Mattie left behind a nineteen-year-old sister, Sadie; a surrogate grandmother, May Beth; and her mother, Claire; but Claire’s been out of the picture for a while.
I first heard about the Southern murder at a gas station outside Abernathy, about thirty minutes from Cold Creek. I was with my crew in the eastern plains and we’d just wrapped interviews for a segment of an episode of Always Out There dedicated to profiling small towns in America. You know, the kind on a rambling decline. We wanted their residents to tell us what those places lost, not because we thought we could restore them to their former glory but simply so you knew they existed. We wanted to give them a voice before they disappeared.
JOE HALLORAN:
It’s a nice thought, anyway. That somebody gives a damn.
WEST McCRAY:
That was Joe Halloran, one of the Abernathy residents we interviewed. I wasn’t thinking about his words when I was standing behind the guy ahead of me at the gas station, listening as he told the clerk exactly what happened to the Southern kid. The grisly facts didn’t inspire me to stick around. My crew and I had gotten what we came for and we were ready to go back home. It was a terrible thing, sure, but we live in a world that has no shortage of terrible things. You can’t stop for all of them.
A year later, I was sitting in my office in New York. It was October, a year to the day Mattie died, actually, the third—and my attention kept wandering from my computer screen to the window, where I could see the Empire State Building. I liked my job at WNRK, and I liked my life in the city, but maybe some part of me—the same part that let me walk away from Mattie’s story the first time without a second thought—was overdue for a shake-up.
It arrived in the form of a phone call.
MAY BETH FOSTER [PHONE]: Is this West McCray?
WEST McCRAY [PHONE]: It is. How can I help you?
MAY BETH FOSTER [PHONE]: This is May Beth Foster. Joe Halloran told me you give a damn.
WEST McCRAY:
There’d been no new developments in the Mattie Southern case, no suspects named to the crime. The investigation seemed to have ground to a halt. But that wasn’t the reason May Beth contacted me.
MAY BETH FOSTER [PHONE]: I need your help.
WEST McCRAY:
Three months ago, in mid-July, she’d gotten a call from a police station in Farfield, Colorado, a town many, many miles from Cold Creek. They’d found a 2007 black Chevy parked on the side of the road and inside of it, a green bag full of personal affects belonging to Mattie’s older sister, Sadie Hunter, who had disappeared that June. Sadie herself was nowhere to be found. She still hasn’t been found. After a cursory investigation, Sadie was declared a runaway by local law enforcement, and, having exhausted all possible avenues available to her, May Beth Foster reached out to me. I was her last hope. She thought maybe I could bring Sadie back home to her alive. Because Sadie had to be alive, because— MAY BETH FOSTER [PHONE]: I can’t take another dead girl.
sadie
I find the car on craigslist.
It doesn’t matter what kind, I don’t think, but if you need more than that to work with, it’s boxy, midnight black. The kind of color that disappears when it’s next to any other. Backseat big enough to sleep in. It was offered up in a hastily written ad in a sea of hastily written ads, but this one riddled with spelling errors that suggested a special kind of desperation. Make an offer, pleas settled it for me. It means I need money now which means someone’s in trouble or they’re hungry or they’ve got a chemical kind of itch. It means I’ve got the advantage, so what else can I do but take it?
It doesn’t occur to me that meeting someone on a road outside of town to buy a car for any amount of money I’m willing to pay might not be the safest thing in the world but that’s only because what I’m going to do once I have the car is even more dangerous than that.
“You could die,” I say, just to see if the clean weight of those words off my tongue will somehow shock their reality into me.
It doesn’t.
I could die.
I grab my green canvas backpack off the floor, shrug it over my shoulders and run my thumb over my bottom lip. May Beth gave me blueberries last night and I ate them for breakfast when I woke up today. I’m not sure if they’ve stained my mouth and I have a hard enough time with good first impressions as it is.
The screen door on the trailer is rusted out, sparks a whine into all our surrounding Nowhere That Matters, but if you need a visual, picture a place far, far less than suburbia and then imagine me, a few more rungs down that ladder living in a trailer rented from Fed-Me-Blueberries May Beth for as long as I’ve been alive. I live in a place that’s only good for leaving, is all that needs to be said about it, and I don’t let myself look back. Doesn’t matter if I want to, it’s just better if I don’t.
I grab my bike and ride my way out of town, briefly stopping on the green bridge over Wicker’s River where I stare down at the water and feel the dizzying pull of its raging current in my gut. I dig through my bag, pushing aside clothes, bottles of water, some potato chips and my wallet until I find my cell phone tangled up in a ball of underwear. Cheap piece of plastic; doesn’t even have a touchscreen. I throw it in the water and then I get back on my bike and ride out to Meddler’s Road, off the highway, to meet the woman who wrote the craigslist ad. Her name is Becki with an i. She’d write that, with an i, like I couldn’t see it for myself in every email she sent. She’s standing next to the boxy, midnight-black car, one hand rested on its hood and the other on her pregnant belly. Behind her, another car is parked, a little newer. A man sits at the wheel with his arm hanging out the open window and he’s tense until he sees me and then all his tension seems to melt away. It’s offensive. I’m dangerous.
You shouldn’t underestimate people, I want to call out. I have a knife.
It’s true. There’s a switchblade in my back pocket, a leftover from one of my mother’s boyfriends, Keith. Long time ago. He had the nicest voice of all of them—so soft it was almost fuzzy—but he was not a nice man.
“Lera?” Becki asks, because that’s the name I gave her. It’s my middle name. It’s easier to say than my own. Becki surprises me, the way she sounds. Like a scraped knee. Longtime smoker, I’d bet. I nod and take the cash-fatted envelope from my pocket and hold it out. Eight hundred in all. Okay, so she countered my initial offer of five but I know it’s a good deal. I’m more or less paying for the repairs they made on the body. Becki says I should get a good year out of it at least. “You sounded a lot older in your email.”
I shrug and extend my arm a little farther. Take the money, Becki, I want to say, before I ask you what you need it for. Because the man in the car does look pretty itchy; unfixed. I know that look. I’d know it anywhere, on anyone. I could see it in the dark.
Becki rubs her swollen belly and moves a little closer.
“Your mama know you’re out here?” she asks and I settle on a shrug, which seems to satisfy her until suddenly it doesn’t anymore. She frowns, looking me up and down. “No, she don’t. Why’d she let you come out here all alone to buy a car?”
It’s not a question I can shake, nod, or shrug to. I lick my lips and steel myself for the fight. I have a knife, I want to tell the thing that likes to wrap its hands around my voice.
“My m-mom’s d-d-d—”
The more I d-d-d the redder her face gets, the less she knows where to look. Not at me, not directly in my eyes. My throat feels tight, too tight, choked, and the only way I can free myself is if I stop attempting to connect the letters altogether. No matter how hard I try in front of Becki, they’ll never connect. I’m only fluent when I’m alone.
“—ead.”
The stutter’s hold loosens.