No Coming Back (10 page)

I take out my phone and bring up the picture of the human bones lodged in the tree roots. “Ruby, there’s something you should know. They found her. Jenna. This morning. Or what was left of her. Up at Hangman Falls.”

Ruby’s eyes widen fully for the first time, enough to show the
whites and all the veins. “Now you really are fucking with me,
Jak
e Olson!”

“I was up there myself, with the police. All the heavy snowfall we’ve been having, it pulled down Hangman’s Tree, upturned it. She was underneath. Some hunters stumbled across her on their way down from the lake.”

She exhales blue smoke. “No fucking way! They actually found her after all this time? This definitely calls for a drink!”

Before I can object or show her the picture, she skips to her feet and scuttles over to a table in a corner, comes back armed with a bottle of vodka, two-thirds gone.

“This is turning out to be one heck of a weird day of surprises, Jake Olson. First you show up, then Jenna. I mean—Jesus!” She unscrews the cap and takes a hearty glug. Her eyes roll back and she’s caught for a moment between heaven and hell. Then she comes back to earth with a bang, licks at a sore in the crack of her lips, and tilts the bottle my way. “Sure you won’t join me? It’s good stuff.”

I shake my head. “I’d like to ask you a few questions and record your responses, if you don’t mind.”

“For the paper? Sure, okay. Shoot.” She takes another swig.

I put the phone on audio-record. “Interview with Ruby
Dickinson
, Saturday, January twenty-four. Ruby, can you tell me what you remember about the time Jenna disappeared?”

“Before or after?”

“Both, but preferably before, on the run-up, if you can rec
all it.”

“You’re asking a lot, you know?”

I smile. “I know. Just take your time.”

“My brain is still muddled from the news they found her.” She tips more vodka into her mouth. “Fuck me. Okay. Do you want me to close my eyes, like I’m in therapy?”

“If it helps.”

“Okay.” She rests her head against the back of the couch and her eyelids drop. Ruby has eighteen years of misty memories to trawl back through. Most of them will be blurry, incomplete,
misplaced
. Drugs do that. Long-term misuse affects everything. I’m not
expecting
any revelations here.

“You know, Jake Olson, when I look back, we were young and naïve. If only we knew back then what we know now.”

“Every generation shares the same complaint.”

Her eyes move under her eyelids, as though she is in REM sleep. A few seconds later she says: “I remember, in those last few weeks, Jenna was a royal pain in the ass.”

“How so?”

“Well, for starters, she kept canceling plans at the last minute. Thinking about it, she was rude and inconsiderate. I loved her like a sister, you know? But I hated her like one, too.”

“And that wasn’t like her, canceling plans?”

Ruby opens one eye. “Did she cancel any on you?”

Now it’s my turn to think about it. Jenna and I were seeing each other for just a few months before her disappearance. Maybe one or two evenings through the week, but mainly at the
weekends
. Either way, plenty of free time for both of us to do our own things.

A quiet grunt sneaks through my lips. “Not that I remember.”

“True love,” Ruby snickers.

“Did she say why she kept canceling?”

Ruby sits up. Her smoke’s gone out. She puts down the vodka and relights the reefer, sucks on it, checks the end is lit, sucks some more. “Truth is, she never said anything at first. In fact, she avoided even talking about it. I had to keep pushing for answers. She didn’t even give me an excuse, just a ‘S
orry, hon, I can’t make it.’
When I pushed a little too hard she told me to butt out.”

“That’s not like her.”

“Yeah, you figure? Anyway, she said she was seeing you and I was to leave her alone. But she wasn’t seeing you. Not those times she canceled.”

I sit up a little straighter. “How do you know?”

Smoke trickles from her nostrils. “Because I followed her.”

“You followed her?”

“Jesus, it made a change from her following me!” She cocks a crooked eyebrow at my sudden frown. “Do you need me to explain?”

“Please.”

