The Silent Girls (15 page)
Authors: Eric Rickstad
I
T WAS 8:30
p.m. when Rath stepped out into the dark night. The shock of winter air felt cold enough to crack glass, and the grass crunched beneath his boots.
In the Scout, he realized his jaw was numb and vision gauzy with scotch. He worked the Scout’s choke and got the beast running and let it idle as the embattled heater sluggishly warmed the rig to a balmy 40˚. He needed to get his prescription filled before the drugstore closed.
The Scout’s engine raced, and Rath pumped the gas pedal to bring the idle back down. He stared at Mandy’s Post-it stuck to the dash. Her handwriting as indecipherable as a doctor’s. Even Gale hadn’t been able to decipher it.
Jesus. Gale. Of course. He dialed her number.
“Hello,” Gale said. “Is this the private eye?”
“We don’t use that term,” he said. “You mentioned Mandy left you notes.”
She paused. “Sure. Grocery lists. Roommate stuff.”
“Do you have any of those notes?”
“Why?”
“I’d like to compare it to the Post-it I found.”
“Umm.” There was a rustling of papers. “There’s a note on the fridge from like a month ago.”
“Can you read it?”
“Of course I
can
read.” Gale sighed. “But. Her handwriting is a first grader’s. I’ll give it my best.”
“Please.”
“ ‘I picked up . . . laundry detergent?’ But didn’t have time to’ Umm . . . ‘do a load. Could you do a load of lights? Thanks.’ ”
Rath could hear the ice clacking in a glass.
“That’s my best guess,” she said.
“Can I come by and take a look at the note?” Rath said.
Another pause and sigh. “I’m just watching a TiVo of
So You Think You Can Dance.
”
Gale answered the door in a pink Wes Welker jersey. She let Rath in and plunked down on the sofa, her bare, pudgy feet stuffed with cotton between each toe, propped on the coffee table as she painted the nails precisely with red and blue stripes. “It’s on the fridge,” she said, blowing on a toe. “Have at it.”
The kitchen’s linoleum floor was peeling at the edges, and beneath the stench of kitty litter the odor of garlic and sour milk rose. Rath plucked the hieroglyphic note from under a Patriots’ refrigerator magnet and went out to the living room.
“I—” Rath began.
Gale waved a hand at him, as if fending off a swarm of killer bees. “Shhh!” She chewed her fingernails, gaping at the TV, where a pair of dancers were being harangued by a coiffed man clearly in his seventies, despite the plastic surgery meant to conceal that fact.
“Oh bull!” Gale screamed. She snatched the remote and turned off the TV. “Show should be called
So You Think You Can Judge.
”
“Could I use your bathroom, to scrub my hands, I got gasoline on them at the Gas n’ Go earlier.”
“Go for it.”
In the bathroom, he ran the water in the sink. Then he opened the lower door on the vanity and found the birth-control pills. The date of the last pill taken was August 20. He slipped the package in his jacket pocket, turned off the water, and went back out.
“Could you read this note again for me?” He held out the note. “Word for word.”
Gale had some difficulty but read it slowly as Rath leaned over her the Post-it in his hand.
“One more time, please,” he said. She read the note again, this time more easily. “But you can’t read this?” he said, and handed her the Post-it.
She squinted at the note, sighed. “No.”
“Why not?”
She looked up into his face. “Can you? It’s gobbledegook.”
He couldn’t disagree. He’d been unable to read it before. But now, he could. After following closely as Gale read the other note. But he still didn’t know what it meant.
He thanked her and went out into a night that was growing colder by the second.
He got into the Scout, thinking. When Gale had read the note, Rath had seen how Mandy wrote certain letters that made them easily mistaken for other letters. Her
y
and her
g
looked like. Her
e
looked like an
a.
Her
h
looked like a
b.
Her
m
like an
n
. Rath looked at Mandy’s Post-it and compared it to the refrigerator note. The handwriting was the same. He did not know what the word meant, but suspected it was a prescription drug. He’d ask Rankin when he saw him in the morning, right before Preacher’s parole hearing.
T
HE DOOR OPENED,
and Rath looked up nervously from studying the anatomy model in Doc Rankin’s office.
Rankin shuffled in, rummaging his fingers in his Santa’s beard as if searching for loose change, worked his eyes over his clipboard. “Well,” he said, and sat on a stool, legs spread, bear-paw hands rubbing the knees of his green Dickies. If you didn’t know he was a doctor, you’d have thought he was a dairy farmer. Rath liked that.
He examined Rath’s eyes and throat, listened to his heart, glanced at the clipboard.
“Well,” he said.
Out with it,
Rath thought.
“I know you were concerned,” Doc said, “about the pain being a symptom of something else.”
Something else.
“The MRI shows nothing of the sort,” Rankin said.
