Authors: Mary Kubica
As I climb into bed beside James’s blazing body, the bulk of the down comforter actually making him sweat, I wonder what good this information—the weather forecast and phases of the moon—actually does me, though I’ve stuck it in a folder beside the dozens of meanings for the name Chloe. Why, I don’t know for certain, but I tell myself that any details notable enough for Mia to recount under hypnosis are important to me, any scrap of information to explain to me what happened to my daughter inside the log walls of that rural, Minnesota cabin.
Colin
Before
There’s trees and a lot of them. Pine, spruce, fur. They hold on tight to their green needles. Around them, the leaves of oaks and elms wither and fall to the ground. It’s Wednesday. Night has come and gone. We exit the highway and speed along a two-lane road. She holds on to the seat with every turn. I could slow down but I don’t because I just want to get there. There’s hardly anyone on the road. Every now and then we pass another car, some tourist going below the speed limit to enjoy the view. There’s no gas stations. No 7-Elevens. Just your run-of-the-mill ma-and-pa shop. The girl stares out the window as we pass. I’m sure she thinks we’re in Timbuktu. She doesn’t bother to ask. Maybe she knows. Maybe she doesn’t care.
We continue north into the deepest, darkest corners of Minnesota. The traffic continues to thin beyond Two Harbors where the truck is nearly engulfed in needles and leaves. The road is full of potholes. They send us flying into the air and I curse every single one of them. Last thing we need is a flat tire.
I’ve been here before. I used to know the guy who owns the place, a crappy little cabin in the middle of nowhere. It’s lost in the trees, the ground covered in a crunchy layer of dead leaves. The trees are little more than barren branches.
I look at the cabin, and it’s just like I remember, just like when I was a kid. It’s a log home overlooking the lake. The lake looks cold. I’m sure it is. There’s plastic lawn chairs out on the deck and a tiny grill. The world is desolate, no one around for miles and miles.
Exactly what we need.
I glide the truck to a stop and we get out. Yanking a crowbar from the back, we make our way up a hill to the old home. The cabin looks abandoned, as I knew it would be, but I look for signs of life anyway: a car parked in back, dark shadows through the windows. There’s nothing.
She stands motionless beside the truck. “Let’s go,” I say. Finally she climbs up the dozen or so steps to the deck. She stops to catch her breath. “Hurry up,” I say. For all I know, we’re being watched. I knock on the door first, just to make sure that we’re alone. And then I tell the girl to shut up and I listen. It’s silent.
I use the crowbar to jimmy the door open. I break the door. I tell her I’ll fix it later. I slide an end table before the door to keep it closed. The girl stands with her back pressed to a wall made of red pine logs. She looks around. The room is small. There’s a saggy blue couch and ugly plastic red chair and a wood-burning stove in the corner that doesn’t give off an ounce of heat. There are photos of the cabin when it was being built, old black-and-whites shot with a box camera, and I remember being told by the guy about it when I was a kid, about how the people who built the home a hundred years ago picked this location not for the view, but for the row of pine trees just east of the cabin that shield it from the driving winds. As if he had any way of knowing what thoughts ran through their minds, those people, dead by now, who built the home. I remember, even back then, staring at his greasy receding hairline and pockmarked skin and thinking he’s full of crap.
There’s the kitchen with mustard-colored appliances and linoleum floors and a table covered in a plastic tablecloth. Dust covers everything in sight. There are spiderwebs and a layer of dead Asian beetles on the windowsills. It smells.
“Get used to it,” I say. I see the disgust in her eyes. I’m sure the judge’s house would never look like this.
I flip the light switch and test the water. Nothing. The cabin was winterized before he took off for the winter. It’s not like we talk anymore, but I keep tabs on him anyway. I know his marriage fell through, again, know he got arrested a year or so ago for a DUI. I know that a couple weeks ago, as he does every fall, he packed his shit and left, back to Winona, where he works for the D.O.T., clearing ice and snow off the roads.
I yank a phone from a phone jack and, finding a pair of scissors in a kitchen drawer, cut the wire. I glance at the girl, who hasn’t moved from the door. Her eyes are fixed on the plaid tablecloth. It’s ugly, I know. I step outside to pee. A minute later I return. She’s still staring at that damn tablecloth.
“Why don’t you make yourself useful and start a fire,” I say.
She puts her hands on her hips and stares at me, with that god-awful sweatshirt from the gas station. “Why don’t you?” she says, but her voice shakes, her hands shake, and I know she’s not as fearless as she wants me to think.
I stomp outside and bring in three logs of firewood and drop them to the ground beside her feet. She jumps. I hand her some matches, which she lets drop to the floor, the carton opening and matches falling out. I tell her to pick them up. She ignores me.
