How They Were Found Part 5

The checkout line crawls while the clerk runs his mouth, ruining his future testimony by telling his story over and over, transforming his eyewitness account into another harmless story.

The clerk says, I was the only one working that night. Of course I remember her.

In juvie, the therapists had called this narrative therapy, or else constructing a preferred reality.

The clerk says, Long blond hair, tight-a.s.s jeans, all that tan skin-I'm not saying she brought it on herself, but you can be sure she knew people would be looking.

The clerk, he has black gla.s.ses and halitosis and fingernails chewed to keratin pulp. Teeth stained with cigarettes or chewing tobacco or coffee. Or all of the above. He reminds Punter of himself, and he wonders if the clerk feels the same, if there is a mutual recognition between them.

When it's Punter's turn, the clerk says, I didn't see who took her, but I wish I had.

Punter looks away, reads the clerk's name tag.

OSWALD.

The clerk says, If I knew who took that girl, I'd kill him myself.

Punter shivers as he slides his bills across the counter, as he takes his carton of cigarettes and his candy bar. He doesn't stop shivering until he gets out of the air-conditioned store and back inside his sun-struck car.

The therapists had told Punter that what he'd done was a mistake, that there was nothing wrong with him. They made him repeat their words back to them, to absolve himself of the guilt they were so sure he was feeling.

The therapists had said, You were just kids. You didn't know what you were doing.

Punter said the words they wanted, but doing so changed nothing. He'd never felt the guilt they told him he should. Even now, he has only the remembered accusations of cops and judges to convince him that what he did was wrong.

Punter cooks two venison steaks in a frying pan with salt and b.u.t.ter. He sits down to eat, cuts big mouthfuls, then chews and chews, the meat tough from overcooking. He eats past the point of satiation on into discomfort, until his stomach presses against the tight skin of his abdomen. He never knows how much food to cook. He always clears his plate.

When he's done eating, he smokes and thinks about the girl in the freezer. How, when walking her out of the pond, she had threatened to slip out of his arms and back into the water. How he'd held on, carrying her up and out into the starlight. He hadn't saved her-couldn't have-but he had preserved her, kept her safe from the wet decay, from the mouths of fish and worse.

He knows the freezer is better than the refrigerator, that the dry cold of meat and ice is better than the slow rot of lettuce and leftovers and ancient, crust-rimmed condiments. Knows that even after death, there is a safety in the preservation of a body, that there is a second kind of life to be had.

Punter hasn't been to the bar near the factory since he got fired, but tonight he needs a drink. By eight, he's already been out to the garage four times, unable to keep from opening the freezer lid. If he doesn't stop, the constant thawing and refreezing will destroy her, skin first.

It's mid-shift at the factory, so the bar is empty except for the bartender and two men sitting together at the rail, watching the ball game on the television mounted above the liquor shelves. Punter takes a stool at the opposite end, orders a beer and lights a cigarette. He looks at the two men, tries to decide if they're men he knows from the plant. He's bad with names, bad at faces. One of the men catches him looking and gives him a glare that Punter immediately looks away from. He knows that he stares too long at people, that it makes them uncomfortable, but he can't help himself. He moves his eyes to his hands to his gla.s.s to the game, which he also can't make any sense of. Sports move too fast, are full of rules and behaviors he finds incomprehensible.

During commercials, the station plugs its own late-night newscast, including the latest about the missing girl. Punter stares at the picture of her on the television screen, his tongue growing thick and dry for the five seconds the image is displayed. One of the other men drains the last gulp of his beer and shakes his head, says, I hope they find the f.u.c.ker that killed her and cut his b.a.l.l.s off.

So you think she's dead then?

Of course she's dead. You don't go missing like that and not end up dead.

The men motion for another round as the baseball game comes back from the break. Punter realizes he's been holding his breath, lets it go in a loud, hacking gasp. The bartender and two men turn to look, so he holds a hand up, trying to signal he doesn't need any help, then puts it down when he realizes they're not offering. He pays his tab and gets up to leave.

He hasn't thought much about how the girl got into the pond, or who put her there. He too a.s.sumed murder, but the who or why or when is not something he's previously considered.

In juvie, the counselors told him nothing he did or didn't do would have kept his mother alive, which Punter understood fine. Of course he hadn't killed his mother. That wasn't why he was there. It was what he'd done afterward that had locked him away, put him behind bars until he was eighteen.

This time, he will do better. He won't sit around for months while the police slowly solve the case, while they decide that what he's done is just as bad. This time, Punter will find the murderer himself, and he will make him pay.

