Courtney
I sit in the front seat of my car, still parked outside of the Matthewses’ house, thinking about something Joanna just said,
how Sam wouldn’t give up on finding Kylie. I need to be doing more to find Reese. I can’t only rely on the police to do it.
I search online on my phone for Daniel Clarke, and though Clarke is a common enough name, I find only one living on Moon Road,
which is a mile and a half from where Joanna and Sam live.
I start the engine. My GPS takes me to Moon Road along the backroads, which are a far cry from the nearby vacation resorts
where suburbanites with nice and sometimes luxury cars spend their time roughing it in the woods. The disparity is evident.
Though the scenery around here is breathtaking, it doesn’t nullify the poverty we’ve seen, people living in small, dilapidated
houses and run-down trailer parks.
Tourism is big, a boon to the economy, and yet I wonder if the locals don’t resent people like us for coming into their town, for using their lakes and woods as our summer playground.
Nearly all of the houses around here are unmaintained, situated on large, heavily wooded lots with rusted, if not wrecked, cars on the lawn beside things like hot water heaters and washing machines that decorate the property like yard art.
At some of the homes, people sit outside, on sunken front porches (a man on one, smoking what I think, at first, to be a cigarette, until I see the bulbous end of a crack pipe) while other homes look like they’ve been abandoned or are uninhabitable.
It’s unsettling and strikes me how very different rural poverty is from urban poverty.
It’s out of view, tucked away on backwoods streets as opposed to homeless people living on city street corners and in slummy housing projects with boarded-up windows that are infiltrated by gangs.
But that doesn’t mean it’s any less prevalent.
I reach Moon Road, which is narrow and potholed. Above me, trees overhang the street, blotting out the sun. I drive slowly,
leaned forward in my seat, searching for Daniel’s house. Eventually I find the address on a rusted mailbox that sits at the
end of a driveway, its post becoming uprooted and pitching forward toward the street: 126 Moon Road.
My stomach tightens. By instinct, I lift my foot up off the gas. I press lightly on the brake and the car slows to a stop
at the end of the driveway. I feel my breath change as I take in his house, which is some type of depressed manufactured home
with a detached garage that’s just barely bigger than a shed.
I lift my foot from the brake. I press lightly on the accelerator and ease the car over the curb and into the driveway where
I stop again, sliding the gearshift into Park. I sit, leaned forward in my seat, eyeing the single-story house through the
windshield, with its low-slung roof and the tiny, jalousie windows that must allow almost no amount of light or air to get
into the home.
I imagine the darkness inside the house. I imagine the stale, unventilated air.
He’s like a cat you let outside to roam. It’s gone so long, you think it’s dead—that a car or a coyote got it—but then one
day, he just reappears as if no one was ever looking for him.
I tell myself to leave, to go back to the cottage, to Elliott and the kids.
But instead, I let go of the gearshift. I turn the engine off. I bring my hands to the seat belt, which I unbuckle, slowly feeding it into place.
I set my hand on the door handle and pull on the lever, opening the door to get out.
The house sits on dirt and is surrounded, like everything else around here, by trees. Outside, I get assailed by mosquitoes,
thousands of them that must breed in the dense woodland and leafy debris that surrounds the small home. I close the car door
quickly, but still, some get in. A chill runs through me, the outside temperature colder in the shade. My senses are heightened;
I’m overcome with a profound sense that something isn’t right, though I tell myself it’s nothing. The police were already
here. They came to look for Daniel and he wasn’t home.
It’s not intuition. It’s just fear speaking.
Daniel Clarke, I remind myself for a third time, isn’t here.
I move away from the safety of my car. The world around me smells damp, earthy, dirt-like. Outside the house, a firepit filled
with ash sits cold beside cigarette butts, beside empty cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and cheap plastic lawn chairs that
are knocked over and lying on their sides on the dirt. There is no grass to speak of, which makes the land feel depressed
and neglected. The ground is soft, the sun unable to penetrate the trees to ever dry the earth fully. With every step, I leave
footprints.
I circle the exterior of the house. There is litter strewn on the ground from garbage cans that have been knocked on their
side, their contents scavenged by wildlife. There are tire tracks in the dirt, like from a bike or an ATV.
My chest feels heavy, a weighted blanket lying on it.
I imagine Reese here, her desperate screams going unanswered.
I make my way to the back of the house, which butts up against the woods. There is no porch or deck to speak of; on the back of the house, the sliding glass door drops down to the earth, where more trash—more cigarette butts, more beer cans—has been left on the ground.
I go toward the door, to see what I can see through the glass. I close in on it, cupping my hands around my eyes for a better
look.
But then I stop. Because the door, I realize, is open, an eighth-inch gap running between the frame and the glass panel.
My jaw goes slack in disbelief. I lower my hands to my sides and stare at that gap. Don’t, I tell myself—willing myself to turn around, to go back to the car, to drive back to the cottage and forget all about the
open door.
But instead, I reach out. I set my hand on the handle, feeling the splintered wood against my skin. I pull without thinking,
and it’s reckless and impetuous. The door slides easily open along the track, the cool summer breeze whooshing in and moving
the broken vertical blinds just inside the open door so that the vanes clang into one another, making noise like a dull wind
chime.
It’s not too late, I tell myself. I can still close the door, turn around, go home.
I do none of those things.
