Jackal, page 18
I see it.
A strange shimmer in the black.
It looks like a curtain or a web of strings. I reach out for it and make contact. When I pull it, the whole void morphs around my fingers. It puckers and tightens and, for the first time, the space gets smaller. I let go of the curtain, but it doesn’t let go of me. It envelops my hand, light as a feather, converting my limb to darkness. Like an itch you can’t scratch, I can’t shake it away. Cool night continues to climb up my body. I shiver. I try to tear it off, but I’m only successful in tearing at my flesh. It doesn’t hurt, the meat of me sloughs off with ease. Pain is replaced with numb.
With no muscle or sinew, the darkness finds a new home in my bones. That’s when the cold sets in. I open my mouth to scream and it tries to climb in there too. I don’t let it. I bite my lips shut so hard that I taste blood.
Afraid to breathe in, I feel the cold and the dark moving over me. I can’t stop it. But, I can’t hold my breath forever.
I gasp in air.
The moment I do, I’m back in my dream. The dream from before.
I’m running.
Always running.
Forever running.
Gasping for breath, I’ve come to rest at the end of the cul-de-sac, standing right in front of the woods. I check my flesh. It’s back on my bones.
Snap!
I turn to the woods and I see the hound. But this time, I see a shimmer of darkness behind it. The hound isn’t emerging from deeper in the woods, it’s stepping out from behind this curtain of night. Before my eyes can focus on the curtain, it’s gone, and the hound is in front of me. It looks at me, waiting. We both know how the rest of this goes. I move my weight to my toes and
start
to
run.
FIFTEEN
Caroline’s Fourth Day Missing
Eat’n Park was one of three destinations I was allowed to frequent as a kid without question. Church was boring and school always felt strange after hours. Plus, Eat’n Park had freshly baked smiley face cookies. A smorgasbord of Americana: twenty-four-hour breakfast, every kind of sandwich, free refills, stickies (dense grilled cinnamon rolls covered in syrup), and every food I was never allowed to eat at home. Mel and I would go there and sit for hours, nursing lemonades and picking over our breakfast feasts. We’d always finish with cookies. She’d press in the frosting of the eyes before she ate them, watching the color spill out from under her thumb, blinding the cookie to its fate.
Smiley face cookies seem like a good start to an apology. But, after picking up a dozen first thing in the morning, I don’t know if I’m the one who should be saying sorry. By the time I reach Mel’s front door, the cookies have gone cold and my anger has gone hot. It sits in my throat like a fishbone, poking me with my every movement. She shouldn’t have left me in the woods, no matter how upset she was. I shouldn’t have pushed my findings on her, no matter how concerned I was. Am. Now we both need to come to an understanding. Solving what happened to all those other girls is the only way to save her daughter.
If she’s still alive.
If they had found Caroline, Mel would have told me. No matter how pissed she is at me. The detective never confirmed what the entrails in the tarp were. Only that the dogs followed the smell of death. Some of the girls were found a week later. Caroline has been gone for four days. We’re running out of time.
I knock on the door of Mel’s house. No one answers. I ring the bell. Nothing. I press against the door itself and it creaks open. Oh no. I’m not walking through an open door. I don’t care whose. What if Melissa forgets she has a Black best friend and freaks out? It’s a silly anxiety. She has a Black husband. Still, I stay on Melissa’s doorstep with the cookies.
“Liz?” I hear from behind the crack in the door. It’s Nick. “What the hell happened?” He opens the door but doesn’t let me in.
“I brought cookies.”
Nick doesn’t budge. The silence of the house behind him feels settled. This is what this home will be like from now on.
“Where’s Mel?” I ask.
“What are you doing here?”
“I need to talk to her.”
“No.” He leans against the doorframe, turning himself into a wall between me and the inside of the house. He’s out of uniform in jeans and a T-shirt tucked into the waist. He has a pack of cigarettes folded into the sleeve of his shirt like some ’80s teenage heartthrob. I see that the flag on his hand isn’t the only tattoo he has. A blurry bloom of an American traditional chipper ship sits on his arm. Above the ship are stars. Summer stars.
