Chapter 2 Marc
Marc and Kimble interview the kidnapped woman under a tree, with the mountains blue and rolling behind. It makes a good background for the shot. Annie sneezes, apologetic. She’s sensitive to pollen.
‘My “Anniegies”, my husband calls them.’ Annie is diminutive, blonde, and shakes as she tells her story.
She holds herself close with her arms at times, as if she is cold.
Kimble asks her more than once if she would like to move inside.
Annie smiles and shivers and says in a little voice that outside is best. It feels better to talk about it in the open air.
After the third time Kimble stops asking.
Outside is better for the shot anyway. Annie is framed by the mountains.
Somewhere in those peaks lies the place where they took her that day, and kept her for three weeks.
She was in her home, asleep in her bed. She woke at the touch of something on her lips.
Dimly, she realised that her husband must have come home early from his trip.
Then the cloth settled gently over her mouth.
She opened her mouth to scream and it clamped down hard.
Annie struggled, then breathed, was pulled suddenly into the black maw of the chloroform.
Gone, pecked up into darkness like seed by a bird.
After that, she says, there was dark. Weeks of dark. Then a blazing square of light. Someone cut her bonds and she was free. She was stumbling and slipping down the dew-slick mountainside until she threw herself in front of an eighteen-wheeler, waving her hands and pleading with the driver to stop.
‘They took blood from me once a day,’ she says.
‘With what?’ Marc asks.
‘A knife. But apart from that they didn’t hurt me. They just wanted me for – my blood.’ She shivers. ‘It was Nowhere, they took me – where I was kept.’
‘How do you know?’ Marc’s warm, inviting interview voice has dropped away. His tone is sharp; he hears it and Annie does too. Her liquid blue eyes go solid, hostile. He looks at Kimble, who widens her eyes. What are you doing?
‘They thought I was passed out when they carried me in,’ Annie says. ‘But I saw flashes of things. A broken Ferris wheel on the ground. Sometimes they whispered, “blood in the land”. Or “blood on the land”. I don’t know which.’
‘Cut,’ Marc says. ‘For a moment.’
Kimble doesn’t cut. ‘What does that mean?’ she murmurs from behind the camera. She’s talking to Annie but she stares at Marc. He has stopped doing his job.
Annie looks down, silent. Her eyelashes are dark on her cheek. She wants Marc to ask her, not Kimble. It’s not unusual for interview subjects to assume that Marc is in control.
Marc takes a deep breath, slow and silent. When he’s sure his voice will be steady he asks, ‘Blood?’
‘They took a little each day,’ she whispers. ‘It was the Nowhere children.’ Annie shivers again, clutching herself. She pulls back her loose linen sleeve.
Kimble zooms in. Annie’s skin is perfect, buttermilk, except for the red welts of old cuts, healing now to scars.
‘Why do you think a group of children would kidnap you and take your blood?’ Kimble asks.
‘They worship him. They live up there where all those people died.’
Marc pauses, letting Annie feel what she has said. When he sees it in her eyes he says, ‘Tell us about them. The Nowhere children.’
‘Most is just what I’ve heard.’
‘What have you heard?’
‘Well,’ Annie says. A faint flush spreads over her ivory cheeks; she’s enjoying being believed. ‘They’re all runaways. It’s a kind of cult but only for kids. They live up there on his old ranch and they worship him.’
‘Him?’ Kimble asks.
‘Leaf Winham.’
Marc nods. For a moment which seems to last an hour, he stares at Annie.
‘Did you report it to the police?’ His voice sounds slow and thick in his ears.
‘I filed a report but nothing happened. They think I’m lying.
They think I was with my ex-boyfriend.’ Annie’s pink lips purse and fold in on themselves.
‘I wasn’t surprised, somehow, when they took me.
When I woke up there.’ She shrinks into the chair, becomes even more fragile and delicate, as if collapsing from within.
‘Maybe all women feel this.’ Annie looks at Kimble, appealing, and Kimble smiles a little, just enough to suggest empathy.
‘Feel what?’ Kimble asks.
‘That it’s your fate. Something like this. Like, I’m just waiting to meet my killer. I was sure every day that the knife would go into my neck. But it didn’t. I don’t know why not.’ She gasps, wipes her eyes quickly, brushing away the tears. ‘Do you know what they fed me?’
Kimble zooms in.
‘Two things,’ Annie says.
‘What were they?’ Marc tries to keep his voice level.
‘Mushrooms,’ Annie says. ‘The kind that makes you see things. I was so hungry, I had lost so much blood I would have eaten anything. I saw – I was—’ She swallows. ‘And the other thing was formula. They gave it to me from a bottle like a baby.’
