On the steps of Willey Library, Rachel glanced at her phone to check a text message from Detective Test. Finally, the detective had gotten back after Rachel had sent several texts with her new mailing address, so Test could send the reports.
“What is it?” Felix said.
“My dad, checking in,” Rachel lied.
“He’s a good dad.” Felix kissed Rachel’s cheek, then pulled the hood of his duster over his head. “Meet me back here after we’re done with work-study?”
Rachel nodded. Felix made a mad dash in the fog and rain toward the Dibden Center for the Arts where he helped catalog the college’s art archives.
When the fog finally claimed Felix, Rachel reread Detective Test’s text: Had an officer drop your “material” at the desk at the inn on his way to a training seminar. Good luck. Rachel broke for the off-campus shuttle, leaping onto it just as the doors sucked shut behind her. The rain fell ludicrous. It sounded like the drumbeat of the apocalypse on the shuttle roof.
In town, Rachel rushed down the block from the shuttle to the inn, her peacoat drenched by the rain. Here in town, the fog grew worse, thick as steam from a hot shower in a winter cold bathroom. She could see all of ten feet. If that. The fog seemed alive, an amorphous and mindless protoplasm insinuating itself into every crevice, strangling lampposts and pedestrians, eating away at reality.
In the inn’s lobby, Rachel asked the manager for her package. He held up three manila envelopes. “These?” he said, as if he had heaps of manila envelopes back there to dole out.
Rachel snatched the envelopes and bounded up the stairs.
In her room, she locked the door, tossed the envelopes on the window table. She dumped her soaked peacoat and hat in a plastic laundry basket and sat at the window table. She had fewer than forty-five minutes to get back to campus and meet Felix without raising his suspicions. She did not want to worry him. And she did not want him to find out about the murder files.
The envelopes were so stuffed they seemed about to burst, as if unwilling to contain the contents forced inside them. Rachel thumbed the brass clasp on the top envelope, opened the seal, and took a deep breath.
She got up and paced, trying to calm herself. She opened the minifridge, stared at amber beer bottles: Felix’s beer. He bought it at a local brewery anointed Best Brewery in the World by some geek site, attracting pilgrims worldwide in search of beers with hipster names like Uncle Floyd and Peace & Understanding. Rachel didn’t like beer. Felix was a fiend for it. He and his buddies poured it into special glasses, into which they stuck their noses like pigs rooting truffles. They commented on frothiness of head, stickiness of legs, creaminess of mouthfeel. It was all vaguely pornographic and farcical. Felix wanted so badly for Rachel to appreciate beer that when he prodded her to take a sip and give her opinion, he’d await her reaction as if he’d just proposed marriage. “Looks like beer. Smells like beer. Tastes like beer. Diagnosis: beer,” she’d say without enthusiasm, though the high alcohol content gave a cozy glow. Which she now needed.
She took a bottle from the fridge, a bottle with the kind of cork flip top that always managed to pinch her fingers.
She sat with the bottle, worked its cork free, pinching her fingers. She didn’t use a glass. Her dad drank his beer from the bottle or can. Why let a middleman spoil things? he said. Why, indeed. She took a long sip, tasted none of the citrus and mango and biscuits and whatever the hell else Felix went on about. It tasted like bitter beer. But it calmed her.
She slid the documents from the envelope. There must have been thirty pages. The top pages were typed up by a state police detective named Barrons. Rachel wondered if this were the same Barrons who was now Canaan’s chief of police.
She flipped to the transcript from a recorded interview with the first person on the scene. Frank Rath. He’d been a detective in those days, but never spoke of it beyond that fact. It still numbed Rachel to know he had discovered the bodies of her mother and father. His sister. It must have shattered him. Even in the cold, objective typeface of Detective Barrons’s typewriter, her father’s pain lay bared. His sentences not sentences. But fragments. Ellipses littered the transcript.
