Other Resort Cities (13 page)

It was a test. Terry believed then that if he could spend seven days without breaking threshold, he could do anything. If he could not be himself, his true self, for seven straight days, it was reasonable to assume that he could assimilate into a life of normalcy, even if it meant living inside an alien skin.

Terry lasted five days, though he reasoned that it should have been expected that he’d sneak into Cooper Donovan’s room, particularly since he had a fairly good idea that Polly was fucking him, too. And the fact that it was true—that she was indeed fucking him, and that he listened to it all from underneath the bed—made it all forgivable. Polly was drunk. Cooper was drunk. And that Polly tearfully told him all of it as they stood watching a famous Mexican blow hole, La Bufadora, gave him a sense of true validation. Other people’s closed-door lives were just as sordid and disappointing as his own; even if the life belonged to the woman he loved.

So he decides his next move. He will take the children back. He will place them inside their beds while Polly and Landon sleep. He will hide his children in their own home, so that when they wake up they might just think it was all a
terrible dream, that the last month spent sleeping in model homes across the West was a shared delusion. First, he’ll take them to Lippert’s ice cream parlor in Pleasant Hill, a place they used to go to as a family for birthday parties, and he will pour a healthy dose of cough syrup into their root beer floats. He’ll use the key Seth wears around his neck to unlock the backdoor—he’ll wait until at least 3:00 AM, until even the most fervent insomniac finally buckles under and takes an Ambien or Tylenol PM—and he’ll carry Liza in first, to make sure, to not fuck it up again. He might sit for a moment alone with just Seth in the car, because Terry realizes that he’s infected this poor seed of his with his own particular brand of sickness, just as he’s sure someone infected him. His mother? His remarried-five-times father? You can blame your parents for only so much, Terry knows, but he imagines he’ll spend a few final moments with Seth whispering directives into his ear on how to live a good life, that he’ll be like Marlon Brando showing up to tell Christopher Reeve’s Superman how to be Superman even though he’d died twenty-five years and eight thousand light years previous. And then he’d carry Seth into his bedroom, would tuck him in tight, would kiss him once on each cheek, would maybe cut a small lock of his hair off and keep it in a locket, something to look at while he drove across America. He figures that he might just get off, that it might be a gray area of the law if you kidnap your own children and then return them, particularly if you haven’t done something awful to them along the way.

Then Terry notices how very quiet the Flying J truck stop has become, how very alone he is standing in the hallway outside the shower stalls, how clearly he can hear Seth and
Liza laughing and talking and splashing, when before all he could hear were the sounds of truckers and families pouring around him, their conversations meeting him in quick thrusts of language, the kinds of conversations he’d like to replicate sometime, conversations about going and coming, about getting somewhere, conversations he’s imagined a million times. And in his mind, Terry Green begins to press the reset button over and over again, closing his eyes against the growing cacophony of sirens in the distance, tries to focus on the knock-knock joke he can hear his son telling his daughter (
Knock Knock. Who’s there? Shirley. Shirley who? Shirley you know this joke.
), tries to make a choice, tries to find a reason, tries to keep it together just a moment longer, tries to tell his children, when they walk out and ask him what is going on, what is happening, Daddy tell us what ’s wrong, that everything is fine, that everything is going to be just fine, that everyone is going home.

T
hey disappeared during the coldest winter on record. There was no special episode of
America’s Most Wanted
. No jogger stumbled on a human skull. Instead, it was Scotch Thompson’s bird dog, Scout, who came running down Yeach Mountain with a human hand in her mouth. And just like that, James Klein and his family were found.

“Damndest thing I ever seen,” Lyle, my deputy, said. “All of them stacked up like Lincoln Logs. Like they were put down all gentle. Terrible, terrible thing.” We were sitting in the front seat of my cruiser sipping coffee, both of us too old to be picking at the bones of an entire family, but resigned to doing it anyway. “You think it was someone from out of town, Morris?”

“Hard to say,” I said. “It’s been so damn long, you know, it could have been anybody.”

