Palindrome (11 page)

“There's a green mailbox with the number on it,” she says. But as we retreat to our car she suddenly calls out, as an afterthought, “But you shouldn't go there.”

Courtney and I both swivel in place. She's staring at us, shaking her head.

“Why not?” Courtney says.

Her wrinkled face contorts like she's sucking on something sour. “Just . . .” she says, then shakes her head, turns away.

We take a few steps closer to her. A click as her tank fills up. She starts climbing into her truck, but Courtney digs into his coat and pulls out three hundred-­dollar bills, jabs them at her.

“Tell us everything you know.”

She turns and stares at the bills, then exhales and climbs out of the truck, leaving the door open like she might have to make a quick escape.

“I'm not stupid or anything,” she says, “but there's something bad happening at that cabin. Everyone around here knows it. Nobody visits anymore. Kids used to go there and party. Till one night they heard
voices
coming from that place. Not ­people's voices either. Weird screaming, like a . . . spirit or something. And weird clanking and banging, flashing lights. A few nights later a ­couple men went back there with guns. From the road they heard the same shit. And then their pit bull started barking. I knew one of the guys, Jonathan Gordon was his name. It wasn't his dog, but he saw the dog take off toward the cabin, barking like nuts. The guys didn't follow. They were
scared
. I heard John talking about that night later, he said the same thing: weird voices, banging, clanging, flashing. He says he thinks it was that girl's spirit trying to escape. The banging is her pounding on the walls.”

The woman goes quiet. Stares at the three hundred in her palm, as if wondering if it was worth it. I see Savannah again, staring at me, desperate. My knees get a little weak. What was she trying to tell me?

“What happened to the dog?” Courtney asks.

She shakes her head and looks away. “Someone driving past the cabin saw him the next morning. He was cut open in the middle of the road, guts everywhere. Real, like . . .
deliberate
.”

“What—­”

“I'm done,” she says, steeling her jaw, her eyes starting to well. “You want your money back, fine. I'm done.”

“Keep it,” Courtney says, and we get in our car, drive in silence for a while, taking it slow so we don't miss the cabin.

It's around two in the afternoon when we find what must be the spot: a dirt driveway distinguished only by a rusty green mailbox marked in fading white paint:
33 Rutgers.
It's so muddy from the persistent drizzle that we decide it's best to park on the shoulder and walk from there. I shut off the ignition but don't move. My butt refuses to leave the car seat.

Courtney is glaring at me.

“What's going on?” he asks.

“Nothing.”

Courtney sniffs and stares me down with wet eyes that look as grey as the sky. I can't help squirming under his intense gaze. Then he cracks a tiny smile of triumph.

“You're a terrible liar, Frank. It's one of your better qualities.”

I sigh and close my eyes.

“I had a weird dream last night,” I say and recount it, omitting nothing. He can sniff out a lie anyways.

He's quiet for a moment. Then opens the passenger side door.

“I wouldn't worry about it,” he says, avoiding eye contact as he climbs out. “You were probably just processing some of the stuff you heard from Orange.”

“You're not saying that just to make me feel better, are you?” I ask as we walk around to the trunk.

“Of course I am,” he says and smacks me on the back. He grabs a red acrylic satchel from the trunk that contains his forensic tools. My own bulky backpack contains the few blunt and crude implements I use in the field. He carries things like tiny screwdrivers you use for eyeglasses and makeup brushes. Most of my tools have existed since the agricultural revolution.

When Courtney hands me a pair of latex gloves to wear, I nearly burst out laughing.

“It's been five years, man. I doubt we're going to disturb any evidence.”

But I comply, and we trudge through the thick mud, me wishing I'd worn anything but my tennis shoes, Courtney seemingly prescient in his knee-­high galoshes.

As we get close to the cabin, I try to ignore images my brain keeps summoning of last night's apparition.
Try to think about anything else: Sadie, sports,
yoga.
I could probably use some fucking yoga right about now. At least it's still light out here. If it was night, I'd be losing my shit.

