What We Lost in the Dark (7 page)

We agreed to come on Thursday and Saturday nights, when I didn’t work. Rob and I would start by sitting on the bottom, looking into each other’s eyes. Then we’d cruise back and forth on the bottom in the deep end, trying to expend as little energy as possible.

At first, I had to fight off hysteria.

Gradually, though, I learned to think of nothing, as Wesley had advised. Thinking of nothing refreshes you, although it is hideously hard doing it. Maybe it
was
a sort of trance state. The closest thing I can compare it to is hypnosis, which I’ve never experienced. Still, bit by bit, I grew to crave that power over my body that so beguiled Rob. We grew closer, with that sense of tribe we’d loved with Parkour—the supreme, almost smug, thrill of being
us
: close together and in the throes of something fierce. And I began to crave the real thing, beyond the pool.

Our nights assumed a kind of purposeful rhythm, based on the desire to dive in Lake Superior before school started again for me.

Wesley warned us: be patient. We wanted to be not ready, but more than ready, when we actually tried a deep dive. “The future comes soon enough,” he said.

If only it never had.

My twenty days of volunteer service ended.

I had, however, done a good job: the ultimate frozen lemonade made from the ultimate lemons of life.

With Dr. Stephen’s permission by proxy (he was still away in Bolivia), Bonnie hired me as a junior assistant, several nights each week until school resumed at the end of January, and then Friday and Saturday nights during the school year. It was good money, and while most girls wouldn’t want to spend four hours of their weekend nights in a morgue, I wasn’t most girls.

“I told you good would come from this,” my mother said.

“I would have rather had it come on a different train,” I told her.

Still, it wasn’t all bad. Bonnie was smart and kind, as was mortuary Melissa, whom Rob referred to as Morticia. I loved the awe-inspiring poignancy and responsibility that came with answering questions the dead would ask, if they could. Bonnie taught me practical things, such as all the things that
petechia could mean, from mononucleosis to alcoholism to lupus to death by strangulation, and how those things sometimes got mixed up. She taught me that hydrogen cyanide can be very hard to detect after death, unless the investigators find residue. A man who had moved to Iron Harbor with his wife from China had slowly poisoned himself accidentally by ingesting arsenic. Over the course of years he had eaten great quantities of rice grown near arsenic-contaminated wells. His wife was fine. She simply didn’t like rice.

Each morning, after I got off work and before we went to sleep, together or separately (both our parents politely looked the other way), Rob and I trained. We did yoga, for balance, strength, and concentration. We did “apnea walks,” to teach ourselves to cope sanely with the feeling of oxygen deprivation. We’d do a big “breathe-up,” (or filling a lunger), followed by a short breath and hold, all at rest. Still holding our breath, we would then walk as far as we could until we absolutely had to breathe. Since both of us were athletes, we could go almost a hundred yards that way, our muscles getting more and more accustomed to working without oxygen.

We also ran and sang, simultaneously. We’d learned that this was a good way to build your lung capacity.

Down the back roads of Iron Harbor, up onto the ridges, past the unoccupied summer houses, we ran, sometimes on crusts of snow that melted away in the still freakishly warm winter weather. We sang our way through classic Motown, newer Motown, old ABBA, even older CCR, anything with a beat that required holding a note, from Boston to Beyoncé to Bruno Mars. Finally, we worked our way up—or down, if you want to look at it that way—to show tunes. That didn’t last long. Garret Tabor didn’t hang around anymore very much, but he would show up
some nights unexpectedly at the medical examiner’s office. One night, I heard him whistling “The Sound of Music,” and I knew it was meant to telegraph to me that he knew what Rob and I were doing. That very thought was appalling. Did he watch me all the time?

NOT LONG AFTER that night, about four in the morning, we were running on Shore Road. We were past Tabor Oaks, down on one of the little beaches along that same stretch of highway, when Rob quietly put his hands on my arm.

“Stop running and be quiet,” he said. “Just fade back behind that little bit of birch and look over there.”

Far to our left, we could see what appeared to be a diver.