“I’m thinking you didn’t know the real Jenna. Not the Jenna I knew. You only knew the nice Jenna. The false smiles and
sweet
-lipped Jenna. You know, the Jenna she wanted you and everybody else to see?”

My frown stays put. “What are you saying?”

“That you were love-blind back then. You had those big puppy dog eyes going on, the kind that can’t see the wood for the trees. Jenna was an angel, wasn’t she?”

“Sure.”

“Wrong! She was anything but angelic! The Jenna I knew could raise hell. Don’t you get it, Jake Olson? She only let you see the side of her she wanted you to see. It was all a game with her. She played you, the same way she played everybody else in her life. Jenna was a social chameleon. I heard that term on Lifetime, so I know it’s true. She did whatever it took to get what she wanted. And I mean whatever.”

My pulse is elevated. “I don’t understand.”

“That’s because she fooled you. I mean, I should know; no one was closer to Jenna than I was, right? Believe me when I say that girl had manipulation and convincing down to a fine art. Don’t feel bad. She didn’t just fool you. She fooled everybody. I spent most of my life with her tagging along.”

“That’s not the way I remember it.”

“That’s because you bought into the façade. Trust me, Jenna was exhausting. Everything I got, she had to have. She copied my styles, my tastes in music, even every boy I was interested in, she had to swear her undying love to.”

“Including me?” It comes out automatically.

Ruby’s lips form an amused slant. “No, Jake Olson, not including you. Jenna chose you for some other reason. Maybe if you looked the way you do now, back then, who knows?” She makes a suggestive face.

My heart is racing. These aren’t my memories, my impressions. “How do I know you’re not lying?”

“You don’t. But I’ve nothing to gain from not being totally on the level with you. I’m not trying to score points or even my next fix here. I’m just saying it like it is.”

“But you were the best of friends.”

“True enough.” She sucks the cigarette, then blows out smoke. “Don’t get me wrong, I liked Jenna. She was fun when she wasn’t being clingy. She had this crazy sense of humor. She was wicked. But she was a leech, and sometimes I couldn’t get rid of her.”

I am stunned and made slightly uncomfortable by Ruby’s announcement. It’s like I’ve lived my whole life in a bubble and Ruby has just popped it. “So, you followed her?”

“I did. I tailed the bitch. One night, after she canceled for maybe the third time. The thing is, I hated being jerked around back then, and Jenna was beginning to piss me off by that point. Normally, we didn’t keep secrets. We shared just about everything. Then she started giving me the brush off and lying about her reasons. So I
followed
her. And that’s when I learned her dark secret.” She sucks on the hand-rolled and holds the smoke in again. “The fucking bitch.”

I sit forward, heart thudding. “What secret?”

“You won’t believe it. I couldn’t believe she’d hidden it from me, for months, and we went everywhere together.” She lets out the smoke. “I challenged her about it and we had this huge fight,
ironically
the day before she went missing. My last words to her were ‘
go rot in hell, bitch’
and I guess she did.”

I am hooked by Ruby’s bait, hypnotized. “What was she doing, Ruby? Where did she go?”

Suddenly, Ruby’s expression flat-lines and a somberness settles, offsetting the effects of the marijuana. She nods at the phone in my hand. “Stop the recording, Jake Olson, or this conversation ends here and now.”

I think about it, think better of it, then slip the phone back in my coat pocket. I don’t hit the
Stop
icon on the way in.

Ruby draws a deep breath, leans forward and places her
fingertips
back on my knee. “Can I trust you, Jake Olson?”

“Implicitly.”

“But I don’t even know you.”

I put a hand on hers. “Ruby, you can trust me.”

She stares at me, unmoving, for long seconds, as though she
has x-ray vision and is able to see my thorny sparks. “Okay. But
whichever
way this pans out, it doesn’t come from me, right? I’m serious. I want no record of this. No one knows I said anything. What I’m about to tell you can get me killed. Do you understand? Don’t tell anyone I told you. I mean it. Not a soul.”

