Devil House(11)

So it seemed there’d been a collective effort to start forgetting about Devil House almost from the moment the story broke. This effort, by and large, had been successful. They hadn’t been able to keep the camera crews away—nobody’s strong or clever enough to drive off the camera crews—but somehow they’d weathered the onslaught quietly. It was a dark miracle of forgetfulness, a gift of near-erasure. There are few such gifts in a world like ours.

I mulled this over in my new house by the freeway—my new house! I loved saying these words, sometimes aloud, thinking about how most houses contain more stories than their present-day owners can really fathom; my work, and the way it worked, had bought me two houses for the price of one. It was a deeper level of engagement than my previous stakeouts, than the simple trespassing of my greener days, I considered; gazing all the while deeply—ridiculously—into its beige walls: trying to imagine them as they’d once been, and coming up empty-handed every time.



* * *



I WISH I COULD SAY I got my box full of primary texts from a retired cop who requested that his name be withheld until five years after his death. I wish I could claim they came bundled like an enormous manuscript, tidily tucked into a box, and that atop the sheaf there’d been a typewritten note in which the anonymous officer who’d had access to this material all along details his anguish over having withheld it from people who, he knew, had need of it—even if, as he says in an aside, he can’t imagine what actual use any of it might be. I wish I could tell you that I then drew up a comprehensive study of the department as it had been during the investigation, eliminating all serving officers still living, so that I might, from among the already narrow possibilities on the list of the dead, draw forth a name or two who might be likely suspects for putting such invaluable sources into my hands. Failing all that, I’d like to say I used social engineering to get into the evidence room at the precinct: bluffing my way past security, lying outright to the clerk, and finally luxuriating in the archives, avoiding curious glances as I pocketed several bagged and numbered exhibits, one-of-a-kind artifacts which I then spirited out of the police station inside the false lining of an overcoat. See me, waiting until I get home to examine my contraband, triumphant but unsurprised: I get away with stuff like this all the time. It’s who I am and how I work, in this version of me.

But that version only exists in movies. I don’t even own an overcoat. I made my first local inroads into the story of Devil House by doing what anybody else does these days: I went on eBay.

Buying source material from strangers on the Internet always makes me a little queasy. The hospital charts that arrived one day from Redding while I was working on Spent Light: nobody’s even supposed to see medical records without a court order. They’re confidential. But nothing’s truly private anymore. There are people out there who will sell you anything.

In San Francisco they make you sign for a package; anything left outside your door will be gone in minutes. I remember the sound of the buzzer in my apartment the day the Spent Light charts arrived; as I signed the FedEx guy’s clipboard I couldn’t shake the feeling that he knew something was fishy. He stayed quiet, but I felt him watching me, I thought, while I scribbled on the signature line. What did he imagine might be in the box: Weapons, maybe? Drugs? What kind of drugs would you need shipped to San Francisco?

But probably he was thinking about how many more stops he needed to make before lunch, or whether he was meeting his hourly quota. I’ve repeated the process enough times now to know that it wasn’t his expression telegraphing guilt or suspicion: it was my guilt. It’s a feverish feeling, preparing to flip through a sheaf of paperwork to which you have no legitimate claim, making ready to glean information from it for the purposes of telling a story whose darker details ought to have remained hidden.

Shortly after I moved to Milpitas I learned that the FedEx guy here just leaves your package on the porch.

It was right there waiting for me when I got back from my shopping. I’d scoped out an enormous Goodwill down the highway, and it didn’t disappoint: shelves were full of dusty plates and cracked cups, abandoned electric popcorn makers and can openers, pens and stationery and knickknacks. I meant to stock the kitchen cabinets with old things, things that might conceivably have passed through the hands of its former inhabitants. Not antiques: cast-offs. Things of no known vintage, the invisible bits of the past that form its greater part. When I immerse myself in the search long enough, I get a precise feel for what works.

I stood on my porch looking down at the package for a minute. Cars on the freeway above me buzzed by in the irregular rhythm of midday. Then I sat on my step, box in hand, and split the seam on the packing tape with a house key. I eased the bubble-wrapped bundle gently out from its housing. It’s a grim sort of Christmas, the arrival of the primary texts: a time when the imaginary world of things I haven’t seen collides with, and is always at least partially annihilated by, the world of the real.

But I’d been deep in secondary research for several months now, ever since Ashton’s initial email. I was glad I’d kept notes from our call, because the contrasts between what I’d heard then and what seemed to be forming a truer picture had begun to sharpen:

Cult of teenagers

Ritual murder

Obscene staged crime scene

No arrests

I was ready to get down to work.