Authors: Koethi Zan
“We don’t know much more than you.”
She stared at me. She must have known that wasn’t entirely true. She changed tack.
“I see. Well, in any event, maybe the three of you will consider participating in our victimological study, especially now that you’re all together again.”
I knew I’d better steer us away from that topic before she could go any further. I had a feeling the word
victimological
would not sit well with Tracy.
“It looks like you and David Stiller have a—a very different relationship from what we thought.”
“Oh, that,” she said tonelessly. “Just reconstructing a scene for a conference presentation.”
I didn’t believe that for a second but decided to move on.
“Adele, do you know whether Jack Derber had a connection to Noah Philben?”
Her face was still for a moment. “Well, only what they said on the news: that his wife is a member of Noah’s church.”
“I mean something from … before. All those years ago. You’ve known Jack a long time. Did he know Noah Philben before prison?”
Adele looked straight ahead and blinked twice slowly, as if only her eyes would tell us anything, in code. Her lashes, in a thick coat of mascara, fluttered. She looked away, straightening some papers on her desk. I thought her smooth gears might slip for just a moment; then she seemed to gain control of herself, and she looked back at us, indecipherable as ever.
“How would I know? Jack and I were not
friends
. We were working on research projects together. I wouldn’t know with whom he associated outside the university, except the people I’ve since met at The Vault.”
With this she sat back and folded her hands carefully in her lap. I waited for her to look away, maybe to shift uncomfortably. But she didn’t. She sat perfectly still.
I could tell that, if she had delivered those letters, we would never get her to admit it. Adele wasn’t going to fall apart like Helen Watson. Maybe because she had more to hide.
I tried to imagine what was going on in her mind. This woman was all discipline, but there had to be something that would break
her. I couldn’t believe she was all power and control and ambition. I had to do something. Something big.
There was only one way left to push her. One place where I knew even she couldn’t hold on to that composure. I had to get her out of her element. Make her face the past she seemed to brush aside.
But I knew it would push us as well. To go back there. Yet we all somehow knew it was the one inevitable place we had to go. The place we knew was calling us home, ready to tell us what we needed to know. Nothing could be more terrifying to me. Nothing. But I reminded myself that I had to be stronger now. I was following Tracy’s advice. We all had to plunge in. With or without Adele, we had to go back there. We had to test ourselves. Test Jack Derber.
“Okay, we’re leaving.” I stood up. Tracy and Christine looked at me questioningly but stood up in tandem, prepared to see where I was taking this.
“We’re going to his house,” I said decisively. Much more decisively than I felt. Tracy and Christine looked stunned.
Even Adele blanched. “Why would you do that? You can’t get in there. Isn’t it all locked down by the police?” Her surprise seemed genuine, and I began to doubt whether she was involved.
“We’ll have to break in then. He has written us letters, Adele. They were delivered to us today at our hotel.” I scanned her face, searching for a sign of guilt. If she knew anything, she was hiding it well. “And everything in those letters suggests there is information hidden in that house. Papers. Photographs. Perhaps some of his
research materials.
”
At that Adele stood up abruptly and grabbed her purse. She was on board.
As we marched down the hall, Christine sidled up to me and whispered furiously, “What the hell are you thinking? No way am I going back there without Jim.”
“Jim would never let us go there at all. We have no choice,” I replied, sorrier than anyone that it was the case. But this was our moment. I felt it. “Jack is telling us something is in there, and I believe him, even if it’s part of his sick game. For this one last time, I think we have to listen to what he has to say.”
CHAPTER 33
We returned to the rental car in silence, Tracy taking her now-familiar place behind the wheel. This time, though, it didn’t bother me, because in some new and strange way I felt I was the one leading us on.
Staring out the window on the passenger side as we left the city proper, I wondered what had made me insist on going to the house. I hadn’t had time to prepare myself mentally, and I reminded myself I had sworn never to return to this state, much less to that awful place. I looked at Tracy. She nodded as she shifted the car into drive.