He remembers: Missing her. Not knowing where she was, not understanding, just wishing she'd come back. Not believing his father, who told him that she'd left them, that she was gone forever.

He remembers looking for her all day while his father worked, wandering the road, the fields, the rooms of their small house.

He remembers descending into the bas.e.m.e.nt one step at a time. Finding the light switch, waiting for the fluorescent tubes to warm up. Stepping off the wood steps, his bare feet aching at the cold of the concrete floor.

He remembers nothing out of the ordinary, everything in its place.

He remembers the olive green refrigerator and the hum of the lights being the only two sounds in the world.

He remembers walking across the concrete and opening the refrigerator door.

More than anything else, he remembers opening his mouth to scream and not being able to. He remembers that scream getting trapped in his chest, never to emerge.

When the eleven o' clock news comes on, Punter is watching, ready with his small, spiral-bound notebook and his golf pencil stolen from the keno caddy at the bar. He writes down the spa.r.s.e information added to the girl's story. The reporter recounts what Punter already knows-her name, the school, the abandoned car-then plays a clip of the local sheriff, who leans into the reporter's microphone and says, We're still investigating, but so far there's no proof for any of these theories. It's rare when someone gets out of their car and disappears on their own, but it does happen.

The sheriff pauses, listening to an inaudible question, then says, Whatever happened to her, it didn't happen inside the car. There's no sign of a struggle, no sign of s.e.xual a.s.sault or worse.

Punter crosses his legs, then uncrosses them. He presses the pencil down onto the paper and writes all of this down.

The next clip is of the girl's father and mother, standing behind a podium at a press conference. They are both dressed in black, both stern and sad in dress clothes. The father speaks, saying, If anyone out there knows what happened-if you know where our daughter is-please come forward. We need to know where she is.

Punter writes down the word father, writes down the words mother and daughter. He looks at his useless telephone. He could tell these strangers what they wanted, but what good would it do them? His own father had known exactly where his mother was, and it hadn't done either of them any good.

According to the shows on television, the first part of an investigation is always observation, is always the gathering of clues. Punter opens the closet where he keeps his hunting gear and takes his binoculars out of their case. He hangs them around his neck and closes the closet door, then reopens it and takes his hunting knife off the top shelf. He doesn't need it, not yet, but he knows television detectives always carry a handgun to protect themselves. He only owns a rifle and a shotgun, both too long for this kind of work. The knife will have to be enough.

In the car, he puts the knife in the glove box and the binoculars on the seat. He takes the notebook out of his back pocket and reads the list of locations he's written down: the school, her parents' house, the pond and the gas station.

He reads the time when the clerk said he saw her and then writes down another, the time he found her in the pond. The two times are separated by barely a day, so she couldn't have been in the pond for too long.

Whatever happened to her, it happened fast.

He thinks that whoever did this, they must be a local to know about the pond. Punter has never actually seen anyone else there, only the occasional tire tracks, the left-behind beer bottles and cigarette b.u.t.ts from teenage parties. The condoms discarded further off in the bushes, where Punter goes to p.i.s.s.

He thinks about the girl, about how he knows she would never consent to him touching her if she were still alive. About how she would never let him say the words he's said, the words he still wants to say. He wonders what he will do when he finds her killer. His investigation, it could be either an act of vengeance or thanksgiving, but it is still too early to know which.

Punter has been to the girl's school once before, when the unemployment office sent him to interview for a janitorial position there. He hadn't been offered the job, couldn't have pa.s.sed the background check if he had. His juvenile record was sealed, but there was enough there to warn people, and schools never took any chances.

He circles the parking lot twice, then parks down the sidewalk from the front entrance, where he'll be able to watch people coming in and out of the school. He resists the urge to use the binoculars, knows he must control himself in public, must keep from acting on every thought he has. This is why he hasn't talked in months. Why he keeps to himself in his house, hunting and fishing, living off the too-small government disability checks the unemployment counselors helped him apply for.

These counselors, they hadn't wanted him to see what they wrote down for his disability, but he had. Seeing those words written in the counselor's neat script didn't make him angry, just relieved to know. He wasn't bad anymore. He was a person with a disorder, with a trauma. No one had ever believed him about this, especially not the therapist in juvie, who had urged Punter to open up, who had gotten angry when he couldn't. They didn't believe him when he said he'd already told them everything he had inside him.

Punter knows they were right to disbelieve him, that he did have feelings he didn't want to let out.

When Punter pictures the place where other people keep their feelings, all he sees is his own trapped scream, imagined as a devouring ball of sound, hungry and hot in his guts.

