The Watcher Page 2

  I didn’t remember the pain. Or the hospital.

  My mother got out with a permanently damaged back. A beam had fallen on her, burned the skin and broken two of her vertebrae. We lived with my grandparents after the fire, when Park was in prison and while my mother got better. And when my grandfather died and my grandmother moved to Vermont to live with my uncle Jimmy, we lived there alone.

  My mother never stopped taking the pills. Or she would, for a time, and then she’d flip out, sweaty and panicked, and go back on them. She was only twenty when the fire happened. She never worked after that. She’d barely worked before. She’d left high school when she had me. Then we holed up in the woods and she got disability, she got food stamps and public assistance, and she got painkillers. That was our life. Until Birdie was born.

  * * *

  Park wouldn’t look me in the eye. We sat a couple of feet apart at a table with thick plastic between us. I held the phone to my ear, but he didn’t say anything for a long time. Time was limited. I studied his face, his shoulders, the way he sat, the way his spine curved forward. I kept my eyes on his, waiting to catch them. We didn’t look alike. I looked like my mother. We didn’t seem alike at all, but I felt it, that fear in my gut that I was just fucking like him, which forced me into a situation I didn’t want to be in. The only way out would be death.

  “What do you want,” he said.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I don’t want anything from you.” Except, I thought, maybe for you not to have tried to kill us. For you to have been around. Maybe not, though. If it hadn’t been the fire, then what?

  “Well,” he said. “Good talk.” He was about to hang up the phone. I was alarmed by the hollowness in his face, how old he looked for forty-two. He was missing a bottom tooth. His eyes were deep set and dark green. His hair, buzzed down to a silvery shadow. On his thick forearm, he had a pentagram with a deer’s head that I knew my mother had drawn in high school and that my uncle Jimmy had tattooed on him. They were all cousins.

  Park put the phone back to his ear for a moment.

  “Tell your mother I know everything,” he said.

  “What?” I said, startled at the rasp of his voice again, at his directness.

  That’s when he looked me in the eye. “You heard me,” he said. “Tell her I know every goddamn thing she does,” he said, and hung up. When he stood, the guard was right behind him, took him by the elbow, and walked him away from the visitation room.

  I hung up my phone without making a sound.

  That was two years ago.

  * * *

  Our town had misfits. There was Junior Savage, who ran the diner. His whole family was from Spring Falls or just north of it. He didn’t quite medically qualify as a midget, but he was only four foot nine. He was missing a finger on his left hand. He let me work at the diner and paid me cash every week so I didn’t have to report it against my mother’s welfare.

  There was Sally, the lady who ran the flower shop. She was willowy and about seventy, and her flowers were exquisite and delicate, but she would sometimes leave the counter in the middle of a sale because she heard the baby crying. She’d hold up a knobby finger. “Let me just check on the baby,” she’d say, and then disappear, usually for the rest of the afternoon. There had never been a baby as far as anyone knew, but Sally would appear in the windows of the apartment above the shop, pacing, like she was walking an infant to sleep.

  There were the Metzgers. They were trashier than we were. A whole family of boys, a dead mom, a dad who started drinking cheap beer at breakfast. I’d gone to school with two of them. I was often mistaken for the youngest, Kyle. We had a similar slight build, blond hair—two flannel-wearing, cigarette-smoking, truck-driving losers in the same town. Except that Kyle was hopelessly straight and dumb as a box of fucking rocks. My mother bought oxys and benzos from him. Nobody in town knew how they even made it, but I knew for a fact that my mother gave Kyle a hundred a week for pills.

  And there was my mother, Pearl Jenkins, who rarely went into town but would drive in to pick up her prescription or to get things from the farmers’ market in the summer. She dressed like a crazy hippie. Most of the time her hair was dirty and she smelled. In the summer, she was always barefoot. People knew her as paranoid and disabled, even though she got around okay. We lived in the woods, surrounded by security cameras. People would say her husband tried to kill her and their son.