I squeeze her hand, say nothing. My heart is in my mouth.

Ruby pulls her hand out from under mine. She glances around us, as though we’re being observed. “Do you remember Six Pack?” Her voice is barely above a paranoid whisper.

I frown again. It’s the last thing I’m expecting her to say. “Sure, although I haven’t heard that name in a very long time.”

“What do you remember about it?”

“Not much. Just the usual. I know Chief Krauss was a member.”

Six Pack was a members-only group of a half dozen handpicked Harper men who met regularly for hunting weekends out in the Superior National Forest. All testosterone and egos. Lyle Cody, the founder, owned a hunting lodge squirreled away deep in the wooded hills somewhere north of the lake. The talk in the playground was that its masked members practiced devil worship up there in those hills, that they even made blood sacrifices to the gods. But no one had any hard evidence to corroborate the claim, and no one was completely sure of the truth, but the rumors abounded nevertheless. Kids scaring the bejesus out of each other, no doubt. The stuff of local legend. Ghost stories whispered around campfires. One or two braver souls had tried proving the theory—essentially by sneaking up on the property—only to be caught nosing around and promptly sent back to town with their tails between their legs. As far as everybody at school was concerned, Six Pack was a secret society. Only its members knew exactly what, if any, controversial practices were conducted in the privacy of the hunting lodge. Probably none. Probably just an innocent hunting club whose members had instigated the scare stories in the first place, to stop kids like us from intruding on their fun.

“It was a couple of days before Jenna disappeared,” Ruby
continues
, refocusing my attention. “Abigail Tilley—you won’t remember her, the redhead with the ears?—she was throwing a birthday party. Girls only, you know? And Jenna sure liked to party. The deal was we’d go together.”

“But she pulled out?”

“She did, and it was the final straw. Like I say, she was pissing me off. I was determined to find out what she was up to. So I tailed her. It was dark. She didn’t see me. We were on foot. I followed her to the big house at the end of Morgan. You know the one I mean?”

“Lyle Cody’s place.” My neck muscles are stiff and my pulse is tapping in my throat. When we were kids, Lyle Cody had a
reputation
for being a player, and I don’t like where this is headed.

“Like I say, it was nighttime. The house lights were on. Jenna went inside. I hung back, mainly because I didn’t want to get caught snooping around, not there. I nearly lost my nerve, even started walking away. But eventually I mustered up the courage to sneak up to a window.” Ruby gulps down a mouthful vodka, then scans the room for invisible onlookers.

Anticipation pulls me even closer. “Ruby. What did you see at Cody’s place?”

Her gaze finds mine and freezes. “I saw four men in a room with Jenna and another girl. They were all buck naked and doing, you know, stuff.”

The tapping in my throat turns to thuds. I ask the single most stupid question: “What were they doing?”

Ruby gapes at me like I’m from Mars. “Fuck me, Jake Olson, do you need me to draw you a diagram? They were taking it in turns, that’s what they were doing! One after the other. Sometimes two or three at the same time!”

My throat is tight, constricted. Steam is rising in my head. “They were
raping
her?” The words come out like a rasp. For the first time in a long time rage boils in my belly, and something else, too. Something like fear.

“No,” Ruby answers with a shake of her head. “You got it all wrong. It wasn’t like that. I wish it was; it would be easier to
understand
maybe, to accept, you know? No, they weren’t
raping
her. Jenna was a willing participant. And she was enjoying it. I mean, she was begging for it. The other girl, too. That’s why she was there. That’s what she was doing all those times she canceled on me. She was screwing around behind your back and mine.”

“She was having orgies with older men?”

Ruby picks at the food lodged in her teeth, then spits it out. “Get with the program, Jake Olson. Jenna Luckman was a
harlot
. A whore. And I’m willing to bet your life on it that’s what got her killed.”

