Authors: Koethi Zan
Tracy started to say something, but I held up my hand, recognizing victory when I saw it.
“Fine. You’ll do it then?”
“I’ll see what I can do. You know, it isn’t easy to get projects staffed these days. We’ve had even more funding cuts for our division. All the money goes to the antiterrorism group now.”
I pulled out my trump card. “You owe it to us, Jim, don’t you think? After that trial?” I almost felt guilty throwing it back in his face, knowing what a sore spot it was for him.
He was quiet for a moment, then, very softly, said, “I’ll get it done. Now why don’t you guys get back to mending fences? I’m glad to hear that you’re seeing each other. It does an agent’s heart good.” He chuckled warmly.
Tracy and I looked away from each other at that. We both mumbled our thanks and hurried off the phone. Only when we hung up were we able to look at each other again. Neither of us could bear to articulate our feelings, so I changed the subject back to the original reason for my visit.
“I have a proposition for you.”
“What?”
“I’m in way over my head with this stuff: literature about sex and death, S&M clubs, academic politics. I need your help, Tracy. You know what all these different things mean. Will you take some time off from the journal, just a few weeks, and come with me? “
Tracy frowned at me. “You think there are things the FBI missed?”
“I know it sounds crazy, but yes. I want to go down south, to see what I can learn about Sylvia’s past. Talk to her family. I think there’s a lot more we need to learn. About Noah Philben, about Adele, about David Stiller. A lot of things happened back then, and
the FBI didn’t even scratch the surface. I think there are answers to our questions, Tracy. We just have to find them.”
At the end of my speech, I took a breath and looked at her with anticipation. I had surprised myself too. I hadn’t asked another person for help since my escape, and I certainly hadn’t wanted anyone to get any closer to me, literally or figuratively. And Tracy would have been the last person I thought I had the courage to ask. Maybe deep down I felt that if we went through this together, she could finally see that I wasn’t the awful human being she thought I was. Or that I thought I was.
With near-perfect timing, as always, when Tracy was about to answer, my phone buzzed. I picked it up only to see a text from, naturally, Dr. Simmons. I pressed the off button.
“Our shrink,” I said with a slightly embarrassed smile.
Tracy laughed. “She seems like a better shrink than we probably give her credit for. Maybe she’s psychic too.” We were both smiling now.
“Will you, Tracy?”
She looked at her computer, then around the room at her books, and sighed. She walked over to her desk and calmly shut her laptop.
“All right. I’ll go. On one condition.”
“Yes?”
“We need to take a little detour down to New Orleans. I have to make a visit.”
CHAPTER 21
Because Tracy couldn’t leave for a few days, I booked a hotel nearby. Neither of us mentioned the possibility of my staying with her. After all those nights next to each other in the cellar, we knew that kind of proximity would bring back too many memories.
That night I had trouble falling asleep. When I finally drifted off, I had my recurring dream, if you could even call it a dream. It was more like a tormenting memory that haunted my sleep.
I was upstairs in Jack’s house, and he was testing me. Finally giving me the chance I had wanted and had been working toward, carefully and methodically.
Without warning and in complete silence, he guided me off the rack, out of the library, and over to the front door of the house. Almost instinctively, I turned back from where I had come, looking back in through the door of the library, taking one, almost mournful
last glance at the rack, hoping the memory of the pain would inspire me in this moment.
The wood seemed to shine, almost to glow. The sunlight burning through the window over it gave it a magical gloss. I turned my head slowly to look forward again at the door to the outside. I had never seen it open before. My feet must have moved, but in the dream I glided over, unable to stop, unable to control my own movements. A ghost, a chimera, I was nothing but air.
Jack pointed forward, saying, “You want to see her, right?”
He had told me before, taunting me I thought, that one day he would dig up Jennifer’s body, just for me, one day when he finally believed I had reached the level where I could be trusted. Trusted to see it. Touch it if I wanted to. Lie down next to it.
I couldn’t tell if he was threatening me with the same death, however gruesome it might have been, that he offered her.
