Paper Ghosts_A Novel of Suspense Page 5

  I’ve been tied up in a closet until I lost track of time, slammed to the ground in a parking garage, tailed by a Mercedes at one hundred miles an hour. I’ve practiced for hours so I can shoot somebody deliberately in the head. None of this left me unscathed. But that wasn’t the point. The point was to redefine how I viewed bravery. Bravery wasn’t a character trait I was born without, thank God. Adrenaline and muscle memory and mind control, that’s all it is.

  We’re rumbling over the first red dot on my map, the 17th Street bridge in Waco. A muscle in Carl’s cheek twitches as he stares out at the corroded view of abandoned buildings and factory clutter like he’s never seen it before in his life. If he remembers what’s under this bridge, he’s not saying.

  “You’re sweating like a pig.” Carl punches the air-conditioning all the way to max. I have no idea what he’s talking about—there isn’t a bit of perspiration on me.

  In fact, the Buick is an oasis of cool after the sausage-coffee perfume and bird chatter of the diner. Maybe Carl’s brain craves the white noise. One at a time, he flips every vent at me. My hair tickles my face, blows in my eyes. I feel goosebumps rise on my arms, a tiny rumble of last night’s panic. I see Carl, sitting in the dark refrigerator of his motel room, listening for my frantic rattling of the chain.

  Fear like this has always nipped at me like a pack of rats. They say we arrive on earth innately afraid of only two things: loud noises and heights. Babies and kittens refuse to move around on a clear glass table for fear of falling, but a duck will waddle across because he knows he can fly. It’s instinct. So they say. I think we fall to earth afraid of everything. We just pretend we’re brave until the monster wakes.

  Carl’s fiddling with the radio, zipping across the stations, filling the car with discordant snippets of music, baseball announcers, weather reports.

  Loves me…chance of rain…hallelujah…fly ball…oh my rose.

  I want to slap at his fingers. Fingers long and delicate enough to strum classical guitar, or clip off an aneurysm, or tie a vicious knot. On the witness stand, Carl said he used his hands for printing pictures and drinking whiskey sours, sure as hell not to kill anyone. Back at the diner, Carl had mentioned slitting throats. Details. They’re important.

  “Jesus Christ, I’ll listen to country crap if you insist,” Carl mutters. “Just shut up about it already.”

  We’ve finished crossing the bridge. I haven’t said a word to Carl in the last two minutes, certainly not about my taste in music. He was so cogent in the diner. Is he just messing with me? Or something else? Don’t ever get lulled, Mrs. T had warned. Dementia is a clever cat. It will walk out the door like it’s totally lost interest. But it will always creep back. It will never give up until the mouse is eaten.

  Carl doesn’t comment when I pull to a stop in the weeds on the side of the road.

  We don’t have to do this, I tell myself. Wasn’t it enough to drive across the bridge and make a point? And yet, at the first break in traffic, I yank the wheel and pull a U-turn back to the steep little road that leads under the bridge. You really have to be looking for it, which is why Carl probably liked it down here.

  I’m crawling down the road against the force of gravity, wheels crunching the gravel. I park immediately at the bottom but don’t open the door. A jungle of concrete pillars and maniacal vegetation stretches out in front of us.

  I turn and reach for two white washcloths on the floor of the backseat. Preparation. Paranoia. People fish down here and could remember us. I’m going to drape the fabric over the license plates.

  “Don’t mess back there.” Carl’s face is flush and angry. His eyes are darting furiously from the rear window to the pieces of cloth in my hand.

  What have you hidden in my backseat, Carl?

  My sister’s name floats up from my subconscious.

  Rachel.

  Rachel, Rachel, Rachel. The safe word I used with my trainer although he was rarely close enough to hear.

  The scarf suddenly feels like a noose. While Carl watches, I rip it off and cram it in the console between us.

  “What are you looking at?” I snipe. “Get out of the car. Let’s see what you remember.”