‘I need a minute,’ Marc says. Kimble nods. They have learned to give one another space when it’s needed.
‘Meet me in the square in an hour,’ she says. ‘Don’t be late.’
The floor of the Dew Drop Inn is tacky. The soles of Marc’s shoes stick and peel up with each step. He orders whiskey and breathes, letting the smell of stale beer and the country music and the sharp liquor burn do its work.
He calls Silvie. She is crying when she answers and that slices Marc right open. Claude comes on the line, and even though he’s trying and he can tell that Claude is too, within a moment they are hissing at each other in an angry blend of languages.
‘Ta gueule,’ Claude is saying. ‘You know what you are? Do you know what—’
‘Chiante.’ Marc hangs up. Anger courses up and down him. The bartender gives him a measuring look.
‘My ex,’ Marc says, easy. The bartender nods, understanding. Everyone knows what that’s like.
Marc orders another drink, and then another right away to save time.
The world is getting that nimbus, that halo around it.
He looks at his watch. He has been here for an hour and a half.
Kimble will be waiting. He thinks, I’ll just finish this then go, but when he raises the glass to his lips it’s already empty so he orders another.
A woman comes in. She is a small, brown-haired. He saw her earlier, behind the cash register of Mountain Foods and Goods.
‘They were in the dumpster again last night, like raccoons,’ she says to the bartender. ‘Expired meat, Tylenol. The camera caught one of them.’ She shakes her head. ‘We’re a nice town and it’s not nice. Trespassing, stealing.’
The bartender gives her a small neutral smile. ‘Susie.’
Marc feels the slipperiness of the round stool beneath him. The texture of the air is thick. He needs to get out of here.
‘Who was in the dumpster?’ he asks.
The woman looks at him, suspicious. ‘Kids.’
‘But not kids from Ault,’ Marc says.
‘I don’t know where they were from.’
‘I make TV shows.’ Marc is careful to hit all his consonants. ‘I’m making one about this place. Could I look at the surveillance footage? The cameras?’
He pulls his cell phone from his pocket. There are eighteen missed calls from Kimble. He closes his eyes, braces himself. ‘Hey, listen, I had some stuff to do—’
‘We were supposed to meet an hour ago and that’s a pretty loud bar you’re in.’
‘Don’t hang up,’ he says quickly. She’s silent, he feels her scorn crackling down the line, but she doesn’t hang up. ‘I’ve got something.’
In Mountain Foods and Goods, Marc follows Susie down the dry goods aisle.
He runs a finger along the very top row of cans.
His fingertip comes away feathered with dust. He nods in satisfaction.
His sister taught him this. Never buy anything from the top shelf, not in these little places.
These cans have probably been here for years. Always buy the things at eye level.
Marc and Kimble crouch in the tiny office at the back.
The screen judders, black and white. Then it settles and there they are – at the edge of the light.
They wear a hood, and on the grainy black-and-white footage it is impossible to tell much else about them.
But they’re thin. Marc can see the bones in the wrist poking out of a baggy sleeve.
After a few moments the figure slips across the screen and lifts the lid of the dumpster.
They duck their head and look around, like someone accustomed to waiting for a blow to fall.
Then they lean forward and plunge both arms shoulder-deep into the dumpster.
They toss the dumpster expertly, carefully, sorting frozen meat, pizzas, canned goods, bags of rice and beans. A few vegetables that haven’t rotted yet. They are tidy and don’t make a mess.
They find something. Their body language changes from casual to relief. They start grabbing cans of something, shoving it into their backpack.
‘What is that? he says to Kimble. ‘What have they got?’
‘Powdered baby formula,’ Kimble says, not taking her eyes from the screen. She chews her lower lip and notes the timecode.
On screen the kid thrusts can after can of formula into their bag.
‘I don’t like it,’ Kimble says quietly.
‘Do we let the lizard go?’ Marc can’t tell whether the big feeling sweeping over him is relief or something else.
‘That’s exactly why we don’t let go.’ Kimble looks up at Susie, who is watching them. ‘Can I copy this? I’ll bring it back tomorrow.’
‘I can’t do that,’ Susie says with quiet triumph. ‘I shouldn’t even have let you back here. I might need it for evidence. You know they kidnap people. They steal little kids to join them and take adults for their blood. I could have been killed, sitting here all on my own last night—’
‘Come outside for a moment,’ Kimble says to her. ‘We can talk, just us girls.’
They are gone for maybe fifteen minutes. Kimble comes back holding a tape. ‘Let’s go.’
‘We’ll find a motel,’ Marc says.
Kimble shakes her head. ‘I’m not staying in this town.’
‘Van? Campground?’