The Backwoods

“Well, now you can see what happened to him over those years.”

“I guess I knew something was wrong—I couldn’t imagine he’d gotten involved with drug people. He wasn’t the type.”

“There isn’t a type. It can happen to anyone. You experiment with something like this, think, ‘Oh, I’ll just do it once to see what it’s like.’ Then you’re never the same. We’re pretty sure Ernie Gooder was the person who burned down the docks two nights ago.”

“What time did you say the fire occurred?”

?Three thirty.”

Patricia smirked. “He was peeping in my window around quarter after.”

“Really?” Shannon said. “You’re lucky that all he did was peep. Anyway, it’s obvious what’s going on out here—a meth war between two gangs. Ernie and some of these other locals are in one gang, and a bunch of these Squatters are in the other. And now they’re duking it out. It might seem impossible for a place like this, but like I said, the same thing’s happening all over the state.” Shannon shrugged. “Chief Sutter being missing doesn’t look good either.”

“So you think he’s involved with drugs?”

?A cop, especially a police chief, is the kind of power person any dope gang will pay to work for them and protect their runs. You wouldn’t believe the kind of money a crooked cop can make.”

“Is that what you really think? That Chief Sutter is working with a drug gang?”

“It’s either that or he got killed trying to make a bust. A police chief doesn’t just disappear. ?

Even in her civilian naivete, Patricia was coming to grips with Sergeant Shannon’s suspicions.

The heat was steepening, the humidity drawing beads of sweat on her brow.

“And I’m sorry I’m the one to tell you this, but I’m sure you’ve already considered it anyway,” Shannon told her. “There’s a pretty big chance that your sister was involved in some of this too. She’s also missing. There’s a good chance—?

“I know, Sergeant.” Patricia faced the facts. “My sister’s probably dead. Her body’s probably lying in the woods somewhere.”

Shannon didn’t say anything after that.

When he went back on his rounds, Patricia headed back toward town. She drove aimlessly, cranking the air- conditioning up. What am I thinking? she asked herself. That I’m just going to see Judy walking down the road? She’s going to wave to me, with a big smile? She knew that wasn’t going to happen.

She drove through more of the town proper, and then the outskirts. I’ve never seen anything like this, she thought; Agan’s Point looked abandoned, evacuated. Not even one person out walking their dog . . . When she pulled into the Qwik-Mart, she found the little parking lot empty, noticed no one in the store, then spotted the SORRY, WE’RE CLOSED sign.

Hours passed without her notice. Patricia tried to keep her mind off what was becoming the greatest likelihood. Eventually, she forced herself to admit why she was driving so pointlessly.

I don’t want to go back to the house.

The comfortable old house she’d been raised in now seemed utterly haunted, not just by her dour parents but by murdered people she didn’t know, and by Judy, by Ernie, by every dim, sad memory, and as she pulled up the long cul-de-sac out front, those memories massed and urged her away. She drove to the southern end of the Point. . . .

Where the town looked evacuated; the tract of land that comprised Squatterville looked evacuating. It’s a mass exodus now, she saw. She wondered how many Squatters actually had been involved in drugs. Just those few? Or had the Squatters become a secret drug culture of their own?

We’ll never know. They’re all leaving now.

In small salvos they trudged up the hill and away, beaten suitcases and sacks of possessions in tow; Patricia thought of refugees leaving a bombed city. Where they go next is anybody’s guess, and it’s not like anyone cares anyway. . . .

The sun was sinking. Patricia drove the loop around the crab-picking house and then winced at the burned pier. The boathouse had been reduced to cinders, while the boats that had been burned had been moored ashore, the hulls like blackened husks. She could still smell the char in the air, thick as the cicada trills.

Out in the bay she saw the pale wood plank sticking up: the Squatter graffiti, their good-luck sign. The plank appeared to overlook the ruined docks, a symbol now of the clan’s bad fortune, not good fortune.

The inevitable approached quickly, like a beast running down a fawn. The sun had now been replaced by a fat yellow moon that stalked her back to the dark house.

She parked the Cadillac out front, then sat for several minutes staring, the engine ticking beneath the hood. I don’t want to go in. There’s nobody there anymore.

She trudged up the steps, frowning at the odd door knocker that was a half-formed face. The fantasy beckoned her: that she would walk in, smell homemade biscuits baking, and Judy would look up from the oven and explain where she’d been the last two days, and it would all be so innocent, and they’d laugh and hug and everything would be okay again.

Patricia’s hands were shaking when she entered and crossed the foyer. Darkness saturated the house. She walked around downstairs, wide-eyed, snapping on lights, but the illumination she sought only made the house feel bigger . . . and emptier. Her feet took her listlessly to the kitchen and no, the air didn’t smell of biscuits; it smelled sterile, lifeless. Instinct urged her to call out for Judy, but she didn’t bother.

Her sister wasn’t here, and probably never would be again.

She checked the answering machine. Had anyone called? Had the police left a message to relate that Judy had been found, had been rushed to the hospital for an appendectomy or something, and was recovering now and waiting for her?

“You have . . . zero . . . messages,” the machine’s generic voice told her.

She turned and went to the refrigerator for some juice, but her hand froze in midair. A strawberry magnet held a note to the door—Things to get: flour, milk, eggs, coffee—a shopping list in Judy’s unruly scrawl. Patricia stared at the list and began to cry.

She wore her clothes to bed, too unsettled to undress. The bedroom window stared at her. It was locked now, its curtains drawn, but just knowing what Ernie had been doing on the other side of it several nights ago gave her a grim fright. A dead man’s sperm is on my windowsill, she thought absurdly. Just a few feet away . . . The notion knotted her stomach. She could go sleep in another room, but that idea distressed her as well. Which room would she take? Ernie’s? Her sister’s? Or what about her parents’ old room upstairs? No, they were all chock-full of ghosts now.

She stared up at the ceiling, at the room’s grainy darkness. Were faces forming in the grains? The window, the window, part of her mind kept whispering to her.

There’s nothing there, so forget about it and go to sleep! she shouted back at herself, but she couldn’t take solace even in her own sense of reason. Eventually she threw back the sheets, sighed to herself, and pulled back the curtain.

See. No one there. No peeping Toms, no monsters. Beyond the glass the yard looked normal, sedate. Night flowers in the expansive garden opened their petals to the night. The moon had risen higher now and turned white, flooding the backyard with a tranquil glow. There was nothing out of the ordinary for her to see.

Back under the covers, she curled into a ball. Did she hear the hall clock ticking? The house frame creaked a few times, causing her to flinch. Please, Judy. Please come home. Please be okay, she prayed, drifting off.

The maw of a nightmare opened wide. She was in the same room, in the same grainy darkness and on the same bed, only naked now, splayed. Moonlight flooded the room and, in turn, her bare flesh. It painted her in a translucent lambency: bright, sharp-white skin, the rim of her navel a shadow dark as black ink. Her legs were spread to the window, her furred sex shamefully bared.

She couldn’t close her legs for the life of her.