Rath nodded, expecting to feel relief. Instead, he felt disquiet, as if someone were eavesdropping on the other side of the door and waiting to bring the real news.
“What it
does
show is your pelvic bone has torn away a bit.” Doc leaned toward the anatomy model to grab hold of its pelvic area. “See here, the largest of the pelvic bone, the palmate part. The ilium. Where it connects the tissue is a bit torn. We’re talking less than a millimeter, a tenth of a millimeter actually.”
“That little? How can it possibly—”
“To your body, it’s seismic. It causes pain, so you compensate with your standing, lifting, and walking, which stresses other areas, other muscles, like the
erecta spinae.
”
“I know that one.”
“The new stress means more pain. So you compensate for that. Get the picture?”
“My hip’s fucked up, and it’s fucking up everything else?”
“So to speak.”
“What can be done?”
“Nothing. Not with PT. You hadn’t been doing your stretches anyway, had you?”
Rath shrugged.
“Uh-huh. Well. The way to correct it,” Doc said, “and it’s not really correcting it, but the way to give you the most permanent relief is to mask the pain, so you no longer compensate and recompensate. Exacerbate the issue. I suggest an appointment at the Spine Center for a series of cortisone shots. That will block the pain.”
“When can I go about doing what I’ve always done?”
“You act as if you’d stopped.”
“Without it killing me.”
“After the shot. Within days, pain-free. The ‘injury’ is an anomaly. But it gets those nerves rankled. So we’ll shoot you up and tell the nerves a lie, that all is OK, and they will quiet down.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it. You can’t reinjure it or make it worse.”
“I don’t know if it can get worse.”
“Pain can always get worse.” Rankin clapped a hand on Rath’s knee in a gesture of finality and rose. Rath stood, the pain in his back coursing along his spine, as if in protest to their conspiracy to kill it. He took the Post-it note from his pocket. “Doc. What does this mean to you?” he said, and held out the note.
Rankin read the note, scratched his beard. “What is this?”
“It’s the word
erythromycin.
”
“Sure doesn’t look it. What’s it all about?”
“What’s it used for, erythromycin?”
“It’s a macrolide antibiotic used to prevent bacterial infection, usually postop, often for individuals who have an allergic reaction to penicillin. Though not always.”
“What would the use of this drug among several teenage girls tell you. If you could give me one word.”
Rankin told him.
I
N THE HALL,
Rath dialed Grout and told him his theory.
“Christ. That’s ghoulish,” Grout said.
“We’re not after the Hardy Boys here,” Rath said. “We need to interview Langevine and whoever’s in charge of the Family Matters in St. J. Later. I have somewhere to be right now.”
An uncomfortable silence bled between them.
“Preacher,” Grout said “That today? No wonder you’ve been an asshole.”
“We’ll need a subpoena. Short notice, I know.”
“I’ll run it up the flagpole for Barrons. Judge Charbonneau owes him for a New Year’s DUI that never was.”
In the Scout, Rath stared out the windshield at Mount Monadnock. The woods bare of leaves, the trees gray as ash. Winter now had the woods clenched in its tight, unforgiving fist.
Rath rested his head on the steering wheel for a moment, trying to collect himself. He’d go home and shower and work on what he was going to say to the parole board even though he knew he’d end up sweating like a wrestler and have every rational thought fly from his mind like bats from a cave at dusk once he saw Preacher in the flesh.
N
ED
P
REACHER HAD
aged well, and this fact sent a wave of hatred through Rath that made his muscles go rigid. He’d expected a fat, grizzled, ruined man.
At the time of the murders Preacher had been rough and seedy, but fit, too, the hard, sinewy body of a laborer, a smile that could be both menacing and charming. He had disarming, persuasive, roguish good looks. Rath supposed this was what kept people off guard—and kept them from believing he was capable of what he’d done. He’d come off as the knowing bad boy. But he’d also had a haggard look around his eyes, and in a certain light, back then, he’d looked fifteen years older than his actual age.
Now, Preacher was 53 but looked 40. Younger and more virile than Rath, he was fit and trim, the bags under his eyes miraculously gone. His skin was weathered but tan. A man who’d spent time soaking up the rays in the prison yard. A man who’d made use of the prison gym. On the public dime. He stood up straight. His easy,
don’t-give-a-fuck
swagger had vanished, and as he was led by the guards into the old judge’s quarters used for the hearing, shackled and cuffed, he walked with a slow, easy confidence, shoulders squared, chin up, eyes forward. His demeanor was one of humility and pride.
Rath felt his utter repulsion for Preacher expand inside himself, suffocate all other emotion, leaving it hard to breathe.
