Kitabı oku: «Alice Isn’t Dead», sayfa 3

8

Swansea was not a bustling town. Nice, but also empty. Life had left this town. There was less of it than there once was. Sylvia directed them to an E-Z Stop on the highway, across from a farm stand that was closed, and two different car washes, both closed.

Keisha shut off the engine. “So what now?” she asked.

“We wait,” Sylvia said. She picked up The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S. and started reading.

“Alright then, I’m getting some jerky. You want anything?” Sylvia didn’t look up. “Suit yourself.”

As Keisha walked toward the E-Z Stop she kept asking herself what she was doing. A runaway child and a delivery that would be at least a day late. She probably wouldn’t have a job soon, and then how would she look for Alice? And all because someone had spoken to her as a fellow human being for the first time in a long time and she had responded like a stray dog finally fed. She had risked it all so that she could keep this little bit of company going, as fucked up and weird as the company was. Or maybe, though she wanted to deny this, she felt that the kid could lead her to some new revelation or piece of evidence. Maybe she was using this runaway teenager to help her search. Maybe that’s the kind of person she was. Or maybe she had found a teenage runaway and didn’t want to abandon her. Maybe there was some instinct of protection in her that made her want to keep Sylvia close. Most likely some mixed-up combination of them all.

The drive to Swansea was only a few hours, but it had been late and so they had spent the night at a stop east of Atlanta. Keisha had tried to insist on giving Sylvia the cot, but Sylvia curled up in the passenger seat and either fell right asleep or feigned sleep well enough that Keisha gave up and slept in the back, feeling guilty right until she nodded off.

The guy at the E-Z Stop counter was withdrawn. Didn’t comment on the truck, or the jerky. Didn’t comment on anything. Laid-back. Or shell-shocked. Probably surprised to see a customer in a town this dead.

By the time Keisha got back to the truck, she had rediscovered some semblance of adult composure. Sylvia didn’t acknowledge her, and so Keisha ate her jerky and waited. The sky changed shade, and then color. Sylvia fidgeted in her seat.

“He was supposed to be here already,” she said.

“Who was?”

Sylvia rocked back and forth, and she seemed the youngest she had been since Keisha first saw her, slight and childlike, rising from the shoulder of the highway. Sylvia ran her hands through her hair, shook her head, and then reluctantly said, “You know about the Hungry Man?”

This violated their tacit agreement of not specifying their fears and experiences, and Keisha wasn’t sure what to do with it. Finally, she nodded.

“The Hungry Man killed my mother,” said Sylvia. “At a gas station a couple hours north of New York.”

Sylvia and her mom saw the Thistle Man. Or, as she knew him, the Hungry Man. They saw him commit a horrible act. Sylvia wouldn’t elaborate what it was, but Keisha could guess. And her mother did what Keisha could not. She tried to intervene.

After that, Sylvia didn’t have a mother. She went back to Georgia, was moved from home to home. No one would believe her story. Or no one would admit that they believed her.

There was one policeman, Officer Campbell, who took a special interest in her. Something close to kindness. He warned her that she needed to stop describing what had really happened, needed to stop trying to get people to believe her. That it would be easier if she let that go.

But letting go wasn’t an option for her. Keisha could understand that. If Keisha knew how to let go, she would have been thousands of miles away, living her life, pretending that she had never seen her dead wife on the television.

Sylvia ran away from the last of those foster homes, two days after moving in, and went looking for what scared her most.

“You want to find the Thistle … the Hungry Man?” Keisha could feel the arm against her throat, the must of his breath. “He’s dangerous.”

“Oh, is he? I must not know that. I must be stupid.”

“Not what I meant.”

“Yeah, it was.”

Arm against throat. The policeman’s glance of comradeship at the monster. The smirk on peeling, sagging lips.

“It’s not what I meant,” Keisha said with finality.

Sylvia snorted.

A few months before, Sylvia was sleeping in a city library. There was a window that didn’t lock in one of the reading rooms, and she would slip in after closing, and, thanks to her inability to reach deep sleep since the death of her mother, slip out as the front doors were being unlocked. She checked her in-box on one of the public computers to find an email from Officer Campbell. He said that since she clearly was never going to let this go, he wanted to help her. But it had to be secret. No one could ever know. He told her to meet him, at this date and time, in the parking lot of the E-Z Stop in Swansea. And he would give her the information he had been able to find, all of it.

“I think he hoped that somehow I could put a stop to it, or at least tell the world. I don’t think he knew what he had signed up for when he signed up for it.”

“Ok,” Keisha said. “Maybe the guy inside saw him.”