We stop walking for a moment as the cabin comes into view. No question now. This is where it happened.

It's a one-­story affair: dark brown, rotting logs stacked Lincoln style. A crumbling brick chimney protrudes from one end like it's trying to escape from whatever's inside. A fallen branch from one of the surrounding pine trees is still lying on the shingled roof. I squint up at where the branch must have broken off, from a towering Douglas whose base is just ten feet from the north wall of the cabin. Probably lightning.

We abandon the muddy driveway, which continues around to the back of the house, and head for what used to be the front door, now just an empty frame containing a portrait of deep black. Clumps of wild grass, weeds and pine needles crunch beneath our feet like breaking glass. Rotting wood steps lead up to a porch and empty doorframe.

I lick my lips. “Go in?” I ask. “Or maybe, you know, comb the exterior a bit.”

In response, Courtney only rummages in his bag for a penlight, then steps inside. I follow.

We enter a dark, narrow hallway. The air is wet and smells moldy. Walls are wet wood that peel away when I touch them. We don't even bother looking for a light switch. On our right is a coat closet, which Courtney opens, flashlight clenched between his teeth. Totally empty besides a few rusty wire hangers.

Courtney pokes his head in and inspects the corners of the closet. With an outdated digital camera, he takes a few pictures that I can't imagine him ever needing. I shift my weight back and forth anxiously and avoid thinking about where we are. Rotting, moldy, evil smells: the scent of death.

“See anything?” I ask.

“No.” He pulls his head out. “Let's keep going.”

The hallway opens into a living room badly in need of some interior decorating. A little light streams in through two dusty windows on the wall opposite us. To the left is an open door, behind which I can see a toilet gone red with rust. The room smells rank and mildewed. Water drips from the ceiling; in fact there's light coming in from a hole in the roof as well. On the floor of the living room is a soaked, dirt-­encrusted mat. Beside it are two metal foldout chairs. There's a bookcase in the corner that's totally empty, save a mess of spiderwebs. The most outstanding feature of the room is a towering pyramid of empty beer bottles, stacked to nearly my height. I pull one out carefully and inspect the label: Black Lab stout. Never heard of it. But all hundred-­some bottles are the same. Black Lab stout. A smiling black dog bares his tongue a hundred times over.

Once my eyes adjust to the dim light, I notice that the floor is coated in wet cigarette butts.

“Think the cops were drinking and smoking when they confiscated everything here for evidence?” I ask.

“I'd wager that's from local teens. Like that woman said. Everyone knows the story. They probably hung out here on Halloween for a scare. Or came here to make out . . . before they started hearing voices and someone cut up a dog, anyways.”

There are two doors on the wall opposite the bathroom. I have to throw my shoulder into the rotting wood to open the first. There's a yellowing mattress on an otherwise bare floor. Something jumps out of the mattress.

I scream.

Courtney rushes in behind me, just in time to see the squirrel leap through one of the empty window frames.

“Little tense?” Courtney asks.

“Little.”

We probe the rest of the square bedroom, Courtney going down on his hands and knees to pull the mattress across the room to check what's underneath. Nothing but mattress stuffing.

“Think this was Silas's bed?” I ask.

Courtney is combing over the surface now with a black light and tweezers.

“No hairs,” he mutters.

“It's been five years.”

“Still. Stuff doesn't just disappear.”

“He was also bald in all the pictures we saw, remember? Tattoos all over his skull. Besides, we're not investigating the murder, champ. Just trying to figure out where that sick fuck stashed this tape.”

“And in order to do that,” Courtney says, rising to his feet and returning the black light to his bag, “we're going to have to get in his head. Unfortunately, we know almost nothing about the guy. So he turns himself in, okay. What does he do with this tape? Keep it on him? Bury it to retrieve later? Destroy it?”

I stare out the empty window pane. Conifers retreating to eternity, all shrouded in a light drizzle. A sea of tightly packed and drenched pinecones and pine needles.

“If he buried it, we have no chance,” I say.

“Agreed.”

