Том Светерлич - The Gone World

“What else have you learned?”

“Your supervisor forwarded me a fax about Mursult from the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis,” said Brock. “Broad strokes about him, redactions. Navy SEAL in the late seventies. Served with the Naval Space Command since the early eighties. Petty officer first class, but his record stops in 1983. Turns out this guy has been living off the grid, everything under his wife’s name. His official status is missing in action.”

Moss thought, A sailor living off the grid— an NSC sailor MIA. A sailor lost to Deep Waters was a tragedy, but a sailor presumed lost suddenly appearing like this, living off the grid, was a national security threat. “We need to locate him immediately.”

“Can we find out anything more definitive about this guy?” said Brock.

“I’ll be working with my director, but NCIS is a civilian agency,” said Moss. “I have top-secret clearance, same as you, but information about Deep Waters is on a need-to-know basis, compartmented. We can only work with what the Navy tells us.”

Brock spit his gum into its wrapper, flicked the wad into the wastebasket. “Let’s focus on what we know,” he said. “The actor woke his victims, gathered them together in the family room before attacking them.”

“With what?” asked Moss.

“An ax,” said Brock.

She imagined the woman and boy kneeling—the wet thwack, pulling the ax free and swinging again. The annihilation of the family as simple as splitting wood.

“Any reason to doubt Patrick Mursult did this?” she asked.

“None,” said Brock. “But he might have had someone with him. The neighbor who called 911 mentioned a friend of his, a guy who drives a red pickup truck, West Virginia plates. We’re focusing on the truck, trying to find this individual. She described him as a nuisance, often blocked her driveway. The truck’s covered in bumper stickers. Let’s take a look upstairs.”

Moss followed Brock from the den. He ducked a line of police tape, led her upstairs, a climb she’d made countless times trailing Courtney, whose room had been the first on the right. The twisting metal railing seemed to spin against her palm, a familiar feeling. Self-conscious climbing stairs now, the movement of her prosthesis vaguely stop-motion, motorized. Brock paused at the top stair, watched Moss climb—he seemed to be spotting her, almost ready to try to catch her if she were to rock backward or fall. Moss had grown weary at these moments of awkwardness, when people first realized they were working with an amputee, trying to puzzle out how they should treat her.

“What happened up here?” she asked.

“His seven-year-old daughter, Jessica, escaped the initial attack,” said Brock. “Ran in here.”

Courtney’s room. Brock put his hand on the doorknob. “I have two daughters,” he said. “Two beautiful girls…”

He opened the door, let Moss through—returning to this room felt like curling back into a cocoon. She remembered coating these walls a pink called Bubblegum sixth-grade summer, slopping the roller from the tray, Courtney yelping whenever paint glopped from the ceiling into her black curls. She remembered puffing cigarette smoke through the window screen in the summer swelter, AC/DC on the turntable, Powerage until the record was scratched and couldn’t play past the first few seconds of “What’s Next to the Moon.” The room was lavender now, with a white dresser and a bunk bed—the Mursult girls must have shared this room. Zeppelin and Van Halen had been replaced with DiCaprio, Romeo + Juliet , but the room felt the same . Jessica Mursult’s body was in the corner, near where Courtney’s bed had been. The girl’s nightshirt was shredded, her back gouged with a deep cut between her shoulder blades that flayed out like gaping lips.

Poor girl. Poor girl…

“Are you all right?” asked Brock.

“Where are their nails?” asked Moss, her focus watery but noticing that the girl’s fingernails and toenails had been removed as well.

“You’ve gone pale,” he said. “Do you need to sit down?”

“I’m all right—”

She wavered, Brock steadied her, a hand on her back. “Thank you,” she said, though still unmoored. A heat of embarrassment flashed through her. Pull it together , she thought. “I’m… I don’t know what’s wrong,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

Brock shepherded her from the bedroom into the hall. “Listen,” he said, shutting the bedroom door, “a scene like this is hard for anyone to take, let alone if you aren’t used to it. It’s all right if you’re a little weak in the knees.”

“I have to tell you something,” she said. “This is… I’m having some trouble tonight, this is uncanny. I know this house.”

“Go on.”

“I grew up around here,” said Moss. “I practically lived in this house when I was a kid. My best friend lived here. Courtney. Her name was Courtney Gimm. This was her room. I spent a lot of time in this room. Her bed was right over there.”

“No shit,” said Brock.

“I’m unnerved by this, but I’m all right,” said Moss. “When Nestor called and said the crime scene was on Cricketwood Court…”

She steadied herself against the wall—touching the wall, she felt like she could tear this present world away and see her friend again, be with her friend as if no time had passed, as if she could step into the old bedroom, the gone world. Slap bracelets and jelly shoes, colored bands in Courtney’s braces.

“We used to hang out in the woods behind these houses,” said Moss. “We’d share cigarettes back there.”

Sunbathing on lawn chairs, sharing High Life. Courtney’s dad worked night shifts, so they had this place to themselves, her mom living up in Pittsburgh with her boyfriend. Pot some nights when Courtney could score, but most nights just staying up too late watching TV—school the next morning with bloodshot eyes. They partied with the other girls on the track team some nights. Neighborhood boys some nights. Some nights Courtney and Moss and whatever boys they’d picked up at the mall would get high and drink and fool around while Letterman played, nothing too serious, just petting and kissing and hand jobs, late nights ending with the smell of hand soap and semen.

“Christ, I lost my virginity in the room down the hall,” she said. Courtney’s brother, Davy Gimm—she could see his face as clearly as if she’d been with him just yesterday. A senior when she was a sophomore, when he took fistfuls of Moss’s hair and kissed her, when he ran his hands under her shirt and unbuttoned his jeans and placed her hands on him. Hardening in her hands. Feeling his weight press on her and feeling him push into her. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”

“Let’s get some fresh air,” said Brock. “Can you make it down the stairs?”

“I’ll be fine,” she said. “I’ll be down in a moment.”

Her first night with Davy Gimm had been in the small bedroom at the end of the hall, more of a closet or nursery than a proper third bedroom. Knives that Davy Gimm had bought from flea markets, she remembered, a poster of Christie Brinkley from Sports Illustrated . Lying on the creaking twin bed, his eager fingers searching beneath the elastic of her shorts, his wet breath heavy on her neck. Remembering the sound of his sleeping, lying awake as moonlight crawled across the swimsuit model.

Moss waited until she heard Brock’s voice from downstairs before she opened Davy Gimm’s old bedroom door—stepping into his room was like stepping into the cosmos, star clusters and the constellations of the zodiac bursting from the infinite darkness. She flipped on the light switch—maybe a part of her expected to see the swimsuit poster and the collection of knives, but she found the room of a little boy instead, walls covered with glow-in-the-dark star stickers. Foolish, regretting what she’d confessed to Brock—realizing she should have just kept her mouth shut, that she shouldn’t have mentioned anything about this house at all. Unprofessional, a moment of weakness. She saw the room not as it had been but for what it was: the room of a dead child.