Of the three of us, she probably had it the worst.
She was two weeks out of high school when it happened. Just a girl trying to scrape together money for community college. She got a job cleaning rooms at a highway motel outside Tampa called The Nightlight Inn. Because she was new, Samantha had to work the red-eye shift, fetching towels for exhausted truckers and changing sheets that reeked of sweat and semen in rooms occupied only half the night.
Two hours into her fourth shift, a man with a potato sack over his head showed up and all hell broke loose.
He was an itinerant handyman with a boner for the parts of the Bible few like to talk about. Whores of Babylon. Smiting the sinners. Eyes for eyes and teeth for teeth. His name was Calvin Whitmer. But after that summer, he would be forever known as the Sack Man.
The name fit, for he carried lots of things in sacks. The back of his pickup was full of them. Sacks of empty tin cans. Sacks of animal skins. Sacks of sand, salt, pebbles. Then there was the sack of tools he carried to The Nightlight Inn, filled with saw blades and chisels and masonry nails. Police found twenty-one tools in all, most of them crusted with blood.
Samantha personally met two of them. One was a sharpened drill bit that found its way into her back. Twice. The other was a hacksaw that caught her upper thigh, severing an artery. Her brush with the drill bit came before the Sack Man lashed her to a tree behind the motel with a loop of barbed wire. The hacksaw was after she had somehow managed to break free.
Six people died that night—four motel guests, a nighttime desk clerk named Troy and Calvin Whitmer. That last one was Sam’s doing, once she freed herself and got her hands on the same drill bit that had entered her back. She leapt atop the Sack Man and plunged it into his chest again and again and again. The cops found her like that—trailing barbed wire, straddling a dead man, stabbing away.
I know all this because it was in Time magazine, which my parents assumed I never read. That issue I did, poring over the article under the covers, pen light clenched in my sweaty palm. I had nightmares for a week.
Sam’s story, meanwhile, made the same rounds as Lisa’s and, eventually, mine. Evening news. Front pages. Magazine covers. Oh, how the reporters came running. Probably the very ones who would later camp on my parents’ front lawn. Sam granted a handful of print interviews, plus an exclusive one to that TV bitch with the Chanel-scented paper, likely for more or less the same price given to me.
Her only condition was that her face couldn’t be shown on camera, nor could any new photographs be taken of her. All anyone saw was that single yearbook photo—the permanent face of her particular ordeal. That’s why it was a big deal when she agreed to join Lisa and me in a chat with Oprah, on camera, for all the world to see. Which made it a bigger deal when I backed out. Because of me, no one got to glimpse another view of Samantha Boyd.
A year after that, she vanished.
It wasn’t a sudden thing, her disappearance. Instead, it was a slow fading, like morning fog sapping away in the sun. Reporters writing about the tenth anniversary of The Nightlight Inn murders suddenly had a hard time tracking her down. Her mother eventually came forward to admit she’d lost touch. Federal authorities, who liked to keep tabs on victims of violent crimes, couldn’t find her.
She was gone. Off the grid, as Coop put it.
No one knows for sure what happened, but that didn’t keep theories from sprouting like mold spores. One article I read surmised that she had changed her name and moved to South America. Another suggested that she was living in isolation somewhere out west. The murder porn sites went dark, naturally, tossing out conspiracy theories involving suicide, kidnapping, government cover-ups.
But now she’s here, right in front of me. Her appearance is so unexpected that I’m at a loss for words. All I can muster is, “What are you doing here?”
Sam rolls her eyes. “You really suck at this hello thing.”
“Sorry,” I say. “Hello.”
“Good job.”
“Thanks. But it still doesn’t tell me why you’re here.”
“Isn’t it obvious? I’m here to see you.” Sam’s voice brings to mind a speakeasy—smoky and booze-scented. It contains the dark lilt of something forbidden. “I thought we should finally meet. If that’s cool.”
We stare at each other a moment, each of us assessing the damage to the other. I get the feeling Sam has also read up on me, because she eyes my stomach first, then my shoulder. I, meanwhile, sneak a glance at her leg, trying to remember if there was a noticeable limp when she crossed the street.
Thoughts of Lisa slide into my head. We’re a rare breed, she once told me. We need to stick together.
Now that she’s gone, no one else can understand what we’ve been through. Sam and I are the only ones. And while I still don’t fully comprehend why she’s come out of hiding simply to see me, I find myself giving a reluctant nod.
“It’s cool,” I say.
Sam looks at my building, her gaze sliding up its exterior. “Are we going to stay out here all day or are you going to invite me in?”
“Sorry,” I say. “Would you like to come up?”
We sit in the living room, not drinking the coffee I’ve set out in front of us. I’ve since changed out of my running clothes into blue jeans, red flats and a turquoise blouse. A splash of color to counteract all of Sam’s black.
I perch on a straight-backed chair upholstered in purple velvet. Stiff and punishing, it’s more for show than for sitting. Sam is on the antique sofa, looking equally as uncomfortable. She sits with her knees together, arms lax at her sides, trying to make small talk, which clearly isn’t her forte. The words come out in short, intense bursts. Each one is like a cherry bomb that’s been quickly tossed.
“Nice place.”
“Thanks.”
“Looks big.”
“It’s not bad. We only have the two bedrooms.”
I cringe as I say it. Only. As if I’m somehow deprived. Judging from the bulging knapsack Sam brought with her, I’m not sure she has a room.
“Nice.”
Sam shifts on the sofa. I get the sense she’s trying hard to resist kicking off her boots and spreading herself across it. She looks as uncomfortable as I feel.
“Not that this place is small,” I say, the words spilling out in a desperate attempt not to sound like I’m a spoiled brat. “I understand how lucky I am. And the spare room is nice to have when Jeff’s family comes to visit. Jeff. That’s my boyfriend. His parents are in Delaware and his brother, sister-in-law and two nephews live in Maryland. They like to visit a lot. It’s fun having kids around sometimes.”
I love Jeff’s family, all of them as catalogue perfect as Jeff himself. They all know about Pine Cottage. Jeff told them as soon as it was clear things between us were getting serious. Those solid, middle-class Protestants didn’t bat an eye. His mother even sent me a fruit basket with a handwritten note saying she hoped it would brighten my day.
“What about your family?” Sam says.
“What about them?”
“Do they visit a lot?”
I think about my mother’s one and only visit. She invited herself, using the excuse that she was going through a rough patch with Fred and just wanted to get away for a weekend. Jeff saw it as a good sign. Naively, I did, too. I thought my mother would be impressed with the new life I had created. Instead, she spent the entire weekend criticizing everything from the clothes I wore to how much wine I drank at dinner. By the time she left, we were barely speaking.
“No,” I tell Sam. “They don’t. What about yours?”