  TITLE: THE GRAVE

  From Time Travel: The Photographs of Carl Louis Feldman

  Waco, 2001

  Gelatin silver print

  Photographer’s note—This mysterious little cross is hidden in the weeds under the old 17th Street bridge in a rundown section of Waco. Every year, I check to make sure it’s still there. I always meet a homeless guy or two, fishing in Waco Creek. I like the sneaky shadows under here, the sense of things abandoned and dead. I like that the cross makes people wonder, but they never bother to dig it up.

  12

  Carl is trudging behind me under the bridge.

  I had hoped he would lead. It would make the rest of the trip so much simpler if he ushered me straight to our first spot on my map. To know right away, for sure, that Carl remembers he has been under this bridge plenty of times with the precious camera he famously named George. A camera that spent hard time in an evidence box after an exotic life traveling across Texas.

  That was a whole other goose chase for me, trying to find someone in Carl’s past named George who might cast significant light on things (not to mention an Allison, the moniker for his old truck).

  Every time I stop short, he does. I can’t tell if he is messing with me or confused. It was tough enough just to cajole him out of the car. The flirt in the diner has vanished. While I draped washcloths over the license plates, he jumped in the backseat and cooed softly to himself. Anyone watching has already reported the two weirdos under the bridge.

  Fishing poles would have been good cover, leaning up on the trunk of the car. I’m going to need to be much more clever than this. Day Two, and I’m being trailed by Carl under a desolate bridge, certain Mrs. T’s advice would have been to frisk him first. But touching him, pulling at his pockets—how much he might enjoy the experience is unthinkable.

  “It’s just another couple of hundred yards,” I say, although inside I’m suddenly certain he knows right where we’re heading. The road down here is old, ragged around the edges, but paved and smooth in the center. That means it’s still used for something. If Carl flips out at me, someone might hear. Or at least eventually find one of us behind the tall feathery weeds that line the road like Vegas dancers.

  I tread carefully in the center of the pavement. Two rusted ribbons of railroad track stretch to my left, reminding me of a particular Pass/Fail day with my trainer. Blindfolded, my foot trapped, the frantic tugging to be free, the train bearing down. It turned out to be the blare of a recording, a track long in disuse, but I didn’t know that then.

  To our right, quarry limestone tumbles down to a trickling creek bed that streams toward the Brazos a mile or two away. A culvert gapes like a giant empty eye socket, a place for snakes, daring boys, graffiti, things to die. Everywhere, bundles of brush lie in wait, as tangled and cruel as barbed wire. I concentrate on the Mrs Baird’s bread factory sign in the distance, the patches of daylight playing on my black running shoes, the clip of Carl’s feet behind me.

  “We’re here.” Only three hundred yards, and I’m breathless.

  He steps up even with me and stares at the steel cross that rises about a foot and a half out of the ragged weeds.

  “I took pictures of that,” Carl says. Matter-of-fact.

  “Yes. You did.” Trying not to sound eager.

  I keep my eyes steady on the beams of the cross, which sits half in the shadow of the bridge, the other in sun. Someone has clipped the weeds a little. Rust is bubbling up on its white paint like freckles of blood. A small, empty metal plaque is soldered to the center.

  The cross is as stick-straight to the sky and forsaken as it appeared in Carl’s photographs. It was freshly parked in his camera, along with the shots he took of Nicole Lakinski and her young son at a park five miles from here, where the cops picke
d him up for a DUI. That was about ten years ago.

  Twenty-seven-year-old Nicole had been missing for three days. Her son, Alex, was found crying on a park bench with an arm hanging at an odd angle. There was a five-dollar bill with her fingerprint and a bit of her DNA on Carl’s dashboard, along with a baseball cap in the truck bed. At the trial, Carl admitted being there. He says she offered him the five because she thought he was homeless. He couldn’t get her to take it back. The little boy, Alex, only remembered falling off the swing. And a man with a blue cap. Or a green one.

  At the time, Carl and George the Camera were on a whiskey bender across Texas in Allison the Truck, with Dylan croaking from the speakers. The backseat had been neatly made up with a blanket and pillow. Not a drop of blood was found there or in the pickup bed. The jury didn’t like Carl, but that’s what they kept coming back to before they offered a verdict. That, and the only cap they found in his truck was white.

