Том Светерлич - The Gone World

Atelephone ringing. The tone of her cell on her nightstand.

“Hello?” she said.

“This is Brock.”

Red digits hovering in the dark, 2:47.

“One of our guys just called about the pager you and Nestor recovered at Elric Fleece’s residence,” said Brock. “Figured something out.”

“Tell me.”

“We found saved pages. No phone numbers, only codes. We haven’t figured out what most of the codes are, but we did find a few that repeated—143 and 607. My guys tell me codes like these are shorthand for ‘I love you’ or ‘I miss you,’ things like that. Teenagers use them.”

Mursult and the woman in the Polaroid photographs scheduling times to meet, maybe using codes learned from his daughters.

“Having an affair,” said Moss. “There were twenty-four pictures of a woman.”

“We checked Mursult’s home-phone records against the pager and found a correlation,” said Brock. “Several times when the pager received the code 22, he placed a call to the Blackwater Falls Lodge, down in Tucker County.”

Blackwater Gorge was familiar—a section of the massive Monongahela National Forest, touristy and accessible because of the stunning waterfalls like pearls on the string of the Blackwater River. Moss had once stayed for a week in the lodge, exploring the miles of trails through the gorge, grueling treks with her prosthesis over uneven terrain, searching the Red Run branch of the Dry Fork River where she had been rescued from her near death in the Terminus. She had looked for the part of the river where she had hanged, had searched for the ashen tree she remembered, the burnt-white tree that had seemed to repeat, but she never found the site of her crucifixion. She’d returned to the cabins around Blackwater Falls often in her summers, losing herself on the trails, gazing for hours at the crashing eddies and whirlpools of the Elakala Falls—reminding herself of the beauty of the world, when it was so easy for her to remember this landscape as desolation and ice.

“That lodge is a few hours from here, but would be a good place to meet someone,” she said. “Romantic, remote.”

“Mursult called the lodge dozens of times, twice in the last month,” said Brock. “I called over to the lodge, but the clerk didn’t have records for anyone named Patrick Mursult. I’ll call the Tucker County Sheriff’s Department first thing in the morning, see if they can send someone out.”

“I’ll head over,” said Moss, doubtful she’d be able to get back to sleep. “I’m in Canonsburg. I can make it out there. I need to head home out that way.”

Her mother snoring from across the hall. Moss crept downstairs, feeling like a teenager again, sneaking out in the middle of the night—she remembered which stairs creaked, knew where to put her weight to stay silent. She brewed a pot of coffee in the kitchen, splashed water on her face to wake up. Marian Mursult was three days gone, last seen this past Friday; Monday morning would dawn in just a few hours. A bottle of aspirin above the sink—Moss took the pills with coffee. She drove the dead-hour interstates, Canonsburg to 79 South, West Virginia, allowing images to swirl in her mind, glom together, the Challenger in the immensity of the sky, a ship for the dead built of fingernails, the forest in winter. The interstate was a river of asphalt illuminated by streetlamp light. She was aware that the mountains grew around her, but she couldn’t see them—they were gargantuan darkness, snuffing out the stars.

A serpentine cut through pinewoods that opened into a parking lot—only a sparse few cars parked here. The lodge was built like a longhouse, red-roofed, with an exposed-stone chimney stack crowning the front entrance. Moss made her way through the vacant lobby, a dropped ceiling and a cream tile floor, the front desk the color of natural cherrywood, everything bathed in garish fluorescence. Moss lingered for a few moments at the unattended front desk, peering behind the counter into an empty manager’s office.

“Hello?” she said.

The murmur of a distant television. She followed the sound around to the hotel bar, where varicolored liquors lined the mirror-backed shelves. A young woman sat alone, drinking coffee, looking over a Vogue piece about the Spice Girls. She was willowy, in knee socks and a skirt embroidered with a forest scene, deer and rabbits, wildflowers, her lip and eyebrow pierced with silver rings, her hair voluminous save for the shaved sides, dyed a jolting shade of electric blue.

“Excuse me,” said Moss.

“Sorry,” said the young woman. “I should be at the desk.”

“Are you in charge here?” asked Moss.

“Checking in?” she asked. “We should have rooms available.”

Maybe in her early twenties, just out of college, or maybe this was a student job. Fine features and dark, lovely eyes. Moss held out her identification.

“NCIS,” she said. “I’m wondering if you can answer a few questions for me, maybe help me out.”

“Are you, like, a cop?” the young woman asked.

“Naval Criminal Investigative Service,” said Moss. “I’m a federal agent investigating crimes relating to the Navy.”

That explanation often calmed people who might otherwise have feared becoming entangled in police business—NCIS something remote, harmless-seeming to people with no connection to the armed forces.

“Like the FBI?” she asked. “Someone just called here a little bit ago.”

“I’m not the FBI,” said Moss.

“I’ll see what I can do,” said the young woman. “I can serve alcohol, if you want a drink. Or coffee. I just brewed a fresh pot.”

“Coffee, thank you. I don’t normally keep these hours.”

“I feel like a vampire sometimes,” she said, heading behind the bar to pour Moss’s cup. She set out sugar and a carton of half-and-half. “Petal, by the way.”

“Petal?” said Moss. “That’s beautiful. Shannon.”

“Skeleton crew tonight,” said Petal. “Got the lobby to myself. More staff will show up closer to breakfast.”

“You work here regularly?” asked Moss.

“Most nights,” said Petal. “Two nights off a week, not necessarily together. Hard to plan a life with no real weekends. And it’s boring. I’m glad you showed up, gives me something to do.”

“Do you know someone named Marian Mursult? Or Patrick Mursult?” asked Moss.

“They aren’t familiar names,” she said.

“I believe Patrick Mursult may have stayed here frequently,” said Moss. “What kind of information do you keep on file about your guests?”

“Basic stuff,” said Petal. “Name, how many people are checking in. That sort of thing. Credit-card number, unless they pay with cash.”

“Phone calls from the room? Incidental costs, damages?”

“Sure,” said Petal.

Moss showed Petal a photograph of Mursult. “Do you recognize him?” she asked.

Petal scrutinized the picture. “No,” she said. “But I don’t have a lot of contact with our guests at my hours. Most people check in before I’m here, check out after I leave—and most of the time they’re out through the forest, hiking. I see people occasionally at breakfast if I stick around to eat.”

“I have dates this man would have stayed here over the past year or so,” said Moss, “and the phone number he used to make the reservations.”

“The phone number wouldn’t be much help,” said Petal. “The dates, though—we could try to cross-check by date.”

“You can run a search like that on the computer?”

“Oh, no,” said Petal. “Our computer system is nonexistent. Ever play Memory?”

They set up in the lounge on either side of a glass table, sitting by a fire that Petal had kindled in the stone fireplace, several file folders arranged between them by date. Each folder contained a stack of receipts from past occupants, some handwritten—Moss started with the lightest folder, flipping through names, credit-card numbers, room numbers—information blurring together as she read. No “Patrick Mursult.”