They went in and asked the guy behind the counter if he had seen a cop car in his parking lot recently. A cop car from Georgia. The guy’s eyes widened, but he shook his head. Keisha revised her impression of him. He wasn’t laid-back. He had seen something. Something of the terror that she and Sylvia had seen. And he wanted desperately to forget.

She leaned in, gentled her voice.

“Man, hey, now look at me, I’m gonna need you to look me in the eyes. I know what you’ve seen tonight. I’ve seen terrible things too; so has this girl, and as long as we’re all quiet, nothing’s going to change. Those terrible things are going to keep on happening.”

The guy didn’t meet her eyes, tapped his hand on the counter.

“Do you want to live in a world where what you saw is possible, or do you want to let us try to change that?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. Sylvia pulled at Keisha’s arm, wanting to leave. Keisha’s anxiety was a vibration in her limbs and chest.

“Ok, how about this,” Keisha said, leaning forward and letting him see on her face every mile she had driven in search of the person she loved. “Whatever scared you, my man, know that I can be so, so much scarier than that.”

His mouth twitched downward and his fingers fidgeted. “I’m sorry. I’d like to help but I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He pointed, past the back wall of the store, to the thick trees behind it.

“There we go,” she whispered, and she patted his hand. “There we go, man.” Sylvia and Keisha went out back, where he had pointed. They looked down into the embankment lined with trees and Keisha spotted a side mirror sticking out of the leaves.

There was no blood, no body. But the windows of Officer Campbell’s cruiser had been broken, all of them, systematically, and every seat had been slashed over and over. Not a trace of Officer Campbell. Keisha suspected that there would never again be a trace of Officer Campbell.

Sylvia groaned, an animal sound of despair, and she collapsed onto the hood of the car, a car that had belonged to the man who she thought would save her, a man who, as is often the case, couldn’t even save himself.

9

The cruiser had nothing useful left. No notes or documents. The computer destroyed. No sign of what he had been planning to tell or show Sylvia. Keisha searched quickly because she felt that it wouldn’t be safe for them to be in this town much longer. She finished up, slammed the door, wiping with her shirt any surface she might have touched.

“Ok,” Sylvia said, her face hard, already on to the next plan. “He was based out of a precinct in Savannah. We’ll go there, see if he left anything that could tell me what he wanted me to know.”

“I’m not helping you break into a police station, Sylvia. You’ve dragged me far out of my way, but you’re not landing me in jail. I have my own search to get back to.”

“Alright, take me to Savannah, drop me off. I’ll be fine on my own. Been fine on my own for a while.”

“I can’t just—” Keisha started but Sylvia waved it off.

“Of course you can. You already want to. I’m giving you permission. Take me to Savannah, leave me near that police station, drive away. You don’t ever have to hear about this again.”

“Ok. Yeah. Ok. I’ll take you to Savannah.”

“Thank you.”

Sylvia didn’t sound annoyed or angry at the possibility of being alone again. She sounded relieved. As they drove out of town, she asked: “What is it you’re looking for anyway? What did you lose to end up circling these roads like me?”

“Ha.” Keisha did not laugh, but said the word to indicate the possibility of laughter. And then she did her best to tell the story, as far as she understood it.

A year and a half before, Keisha had seen her dead wife on the news. After that first sighting, Keisha decided she couldn’t afford to miss a minute. Multiple channels of twenty-four-hour news, and she did her best to cover them all, fast-forwarding, rewinding, searching for proof that she had seen what she had seen.

A fire outside of Tacoma. A landslide in Thousand Oaks. A hostage situation in St. Joseph. Earnest folks speaking earnestly, describing only the bad parts of the world. And among the concerned faces that the news cameras used as a backdrop, Alice. A fleeting face, sometimes, other times a long, head-on stare. Alice over and over. Keisha scrawled down in a notebook in which the first fifteen pages had been grocery lists, a list of every place Alice appeared, and that list became a map of America.

Keisha stopped going to groups. She stopped sitting in circles, stopped describing the shape of the monster that was devouring her, because now she knew that she didn’t understand even the most basic shape of it. The counselors from the groups and some fellow grievers who weren’t quite friends but weren’t quite not friends called her for a few weeks, checking in, but after she assured them over and over that she was fine, they gave up and let her be, and then it was her alone in the house with the question that her life had become.

She quit her job, such as it had been. Ever since what she had believed to be a death, she had been taking a leave, anyway. She went through Alice’s things. Her work stuff, her laptop, letters hidden under piles of clothes. Was that an invasion of privacy? Keisha wasn’t sure. It’s not an invasion of privacy to go through a dead wife’s records. That’s being organized. But Alice wasn’t dead. So did she deserve privacy?

