This little town is not known for its displays of violence, and so the murder takes them by surprise.
It starts with the man who trudges into the block of apartments that litter the side of one street with gray. The man pauses by door 6A and pounds on the frame like he expects the wood to fall away from the force of his fists alone.
“Hey, Mosses!” he roars. “Mosses, open the fuckin’ door and give me my money, you sonofabitch!”
If there is anyone alive inside, they do not answer. The knocking grows furious, violent.
“That’s it, you fuckin’ bastard! I want you the hell out of my place! I don’t fucking care if you gotta sleep in the gutters tonight!” He yanks out a set of keys and fits one into the lock. He twists the doorknob and all but kicks the door open.
The rumors spread: first like tiny ripples, then growing until they overlap into wider spirals of gossip.
The first thing that people are told is that “there is a dead man in the Holly Oaks apartments.”
The second thing they will be told is that “his face is bloated, like he was held underwater for a very long time.” And yet there is not a drop of water on or around him, nothing to suggest foul play other than the appearance he presents. That is why the apartment manager, whose name is Shamrock, throws up all over the stair banister in his fruitless bid to escape the room and his first sight of the body, spattering an unfortunate couple standing below.
The police come next. They park their sirens in front of the building and mark off the area with yellow tape. “You can’t go in there,” one policewoman says to passersby and curious onlookers, as the other officers cordon off the scene. “This is a crime scene.” They turn down interviews by reporters. “We cannot divulge anything more specific until after a full investigation has taken place.”
Some of the reporters showed up before the police arrived. “This is Cynthia Silvia from WTV Channel 6,” one reporter tells the camera and the world watching through the lens. I count them—the police, the growing number of people. I drift past the camera and peer into the frame, though no one notices. “Very little information has been released so far, though the police believe this to be a homicide by a person or persons unknown. We’ll update you as soon as we know more…”
“A thirty-five-year-old man was found dead in his apartment this morning. Sources tell us he may have been dead for days, though the police have yet to release any information corroborating this…”
“This marks the first homicide case in Applegate in almost ten years. Not much is known about the victim, thirty-five-year-old Blake Mosses. He was a loner, according to his neighbors, and lived in Holly Oaks for only six months before his body was found…”
“This is Cooper Wilkes of ANTV Channel 5 News, reporting live from Holly Oaks…”
“This is Tracy Palmeri, Channel 2 News. Back to you, Jeff.”
It would surprise these reporters to know that few stories begin with death. Often, they start with grief.
This story starts hundreds of miles away, where a small town in South Carolina gathers to pray for a young girl who has been missing for four months and who will never return home, although they do not realize it. Posters of her decorate every inch of tree and wall, and her sweet, gap-toothed smile enchants those who care enough to take a cursory glance. Her parents, a listless bearded man and a weeping woman, clasp hands as they implore the public to help in the search, knowing that in time their daughter will slip through their fingers and disappear into the archives of unexplained cases and old news.
The reports are different here from at Holly Oaks.
“Officers from two counties are continuing the search for eleven-year-old Madeleine Lindgren, who disappeared in May. Police have set up an AMBER Alert for the missing girl, and so far, thousands of tips have come through the hotline…”
“The police say they are going through every piece of information that passes through the channels but admit that, with the number of tips coming in everyday, filtering through the information will take time. More than a hundred officers and volunteers have joined in the search for little Madeleine…”
“If you have any information related to this case, please call the following numbers: 242-45…”
Strings of a story move through states and cities, leaving parts of the story at every stop. People find themselves at the beginning of a tale without an end, or in a middle that neither starts nor finishes, or at a conclusion that knows no beginning. Only two have read this story in its entirety, can quote it from cover to cover, and had been there from introduction to curtain fall.
One is the Stained Shirt Man that people are now calling Blake Mosses.
I am the other.
And when the news provides no other answers, gossip takes center stage.
For the neighbors at Holly Oaks apartments, it is their moment to shine. “Always knew he was a bad seed,” says Greta Grunberg from 6D, who said no such thing to anyone until after the fact. “Skulking up and down the stairs, never leaving the room for days. He was going to come to a bad end, I always thought.”
Annabelle Mirellin from 5C believes that Mosses was attacked by a wild animal and wonders if this could be possible grounds for suing Holly Oaks for mismanagement. She is not swayed from this belief by the fact that the door was locked from the inside and no trace of a wild animal was found inside the room.
The police, more sensible creatures than the neighbors, are baffled. But it will be days before they discover the small strand of hair hidden underneath the dislodged carpet, and it will be months before they fully understand its importance.
• • •
The Smiling Man is unconcerned about this most recent development. The town of Applegate is already proving to be a distraction, and he is busy planning, plotting his next move.
He parks his white car at one corner of the street and strolls toward where the crowd of people (fifty-seven) have gathered, watching in fascination as medical personnel (four) wheel out a large gurney that carries something (one) large and bulky, hidden from view by a large, black blanket. Many have never seen this manner of death up close, one that does not point the blame at old age or sickness.