I was late . . . You see . . . I was late for— Because. I was with someone. A woman. No one important. A one-time thing. And . . . So . . . I was late. To see my sister. She was putting on a . . . birthday dinner, for me. I’d said I’d be there to help . . . promised. She had the baby . . . to tend to and all. Except. I was late. I said that already. Instead of being on time. Instead of helping her. I . . . found her. Her . . . body. It. At the bottom of the stairs . . . on the white carpet . . . just. Engulfed . . . by blood. An ocean. Blood. Her blood . . . her husband’s. I doubt there was any blood left in them. He was draped over her. She’d been . . . stabbed. Dozens of times. Dozens. Her . . . neck. Broken. I didn’t . . . touch her. Them. I didn’t want to contaminate the scene. I did . . . touch her wrist. For a pulse. Even though . . . I knew. I knew. Her head. It was barely hanging on to her neck. And. Then. I heard her. The baby. Upstairs. Rachel. Their daughter. And I forgot . . . all about my sister. She was dead. There . . . There is nothing we can do. For the dead. But . . . she was alive. We must do something for the living, if we can. She was what mattered. I don’t know . . . what is going to become of her? She’s a baby . . . my niece. I don’t know what’s going to become of her. What on earth is going to become of her?
There were pages and pages of him speaking of the crime scene, always returning back to the baby. To her. To Rachel.
Rachel took a drink. The beer had warmed some and warmed Rachel. She had to admit, it tasted pretty good. She picked up a cache of Xeroxed photos of her mother’s and her father’s bodies. There was more blood than she’d ever believed could be inside a person. And. The wounds. Shown in alarming close-ups, uglier and meaner than she’d imagined. If she’d imagined anything, she’d imagined slices, punctures, clean wounds. These were not that. The flesh was gouged and torn, flayed, as if her mother had been attacked by a prehistoric bird, a pterodactyl with fierce talons and a ragged beak. Her mother’s head was cocked at a sick, macabre angle, head cranked around so it almost faced backward.
The profound and profane violence did not crush Rachel; the photo of her parents alive, beaming, coddling their swaddled baby between them, did. They were radiant. They were young. In their twenties. Scarcely older than Rachel.
Rachel forced herself to memorize the photos. She would never look at them again, but she wanted her blood to absorb and her mind to be tattooed with the images.
It wouldn’t prove difficult. The images would never let her forget.
She stared. The body of her birth father—for how else could she think of him, a man she’d never known—lay draped over the body of her mother, a woman she’d never known, at the foot of the stairs of a house that held no memories. Her parents made strangers by murder.
The white carpet on which the bodies lay was black with their blood. An orgy of blood slung in furious strings across the walls and furniture. The bodies had been photographed from every conceivable angle and distance. From above and from each side, down low, so it appeared the photographer must have lain on her side on the bloody carpet with them, nearly nose to nose with the corpses. In most photos Rachel’s mother’s face was mercifully turned away, hidden from Rachel and the camera’s eye.
Rachel’s birth father’s face was visible in most photos, the eyes wide open with what looked like amazement, the mouth hung open in grief or agony. His tongue lolled out of one corner of his mouth, cartoonish and mortifying. Rachel wanted to tuck his tongue back into his mouth, close his mouth and his eyes. Grant him dignity.
Rachel took another drink of beer.
It tasted bitter again.
She read the medical examiner’s report. The clinical, scientific language that described her parents’ wounds seemed cruel and uncaring.
The murder file told of Preacher’s backstory. In 1989, he’d sodomized a twelve-year-old girl in upstate New York. Then, showing “a kindness,” he released her naked and bleeding into the Adirondack wilderness, saying in the police interview: “If God wanted her to live, she would.” He’d destroyed this girl for perverted pleasure, but “cooperated,” pleaded down from aggravated first-degree rape and kidnapping to third-degree sexual assault. Five thousand dollars bail, which he’d jumped. Within months he’d kidnapped a fifteen-year-old girl in Maine; took her to a forest and raped her while he’d told her how he was going to kill her. The girl escaped while Preacher slept. He was caught. Pleaded. Again. Got a lesser sentence. Again. Served five years, minimum security, and underwent behavior modification. “Mr. Preacher,” a social worker said in court documents, “and society will profit from behavior modification. He accepts blame for his role.” As if someone else, his victims, had played a role in his savagery.
He was paroled. Again. Moved to Vermont to work as a handyman for local residents, including . . . Rachel’s parents.
He knew them? The revelation shocked Rachel. It made his crime more odious. More mystifying. The report showed that while he’d worked for them in Vermont, his time there had been short. He’d left abruptly to live back in Maine for nearly a year and a half, until he became a suspect in an attempted kidnapping of a mother and daughter.