Keisha didn’t care. Alice had made herself a mystery, and now everything she left was a clue. She was a missing persons case and everything she had ever touched was evidence, right down to Keisha’s hands, her skin. The abandoned wife, exhibit A.

Again and again, in the papers and computer files. Phrases Keisha didn’t understand. Praxis. Vector H. References to a war, to “missions.” And more than any other, to Bay and Creek Shipping. Over and over Alice had written about Bay and Creek Shipping.

Keisha had called about a job with Bay and Creek the next day.

“Shit,” said Sylvia.

“Yeah,” said Keisha. Neither of them said anything else for a while.

On the way through Georgia, they passed a house by the highway with a pile of trash burning on its front lawn, big orange flames, thick plume of smoke. A man standing there watching it burn. Sylvia only saw it for a moment, and only in the corner of her eye, and that slice of time was stuck in her head that way forever. The man never moving. The fire never consuming. Keisha never saw him. That moment of time didn’t exist for her at all.

Even after a couple days, Sylvia smelled as strong as ever. Something natural, but not. Organic, but aggressively so.

“What’s that smell?” Keisha asked.

“I was wondering how long you’d be polite. It’s heather oil.”

“Why are you drenched in heather oil?”

“Yeah, I dunno,” Sylvia said. “I’ve heard the Hungry Man, he doesn’t like it. Wards him off. Probably bullshit but …” She shrugged.

“You heard that? Where did you hear it from?”

“You think we’re the only lives he’s touched? You think you’re the only one he’s talked to? Word gets around. I’ve been wandering this country for almost a year now. Others have seen him. I’ve met them. Most were too scared to be as helpful as you.”

Sylvia smiled at her and Keisha managed back a grimace that was a distant cousin of a smile.

“Bad news. I’m real scared too. Kind of all the time. Used to go to therapy and shit.”

“Ain’t important if you’re scared,” Sylvia said. “You’re helping anyway. Can’t control feeling fear. Can control what you do while feeling it. Learned that too.”

“A hard-won lesson of life on the road?”

“Nah, I used to go to therapy too. Anxiety bros?” She held up a fist and Keisha bumped it. Sylvia did a big exploding movement with her fingers, adding sound effects. They both laughed.

“Sure. Anxiety bros,” Keisha said. “I’m still only taking you as far as Savannah, though. Then I have to get back to my thing.”

“I know. Man, I hope you find her.”

“Yeah.”

“Hope she wants to be found.”

“Yeah,” Keisha said. “Yeah.”

Another silence. Keisha didn’t want to say what she was about to say but was unable to stop the words.

“Shit,” she said. “Let’s break into a police station.”

“Thank god,” said Sylvia. “I kept thinking, ‘She’s gonna offer to help me, right?’ And then you didn’t and I was, like, ‘Man, I thought she was a good person.’”

“So I’m a good person now?”

“Good? Remains to be seen. You’re cool, though. Let’s do this.”

10

Savannah looked like a city half remembered from a visit years before. Hazy and dreamlike. Brick buildings sagged into themselves. The trees were more moss than tree. The park at the center of town was full of gutter punks. Kids who had run away out of choice, not out of fear. Two of them catcalled passersby, the same line over and over. They’d removed themselves from the system enough to stop showering but not enough to stop harassing women.

Keisha and Sylvia walked the few blocks to the station and scoped it out. The front of the station was a big glass window, fine, but the rest was cinder-block blank, barred windows, a back door hazardously blocked by a dumpster, nothing that could be crawled through or into. It was a box with one available opening, and that opening was right on the street. Even trying to case the place was hard. There were cops everywhere, hanging out, chatting, and staring at Keisha and Sylvia as they tried to casually walk by.

“Nothing casual about the two of us, I guess,” Keisha said.

“Could we just run in and run out?”

“There’s one usable door. You run in, it’d be tricky to run out.”

They took their fourth walk down the block. An officer across the street watched them with open suspicion. Keisha felt her heart pound seeing the uniform, remembering a dark parking lot in Kansas.

“Not the front then,” she said. “I’m going to walk down that alley, meet me on the other side.”

At the end of the alley was another dumpster. Well, fuck it then. She climbed up on it and from there got on the roof. Body prone so there would be no footsteps, she crawled along the top of the building. There were skylights at regular intervals. She peered over the edge of one, down at a desk that needed decluttering and a floor that needed mopping. She inched her way back, hopped from roof to dumpster to ground, and continued through the alley to where Sylvia was waiting.

