RATH DROVE NORTH on his dirt road, past the enormous, looming, granite face of Canaan Monadnock, which gave way to flat farmland with the abruptness of the Fundy Escarpment smacking up to the Atlantic’s edge; a geologic anomaly in a state of worn, aged mountains that folded into gentle foothills and gradually leveled out into Lake Champlain to the west and the Connecticut River to the east.
As a boy, Rath had been fascinated by this peculiarity and spent nights tucked under his covers, his sister asleep in her bed beside his, enrapt by books on plate tectonics, volcanoes, and the Earth’s molten core. In 1862, whalebones had been unearthed by a farmer’s plow blade in the surrounding fields; eleven thousand years before the world’s most famed carpenter supposedly rose again, the glaciers had retreated, and the Atlantic had rushed in, creating a paratropical ocean that for three thousand years reached north to the Saint Lawrence and west to Ottawa. Hence: whalebones. Those early years, Rath had been obsessed with the violence of nature and how it shaped the physical world. As he’d grown older, his fixation had shifted from the violence of nature to the nature of violence, and how to stop it.
Rath turned north onto Route 15, toward Canada, lighting a cigarette and wondering about this missing girl.
Up ahead, the mountain foliage was set ablaze with the beauty of autumn’s death, a supreme loveliness that people traveled across the globe to view from Peter Pan buses.
Regional tourists, those rocketing up I-89 to flee Boston in their Beemers, cruising in Volvo Cross Countrys up I-91 North from Connecticut, and oozing south from Montreal in Jag XJs were lulled by the pastoral idyll, the dairy farms dotted with black-and-white Holsteins; sugar shacks tucked tidily among the sugarbush; general stores painted “barn red” to approximate the original nineteenth-century pigment created from rust.
As soon as the sightseers crossed into the land where billboards were banned for their affront to nature’s aesthetics, they settled into their heated leather seats, bathed in a Rockwellian serenity and liberated from the gray grind of urban life. They’d power down their windows to breathe in the crisp mountain air, buoyed and intoxicated by the setting and by a pang of nostalgia for a past they’d never lived but could taste on their tongues nonetheless. Here, the air was sweeter. Here, they were alive. Safe.
Safe. Rath snorted as he adjusted his back against the pack of thawing peas. Nowhere was safe. No one. Violence lurked here as it did the world over, most often exacted by known parties. Intimate, familial, and unspeakable.
He’d always wondered why people in rural areas, when interviewed after appalling violence, said, “This isn’t supposed to happen here.” As if violence had forgotten to keep itself within some prescribed geographic boundary.
Rath drove along a piece of road that annually made the New York Times’s Top 10 Fall Foliage Drives, but was known to locals as Murder Road: the stretch where Gabe Hoyt shot his cousin. The two men had been arguing over a woman in Hoyt’s truck when Hoyt crashed his rig. As his cousin staggered away, Hoyt shot him in the head with a .45 he kept in his glove box. Panicking, Hoyt ran over his cousin’s skull with his truck, believing it would hide the evidence. Good theory, for a pickled redneck. The blood still stained the road here, a dark smear like that left by a deer mauled by a logging truck.
Rath flicked cigarette ash in the Scout’s ashtray.
There was last year’s home invasion of two married Vermont Law School professors who had been tied up, tortured with a blowtorch, and bludgeoned with the fire poker they’d last used to stoke a Christmas fire. The fifteen-year-old killers recorded the crime on their cell phones. Neither boy had even a whiff of a violent past. They’d simply skipped school on a whim and along the way gotten it in their heads it would be “freaky” to kill someone. So. Knock knock.
How did one explain such acts? What word did you put to them other than evil?
Rath drew in smoke from his cigarette. The tobacco crackled.
Then, of course, there were the Pritchards, slaughtered on Monday, May 3, 1995, a notorious crime, because of the baby.
At 4:30 P.M., Laura Pritchard had returned home from the farmer’s market, put the baby to sleep upstairs, and was preparing a birthday dinner for her younger brother, when the doorbell rang. Her brother was supposed to have met her at the farmer’s market. But he’d not shown, as usual. With a woman, as usual. No regard for anyone but himself. So she’d gone to the door, likely expecting it was him.
But it wasn’t him. It was the man who had once mown Laura’s lawn. A Mr. Fix It who drove a jalopy truck with power tools clanking around in the bed and a sign on the door that boasted FREE ESTIMATES. Ned Preacher. Though that wasn’t the name he used then.