She needs to understand that I’m the one in the driver’s seat. Not her. She’s along for the ride, so long as she keeps her mouth shut and does what I say. I yank the gun from a pocket and attach the magazine. And I point it at her. At those pretty blue eyes that go from sure to not-so-sure as she whispers to me, “You’ve got this all wrong,” and as I cock the hammer, I tell her to pick up the matches and start a fire. And I’m wondering if this was a mistake, if I should’ve just handed her over to Dalmar. I don’t know what I expected from the girl, but this sure as hell isn’t it. I never figured I’d end up with an ingrate. She’s staring at me. A challenge. Seeing if I have it in me to kill her.
I take a step closer and hold the gun to her head.
And then she caves. She drops to the floor and with those shaking hands, picks up the matches. One by one. And drops them in the cardboard box.
And I stand there with the gun pointed at her while she scrapes one match and then another against the striking surface. The flame burns her fingers before she can start a fire. She sucks on her finger and then tries again. And again. And again. She knows I’m watching her. By now, her hands are shaking so much she can’t light the damn match.
“Let me do it,” I say as I come up quickly behind her. She flinches. I start a fire without any trouble and brush past the girl, into the kitchen, looking for food. There’s nothing, not even a box of stale crackers.
“What now?” she asks but I ignore her. “What are we doing
here?
” I walk around the cabin, just to make sure. The water doesn’t work. Everything has been shut off for the winter. Not that I can’t fix it. It’s reassuring. When he winterized the house, he wasn’t planning on coming back until spring, the time of year he goes underground, lives like a hermit for six months of the year.
I can hear her pacing about, waiting for someone or something to come barreling through the front door and kill her. I tell her to stop. I tell her to sit down. She stands there for a long time before she finally backs a plastic chair against the wall opposite the front door and drops down in the seat. She waits. It’s apocalyptic, watching her sit there, staring at the front door, waiting for the end to come.
Night comes and goes. Neither of us sleeps.
* * *
The cabin will be cold by winter. It was never meant to be lived in beyond November 1. The only source of heat in the cabin is a wood-burning stove. There’s antifreeze in the john.
The electricity had been shut off. That I fixed last night. I found the main breaker and flipped it back on. I literally heard the girl thank God for the 25 watts given off by an ugly table lamp. I made my way around the periphery of the cabin. I checked out a shed out back that’s filled with a bunch of crap nobody’d ever need, and a few things that might come in handy. Like a toolbox.
Yesterday I told the girl she’d have to piss outside. I was too tired to deal with plumbing. I’d watched her walk down the stairs as if she was walking the plank. She hid herself behind a tree and slid down her pants. She squatted where she thought I couldn’t see, and then, because she wouldn’t dare touch her ass with a leaf, she opted to air dry. She only peed once.
Today I find the main water valve and slowly let the water in. It sprays at first, then begins to flow normally. I flush the toilet and run the sinks to get rid of the antifreeze. I make a mental list of things we need: insulation and more duct tape for the pipes, toilet paper, food.
She’s pretentious. Smug and arrogant, a prima donna. She ignores me because she’s pissed off and scared, but also because she thinks she’s too good for me. She sits on the ugly red chair and stares out the window. At what? At nothing. Just stares. She hasn’t said more than two words since morning.
“Let’s go,” I say. I tell her to get back in the car. We’re going for a ride.
“Where?” She doesn’t want to go anywhere. She’d rather stare out that damn window and count the leaves falling from the trees.
“You’ll see.” She’s scared. She doesn’t like the uncertainty. She doesn’t move, but watches me with fake courage and deluded defiance when I know she’s fucking scared to death. “You want to eat, don’t you?”
Apparently she does.
And so we head outside. We get back in the truck and take off for Grand Marais.
I make a plan in my head: get out of the country, soon. I’ll leave the girl behind. I don’t need her slowing me down. I’ll get a flight to Zimbabwe or Saudi Arabia, some place where they can’t extradite me. Soon, I tell myself. I’ll do it soon. I’ll tie her up in the cabin and hightail it to Minneapolis for a flight before she has a chance to spread my face all over Interpol.
I tell her that I can’t call her Mia. Not in public. Soon enough word will leak out that the girl’s missing. I should leave her in the car, but I can’t. She’ll take off. And so she wears my baseball cap and I tell her to look down, don’t make eye contact. It probably doesn’t need to be said. She knows more about the gravel than me. I ask what she wants me to call her. After enough hesitation to start to piss me off, she comes up with Chloe.
No one gives a damn that I’m missing. When I don’t show up at work, they’ll assume I’m lazy. It’s not like I have friends.
I let her pick out chicken noodle soup for lunch. I hate it but I say okay anyway. I’m hungry. We get about twenty cans. Chicken noodle, tomato soup, mandarin oranges, cream corn. The kind of food you find in a survival kit. The girl realizes this and says, “Maybe you don’t plan to kill me right away,” and I say no, not until we’ve eaten the cream corn.