“So here’s what, Sylvia. I’m going to need you to make a distraction.”

“What kind of distraction?”

“That I don’t know, but I need to do something very stupid and very loud, so I need you to do something stupider and louder than me.”

She grinned.

“I know just the thing.”

“Oh, man, don’t tell me. I’d have to try to stop you. Just do it.”

Keisha clambered back on the roof and waited. She couldn’t see anything from her crouched position, but then, if she couldn’t tell when Sylvia’s distraction started, the distraction hadn’t been big enough. As she waited, she wondered how stupid she was, letting a teenager lead her to sitting on a roof waiting to do somesilly stunt that would land her with a felony charge. But all that became moot as time passed with no sign of Sylvia, and Keisha knew that it had gone wrong and that Sylvia had been caught, with Keisha aiding and abetting her in this nonsense.

Then the distraction came, and it was big enough.

Sylvia had strolled a few blocks away, broken into a car, and hot-wired it. A few years on the road had made her good at that, for the days when hitchhiking wasn’t working or she had a gut feeling that today would be the day a murderer would pick her up if she tried thumbing a ride. She drove the car to the street in front of the station, pointed it at that big glass front window, and, in a move that she managed with far more grace than she would ever have expected, simultaneously gave it a rev and rolled out. The sedan heaved forward, then rolled on momentum, slow enough that everyone could get out of the way but fast enough to be unstoppable. It entered the front window with a pop and came to a rest there. A lot of the cops ran after Sylvia, which she knew would leave the station empty for Keisha, great!, but also meant, oh shit, there were a bunch of cops after her. There was no way she could outrun them, but she had planned a route to a hiding spot down a side street. Her one chance was to get to the spot before any of her pursuers turned the corner and saw her hiding. She couldn’t waste time looking back and so she dove behind the wall she had picked out and crouched there, praying to whatever was out there, praying that none of them had seen her. All of them ran by. She put her head against the wall and closed her eyes. Now it was all up to this woman she had met only a couple days before.

Keisha heard the car and was immediately on her feet, stomping on the skylight until it gave and her body went with it. She landed hard on her side in a shower of glass and found she was somehow unharmed. The cops were all either out front inspecting the damage or failing to catch Sylvia, and so she was alone in a room with five desks. She wasted a good thirty seconds finding the one with Ben Campbell’s nameplate. By that point she had no time to look at what she was grabbing. She seized every scrap of paper on top of and inside of his desk and threw it into her bag. It was time to get out of there.

Which is when it occurred to her, with the usual stab of disappointment in herself, that she had not fully thought through this plan. Because get out of there how? The front was a swarm of uniforms, the back door was blocked, and the skylight was high above and rimmed with vicious broken glass. She was trapped. Panic welled up her neck, sloshed around her brain, made it difficult for thoughts to connect. Giving up felt like a reasonable option, but she shook that off, tried to find determination or at least manufacture a simulacrum of it. Every second she stood there, the probability of getting caught ticked toward one. She tried jumping, but the skylight was way too high for that. She scrambled around for a miracle. But there was no miracle. There was only her, and her body, and whatever she would be able to do with that body.

So she clambered up on Officer Campbell’s desk, turned, and, without giving herself time to think, hurled herself from the desk up at the skylight, sucking in her stomach in a half-assed attempt to keep from bleeding out on the glass.

Her hands slapped onto the roof, and her chest slammed into the edge and that did some bad things, but there wasn’t much glass where she hit, so she avoided getting completely skewered. Even with the excitement of the car, there was no way a bunch of cops wouldn’t notice a woman jumping off a desk and half landing up through a skylight. She had to move fast. Her chest was on fire, and her hands were painfully sliding on the sandpaper roof, about to lose grip. Footsteps, louder and louder. Shouts. In a few moments, there would be a hand around her ankle. She thought again about a parking lot in Kansas. About an arm on her throat. And she dug her hands harder into that roof, pulling with whatever she had and ignoring the pain as her chest slid along the edge. In a moment, she was off the roof onto the ground with a brief, awkward stop on the dumpster that didn’t so much slow her fall as roll her ankle. And so, bleeding and limping, she tore as fast as she could away from the station.

She ran until the world flickered at the edges, until she could hear the hollow of her breath. She made it back to the truck where Sylvia was already waiting. They were about a half hour out of town on the highway, the long slashes on Keisha’s chest no longer bleeding, her ankle throbbing, when she started laughing. She laughed and laughed, and Sylvia started laughing too. Every time they glanced at each other another wave would come. They laughed until there was no sound, only shaking, and Keisha had hiccups for the next two hours.