Authors: Blake Crouch
Vi threw the towel into the bathroom and climbed onto the bed.
She lay flat on her back beside Max without touching him.
He still wore his navy sweat suit from cross-country practice and smelled of running outdoors in the cold, his plentiful
curlyblack
hair in a sweaty tangle.
Max sat up and said, “I’ll bring your dinner back here.”
“Just lay with me.”
Max laid back down.
They didn’t move or speak for awhile.
“I talked to this little girl,” Vi said finally, staring into the ceiling.
She spoke at hardly more than a whisper.
“Thirteen years old.
Name’s Jenna.
Wants to be an Olympic swimmer.
Four days ago, in the middle of the night, Jenna watched a man with long black hair beat her mother unconscious.
That man had just come from the next door neighbors where he’d broken the necks of two little boys and murdered their parents.
“While her mother lay unconscious in the hall, this thing broke into Jenna’s bedroom.
She was hiding in her closet.
He threw open the doors, told her to get on the bed.
She said he spoke very softly.
Said he was covered in blood.
Thought it was her Mama’s.
“Jenna got on the bed thinking she was going to be raped and killed.
You know what he did?
Tucked her in.
Pulled the covers up around her neck, his face just inches from hers.
She said he smelled like lemons.
He told her, ‘I have to take your mommy with me.’
Said it very softly.
Then this monster told Jenna he’d drown her in the bathtub if she got out of bed before sunrise.
“He left her room and went and talked to her brother.
Jenna stayed in bed until the sun came up.
When she walked out into the hallway, her mother was gone.
“She told me all this, sitting in the Cherokee.
Never cried.
But she’s very worried about her brother.
He won’t talk to anyone.
Their father was killed by Andrew Thomas.
Now the mother’s probably dead.
And we may not catch this guy, Max.”
“But you know it’s Andrew Thomas.
I mean, who else would’ve pushed his old girlfriend off that lighthouse?”
“Of course we think it’s him, but the evidence isn’t there yet.
The physical description of the
perp
from that terrified little girl doesn’t really fit Andrew Thomas.
We got faint boot prints in the
Worthingtons
’ backyard.
Reports of a gray Impala in the neighborhood on Sunday afternoon.
The only promising piece of evidence is a laser pointer we pried out of Ben Worthington’s right hand.
CSI lifted a partial and latent prints is checking it out.
It’s the only hope we’ve got at this point.
And even if it turns out it belongs to Andrew Thomas, we still have to find him, and he’s managed to hide for seven years.”
“You
gonna
be able to detach from this?
I mean, how long till I have my wife back?
I can’t go for a week without you—”
“He murdered an entire family, Max.
Children, you know?
Tore up the parents something fierce.
Since before we got married, my period has started every twenty-eight days between two and five o’clock in the afternoon.
My body’s an atomic clock, and right now, I’m two days late.
This didn’t even happen when Papaw died.”
Max rolled over on top of Vi, held her face between his palms.
“I know what would take your mind off this,” he whispered, planting delicate kisses along her eyebrows.
“
Wanna
play?”
He had the long lean body of a runner and it fit perfectly between her legs.
She sensed him swelling against her through his nylon pants, felt lewd for wanting him while the slaughter of the
Worthingtons
consumed her.
“I still have the smell of that family in my nose,” she said.
“How can you even—”
Max slid her sweatpants below her knees, kissed her inner thigh, and moved up slowly with his tongue.
“You just tell me when to stop,” he said, “and I’ll go get your dinner.”
He went back to work.
She did not tell him to stop.
26
ON Halloween I flew into Rock Springs, Wyoming, rented a car, and by sunset was cruising north up Highway 191 into the unending bleakness of the high desert plain.
At dusk I pulled over at an abandoned gas station in
Farson
where 28 crosses 191 and runs northeast around the southern terminus of the Wind River Mountains for seventy miles to the city of Lander, my destination.
Stepping out of the car, I walked across broken faded pavement into the middle of 191 and gazed north and west into the evening redness.
I wondered if my brother’s cabin still stood in this wasted country.
Just thirty miles north I imagined I could feel it, a dark presence on the horizon exhuming memories I would not acknowledge.
The wind was calm, the highway empty.
The silence and loneliness of the desert bore down on me, matching my spirit.
At an elevation of 7,550 feet I crested South Pass.
