IN HER MEMORY, THE PLACE ALWAYS LOOKED THE SAME, THE WAY IT had looked on the day she first saw it. Now, sitting in the driver’s seat of her pickup two decades later, Erin was aware that there was part of her childhood still trapped here, the ghost of a bike lying against the curb. She had not yet gotten out of the truck, but she could feel the crunch of the crabgrass beneath the soles of her sneakers, the weight of the straps of her backpack pressing down on her shoulders. She was thirteen again, if only for the space of this moment. The place beckoned to her with its sagging walls and screen-door hinges dense with rust. There was something inside that was still waiting, some part of herself that could still be saved.
She leaned over and grabbed the instrument from the passenger footwell, opened the door, and climbed out of the truck. The bench seat was empty beside her. She had left Diesel with her father and the people who’d come to listen to his statement. By now it must be over. The police would be discussing the case. If they arrested him, the lawyer would call her. She hadn’t wanted to witness that, her father being placed in handcuffs for a crime he didn’t commit.
The white van that had once been parked here had been replaced by an aging Jeep Cherokee, but the windows were dark and there was no light or hint of activity from inside the house. The heavy front door was closed, but she remembered the hallway beyond and the sound of his singing in the kitchen. She had come here to find out what he had done to her mother. He had discovered her standing in the backyard and strangely enough had invited her in for dinner.
(“Got . . . something stuck . . . here. Can’t . . . seem to . . . get it out.”)
She looked to the left, at the spot where the man had fallen. After he was dead, she and Robbie had to drag him into the house while the shovel was still lodged in his head. They hadn’t been able to remove it. It was buried too deep. Her father had to place his boot on the man’s chest to yank it out. It had made a squeaking noise as he worked it loose.
Erin watched him lean the shovel against the wall. “We should call the police,” she said, “and tell them what happened.”
Her father was sweating, although the sun was below the horizon and the evening air was cool against her skin. She watched as the swell of his Adam’s apple slid up and down, as if he needed to retch but had decided to do it elsewhere when the eyes of his daughter were not upon him.
“You spoke with Chief Ward at the police station earlier today,” he said. “You both did. Is that correct?”
They nodded.
“And you told him about your suspicions?”
Again, they nodded.
“What did he say?”
“He said we didn’t have any evidence and that we should just stay away from him,” Erin replied.
David closed his eyes and pressed the fingertips of his left hand against his temple. “And then you rode your bike home, took your mother’s gun, and came here.”
Your mother’s gun, Erin thought, but her mother was dead. She felt the pain of this new reality rise to the surface, the way it would a thousand times in the months ahead.
Her father looked at Robbie. “Did you know that she was coming here?”
“No, sir. Not exactly.”
“Then how did you find her? How did you know to come here?”
Robbie swallowed. “Erin was mad,” he said. He stopped and glanced over at her. “She said she was going to take care of things herself. I figured she would come here. It was a guess. When she took off on her bike, I figured that’s where she was heading.”
David turned to his daughter. “So you went to the police chief, told him you thought Mr. Griffin was responsible for the disappearance of your mother, and when you didn’t get the response you were hoping for, the two of you came out here and killed him.”
Erin shook her head. “That’s not how it happened.”
“No,” he said, “but the police will see it that way. Mr. Griffin didn’t kidnap you. You rode out here on your bikes. You came with a gun.”
“Daddy,” she pleaded, but she didn’t know how to finish. Her intentions in coming here were all jumbled in her head.
He walked to the kitchen and looked at the dishes. “It’s hard for a child—even one as strong as you, Robbie—to drive the blade of a shovel that deep into someone’s skull.”
“It was a lucky shot. I swung it as hard as I could.”
David stood near the kitchen table. His eyes were on the floor. “What’s more believable,” he said, “is that I swung the shovel.”
They were silent, staring at him.
“You came home and told me your suspicions, and I drove out here to confront him. We argued, he attacked me, and I killed him with the shovel.”
Erin was shaking her head. “That’s not how it—”
“I know,” he said, “but it’s what the police will believe. Or . . . they’ll think I attacked him first.”
