The Silent Girls
Authors: Eric Rickstad
Contents
O
CTOBER 31, 1
985
U
NDER THE DIM
porch light, the child’s gruesome mask looked real, as if molten rubber had been poured over the poor thing’s skull and melted the flesh, the features hideous and deformed.
The woman caught her breath and shrank back, the bowl of candy nearly slipping from her hand.
What kind of mother lets a young child wear such a grotesquerie,
the woman wondered.
And where are the child’s parents?
Sometimes, parents who drove their kids to these better neighborhoods waited in their cars as they sipped beer from cans and prodded kids too young for Halloween to
Go on up and get your goodies. Grab Mommy a big handful.
But the woman didn’t see any adults or vehicles at the shadowy curb.
She stooped to better see the child’s mask.
“And what are we supposed to be?” she said.
“Dead.”
The child’s voice was reedy and phlegmy, genderless.
The woman searched the child’s mask, unable to tell where the mask ended and the child’s face began. There seemed to be no gaps around the unblinking eyes; the irises, as black as the pupils, wet and animal, swam in the oddly large eye whites.
“You’re very scary,” the woman said.
“You’re scary,” the child said in its strangled voice.
“Me?” The woman said.
The child nodded. “You’re a monster.”
“I am, am I?”
“Mmm. Hmmm.”
The woman started to laugh, but the laugh died in the back of her throat, gagged on a sharp bone of sudden, inexplicable dread. She looked over the child’s shoulder, toward the street, which was quiet and still and dark.
Where were all the children from earlier, so ecstatic with greed
?
“There’s no such thing as monsters,” the woman said.
“Mmm. Hmm.”
“Who says?”
“My mom.”
“Oh? And who’s your mom?”
“You.”
“I see. And who told you I was your mom?”
“My mom.”
A greasy sickness bubbled in her stomach. The dread. Irrational. But mounting. Her blood electric. She reached back to grip the doorknob as blood thrummed at her temples.
A child shrieked. The woman flinched and looked up as a pair of kids in black capes floated along the sidewalk and melted back into the darkness.
Wait! Come back!
the woman wanted to scream.
She looked down at the child again. It held something in its hand now: something gleaming. A knife. The blade long and slender. Wicked.
The woman held out the bowl of candy.
“Take all you want,” she croaked, “and go.”
The child’s black eyes stared.
The woman’s eyes caught the silver glint of the knife blade as the child jabbed it at her belly.
“Jesus!” she cried. “You little shi—” But she could not finish. Pain cleaved her open, turned her inside out. Her hand slipped from the doorknob, and the candy bowl clattered to the porch.
Oh God.
She clutched her belly—too terrified to look— feeling a warm stickiness seep between her fingers.
The child drove the knife blade clean through her hand, and the woman howled with pain. The child plunged the knife again, just above the waistband of the woman’s jeans and yanked upward.
Oh God.
She was being . . .
. . . unzipped.
She staggered backward, crumpling in the foyer.
The child stepped into the house and shut the door with a soft
click.
Its face hovered above the woman’s. The woman reached up, clutched the mask’s rubbery skin. Pulled. The mask would not come off. She dug her fingers in. Clawed. The mask stretched. The knife sliced. She tore at the mask, gasping. The child had been right.
Monsters did exist.
O
CTOBER 22,
2011
T
HE BLOOD ON
Frank Rath’s hands steamed in the cold October air as he slung one end of a rope over the barn’s crossbeam, tied the other end to the center of the tomato stake skewered through the gutted carcass’s legs, and yanked.
Pain erupted in his lower back as if he’d been struck with an axe. He dropped to his knees, the dead deer sagging back in a puddle of its own sad blood on the frozen dirt.
Rath remained still, breathing slowly through his nose, counting backward from ten.
Erector spinae.
He’d learned the Latin from studying the anatomy model while whiling away his autumn in Doc Rankin’s office.
Rath’s cell phone vibrated in his shirt pocket. Rachel, he hoped. For seven weeks now, she’d been away for her first semester at Johnson State, and in that time, loneliness had nested in Rath’s heart. The house felt lifeless, no hum of Rachel’s hair dryer in the morning, no insistent burble of incoming texts when she left her cell phone idle for even a second on the kitchen table.
Rath reached for his cell phone, but the skewering pain insisted he lower himself onto his back, where he performed an inept pelvic tilt. Doc Rankin had sent him to a whack-job physical therapist, who’d prescribed a contortionist’s regimen of humiliating stretches that made Rath feel as though he were about to shit himself: stretches better suited to rich housewives who performed them in steamy rooms while listening to didgeridoo music than to a man whose idea of stretching was reaching in the top cupboard for his Lagavulin 16 and chocolate Pop Tarts. Rath gained his feet with a groan.
What worried him wasn’t the pain but that the pain seemed to have no source. He’d simply awoken one morning as if someone had punched a hole in his back and ripped the
erector spinae
from his spine.
He looked down at the deer. He had to get it hung. First the deer. Then a beer. Or three.
Rath’s cell phone buzzed: Harland Grout.
The lone, lead detective on the anemic Canaan police force, Grout was as green as the back of a wet frog. He was also a dart player in Rath’s dart league. Most importantly, he had a strong young back good for lifting a dead deer.