I looked through the door, almost afraid of the open space it harbored, after all this time. I had spent months building up Jack’s trust in me, making him believe that I was accepting my “fate,” that I would never run away. I had built up that trust at a high cost, and I wasn’t about to lose everything I had put into it now.
But was this the moment it had all been leading up to? One false move, and I could be dead. Dead or free. There were no other options, and there was a chance they were one and the same. Either way, nothing would be the same after this. This was a turning point. My heart felt as though it might burst.
The opportunity had arrived unexpectedly. I hadn’t thought it would come this soon, so even though I had been planning, I hadn’t planned this far. I didn’t know if the time was right. I hadn’t eaten in two days, so my brain could hardly calculate the odds, as if there were enough data points in this situation to run any numbers. It didn’t help that I was fully naked and still in pain. I was utterly vulnerable, yet utterly determined.
I had believed my mind was strong, but I knew in my heart I had wavered. That there had been times over these last months when I thought maybe I should give in and accept that this was the rest of my life. That I would stay here as Jack’s faithful servant until the day he decided to kill me. That if I didn’t fight back, even in my head, he would be merciful at least on the physical punishments. Then I could live happily with the little bit of release I had earned.
Through the open door, I saw a small porch and beyond it a dirt driveway with a large red barn at the end. The barn was tall and run-down, with peeling paint showing the worn boards beneath it. Its door was cracked open about two feet, but all I could see was darkness within.
I didn’t immediately notice the body. But eventually my eyes, unaccustomed to taking in such a large depth of field, made their way there. On the ground, to the left of the open door, was a blue tarp, carefully wrapped around a human figure.
My heart nearly stopped when I saw that the discolored and bloated object jutting out at the end of the tarp was a foot. It was almost unrecognizable as part of a human body. It was dirty, the earth caked around the swollen ankles and toes. He had clearly buried her without a casket of any sort.
He pushed me through the open door, and I started to walk slowly toward the body. Even though I had known for many months that he had killed Jennifer, and I thought I had mourned her, somehow seeing her there escalated my grief and fear, compounded it by a power of ten. And yet pushing back wave after wave of regret and pain, I drew my focus back to myself. Was this the moment? Should I run? Should I look at her? My sweet Jennifer.
As I always did at that moment in the dream, I woke up in a cold sweat, Jack’s laughter echoing in my head. I sat up, went into the small, antiseptic bathroom of the hotel, and drank glass after
glass of cold water. I went back to the bed and sat down, not turning on the lights.
Eventually my eyes adjusted to the darkness of the room, and I could vaguely make out the shapes of the furniture. I stared at the mirror across from me, my outline a visible but darkened shadow. A familiar friend, my only friend. I could pretend my reflection was Jennifer’s ghost. I often talked to her, though she never answered, just like the years in the box.
Tonight I just looked at her for a long time, until I finally got up and walked over to the mirror, where I traced her image with my fingertip. The only other human I would dare touch. Who was the lucky one here? I wondered. Jennifer didn’t have to be alone anymore, while I was here, locked in my own box, a solitary figure unable to let anyone in. Sealed up as tight as a drum, with nothing but phobias and paranoia to guide me. Broken. Unfixable. Trapped.
CHAPTER 22
A few days later Tracy and I flew into Birmingham. From there we rented a car and drove for hours down a four-lane highway, until we exited into the heart of small-town America, with its disjointed mix of farmers’ co-ops, half-deserted strip malls, and VFW posts. Tracy seemed relaxed, happy to be back in the South on her home turf.
Maybe it was her good mood that enabled her to tolerate my many eccentricities. The way I jumped when she slammed the trunk of the car shut. The methodical process by which I counted my bags, checked for my phone, double-checked the credit cards in my wallet, secured my seat belt, and pulled it three times to confirm it was working properly. The way I was a backseat driver, nervously eyeing all the other drivers as though we were in a derby race and they were out to knock us off the road.
I was grateful she chose to find it amusing, because I could only
imagine how annoying it must be to travel with me. But I knew if I didn’t use those coping mechanisms, as Dr. Simmons would call them, my anxiety would ratchet up, then look for a place to land. I needed to calm myself by running through my lists. The oven is off, the front door is locked, the alarm is set.