“They’ll understand,” she said. “If I explain it to them, the way it really happened . . .”
“And tell them what, that he invited you in for dinner?”
She looked around the room.
“Jesus,” he said, and ran a hand through his short hair as he stood there, head down, trying to think things through. “Robbie’s fingerprints are on the handle of the shovel, but so are yours and mine. My boot tracks are in the yard.”
“If we find Mom,” she said. “That’ll prove that—”
“It doesn’t prove anything,” he said, and his words sounded harsh and angry in the confines of the house. “Maybe he buried her and maybe he didn’t.” He looked down at the body of Abel Griffin. “He covered her mouth and nose with duct tape? Is that what he told you?”
“Yes,” Erin told him. “He said it was an accident the way she died. He didn’t mean to stop her from breathing.”
David stood with his back to the children, facing the kitchen. He made a noise that Erin couldn’t quite decipher, followed by the question: “What did he mean to do to her instead?”
The room was quiet as they watched him. Her father stood there for a long time, his head down, his right hand covering his face while the other one hung limply at his side. The children looked at each other, and neither of them spoke. And David was quiet himself, so quiet that Erin could hardly hear him sobbing.
Eventually he cleared his throat and lifted his head. “Once the police get involved,” he said, “it’s hard to predict what direction things will go. I could be found guilty of murder, or they could come after you. I’ve already been to prison once. It won’t be hard for them to put me there again.”
Erin winced as something dug into her right ankle, bringing her back to the present. She was alone and standing in the backyard now, looking toward the cluster of trees behind the house. Beyond that was the marsh where they’d found her mother’s body. Abel Griffin had marked the site with a tiny cross made of two Popsicle sticks that he’d glued to a tree.
She was back here, Erin thought. During all that time that we were searching for her, she was behind this house, waiting for us to find her.
She reached down and removed the thistle from her ankle. One of the thorns pierced the flesh of her thumb, and she watched as a small bead of blood rose to the surface.
It doesn’t matter now, she told herself. What’s done is done. All of those things happened a long time ago.
She turned around to face the back of the house. Here was the solid wooden door, a bit flimsier than the one in front.
Erin looked down at the metal instrument in her hand, a small crowbar she had brought from the truck.
What do you hope to find in there? she asked herself. It’s over. Why can’t you leave it well enough alone?
“Because part of me is still in there,” she said, “and maybe the evidence of all those others he brought to this place.”
She reached into her back pocket and pulled out her cell phone. She’d called and left Robbie a message that she was coming here. It hadn’t seemed right to do this without him.
Erin looked down at the phone. On her home screen was a picture of her father and Diesel returning to the house from one of their walks. She’d taken it from the front porch three days ago, during the golden hour just before dusk. They were in midstride, not looking at the camera. To their right, tan slender blades of knee-high grass were bending toward them in the breeze.
“You didn’t have to take the blame for us,” she said, and clicked off the phone and returned it to her pocket.
She stepped forward and placed her hand on the back door. The wood felt cold and hard against her skin. She tried the doorknob and was surprised to find that it turned in her hand. The door itself resisted her efforts, and she put her shoulder against it and gave it a shove.
The door popped open and swung in on its hinges.
The interior hallway was dark, just as she remembered. For a moment, she could hear him in the kitchen, boiling the spaghetti in a pot and chopping hot dogs into fingertip-size pieces on the cutting board.
(“Hut-two-three-four. Come on in and close the door.”)
Erin stepped inside but left the back door open. She took a few steps down the hallway toward the front of the house. The black-and-white-checked tile sagged beneath her feet. Vacant picture hooks hung from the walls. She found a light switch and flipped it, but nothing happened. To her right was a bathroom, but the light didn’t work in there, either. Most likely the electricity had been shut off a long time ago.
She came to a closed door on her left. Erin tried to open it but found that it was locked.
The back door was open, but this one is locked. Why would that be? she asked herself.
She considered going through the drawers and cabinets in an effort to find a key. Instead, she placed the tip of the crowbar between the door edge and its frame. It took about ten seconds for her to pop it open, and she stepped inside and gave her eyes time to adjust to the darkness.