Chapter Twelve

S
eventeen years ago, when trying to explain my obsession with Jenna, a psychiatrist told me that I block out all the bad and only see the good. She even got me to perform a picture-association test to prove it. The end result was that I idealize those people who are nice to me and never think twice about those who aren’t. I always thought it made me sound pathological.

In the blink of an eye, Ruby’s revelation makes me question everything I know about Jenna. Just like that.

For almost two decades her golden memory has remained untarnished, radiant. A pristine picture of first love. I never planned it that way. In lockup, inmates do whatever it takes to survive.
Visualizing
her angelic image kept me alive. I believed in Jenna. I believed in what we had together, that it was real and founded in trust. It was all I had. Now Ruby has turned my world on its head, like that damned tree up at The Falls. Flipped my heart inside-out and got me in a spin. It’s nauseating, confusing. A bombshell. Memories turned to rust. If she is right, what else did Jenna keep from me and why didn’t I see it?

The answer: puppy love eyes.

But I need to keep some kind of perspective here. Although Ruby has no outward reason to spin a lie about Jenna, I must remember she is a drug addict whose perceptions of reality can be warped. For all I know, every word spouted from her lips could be untrue. Projecting her own failings on another, as my psychologist would say. And yet it doesn’t feel like a tall tale. It seems too believable to have been conjured up on the spur of the moment. I have spent eighteen years in the company of liars, cheats, addicts. I
recognize
the signs, the traits, the plays. Ruby displays none of them. She is a tattered book, but she’s an open one.

“Did you tell the police this story, after she disappeared?” I ask her before leaving, while the tape still rolls in my pocket and the panic is yet to flood my veins.

Ruby nods. “You bet. I told the chief everything. Just like I told you.”

“So Chief Krauss knew?”

“No, not the chief back then. The new chief, now.”

“Meeks? You told Meeks? Why him?”

“Because he was the one who came asking the questions.”

She doesn’t add the word
Duh
but I hear it nonetheless.

“What did Meeks do about it?”

Ruby snickers at the memory. “He said I should shut my dirty mouth and stop trying to throw slurs on good reputations. He went on to tell me I had a sick imagination and if I told anyone else what I’d told him, he’d charge me with slander, or worse.”

It sounds like Meeks.

“So what happened next?”

“What do you think? I thought
fuck this
and did as I was told. You have to remember how things were back then. I didn’t want no trouble. I’d seen stuff I shouldn’t have seen. These were powerful men. For all I knew, Shane Meeks was one of those guys having sex with Jenna. I didn’t want no comeback. Meeks is a bully, but Gavin’s a psycho.”

“Jenna’s brother?”

She nods. “He was with Meeks when he questioned me. He said if I told anyone about his sister he’d do very bad things to me.”

I haven’t thought much at all about Gavin Luckman in a long time. I knew he and Meeks were in cahoots from an early age and that the deadly duo were notorious troublemakers in town. But the age difference between them and me meant we moved in different circles. Aside from general memories of their bullying, I remember stumbling across them in the woods, one springtime. They were at a creek, playing baseball with frogs. The cracks of bone and the sickening squelch of ruptured flesh echoing across the calm water.

“So I didn’t tell a soul,” Ruby continues, refocusing me. “Pretty soon it was moot anyway. You were accused of her murder, Jake Olson, and I didn’t mention it to anyone else after that. In fact, aside from those two freaks, you’re the only person I’ve ever told. How fucked-up is that?”

I replay Ruby’s shocking statement as I leave her home and pick up the main route back into town. The arthritic Bronco is
warming
to the frozen roads, and the stench of Marlboro Reds isn’t as
suffocating
. I listen to her words on the recording on my phone, my thoughts all shuffled up and scattered, like a deck of cards thrown in the air.

