Heather’s father says, “This can’t be the first time you’ve seen it. She used to sprinkle detergent in the birdfeeder.”
“Do it,” Heather tells me, “so we can start our new life.”
Her father says, “She was thirteen the first time she tried to kill me.”
“Why don’t you stake out some territory for yourself?” Heather asks me. “Be a man. Get in the game, for Chrissake. You can’t let people walk all over you. Let’s break free. Let’s set out on our own.”
“Let’s,” I say.
“Do it, then.”
“Why can’t we just leave?”
She says, “We have to cut all our ties.”
Her father says, “In an hour she’ll love me again. She’ll blame you for killing me. Every day you’ll be wondering who she’s going to ask to do you. Indecision, kid. It’s what separates man from the animals.”
“Regret,” I say.
“That too.”
I take a deep breath and unlock my door.
“Where will you go?” Heather says. “I thought you were on the run.”
“I’ll have to think of something.”
“You’re nothing,” she sneers. “You always need someone else to do your work. Maybe I’ll get Kelly to do it. I’m sure he has the balls. Maybe I’ll even throw a little pussy his way.”
“Good luck with that,” I say. “Today we’ve been selecting against silk-suit thrill killers.”
As I am opening the door, I hear Heather say, “I don’t need you anymore.”
“I love you,” her father says. “I want to help you.” His voice cracks.
I close the door and leave them there.
Walking back along the bridge, I imagine the beginning of the universe.
Christopher Coake
All Through the House
From Gettysburg Review
Now
Here is an empty meadow, circled by bare autumn woods.
The trees of the wood — oak, maple, locust — grow through a mat of tangled scrub, rusty leaves, piles of brittle deadfall. Overhead is a rich blue sky, a few high, translucent clouds, moving quickly, but the trees are dense enough to shelter everything below, and the meadow too. And here, leading into the trees from the meadow’s edge, is a gravel track, twin ruts now grown over, switching back and forth through the woods and away.
The meadow floor is overrun by tall yellow grass, thorny vines, the occasional sapling — save for at the meadow’s center. Here is a wide rectangular depression. The broken remains of a concrete foundation shore up its sides. The bottom is crumbled concrete and cinder, barely visible beneath the thin netting of weeds. A blackened wooden beam angles down from the rim, its underside soft and fibrous. Two oaks lean over the foundation, charred on the sides that face it.
Sometimes deer browse in the meadow. Raccoons and rabbits are always present; they have made their own curving trails across the meadow floor. A fox, rusty and quick, lives in the nearby trees. His den, twisting among tree roots, is pressed flat and smooth by his belly.
Sometimes automobiles crawl slowly along the gravel track and park at the edge of the meadow. The people inside sometimes get out and walk into the grass. They take photographs or draw pictures or read from books. Sometimes they climb down into the old foundation. A few camp overnight, huddling close to fires.
Whenever these people come, a policeman arrives soon after, fat and gray-haired. Sometimes the people speak with him — and sometimes they shout — but always they depart, loading their cars while the policeman watches. When they depart he follows them down the track in his slow, rumbling cruiser. When he comes at night, the spinning of his red and blue lights causes the trees to jump and dance.
Sometimes the policeman arrives alone:
He stops the cruiser and climbs out. He walks slowly into the meadow. He sits on the broken concrete at the rim of the crater, looking into it, looking at the sky, closing his eyes.
When he makes noise the woods grow quiet. All the animals crouch low, flicking their ears at the man’s barks and howls.
He does not stay long.
After his cruiser has rolled away down the track, the woods and the meadow remain, for a time, silent. But before long what lives there sniffs the air and, in fits and starts, emerges. Noses press to the ground and into the burrows of mice. Things eat and are eaten.
Here memories are held in muscles and bellies, not in minds. The policeman and the house and all the people who have come and gone here are not forgotten.
They are, simply, never remembered.
1987
Sheriff Larry Thompkins tucked his chin against the cold and, his back to his idling cruiser, unlocked the cattle gate that blocked access to the Sullivan woods. The gate swung inward, squealing, and the cruiser’s headlights shone a little ways down the gravel track before it curled off into the trees. Larry straightened, then glanced right and left, down the paved county road behind him. He saw no other cars — not even on the distant interstate. The sky was clouded over — snow was a possibility — and the fields behind him were almost invisible in the dark.
Larry sank back behind the wheel, grateful for the warmth and the spits of static from his radio. He nosed the cruiser through the gate and onto the track, then switched to his parking lights. The trunks of trees ahead faintly glowed, turning orange as he passed. Even though the nearest living soul, old Ned Baker, lived a half mile off, he was an insomniac and often sat in front of his bedroom window watching the Sullivan woods. If Larry used his headlights, Ned would see. Ever since Patricia Pike’s book had come out — three months ago now — Ned had watched the gated entrance to the woods like it was a military duty.
Larry had been chasing off trespassers from the Sullivan place ever since the murders, twelve years ago in December. He hated coming out here, but he couldn’t very well refuse to do his job — no one else would do it. Almost always the trespassers were kids from the high school, out at the murder house getting drunk or high, and though Larry was always firm with them and made trouble for the bad ones, he knew most kids did stupid things and couldn’t blame them that much. Larry had fallen off the roof of a barn, drunk, when he was sixteen. He’d broken his arm in two places, all because he was trying to impress a girl who, in the end, never went out with him.
But activity in the woods had picked up since the Pike woman’s book came out. Larry had been out here three times in the last week alone. There were kids, still, more of them than ever — but also people from out of town, some of whom he suspected were mentally ill. Just last weekend Larry had chased off a couple in their twenties, lying on a blanket with horrible screaming music playing on their boom box. They’d told him — calmly, as though he might understand — that they practiced magic and wanted to conceive a child out there. The house, they said, was a place of energy. When they were gone Larry looked up at its empty windows, its stupid, dead house-face, and couldn’t imagine anything further from the truth.
The cruiser bounced and shimmied as Larry negotiated the turns through the woods. All his extra visits had deepened the ruts in the track — he’d been cutting through mud and ice all autumn. Now and then the tires spun, and he tried not to think about having to call for a tow, the stories he’d have to make up to explain it. But each time, the cruiser roared and lurched free.
He remembered coming out here with Patricia Pike. He hadn’t wanted to, but the mayor told him Pike did a good job with this kind of book, and that — while the mayor was concerned, just like Larry was, about exploiting what had happened — he didn’t want the town to get any more of a bad name on account of being uncooperative. So Larry had gone to the library to read one of Pike’s other books. The Beauties and the Beast was what the book was called, with the close-up of a cat’s eye on the front cover. It was about a serial killer in Idaho in the sixties who murdered five women and fed them to his pet cougar. In one chapter Pike wrote that the police had hidden details of the crime from her. Larry could understand why: The killings were brutal, and he was sure the police had a hard time explaining the details to the families of the victims, let alone to ghouls all across the country looking for a thrill.