Authors: Koethi Zan
Tracy didn’t slow down until we were within the city limits. We stopped under the glaring lights of a Chevron station to refuel, and then she drove on until she spotted a Waffle House. We took a booth in the corner and ordered coffee, sitting in silence, as we waited for our hearts to stop pounding and our heads to clear.
CHAPTER 24
Two days later Tracy and I got off the plane together in Portland. I was beginning to feel like a seasoned traveler. No panic attacks. I’d learned to cope. I bought a little rolling suitcase I only allowed to be gate-checked. I wore a smaller bag crosswise over my chest. I kept my valuables in its zippered interior pocket that I checked every half hour on the dot. My physical belongings, at least, were safe with me.
Tracy and I had hardly spoken since New Orleans, though I didn’t understand why. I wondered if she was embarrassed by what she had told me, regretting it now that we were away from the site of her painful past. Or maybe she had been looking for more of a response from me—understanding or commiseration, something I didn’t know how to show. And maybe, no matter what she said, she still couldn’t disentangle the past from the present any more than I could.
At any rate I was not, I told myself, eager to rekindle some relationship with Tracy. Yet even as I thought this, I knew I really didn’t believe it. I couldn’t stay in my bubble anymore, and oddly, I didn’t want to.
Still, it was surreal being with her, out in the world like this, without any walls to contain us. Yet here she was, here I was, and we were in Oregon. We never would have believed that anything could make us come back to this part of the world.
I pulled out my phone to do my check, to distract myself. I saw I had another message from Dr. Simmons and thought a busy public area would be as good as any place to call her back.
She answered right away. “Sarah. Where are you?”
“I’m taking a vacation, Dr. Simmons.”
“Sarah, Jim and I have spoken. Where are you? Is everything okay?”
“I’m fine. Listen, you’ve been enormously helpful. Really. But I have to figure out a few things on my own. And then we can discuss them. At length. In elaborate detail.”
“I understand. I just want to tell you that it’s not all on you. It’s not all your responsibility. Remember that.”
I stopped. The wheels of my suitcase glided to a slow halt on the smooth floor of the airport. Dr. Simmons always did manage to touch a nerve.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Just that. Just that I know you put a lot of pressure on yourself. And in this case, there are a lot of other people bearing the burden of keeping Jack Derber in jail. It’s not all on you.”
“Well, of course I know that,” I said, perhaps a bit too quickly.
“Okay, then. That’s all I wanted to tell you. Have a great trip. Call me when you get back. Or sooner if you need me.”
I hung up, staring off at the illuminated sign of a barbecue place. Dr. Simmons was right. I didn’t have to bear the whole burden, but
that wasn’t the whole story. Even if I hadn’t been responsible for everyone else’s pain, I did have a duty to Jennifer. I owed her something more.
My thoughts drifted back over the familiar territory of our abduction. If only I hadn’t persuaded her to go with me to the party that night. She’d had an exam to study for, but I had pushed her to go out. I can still picture her face as she hesitated, then relented for my sake. If only I hadn’t pushed. Where would we both be now?
I was doing it again, I told myself, as I shook my head to clear my thoughts.
Tracy glanced at me out of the corner of her eye, as she headed straight for the exit. “Dr. Simmons?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know why you still see her. She’s basically an instrument of the state.”
“You mean, because she works with Jim so much?”
“I mean, because doesn’t the State of Oregon still pay her? And because she saw all three of us at the beginning. Come on, Sarah. They are keeping tabs on us. To make sure we don’t go before the legislature again to demand compensation. I started seeing a private shrink immediately. I only see Dr. Simmons once a year to keep Jim off my back. A check-in, he likes to say. Which is, I’m sure, exactly right. I’m sure he checks in. I’m sure it is a total pass-through situation.”
“What do you mean?”
“Come on, Sarah. I’m sure she tells the FBI everything, and they have put us into some massive database of theirs. One day, you can rest assured, they’ll be calling on you to be a secret trained assassin. They’ve probably planted some kind of microchip in our brains. Whatever Jack Derber couldn’t achieve, they probably can.”