“Summer Triangle?” I point to the constellations on his arm.
He shrugs. “I guess.”
“You’re the one who put it on your skin.” The man who’s doing this might know those stars. He’d definitely know the woods. He’d also be both connected to the department but small enough to disappear, like a shadow. “Shouldn’t you be at the site?”
Nick shakes his head. “I’m right where I’m needed.” He crosses his arms and settles in, just like the detective who interviewed me. This time, the gesture makes me uncomfortable.
“Is she here or at the—”
“She hasn’t told you?” He’s not as good as the detective at keeping his emotions at bay. No wonder he hasn’t advanced in the ranks. “Thought you two were close.” The sarcasm in his voice makes my blood boil. She’s clearly told him about our fight. “What are you doing, Rocher?”
“What do you mean? I—”
He never lets me get a sentence out. “She said you have some crazy ideas about this search. Said you think we’re messing things up on purpose. Said you were comparing Caroline to runaways and troubled kids.” Nick rubs the stubble around his mouth. His lips part and I notice that he’s someone who has pronounced canine teeth. “We have everything under control.”
“Garrett got the dogs. You’re not looking everywhere, in every way you can,” I challenge him. “Or is getting this solved your way and your promotion more important?”
His tone darkens. “Don’t put those words in my mouth.” There is always a violence to Nick. He keeps it controlled but he unnerves me. “Just because you lost her doesn’t mean you get to blame someone else. We’re fixing the mess you made. Caroline isn’t your daughter, she isn’t your blood.”
“She’s yours. What are you doing to bring her home?”
Nick takes a quick step toward me. I lurch back.
“What are—”
He does it again, and I fumble the cookies. I wind up to slap him, but that’s exactly what he wants.
I lower my hand. “Are you fucking high?”
“Go ahead.” He grabs my wrist and places it back near his face. “Fight me!”
I jerk away at those words. Ripping my arm out of his hand, I drop the cookies. They scatter over the front steps. I massage my wrist where he grabbed me, the flesh red and tender.
“Why did you— You made me do that—” I get out, but I’m still rattled.
“Alex Edwards.” Nick unearths my ex’s name. “He was supposed to be your plus-one at the wedding. The two of you had a domestic disturbance call February fourteenth. Both sustained injuries. You had some nasty bruises on your neck. But he was…” Nick gives me a knowing look. “Liz, what did you do to him?”
Breath escapes me as his words pull me back to four months ago.
“I’m not giving you another chance to be alone with Mel.”
“I am not—”
“Alex said you’re unrecognizable when you get angry.”
“You talked to him?”
Nick shrugs. “Just wanted to know what you’ve been up to.”
“He…he…”
The back of my neck aches at the memory of being yanked backward by my hair. Alex always liked my hair long. I never thought he’d use it to tip me off balance and roll me under his weight. When he started to press on my neck, I didn’t fight. Everyone thinks they’ll scratch, or bite or claw. When faced with death, you are supposed to choose life. Fight! His words rattled all the broken pieces of me. He needed me to fix this for him. Fight me! He needed my anger to justify his violence. An angry Black woman can be put down without a second thought. A weak Black woman is shameful. When I started to cry he looked annoyed. I don’t know what I was more embarrassed about, the fact that I found myself in an abusive relationship or the fact that when faced with death, I didn’t fight. I named things to stay conscious, but I could barely make out any shapes in the dark. So I named how I got there:
Blind date.
Whirlwind romance.
Pushed limits.
Fast proposal.
Promotion.