June in Alabama was more than I had bargained for. It was hot and humid, of course. That much I had expected. But the weight of the humidity pressed down on you so hard, you wanted to burrow into the earth to escape it. I cranked the car’s air-conditioning to high, just as Tracy turned up the volume on the radio, I supposed to avoid talking to me.
Our plan was to drive directly to Sylvia’s parents’ house. They lived in the small town of Cypress Junction, in the southeast corner of the state, near Selma.
When we finally reached the town, we could tell it was dying. The main street was lined with quaintly faded redbrick Depression-era buildings, which had nothing but To L
EASE
signs in the windows. There was one bank in the center of town, and we passed a post office, the town hall, and a single chain drugstore. No parking lot had more than two cars in it. A small restaurant displayed a placard declaring it was “open,” but through the windows you could see chairs flipped over onto tables. The lights were out.
“What do people here do for a living?” I said, as I stared out at the empty buildings.
“The ambitious ones make meth. The others take it. Or maybe work at the fast-food joints in the ‘new’ part of town. Welcome to the rest of America.”
We turned a corner and drove out onto a large bypass. It was deserted, but Tracy assured me it would be busy on Fridays because it led straight down to the Gulf Coast beaches.
We followed our GPS’s directions until we reached a brick ranch house in the middle of rolling fields, a mix of cotton and grazing.
We pulled into the driveway, which was nothing more than a reddish, sandy dirt path. As I stepped out of the car, the sun blazed down on me again, and I wished I’d worn something even lighter than my gray cotton pants and white linen button-down.
Before I took the first step, Tracy shouted, “Watch out!” I looked down and saw an anthill seven times bigger than any I had ever seen in my life. It was a foot high. I leaned over to study the swarming insects, frantic with their communal life, some carrying little white bits, some stopping to connect with their peers with a swift touch before moving on.
“Fire ants,” said Tracy. I grimaced and stepped carefully around the hill.
We hadn’t called ahead, so we didn’t know if Sylvia’s parents would be home. We knew they were farmers, though, and as Tracy said, in the South, farmers had to quit working early because of the heat.
It was four o’clock now, the hottest part of the day.
We knocked and heard someone calling from inside. A man in his early sixties opened the door, which I noticed hadn’t been locked. He looked as if he’d just woken up from a nap, as he stood before us in jeans and a white T-shirt, no shoes. I hoped he would invite us inside, where I could feel the air-conditioning so crisp and cold, my skin drew toward it involuntarily.
“Can I help you?” the man said in a friendly and polite, if not welcoming, voice. He must have thought we were selling something, but there was no trace of rudeness. And he didn’t seem to notice or object to Tracy’s unorthodox appearance, even as her facial piercings glinted in the bright sun.
Tracy took the lead. “Mr. Dunham, we are here about your daughter.”
Instantly, a look of dazed dread passed across his face. I realized he must have thought we were here to tell him she was dead, so I quickly jumped in.
“She is fine, sir.” His face relaxed instantly. “Well, at least we hope she is. We don’t really know her, but we want to get in touch with her. We need to ask her a few questions.”
“Is she in any trouble?” he asked, clearly pained. My heart was breaking already.
“No … no, sir, not that we know of. She just might be a … witness to something.”
“Something that husband of hers has done?” His voice was gruff, and I could see the muscles in his neck tense. I thought he might cry.
“It’s related to him,” I said, “but we’re not at liberty to discuss the details right now.” It was almost the truth.
“You’re with the police?” he asked, squinting at Tracy.
“No, not exactly,” she replied, “but they’re … aware of our investigation.”
He peered at us, sizing us up. For the first time I thought he noticed Tracy’s partially shaved head, because he leaned in closely to see her. Nevertheless, he paused only for a split second before inviting us in.
“Erline,” he called out in his lilting accent, “we’ve got some visitors.” He smiled at us warmly then, even though we must have been stirring up his pain. I liked him instinctively. How had any daughter of this man ended up married to Jack Derber?