I didn’t really have a sense of what sort of pay scale a true crime writer could expect, but the job seemed to have panned out all right for Gage. Two bedrooms, a big living room with stone walls and redwood beams, and a backyard with a firepit. The movies buy this or do they pay writers better than I think? I said, kidding a little but also a little jealous. It was a nice place.
He laughed. Well, he said, I got this between booms, I guess, anyway it wasn’t worth as much then as it is now, property’s nowhere near as expensive here as it is in the city, but you’re right, I do all right, they start cutting you bigger checks after you write a book that gets made into a movie, for sure, that’s where the real money is, those guys get to call their own shots.
Still, I said, California real estate, the way I understand it there isn’t really any cheap California real estate.
He sat down in one of his modern but comfortable-looking chairs and gestured for me to do the same. Yeah, that’s about right, he said, on my beat people tend to stay close to home base, it’s like there’s a home field advantage to keeping your focus on places you already know a little. I got lucky with this place and my agent gets me pretty decent advances, we’ll see if that trend continues if we ever come to an agreement about the monster over there. He pointed at his desk, nestled up against a window that looked out onto his backyard. Atop it were big piles of paper—printouts, it looked like—and several mini-towers of bulging manila envelopes stacked four or five high.
The monster, I said.
The thing I’ve been working on, he said, it’s a whole thing, I’m at sixes and sevens, really, I was kind of hoping to talk to you about it, maybe get a, you know, second opinion. He made quotation marks in the air when he said “second opinion”; they drew me in.
I don’t know if I’m really qualified, I said, but I’m curious.
Who’s not qualified, he said, his tone still suggesting some familiarity I didn’t yet share. I ought to have felt suspicious, I guess, but either I’m not sufficiently guarded about things, or Gage’s disarming demeanor had a way of preempting my defenses. You want to go get a pizza?
Sure, show me to the bathroom first, I want to splash some water on my face, I said; and, washing my hands, I looked at my face in the mirror, trying to take stock of where I was and what was going on, enjoying an odd feeling of being, by virtue of Gage’s vague remarks and gesticulations, implicated in something.
5.
IT’S WEIRD, GAGE SAID, all these memories you have of Milpitas are specific to a time that’s ten-plus years before most of the stuff I know about, the stuff that’s my field, right, and here he laughed. The field of Where’d They Hide the Bodies, right? We were at a pizza place, the spot our friends usually picked for birthday parties when we were kids: it was largely unchanged.
But your memories are entirely firsthand, he said, firmly planted on actual ground, you know. My Milpitas is a combination of news footage, and stories in newspapers, magazines, secondary sources, right, and the time I ended up spending there gets sort of superimposed on top of all that, or maybe the previous time gets overlaid onto mine; but anyhow, it’s a sort of stereoscopic image that never fully resolves: and then there’s you, and there’s no way you knew I was writing anything about any of this when you just sent me a postcard out the blue, right?
No, I said, as I say, I did read The White Witch several times, there are so many things in there that feel so ancient to me, I don’t know if I can explain it—like, things I know are real but feel like they come from a different world, a world I can vouch for because I lived there, too, am I making sense?
Ah, that’s great, he said, thanks, like what stuff specifically? Just San Luis Obispo stuff?
Sure, yes, I said, but for example the witchy stuff, the astrology booklet she buys at Jordano’s: hand to God, my mom bought stuff like that at that same Jordano’s, my mom wasn’t especially witchy but it was sort of in the air back then; and so when I first read that, it was like I could hear the buzz of the lighting in the grocery store, the specific hum, it was wild.
Oh, for sure, he said, the lost age, the more books I write, the more I notice how almost everything takes place in the lost age, the window just shifts, it’s sort of disturbing at first but then it’s kind of liberating.
I’m not sure I follow you, I said.
Well, King Arthur, right, the king and his castle, les chevaliers de la Table ronde, the old magician training up the boy king, all the myth and legend, that all happens in some weird before-time, right? Which is both childhood and the Garden of Eden, do you follow me, lost ages, but over time either the lost age gets too found to persist, or the window shifts, some other age gets lost so that the unlost age can finally get a little room to breathe—
He must have seen my eyes clouding over, because his face assumed the gentle look of a teacher who knows his students won’t ever be as bright as he was when he was their age, and he said:
But just King Arthur, OK, let’s start there, we all know good King Arthur, right?
Sure.
Presumably a lot of kings before him, right?
Well, I said, this isn’t really my area, but—
Grant me that Arthur isn’t the first king.
Granted, I said.
Cool, he said. Now picture him on his throne, with his court, right, where does he live?
In the castle, I said.
In the castle, he said, which is a structure not imported into England until after the Norman conquest, which is, at the earliest, five hundred years after the death of the best candidate we have for the historical Arthur.
So, no castle, no king? I said.
No, no, that’s not the point of the lost age, he said. The point is that the king is still in his castle, but to you, he doesn’t look like what you mean by king, and his castle doesn’t look like a castle.
So what does it look like? I said.
It looks, he said, like a dirt mound somebody piled up in a real hurry overnight to protect a very small group of people from attack.
* * *
SO ANYWAY, THE MONSTER, HE SAID, I was going to tell you about the monster. The first thing was my editor, he’s got three names—here Gage shot me a conspiratorial look implying a shared Californian suspicion of old-money pretensions—he wrote and said he’d come across some news story. Multiple Murders in Milpitas.
Multiple Murders in Milpitas, I said.
Yeah, yeah, he said, fish in a barrel, right? and I remembered you, and that kind of fired my imagination a little, you know, the dreams of children or whatever, right? Lost age. So my editor sent me the story, and I read it, and he was absolutely right, it was directly up my alley, because it was tethered to a specific site, this shuttered porn store, and some kids had been in there, using it as a sort of clubhouse but also, like, as a house, some of them lived there, maybe. So it wasn’t just the place where something happened, it had its own history on top of that. Something about places, they speak to me.
They have an energy, I said.
That’s right, he said.
But this case, though, I said, this isn’t River’s Edge? I saw that movie.
No, no, he said, that’s actually part of what makes this one interesting, because it wasn’t all that long after the Conrad case, that was the River’s Edge vic, Marcy Renee Conrad, 1981. Also Milpitas, but different case.
Wow, yeah, I said, “vic,” that’s victim, right, I feel like I’m out of my depth.
Ah, everybody finds their depth eventually, he said. Our pizza arrived, steam rising from the bubbling cheese on top.
But this other one, he said, the one I’m presently in hot water about. It’s during the so-called Satanic Panic. What little coverage I could find was extremely lurid and sensational, the sort of thing you’d think everybody would have heard more about, especially the sort of thing I’d think I would have heard more about, being that whole field is my beat, right, but Ashton’s pitch was, “Move into the house,” so I—