B004XTKFZ4 EBOK (11 page)

I sat with my whiskey sour at the bar of the hotel in Quiet, thinking about it. I’d never known much about any of this then; I was far from Quiet by the time Lucy’s body was discovered, by the time they caught Mike McCoy. That entire period thirty years before was nothing now but a jumbled impression of cries, screams, tears. It was probably better that way, I realized. What I knew now came from the newspaper reports I’d read that morning and a few things Ms. Sparrow had told me.

I wondered how he’d gotten the girls to his house; Lucy might conceivably have gone quite willingly (
Where’s that pool table, Mike?
). Once there, he somehow got them into his basement (
It’s downstairs, lovely lady, c’mon down, I’ll show you how to play
), where there was a heavy steel door which would have closed and locked behind them. A short plywood set of stairs led down to the basement itself, which was lit by two naked light bulbs dangling by wires from the ceiling.

Nothing would necessarily have looked immediately threatening to the girls. Objects like the rack and the bed would, at least for a few moments, excite only curiosity, until the dread moment when each realized that something was terribly wrong and they turned to rush back up the stairs; McCoy would have blocked them then, probably at the base of the staircase, but even if they made it to the door, it didn’t matter. It locked automatically upon closing, and McCoy had the only key.

When they realized this—maybe he told them, with a little smile on his face—they might have tried to bargain with him, or threaten him with some vague consequences (parents, police), or perhaps they just began to scream. It didn’t matter. The basement was effectively soundproofed, and McCoy’s nearest neighbor was over a mile away.

What did he do to them?

It was a bit different with each girl, apparently. Maria Sanchez, his first, died the fastest. I thought I could picture it, his nervousness, his fear that the police would come crashing through the door at any moment, his feeling that he had to do it
now, now or never,
and so hurriedly punching her into submission (several bones in her face were broken), gagging her, slamming her down onto the torture bed, strapping her in, finishing her with the drill as quickly as he could.

With Trista Blake he had taken longer. His confidence had grown, no doubt. He’d successfully killed Maria Sanchez, after all; not only that, he had used the band saw to chop her body into chunks, then placed them into a big plastic tub and driven them to the riverbed in the middle of the night, quietly dumping them there. He’d never even been suspected; in fact, the girl’s boyfriend had been seriously interrogated by the police, to the point that his parents had threatened a lawsuit against the department for harassment and brutality. It was a month before they even found Maria Sanchez’s body, the pieces of it mud-covered, rotting, picked over by crows.

It was around that time he had killed Trista Blake. She had survived, apparently, several hours, as she had been repeatedly asphyxiated nearly to the point of death before he revived her each time. Parts of her body had been burned with the torch. Finally he had finished her the same way: he drilled holes in her temple, her forehead, the top of her skull, just as he had with Maria Sanchez. One of his drill bits broke inside Trista Blake’s head; it was lodged in her brain, the first significant clue the police found. And yet it led to nothing; such drill bits could be bought anywhere. The investigators really were no closer to finding the culprit than they’d been before when Lucy became his third victim.

I swallowed the remainder of my drink.

“Another, please.”

The bartender brought it, placed it quietly before me. I drank it more quickly than the first one; I had to blur the visions that were forming in my mind.

How hard was it to cut a human body apart?

How much blood was there?

What did it feel like to carry chopped-off arms, legs, torsos, heads in your hands?

I shook my head, tried to stop thinking.

So long ago. Another era. Someone my daughter’s age could hardly even imagine that people lived then, in an age they saw only in old film clips. No computers, no Internet, no video games, no cell phones, no text messaging, no DVDs, no CGI, nothing that made life worth living to a girl today, a girl who was now the age that we were then. All gone, that world. Gone with the bell bottoms and the LP records. Dead fashion, dead technology. Dead and gone.

And Jess, my daughter? Not dead. But gone.

Jess has decided she’d rather not see you for a while, Frances.

What do you mean, not see me? She has to see me.

You know how upset she becomes.

I don’t care, Donald. I have a court-ordered right…

I’m not so sure. After this second accident.

It was a fender-bender. It was no big deal.

She was in the car, though. And you failed the Breathalyzer test.

That test was crazy. I’d had one drink. One. Drink.

But Frances, on top of the other, before, when you nearly…

Don’t say it. Don’t.

You have to face reality, Frances.

Reality: sitting in my ex-husband’s house, he and his new wife hovering nearby, watching, while I sat humiliated across from my daughter in their living room and tried to think of something to say to her, anything at all that might interest her, while she slouched there on the sofa not making eye contact, her long hair hiding her eyes, chewing gum and blowing bubbles, flipping through magazines, never speaking to me, never acknowledging my presence.
How is school? Do you have a favorite teacher? Are you playing sports now?

Then Jess looking toward her father and stepmother:
Is the hour up yet? Can I go?

Remembering my own parents, the tears and recriminations, the needles, the strange people in the house in the middle of the night, it was like an endlessly recurring phantasm: they’d failed me, failed me when they herded me off to Uncle Frank and Aunt Louise in the middle of the night, failed me after I returned when police cars came with lights flashing and broke down the front door of that
upper-middle class home in one of Fresno’s most beautiful neighborhoods,
as the media said later, the kind of place where
things like this just don’t happen,
and yet they did, the two of them led off in handcuffs in
Fresno’s
biggest drug bust in a decade,
huge quantities of heroin and cocaine and marijuana in the basement, in their bedroom, in the hall closet. And Alba holding me tight in my room, saying,
Don’t look, sweetheart, don’t look,
though I couldn’t help but see the red-and-blue flashing lights outside, hear the crashing of the door, the shouted voices. They’d failed me. Just as, now, I’d failed Jess.