  * * *

  The cairns on the side of the road were what stopped me. They might have been there all along, but the day I noticed them, it was like they’d grown overnight. A balanced pile of rocks that seemed impossible, a bigger stone on top of all the rest, touching at only a narrow point. It was two feet high, visible from my bike as I whizzed past. I skidded to a stop a few yards ahead and backtracked.

  There were two. One close to the road, and another, similarly precarious, a few feet in. They marked the edge of a narrow dirt trail that followed a line of pine trees along Mill Road, where I rode my bike every day on the way home from the diner.

  I looked off down the path. It led into the woods in such a way that I thought it might cut right through to my house. I’d been biking my way down Mill Road to Hidden Drive all this time, riding for miles around the edge of the woods.

  It wasn’t dark yet, so I got off the bike and walked it beside me, following it alongside the trees and then deep into them, the woods cool and completely shaded, heady with pine needles, like the floor was spun with gold. Not far in, a ravine sloped off to the right, and people had dumped tires and old appliances down it. A whole washing machine lay on its side between tree roots and rock.

  And behind it all, slid down the dirt, was an old Pontiac, crashed against a tree trunk, like someone had driven it over the lawns and between the trees sixty years ago and left it there, doors flung open, and run.

  I stood with my mouth open. “Holy shit,” I muttered.

  I had never been back here. I’d covered the trails all around our house, but they’d never connected to anything that led here. I gauged the terrain between where I stood on the narrow path and where the car lay. If I put the bike down, I could probably make it. I glanced at the sky, still light enough, and went for it.

  The inside was a masterpiece, covered in leaves and dotted with water spots. The steering wheel was huge and part chrome, the seats black leather with white piping. I pulled on the door that I imagined had been rusted open for years, and it creaked, but it shut, heavy, full steel, like closing the door on a vault.

  My heart raced; my skin pricked in my armpits.

  I knew there was strange shit in the woods. People always said that somewhere there was an old refrigerator with the body of a little kid in it. I’d never seen it. But then, I’d never seen the car either. People also said that if you went far enough north off trail, you’d find a cabin, and that an old fur trapper still lived there, eating the animals he skinned, living on gamy meat and berries and melted snow.

  There was no cell service once you turned the corner on the way out of town. Much of the woods hadn’t been mapped. It was just dense green, filled with chasms and secret waterfalls that froze half the year.

  After I got out of the car, I kept looking back at it—from the other side of the ravine, from the trail as I wound in with my bike. When the path curved to the left, the car was out of sight, and so I stepped back, making sure I hadn’t imagined the whole thing.

  It flashed into view all at once, and my heart skipped a little. I noticed from this vantage point that another cairn stood on the edge of the cliff, five rocks high. I could see the lights of town from up here: the lit-up football field, the parking lot at the IGA, the new houses being built way up on the opposite hill.

  It seemed like a magic spot, a secret. Tomorrow after work I’d bring a book, and some cigarettes, and maybe something to drink, and I’d hide out while the last light came through the windshield, safe, in a steel vault.

  By the time I got home, it was dusk, t
he woods purple and close. Our house was lit with one lamp in the living room, but I knew I’d find the TV on as well. My mother never turned the surveillance cameras off.

  They were asleep already. My mother, sweaty from a pill, was out cold on her back with the baby crooked in her arm.

  Except when I looked at the baby, and the length of her four-year-old body alongside my mother, I thought, she’s not a baby anymore, and realized, looking at the muscle tone of her arms and legs, naked on the sheet, that this baby, this sweet little pudge of a girl with fire-red hair and the temperament to match, might someday rise up against us.

  * * *

  The following day was payday, and I gave Junior Savage money back from the cash he paid me to go across the street and buy me a small bottle of whiskey.

  I could buy my own cigarettes, but at nineteen, I had to finagle liquor.

  He did it without hassle. He brought back a flat plastic bottle of Canadian Club, and I left the restaurant at three thirty and headed straight to the car.