“You’re right, Sarah. We need to do this.”
I found the address on Google, and we punched it into the GPS. Amazing how easy it was to find now, when so many had searched for it for so long. There it was, on Google Maps, street view and satellite. I turned to the backseat. Christine’s hands were shaking again, as she ran them up and down her thighs.
I felt my breath coming a little faster and recognized with annoyance the dizziness that was starting to whirl the thoughts around in my head. If there was one thing I was not going to do, however, it was let Adele see me crack. This time I didn’t bother with any sophisticated stress-reducing techniques.
Goddammit
, I thought to myself,
you are not going to have a panic attack right now. You can’t.
I held my breath and counted to twenty, squeezing my eyes shut. This was for Jennifer. I had brought her photo along again, and I pulled it out, taking a long look at her face. Then I slipped it back into my pocket as a talisman against the evil of this place.
I felt my head begin to clear and my breathing return to normal. And then once again, I began to feel that strange sense of elation. Maybe we would find something. Evidence. Explanations. Answers. Something we could use to keep Jack in prison, something that would take us to Jennifer’s body, or maybe, just maybe, something that would explain why this had happened to us. I couldn’t tell what was more important to me at this point.
When I finally made my escape, I had thought I would never be unhappy again. That there was no room for unhappiness as long as I was free. Why, then, couldn’t I actually be happy?
Or is it the case that no one ever truly gets over anything? Is there really that much pain and suffering continuing right now at this minute, in millions of hearts, in bodies carrying on the burden of existence, trying to smile through tears for fleeting, passing moments here and there—when they can forget what happened to them, maybe even for whole hours at a time? Maybe that’s what it is to live.
But I couldn’t think about that now. I had to focus. However doubtful it seemed that we would find anything the FBI had overlooked, I reminded myself that they had been searching for something entirely different. They hadn’t been exploring Jack Derber’s
whole existence back then. They had been looking for girls tucked away in crevices. The hard evidence of bodies.
And back then prostitution rings would have been low on the list of FBI priorities anyway. The Internet hadn’t yet linked together the perverted of the world for more coordinated horrors. Back then it had been serial killer season. That was where the glamour was. That’s what they wanted Jack to be—a mad, lone attacker.
None of us spoke for the entire forty-minute drive. We just listened to the GPS, its computer-generated voice filling the spaces where we couldn’t connect anymore.
Recalculating
came the constant refrain, and I could see in all of our faces that that was what we were doing as well. Trying to adjust ourselves to this sudden new reality. We were approaching the place where we had thought we would die. The place where we had wanted to kill each other. We didn’t know what this would feel like, but it would not feel good.
We found the driveway, which I recognized from the newspaper photos. Tracy stopped on the road, her turn signal flashing. A light rain started to hit the windshield, and without a word she flicked on the wipers. We sat there, still in the silence. The GPS reminded us that our destination was on the right.
“Are we ready?” Tracy finally said.
“No, not ready,” came Christine’s voice from the back. “But let’s do it. Let’s just do it.”
I looked back at her. Christine’s hands had stopped fidgeting, and there was a new resolve in her face. I nodded to Tracy, and she turned the car into the driveway, which twisted along up the side of a low mountain through a heavily wooded forest. I looked at the trees and remembered the time I had spent in those woods, after my escape, wandering, nearly dead from dehydration, naked. An animal in the forest, disoriented and alone. More alone than I’d
ever been in my life. The weather had been the same then, and I remember opening my mouth toward the sky, tasting the rain.
As we drew closer, I noted that here and there, strewn on the ground or hanging from trees, were tattered bits of yellow police tape, hardly recognizable unless you knew to look. We finally pulled around the last corner, and the house came into view. A large A-frame lodge, dark green, blending with the forest, and a deep red barn over to the right. That barn, I thought.
That barn.
I shuddered as we pulled to a stop in front of it.
