If Detective Culverson were here, he would do a quiet, focused reenactment—walk it through, play all the parts. The girl was splayed out, facedown, pointing westward. Which means she was running from this direction, tripped here perhaps—fell forward this way. I pantomime her last desperate running steps, throw my hands forward like Superman. Imagine falling and landing, do it again, falling and landing, sensing behind me the shadowy form of my pursuer, knife in hand, bearing down.
There are plenty of distinct footprints in the thick mud of the clearing, but they’re from two hours ago, from us: the squared-off heel of my traveling Doc Martens, the wedge of Cortez’s cowboy boots. I can even see the circuitous routes of Houdini’s paw prints, dancing circles around the scene. But the ground around the girl is an indistinct mush of scuff marks, ambiguous indentations, ground-down leaves and clots of mud. Black traces in the surrounding brown. All signs of the assailant buried or washed away from the crime scene by the wet weather of the past two days.
I trudge back through the woods to the station, emerge onto the gravelly driveway that horseshoes through what was once a neat municipal lawn and is now an ugly field. Uneven beds of zinnias surrounded by overgrown grass like an advancing army. In the center of the lawn are two flagpoles, two flags rustling listlessly in the light rain: the United States of America, the state of Ohio. I search as carefully as I can through the lawn, dividing it into a grid in my mind and moving through sector by sector. I find things that might be clues and might not be: a mound of peanut shells, a tangled half-foot length of twine. In a sector just north of the Ohio state flag I find three evenly spaced divots in the mud that look to have been left by tent poles.
When I’ve completed the grid I stand for a long time under the flags with my hands on my hips, rain in my eyes like tears, rain dribbling down my nose and chin. There is a level of tiredness where your body feels tender, like a bruise. Your throat hurts; your eyes sting. The hunger intensifies it—you feel shriveled, sort of, bent, burnt, hardened. Like the crust of something, the rind.
Budgeted for today I’ve got three little bags of the honey-roasted peanuts, plus a green apple from a basket we took from a Residence Inn in Penfield. I eat one of the apples rapidly, like a horse. I almost eat one of the bags of peanuts and then I decide to save it for later.
Two overlapping trails of blood; two passages down the corridor; one going out and one coming back.
Lily is attacked inside the kitchenette. She runs, blood singing out of her neck, perpetrator chasing after, and manages to lose him in the woods. Collapses in the clearing where we found her. Assailant goes back inside, blood still dripping off his three knives. Hangs them up and disappears.
Disappears, though, what does that mean? It means he goes underground. Through the hole in the floor of the garage.
Right? Detective Palace, isn’t that right?
Right, except how does the determined and murderous perpetrator fail to track down a defenseless, hundred-pound girl, stumbling through the woods and bleeding from the neck?
Right—except why, and how, is he juggling three knives?
I stare up at the sky and clench my teeth and fight back a fresh wave of panic and guilt and desperation because I will probably never know. This mystery, along with my sister’s, will remain unsolved forever. It is the right place, the police station in Rotary, Ohio, it’s the right place but now it’s the wrong time, we’re too late, we didn’t get here in time to stop this girl from being attacked and we didn’t get here in time to stop my sister from slipping down through the earth and away. My fault. All my fault.
I rub my forehead with the heel of my hand, staring at the edge of the station lawn where it becomes the woods, seeing her, our nameless sleeping girl, racing through the darkness, hand clutched at her throat, trying to scream, unable, blood exploding from her wound.
*
It was not a trap after all. There really was a small-town zoo and these two well-meaning foolish teenagers really had freed the animals and the girl’s brother really was now trapped by a tiger. This was in early September, about two weeks ago, sixteen days maybe, halfway through our tortuous journey. Seneca Falls was a gray town, uneasy calm, people out in the streets, some armed, some not armed, some in groups and some alone, everybody grave and on edge. Ten miles out of town is where we spotted the girl waving her arms, and we put her in the golf cart and drove at top speed, shivering and jolting over back roads to this tiny zoo and there he was, tank top, jean shorts, barely sixteen and scared out of his head, quavering out on a top branch, his fidgeting weight bending the branch low to where the animal was snarling up at him. Mangy coat stretched thin over the rickety ribs.
“What are we going to do?” said the girl, and I said, “Well—” and Cortez brought down the animal with one shotgun blast in the center of the nearer flank. The boy yelped and dropped out of the tree into the dirt, beside the dead animal. Gore and steam rising out of its exploded orange side. Cortez jammed his gun away and looked at me and said, “Can we go now?”
“Wait, wait,” the sister said, rushing after us as we clambered into the golf cart. “What are we supposed to do now?”