Should’ve brought a flashlight, she thought, but it didn’t make sense to go back for one now. She stood there until the contents of the room came into focus, a collection of ill-defined masses of different shades of gray. She moved around the room and touched some of them: a chair stacked high with books; a collection of rubber boots and coats; cans of paint and a Shop-Vac in the corner; metal shelving with boxes of games and puzzles. There was nothing in here worth locking up, and she was about to leave before she saw it resting against the far wall next to a mop.
Erin stepped forward and ran her fingers along the plastic rim. It seemed smaller than she remembered. She lifted it up and felt the insignificance of its weight. She could still remember their conversation on the bus that day, while the snow was piling up on the streets and yards all around them.
(“Jacob’s Field, right? You going?”)
(“Yeah. Who else will be there?”)
(“Me, Deirdre, Robbie, Emily . . .”) She ticked off the names of their friends in her head.
(“I have to shovel the driveway before I go.”)
(“Can’t you do it tomorrow?”)
(“No, I have to do it today. Otherwise it turns to ice and my dad gets mad.”)
Erin brushed away the cobwebs from where they clung to the plastic sled. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m sorry I didn’t help you.”
She carried it into the hallway, stood it up against the wall, and placed the crowbar at its base to anchor it so it wouldn’t fall. How many other things are in there? she wondered. How many of those coats and boots belonged to the people who went missing?
She stood there in the hallway for a while, looking at the sled. She would take it with her when she left. It had already spent too many years locked away in this sad and forgotten place.
Erin sighed and walked to the kitchen. This was where Abel Griffin had stood at the counter and prepared their dinner. He hadn’t seemed like a horrible person. Instead, he had spoken and behaved like a child. How had he managed to commit all of those abductions and never get caught? What had he done with the other bodies? She and her father hadn’t found any other crosses back there in the marsh.
She turned to the living room. It was dark like the rest of the house, but she could make out the train track encircling the couch, the shape of the transit station and the little plastic people waiting for their ride. On the day she first came here, she had stepped on some of them, knocking them over. Her father had instructed them to put things back in order while he carried the body to the truck. It was important, he said, to erase any signs of a struggle.
It was strange how the past and the present melted into each other. In the dim light of the room, Erin could still see him sitting there on the couch. The television was off and there was nothing for him to look at, but he sat upright, facing forward in the dark, as if he, too, was waiting for a train that would never come.
She turned away from him and looked at the heavy front door from the inside. It had been difficult for her and Robbie to drag him across the yard and into the house. Getting him up the two steps to the level of the porch had been the hardest of all. Dead weight, people called it, and Erin shuddered as she pictured the way the shovel handle had bobbed up and down in the air as they moved him.
She turned back to the living room. The man’s head had swiveled to the right. He was staring at her from his spot on the couch.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“Oh . . . oh Jesus,” Erin whispered. She scrambled around the table and put her back against the kitchen counter.
The man remained where he was, his body facing forward with his face turned toward the kitchen. It was a hallucination, pure and simple, or the trace of a memory that had come back to haunt her. She had watched him die. She had knelt in the grass beside him and held his hand as he slipped away. He had asked her, inexplicably, if they could be friends. Erin had told him yes, and then watched as her father buried him on the farm.
The man rose from the couch and began to walk toward her. There was something wrong with the shape of him. His body was shorter and wider than she remembered.
“No,” Erin said. “You’re not real. You’re nothing but bones now. They dug you out of the ground a month ago.”
The apparition stopped in the entryway to the kitchen. There was only the table between them.
“Erin Reece,” the thing said, but it was not the deep rough voice she remembered, but something older and more feminine. “I was hoping that I’d get a chance to see you again. You’ve grown up a bit, although not for the better. You’re still sneaking around, I see. You’re still trespassing on other people’s property.”
“I didn’t . . . I wasn’t trying to . . .”
“What are you doing here? Haven’t you learned by now that you ought to leave well enough alone?”