His anger always came out around my job. When we were dating, I thought it was cute that he was jealous of my work schedule. I thought he wanted more time with me. I was wrong. The better my job was, the harder I was to control. I’d be making more money than he was, doing a job that didn’t matter, selling wine. Looking at the cracked white plaster ceiling of my apartment, I longed for the stars. No one tells you how long it takes to strangle someone. As I began to fade, my head rolled toward a tall shape in the corner. My floor lamp. A large modern disk with a sharp edge. I felt the cord running under my spine and arm. I wrapped my hand around it and pulled.
Snap!
A dislodged flicker of filament flashed light in my dark apartment before the heavy metal lamp came crashing down on the back of his head. After a moment, he stumbled off of me and searched for his phone to call 911. I didn’t need to look at the wound to know it was bad—the amount of blood over both of us told me that. The shame never fully subsided, but another emotion came in.
Pride.
When the cops came to take statements and the EMT patched him up before loading him into an ambulance, everyone asked me what I’d done. Like Nick, they saw me as some monster who lashed out. I didn’t mind. A monster could defend itself. Neither of us pressed charges, both too ashamed to show up in court. We avoided each other while he moved out of my place. No one needed to know the truth—I didn’t fight. In the burst of light before the lamp fell, my entire apartment was illuminated, except for one distant corner.
In my periphery, there was a settled shadow. It had no need to move. I want to say it had no shape, but it did. Like a well-trained dog, it sat still, like it had always been there. Watching.
My tears speckle the stones of Mel’s landing, pulling me out of the memory. My hands race to the sore spot at the nape of my neck, where it’s still tender, where it might always be tender. I breathe. Hard. To remind myself that I can.
In and out.
In and out.
I look up and see Nick’s weight shift back. He’s on the defensive now. He was so ready to fight with words and fists, not tears. He watches me the way Doug does. Like he’s trying to remember something about me from a dream or a memory. He also looks at me the way Alex did. Both men have empty blue eyes. My pain annoys them.
I hate that I’m crying in front of him. “It was dark. I didn’t want to die.”
“Liz.” My first name sounds wrong in his mouth. “We’re searching at the site and in the lab. If you have anything to do with this, beyond losing Caroline…I’ll rain hell down on you.” After a beat of mutual understanding, he shuts the door in my face.
He’s right. Why do I think I can do this? Any of this? How am I going to fight for anyone when I can’t even fight for myself? I look at my feet. Cookies cover the porch. I go to gather up the ones that haven’t been crushed. On my knees, scraping together crumbs, the sugary chemical smell of them rises. I grab them by the fistful and they crumble between my fingers, mixing with the dirt. This mashing of food and earth should disgust me, but I’m suddenly starving. I bring a handful to my nose, I realize I’m attracted to the earthy smell, not the cookies.
Something red flickers in the corner of my eye. Not a shadow. I turn and see a sole ember smothered in the grass.
Cigarette butts.
There are only three smokers in the family: Nick, Mr. Parker, and Garrett. I stop gathering the cookies and gather the butts instead.
And Mel? Fighting or not, I need to get her away from them. If they did this to her child and others, what might they do to her out there? Nick’s threat fresh in my mind, I’m reminded that the cops have my DNA and my prints. But they don’t know that I have Doug.
SIXTEEN
A chipper white woman yells from somewhere beyond the threshold, “I have some snacks ready if you’re hungry.” She totters off back into what I assume is the kitchen or dining room.
I’m in the entryway of Doug’s house, not the ME’s office. I can’t be seen at the station. Doug promised to run home on his lunch break to meet me. Kicking off my shoes, I walk into the hallway. His home is straight out of a time capsule. A quick glance at the ceiling and I see it’s that sculptural-looking stucco stuff that was popular in the 1990s. As a kid, my fingers longed to caress those dusty ridges. The wallpaper is something floral and ’70s. The hardwood floors shine. I move out of the hallway and find myself in a kitchen. The mid-century is strong in this house. Fashionable mint kitchen appliances hum with heat and use.
