The Watcher Read online

  THE WATCHER

  A Novel

  JENNIFER PASHLEY

  For my mother, who told me I wouldn’t understand her until after she was dead.

  Many are the deceivers.

  —Anne Sexton

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  There are many people to thank in the making of this book, beginning with my stellar agent, Wendy Sherman, and my editor and woman-who-truly-gets-me, Jenny Chen. I’m grateful to them both for their patience and their keen vision in bringing The Watcher to light. I’m also indebted to the many friends who offered me time and space to write: Georgia Popoff, Shanna Mahin, Kristen Sullivan, Tatyana Knight, and Jane Springer. Their generosity and their company during a solitary process meant the world to me. I’m grateful for the many readers and other writers who encouraged me along the long way to publication, but especially Wendy Walker, Danielle Girard, A. F. Brady, Vanessa Lillie, and Lena Bertone, whose daily text messages kept me afloat and continue to highlight my day.

  This book was made fully possible by a six-week residency at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in the fall of 2016. It was there that these characters took shape, and I am forever grateful for the opportunity to be housed, fed, and well companioned amid the mountains and the Osage oranges.

  Everything I am and able to do is because of the love and support of my family: my sons, Kieran and Liam, who encourage me daily by becoming the creative and amazing people they are, but especially my husband, Geoffrey, whose grace, patience, and love are my life’s blood.

  ONE: KATERI

  MONDAY, OCTOBER 16

  He warned her in the dead of summer, when the heat blew over the trees like a dry lick of fire, that nothing happens here. Until it does.

  It’s the same stuff over and over up here, Hurt told her. Drugs. Robbery. Domestic. Child abuse. Animal cruelty.

  She’d cut her teeth as a criminal investigator in Syracuse. But after her own run-in with the law, she’d come to Spring Falls as a plea deal.

  She hears Hurt call her name before he appears in her doorway. “Fisher,” he says, and then leans in, hair and pants misted from riding his bike in to work. “I need you on suspicious activity.”

  “Where are the deputies?” she asks, and pushes her chair back. In truth, she’s happy to have something to check out, a reason to get out of the office, even if it’s just a task.

  “Everyone’s out on the Lenox Ave fire,” Hurt says. Six months side by side and he is still awkward around her. He comes no more than a foot into her office and seems to look anywhere but at her. She folds her arms over her chest.

  “All the deputies are at a fire,” she repeats, disbelieving.

  “It’s a meth fire,” Hurt answers. “Blew up a motel room.”

  She nods. She heard the call earlier. Twelve-room motel on Route 8, heading into the mountains. Everything a loss. Kateri stands and attaches her duty belt, and Hurt watches the wall behind her.

  “Where?” she asks.

  “At the edge of Silver Lake Park.” He hands her a report. The address is only a space—Hidden Drive, Space 17. Hidden Drive, a winding road that leads into acres and acres of forest.

  Before Spring Falls, Kateri herself was found on the edge of a park. Covered in blood, throat cut and embedded with glass, unconscious. It was a cop who found her. It was a cop who sent her here. Hamilton County had expected a promotion from within, and instead they were sent an outsider, a woman, from a city. One who’d arrived after a forced leave of absence, and with a mysterious scar.

  Kateri looks at the report. “Did they find something?”

  Hurt shrugs, then sighs. “People get panicky about a dead smell in the woods,” he says, but adds, “It’s probably nothing. It’s probably a deer.”

  * * *

  She drives out in her own car, a Subaru she bought when she left for the North Country. Winters were already bad in Syracuse. What awaited Kateri up north seemed like a nightmare of snow and ice, stretching from October to May.

  Her other car, a small, smart Jetta, was unsalvageable. She was lucky: no one else had been involved. Just Kateri and a brick wall at the edge of Thornden Park, her Jetta crumpled like a wad of paper. She didn’t remember leaving the bar or getting behind the wheel. The whole night, a blackout. She woke up in the hospital with fifty-two stitches under her chin, a broken wrist, and two cracked ribs. They had her on the addiction rehabilitation floor.