I can’t quite process the information. As far as it’s gotten me, I have always tried to be open-minded and nonjudgmental. My counselors taught me to always try to wear another’s shoes, but only figuratively. If the argument has merit, I can be persuaded to believe it. Right up until ten minutes ago, I believed I knew Jenna as well as anyone knew Jenna. I knew her intimately, in ways others didn’t. We were as close as two halves of a clamshell, with something delicious between us. I know I romanticize, but I am not stupid; I know time can warp memories, make them fonder, warmer than they actually were. But mine were kept in focus by reliving them every moment of my imprisonment. Ruby’s damning accusation flies in the face of everything I know. I have spent the greater part of my life savoring Jenna’s sweetness. Now there is a bitter taste in my mouth. Instinctively, I want to protect Jenna, even after all this time, but the thought of her screwing around with men old enough to be her dad isn’t just uncomfortable, it’s horrible.

Puppy love eyes.

Rightly or wrongly, I’d put Jenna on a pedestal all these years. The girl I knew wasn’t promiscuous. The girl I knew liked fluffy
slippers
and nights in front of the TV, watching Comedy Central and finding funny in the absurd. The Jenna I knew didn’t keep secrets, especially from me.

And yet, according to Ruby, she had.

Who else has been keeping things from me?

Prison has made me paranoid, and survival has sharpened my senses. Nowadays, I notice things ordinary people overlook.

A glance in the rearview mirror confirms I’m being followed.

During my first week inside, one of my fellow inmates had warned me: “You want to survive this place? You need to grow eyes in the back of your head and keep one of them open when you sleep. Trust me, bro, your enemies will always come at you from behind.”

The advice saved my life more than once.

The vehicle in pursuit is a black pickup, with tinted windows—even the windshield, which I know is prohibited. The owner has mounted a pair of bull horns on the radiator grille, right above a nasty-looking bull bar. I first noticed the truck as I left Ruby’s street, keeping the same distance behind. To test my theory, I took a circuitous route into town. The pickup followed. Now I’m
holding
on a red, waiting to take the left, and the pickup is creeping up from behind, about twenty yards back, engine thrumming. It’s the kind of strange behavior that doesn’t go unnoticed. The driver is hidden behind the tinted windshield. I can hear the dull stampede of percussion instruments trampling brain cells. It sounds like rock music, maybe something by Guns ‘n’ Roses.

Without warning, I throw the Bronco in reverse and back up at speed. It takes a few seconds for the pickup to perform the same swift maneuver. Then we’re both reversing at a pace. Luckily, there’s no other traffic in our lane, or even on the road as a whole. I keep the Bronco in reverse until I’m alongside the opening to an alley, then hit the brakes and swing hard left, throw it in drive and floor it through icy puddles.

A glance in the rearview mirror shows my tail is no longer
following
.

I continue onto Main Street, looking for signs of the black pickup, but it seems to have given up the chase. For now.

The town is busier than it was first thing this morning; more people wrapped up against the chill and watching their step on the slippery sidewalks. More traffic taking it easy. Gray snow clinging to the curbsides.

I park the Bronco at an angle outside Occam’s Razor—a barbershop directly across the street from Merrill’s—and climb out.

Varney’s Bait & Tackle is Harper’s prestige hunting store. It’s every visitor’s starting point before venturing into the wild unknown. Mine, too, it seems.

As I make my way inside, I start the audio-recorder on my phone.

The air is thick with competing smells, but it’s predominantly oil and fish that assault the senses. Greased guns and bait worms. The lighting is deliberately dim, to make it feel like a shadowy grotto. I haven’t stepped foot in here in twenty years. Unbelievably, the place is unchanged: bait tubs breaking up the floor space; racks of hunting paraphernalia; fishing poles crisscrossing the
ceiling
. Everything a hunter needs to bait a trap or kill a prey. Soft
country
music undulates from a darkened corner. It sounds like Johnny Cash is walking the line again.

An internally lit glass counter-cabinet stretches across the back of the store. Inside is an assortment of handguns, blades, binoculars, and scopes. A treasure trove of killing devices. The whole of the wall behind the counter is lined with rifles, shotguns, and boxed cartridges. Enough ammunition to wage a small war.