A bell rings from inside the building. Soon the doors open, spilling girls out onto the sidewalk and into the parking lot. Punter watches parents getting out of other cars, going to greet their children. One of these girls might be a friend of the drowned girl, and if he could talk to her then he might be able to find out who the drowned girl was. Might be able to make a list of other people he needed to question so that he could solve her murder.

The volume and the increasing number of distinct voices, all of it overwhelms Punter. He stares, watching the girls go by in their uniforms. All of them are identically clothed and so he focuses instead on their faces, on their hair, on the differences between blondes and brunettes and redheads. He watches the girls smiling and rolling their eyes and exchanging embarra.s.sed looks as their mothers step forward to receive them.

He watches the breeze blow all that hair around all those made-up faces. He presses himself against the closed door of his Ford, holds himself still.

He closes his eyes and tries to picture the drowned girl here, wearing her own uniform, but she is separate now, distinct from these girls and the life they once shared. Punter's glad. These girls terrify him in a way the drowned girl does not.

A short burst of siren startles Punter, and he twists around in his seat to see a police cruiser idling its engine behind him, its driver side window rolled down. The cop inside is around Punter's age, his hair starting to gray at the temples but the rest of him young and healthy-looking. The cop yells something, hanging his left arm out the window, drumming his fingers against the side of the cruiser, but Punter can't hear him through the closed windows, not with all the other voices surrounding him.

Punter opens his mouth, then closes it without saying anything. He shakes his head, then locks his driver's side door, suddenly afraid that the cop means to drag him from the car, to put hands on him as other officers did when he was a kid. He looks up from the lock to see the cop outside of his cruiser, walking toward Punter's own car.

The cop raps on Punter's window, waits for him to roll down the window. He stares at Punter, who tries to look away, inadvertently letting his eyes fall on another group of teenage girls.

The cop says, You need to move your car. This is a fire lane.

Punter tries to nod, finds himself shaking his head instead. He whispers that he'll leave, that he's leaving. The cop says, I can't hear you. What did you say?

Punter turns the key, sighs when the engine turns over. He says, I'm going. He says it as loud as he can, his vocal cords choked and rusty.

There are too many girls walking in front of him for Punter to pull forward, and so he has to wait as the cop gets back in his own car. Eventually the cop puts the cruiser in reverse, lets him pa.s.s. Punter drives slowly out of the parking lot and onto the city streets, keeping the car slow, keeping it straight between the lines.

Afraid that the cop might follow him, Punter sticks to the main roads, other well-populated areas, but he gets lost anyway. These aren't places he goes. A half hour pa.s.ses, and then another. Punter's throat is raw from smoking. His eyes ache from staring into the rearview mirror, and his hands tremble so long he fears they might never stop.

At home, Punter finds the girl's parents in the phonebook, writes down their address. He knows he has to be more careful, that if he isn't then someone will come looking for him too. He lies down on the couch to wait for dark, falls asleep with the television tuned to daytime dramas and court shows. He dreams about finding the murderer, about hauling him into the police station in chains. He sees himself avenging the girl with a smoking pistol, emptying round after round into this faceless person, unknown but certainly out there, surely as marked by his crime as Punter was.

When he wakes up, the television is still on, broadcasting game shows full of questions Punter isn't prepared to answer. He gets up and goes into the bathroom, the pain in his guts doubling him over on the toilet. When he's finished, he takes a long, gulping drink from the faucet, then goes out into the living room to gather his notebook, his binoculars, his knife.

In the garage, he tries to lift the girl's tank top to get to the skin hidden underneath, but the fabric is frozen to her flesh. He can't tell if the sound of his efforts is the ripping of ice or of skin. He tries touching her through her clothes, but she's too far gone, distant with cold. He shuts the freezer door and leaves her again in the dark, but not before he explains what he's doing for her. Not before he promises to find the person who hurt her, to hurt this person himself.

Her parents' house is outside of town, at the end of a long tree-lined driveway. Punter drives past, then leaves his car parked down the road and walks back with the binoculars around his neck. Moving through the shadows of the trees, he finds a spot a hundred yards from the house, then scans the lighted windows for movement until he finds the three figures sitting in the living room. He recognizes her parents from the television, sees that the third person is a boy around the same age as the drowned girl. Punter watches him the closest, tries to decide if this is the girl's boyfriend. The boy is all movement, his hands gesturing with every word he speaks. He could be laughing or crying or screaming and from this distance Punter wouldn't be able to tell the difference. He watches as the parents embrace the boy, then hurries back through the woods as soon as he sees the headlights come on in front of the house.