Tracy looked over at me, but I couldn’t read her expression. Was she checking on me, or was she lost in her own painful memories? I couldn’t tell.
I looked back at Adele, who had a look of wonderment on her face. I didn’t know if she’d ever been here—if this place had been a secret haunt of hers as well—but at least she seemed properly in awe of what had occurred in this spot.
I looked over at Christine. She was calm and solemn. Her hands were still.
We got out of the car almost simultaneously, the doors clicking in unison as we closed them gently. We all stopped in our tracks, looking at that house with silent dread. It was overwhelming. This building felt alive to me, ominous and strange. It seemed to be watching us, a part of Jack he’d left behind.
Finally, I took a deep breath and started toward it, careful not to look at the barn. I almost laughed out loud at the irony of trying to break
into
this house that we’d spent years trying to get out of. But here we were. And we were all terrified.
I got close enough to look into the window by the door. It looked well organized and scrubbed clean inside. I wondered for a moment what lucky person had had the job of restoring the house after the ransacking by law enforcement.
Tracy, leading the way, walked over to the door and was reaching for the doorknob, when I interrupted her.
“Should we avoid fingerprints?”
“Well, we aren’t exactly prepared with gloves, now are we?” Still, she stretched the end of her T-shirt to grasp the door handle. It was unlocked, and she flung the door open.
“So there we are. Our first experience as criminal trespassers—a great success.”
“That’s weird,” came Adele’s voice from behind me. “Creepy, in fact.”
The door stood open before us. We looked at each other again. Who would take that first step?
I knew the answer. I had dragged us all here, so it was only fair that I should be the one to cross that threshold first.
I took a deep breath, trembling only slightly, then entered the house. I turned back to the others.
“See, it doesn’t hurt at all.”
No one cracked a smile.
I took another step in, and Tracy followed me.
“Well, here we are, in never-never land,” she whispered, looking around at the prim kitchen. It seemed so ordinary. No one could have detected the evil residue his touch must surely have left behind.
Adele followed us in cautiously, eyes wide.
Christine stood at the door, immobilized by fear. I noticed her left hand start to quiver. Then, bracing her left arm with her right hand, she stepped over the threshold slowly and deliberately, inhaling deeply.
“Okay, then,” was all she said.
I propped the door open with a small side table from the entryway, not ready to be fully enclosed in there, and then led the way down the hallway, fighting all the while to keep myself from hyperventilating. My pulse was racing, and that old familiar dizziness
was creeping in. I knew, though, that for everyone’s sake, I needed to keep it under control.
I went down the hall and stood for a moment alone in front of the double doors to the library. If anything relevant was hidden in this house, I knew it would be in that room, but I wasn’t sure if I was ready to face it.
I put my hand in my pocket, reaching for Jennifer’s picture. I clutched it. I could feel it crinkle up in my fist. I might be damaging it, but I needed to draw a kind of physical strength from it now, to let the ink from that image soak into my fingertips and bring Jennifer closer to me. I slid the door open slowly, hoping I could take in the room in bits and pieces, easing into it.
The first thing I saw was the rack, still there in the corner.
Tracy’s voice was right in my ear behind me. “Ugh, why didn’t they take that freaking thing out of here?”
“The room seems so much smaller,” Christine said softly.
“That makes a lot of sense,” began Adele. “This room won’t have the same power for—”
“Shut up, Adele,” Tracy and Christine said in unison.
Adele shut up. We all stepped into the room and stared up at the bookshelves, which ran up to the top of the double-height ceiling. The books were still there. Thousands of them.
I walked over to the heavy oak desk, with its roll top and its dark green blotter. It was expensive, clearly. Jack’s adoptive family had not wanted for money, and neither had Jack.
In the dead center of the blotter lay an unmarked envelope. I lifted it up. It was sealed. The others came over to see what I’d found, Tracy and Christine carefully avoiding touching the rack as they made their way to my side.
“Should I open it?” I looked at them.
“Why not?” said Adele. “We’ve already broken and entered.”