The figure took a half step forward, into the dim light that filtered through the window. It was Connie Griffin, a couple of decades older than the last time she’d seen her but still tall and stocky, with wide shoulders that gave rise to thick arms that barely tapered until they got to the wrists. Her gray hair was pulled up into its usual bun, but it was lopsided and slanted to the right, like a mound of melting ice cream, and clusters of untethered hair hung like vines along the sides of her face. The flesh beneath her eyes was dark and puckered, and the creases around her lips had deepened. She was in her mid-fifties now, Erin guessed, but she looked stronger and more hardened than the woman who had looked down at them from behind the concession counter of Prairie Cinemas.
“I came . . . to pay my respects,” Erin told her. “Your son was—”
“Oh no,” she said. “You don’t get to talk about my son.” Connie smiled with a mouth that was too small for her face. A row of densely packed teeth glinted and then disappeared in the space of a second. “You don’t know anything about my boy,” she said. “You have no idea what you and your father took from me.”
“He was disturbed,” Erin said. “Abel was killing people. He made a mistake when he killed my mother.”
“My Abel was a good boy.”
Erin shook her head. She reached back and felt the edge of the counter. “There were things you didn’t know about him, things a mother never wants to know. That sled in the hallway belonged to Angela Finley. He kept it as a souvenir after he disposed of her body.”
Connie turned and looked to her right, at the plastic sled standing upright against the wall. “That was his sled,” she said, and she swiveled her head around again to look at Erin.
“No,” Erin told her. “It belonged to Angela. I recognize it. The room where I found it is full of things like that. He kept them after he killed those people and got rid of their bodies. Your son was . . . he had a sickness. I’m sorry to have to tell you that.”
Connie stood there and looked at Erin, her shoulders rising and falling with the rhythm of her breathing. “The things in that room don’t belong to those people,” she said. “Those were his things. He earned them. I told him he could keep them.”
Erin stared at the woman on the other side of the table. “You told him he could . . . ?”
“Do you even know how his brother died? You found him, so I reckon I should ask you.”
“He drowned,” she said. “Abel’s brother died in the river. Robbie and I found him along the north bank, facedown in the reeds.”
“That was four days after he disappeared. He didn’t die in the river, and it wasn’t the fire that killed him, either.”
“What fire?”
“The barn that burned to the ground the day Miles went missing. They chased Abel inside, then lit the place on fire and watched it burn.”
“Who?”
“Local kids,” she said, “a whole bunch of them. Abel pointed them out to me, every last one. At first he was afraid to tell me about any of it. He said he didn’t know about the fire. But he came to me eventually and told me what he did.”
Erin shook her head. “I don’t underst—”
“Miles went in there to try to save him. But Miles died and Abel lived. Afterward, Abel carried him down to the river.”
“Why?”
Connie shrugged and placed her hand on the back of one of the wooden chairs at the table. “He was trying to save him,” she said. “The boys were baptized in the river three years before. Abel remembered how Pastor Kimble had talked about being ‘born again.’ He thought that maybe . . . if he carried his brother to the river and put him in . . .”
Erin nodded, but her mind kept returning to what the woman had said earlier.
(“The things in that room don’t belong to those people. Those were his things. He earned them. I told him he could keep them.”)
“And then what?” Erin asked. “He started killing people?”
Connie shook her head. “He started collecting them, the ones who set that barn on fire or members of their families.” She reached up and touched the side of her face with the palm of her hand. Got . . . something stuck . . . here, Erin heard in the back of her mind, and it wasn’t the voice of the son or the mother but something in between.
“We began with Angela Finley,” Connie said. “She chased my Abel in there and watched the place burn with the rest of them. But after that first one I got to thinking: there’s more pain in losing someone you love than there is in being taken yourself. The loss of Miles helped me understand that. During the funeral, I sat at his graveside and asked God why he hadn’t taken me instead. It’s what I wanted. It’s what a merciful God would’ve done.”
She took a deep breath and let it out. Her face was cast in shadows, and her voice wavered as she spoke, the sound of someone who has been beaten into submission but doesn’t understand the reason why.
“God has never been merciful to me or my family,” she said. “On the other hand, he has taught me a few lessons about pain and loss. It’s so much worse to be the one left behind. You understand that . . . don’t you, dear?”
Erin swallowed. She felt a click in her throat.