James Klein, his wife Missy, and their twin sons, Andy and Tyler, fell off the earth sometime before October 12, 1998. Fred Lipton came over that day to borrow back his wrench set, but all he found was an empty house and a very hungry cat.

“You think it was some kinda drug thing, don’t you?” Lyle said, but I didn’t respond. “You always thought Klein was involved in something illegal, I know, but I thought they were good people.”

“I don’t know what I think anymore, Lyle,” I said. A team of forensic specialists from the capital was coming down the side of the mountain, and I spotted Miller Descent out in front, his hands filled with plastic evidence bags. I’d worked with Miller before and knew this wasn’t a good sign. What Scout the collie had stumbled onto was a shallow grave filled with four bodies, along with many of their limbs. The twins, Andy and Tyler, were missing their feet. James and Missy were without hands.

Miller motioned me out of the cruiser. “Lotta shit up there,” he said. Miller was a tall man, his face sharp and angular, with long green eyes. He had a look about him that said he couldn’t be shocked anymore; that the world was too sour of a place for him. “Like some kinda damned ritual took place. Animal bones are mixed up in that grave, I think. Need to get an anthropologist up here to be sure, but it looks like dog bones mostly. Maybe a cat or two. Snow pack kept those bodies pretty fresh.”

“Jesus,” I said. “What’s the medical examiner say?”

Miller screwed his face up into a knot, his nose almost even with his eyes. “Can I be honest with you, Sheriff Drew?”

“Sure, Miller.”

“Your ME about threw up when she saw all them bodies,” he said. “You know, I was in Vietnam so this doesn’t mean so much to me. I’ve seen things that’d make your skin
run
, but she just, well, I think she was a little bothered by the whole thing. You might want to have them bodies cut up by some more patient people upstate.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.

Miller smiled then and scratched at something on his neck. “Anyway,” he said. “You still playing softball in that beer league?”

I never knew how to handle Miller Descent. He could be holding a human head in one hand and a Coors in the other and it wouldn’t faze him.

“Not this year,” I said.

“Too bad,” he said, and then he shuffled his way back up Yeach.

 

I didn’t get home that night until well past ten o’clock. I brewed myself a pot of coffee and sat at the kitchen table looking over notes I’d written when the Kleins first disappeared, plus the new photos shot up on the mountain. Since my second wife, Margaret, died, I’d taken to staying up late at night; I’d read or watch TV or go over old cases, anything to keep me from crawling into that lonely bed. But that night, my trouble was not with the memory of a woman who I loved for the last thirty years of my life, or my first wife, Katherine, whose own death at twenty-four still haunted me, but for a family I had barely known.

The Kleins moved into Granite City during the fall of 1995. James Klein was a pharmacist, so when he and his wife purchased Dickey Fine’s Rexall Drug Store downtown, everyone figured it was going to be a good match. Dickey had gotten old, and going to him for a prescription was often more dangerous than just fighting whatever ailment you had on faith and good humor.

James and Missy were in the store together most days. James wore a starched white lab coat even though it wasn’t really required. It inspired confidence in the people, I think, to get their drugs from someone who looked like a doctor. Missy always looked radiant, no matter the season, standing
behind the counter smiling and chatting up the townspeople and, when skiing season started, the tourists who’d come in for directions or cold medicine.

All that to say I never trusted them. I’d known the family only casually, but I knew them well enough to know that they were hiding something. James sported a diploma from Harvard inside the pharmacy, and Missy looked like the type of woman who was best suited for clambakes at Pebble Beach. They were not small town people—they drove a gold Lexus and a convertible Jaguar—and Granite City is a small town. I never had cause to investigate the Kleins, never even pulled them over for speeding, but I aimed to at some point, just so that I could look James in the eye when I had the upper hand, when my authority might cause his veneer to smudge. That chance didn’t come.

I picked up a photo from the gravesite, and there was James Klein’s face staring up at me. Miller was right: the bodies had been well preserved by the snow pack. The skin on James’s face was tight and tugged at the bones. His eyes had vanished over the course of the year and a half—eaten by bugs or simply by the act of decay—but I could still picture the way they narrowed whenever he saw me.