I couldn’t tell if this was Tracy’s attempt at dark humor, or if the world truly did hold more horrors that I hadn’t considered. I
needed to think about that one later, I decided, and shelved it in some inner recess of my brain.
Our first stop was Keeler, Sylvia’s town. I wanted to see if she’d been home, or at least what was filling up her mailbox.
We drove slowly down the street past Sylvia’s house. Nothing had changed. The mailbox was jammed full. The postman had tried to close it, but it would shut only halfway. We pulled up close, and I jumped out, looking around to make sure no one saw me.
I pulled out a slip of paper from the top. A notice that Sylvia’s mail was being held at the post office going forward. I dug in a little bit farther but found only more junk mail. No letters from Jack, which suggested to me that maybe he knew where she was. Or at least where she wasn’t.
“Okay, go!” I practically shouted to Tracy as I got back in the car.
“Is someone after us again?” she said. I couldn’t tell if she was teasing me or not.
“No, but I need to get away from here. That place creeps me out.”
Tracy obligingly sped away, and we made our way to visit Val and Ray on the other side of town. I’d arranged for us to have dinner with them, and as we pulled into the driveway of their tidy bungalow, I told Tracy that while we were here, her name would be Lily. She made a face at the name and asked if she could pick it next time.
Ray was waiting for us in the rocking chair on their front porch. He waved us in. Their house was cheerful and bright, decorated in a soothing palette of soft colors. A pot of stew must have been cooking somewhere in the house, its delicious aroma reminding us we hadn’t eaten anything since the pathetic boxed lunch on the plane.
I introduced Tracy as Lily, relieved when she didn’t dispute it. Ray made a little joke about how her piercings must have hurt, and she nodded and smiled indulgently. She was on her best behavior at least, I thought, as Val joined us.
“It was good to hear from you, Caroline,” Val began. I started
at the name my body still rejected. She shook hands with Tracy. “And how long have you been working as Caroline’s researcher?”
When she was sure no one was looking, Tracy rolled her eyes at me and muttered a pointed “not long” under her breath.
“And I’m delighted that you can stay for dinner,” continued Val, barely stopping for a beat. “Ray has some things he’d like to show you afterward.”
After dessert Ray excused himself and returned a few minutes later with a large photograph album in hand. He set it down in front of us with an air of triumph.
Val giggled. “Oh, he’s wanted to show this to someone for so long. I won’t have anything to do with it. Usually I won’t let him share it with anyone else, in case they think he’s a real weirdo. But we figured you’d be interested.”
Tracy reached over to the album and flipped it open to the first page. Instead of photos, though, it was filled with carefully preserved newspaper clippings. Next to each one was an index card covered in a fine handwriting that slanted hard to the left.
“My notes,” said Ray, noticing where our attention had gone. “I took notes based on the TV news reports and then added my own thoughts on the story. I always believed there was more to it. You know, the press only found out so much.”
I looked over at Tracy. She was transfixed. I had known at the time that the press was covering our story, but I hadn’t seen any reports, mostly because I hadn’t been allowed to read the newspapers or watch television then. My parents had me cocooned at home, sheltered from the media frenzy. All I remember from those days was eating myself sick with the endless plates of food my mother made or that the neighbors brought over in steaming casserole dishes.
Looking back, I realized I had been almost a prisoner at my parents’ house, patiently lying still on the couch as they stared at
me in delighted disbelief for hours on end, offering to get me anything I wanted. New slippers, a cup of lemon ginger tea, any and all my favorite childhood desserts.
But my favorites weren’t my favorites anymore. My very taste buds had been transformed from the experience. In fact, I began to wonder if my mother suspected I wasn’t really her daughter at all afterward, I was so changed. She wanted to know everything that had happened to us, but I told her only the most carefully edited bits and pieces. I doled it out in small measured doses, hoping never to let her feel the full impact of the truth. I believed that only I could gauge how much she could take, and I needed to protect her from what I knew she would be unable to live with.