He makes it to his own car just as the boy's convertible pulls out onto the road. Punter starts the engine and follows the convertible through town, past the gas station and the downtown shopping, then into another neighborhood where the houses are smaller. He's never been here before, but he knows the plastics plant is close, that many of his old coworkers live nearby. He watches the boy park in front of a dirty white house, watches through the binoculars as the boy climbs the steps to the porch, as he rings the doorbell. The boy does not go in, but Punter's view is still obscured by the open door. Whatever happens only takes a few minutes, and then the boy is back in his car. He sits on the side of the road for a long time, smoking. Punter smokes too. He imagines getting out of the car and going up to the boy, imagines questioning him about the night of the murder. He knows he should, knows being a detective means taking risks, but he can't do it. When the boy leaves, Punter lets him go, then drives past the white house with his foot off the gas pedal, idling at a crawl. He doesn't see anything he understands, but this is not exactly new.

Back at the pond, the only evidence he gathers is that he was there himself. His tire tracks are the only ones backing up to the pond, his footprints the only marks along the sh.o.r.e. Whoever else was there before him has been given an alibi by Punter's own clumsiness. He knows how this will look, so he finds a long branch with its leaves intact and uses it to rake out the sand, erasing the worst of his tracks. When he's done, he stares out over the dark water, trying to remember how it felt to hold her in his arms, to feel her body soft and pliable before surrendering her to the freezer.

He wonders if it was a mistake to take her from beneath the water. Maybe he should have done the opposite, should have stayed under the waves with her until his own lungs filled with the same watery weight, until he was trapped beside her. Their bodies would not have lasted. The fish would have dismantled their sh.e.l.ls, and then Punter could have shown her the good person he's always believed himself to be, trapped underneath all this sticky rot.

For dinner he cooks two more steaks. All the venison the girl displaced is going bad in his aged refrigerator, and already the steaks are browned and bruised. To be safe, he fries them hard as leather. He has to chew the venison until his jaws ache and his teeth feel loose, but he finishes every bite, not leaving behind even the slightest sc.r.a.p of fat.

Watching the late night news, Punter can tell that without any new evidence the story is losing steam. The girl gets only a minute of coverage, the reporter reiterating facts Punter's known for days. He stares at her picture again, at how her smile once made her whole face seem alive.

He knows he doesn't have much time. He crawls toward the television on his hands and knees, puts his hand on her image as it fades away. He turns around, sits with his back against the television screen. Behind him there is satellite footage of a tornado or a hurricane or a flood. Of destruction seen from afar.

Punter wakes up choking in the dark, his throat closed off with something, phlegm or pus or he doesn't know what. He grabs a handkerchief from his nightstand and spits over and over until he clears away the worst of it. He gets up to flip the light switch, but the light doesn't turn on. He tries it again, and then once more. He realizes how quiet the house is, how without the steady clacking of his wall clock the only sound in his bedroom is his own thudding heart. He leaves the bedroom, walks into the kitchen. The oven's digital clock stares at him like an empty black eye, the refrigerator waits silent and still.

He runs out of the house in his underwear, his big bare feet slapping at the cold driveway. Inside the garage, the freezer is silent too. He lifts the lid, letting out a blast of frozen air, then slams it shut again after realizing he's wasted several degrees of chill to confirm something he already knows.

He knew this day was coming-the power company has given him ample written notice-but still he curses in frustration. He goes back inside and dresses hurriedly, then scavenges his house for loose change, for crumpled dollar bills left in discarded jeans. At the grocery down the road, he buys what little ice he can afford, his cash reserves exhausted until his next disability check. It's not enough, but it's all he can do.

Back in the garage, he works fast, cracking the blocks of ice on the cement floor and dumping them over the girl's body. He manages to cover her completely, suppressing the pang of regret he feels once he's unable to see her face through the ice. For a second, he considers crawling inside the freezer himself, sweeping away the ice between them. Letting his body heat hers, letting her thaw into his arms.

What he wonders is, Would it be better to have one day with her than a forever separated by ice?

He goes back into the house and sits down at the kitchen table. Lights a cigarette, then digs through the envelopes on the table until he finds the unopened bill from the power company. He opens it, reads the impossible number, shoves the bill back into the envelope. He tries to calculate how long the ice will buy him, but he never could do figures, can't begin to start to solve a problem like this.

He remembers: The bas.e.m.e.nt refrigerator had always smelled bad, like leaking coolant and stale air. It wasn't used much, had been kept out of his father's refusal to throw anything away more than out of any sense of utility. By the time Punter found his mother there, she was already bloated around the belly and the cheeks, her skin slick with something that glistened like petroleum jelly.