  If he kidnapped Nicole, where was a thread of her dyed blond hair? A smear of her spit or sweat? A broken bit of the pink-and-black zebra stripe painted on her artificial nails? The blood-red imprint of the Ruby Woo lipstick she wore? The silver owl ring she wore on her pinky that was always slipping off? There was so little evidence that it took the police a year to officially charge Carl; the judge even set him free on bail before the long march to trial.

  For a second, I imagine the scene under the bridge a decade ago—the frenzy after the cops developed Carl’s photos and one of them had recognized the spot with the cross.

  Regular 17th Street bridge trolls said the cross had been lost in the weeds for years but that didn’t stop police from mucking through the gushing creek and the culvert and stomping the wooded area looking for a missing woman.

  They picked up nine muddy shoes that didn’t go with one another, 208 beer cans and bottles, half of a waterlogged copy of Bleak House, a child’s B- math test, a biohazard collection of condoms and needles, a litter of tiny animal bones. In the creek, they found four waterlogged guns and three rusty pocketknives. None could be connected to any crimes.

  No one thought twice about why people had never questioned the cross if it had been there so long. The cops shoveled up a circle ten feet wide and ten feet deep. After unearthing nothing interesting, the hole was filled in and the cross hammered right back in place. In Texas, whenever a cross shows up, it stays.

  The trial judge let the photos in Carl’s camera into evidence, no problem. By that time, the media speculation was in full frenzy—reporters, prosecutors, and police officials had been drawing vague lines to crimes and other photographs of Carl’s for a long time. It was a journalist who first figured out Carl had photographed this cross more than once, long before Nicole Lakinski’s disappearance. A Waco reporter recognized it in Carl’s published book.

  Carl is running his hand over the metal, admiring it like a carpenter would. It’s a serious effort, with beams filched from a construction site or a junkyard, fired together and spray-painted white. Engineered, leaden to carry, brutal to stake into the heart of hard clay.

  I think about taking out the small knife on my keychain and scratching Rachel in the white space even though I know it isn’t her grave. I want her remembered. Whoever went to this much effort to bang it into the ground had a very good reason.

  Carl kneels in front of the cross. Closes his eyes. Enacting a ritual? A few inches to his left, a fire ant feels the slight quake of his knee hitting the ground and trickles out of his soil castle. Man on duty. And then another ant, and another, on a bead for Carl’s hand. One has crawled to his thumb.

  Bite him.

  As the ant prepares to set his hand on fire, Carl’s eyes flick open. “Smells that pancake syrup,” he says. “You know ants have five times more odor receptors than other insects?” He pinches the ant into a crumb. Rises.

  “I’m ready to go,” Carl says.

  This isn’t what I planned. Ten minutes of nothing. I wanted to leave here with something tangible. Carl can never be tried again for killing Nicole. Double jeopardy. At this spot, especially, surely he might be careless, unable to resist dropping a detail or two.

  “What do you remember happened under this bridge?”

  “I remember wanting to write a name on this cross.” As if he is reading my mind.

  And then I hear it. A tiny, terrified violin. From the creek bed? From deep in the ground under the cross?

  “Why you got your fingers plugged in your ears?” Carl’s voice tunnels through.

  I drop my hands to my sides. Nothing disturbing the air now but the trickle of creek water, the honk of a horn above us.

  “Let’s go.” I turn around.

  “You hear that?” Carl asks.

  I don’t want to. But I do. The sound is thinner now, more desperate. A wobbly bow across a single string. Overhead, the relentless drumbeat of tires thumps the concrete.

  Is Carl throwing his voice? Mimicking the sound of someone dying?

  He’s facing the creek bed, his back to me. I can’t see if his throat is vibrating but I know it is.

  “You bastard.” I snatch at his shoulder but Carl is already tearing away, vanishing into the thicket behind the cross. Red ants seethe over my shoes, desperate for skin. I’m paralyzed. All that training, I think. All that preparation. Carl is crashing through brush and then, silence. I don’t know if there’s a way out on the other side. He’s gone, maybe for good.