  She was given a six-month unpaid leave of absence. After her grandmother died, she sold her childhood home, filed the final divorce papers, and moved to Spring Falls with nothing but a small suitcase. Things were falling away from her. She needed a change. She needed a town where no one knew her.

  “How will I know where to look?” she asked Hurt before leaving. He gave her a paper map of Silver Lake Park, dotted hiking trails, camping areas, parking lots. He circled a blank spot in the trees— Space 17.

  “There’s one residence,” he said.

  “Inside the park?”

  “On the edge,” Hurt said. “There’s a house. You’ll see it. The Jenkins own half of it.”

  “Half of the house?” Kateri asked.

  “Half the land,” Hurt corrected. “The park isn’t as big as it looks. A lot of the land is private, and most of that belongs to the Jenkins.”

  She imagined a mansion, dilapidated and old, guarding the entrance of the forest.

  “I don’t even know if it’s still occupied,” Hurt said before she left. “They’re dirt fucking poor and crazy,” he added.

  She was just beginning to glean the importance of some families in Spring Falls. The Nelsons, who owned the credit union. The Parrys, who were on the school board. The Sullivans, who made up two-thirds of the law firm.

  “Who are the Jenkins?” Kateri asked.

  Hurt looked at the wall behind her, a habit she disliked. “Almost as bad as the Metzgers,” he said. They’d arrested the senior Metzger last week on weapons charges and child endangerment. He was sitting at county, waiting for arraignment.

  * * *

  She parks at an entrance called Blue Bell, a field of grass and flowers near a picnic pavilion, a public bathroom, and an opening into the woods marked WHITE TRAIL. She can just make out the house through the trees. It’s gray and low, with a sloping porch. A dense vine grows over the sides and roof, stitching in around the front door, like the woods are trying to take it back.

  She would have guessed it was vacant. It doesn’t look livable. But a box fan runs in one window, a small, quiet sign of life.

  Her first patrol cases were rural, calls where she went along with a senior partner, checked the welfare of children and animals. She’s seen suicides by hanging and by gunshot and her fair share of DWIs. When she moved to criminal investigation, she worked a rape and murder by the lake, a child rape case, and drugs. Drugs are everywhere.

  A jogger enters the trail with a spray of pebbles, his feet hitting the ground with a hollow thud. He startles Kateri, and Kateri surprises him, standing there in her work clothes and belt. She sets her mouth and waves slightly at him while he picks up the pace, his brow furrowed and his cheeks puffed with exertion. He doesn’t stop, and Kateri watches the backs of his calves as he climbs the trail, his ankles paper-thin above his sneakers.

  She thinks for a minute about Joel Hurt, the shape of him next to her in the squad car. She knows he runs out here as well, his body lean and working. He’s never completely still. He’s like a compressed spring.

  Who didn’t come with her.

  She draws her weapon and keeps it low, approaching the house with her head cocked and listening. The woods are loud with birdsong, chattering squirrels, the creak of branches, the crunch of her own feet, the sharp caw of crows.

  She can smell
it from the porch. The iron tang of blood and a warm, rotten smell underneath it. The house is dark inside, closed up, close, ripe. Slow, fat flies buzz in the windows.

  Kateri pulls her sweater up over her nose and takes shoe covers and latex gloves from her pack. The air inside is too thick to breathe.

  In the front room of the house, there’s the largest flat-screen TV Kateri has possibly ever seen. It must be six feet wide. The screen, turned on, shows nothing but the quad of security cameras, pointed into the woods, out at the road. One shows the chairs around a fire pit in the yard, another a sliver of light on the trail where Kateri appeared moments ago, the jogger rushing past her.

  A large pool of blood collects in the kitchen, the edge smeared from the pull of the body. It drags over the linoleum and onto the wood but disappears. Someone has wiped the path to the doorway. Blood spatters the cupboards, the counter, up onto the ceiling in a particular pattern. Nothing but the floor has been wiped.