When he’d fled to Vermont, he’d headed straight for Rachel’s parents’ home.
Rachel felt vomit churning and rising in her. She breathed deeply and put her head down between her knees, her arms wrapped behind it. After a spell, she sat up again. Why had Preacher killed her parents? And why a knife? Why had he suddenly escalated to such a savage double murder? It was an act of outsized rage, almost personal. Was he jealous of them? Did he feel slighted? There had to be a reason, in his sick mind. Until the mother and daughter he was suspected of trying to kidnap in Maine, all his prior victims had been girls. He’d never chosen women, or a male of any age. He’d never used a knife, as he’d used on Rachel’s parents. A knife he’d bought that morning at the local hardware store, knowing in less than an hour he’d butcher two people with it. The store cashier said there was “nothing out of the ordinary with his behavior. In fact, he’d seemed jovial.”
Jovial.
And now he was out, because he’d behaved inside, found Jesus.
Rachel read another of Barrons’s notes: It appears the male victim was not planned, but killed when he entered the house unexpectedly.
There was another note from Barrons: Is he the CRVK?
Rachel knew from her fixation with serial killers that violence was an addiction for them. The lust for the adrenaline rush often intensified, and more extreme acts were needed to reach the same endorphin high. Perhaps that explained the knife. The rage. But was there something else at work to explain the departure in his MO both in choice of victim and the acts?
Rachel’s mind felt splintered into a thousand shards of broken glass. It hurt to think of what Preacher had done. Physically ached. Sorrow burrowed in her like an injured animal seeking a place to die. She’d read and watched dozens of biographies of sadistic killers, been sickened and disturbed and titillated. But she’d never felt sorrow.
She had ten minutes to catch the shuttle back to campus to meet Felix. If she missed it, she’d have to wait another twenty minutes or hike up the long hill. Felix would freak if she wasn’t on time. He was letting fear get the best of him, too. Fear that emerged as concern and protectiveness, but fear nonetheless.
Preacher. What he’d done by following her at the pet store was seeping into her blood. Consuming her thoughts. It had to stop.
She understood now why her father had not told her the truth about her parents’ murders. It was to spare her this anguish and confusion. What better reason was there to lie than to save a loved one pain? She’d have done the same, she realized, because she wished now she’d never laid eyes on these hideous files. It was too late. There was no undoing what she’d done any more than there was undoing what Preacher had done, had started, sixteen years ago.
She felt a deep compulsion to harm him. She could not let this man, this beast, who’d rewritten so many lives sixteen years ago with a knife, author her or her father’s future. Could not allow it. Or allow him to keep her trapped here, in need of a chaperone, her movement limited as she hid out in a musty inn with doilies and quilts, and do it in fear.
A plan formulated. Detestable. Abhorrent. Necessary.
A thump came at the window. Rachel let out a sharp cry. She was on the second floor. No one could reach the window; besides it was sealed so tight with decades of paint it might as well have been nailed shut.
Rain streaked the pane. Outside, the fog lent the day an aura of a failing silvery dusk, as if Rachel were looking at an antique negative gel plate of the town from an earlier era. Dark shapes scuttled in the fog, trailing swirls of mist as they retreated to warm, dry havens.
Except for one shape.
A dark figure under an awning across the street.
Still as stone.
Rachel could not tell if the figure—a man, by height and size—stood facing her or facing the shop window on his side of the street.
Even if he were staring up at her window, he couldn’t possibly see her well enough to know who she was.
She considered drawing the curtain, but if it were him, she wanted him to know she saw him; she wasn’t going to shrink from him.
Fuck him.
Her germinating plan was to do anything but shrink.
It was the opposite.
She’d go out there now, cross the street and—
The figure moved.
Was he pointing?
At her?
It was hard to tell.
Another figure approached him out of the fog.
The man lowered his arm and embraced the person, and the two figures walked away, though Rachel was nearly certain the figure looked back at her as it slipped into the fog.
She stuffed the papers in their envelope, crammed the envelopes in her backpack, and put on her coat and hat. God, her peacoat was soaked, heavy as a suit of armor. Cold.
As she unlocked the door’s bolt and made to leave, the doorknob turned in her hand, from the other side.