When I returned, the whole world seemed hazy and bright and unreal. I had been living only in my own head for so long, pushing everything else out, that I found it hard to be present. So despite my mother’s best efforts, we were still separated.
It was a gap I would never figure out how to bridge. My mother’s deepest sadness was that I could hardly bear to have her cradle me in her arms, when all she wanted to do was hold me. But for me, all my circuits were cut. I had lost all connections except to a dead girl in the ground somewhere in Oregon.
My mother was sad, of course, about Jennifer, but her happiness to have me alive and with her again dwarfed her grief for this other lost child. I thought—I
knew
—that Jennifer deserved more. She deserved a real grief, all her own, and even then I felt I was the only one who could adequately provide it.
We were still in high school when Jennifer had finally stopped speaking to her father, and he never made much of an attempt to connect with her again. He left that part out when he spoke to the press about his deep and abiding loss, of course. I watched him warily when he came to visit me, and I saw behind his eyes that all he really wanted was attention. To me, his tears didn’t really count.
So here I was, in this comfortable kitchen in Keeler, with the smell of our after-dinner coffee lingering in the air, poring over the press clippings of another lifetime. I looked them over, reading a few paragraphs here and there, noticing the shift in tone as the story developed, day by day. I detected in those words the familiar aura of professional excitement, this time from the journalists realizing the thrill factor of the unfolding story.
Then I noticed that the byline on most of the articles was the same: Scott Weber. That must be the journalist David Stiller had mentioned, the one who had been mooning away over Adele. I wondered aloud to Tracy whether we should meet with him, and she replied, “Definitely,” without looking up from the articles. Her eyes glistened. Even for her this was hard. Even for her.
“Ray,” asked Tracy, without looking up from the pages, “why did you take such an interest in this particular case?”
Ray smiled broadly. “Oh, not just this particular case, though this was definitely one of the more dramatic stories. And then when Sylvia moved to the area, it did become a bit of an obsession.”
I looked up at him. “What do you mean?”
“Well, girls, come with me.” We followed him down the hall to a door at the rear of the house. I hung back, suddenly feeling closed in, too close to other people’s bodies. I didn’t like going down narrow hallways, even in cheerful homes like this one.
I was a couple of steps behind them as we went into Ray’s small study, and I gasped when I turned the corner. The walls were covered in sheets of newsprint, filled with headlines and photographs of the most gruesome crimes. Framed copies of historic documents, all relating to famous murders, were set up on the desk, balanced against the wall. He’d obviously gone to great lengths creating this elaborate and macabre gallery of horrors, dug deep into the past to accumulate an archive of the ways human beings make other human beings suffer.
A long shelf along one wall was filled with photo albums, nearly identical to the one he’d shown us, each labeled with a different proper name. I didn’t know if they were those of the victims or the perpetrators, though, I thought bitterly, usually it was the perpetrators’ names everyone remembered.
I looked back at Ray and saw him beaming with pride. He felt no shame about his obsession. And why should he? These were just stories to him. Did he even think of the victims as real people? Did he understand the tragedy, the horror those volumes contained? People’s lives destroyed forever, and here it was, his hobby. Like stamp collecting.
I could sense without looking at her that Tracy too was repelled. Neither of us could even speak. I was unable to comprehend how someone could be so drawn to the things I was trying so hard to shut out. Ray looked at our astonished faces and started to try to explain.
“I know what you’re thinking. That this is a bit, well, strange. Please don’t misunderstand me. For a long time I wondered whether there was something wrong with me. But I think … I think … I just want to understand. I want to understand why people do these things, how it happens.
“So many times people get carried away by passion, do things they never thought they’d do, and their whole lives change in an instant. Sometimes people are simply insane—mentally ill—and it isn’t their fault. But occasionally, just occasionally, there seems to be evil at work. Real evil. Like Jack Derber.”
“You don’t think he is mentally ill, Ray?” Tracy perked up. She suddenly seemed interested. For the first time it occurred to me she was still looking for answers. I thought she had it all neatly analyzed and had moved past it. She always seemed to know everything, but maybe she still had her questions, her doubts. Just like me.