This provides ghoulish enjoyment, for the town is too large to know of the little perversions that move in villages, yet too small for its residents’ spirits to have been toughened by the crimes of cities. There is a thrill in relishing the suffering of strangers, and they hide their interest with worried faces. The dead man, Blake Mosses, had not been One of Them, and they can afford to treat him as a source of unfortunate entertainment rather than one of genuine bereavement.
The Smiling Man wanders in and out of the crowd, the dead children forced to keep up with every step. He does not bother to look at the man’s corpse, for he does not specialize in this kind of death. His eyes are trained on a young girl who has wandered some distance away from the group. She sits on a small park bench opposite the apartment block, engrossed in her music.
The Smiling Man sets up shop at the other end of the bench, ostensibly to watch the drama unfolding on the other side of the street. He observes her when she is not looking.
“I don’t think your mother would want you watching all this,” he says after considerable time has passed.
The girl shoots him a suspicious look. Few adults, in her experience, would condescend to talk to children the way this man does with such impunity. She takes an earbud out of one ear. “Mommy’s a policewoman,” she says. “We were driving home from school when the alert came on her radio. She was the closest to the crime scene, so she had to investigate. Mommy says we don’t have enough cops in this town, so we always have to adapt. She told me to stay inside the car,” she adds, as if this was a trivial detail not worth repeating. “But it was stuffy inside.”
“That is true,” says the Smiling Man, whose interest wanes slightly once the girl divulges her mother’s occupation. “But I don’t think she’d like to hear you’ve been talking to strangers, either.”
“Mommy said talking to strangers is dangerous,” the girl admits. “Are you a stranger?”
“I live in Massachusetts,” says the Smiling Man. “So I suppose you can call me a stranger. Can you say Massachusetts?”
“Massachusetts,” says the girl. “I’m not an idiot. Are you dangerous?”
The Smiling Man laughs at her courage. “Well, it was dangerous for that man over there, wasn’t it?” he asks, sidestepping her question and pointing toward the crime scene, where the crowd surges closer, straining to see more of the dead man as the medical technicians begin loading the body into the back of an ambulance. A flock of reporters (eight) swarm around the police officers (five), firing volleys of questions into the air at them like bullets. “They say he was a stranger, too.”
“That’s true,” the girl concedes. “Maybe strangers can also be dangerous to each other.”
The man laughs again, amused. “My name is Quintilian.”
“Sandra,” the girl counters and adds, “That’s a weird name.”
“My mother named me after a Greek philosopher.”
“Mommy named me after her favorite soap-opera actress.”
“Sandra is a nice name.”
“I wish she’d named me after someone more famous. Like Marie Curie. I think Marie is a nice name. Or maybe Marie Antoinette.”
“Marie Antoinette had her head chopped off by a group of angry Frenchmen.”
The girl is unfazed by his choice of words. “But she got to go to parties and wear wigs and eat a lot of cake. What are the names of all your other friends?”
“What friends?”
“All those kids sitting on your back.”
The man stills suddenly, and his smiling face changes. His gaze is now wary, and his hand slowly dips into his coat pocket and stays there. “There aren’t any kids on my back,” he says, trying to sound like a patient adult dealing with a rather precocious child.
“I can see them. They’re grouped all around you, and they don’t look very healthy. Why are they all afraid of you?”
“What an interesting child you are, Sandra,” the Smiling Man says. “What a funny little child.” From his pocket he withdraws a folded handkerchief, sending a faint whiff of chloroform into the air. He should not be doing this so close to the police cars, he knows, but sometimes the thrill of it fuels his motivations.
“You’re quite creative when it comes to making things up, aren’t you?”
“Sandra!” a woman’s voice calls from where the throng of people is thickest, laced with a mother’s worry and panic. “Sandra! Where are you?”
This produces a most unusual change in the Smiling Man. Where his body had been tense and coiled, as if he was biding his time to spring, he now relaxes and slides back against the bench. His hand slackens, and he slips the handkerchief he is toying with back into his pocket, out of sight.
“It appears your mother is looking for you, Sandra.”
The girl pops the bud back into her ear and skips across to where her mother stands, a tall woman with cropped hair and a dark blue police uniform, a tall woman struggling between a job that takes up too much of her life and a child who needs too much of her time. The anxiety in her face shifts into a cross between welcome relief and anger as she spots her daughter.
“What did I tell you about leaving the car? I told you to stay inside!” she scolds, as she brings the girl to where a police car is parked half a block away, the windows rolled down and the doors unlocked.
“I’m sorry, Mommy,” the girl says sincerely. “But it was really hot inside.”
“What am I supposed to do with you, Sandra?” The woman is exasperated. This is not the first time her daughter has wandered off on her own.
“The guy from Massachusetts and all those kids with him kept me company.”
“What guy from Massachusetts?” The woman’s maternal instincts have been triggered, knowing there is something odd about her daughter’s words without knowing why. She scans the crowd, hunting for a face that may strike her as strange or unusual.
But when her eyes come to rest on the bench, no one is sitting there. Making his escape while the cameras flash and the sirens turn on, while the door slams shut behind what is left of Blake Mosses and the ambulance speeds away, the Smiling Man has disappeared, and with him, all the dead children he has killed.