Laura must have been surprised to see him. Not just because he wasn’t her brother but because, sixteen months earlier, Ned had skipped town, leaving a check due him for $150. Perhaps she’d thought Preacher had finally come to collect.
Rath had been first on the scene, and in the years since then, he’d imagined every possible scenario that might have transpired in that doorway. He’d found the front door open and a lake of blood soaking the carpet, clots and strings of it slopped on the walls like some macabre Pollack painting.
Laura’s body had lain at the bottom of the stairs in an undignified pose: her legs pinned abnormally beneath her torso, her lacerated face turned to the side as if in shame. The plush, wall-to-wall carpet, once as white as a fresh snowdrift, now so drenched with her blood it squished underfoot. Her neck had been broken, and she’d been rudely violated with objects other than the male anatomy though that would prove to have been used, too.
Rath shuddered now, his flesh cold and rubbery.
The broken neck had killed Laura, but she’d have bled out in seconds from where the knife had nicked her superior vena cava, preventing the flow of deoxygenated blood from her brain to her right atrium.
Daniel Pritchard’s body had been draped over his wife’s chest as if trying to protect her even in death, a tableau out of some twisted Romeo and Juliet, these players done in by another’s dark impulses.
Daniel had been stabbed as he’d walked in, Preacher hiding behind the door, the knife plunged between Daniel’s third and fourth ribs, slicing the liver’s caudate lobe and hepatic artery. He’d suffered four defense wounds in the palms of his right hand, his right thumb dangling by a flap of skin, and two more wounds in the back of the neck, both puncturing his posterior external jugular vein beneath the splenius and trapezius muscles: death by catastrophic blood loss.
Even now, the images cast a shadow over Rath’s soul and left a bitter metallic taste on his tongue. Even now, he tried to beg off the misery squeezing his heart in its ugly, unforgiving grip.
Standing there with the two bodies at his feet, it had suddenly struck Rath: the vacuum of ominous horrific soundlessness. Then. Faintly. A nearly inaudible whine, like the sound of a wet finger traced on the rim of a crystal glass, piercing his brain.
The baby.
He’d scrambled over the bodies, slipping in the blood, mindless of physical evidence, as he sprang up the stairs to thunder down the hallway and smashed open the door across from the master bedroom.
He’d rushed to the crib.
There she’d lain, tiny legs and arms pumping spasmodically, as if she’d been set afire, her mouth agape but just that shrill escape of air rising from the back of her throat, air leaking from a balloon’s pinched neck.
Rath had clenched the wooden rails of the crib until they’d cracked. Downstairs lay the baby’s mother, raped and murdered by a man who’d prove no stranger to rape and murder. Laura Pritchard. Loving wife. Adoring mother. Older sister to a sole sibling whose presence would have prevented the murder if he’d been on time as promised, but, as always, had failed to be, just like their old man. Laura’s only sibling, her younger brother.
Frank Rath.
Rath shivered, that day as alive and crawling inside him now as then. Nothing dulled the guilt or the loss. Not even his deep love for the baby girl.
Rachel.
At the moment Rath had picked Rachel up from her crib, he’d felt an abrupt shift within him, a permanent upheaval like one plate of the Earth’s lithosphere slipping beneath another; his selfish past life subducting beneath a selfless future life, a deep rift created in him, altering his inner landscape. A niece transformed into a daughter by acts of violent cruelty.
For six months after the murder, Rath had kept Rachel’s crib beside his bed and lain sleepless each night as he’d listened to her frayed breathing, her every sigh and whimper. He’d panicked when she’d fallen too quiet, shaken her lightly to make certain she was alive, been flooded with relief when she’d wriggled in her swaddle. He’d picked her up and cradled her to him as she’d broken into the loneliest cry he’d ever heard, her baby heart pattering as he’d promised to keep her safe. Thinking, If we just get through this phase with its SIDS and spiking fevers and odd diseases, you’ll be OK, and I won’t ever have to worry like this again.
But peril pressed in at the edges of a girl’s life, and worry planted roots in Rath’s heart and bloomed wild and reckless. As Rachel had grown, Rath’s worry had grown, and he’d kept vigilant for the lone man who stood with his hands jammed in his trouser pockets behind the playground fence. In public, Rath had gripped Rachel’s hand fiercely, his love ferocious and animal.
If anyone ever did anything to her.