Red-and-blue lights against the night, three decades later. Coming to consciousness, realizing blearily that I was behind the wheel of my car, the inflated air bag dust-odored in my face. Hearing voices around me, a knock on the door, uniformed policemen peering in. Then looking to my right, seeing Jess slumped against the passenger side window, forehead and lips bloody, front tooth split vertically to her gums, left cheek gashed and purple, but most of all, by far worst of all, her eyes closed, mouth agape, her body utterly, horrifyingly still.

Jess! Jess!

I thought of the ouroboros, the self-devouring serpent-beast I used to enjoy drawing when I was a girl. Somewhere my life had looped back into itself and I’d wound up replicating the same disasters my own parents had inflicted on me. In my own way, certainly; as a result of my childhood I’d never had anything to do with drugs, for instance, yet alcohol had proved a worthy substitute, as it had been the night I’d taken Jess to a movie and then dinner—it was the first time I’d seen her in a month, I was giddy with excitement—and ordered the first drink, just a single glass of wine, followed by a second and, almost unconsciously, the third….

I’d started drinking while I was in the various foster homes to which I was assigned after the catastrophe with my parents. Alcohol unfocused things, I found. Blurred them marvelously. Took away the harsh and dirty edges and made everything smooth and clean. I drank through high school, through college, through the early years of my marriage, keeping the weight off by fiercely devoting myself to my morning workouts at the gym. Running, cardiovascular machines, weight training, swimming. Sports whenever I could. I was known as a fitness nut. And Donald drank a good deal too—we drank together—until one day he decided that he would stop.

I never stopped.

My life kept looping back, encircling itself, eating itself. Somewhere it had all gone wrong and nothing I’d ever done had put it right. At this point I didn’t know how; I didn’t know what “right” was. There had been a second accident with Jess nearly a year later; minor in itself, with no injuries, it had nonetheless led to my failing a Breathalyzer test; and that was the end, of course. Donald and his wife took full custody, reducing me to brief supervised visits during which Jess read magazines and blew bubble-gum bubbles. When I thought of her now, I felt utterly, comprehensively defeated, as if I could just cry for the rest of my life and still not be done with tears.

Donald, ask her to come to the phone, please ask her.

She won’t, Frances.

Just for one minute. Exactly a minute. Sixty seconds.

She won’t, Frances.

I swallowed the last of the whiskey sour and got up to leave. Had my life been hopelessly off-course even when I’d lived here in Quiet? I didn’t think so. No, at that point there had still been the possibility of salvation. Frank and Louise hadn’t been loving, but they had provided me something like a home. I did well in school, as I always had. And there was Lucy, whom thirty years of eating my own tail had nearly obliterated from my memory. For three decades the very thought of her had been too much to contemplate. She’d vanished from me, from my mind, though of course she hadn’t. Not really.

Without any conscious thought of where I was going, I wandered through the hotel lobby and out the sliding-glass front door to the parking lot. I was restless, shaking slightly, unwilling to go back to my room where, I knew, I would simply continue drinking. I’d had two whiskey sours but I knew I was all right to drive. Would I pass a Breathalyzer test if I were pulled over? Possibly not. But I wouldn’t be pulled over. I would be careful.

And I was. I got into my car, switched on the headlights, eased out of the lot and onto Main Street. It was late, past eleven. Thirty years ago the town would have been dark, lifeless; now, there were places still open. A car sat in the drive-through at the Burger King, the young woman in the window handing the driver a white bag. I saw customers wandering the aisles of the video store across the street. A restaurant or two hadn’t yet closed; there were diners visible in the windows. The streets were well-lit here, nearly as bright as day; how different from back then, when by this time the town would be virtually enveloped in darkness. The rest stop near the freeway was still there too, though massively built-up now; what had been an expanse of green grass was now a glittering Tourist Information building. The tall oak that had once stood there was entirely gone. I turned off before I reached the onramp, not stopping.

Instead I drove onto the street which, I thought I recalled, led to where the gas stations had been, and sure enough, where I remembered the Enco the bright lights of an Exxon soon appeared before me. Though renamed, it was much the same place as back then, bigger now, with a friendly-looking mini-mart connected to it (also open). Across the street, however, there was no evidence whatsoever of a grubby little gas station called the Red Ball. In its place stood a shining Merchant’s Tire and Auto Center, closed for the night.

I pulled to the side of the road, studied the spot for a moment. The building was big, clean, and attractive. It was hard to believe that Lucy and I had ever sat there on Mr. Farrington’s chairs, watching the cars go by, eating free candy with him. Harder still to think that Mike McCoy had worked there, right there, had talked to us, called us
lovely ladies.

I drove on. Somewhere up ahead, on one of the little dirt side roads, would be the spot where Mike McCoy had lived. The house I thought of as a shack.

More of the roads were paved than had been thirty years before, and the businesses came farther out into the country, but they still trickled off eventually and left only open fields. I turned onto a side road, thinking this might be it, but after a few minutes I saw nothing that looked like his house. I backtracked, tried a different road; again nothing. It seemed very dark out here. After a time I felt my heart beginning to race. One of these roads was the right one, I knew. One of them led directly to the place where McCoy had lived, even if the house no longer existed, which it probably didn’t. I was very close to where he had kept his basement, close to where he had killed the three girls, close to where Lucy had been drilled into and hacked apart. I might be driving past it even at this moment, the place, the very place.

But I couldn’t find it, and after a while I became fearful that I would get lost on these obscure back roads. Yet perhaps, I reasoned, that wouldn’t be so bad. I kept driving, circling around, trying this road and that, crawling through the darkness, imagining that eventually I might come across Lucy, her ghost, standing there at the side of the road, beckoning to me, waving, calling,
C’mon, Franny-Fran. Come on out. We’ll go someplace. Together!