  I had an old paperback with me. My mother would grab them from the library trash and bring them home. Sometimes they were too moldy, but lots of them were fine. Old dime-store pulp titles that had once sold for sixty cents. I had a copy of Giovanni’s Room with yellowed pages and tiny print. The spine turned to dust where it cracked open. It was hard to see in the dim light inside the woods, inside the car, but I loved just the smell of it, the feel of the brittle paper in my hands. I drank, and smoked, and read while I could, stuck in the dream of the story until a stranger appeared alongside the car, looking in at me.

  I was too scared to scream.

  His face appeared in the passenger’s side window, watching me smoking and drinking with the book propped open in one hand. My mouth went dry and my heart took up all the sound in my own head, pounding. It sounded like the ocean.

  I thought, I’m going to die.

  He waved. One hand raised, moving slowly.

  I couldn’t believe I’d been so stupid.

  * * *

  I was a kid who was used to getting in trouble. Getting yelled at for cutting through people’s yards, getting suspended from school, having the cops called on him. There wasn’t anything in me that believed this wasn’t something that would get me arrested, beat up, or killed.

  The stranger was wearing a soft button-down white shirt and gray pants, and his outfit was trim to his body like it had been tailored for him. His hair was blue black, cut like an old-fashioned movie star’s, and swept up off his forehead.

  “I’m sorry” was the first thing I said when he opened the door and stood there looking in at me.

  “For what?” he asked. He slid in but left the door open, one foot still outside in the leaves. His shoes, even, were shiny black leather.

  I couldn’t look at him. “Am I on your property?” I asked.

  “You are,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said again, and went to open the driver’s side door and get out. Run. He put his hand on my arm, his finger on the part of the burn that wrinkled the underside of my bicep.

  “Don’t,” he said.

  He held me like that, stock-still, for longer than I would have thought possible. He kept waiting for me to look at him. When I did, his face was unusually kind, with a soft mouth and bright blue eyes.

  He let go of my arm and fished a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket. Lucky Strikes. He lit one with an old flip-top Zippo.

  “Is it your car?” I asked.

  “No,” he said.

  “I didn’t—” I stammered. “I thought I could cut through the woods to my house.”

  “You can,” he said.

  “I’ve never done it,” I said.

  “You did it the other day,” he said. He smiled.

  “You saw me,” I said.

  “I was watching,” he said.

  I thought for sure I had never seen him in my life. I’d gotten used to everyone in town—everyone who came in and out of the diner, who worked in town, who went to the school. I would have remembered. I asked him if he was new.

  “I’m just here on business,” he said. He blew out a straight line of blue smoke.

  “I’ve never seen you,” I said.

  “You’ve just never noticed,” he said.

  It left me with just one response. I took at drink from the bottle and offered it to him. “But you’ve noticed me,” I said.

  He smiled again, his eyes narrowed, and he took the bottle from my hand, brushed my fingers. “I know who you are,” he said.

  I asked him his name, and he told me people called him Baby Jane, a name I’d never heard, didn’t understand, and didn’t question. I said it back to him. It felt like uttering a magic word. Like learning to say Rumpelstiltskin.

  I said my name was Shannon.

  “I know,” he said.

  THREE: KATERI

  MONDAY, OCTOBER 16

  “My name is Kateri,” she says, making herself small, lowering her hips to the floor by the little girl. “What’s your name?” The girl has on jeans and little hiking boots, a sweater that’s caked with mud and what looks like blood.

  She raises her head and peeks out through her fingers. Her hands and face, too, are speckled with spatter. Her fingertips, deeply stained.

  “It’s okay,” Kateri says. “You’re safe with me.” She pulls her own sweater down, concealing her weapon and her cuffs. “May I sit here with you?”

  The girl nods. When she takes her hands down, her little face is gaunt, hollow under the eyes, which makes them look huge. She has a round, turned-up nose and chapped lips. Over the bridge of her nose and across the tops of her cheekbones are a smattering of light freckles.