The woman in the kitchen isn’t making snacks, she is making a feast. It’s almost like she knows I’m starving. Her skinny jeans and modern blouse assure me I haven’t time traveled. I see a small plate of baby carrots and ranch. I hate ranch. It makes my empty stomach turn. My gaze lands on the shadowed back door. There rest women’s sneakers and a pair of men’s boots. Both are desperately muddy.
Seeing her fully, I recognize her instantly. “You were at Mel’s. Your Pyrex burned me.”
“Yes! I’m Kirsten. Doug’s wife.” Something dings. She does a little footwork as she dances around the kitchen. It’s too precise to be a habit. She must have been trained, a ballerina by the looks of her. She is a tiny woman with a large presence. I spot a barrette in her hair. “How are your hands?”
I show her. Her eyes go straight to the scar on my wrist. I do my best not to be awkward about it, but she is staring. Most people ask me if it was some playground injury or a sports thing.
“Shark attack,” I say.
She gives me a short laugh before her smile fades. “How is Melissa doing? Must be a nightmare for her. After all that perfection, this is…She must really be leaning on you.”
“Um.” I’m a good liar, but lately it’s gotten harder to think of plausible answers. “She’s, um…”
“Did they find Caroline?” She leans in.
I try to respond, but I honestly don’t know. The detectives haven’t told me what’s in the tarp. But because the dogs found it, I know some part of that bloody mess is human. Mel has stopped responding to my messages. No mention of Caroline or if the search is still going.
“I don’t know. She won’t talk to me.” It’s the kind of thing you confess to as a drunk girl in the bathroom in that unspoken camaraderie between women.
“You’ll find your way back to each other. I’m sure,” she says. Something dings again and she returns to her cooking. I lean against the counter. The linoleum feels worn but cared for. Kirsten takes a sip of what looks like chardonnay. I can smell its buttery notes from where I stand. I have half a mind to ask for a glass. Before I can, the door opens.
“You’re here!” It’s Doug. Just like his wife, he’s a little too excited to see me. He stands in a darkened doorway leading to the garage. The light and warmth from the kitchen seem to be the only thing illuminating this home.
He carries a large box in his hands. “We can head down to the basement. There’s more space down there.” I follow Doug.
At the edge of the basement steps, my stomach clenches around itself. I stop. It’s probably from hunger. I will myself forward.
Doug’s basement isn’t covered in red string, far from it. It’s very clean, organized, and put together. There’s the requisite comfy chair, a TV, and a video-game system. They’re all piled in one corner. A thin layer of dust reveals their lack of use. The other side of the space has laundry. A dryer rumbles and warms the basement. In the far corner is a bookshelf. I look and see heavy medical textbooks. History of Johnstown. Some books on the flood. A few beach reads.
Unrelenting sunlight pierces the basement window and creates a small spotlight on the worktable between us. Doug puts the box he carried in on the floor and pulls out the map from earlier.
“It’s a lot,” he warns. I nod. He spreads it out between us. Its vast expanse is filled with red and orange Xs. It mocks me. An X for where each girl was taken and an X for where she was found. If she was found.
Doug starts to take out documents in stacks. “I made copies, but this is everything I have on the girls whose names—”
I cut to the chase. “What was in the tarp?”
“Deer guts.” His nose shrivels at the thought of the smell. “But the dog scented. Oswald’s breaking it down. Wouldn’t be the first time someone tried to cover up a crime scene with animal remains.”
“So there are human remains?”
“Not necessarily, could be blood. Human blood. Dogs can tell the difference. Up to us to identify whose.”
“That’s why they wouldn’t tell me.” Nick said they were checking the woods and the lab. They must have samples of whatever human they found.
“What?” Doug looks genuinely perplexed.
I catch Doug up on all of it, Mel and I in the woods. Garrett and the deer. My interview with the detective. My run-in with Nick. That I was the one who found the tarp.
“What about the plate you had me run?” he asks.
“Oh. That. A jealous girl. She was watching my house to see if I was hooking up with some guy. Like staking out, late at night.”