We leave the bedroom, and I slam my shoulder into the second moldy door off the living room. This room is slightly bigger. Another decaying mattress in the corner, a fireplace and a small kitchenette: propane stove on a metal stool, rusty steel sink, two pans hanging from hooks on the wall. There's also a white minifridge, which Courtney opens. Mercifully empty; if someone had left a tuna casserole behind, we'd need hazmat suits to stay in here.

I try the faucet, and there's a hiss of air, then gurgling and finally an ejaculation of freezing water.

Courtney is kneeling at the fireplace, combing through a pile of black ash with what looks like a very fine paintbrush.

“You think there hasn't been a fire in there since Silas?”

“No way to tell really. Ash doesn't age. Looks the same the day it's burned as it does a hundred years later. This is all soaked through from water coming down the chimney.” Courtney stops. He quickly fumbles in his pack for a magnifying glass and a pair of tweezers, then bends down until he's practically kissing the pile of black charcoal.

“What is it, Courtney?” I ask.

He doesn't respond, just picks carefully through his pile. I shiver and zip my windbreaker up as high as it will go.

Courtney finally extracts something with his tweezers and stands up, examining it in the glow of his flashlight. Then he grins.

“Take a look at that, Frank,” he says proudly.

I squint. It is nothing; a strand of charred white material a quarter the length of a fingernail.

“Congrats, you've cracked the case,” I say, rolling my eyes.

“You know what that is?”

“A scale model of your prick?”

“I believe”—­Courtney inspects it again with his magnifying glass—­“that this is bone.”

My stomach does a little somersault.

“Bone?” I stare at the little sprig. “How the hell can you tell?”

He tugs it a bit with his tweezers.

“You make a really hot fire, let it burn for
hours,
it looks like the bone has been consumed, but you're wrong. Because bone is surprisingly hard to burn.”

“Okay.” I grimace. “So it's bone. Whose?”

I pull my jacket tighter around my collar. The rain is picking up outside.

“Not Savannah's, since she was totally intact,” Courtney says, dropping the alleged bone into a small Ziploc bag and stashing it in his kit. “I'll bet it belongs to that dog.”

I rub my cheeks to warm them up. “Those teenagers must have been having some pretty wild parties.”

Courtney traces his thin jawline, doesn't seem to hear me. “What if someone else was here looking for the tape? Scared the locals off by killing that dog?”

I say nothing.

“Pure speculation.” I shiver. “Let's get out of here.”

“Almost done,” he replies, zipping up his bag and walking back into the living room. “Gotta check the basement.”

There's no descending stairway or trapdoor to the basement inside the house, so we check the back to see if there's an exterior staircase.

There's more shit behind the cabin than I expected. It's a junkyard.

Two ancient pickup trucks devoured by rust, both half-­buried in the wet ground and stripped down to their skeletons. Maybe they belonged to Silas? From the looks of it, they were here well before he ever showed up.

There's what looks like a disassembled, rusty oven covered in mud; coils of wire; cracked ceramic plant pots just filled with dirt; a few shredded rubber tires; an old coffee machine; a pile of yellowed, soaked paper; and more empty Black Lab beer bottles.

About twenty feet from the back door, there's a wooden shed about six foot square, composed of vertical two-­by-­fours. A thin pole runs through the roof of the shed, up about twenty-­five feet. We wade through the trash to see it up close. It takes Courtney a moment to figure out what it is:

“Solar panels up there, and there must be a generator inside.”

“Let's find out for sure,” I say and grab my flathead screwdriver from my backpack. I wedge it between two of the wet boards and pry one loose easily; nails glide out of their rotting homes like warm knives from year-­old butter. Courtney shines his penlight into the chasm.

“I was right,” he says, not bragging. Just stating. “Still running too.”

“Think Silas put it in?” I ask.

“Guess so.” Courtney shrugs. “Maybe there's no power lines out here.”

I pry out two more boards with my latex-­gloved hands and poke my head into the shed. The air in here is still and heavy. In the light, I make out something that looks like a giant car battery. And sure enough, a little red light is flickering.