The Red Hunter(60)

I got out of the car and walked through the chill night to knock on the door, the glass cold beneath my knuckles, then again. The street was quiet, deserted—all the businesses shuttered for the night or empty. The recession hit this town hard, and it had not recovered. The coffee shop, the bookstore, the hardware store, all closed. Only the liquor and convenience stores still thrived. There was a pawnshop, too. A store that sold uniforms . . . which survived because most people around here were employed by the hospital two towns over, or the bottle factory just a few miles away. There was a lumber storage warehouse, too, down at the end of the street. Off in the distance, there was nothing but trees. There’s always a conflict here, between the lumber companies and all the environmentalists trying to preserve the forest.

I say cut it all down. I hate nature. It has so many ugly secrets. It wants you back, wants to swallow your flesh, suck you back from whence you came. I like steel and concrete glass and engines, metal tracks and rebar. Things that man must wrestle into shape. We build whole cities, just to keep nature away, to show it that we’re boss—for a little while anyway.

Seth came to the door finally, wearing a Rutgers sweatshirt, three days of stubble, and dark purple circles under his eyes. He wasn’t older than I was, but prematurely gray, he could pass for middle-aged.

“Zoey,” he said.

Something weird happened then, a kind of hard flash on the moment when I drove the hunting knife into John Didion’s heart. You have to be strong, purposeful to drive a knife blade through the powerful intercostal muscles of the chest. That blade was razor sharp, though—it slid right in, and he had no strength to resist me. It was easy. Didion released a soft wheeze, then slumped against me as if we were intimates. His weight, suddenly a ton, pulled us both to our knees. I pressed that knife in deeper. I felt the life leave him, a drain, a passing, something held then released. Then a strange total silence surrounded us, driving away all the noise from outside. I’d hoped for a blast of rage, or a deep surge of joy that vengeance had been delivered. Anything. Anything but the deep nothingness that followed, the yawning hollow inside me. I sat with Didion awhile, watching his blood spill, thinking of the black pool that my mother had lain in. I waited to feel something. Even remorse. Nothing. What does that make me?

“You look horrible,” Seth said. He put on a pair of wire-rimmed glasses and inspected me. “Are you sick?”

Maybe. Yeah. Maybe I am. I caught something that night, and it’s been wasting me slowly ever since, eating me from within.

“I thought you might come,” he said when I didn’t say anything.

He stepped aside, and I walked into the foyer, then followed him up a narrow flight of stairs into a large loft space. The kind of space he had—cavernous with exposed pipes and vents, wood floors—would have cost a fortune in the city. He probably paid less than a grand a month. Tall windows looked out over the other surrounding buildings, to a parking lot, to the woods beyond.

I followed him through the room. There were several desks, all the monitors dark. Each workstation had some personal items—photos of people, kids, pets, a mug that read World’s Best Dad, a compact, and lipstick.

“Expanding?” I asked.

We walked through a doorway to his living quarters. A galley kitchen, a tossed bed, a plain gray couch, and an enormous television mounted on the wall. The set was tuned in to CNN, with the sound down. President Obama looked characteristically grim, graying, issued a condemnation of ISIS.

“I hired a couple of people part-time,” he said. “They have their own gigs, too, pay me a percentage for office space.”

“I wouldn’t have thought there would be so many mysteries in a small town.”

He snorted.

“There are as many mysteries as there are people,” he said. “Life is one big unanswered question.”

I nodded, my eyes falling on some pictures on his round kitchen table. A woman, youngish, plain with glasses and some acne scarring, mousy hair. There was a professional portrait where she smiled stiffly, one with a friend, one where she sat awkwardly atop a horse.

“Take Mariah Penny for instance,” he said, when he saw me sifting through the photos. “Missing forty-eight days.”

“I didn’t hear about it.”

“Twenty-eight years old, CPA, unmarried, lived alone, caregiver for her aging parents. She left the firm where she worked one night and didn’t come home. Somewhere between her office and her nice condo, she and her Mercedes C-Class fell into the vortex.”

“Drugs?” I offered. “Depression? Caregiving is hard.”

“She is a straight arrow,” he said. “A good girl. Cheerful, friendly, helpful by all accounts. No debts. No boyfriends. No secrets.”

I sat, continued sifting through his notes and photos. “Maybe she just got sick of it all. Took off.”

“No withdrawals or credit card usage since she went missing. Phone off the grid.”

“Hmm,” I said.

“But you didn’t come to talk about that.”

“No. This is the endgame,” I said. “Rhett Beckham is out of jail and back in town.”

He rubbed at the stubble on his jaw, sat heavily on a stool over by the counter. “Living with the brother.”

“I’m not interested in the brother,” I said.