There could not be another human being as melon-ball nuts as Rob and me. What was somebody doing out in the lake alone in the middle of the night? It wasn’t a rescue diver, because there were no lights or vans or any other equipment set up. And who ever dived alone? Crouched quietly, we watched the distant person make what Rob called a shore entry (the other kind of scuba entry, which was tipping backward or taking a big scissor walk out of a boat) and slip away into the dark water. The only sign of the person was a series of lighted flats that were presumably tethered to buoys. We watched for a long time, but our heated-up muscles were starting to knot up painfully, and even in winter, night doesn’t last forever. So we turned and jogged back to Rob’s Jeep and headed toward home and a hot soak before sleep.

THE NEXT NIGHT, at the pool, I was mermaiding along the deep-end bottom when suddenly, it hit me like a piano dropped from the penthouse.

Rob thought I was in trouble when I started pointing to
the surface like a crazy person, dragging on his arms, finally pinching him.

When we broke the surface, I gasped, “I know where he keeps them! That was him! That’s where they are!”

Although he knew what I meant, Rob had a cooler head than my own. “Okay, sure. Allie, I’ll think that over.”

“Think it over? We have to go down there!”

Wesley appeared at the side of the pool. “What? You guys find buried treasure?”

Rob said, “Oh, no, man. It’s nothing. Just … some things we lost in the dark one night.”

That night, as we drove home from the Y, we were both tired and famished. Swimming hunger makes you deranged: I could have killed a deer and roasted it on the hood of the car. I wanted to curl up at 9
P.M.
with my blankie in the middle the night like some Daytimer. Still, my realization at the bottom of the pool had opened a pure adrenaline IV. Had I tried to lie down for a nap, all my conjectures would have kept on gyrating around the ring in my brain like electrons in a synchrotron until I glowed.

Most stereotypes are obnoxious, but a few have earned the gold standard of truth. One is that girls do talk more than guys do. Our brains seem to issue press releases every few minutes whether we like it or not. It’s our way of trying to figure out the trajectory of the universe so that we can alter it. Girls firmly believe this is in our power, whether it requires intellect, pure force, stealth, or berry lip stain. Rob once told me that guys don’t talk as much because guys are here now, in the present—like Zen-ing. They’re watching the
passing parade. He said that men think of the universe and time like an escalator. They’re on it, and it’s either going up or it’s going down, but they can no more control its course than they can see who’s running the machine. Any girl would consider that foolishness.

So, as soon as Rob and I got into the car, he wanted to talk food and I wanted to talk homicide. Crackling with frustration, I waited until we were in Rob’s mother’s kitchen.

Soon, we had assembled double-stuff pimento cheese and pickle sandwiches and potato soup so thick it was like a colloid, and I then became absorbed with my stomach’s primal demands. When those were satiated, and we’d gone up to Rob’s place, Rob got interested in other primal demands and was persistent and skillful enough so that those demands became urgent for me, as well.

AFTERWARD, LYING UNDER the sweep of stars in bed, it would have been so easy to dismiss all that nasty jazz about cold and watery tombs. But Rob didn’t love me just for my body. Although my preoccupation with other people’s, the blue-white and decomposing kind, wasn’t a particular attraction.

“Hey you,” I said. “What Wesley said about the structure, all those sunken boats?”

“What?” he mumbled.

“Rob! That’s where he hides things. People. Dead bodies. That’s Tabor’s stash. He was that diver. You know it.”

“That doesn’t make sense, Allie. If Tabor didn’t want to get caught, he’d scatter the bodies all over the hills. I hate to say this, but a part here and a part there—”

“No, no!” I broke in, sitting up under the covers. “Don’t think in terms of regular person sense. A regular person
would think in a different way. That’s what they do. Serial killers like having a habitat. They visit their kills. They dig them up and sometimes they even …”

Rob actually paled. “If what’s coming is what I think is coming, do not go there. I don’t have your capacity for mayhem. I’m going to major in computer programming.”

I almost smiled. “Okay, but see my point? He was going to visit those corpses. So many of them do that. They’re driven to.”

“Allie, what I love about you is you’re just so damn cuddly, aren’t you? All roses and pink ribbons.”

“Pardon me. I didn’t know those were your expectations.”

“Let’s just let it go for a little while, Allie Bear. I just want a little nap.”

