Том Светерлич - The Gone World

She found Brock outside. The lawns of Cricketwood Court were touched with frost, crystals feathering the windshields of parked cars. An upstairs light in a neighboring unit had flipped on.

“Where was Marian through all this?” she asked. “Has anyone seen her?”

“All the neighbors know who she is, but she hasn’t been around,” said Brock. “Not since Friday. We’re waking friends and family, trying to track her down.”

“You mentioned that Mursult has a friend who drives a red pickup truck,” said Moss. “No one knows this guy?”

“No one,” said Brock. “Neighbors noticed the truck because it was often parked out on the street, but Mursult and his friend kept to themselves.”

“I think we should go ahead and create the Amber Alert,” said Moss.

“She might turn up,” said Brock. “She might be at a friend’s house. We’re checking everywhere.”

Amber Alerts were new, Moss reminded herself, not as familiar as they would become. “It will help us,” she said. “Someone might have seen her.”

Brock checked the illuminated dial of his watch. “Moss, your office is at CJIS, isn’t that right?” he said, pronouncing the abbreviation like the name “Jesus.” CJIS was the Criminal Justice Information Services building, the nerve center of the FBI—a newly minted campus, a crystalline oddity nestled in the middle-of-nowhere hills just outside Clarksburg, West Virginia. An FBI building, but without a Navy or Marine Corps installation in the region, Moss’s NCIS office was co-located there. “You live out that way?” he asked. “Out near Clarksburg?”

“That’s right.”

“My wife Rashonda’s at CJIS, in the print lab. Maybe you’ve crossed paths.”

“You’re Rashonda Brock’s husband?” Moss said. A few thousand with offices in the CJIS facility, but Rashonda Brock was well known, the deputy assistant director of the Laboratory Division. Moss’s office was near the facility’s day care, so although she had never met Brock’s wife, she saw Rashonda drop her daughters off most mornings, a flurry of kisses and hugs. “I think I’ve seen some of your kids’ paintings,” she said. “Brianna and Jasmine, right? Their name tags are hanging on a corkboard near my office. Purple dinosaurs—”

“Barney,” said Brock, smiling now, chuckling. “Everything’s Barney the dinosaur—Brianna’s room is covered with him.” Moss understood how Rashonda might fit together with Brock, Rashonda always radiant, a plump woman, tall—she must feel a warm sense of satisfaction whenever she drew laughter from this serious man.

“So you drove in from Clarksburg, thereabouts? That’s, what… an hour, an hour and a half from here?” he said, fishing out a key card from an envelope in his jacket pocket. He offered it to Moss. “We rented a block of rooms nearby—don’t make the trip home to Clarksburg tonight. You’ll need to be right back here tomorrow morning.”

“I’ll crash for a night,” she said, weighing the change in Brock’s demeanor. He’d softened since noticing her prosthesis, since mentioning his wife.

“Deep Waters,” he said, glancing skyward, though cloud cover occluded any chance of stars. “My boyhood dream was to be an astronaut. My grandparents took me to see a rocket launch at Cape Canaveral. It was the most beautiful sight I’d ever seen until my daughters were born.”

Moss had seen the flares of firelight streak across the dawn, rockets lifting and vanishing from view. “It’s always beautiful, every time,” she said.

“Get some sleep,” said Brock. “My team will continue through the night. Progress meeting at nine a.m. with everyone involved, and then we’ll do the presser.”

Adesire to put distance between herself and that house prickled her shoulders, her spine, as she pulled away from Cricketwood Court, from Hunting Creek. The hotel Brock had booked was a Best Western nearer to Washington, Pennsylvania, but before picking up 79 she looped through the parking lot of the Pizza Hut that edged Chartiers Creek. Courtney had been killed here, November of their sophomore year. The Pizza Hut was as it ever was, unchanged since the last time Moss had swung through here, a brick building with a Quonset hut roof, two dumpsters around back, blue dumpsters illuminated by Moss’s headlights. Courtney’s body had been left between those dumpsters. Moss counted hours—nearing thirty-three since Marian Mursult had last been seen. Marian was seventeen, Courtney had been sixteen when she died. Moss drove to the hotel, thinking of her dead friend, thinking of the missing girl. Fingernails and toenails missing from the bodies of the dead. Had Patrick Mursult killed his family? Where was he now?

Moss kept her go bag in the trunk, two changes of clothes and a toiletries kit, ready to travel at a moment’s notice. She undressed in her hotel room, removed her prosthesis, removed her liner—a whiff of moist, pungent sweat knocked her awake for a moment. The shower was tricky without safety bars, but once the water had warmed, she sat on the edge of the tub and swung her leg in, sliding down the porcelain to sit on the nonslip mat. Hot water streamed over her. She washed her hair, using the full complement of shampoo, tried to wash away the smells of putrescence and blood. Without her crutches or wheelchair, she hopped across the hotel carpeting before slipping between the bed’s crisp sheets, bundling into the comforter. With the blinds drawn and the lights out, the room was miraculously dark. Cold. She turned over to sleep but saw the bodies of women and children unspooling in great bloody arcs and flowering wounds. A rising disgust and hopelessness burned acidic in her throat. She thought of Marian— still alive, please still be alive —but she didn’t know what Marian looked like, so her imagination filled with the image of Courtney Gimm and her mind raced to ax blades biting through bone and wounds that opened like mouths. Clammy, tossing against the mattress and tangled in her sheets, the smell of her prosthesis liner wafting over from across the room, sour. She sat up and fumbled in the darkness for the remote control. The local channels were all reporting about the family killed in Washington County, just outside Canonsburg. Moss squinted as the growing television brightness stabbed her eyes—aerial shots of the neighborhood roofs and film of the sheriff’s blockade, the deputy with the Chaplinesque mustache hitching up his pants near the sawhorses.

The Amber Alert was first broadcast nearing 5:00 a.m. Marian Tricia Mursult, seventeen, of Canonsburg, Pennsylvania. An image sun-kissed and freckled, cutoffs and a tank top, her straight hair the color of coal. Moss’s breath caught at the similarities between her friend and the missing girl—casually beautiful, each with that long, dark hair. Moss had been trained in time travel—accustomed to reliving future events as they played out in the terra firma of the present, but this déjà vu was something else, like she’d caught the world repeating itself, the house, the girls, like she had seen something she wasn’t supposed to see, the repetitive mechanics of cyclical time. Or maybe the similarity between the girls was something more rare, something like a second chance. She had lost Courtney, but she could still save Marian. Moss relaxed into bed, comforted knowing that people would be looking for the girl, that someone might already have seen her, might know where she is, safe, safe—but as she drifted off for only a few hours of sleep, Moss could almost feel the girl’s body grown cold.

Listless after Courtney died, Moss just shy of sixteen. The Gimms invited her to stand with them at the funeral home, an exhausting honor—awkward next to Davy in the reception line, Courtney lily white from concealer, laid out in an approximation of sleep. Courtney had always said she’d wanted to be buried in blue jeans, but they dressed her in a crushed-velvet dress with a high lace collar, necessary to cover what the makeup couldn’t hide of the slash across her neck. The stillness of the body so complete, so unnaturally still, that Moss almost expected her friend to sit up, to somehow stir or breathe.