So Much Pretty (23 page)

He also didn’t know if he’d planned it, but when he started doing it, it all felt familiar, like he could just tell what was coming and what to do next. It felt good in a way nothing else had. If he had planned it, he would have had to put things in order—but things were already there. He had space, privacy, noises from the farm, animal tranquilizers, a few friends and relatives interested in the same thing. That’s not a plan, that’s an invitation.

He was fulfilling a dream. It was like taking a trip to Cancún or the Virgin Islands. He chuckled. The sun was beginning to rise. If he had planned it, it was planned in the same way you would plan a trip. You talk about it to your friends. You joke about it. You say you wish you were lucky enough. You make sure you don’t tell people who will be jealous or rude. Maybe you bring some friends along. Guys you love because they love the same things. A golfing or hunting trip from heaven, he thought. You look at brochures of the exotic. Then, when you’re brave enough, off you go.

“Off. You. Go,” he sang to himself and Wendy. He was getting tired of driving around. If it wasn’t for his respect for her family and his, he would have dumped her naked in one of the manure lagoons or somewhere out of town. He didn’t want her
father to think she was still alive somewhere or that she had just run away. He wanted them to know it was her. That she hadn’t run out on him. She’d been taken from him. From them. She was dead. He looked over his shoulder at the sheet on the floor in the truck’s little backseat and thought distractedly that he was glad he got an extended cab.

He planned it, but he didn’t invent it. The idea to do it was there all along, and so was the knowledge that he’d never get caught, he’d been watching movies or the news about it his whole life. He was not a dirtbag or a pedophile or a black guy some cops would be looking out for, or a creep that stalked prostitutes, or a quiet old pervert. And he wasn’t some super-rich guy everybody paid attention to. He was just a guy who lifted up the sheet to see what was underneath. Braver than most, like his mother always said.

He finally settled on the ditch near Tern Woods because he was getting tired and wanted to stop at the Savers Club to get a coffee before starting the day.

He felt kind of sad leaving her as he pulled away. Sad for her for one breathtaking second that traveled through his intestines and then made him slightly hard. He remembered what her eyes did to him, put something in him. He wished he could have that exact feeling of what her eyes did again from remembering it, but he just couldn’t, and it was sad. Now he knew for sure things would be dulled. Nothing would ever be sexier and funnier and scarier than her eyes, than her squinting up from the crawl space with her mouth bleeding, saying please.

“Please.” He would say it to himself in her voice. “
Please
,” he would whisper for the rest of the afternoon.

Audio File: Haeden County 911 Dispatch
8:38 A.M. 4/2/09

“Nine-one-one, how can I help you?”

“Yeah. Hi. I think I just passed an emergency situation. I am driving on Route Thirty-Four right now, just past the Savers Club in Haeden.”

“Where is the accident? Is this a car accident, ma’am?”

“No. no. I think I saw a person hurt by the parking lot. It looked, I’m not sure actually, I wanted to call just in case because I can’t stop, I’m late for a meeting, but it looked like a person was lying by the parking lot near that woods. I don’t know. It could be someone dumped some garbage.”

“You say it’s a person?”

“I think so. It looks like an old lady, maybe someone walking fell. Maybe someone out walking early morning. Oh. Maybe got hit by a car! Usually I’m not driving this early. I think she may have fallen. I couldn’t check. I think someone should check. I’m pretty sure I saw a hand reach up from the edge of the parking lot. I think someone maybe some lady got hurt. I would have stopped but I’m almost late. Someone should go check on that. I’m sure actually. I’m sure I saw an arm actually. Looked like someone fell down the embankment.”

“We’ll send someone over.”

“Oh good. Good. Now that I think about it, I am sure it was an arm. Do you need my information? Do you need my phone number?”

“We have it, ma’am. We’ll send someone over.”

Flynn

T
HERE WERE VIOLETS
at the edge of the woods, I remember. Violets and red trillium. I could see the ambulance approaching in the distance, flying toward the site with just the lights on, no siren. I stood beside her body, watching.

There were plenty of things I could tell were wrong right away. There was no medical examiner, for one. And Giles stood snapping pictures with a small square digital camera. One I had seen him use at his kids’ ball game.

The ambulance arrived beside us with its loud engine sucking away the silence. Tom and a kid who looked about twenty stepped out and walked around to the back doors to unload and unfold the stretcher. The kid was visibly high on adrenaline and fear, barely contained in his own skin. Everything else from here on in was just waiting and formality. A series of actions that had to be undertaken. Tom looked up at me, and I nodded at him and kept watching, knew without knowing anything that we were both shut down, had gone somewhere else. He laid the length of the black bag on the ground beside what could not really be described as a grave.

Alice

April 5, 2009

Theo
,

Here is the clip glued below. I sent you the whole paper too. Burn this when you are done and then call me
.

A body found yesterday morning in a drainage ditch at the eastern edge of Tern Woods in the village of Haeden has been identified as twenty-year-old resident Wendy White, who had been missing since November 2008.

Police and rescue workers found the remains after responding to a call from a commuter on Route 34 saying she believed she had seen an injured person on the side of the road that ran between the woods and the Savers Club parking lot.

White disappeared last fall after working late at a pub in the village.

Haeden Police Chief Alex Dino said a full investigation is under way.

At this time police have stated they have no leads pointing to the identity of the killer.

“We are pursuing all avenues,” Dino said. “We are working with state police and investigators from Elmville and we’ll be examining DNA evidence. At this point that is all the information we have.”

I will probably call you before you get this. I need to talk to you
.

This is what we’ve been talking about. I figured out today when they were having a “moment of silence” for her at school what was really going on. We need one more moment of silence? Oh my fucking GOD. Do you know what is going on? I know you do. You must
.