  On the cluttered counter are bottles of oil, homemade infusions, spices poured into jars and marked with careful handwriting. A row of herbs grow in small pots on the windowsill—basil, mint, oregano. A magnet on the wall holds a collection of old but good-quality knives, a pair of kitchen scissors, a cleaver. The blood is heavy in concentrated areas, caused by blunt force, not a spray from gunshot. From the amount on the walls, she imagines a head wound. From the floor, maybe a stabbing. The cleanup is sloppy and compromised. Whoever was attacked likely fought back.

  Kateri glances down the hall to two open bedrooms, a bathroom, and a locked utility closet. She pulls her sweater up over her nose, breathing through the wool, and steps away from the kitchen, eager for fresh air and anxious to call Hurt.

  “What’d you find?” he asks.

  “A lot of blood,” she says, “but there’s no body inside the house. Looks like a struggle.”

  “How fresh?” Hurt asks.

  “Sticky,” she says. “With spatter, but not from a gunshot. Looks like blunt force, possible stabbing.”

  * * *

  Kateri’s grandmother died quickly, within four months of her diagnosis. She declined treatment, accepted pain management, and stayed home with Kateri in a hospital bed in the living room, where they watched TV together, her grandmother drinking tea, Kateri whiskey.

  When it happened, Kateri leaned her head onto her grandmother’s arm, and she said, “Honey, you have to let me go.”

  She left the house for two days while a team from hospice removed all the medical items. She had her grandmother cremated at her request. When her friends called for a memorial service, she couldn’t answer them. She turned her phone off, let the battery die, didn’t return messages. She stayed in, closed the blinds, left the TV going and the bottle open.

  When the accident happened, right before Christmas, Kateri herself spent three days in a hospital bed, her arm in a cast and her jaw stitched up. After, she went back to the same rooms, the same TV, and tried to live as she had before, minus the whiskey, minus the woman who’d raised her, minus even the husband she’d held on to for a few short years in her youth.

  The yellow walls, the plaid furniture, her grandmother’s things, an owl figurine, a sprawling spider plant, told her it was time to go. Time to sell, to let new, different life into the house. She lit a candle, barely believing, but asked her grandmother to send her a sign.

  The next day, the sheriff offered her a transfer from Onondaga County out to tiny, rural Hamilton County. They’d had a criminal investigator retire. At best, it was a lateral move.

  “I’m not terminating you,” the sheriff said.

  It still felt like an ending.

  * * *

  Kateri asks for backup and a full forensics team, who come in hazmat suits with bright lights and packets of baggies to gather evidence. She looks into each of the rooms, one packed with clutter, clothing, books, candles. There’s a half-blackened sage stick beside the bed and a long cord with brass bells hanging in the window.

  In the other bedroom, there’s a twin mattress on the floor, boys’ sneakers and a flannel shirt, a stack of cracked-spined paperback books next to the pillow.

  “House belongs to Pearl Jenkins,” Hurt says in the hallway, where they stand side by side in regular clothes while a bevy of suited forensic technicians work around them. “But it was recently transferred to her son, Shannon,” he adds.

  “Why?” Kateri asks. She knows that any transfer of property, like any large life insurance policy, is never a great sign. At the least it signals money trouble. The worst, coercion.

  “The house was about to be seized for back taxes,” Hurt says. “I’m sure it was a work-around.”

  “How old is the son?” She watches Hurt as he watches the quad screen of surveillance.

  “Let’s pull footage from this,” he says to a tech. “He’s an adult,” he tells Kateri.

  “With a record?” Kateri asks.

  “Not the kid; just the dad,” he says. “Park Jenkins was put away for years.”

  “For?” she asks.

  “Arson,” Hurt says.

  Behind him, two techs pull samples from the blood and snap pictures of the spatter on the walls, the cabinet doors, the ceiling. They have pulled all the knives and bagged them. They begin opening drawers, careful not to disturb but looking for more evidence of a weapon. It would have to be a heavy object to cause that trajectory of spray.

  “Detective Hurt,” one of them says.