“After Angela,” Connie said, “I decided to take a member of each of their families and leave the children behind. It was better that way, more effective. They’d grow up as lost souls. They’d never stop paying for the things they took from me.”
Erin placed a hand on the counter, her legs weak and unpredictable beneath her. “All of those people,” she whispered, the weight of it pressing down upon her. It was not just the loss of so many lives, but the pain and horror left in their wake. “What did he do with them?” she asked. “Did he torture them and bury them in the marsh like my mother?”
“No,” she said. “You haven’t been listening. My Abel was a good boy. He collected them and brought them to me.”
Erin was silent, staring back at her. The man who had killed her mother wasn’t the monster she had once imagined him to be. The true monster was standing right in front of her.
“In a way,” Connie said, “I’m thankful that they found him on your father’s farm. I wasn’t certain what had happened to him. I thought maybe he’d decided to run away. Children do that sometimes, you know. They head out on their own thinking things will be better, but their lives are almost always worse because of it.” She glanced toward the window, and the flesh of her face looked pale and tired in the darkness. “No one will ever love them like their mother.”
Erin scanned the counter, her eyes falling on the knife rack to the right of the sink.
“It’s the pain,” Connie continued. “There is no end to the amount of pain we are willing to endure for the sake of our children. And there is no end,” she said, “to the amount of pain we are willing to inflict on those who take them away from us.”
Erin lunged for the knife rack. She pulled out the one with the largest handle, a chef knife with a broad blade that felt lethal in her hand. “Please,” she said, “it can be over. We don’t have to—”
“Oh, but I want to,” she said. “I’ve been sitting here in the dark, missing my boys and thinking about how I’m going to get to you and your father. And then you just show up, like a gift from the heavens. Maybe I was wrong,” she said. “Maybe God is finally paying me back for all the times that he did me wrong.”
Erin pressed her back against the corner of the counter. There was a small wooden table between them. It didn’t seem like very much at all.
Connie studied her for a moment. Then she turned and walked down the hallway. A moment later, the plastic sled clattered to the floor.
She reappeared in the entryway to the kitchen, holding the crowbar. Her arms hung loose and casual at her sides, but her head was flexed slightly at the neck, and her eyes were on the knife.
“It’s going to get ugly after this,” she said. “Do you want to take a moment to enjoy the way your body feels before I begin to take it apart?”
“Please,” Erin said. “It doesn’t have to be like this. I don’t want to have to kill y—”
Connie let out a cry that started deep in her throat and rose in pitch and volume until it filled the house. It reminded Erin of the sound that Robbie had made before he buried the blade of the shovel in Abel’s head.
The crowbar flashed in the slanted light from the window as Connie raised it above her head. She was still screaming, and Erin caught a glimpse of the metal against the darkness of the hall. Connie threw it with both hands, the bar turning once in the air on its flight across the kitchen. It struck a glancing blow to the side of Erin’s face, smashing into her cheekbone and slamming her head against the wooden cabinet behind her.
A moment later Erin was on the floor, the palms of her hands pressed against the tile. Her left eye had stopped working, and the vision through her right eye was teared and blurry. She could see blood on the floor, large drops that fell from her face and spattered on the black-and-white-checked tiles.
She put a hand to her head to search for the place where her skull had been split apart. Would she find the wound, she wondered, or part of her brain bulging out through the opening? She had seen the weapon coming and had flinched to the right, avoiding a direct hit. Maybe that was why she wasn’t dead already.
Her fingers found a gash in the left side of her face. The flesh around her left eye had swollen shut. It was hard to know whether there was anything left of the eye itself.
The woman was still screaming. Erin looked up in time to see her raise the small wooden table like a battering ram before she ran across the kitchen with the table out in front of her.
Erin wrapped her arms around her head as the table slammed into her and she was shoved back against the lower cabinets. Something in her neck snapped, and she felt the crunch of ribs along the left side of her chest. She struggled to suck in a breath as the tabletop pressed down on her, the woman throwing her ample weight against it from the other side.
(There’s a knife. You dropped it when you got hit with the crowbar.)
A knife, she thought, and she placed her right hand on the floor to search for it. It was just cold tile beneath her, that and the slick feel of blood and whatever else was leaking from her body.