His body lay face up, his arms flung to either side of him. He was draped on top of his wife, his hands chopped from his arms, wearing his now drab gray lab coat. Shards of bone jutted from underneath his sleeves, and I thought that whoever had done this to him had taken great pains to make him suffer.

For a long time I stared at James Klein and wondered what it would be like to know that you were about to die. Andy and Tyler, the twins, must have known all too well that
their time on Earth was ending before it ever had a chance to begin. They were only twelve.

I stood up, stretched my arms above my head, and paced in the kitchen while I tried to gather my thoughts. After the family had initially disappeared, I’d searched their home with Deputy Nixon and Deputy Person. We didn’t find any forced entry or signs of a struggle, but we did find bundles of cash hidden in nearly every crevice of the house. All told, there was close to half a million dollars stashed in shoeboxes, suitcases, and file cabinets. The money was tested for trace residues of cocaine, heroin, and marijuana but came up empty.

For almost three months, we searched for the Klein family. In time, though, winter dropped in full force and even James Klein’s own mother and father returned to their hometown. I told them not to worry, that we would find their son and his wife and their twin grandsons, but I knew that they were dead. I knew because there was $500,000 sitting in my office unclaimed, and no man alive would leave that money on purpose. And so, as the months drifted away and my thoughts of the Klein family withered and died in my mind, I figured that one day when I was retired someone would find them somewhere.

“Hell,” I said, sitting back down at the kitchen table. My eyes fixed on a pair of pale blue Nikes, unattached to legs, pointing out from the bottom of the grave. I wanted to just sit there and cry for those boys, but I knew it wouldn’t do either of us any good.

 

I got to the medical examiner’s office late that next morning, figuring I didn’t need to see her slicing and dicing. But it turned out I was right on time. The ME, a young kid named
Lizzie DiGiangreco, had been working in Granite City for just over a year. Her father, Dr. Louis DiGiangreco, had been ME in Granite City for a lifetime and had practically trained Lizzie from birth. She went to medical school back East and then moved home after her father died at sixty-four from heart failure. I was one of Louis’s pallbearers, and I remember watching Lizzie stiffen at the site of her father in his open casket. I knew then that her profession had not been a pleasant choice for her, but that she was duty bound.

Lizzie greeted me with a handshake just outside the door to her lab.

“Glad you could make it, Sheriff,” Lizzie said, only half sarcastically.

“Miller said you were a little queasy up on Yeach,” I said. “I can get someone else to do this, if you want.”

Lizzie made a clicking sound in her throat, a tendency her father displayed when he was about to be very angry, and then exhaled deeply. “I don’t like to see kids like that,” she said. “Maybe Miller is used to it, but I’m not.”

“Understandable,” I said and then followed her into the lab.

The four bodies were covered with black plastic blankets and lined up across the length of the room. Lizzie’s assistant—what they call a diener—an old black man named Hawkins, was busy gathering up the tools they would need for the procedure. I’d watched a lot of autopsies in my thirty-five years as sheriff in Granite City, but it never got any easier. Hawkins had been Lizzie’s father’s assistant, so he knew what I’d need to make it through the next few hours.

“There’s a tub of Vicks behind you in that cabinet, Sheriff,” Hawkins said. “These folks ain’t gonna smell so fresh.”

Lizzie glared at Hawkins, but she knew that he didn’t mean any harm. Hawkins could probably perform an autopsy just as well as she could, and Lord knows he never went to medical school.

Hawkins pulled back the first blanket, and there was James Klein’s naked, handless, body.

“Where’d you put the hands, Hawkins?” Lizzie asked.

“I got ’em in the jar by the back sink,” he said. “You want them now?”

“No,” she said. “But make sure not to cross them up with Mrs. Klein’s.”

Hawkins nodded in the affirmative, and I was struck by how, for these two people, this was a day in the office. For Lizzie, maybe, seeing those children would be different. But for Hawkins, they would be nothing but cargo, something to load onto a table and then something to haul back to the refrigerator.