  “I’m supposed to wait,” she tells Kateri.

  “For what?”

  The blood on the girl’s hands is so dark, it’s like ink, seeped into the creases of her skin, her fingerprint whorls, her cuticles. Her eyes are wet with tears, and she pokes her tongue at the worst crack in her lip so that it glistens with fresh blood.

  “Sweetheart,” Kateri says. She hears Joel Hurt’s voice from the yard, directing techs to look farther along the trail. “What’s your name, honey?” she asks.

  “Birdie,” the girl says, and Kateri says it back to her.

  “Birdie, did someone put you in the closet?”

  Her face is blank until Kateri asks her again. “Birdie, who were you waiting for?”

  “Him,” she says.

  Kateri waits.

  “The angel,” Birdie says. “The angel was coming to get me.”

  * * *

  She doesn’t appear to be a flight risk, so Kateri lets her sit where she is, on the beanbag in the closet, with the door open, and goes to get her a cup of water and to step outside to find Hurt.

  “I need medical,” Kateri says when she sees him on the edge of the yard. Hurt takes his phone out to begin, but Kateri stops him. “I’ll call,” she says.

  * * *

  She had a case with two young sisters. One had been killed. One had survived. Both had been raped. They were little girls, ten and twelve. It was the ten-year-old who survived. When they sent the ambulatory unit, with lights flashing and sirens screaming, the girl flew into a panic. She thrashed and reopened a wound on her belly. Her vagina was bruised and still bleeding. Kateri was covered in blood trying to keep her still. She ended up restraining the girl the best way she knew how, from behind, with her arms crossed over the girl’s and the girl’s head bashing backward into Kateri’s face, giving her a fat, bloodied lip. The medics were all men. The girl was traumatized all over again. All those blank faces. So many big hands. The roar from inside the moving medical unit, barreling down a highway to a hospital she’d never been to. Her sister, dead in a separate van.

  Kateri was twenty-five.

  She remembers the estranged father of the two girls, living like her own estranged father in a dark, dirty apartment thick with smoke. He had a ponytail. Was never without a lit ci
garette. Sometimes he had two, one in the ashtray, one in his mouth. His eyes went from top to bottom and lingered at Kateri’s chest.

  “Little-girl cop,” he said. “Give me a fucking break.”

  * * *

  Dispatch sends a small van, marked, but without its lights going, and two medics, a wiry woman in her fifties and a younger man, baby-faced and soft around the edges. Kateri meets them between the trees. The deputies have put police tape around the house, fluttering.

  “Detective Fisher,” she introduces herself. “She may be in shock,” she tells the woman medic. “She’s almost certainly a witness to something brutal, quite possibly a murder,” Kateri says, “and she may be a victim as well. I can’t tell what condition she’s in, physical or mental. She might be badly hurt.”

  She looks at the woman’s badge.

  “Maggie,” the woman says. “This is Rick.”

  “She goes by Birdie,” Kateri says.

  “How old?” Maggie asks.

  “No more than five or six,” Kateri says. “She’s small. She still has baby teeth. Please,” Kateri says, though she knows she doesn’t have to, “be very, very gentle.”

  Kateri watches while Rick stays in the doorway and Maggie practically crawls through the gore of the kitchen toward the girl hiding in the open closet. She hears Maggie speaking slowly, quietly, like she’s luring an injured animal.

  Birdie comes out with her eyes blank. Kateri is afraid of a potential fight, that she will protest being taken anywhere, will wail for her mother or thrash when touched, will need to be restrained or even sedated in the van. But she does just what Maggie asks her to do. She comes out and gets on a small stretcher that Rick brings forward, and she lies back, her little brown hand gripping Maggie’s wrist. Between Birdie’s fingers, Kateri notices a small blue tattoo on Maggie’s wrist, a crescent moon. Rick covers Birdie with heavy cotton blankets, tucking the sides in.