In the afternoon I try to sleep. These days it doesn’t come easy. I get an hour here, an hour there, but most of all I’m awakened by the idea of Dalmar coming after me or the cops showing up at the door. I’m on the lookout, all the time, peeking out every window as I pass. Always looking behind me. I barricade the front door before I sleep, glad to find the windows sealed shut by some idiot with paint. I didn’t think I had to worry about the girl trying to escape. I didn’t think she had it in her. I let my guard down, left the truck keys out in plain sight, and that was all the encouragement she needed.
And so I’m sound asleep on the sofa, hugging the gun, when I hear the front door slam shut. I’m on my feet. It takes a minute to get my bearings. When I do I see the girl fall down the second half of the stairs down to the gravel drive. I run out the door, screaming, irate. She’s limping. The truck door is unlocked. She gets in and tries to start the ignition. She can’t find the right key. I can see her through the driver’s window. I see her pound a fist on the steering wheel. I’m closing in on the truck. By now she’s grown desperate. She slides across the front seat and out the passenger door. She takes off into the woods. She’s fast, but I’m faster. The tree branches reach out, scraping her arms and legs. She trips over a rock and falls face-first into a pile of leaves. She gets up and continues to run. She’s getting tired, losing speed. She’s crying, begging me to leave her alone.
But I’m pissed.
I grab her by the hair. Her feet continue to run but her head snaps back violently. She lands on the hard earth. She doesn’t have time to cry out before I’m on her, all two hundred and some pounds crushing her slender frame. She gasps, begging me to stop. But I don’t. I’m mad. She’s crying wildly. Tears stream down her face, mixing with blood and mud and my own spit. She squirms. She spits on me. I’m sure she sees her entire life float before her eyes. I tell her how stupid she is. And then I hold the gun to her head and cock the hammer.
She stops moving, becomes paralyzed.
I press hard, the barrel leaving a mark on her head. I could do it. I could end her life.
She’s an idiot, a damn moron. It takes every ounce of goodwill I have not to pull the trigger. I did this for her. I saved her life. Who the hell does she think she is to run away? I press harder with the pistol, dig the barrel into her skull. She cries out.
“You think that hurts,” I say.
“Please...” She’s begging, but I don’t listen. I should have handed her over when I had the chance.
I stand up, grab her by the hair. She bawls. “Shut up,” I say. I drag her by the hair through the trees. I shove her ahead of me and tell her to move. “Hurry up.” It’s like her legs don’t work right. She trips, falls. “Get up,” I snap.
Does she have a clue what Dalmar would do to me if he found me? A bullet in the head would be the easy way out. A quick and easy death. I’d be crucified. Tortured.
I push her up the steps, into the cabin. I slam the door shut, but it bounces back open. I kick it shut and throw the table down to keep it closed. I yank her into the bedroom and tell her that if I hear her so much as breathe she will never again see the light of day.
Gabe
Before
I drive downtown again, the fourth time in a week, planning to bitch when I don’t get reimbursed for all the miles I’m racking up on my car. It’s only about ten miles each way, but takes nearly thirty minutes in the damn traffic. There’s a reason I don’t live in the city. I fork over another fifteen dollars to park—robbery if you ask me—because I’ve passed the intersection of Lawrence and Broadway nearly a dozen times and still can’t find an open meter.
The bar doesn’t open for a few hours. Just my luck, I think, knocking on the window to get the bartender’s attention. He’s stocking the bar and I know he hears me but doesn’t budge. I knock again and this time, when his eyes gaze in my direction, I show him my badge.
He opens the door.
It’s quiet in the bar. The lights are dim, few of the sun’s rays making it in through the grimy windows. The place is dusty and smells of stale cigarette smoke, things you wouldn’t necessarily notice when jazz music and candlelight set the mood.
“We open at seven,” he says.
“Who’s in charge here?” I ask.
“You’re looking at him.” He turns and begins a retreat to the bar. I follow and prop myself up on one of the torn vinyl stools. I reach into a pocket for the photo: Mia Dennett. It’s a fascinating picture, one Eve Dennett let me borrow last week. I promised it wouldn’t get lost or hurt, and I feel bad that my shirt pocket has already wrinkled a corner. To Mrs. Dennett, it was the photograph that was
all Mia,
or so she claimed, this image of a free-spirited woman with dirty blond hair that hangs too long, azure eyes and a straightforward, honest smile. She’s standing before Buckingham Fountain, the water shooting out aimlessly and, in the Chicago wind, spraying the woman who laughs like a child.
“You ever seen this woman before?” I ask, sliding the photo across the bar. He snatches it in his hand to have a look. I tell him to be careful. I see the recognition right away. He knows her.