  Between the potted herbs, another tech finds a single molar, a tiny bit of dried gum still clinging to the soft curve of exposed root.

  “Bag it,” Kateri says. “There’s our ID.”

  She watches as they pick up the tooth with tiny surgical tweezers and place it in a bag. Behind them, investigators comb through the bedrooms, bagging clothing, hairs, dusting for fingerprints, shining bright lights into dark corners, revealing mouse turds and cobwebs.

  “Ma’am,” a tech calls, her voice sharp and panicked. “Ma’am.”

  Kateri thinks, here it is. They’ve found the body, or what’s left of it.

  The only female tech on the forensic team stands at the utility closet door, a heavy lock cutter in one hand, the other on the doorknob.

  Kateri meets her eye before she pulls the door open, bracing herself for the worst: A dismembered corpse, hacked into pieces. A trash bag filled with parts. More blood.

  But what she sees isn’t in pieces, or dead at all.

  A small girl sits in a pink beanbag chair. The closet is empty except for her and the cushion. She has her knees bent up under her chin and her hands clamped over her eyes. Her hair is a mess of fire-red curls, her clothes spattered with more blood.

  On the wall at the back of the closet is a stick-figure man, the kind a kid draws but out of proportion, his arms and legs too long and creepy, his body in black crayon. His eyes in the middle of his big circle head are bright blue, and his mouth is painted on in dried blood.

  Kateri looks over her shoulder at the tech, who has paled and tells her to be quiet, even though she hasn’t made a sound. Then the tech says it again, louder, to everyone else in the house. Kateri sees Hurt look in and hears him mutter an obscenity.

  “Get everyone out for a few minutes,” Kateri says to him, and he starts rounding people up, waving his arms, speaking in a harsh whisper. Flashes go off, and Kateri holds up her hand to block the light. The closet has one dim bulb on a pull chain and no window, no outside light.

  She hears the team start to shuffle out, and the house settles to an eerie calm, just the tick of the clock, the quick patter of a leaky faucet. Kateri crouches in the closet, close to the child but not touching. She watches as the girl parts her little fingers, peeking out. She has light eyes. Greenish, like seawater.

  TWO: SHANNON

  AUGUST

  Every town has one. A loner. An outlier. A stranger who doesn’t belong, someone who blew into town, disconnected from the people who have been there for generations. Sometimes th
e stranger stays and learns to fit in, and after years, no one thinks of them as strange anymore. Sometimes you try to keep them, like catching a young deer, still wobbling on his spindly legs. But at some point, you know they have to go. At some point, you stop holding on so tightly, and the deer follows his instincts. He does what he was born to do.

  * * *

  The last time I saw my father was through safety glass. It took three tries over two days. The first day I walked in there and went through security, I left all my belongings in the car, even the keys, so there wouldn’t be any hitches at all. And the guard said, “No visitors.”

  “I’m sorry, what?” I asked him.

  “Park Jenkins. No visitors,” he repeated.

  “I’m his son,” I said. I was there on my own, without my mother knowing. I’d driven three hours to look him in the eye. Even if I didn’t say anything to him, I wanted to look him in the eye.

  The guard tried to look past me. He was big. Six inches taller than I was and about three of me wide. I saw him blink.

  “Come back tomorrow, kid,” he said.

  * * *

  I knew what my father looked like from pictures. I remembered living in the farmhouse, but I didn’t remember living with him. We moved into the woods when I was three, when the farmhouse burned down. When my father, Park Jenkins, set it on fire and tried to kill all three of us, himself included. What I knew was the story my mother had told me, about the falling beams, about the staircase on fire, about crawling out to the front porch, which was crumbling above us as we went. I remembered her story but not the event. I carried the trauma on my body in the form of scars. As if trying to kill me wasn’t enough. I had damage anyone could see, anyone could feel with their hands. A scar on one shoulder that spread over the blade and up onto my clavicle, the skin wrinkled like a wadded-up piece of paper. It was mostly covered in a T-shirt.