The proprietor hears the bell jangle against the glass as I enter and comes out of the back office to investigate.

“You kill me,” he laughs to somebody out of sight. “Hold that thought; I’ll be right back.” He closes the internal door and turns my way.

He’s a short guy with a big gut and a handlebar moustache. The last time I saw Ben Varney he sported a thick mop of curly black hair and the kind of beach-boy physique sculpted from obsessive gym work. He was the only guy in town to have a suntan all year round, and that’s saying something in these parts. This older version has drifted out to sea. Muscles replaced by fat, with most of it gathered in a limp belly overhanging his waistband. He still sports a mop of black hair, but it’s clearly a wig and a bad one at that.

He takes one look at me and reaches behind the
counter
. A
second
later his hands reappear holding a double-barreled
shotgun
, which he promptly points at me.

“Hold it right there, Olson,” he says in a no-nonsense tone. “That’s far enough. Any closer and you’re ground meat.”

It sounds like he’s watched one too many gangster movies. I’m not deterred by his fake bravado. There’s a security camera behind the counter, watching us, and I’m unarmed. He can’t use the excuse I was robbing his store to fill me with buckshot. I take a cautious
step forward, arms spread, shoulders relaxed, and all of it non-
confrontational
.

All the same, he raises the gun. “Don’t force my hand, Olson. I was warned you were back in town. You’ve got some sick balls coming back to Harper after what you did. You should have stayed in the Cities. Kept the hell away. No one wants you here. People haven’t forgotten what you did, or forgiven.”

My hands are still hoisted. “Ben, I’m not looking for any
trouble
. I just want to talk, that’s all. You know me. I used to be in here all the time, messing up the merchandise. You even let me shoot empty cans out back the summer I turned fifteen.”

His eyes are mere slits. He’s trying to look mean, dangerous, but I can tell by his hunched posture and by the sweat running from under his hairpiece that he’s unsettled by my appearance. The gun looks too heavy for him, bigger than he is. I doubt he keeps it prepped for shooting when it’s under the counter. Harper may be a frontier town but it isn’t a city ghetto.

He waves the weapon dismissively. “So do yourself a favor and turn the hell around, get out of my store. I’ve been warned not to engage in any dialogue with you. We have nothing to talk about.”

I stand my ground. I don’t believe for one second Ben will
purposely
shoot me. He’s too proud of his store and too precious about the stock to risk getting blood everywhere. Although the fish might like it, brains in the bait isn’t good for business. “Ben, hear me out. I promise, this won’t take a minute. I have just one question I need you to answer.”

He nods over the barrel of the gun. “Make it a quick.”

“You were in Six Pack, back in the day.”

Dread rises his face. “So what if I was? That was a long time ago. Nobody speaks about it anymore. What’s your question?”

“I’m doing a story for the paper.”

“About the club?”

“Not exactly. There’s a crossover. I take it you heard the news this morning? They found Jenna’s remains, up at Hangman Falls.”

His gaze is locked along the length of the barrel. “You sick son of a bitch. What’s this—your way of gloating? I ought to do the world a favor and put you down right here.”

It’s an empty threat and I don’t make a bolt for the door. “Ben, listen to me. I’m not here to start a fight. I’m here because I need your help. New information has come to light and I’ve uncovered a link between Six Pack and Jenna. I think it might have something to do with her disappearance. I only know the names of half its members: Chief Krauss, Lyle Cody, and you. I need you to tell me who the other three are.”

Suddenly, the shotgun comes level with my face. “Go to hell, Olson. I’m not saying anything. You’re way out of line coming in here like this and throwing around wild accusations after what you did. Everyone in town knows you’re a murderer.”

“All I need are the names, Ben, for the story. I’m working for Grossinger now.”

“Yeah? And I don’t give a shiny shit if you’re working for the president of the United States. You’re not welcome here. Now get out of my store.”