  I wait a full minute. Then two.

  Carl emerges, bent over by the weight of what he’s cradling.

  He’s stumbling toward me. There’s blood on his face, his jeans.

  I can’t help but think of my sister. Of Nicole.

  The closer he gets, the more I want to run.

  Thirty feet away. Ten.

  I have to look at what he’s holding.

  One of the eyes is stitched shut by infection and crawling with gnats. The appeal from the other, deep and brown, steals my breath.

  MISSING GIRLS CONNECTED TO CARL

  NICOLE LAKINSKI, AGE 27, WACO

  Disappeared: May 8, 2008, between 1 and 5 P.M.

  Details: Abducted from park

  Last seen by: Son, age 5

  Suspects: Husband (alibied), ex-boyfriend (no alibi),

  Carl (acquitted)

  State of case: Unsolved, no body

  Linking photograph by CLF: Titled The Grave (a taunt?)

  VICKIE HIGGINS, AGE 24, CALVERT

  Disappeared: June 9, 2010, time unknown

  Details: Reported missing by her husband when he came home for dinner

  Last seen by: 82-year-old neighbor (now deceased) saw her in yard around 9 A.M.

  Suspects: Husband (alibied), FedEx driver (alibied)

  State of case: Unsolved, declared dead in absentia

  Linking photograph by CLF: Titled The Bride (victim about to celebrate 1st wedding anniversary)

  VIOLET SANTANA, AGE 21, GALVESTON,

  SAN LUIS PASS BEACH

  Disappeared: March 19, 2003, between 10 and 11 P.M.

  Last seen by: Friends with her on beach

  Details: Alcohol involved, skinny-dipping, very dark

  Suspects: None

  State of case: Declared accidental drowning with parents’ blessing, no body

  Linking photograph by CLF: Titled The Drowning (How he killed her? Has a thing for names that start with V?)

  13

  I break one of my rules. I use my burner phone under the shadows of the bridge to Google the closest emergency vet. So much for a vow to avoid electronic trails. We end up 1.7 miles away in a clinic in a yellow clapboard house badly in need of paint.

  I’d hesitated when I saw the sign: Budget Holistic Vet: Exotics and Emergencies Welcome. I almost peeled out of the parking lot for someplace else. But Carl was growling at me to stop the car, insisting the dog had only minutes, like he would know. I imagine the best killers, the ones who stay free, do. I took his word for it.

  I also have to accept the
unspoken word of the freakishly strong waif of a woman assessing this barely breathing animal that she is a licensed veterinarian. It didn’t help that she had greeted us with, I’m Dr. Kiwi, like the fruit. When she bent over to scoop the dog off the couch in her packed waiting room, she flashed the tattoo that lined the smooth flat of her back above her Levi’s: Dog whispering is for bullies. My trainer wasn’t a fan of reality star dog trainer Cesar Millan, either. Dominance does not tame, he would tell me.

  The injured dog lies flat on his side on the exam table, whining through his teeth, lapping in shallow breaths, doing his heartbreaking best to be a good patient while Dr. Kiwi runs hands gently over him, exploring.

  I’m working the math on my shrinking budget while staring at tiny cats twisted into yoga poses or in the throes of tantric sex—the wallpaper’s too faded to tell. Carl’s sitting in the room’s only chair, arms crossed, lips crunched.

  I’m looking everywhere but at the dog—his gnatted eye, his stomach wound. His whine coils inside me like live electrical wire. I wish the pain were mine instead, a feeling I work hard to control.

  This radical empathy of mine extends to things God didn’t give a voice—the half-smashed fly wriggling his legs on the windowsill, the fish bleeding from a vicious hook, flapping, puckering his mouth in the air. At three years old, I’d bite into the skin of a peach and wonder if it was silently screaming. My trainer worked on this weakness and got nowhere. He really didn’t try that hard. He said it wasn’t much of a weakness.