.
Some humans were psychopaths.
Rex’s father was a human.
Ergo, Rex’s father could be a psychopath.
That was the syllogistic argument anyway, and if Rex were to go with the wild conclusion—and he was, for the time being, if only to prove it false—what then might have occurred up here in the summer of ’81? Did Troy Chapman have too much to drink one night and pick a fight with Rex’s mother, Sally? Did the argument spin out of control, and did he kill her in the passion of the moment? Did Logan and Rex witness this and try to flee? Did their father catch Logan and kill him to keep him silent? Did their father get rid of the two bodies so there would be no physical evidence of his crime if he were ever captured and charged? Did he disappear into the mountains to live the life of a hermit? But what of the other families? The Petersons and the Ryersons? Why kill them? Did he return to Pavilion Lake in 1987 to stock up on supplies? Did he play Goldilocks in vacant cabins? Did the Petersons catch him red-handed in theirs? Did the same thing happen eleven years later in 1998 with the Ryersons…?
Rex massaged his temples with his thumb and middle finger, plying the skin in small circles. This is ridiculous, he thought. Sitting here, thinking about this, playing Sherlock Holmes, turning his father into some murderous mountain man, ridiculous.
The bottom line was that Rex didn’t have any proof, Tony didn’t have any proof, nobody had any proof of what happened to his family, to the Petersons, and to the Ryersons. Not one iota of proof. Whatever did happen would likely never be known, as was the case with the vast majority of unsolved murders—
Murders? he thought. There I go again. Tony’s poisoned my mind. Because without any bodies, who’s to say a single murder was ever committed? Mom, Dad, Logan, the Petersons and the Ryersons, they could all be living in some backcountry utopian commune, sharing chores and clothes, husbands and wives—
Something slammed into the cabin door, seeming to shake the entire room.
Rex shot upright. Tabitha, wide-awake, seized his arm in a vice-like grip.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
Someone was trying to get in.
CHAPTER 6
Paul Harris climbed the staircase to the police station’s second floor. The spacious constable quarters included a living room, kitchen, dining room, two bedrooms (which had originally been a single space filled with bunks for the unmarried troopers), and a large bathroom. Most of the building’s original architectural features remained intact, such as the stone walls and chimney, double-hung sash windows, hardwood floors, and high mansard roof. In the 1950s, an east-facing bay window was added in the living room to capture the morning light. More recently, the kitchen and bathroom received modern facelifts, with the latter getting a small laundry.
Paul stuck his head in the living room, expecting to find his wife, Nancy, curled up on the rose loveseat reading one of her mystery novels. She wasn’t there. He continued down the hallway and heard water running through the bathroom pipes.
That woman has more showers than anybody else, Paul thought to himself. One in the morning, one at night, sometimes one in the afternoon if she was bored and wanted something to do. Perhaps she had been a fish in her past life?
For his part, Paul had little interest in water in general, aside from drinking it. When he took the family to Joffre Lakes to soak up the wilderness on a warm spring or summer day, he would remain on shore, or in the canoe if they brought it, while Nancy and their grandson, Zephaniah, splashed around in the shallows.
Why get wet? What was the point? You just had to dry
yourself off again. One shower in the morning was enough for him. One every other day in the wintertime when the temperature dropped below zero.
Paul had clearly been no fish in his past life. Likely something from a temperate or tropical climate. An orangutan, maybe, or an armadillo. Yes, maybe an armadillo, from a South American rainforest. That sounded like the good life. Forage in the mornings, catch some Zs in the afternoon, forage a little more in the warm evenings...
Paul stopped outside Zephaniah’s bedroom door. Zephaniah’s father—Paul’s forty-three-year-old son—had been in and out of jail since he was twenty, and he was now serving three years in a medium-security penitentiary for smuggling firearms across the border for a convicted felon. Zephaniah’s mother died when he was two from a drug overdose. Consequently, Paul and Nancy had agreed to take custody of Zephaniah until his father was released from prison—though they were now planning to request permanent custody of the boy on the grounds that his father was an unfit parent.
Paul knocked on the bedroom door.
“Yeah?”
“Can I come in?”