As Preacher was aided into his seat by the guards, he locked eyes with Rath, and a smirk oozed across his face, as if he might break into a fit of his soulless laughter, his eyes brilliant with evil. Then it was gone. His face full again with false reverence. An act. This room his theater. The five people on the board, the only audience he had to impress. In his hands, he held a book. The Bible.
Rath fought a mounting urge to spring from his folding chair and drive his fist through Preacher’s teeth, through the back of his throat, grab hold of his spine, and rip it out. He closed his eyes, trying to master his rage.
Laura had never been a vengeful person. She’d been forgiving, a study in patience and understanding. But that had been toward transgressions of the everyday variety. How patient would she be after what she’d suffered? After what her husband had suffered? Would she be so forgiving? She’d forgiven Rath’s selfish youthful ways partly because she herself had struggled with promiscuity in high school and college, until she’d met Daniel.
If I’d been on time.
The thought knifed through Rath’s heart. If not for Preacher, Laura and Daniel would be the ones worrying about Rachel these days. And where would Rath be? Still a bachelor? Unmoored and indifferent, sating his base desires? Unable to commit because he could feel the old man’s blood like a toxin in his veins. A man alone because he was unable or unwilling to suppress his own ugly appetite? He could imagine it, and it chilled him. Laura’s death had been his rebirth into a better life. Her death had saved him. And this thought sickened him most of all. The simple truth: Rath loathed himself even more than he loathed Preacher.
Preacher looked at Rath, a malicious glint in his eye, the look of one accomplice to the other:
Without you, I could not have done it.
As the parole board readied at its table with the shuffling of papers, Preacher clutched his Bible to his chest, eyes on Rath, and winked. Rath, trembling, willed himself to keep calm.
That Preacher was even here today, given a pulpit from which to spin his web in a civil procedure, was a mockery of the system, or perhaps it revealed the system for what it was: inept and inadequate. Justice was blind all right—blind to its own failings.
This was a waking nightmare.
A female parole-board member, a former public defender, for God’s sake, was nattering about procedure. How the victims and family of victims would have a say. Rath was the only family. He and Rachel. And Rachel had no idea Ned Preacher had murdered her parents. He’d not spared her pain she didn’t deserve but robbed her of a truth she did deserve. However hard it would have been to tell it. He’d been weak.
The parole-board members cleared their throats, adjusted microphones, and poured springwater from plastic bottles into glasses etched with the scale of justice.
Rath’s hatred radiated from his every pore.
“Mr. Rath. Would you care to speak?” a parole-board member, Jonas Kron, said, staring at Rath as if he knew what Rath had been thinking. Kron was a liberal who used
human-rights
issues to benefit and free criminals rather than think of the victim’s rights to keep the criminal locked up.
Rath stood, and the Earth’s rotation had slowed, gravity had lessened, and he felt he’d float away. He held fast to the back of the chair in front of him to keep from doing just that.
“This,” he nodded toward Preacher. He wanted to say pervert, sociopath,
monster.
But hot emotion did not play as well as cold fact in this theater. Unless you were the criminal sobbing false tears of regret, not for what you’d done but for being caught. Then, emotion worked.
Rath continued. “This man killed my sister. He stabbed her and he cut her throat and he broke her neck. He raped her. While her baby slept. And when her husband came home, he killed him, too. The mother and father of a sleeping baby. My niece. My daughter.” Rath tried to swallow, but couldn’t, his throat tight, as if a pair of hands were squeezing it. “What he did was not the result of a momentary fit of passion. It was planned. Calculated. Sport. His entire life, this
man
has committed violent crimes, ruined lives, then plea-bargained, knowing the law would go easier on him for saving the state money. He has it figured out, what the state’s priority is.
Money.
”
Rath’s heartbeat was accelerating too fast. “He works the system. In prison, he takes every
‘self-improvement’
class available. He’s a Good Boy. Not because he’s changed. But to help
himself
get out. I don’t think his appetite has lessened. It’s grown, the same way your own appetite grows for something you crave when you are deprived of it, and whatever he tells you, how he’s a better man, repentant, changed, found Jesus, don’t believe it. He can’t wait to do it again.” The words were gushing forth now, his adrenaline screaming, his blood lit gasoline. “Ask yourselves why men like him
find
Jesus only after being locked up? Why can’t
Jesus
find the
man
before the man commits such acts? When ‘God’ becomes proactive and spares women and children, maybe I’ll start to believe in him.”
Rath’s thoughts were fleeing, his emotions boiling over. To continue was a mistake. But he could not stop himself. “He can’t be allowed to do these things again. Ruin more lives. He doesn’t have the right. The only way to
guarantee
that he won’t is to keep him locked up. If you let him out, when he does it again, and he
will
, those crimes are on your hands.”
Rath sat.
The parole board responded with cold stares and the scratching of pencils in notebooks.