Juliet had called me Allie Bear. Rob might have thought he was pouring on the soothing syrup, but on this girl’s fire, it was lighter fluid.

I was desperate.

I got up and put on Rob’s shirt.

Here is another stereotype that may not bolster the image of young guys as fragile emotional beings able to conquer their desires in most circumstances, and yet it’s a stereotype that glows with authenticity. One hour after running the Death Valley marathon, a guy will stand to attention for a girl wearing his shirt over nothing else.

And Rob did. He sat up and slapped on an expression that said: I’m committed. It didn’t matter if he really was serious, it only mattered that he acted like he was. I would settle for Rob being along for the ride, because Rob along for the ride was as good as most people’s complete commitment. An Oscar-winning fake could trump the real thing:
Otherwise, why would half the people in Iron Harbor trust Garrett Tabor?

“That’s where those girls’ bodies are, Rob. It’s like this was meant to be. Tabor hides them down there. Remember I started babysitting at the condos? Remember? And I saw him standing out on the lawn and he had something, like a sail, folded up on the ground. But what if it wasn’t a sail? What if it was a girl’s body, wrapped in a sheet?”

“What if it was an old sail wrapped in a sheet?”

When I’d called the police that time, they’d found the old door, a kind of hatch entrance to the long-gone boathouse.

“But he disappeared, Rob! He went down that door that Dr. Stephen had nailed up later. What if he went back and pulled it apart? It wouldn’t be so hard. What if he uses that old door in the ground like his own trapdoor to hell? That book I was reading? About murder and geography? People would dump dead bodies in lakes all over Minnesota if it weren’t so hard to keep bodies hidden in lakes. But Superior’s different from other lakes.”

“Wait,” Rob said. “Slow down. What book?

“I told you about that book ages ago. Jesus! Whole civilizations have risen and fallen since I told you about it!” I’m not a patient person. You may have intuited that.

“I don’t remember.”

But I was thinking harder now, thoughts literally humming like notes on a big chord organ. What if Tabor actually brought victims—their bodies—to the actual medical examiner’s office? What kind of a pimp would that be? What if somebody walked in? He could just cover the body with a sheet or put it in the filing cabinet of death, those refrigerated drawers. I said, “Rob! He knows there’s no video cameras in that office. The only cameras are the Polaroids they use during
an autopsy. The only recording devices are the microphones they use to describe autopsy findings, when they weigh and measure, you know, people’s parts.”

“Allie! You’re spinning like the hubcaps on my dad’s old Camaro! Just slow down!”

If only I had a dollar for every time someone has told me to slow down. Or even a penny. I’d be a freaking thousandaire.

“Were you even listening?”

“I was.”

“Well, your buddy Wesley said Gary’s an expert diver. And you know that serial killers …”

“You mentioned that. They want to revisit their … kills. The whole thought is beyond me, but okay.”

“This would be a really unique way for him to visit his kills,” I said. “So we have to go down there. It can’t be too deep. Maybe thirty feet. The perfect dive.”

“The dive is the point of the dive,” Rob said.

“People free dive all the time to spear fish and stuff.”

“We were going to do it for the dive itself.”

“Oh, come on, we’ll do a dive that’s pure first, and … and then can we look?”

“You’ll feel like it’s wasted time, won’t you?” Rob said.

“Not really.”

We both knew that I was lying.

Without Garrett Tabor’s constant presence, life at the medical examiner’s office with Bonnie and Melissa, the technician, was pleasant—if you can say such a thing. Did I develop a callous on my sensibilities with regard to death, its sights and messages?

I did.

My experiences began to harden me—not my core personality, but a slice of my outer being, to a degree that shocked Rob and bugged my mother.

To be honest, I also was actively trying to bug my mother.

Maybe you can explain the psychology of this; I can’t. I wanted her to be mad at me because I was so afraid of this new sport Rob and I had undertaken.

Little things about it kept shearing my nerves.

For one thing, our first free dive should have been uneventful.

Wesley had dropped a rope with an anchor to the bottom of a small, clear, familiar lake, The Little Cauldron. Holding
the rope, he went down first, wearing scuba gear and a headlamp (we had on waterproof, mini miners lights over our hoods, as well). Next, all three of us made the slow descent, but only Wesley was breathing.