I think I have fallen through the hole in all the logic of the entire world and I can see now that nothing holds up and I feel that I am going to keep falling. This is what Claire was so upset about. What everybody sees and then hides from, just bows down to
.

Read the paper. The whole thing. Stacy talked about this stuff in every article, every single one
.

All these girls at school are scared and weirded out, because the woods are so close to the school. Like the fucking woods did it. I want to tell them to shut up. SHUT UP. And don’t be scared. Fear makes you run in circles. I need to call you. We need to figure all of this out somehow
.

Then Ross tells me this whole thing is one reason why it’s good I’m such a good shot in case someone is going to fuck with me. WTF? Like I walk around with my gun? It was the first time I had ever really seen him. I know you love him and I do too but it made me so mad. He looked like a sick old stupid war vet who had done bad things and was now “protecting me” by teaching me how to shoot ’cause he thinks I can redeem what he did
.

It was like I could see ALL the differences I’d never known existed. But I’m the fucking fool for not looking close enough. For not putting it all together from the books Claire gave me
.

Then there was this picture of the ditch in the paper, with police tape around it. The fact that they had this place, this grave, in the paper, where there was no way she could say “No, please don’t take my picture,” made me infuriated. It reminded me of that time I was telling you about—that asshole Jim took pictures of Trina with his cell phone when she was sleeping after they had sex—and he sent them to everyone. I could see Trina in that grave in the woods. Then the principal comes on and he says all this pious fucking shit, that there’s going to be a moment of silence. Seriously? More silence?

And all these boys that want to walk us home now. Like we’re supposed to think they don’t just want to get laid or have the chance to get in a fight with each other and are using us as an excuse. Or to prove they’re not bad. Be a prince or a hero. You would throw up if you saw it. It’s everything you’ve ever hated. It made me feel so sad for you, to see these things. Love you so much and feel so sad that you are a boy, and that because of your body you could be mistaken for a thing that is all (T)error. It’s an unfair camouflage they walk around in, Moley. Not fair to either of us. I don’t want any part of it
.

During that moment of silence I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs. I wanted to flip my fucking desk over and smash every window in that classroom. But of course I sat there and didn’t say a word
.

I can’t write anymore. I’m going out to the barn to do pull-ups
.

p.s. The Dairy Prince has maybe one more chance to reveal himself as actually human, someone who better have been joking
.

p.p.s. Burn this
.

Flynn

“N
ASTY MORNING, HUH
?”

I looked up, and Cutting was there, holding some pale blue flowers. He said, “These were growing in the field across from the VFD. But I thought they’d look better surrounded by computers and stacks of paper.” He set the little vase on my desk and I pictured the woods.

He was not the person I wanted to see that afternoon, given that our last two encounters involved partially clothed bodies in brutally contrasting states. I opened the bottom drawer of my desk and got out a bottle of Old Thompson and two shot glasses, and he smiled and said, “I thought that was a stereotype.”

“Are you fucking kidding? It’s one of the more accurate public perceptions about how newspapers work.”

I poured him a shot, drank mine, and then was happy he was there so I could finish up my story. “It was White,” I said.

He nodded. “Her parents identified the body.”

“On the record now?”

“Yeah.”

As long as we were talking about the concrete operations of our jobs, I felt completely fine, felt nothing. I thought it might have been that I felt fine, period. That I just wanted things to be resolved and didn’t care how they were resolved. As long as all the details were out, were in print. Fine. I didn’t find Wendy, and Wendy is dead. That’s another story that can be filed. That’s another body Tom Cutting packed up.
Fuck it
. I poured us each another shot.

“What else did you do today?” I asked Cutting.

“It was pretty busy, actually. A farmer had a heart attack just after lunch.”

“Did he live?”

“He’s going to be okay. One of his workers made the call as it was happening. Got there well within the golden hour. He needs to lose about fifty pounds. They’ll tell him to lay off the bacon. What did you do?” he asked.

I didn’t answer because it was fucking obvious.

“Did you just have to write about this stuff?” he asked. Something about the way he looked bothered me, like he was embarrassed, ashamed. At least he had changed out of his uniform.

“Where was the coroner, or whatever they call him around here?”

“He was out of town working.”

“Working?”

“You know, coroner is a part-time job in this county.”

“Do they have a cause of death?”

“I don’t know what the autopsy is going to find.” He looked away from me and pinched the bridge of his nose.

“What did it look like to you?” I asked.

“I didn’t get a close look after I unpacked the body. There was definitely trauma. The cause of death, though, I don’t know. It could have been a drug overdose.”

“A drug overdose.”

“Yeah.”

“It doesn’t jibe with her history.”

“Not at all, no. It doesn’t,” Cutting agreed. “There were bruises, but I can’t say what that means.”

“Why can’t you say what that means?” I was getting sick of the short answers. Why was he being cagey about it? I stopped thinking about the question and looked at him for a minute, looked for the reason he was being short with me. Something in my body supplied me with a reason I couldn’t fully get behind. I experienced a second of vertigo, a flutter in my stomach, and then quickly took another sip of my drink.

“With certainty. I can’t say if the bruises contributed in any
way to her death. I saw no significant trauma to her head or torso.”

“Do you think she was murdered?”

“Yeah. Of
course
I do. Or put in a position where her death was a likely outcome.”

“Then why can’t you say what it means?”

“Because you asked me the cause of death. Murder isn’t a cause of death.”

I nodded. “I’m asking you to speculate.”

He reached out and touched the petals on one of the flowers he had brought, and I realized he was trying not to think about it at all. “I don’t know what they’re going to find,” he said.

I tried, but there is no way to say “Do you think she was killed here in town?” more gently. So I just said it.

“Probably. I think she had been dead almost an hour before we got there. There was a good deal of lividity.”