There was a breeze, carrying on it the heady smell of burning leaves. I thought of high school and football games and sitting in the stands with the girl who'd become my wife. All that sweet frantic necking in the backseat of the car later on, and a wolfed-down midnight pizza at Pizza Hut. Then more necking before she finally went in for the night. It was painful to confront my loss this way; and yet it was pain lined with pleasure.
"Are there really cannibals?"
"I'm afraid there are."
"You ever meet one?"
"Once. When I was with the FBI."
"Wow. You were with the FBI?"
I nodded.
"So how many people did he eat, the cannibal, I mean?"
I smiled. "Well, I don't think he ate whole people. Just little bits and pieces of them."
"You ever meet anybody who ate an entire person?"
"Not that I can think of."
She was a great kid. Cute and smart and curious, even if her curiosity did take a macabre turn here and there.
I said, "You think he did it?"
"Who?"
"Rick."
"Killed Sandy, you mean?"
"Uh-huh."
She looked at me. "Maybe."
I guess I was surprised she hadn't simply said yes. His history with Sandy. The blood on his hands.
"You think of anybody else who might've done it?"
"That's what Iris wants me to talk about."
"Somebody else you suspect, you mean?"
I could see her tense up. "You were really with the FBI?"
"Yes."
"How long?"
"Eleven years."
She watched me some more. "I still probably ought not to tell you anything."
"'Why not?"
"'Cause
Iris'd
get mad. She's got a terrible temper."
"She does, huh?"
"She got kicked out of court one day because she told the judge
he was stupid." She checked her watch. "Well, I guess I'll ride over to Wal-Mart. I need to get some stuff. Then I'll stop back here."
"She left a note. She's supposed to be back in half an hour."
"Well, if you see her first, just tell her Emily Cunningham stopped by."
"Any other message?"
She smiled. "You just want to know what I want to tell her, don't you?"
"I sure do."
"We'll have to talk some more about cannibals sometime."
"I can't wait."
She looked at me and said, "Tell her I want to talk to her about Sandy's dad. And that baby picture. She'll know what I mean." Then she was gone.
I
spent two hours in the library reading about Paul
Renard
and the asylum fire. The librarian, a sweet-faced woman with a slow, sad smile, said that this was the most exciting story in all of Brenner's history. She said she could remember seeing Paul
Renard
when she was a young girl and that he'd been quite handsome. She then gave me what she referred to as the "
Renard
File."
Renard
had been a local boy of great means. He'd gone east to school and graduated from Princeton, then returned here to run his father's bank. His parties were famous. He'd once brought a string quartet in from Chicago. On another occasion, he got Robert Frost, who'd been doing a reading at the University of Iowa, to have dinner at his estate.
Renard
was cultured, smart, generous, and a heartbreaker. He flew women in from as far away as Los Angeles and New York for some of his three-day weekends. His manse had a pool, a tennis court, and a beautiful view of the Iowa River, complete with natural dam.
It was believed he killed his first woman when he was
thirty
one
. This was never proven—or at least, the local police didn't try very hard to prove it and he killed his second when he was thirty-three. Both were hitchhikers. Both took months to identify. He had buried them in deep pits. During all this time, he continued to run his bank and have his parties. There were those who believed he belonged in prison; and there were those who believed he was completely innocent, and that his accusers were merely jealous of his lifestyle. He was an awfully charming man, apparently, and a lot of people liked him. Six months after the discovery of the second body, an assistant county attorney went to the town council—behind his boss's back—and gave a rambling and melodramatic speech, the point of which being that Paul
Renard
should be indicted on two counts of murder. When his boss did find out about it, he fired the young man, who left town shortly thereafter.
The quirk in the story had to do with a third murder. A local waitress was found strangled to death in her house trailer. Paul
Renard
could not possibly have committed this murder. He was in New Jersey at the Princeton homecoming. But the feeling of the town's three or four most powerful civic leaders was that violence was getting out of hand—three murders in five years in a town that hadn't seen a murder in the previous two decades—and while they were resolving the waitress's murder (her boyfriend, a redneck drifter with ties to the KKK, had already been indicted), they might as well deal with Paul
Renard
as well.
They gave him his choice. He could face indictment and trial or he could agree to voluntary incarceration in the local psychiatric hospital. He offered a third option. He would go away and never return. They said no. They were decent people; why inflict a sociopath on another community? There was no doubt about his guilt. He'd lost a wristwatch at one of the death scenes. They kept reminding him of this. They kept reminding him that after the second death, the local police had secretly searched his manse and found bloody clothes. The blood on his shirt and trousers matched the type of the dead girl.
Paul
Renard
was incarcerated. The story went that he'd suffered a complete nervous breakdown. Apparently, those parties weren't as easy to stage as they might appear to the untutored eye. They had taken their toll on the poor dear.