“She’s here all the time—sits in that booth over there,” he responds, motioning with a nod to a booth behind me.
“You ever talk to her?”
“Yeah. When she needs a drink.”
“That all?”
“Yeah. That’s all. What’s this about?”
“Was she here last Tuesday night? Around eight o’clock?”
“Last Tuesday? Buddy, I can barely remember what I had for breakfast this morning. She’s been here before, that’s all I know for sure.” He hands me back the photo. I hate that he called me
buddy.
It’s denigrating.
“Detective,” I say.
“Huh?”
“It’s Detective Hoffman. Not buddy.” Then I ask, “Can you tell me who was working last Tuesday night?”
“What’s this about?” he asks again. I tell him not to worry about it. I ask him again who was working Tuesday night, this time with a militant tone that completely goes over his big head. He isn’t too fond of my disrespect. He knows he could kick my ass if he wanted to. Only one problem: I carry a gun.
But he retreats into a back room anyway. When he returns he’s empty-handed. “Sarah,” he says.
“Sarah?”
“She’s the one you need to talk to. She was serving
that
table,” he says, pointing to a filthy booth at the back of the bar, “Tuesday night. She’ll be here in an hour.”
For a while I sit at the bar and watch him stock bottles of booze. I watch him refill the ice bins and count money into the cash register. I try to make small talk to throw him off as he tallies up what seems to be thousands of pennies. I lose track at forty-nine. I pace.
Sarah Rorhig appears within an hour, coming through the front door with an apron in her hands. Her boss engages her in a secret exchange, during which her eyes turn to mine. There’s a worried look on her face, a forced smile. I’m at the table, pretending to be rummaging around for clues when all there is is the vinyl booth and a slab of wood masquerading as a table. That and a frilly little green candle I consider swiping for my own home.
“Sarah?” I ask and she says that she is. I introduce myself and ask her to have a seat. I hand her the photo of Mia. “Have you seen this woman?”
“Yes,” she admits.
“Do you remember if she was here last Tuesday, around eight o’clock?”
It must be my lucky day. Sarah Rorhig is a full-time medical assistant and only works Tuesday nights to make a little extra cash. It’s been a week since she was here and so Mia’s image is fresh in her mind. She says with certainty that Mia was here last Tuesday; she says Mia is always here Tuesday nights. Sometimes by herself, sometimes with a man.
“Why Tuesdays?”
“Tuesday-night poetry slam,” she says, “or so I assume that’s the reason she’s always here. Though I’m never entirely sure she’s listening. She always seems to be distracted.”
“Distracted?”
“Daydreaming.”
I ask what the heck a poetry slam is. I’ve never heard of it. I imagine works of Whitman and Yeats being thrown on the ground; that’s not the case. The idea of listening to people recite their own poetry on stage, however, has me even more baffled. Who the hell would want to listen to that? It appears I have a lot to learn about Mia Dennett.
“Was she by herself last week?”
“No.”
“Who was she with?”
Sarah thinks for a minute. “Some guy. I’ve seen him around here before.”
“With Mia?” I ask.
“That’s her name?” she queries. “Mia?” I say that it is. She says that she was nice—the use of the past tense runs into me like a freight train—and always very friendly. She leaves a good tip. She hopes that everything is okay. She can tell from my questions that it’s probably not, but she doesn’t ask to know what happened and so I don’t say.
“This man Mia was with last Tuesday night...they’ve come together before?”
She says that no, they haven’t. This was the first time she’s seen them together. He’s usually at the bar, alone. She’s noticed him because he’s apparently cute, in an enigmatic sort of way—I write that down; I’ll have to look that one up in the dictionary. Mia is always at this table, sometimes alone, sometimes not. But Tuesday night they sat together and they left together in a hurry. She doesn’t know the man’s name but when I ask she can describe him: tall, sturdy, a mound of messy hair, dark eyes. She agrees to meet with a sketch artist later to see if they can come up with something.
I ask again, “Are you sure they left together? This is really important.”
“Yes.”
“Did you see them leave?”
“Yes. Well, sort of. I brought them the bill and when I came back they were gone.”
“Did it seem she was leaving on her own free will?”
“Seemed to me she couldn’t wait to get out of here.”
I ask if they arrived at the bar together. She says no, she doesn’t think so. How did he come to be at Mia’s table? She doesn’t know. I ask again: does she know his name? No. Would anybody know his name? Probably not. He and Mia paid cash; they left a fifty on the table, which she still remembers because, for five or six beers, it was a charitable tip. More than her usual customers leave. She remembers bragging about it later in the night and flashing Ulysses S. Grant’s face for all her co-workers to see.
When I leave the bar, I check up and down Broadway for security cameras outside of restaurants, banks, the yoga studio, anything that will tell me who Mia Dennett was with that Tuesday night she disappeared.