Unsure what he should do, he'd slammed the refrigerator door and ran back upstairs to hide in his bedroom. By the time his father came home, Punter was terrified his father would know he'd seen, that he'd kill him too. That what would start as a beating would end as a murder.

Only his father never said anything, never gave any sign the mother was dead. He stuck to his story, telling Punter over and over how his mother had run away and left them behind, until Punter's voice was too muted to ask.

Punter tried to forget, to believe his father's story, but he couldn't.

Punter tried to tell someone else, some adult, but he couldn't do that either. Not when he knew what would happen to his father. Not when he knew they would take her from him.

During the day, while his father worked, he went down to the bas.e.m.e.nt and opened the refrigerator door.

At first, he only looked at her, at the open eyes and mouth, at the way her body had been jammed into the too-small s.p.a.ce. At the way her throat was slit the same way his dad had once demonstrated on a deer that had fallen but not expired.

The first time he touched her, he was sure she was trying to speak to him, but it was only gas leaking out of her mouth, squeaking free of her lungs. Punter had rushed to pull her out of the refrigerator, convinced for a moment she was somehow alive, but when he wrapped his arms around her, all that gas rolled out of her mouth and nose and ears, sounding like a wet fart but smelling so much worse.

He hadn't meant to vomit on her, but he couldn't help himself.

Afterward, he took her upstairs and bathed her to get the puke off. He'd never seen another person naked, and so he tried not to look at his mother's veiny b.r.e.a.s.t.s, at the wet thatch of her pubic hair floating in the bath water.

Scrubbing her with a washcloth and a bar of soap, he averted his eyes the best he could.

Rinsing the shampoo out of her hair, he whispered he was sorry.

It was hard to dress her, but eventually he managed, and then it was time to put her back in the refrigerator before his father came home.

Closing the door, he whispered goodbye. I love you. I'll see you tomorrow.

The old clothes, covered with blood and vomit, he took them out into the cornfield behind the house and buried them. Then came the waiting, all through the evening while his father occupied the living room, all through the night while he was supposed to be sleeping.

Day after day, he took her out and wrestled her up the stairs. He sat her on the couch or at the kitchen table, and then he talked, his normal reticence somehow negated by her forever silence. He'd never talked to his mother this much while she was alive, but now he couldn't stop telling her everything he had ever felt, all his trapped words spilling out one after another.

Punter knows that even if they hadn't found her and taken her away, she wouldn't have lasted forever. He had started finding little pieces of her left behind, waiting wet and squishy on the wooden bas.e.m.e.nt steps, the kitchen floor, in between the cracks of the couch.

He tried to clean up after her, but sometimes his father would find one too. Then Punter would have to watch as his father held some squishy flake up to the light, rolling it between his fingers as if he could not recognize what it was or where it came from before throwing it in the trash.

Day after day, Punter bathed his mother to get rid of the smell, which grew more pungent as her face began to droop, as the skin on her arms wrinkled and sagged. He searched her body for patches of mold to scrub them off, then held her hands in his, marveling at how, even weeks later, her fingernails continued to grow.

Punter sits on his front step, trying to make sense of the scribbles in his notebook. He doesn't have enough, isn't even close to solving the crime, but he knows he has to, if he wants to keep the police away. If they figure the crime out before he does, if they question the killer, then they'll eventually end up at the pond, where Punter's attempts at covering his tracks are unlikely to be good enough.

Punter doesn't need to prove the killer guilty, at least not with a judge and a jury. All he has to do is find this person, then make sure he never tells anyone what he did with the body. After that, the girl can be his forever, for as long as he has enough ice.

Punter drives, circling the scenes of the crime: The gas station, the school, her parents' house, the pond. He drives the circuit over and over, and even with the air conditioning cranked he can't stop sweating, his face drenched and fevered, his stomach hard with meat. He's halfway between his house and the gas station when his gas gauge hits empty. He pulls over and sits for a moment, trying to decide, trying to wrap his slow thoughts around his investigation. He opens his notebook, flips through its barely filled pages. He has written down so few facts, so few suspects, and there is so little time left.

In his notebook, he crosses out father, mother, boyfriend. He has only one name left, one suspect he hasn't disqualified, one other person that Punter knows has seen the girl. He smokes, considers, tries to prove himself right or wrong, gets nowhere.

He opens the door and stands beside the car. Home is in one direction, the gas station the other. Reaching back inside, he leaves the notebook and the binoculars but takes the hunting knife and shoves it into his waistband, untucking his t-shirt to cover the weapon.