Through the driver side window I could see the lavender foothills of the Winds.
When I swallowed my ears popped.
The highway descended at a gentle grade.
A brown sign informed me that I was now in grizzly bear country.
The moon came up, lit the hills.
I drove through downtown Lander, a small town that in the summer months served as a port of entry to the eastside of the Winds.
But now that the range was
snowmantled
and inaccessible most businesses had closed for the winter leaving the streets of Lander forlorn and listless.
Brawley’s Self-Storage Co. was located off 287, two miles north of town.
I pulled up to the gate several minutes past eight o’clock and punched in the access code.
The facility was dark and deserted.
As I entered and the gate rolled shut behind me, I recalled the last time I’d come here, after fleeing the cabin seven years back, in that state of shock and dread.
At the time I didn’t think I’d last through Christmas.
My life was over in every way imaginable and the first enticing whispers of self-destruction had begun to germinate in the weakened tissue of my psyche.
I drove through the empty rows of storage buildings for five minutes until I located mine.
It was colder when I stepped outside, the moon still rising, the snowfields glowing high on the distant peaks.
I unlocked the door and stepped into the hallway of small storage lockers.
Mine was a 3’ by 4’ on the bottom row.
I’d rented the space for nine years at a cost of $1,200.
Kneeling down, I removed the padlock and pulled open the door.
Dust plumed.
I coughed.
The overhead light had burned out in the corridor and the moonlight that streamed in through the doorway did not provide adequate illumination.
So I dragged the filthy suitcase out of the locker.
I walked back outside, set it down on the hood of the Buick.
I unzipped the suitcase.
They moved me in a terrible way, these artifacts of Orson.
Sitting down on the hood, I lifted a manila folder and a notebook from the stash.
Despite what I would have to pay for looking at his photographs and reading his words, I intended to examine everything, to immerse myself once more in my brother’s depraved world, to learn what I could of his accomplice, Luther Kite, and where he might possibly be.
27
THE starting gun for the girls’ race fired as Vi opened the back hatch of the Cherokee and grabbed the folded blanket she always brought to Max’s cross-country meets.
She followed the trail to the start/finish line, staring through the tall limbless loblollies of
MacAnderson
Park at the field of runners dashing up the first hill of the 3.1 mile course.
The cheers of the spectators faded as the runners moved out of sight.
It was the first Monday of November, a mild one, the sky unblemished and sapphire, the leaves a week beyond peak—red into crimson, gold into russet.
The air stank of pine needles and exhaust from the tailpipes of the yellow buses that had carried the six cross-country teams of the Foothills Athletic Conference to this championship meet.
Vi walked over a footbridge and made her way toward the circle of blue and white uniforms near the start line.
Max stood in running shorts and a tank top amid eight lanky boys, charging them for this last race of the season.
He’d woken her this morning practicing his pep talk as he shaved in the bathroom.
Stepping out of her heels and spreading the blanket across the grass, she listened to Max, tickled at his excitement.
“This is a special day, gentlemen.
You each have the opportunity to make history for your school.
Now I know we aren’t favored.
I know ya’ll think the Raiders over there are an awesome squad—and they are—but anything can happen at a conference championship.
What’s the most important thing?
Somebody tell me.”
“Having fun?” offered the smallest boy on the team.
“Well, yeah.
But
after
having fun.”
“Breathing,” said Patrick Mullins, truest athlete of the bunch and oldest son of Barry Mullins, Vi’s sergeant in Criminal Investigations Division.
Patrick would be attending Davidson next year on a track scholarship.
“That’s it,” Max said.
“Breathe, gentlemen.
That’s all I want you to think about out there.
Filling your lungs with sweet oxygen.
Now it’s thirty minutes till the gun.
Go warm up.”
As the boys took off from the start line Max jogged over to Vi’s blanket.
“You came,” he said.
“Wouldn’t have missed it.”
That wasn’t entirely true.
She would’ve missed it had Sgt. Mullins not left a message on her cell phone saying he needed to see her at the cross-country meet to “discuss things.”
“You look cute, honey,” she said.
“Just don’t let your package hang out of those itsy bitsy shorts.”
Max grinned, said, “Violet King, you better watch that mouth.”
He leaned down, kissed her, and ran off toward the footbridge to rejoin the team.
As Vi watched him go, someone called her name.
“Violet!
Hey, sweetie, how
are
you?”