Rath answered. “Grout. I’m trying to hang a deer here. Maybe you’d like to earn a six-pack and lend your—”
“There’s a car. Out on Route fifteen,” Grout said.
“That sort of specificity and twenty bucks Canadian will buy you a lap dance at The Dirty Girl over the border in Richelieu.”
“Yeah,” Grout said, and Rath noted a barb of severity in his voice that made him regret his initial glibness.
“What?” Rath said, and wandered out of the barn to lean against the fender of the ’74 International Scout it seemed he’d been restoring since Lincoln was a Whig.
“The car appears abandoned.” Grout paused to wait for the static of the weak signal to pass. Up here, near the border, there wasn’t one cell tower within five thousand miles. God bless Vermont. Or not. “The car belongs to my wife’s cousin’s daughter.”
“Shit,” Rath said, not even trying to untangle that snarl of family-tree branches.
“She’s sixteen.”
“Shit.” Rath slumped against the Scout. “You think something happened?”
Something happened.
What euphemistic bullshit for the images—none pretty—that leapt into Rath’s mind the instant he heard of a girl gone missing.
“It’s hard telling,” Grout said. “I just got the call on the car. When I called her mom, she was worried. Hasn’t heard from her in days and asked me to look into it.”
“Why call me? She’s a minor, you can investigate it straightaway as an MP.”
“She’s emancipated.”
“Shit,” Rath said again. His repertoire of blue language needed work.
Unless foul play was clearly evident, seventy-two hours had to pass before an official investigation could begin on a missing adult. And, by Vermont law, an emancipated girl, sixteen or not, was an adult. It made no sense. Sixteen was a
child,
and any adult who looked at a girl that young and saw anything
but
a child was deluded or a pervert.
“I’m on my way there now,” Grout said. “For all we know, the car’s clean, and she’s just off banging a boyfriend or crashed at a girlfriend’s. Or something. I got Sonja Test headed there, on her own time, giving up her Saturday training to bumper-to-bumper it best she can
in situ.
That itself is against protocol without probable. But Chief Barrons is out three more days fishing the Bahamas, and—”
“That bastard,” Rath said. Barrons had been Rath’s senior the three years Rath was a state-police detective in the 1990s. Barrons was an exceptional cop and an even better fisherman. Rath wasn’t sure for which trait he resented and envied Barrons more.
“So,” Grout said, “I’m taking liberties as it is without leaving my entire nutsack hanging out for Barrons to lop off and brine when he gets back. This girl is, technically, family; if it looks like I’m playing favorites or expending resources without due cause, and the girl just strolls in, my ass is in a sling, right when it’s looking like the budget might open up, and there’s a shot at a promotion. At the same time—”
“Fuck protocol,” Rath said. The hard consonants felt good to bite off and spit out.
But, what promotion?
If Grout wanted to excel in law enforcement, he should have taken Rath’s advice several years back and gone to the staties. And he shouldn’t have been calling Rath for help. Grout needed to take the helm himself, damn the repercussions: Protocol never outweighed doing what was right. Rath knew that if he wanted to help Grout and his career, he should force Grout to see this through on his own and be either tempered or turned to ash by the heat he’d feel from Barrons.
But there was a missing girl. That came before any career.
“I could use your help,” Grout said. “Even if it becomes official, it’s still just an MP, a low priority unless it becomes something else.”
Something else.
The sun glared on the skin of snow that had fallen overnight, melting fast, water dripping from the barn roof to tick on a sheet of rusted tin that had been leaning against the barn since the Pleistocene ice age.
Rath lit a cigarette and drew in the smoke. All he got from it was trembling fingertips and a numb nose. He needed to go back to dipping.
His cell-phone screen glowed with an incoming call: Stan Laroche. Rath let it go.
“Where’s the car?” Rath asked Grout.
Grout told him, and Rath tossed his cigarette into a rag of snow, where it settled with a paling hiss. He ended the call and looked back at the dead deer on the barn floor.
“Not today, pal.”
He yanked shut the barn door, to keep out the coyotes that skulked around the place at night; he had a draining feeling that he’d be occupied until long after dark.
In his kitchen, an ember of pain glowing in the old
erector spinae,
Rath scrubbed his hands with Lava soap, the water foaming pink with deer blood. He searched the freezer for an ice pack, remembered he’d left it in bed where it was now thawed, and dug out a pack of frozen peas. He snatched a bottle of Vicodin off the counter, slugged back two pills with a half bottle of Molson Golden left in the sink from the night before, then listened to Laroche’s message: “Rath. Laroche. Call me.”
Laroche. Mr. Department of Corrections; no doubt calling to weasel out of darts so his wife could strut off to some scrapbooking or karaoke night with the gals. Supposedly. Rath suspected there was a man involved. He deleted the message. Let Laroche swing.
In the Scout, Rath tucked the pack of peas behind his back, sighing at the minor temporary relief it brought. He worked the Scout’s choke and fired up the old lady. With 350,670 miles on her, she had leaky gaskets and bad springs, but she kept on stubbornly plugging along. Not unlike Rath.