Instead, I climb the stoop and enter Daniel Clarke’s home, sweeping the blinds away with a hand, moving past them. I leave
the sliding glass door open behind me.
I don’t think about the fact that I’m trespassing or about getting caught.
I only think about finding Reese.
The smell that greets me is rancid, like rotting meat in a trash can. It stuns me at first, stinging my eyes. Standing there
in the kitchen, trying to ascertain the source of the smell, I wonder if the police entered the house when they came to look
for Daniel, or if they just knocked on the door and then left when no one answered it.
What if Reese is here?
I want to call out for her. But instead I keep quiet. I hold my breath, practically gagging on the smell, dragging myself across the room, my heartbeat drumming in my ears.
The ceilings of the house are low. The walls are a wood paneling from some other generation. Stained high-pile brown carpeting
lines the floor except for in the kitchen, which is a faux brick linoleum. Everything is brown and dreary. As expected, there
is almost no natural lighting coming in through the small windows. There is no air.
Dirty dishes sit in the kitchen sink and on the table. On them, a half-eaten bagel, cereal floating in spoiled milk and a
crust of bread, which the ants have found.
I press a hand to my nose to hold back the smell. I make my way further inside the home, into an adjoining family room, which
is unexceptional except that the TV is on though it’s on mute. On the screen, Steve Harvey hosts an episode of Family Feud, his mouth moving though no sound comes out.
I’ve lost track of what day it is. What time. I wonder how long that TV has been on and if it’s been on for days. I spin in
a slow, lazy half circle. Behind me sits a narrow hallway, which is dim, windowless, the already-inadequate light that comes
in from the small, slatted, louvered windows barely able to reach that far.
I make my way toward the hall. I reach for a light switch at the entryway, but either the ceiling lightbulbs have burnt out
or the fuse is blown because, when I flip the switch, the hall stays dark.
I stand there, wondering what’s down the hall, wondering what happens beyond the ninety-degree turn where I can’t see. I try
to summon the courage to move forward, to look. My breathing is shallow, my mouth dry, my body heavy. I fall back a step first,
thinking about leaving, but then I start to move forward rather than away by instinct, treading across the thick carpeting,
my body moving as if separate from my brain.
Elliott doesn’t even know where I am. He thinks I’m at the store, picking up groceries.
If something were to happen to me, he wouldn’t know.
If I never came back to the cottage, he wouldn’t know where to look.
He’s like a cat you let outside to roam.
You think it’s dead—that a car or a coyote got it.
Then one day, he just reappears as if no one was ever looking for him.
I come to a bathroom first. Small, boxy, the smell of urine strong. I leave the light off; I don’t bother with the switch.
Standing in the open door, there is just enough light for me to see that the toilet has been left open and unflushed. There’s
a rumpled towel on the floor and the shower curtain is flung open, bottles of shampoo and body wash lying on their sides,
open, spilling out.
I round the corner. Just beyond the bathroom is a bedroom. The bed is unmade, a stained white sheet untucked and falling off.
There is a blanket on the floor and a flat, rumpled pillow at the head of the bed. Dresser drawers are open, clothes wilting
from the drawers. On top of the dresser is a small amassment of expensive-looking jewelry completely unbefitting for this
house and this room. A pendant necklace, drop earrings, a woman’s wedding band, loot he has yet to pawn, I can only assume.
A side table light has been left on, the glow of it faint but visible. I try to imagine the last time Daniel was here, thinking
that it was dark from the light left on, and wondering if it was nighttime, sometime after dark, or early morning before the
sun came up. I imagine him waking up, snatching clothes from the dresser drawers, leaving in a hurry with the light and the
TV still on, the back door open.
Why was he in such a rush?
I turn around. Fleecy pink fabric catches my eye, peeking out from beneath a wrinkled, pleated bed skirt, the color out of place in the insipid room.
I bend down and grab for it, pulling it out from under the bed, knowing right away what it is, the recognition coming as a punch to the gut.
My diaphragm spasms. The pink is Reese’s fleece sweatshirt.
It’s a cropped thing with a wide neck that she cut herself to show more skin, much to Emily’s dismay; it’s meant to be off-the-shoulder, and I can picture Reese wearing it, her sunburned shoulder and bare midriff exposed, the pink of her skin rivaling the pink of the shirt.
I take it by the shoulders, my hands starting to shake as I unfurl the shirt for a better look. There is blood on the sleeve.
Reese’s sweatshirt, Reese’s blood.
Just then, something outside startles me. A sound, though I don’t so much hear it as I feel it—a low-frequency vibration in
my chest—and I bolt suddenly upright. The sound is something subtle. It’s insidious, a predator lying in wait to ambush its
prey. It makes me wonder—as I turn without hesitation, taking the sweatshirt with me and scurrying down the hall to get back
in my car and leave—if I heard it or not.
But as I rush down the hall, the sound comes again, far more evident this time. Far closer.
I only make it as far as the family room.
In my peripheral vision, I see the shadow of a man’s head pass by the windows, and I know that I won’t have time to get to
the sliding glass door, to run outside and back to my car. My legs founder, feeling tingly, gelatinous, the blood rushing
to them. I let go of the sweatshirt by mistake, watching it plunge to the floor as I crouch down by instinct, searching the
house instead for a place to hide.
But I’m too slow. It’s too late.
There is nowhere to go before the front door swings violently open and I find myself staring down the dark barrel of a gun.