By the time my pizza comes, the FBI agents have cleared out, leaving behind a mess for the girl behind the counter to tend to now that things have slowed down at the restaurant.
“What time do you guys close?” I ask her between bites when she comes to wipe down their table.
“Normally, an hour ago,” she smiles. “But things are a little out of whack right now. Owner wants us to be good hosts for the out-of-town folks. Like you,” she adds the last with a bitter smile that indicates she’d rather be spending her Saturday night anywhere but here. I have news for her: there isn’t anywhere else to be in this town.
I don’t return her smile. Instead, I hurry to finish my pizza and wipe my hands on my jeans. It’s a habit that my mother has tried to break time and again well into my adult years. It’s a hanger-on from childhood that I think a therapist might have a field day with. Something about comfort, I suppose. Or maybe control. I’m big on control.
I clear out of the restaurant not long after finishing my pizza. I leave a tip on the table and walk back across the street to the Cactus Flower. The sun has officially sunk below the horizon, blanketing the little town in a darkness that I’ve never known in the city. There are still streetlights to pollute the sky, but not by much. I wonder what it would be like to be somewhere without any light pollution at all. And I know that the following night, I’ll get my chance to find out.
The neon of the sign that now reads NO VACANCY hums like a bug zapper. A car rolls past on the main drag and I turn back to look at the little town one more time. I wonder what it would feel like to have your world flipped upside down by something like what happened out at Revelation Ranch. The name itself is so absurd to me. Something only someone with Tom’s level of delusion could come up with. And something tells me that his self-aggrandizement has only worsened in the time since I’d cut him out of my life like a cancerous growth.
I walk, eyes up and hands on my keys, back to my room. I make sure to look around before looking down to unlock the door. Once inside, I bolt the lock and secure the additional chain mechanism. Something about the place, however quaint, gives me the creeps. It reminds me of every motel I’ve ever seen featured on an episode of Forensic Files. Something that Wes used to call murder porn.
The thought of Wes stings like alcohol poured into a wound. But maybe, if I keep pouring it on, eventually it will burn away all the remaining nerve endings and the burning will stop. I can’t help but think about Wes. I feel like he was right about me. I’m a leaver. I run at the slightest provocation. Here I am, running again. Except, I remind myself, this time, I’m running to something.
If true crime is murder porn, I’m about to make my film debut.
IONE
7 YEARS AGO
Early fall of that year was still unseasonably hot enough that all I needed was a light cardigan. The cold had tried to come in and had been banished back once more by a warm front toward the end of the month. Oklahoma had the unpredictable mood of a teenager when it came to the temperature. Anyone living in the state for more than a year could tell you if you didn’t like the weather, stick around a few minutes, it’d change.
The combination of the sixty-nine-degree air and the pools of fallen leaves unsettled me. It didn’t seem right. Something seemed off the night of the last party that I attended at Tom’s house.
As I got ready that night, the voice I’d worked so hard to quiet during the weeks of our affair had refused to be silenced any longer. Don’t go, it whispered as I threaded an earring through a much-neglected ear lobe piercing. I stopped and looked at myself in the mirror, almost certain that I’d heard the voice just next to me. But I was alone.
Birdie had stopped attending the parties and we’d stopped hanging out quite so often. The two of us knew that my affair with Tom had created a rift between us, but neither of us was willing to budge an inch on the ground that we held: her that I was in the wrong, and me, that I’d fallen in love.
So, I hushed that voice. The one that had fought so hard to make it back to the surface after months and years of conditioning it to be quiet. That ever-present voice that every woman knows. Her intuition—her gut—that tells her when something just isn’t quite right. Instead of listening, I got in my car and drove over to the west side of campus where castle Wolsieffer stood.
I walked down the block and approached a woman walking her dog. I stepped to the side as I passed her, treading on someone’s lawn. I smiled and she smiled back. I noticed she was visibly pregnant, and I entertained an irrational thought: what if one day I had a baby? Tom’s baby, to be more specific. It horrified and thrilled me. I wasn’t ready to be a mother by any stretch of the imagination, or sure that I even wanted that. But infatuation disguised as love seeds some incredible thoughts into the fields of your mind. Sometimes they sprout up in the most unexpected ways.
I turned up the walk to the house and entered the backyard as Tom had told me I could. It was the way I came and went when we met up there some nights when his wife, Vanessa, was working late. He left the patio door unlocked for me on those nights and sometimes I wondered