One year into his stay at the psychiatric hospital,
Renard
began to cause trouble. He'd discovered voodoo, a belief system which fascinated him. He had his little cult of followers. He was their absolute master. He began by sacrificing rats and cats and stray dogs. A nurse, in love with him, even allowed herself to have sex with all of the men in the cult as
Renard
watched. The cult grew. The staff did everything it could to turn his followers against him. They were always pointing out how he abused and degraded them in his "authentic" rituals, and how said rituals were really nothing more than excuses for
Renard
to have sex. The two hospital administrators in charge were reluctant to call for outside help because the publicity would shut them down. Who wanted to send a troubled loved one to a mental hospital where voodoo was practiced in the patient rooms?
And then the fire.
More than thirty years ago.
Twenty people dead.
And Paul
Renard
on the run.
It was commonly believed that nobody could survive a fall into the rapids. Not even
Renard
. Two of the deputies who followed him to the edge of the cliff swore they saw his head being smashed against the jagged rocks in the churning waters. One even said that he saw blood spray from
Renard's
skull when
Renard
hit the rapids and then the dam. He assured the press that nobody, however wealthy, however elegant, however cunning, could possibly have escaped those rapids. And then being hurtled over the dam itself.
But still, there were those locals who insisted that he had not only survived but had returned in another guise. This was at least in the realm—however unlikely—of the possible.
The supernatural stories were another matter. Rick Hennessy
wasn't the first person to claim that he had been possessed by the malignant spirit of
Renard
. At least three others accused of murder had also blamed
Renard's
hardworking ghost for their troubles.
A sanitized version of
Renard's
life story (wanton mental-hospital voodoo orgies not included) was told to local students at Halloween. And a Hollywood producer, no less (
Angels and Tramps
,
Sisters in Sin
, and
My Bed or Yours?
) had visited here twice, both times discussing at length the Paul
Renard
story. He was especially interested in the "wanton mental-hospital voodoo orgies," a descriptive phrase that he, as a matter of fact, had come up with. So far, the cap was still on the lens.
"F
ascinating, isn't it?" the librarian said when I brought the file back to the front desk. She was a nice-looking woman in a navy blouse and bias-cut print skirt.
"He was a busy boy."
"You think there's any chance he's still alive?"
"He'd be seventy-two years old now."
She gave a little shudder. She was fiftyish and very cute. "I guess I just like scaring myself. I still love ghost stories. And I always watch the horror movies with my two boys." Then, "But you know, a lot of people still believe that he's still here somewhere."
"Just wandering around spooking people?"
She gave me an impish smile. "You picked yourself an interesting case to work on, Mr. Payne."
I
raised my hand and was about to knock when I heard Tandy's voice say, from behind the motel room door, "Just go fuck yourself, Laura."
"Oh, that's nice. I'm holding all this together and you're telling me to go fuck myself."
"Don't play the martyr. If you're holding this together, it's for your own sake. Not mine. You like all this bullshit."
I figured I'd do them a favor by knocking. I knocked. Tandy opened the door. "I'll bet you heard us screaming
."
I smiled. "Just the 'fuck off' part."
"Oh, good," Laura said behind Tandy. "He didn't hear the 'stick it up your ass' part."
"Now, that would've shocked me."
Tandy waved me in. "Our secret is out, I'm afraid. My sister is an arrogant, cynical, selfish bitch. Nothing personal, of course."
"This is just like pro wrestling," I said.
"The diva is throwing a diva fit," Laura said. "The cable folks want her to do a couple of teasers about the ghostly spirit of Paul
Renard
. And she won't do it."
"We don't even know if there is a ghostly spirit," Tandy said.
"That's why I won't do it. If I honestly believed that Rick was possessed, then I wouldn't
mind
doing it."
"You want me to show you our last Nielsen, babe?" Laura said.
"Don't call me babe."
"Lowest rating we ever got."
"The
ratings'll
get even lower if I start faking stuff."
"They
can't
get any lower. Babe."
The motel room was identical to mine. Badly scuffed brown outdoor carpeting. Heavily glued but surprisingly spindly desk, a small water-scarred bureau, bed. And paintings of horses done by somebody who didn't know much about anatomy, equine or otherwise. There was a submarine-like darkness and dampness to it, a netherworld atmosphere—with the door closed at least—where salesmen battled loneliness and adulterers battled guilt and drifters battled those stray dangerous impulses that came on with meth or coke.
"You know a teenager named Emily Cunningham?" I said.
"Sandy's cousin," Laura said.
"She was over at Rutledge's office. Says she's going to cooperate. What's that supposed to mean?"
"Sandy supposedly told Emily something right before she died," Tandy said. "But Emily has been reluctant to tell the Rutledge woman what it was."
Tandy looked down at her sister, who sat on the edge of the bed. "I hate you, Laura."
"Well, I hate
you
."
"Go to hell."
"No,
you
go to hell."
Tandy sat down next to her and they were soon enough entangled in girly white arms, giggling and sort of half-assed crying and saying, "Oh, I'm sorry."
"No,
I'm
sorry."
And I could see them in that moment as little girls, sweet and pretty and smart, making up over some idiotic fight they'd had.