(Get the knife. Find it! It’s important.)
Above her, Connie was still pressing down on the table. She had stopped screaming at least, and in the silence Erin heard the shink of something being pulled from a sheath. Erin recognized that sound. She had heard it a few minutes ago, just before the attack.
(She’s pulled a knife from the rack above you. She’s going to jab it into your head or the side of your neck!)
Erin felt cold steel with the tips of her fingers: the knife, lying beneath her. She followed the blade until she found the handle, wrapped her palm around it, and pressed herself low against the tiles. There was an opening between the edge of the table and the floor. She stuck her foot into the space to keep it open, then reached through with her free hand and found the woman’s ankle.
A two-pronged carving fork came plunging down at her from above. The tips of the prongs pierced the air where Erin’s head had been a few seconds before.
(Do something! Do something to defend yourself!)
She cupped her free hand around the back of the woman’s ankle and shoved the knife into her lower leg as hard as she could. There wasn’t much room between the edge of the table and the floor, and she couldn’t see where the blade was going. She could feel it, though, the knife stabilizing as it entered the flesh. There was a sickening density to it, a slowing of the blade as it sliced through muscle.
Connie howled and tried to jerk away. Erin let go of the handle, but kept her left hand cupped around the back of the woman’s ankle. The heel pulled tight against her palm, and a moment later Connie toppled backward and the table slid away from her.
Erin got to her feet and lurched down the hall toward the door at the rear of the house. She could hear the table moving, the sound of Connie struggling to get up again. Would she be able to walk with the knife in her leg? It doesn’t matter, Erin thought. Get the hell out! Leave this house and Wolf Point, too, if it lets you. It had been a mistake to return here. The separation between life and death was too thin. Nothing rested, on this side or the other.
She reached the open door and tumbled out into the yard. Here she was again, and for a few seconds she actually saw him, standing in the grass at the corner of the house. He put his hand on the metal wheels of the toy locomotive and gave them a spin.
Erin blinked and the man was gone—not a man, really, but a child in a man’s body. She could hear his mother in the house, lumbering down the hallway.
Erin got to her feet and backed away from the open door. The hallway was dark on the other side of it.
(Go! Don’t wait for her! She’s got the carving fork and the crowbar, and a lot more in store for you if you give her the chance.)
The door slammed shut with a bang. Erin screamed and stumbled backward.
(Go! Go go go!)
She raced through the yard, the weeds snatching at her ankles. The truck was parked against the curb. She ran to it, her right hand digging for the keys in her pocket.
(You lost them in the house. They fell out when you were lying on the floor.)
No, she realized. Here they were. Her fingers closed around them and she pulled them out. The teeth snagged on the lining of her pocket, and the keys almost fell from her hand.
(Don’t drop them. If you drop them, you keep right on running.)
She closed her hand around them and kept running. She was near the front corner now. The house would be behind her in a second.
There was sudden movement to her right. Connie came off the front porch at the corner, head down and legs pumping. She didn’t so much tackle Erin as run into her full force, their bodies colliding like sumo wrestlers.
They crumpled to the ground, and Connie landed on top of her, forcing the air from Erin’s lungs. She wrapped her pudgy hands around Erin’s neck and squeezed, her fingers sinking into the flesh.
“Gonna show you pain,” she said. She lifted Erin’s head by the neck and slammed it against the earth.
Connie’s mouth was stretched into a half grin, half grimace. Most of her hair had pulled free of the bun. What was left of the bun leaned so far to the right that it hovered over her ear, as if that part of her head was somehow melting. Her eyes were wild but triumphant. “Aaauuuuggghhh!” she screamed. “Now we’ll see where your train is going.”
“Go to hell,” Erin told her, but her voice was barely more than a whisper. She reached up to push the woman away, but her arms felt distant and disconnected from her body.
Connie lifted her by the neck again so that their faces were almost touching. Her breath was old and stale, like the air in a forgotten closet. “Don’t you worry, child,” she said, and she squeezed tighter. “Hell ain’t that far from here. I know the way. We’ll be gettin’ there soon enough.”