Out in the world, I am lost. I am less and less every year, but inside your voice, inside your stories, I am a hero, I am a solver of problems, I am a saver of women everywhere. I am a saver of myself. I am home. You are my home.
I have every episode of your podcast downloaded on my phone, and I fall asleep to the sound of your voice, Episode 7: The trees out here feel like they’re alive. I can’t really explain it. You have to experience it for yourself. This place is just . . . You sigh. Crazy.
And then you tell me about the missing Missy Schubert. How she danced. Where is she dancing now?
Episode 9:
The Wrong Place at the Wrong Time
Daisy Queen showed up at the main house at twelve forty-five for a one o’clock appointment, to sell LuLaRoe. Samples of her blood were found on six pairs of leggings and eight perfect tanks.
I wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of voices arguing. They could be miles away or right behind me. The voices could have filtered out from my dreams, which are amplified by the unnatural dark. I grasp for my phone, forgetting I’m not on my bed and then remembering, when the uneven springs coil and retract beneath me. The stink of the place is so full in my nostrils that my temples ache. I try to concentrate on the words but I can’t decipher them. I hear a feral whoop, like someone challenging the dark; then a motor roars and zooms away. I finally find my phone trapped in a tangle of quilt between my legs.
3:37 a.m.
I make a note of it like it might come into play later. She heard a car stop outside at three thirty-seven a.m. She arrived at three thirty-seven p.m., and she heard arguing at three thirty-seven a.m. Like life is a pattern that can be mapped.
I lie on my back in the dark; the only sound is the rodents tickling the wood. I was dreaming about an argument too. Me and my ex-husband. What was it about? My muscles seize as I remember.
I feel like I have no purpose.
If you’d had the baby, you’d have a purpose.
The baby died. In the dream. Why do I have to dream about that? Isn’t it bad enough that it really happened?
The ranch goes quiet—the rodents even stop tickling the wood—and I’m left wondering if the voices were ever really there to begin with.
* * *
—
It’s just after six. The morning light reveals that the quilt is dirty, the mattress stained. The stink of rat shit is so strong that as soon as I fight my way out of the covers, I open every window, shredding the spiderwebs, mowing down the bug carcasses trapped in the runners.
It’s cold but I’m driven out by hunger. I have half a bag of Cheetos in my car and another jacket, a pair of gloves. I couldn’t bring anything else with me. I didn’t plan ahead. Even as I got into my car early yesterday morning, I thought I would turn back around, realize all this was crazy, that I belonged somewhere, after all.
I spent most of the past year in my bedroom. I was tired. Tired of going out. Tired of Tinder dates once I realized it was a sex app. Tired of meeting up with old friends who couldn’t get babysitters, so it was me watching their kids or me watching them watch their kids, phone calls for which they couldn’t get away, so they actually seemed annoyed that I wanted to talk to them. So we had nothing in common anymore, so the person I once knew was now just so relieved to have escaped themselves, to have moved on to something better, the magnitude of which I could never imagine, the power they feel in looking at a small version of themselves that they made.
You never wanted kids. Never. You just didn’t understand it. How could you bring kids into a world like this? you said. Where there is evil everywhere?
I spent the past year obsessively checking my favorite true-crime forums for six, eight, ten (fourteen?) hours a day, watching unsolved-crime episodes on YouTube, reading case files and finally listening to you over and over until I was hypnotized, pulled by your magnetism into your world, so immersed that it seemed only natural, it felt only right, that I should cross over into it, into the place that you swore I couldn’t understand unless I experienced it.
I had always wondered what would happen if I disappeared. If I just kept driving. What if it was my choice? Instead of just allowing myself to vanish, day by day, year by year, what if I drove toward it, into the vanishing point at the end of the world, to a place where people went to disappear?
I stepped on the gas, and I drove onto the twisty roads, into the isolation, the loneliness of my greatest, most inevitable fear. I drove toward you.
The air outside the cabin has the exquisite, uncontained cold of the true outdoors. There are no warm pockets, no artificial respite. It soothes my aching fingers. I open my car door with care, even though your mother’s house is on the other side of the ranch. I know that sound travels mysteriously out here. I wrestle a fleece-lined denim jacket from the back of my car. It was my ex-husband’s, and it’s roomy and smells of nothing, the way he did. I find hiking gloves and the bag of Cheetos. A horse nickers.
I have less than an hour before I’m supposed to meet your mother, and I plan to use it. I will find your yellow house. I start down the main thoroughfare, moving away from your mother’s house, away from the entrance, toward Jed’s house and the far edge of the ranch. A thin wisp of trail shoots off through the trees past the miniature train tracks, and I take that, thinking I will not be seen.
The trail is overgrown, scattered with rocks and wet with dew. Beside me the land drops in a sheer cliff to the highway below. I pass by an empty field, and then I reach Jed’s house. There the trail dives down the cliff in switchbacks.
I stop. There is a good sitting rock at the point of the cliff, the kind of place people go to think, gaze through the trees and across the highway, where the wide brown Klamath winds through the mountains. I sit down on the rock. There are cigarette butts scattered in a circle like a tribal stamp, glossed with spitting tobacco. I eat my Cheetos with my eyes fixed on the river.
Where is your yellow house?
I finish my Cheetos, stuff the empty bag in my coat pocket to throw away later. Then I take a deep breath and head down the trail. A creek runs through the bottom of the valley, bringing a primordial greenness, so it looks Jurassic, Irish, always in bloom.
When I first notice the smell, I think I am imagining it. At first, it’s an undercurrent, like a rat in a trap, but recognition is instinctual. It’s a smell you know without anyone having to tell you what it is; it’s the smell of death.
Episode 62: She walked into the kitchen and her sister was on the floor.
Episode 18: She found the body.
Episode 43: They were hidden in the walls, stuffed in garbage bags, hidden in the closet.
Episode 33: Their bones were buried in the garden.
I hear your story, in your voice: She found her in the woods, like she was meant to find her all along. Murder, she spoke. And I’m thrilled-attending-terror.