Catie Disabato - The Ghost Network

When Berliner was satisfied Molly wasn’t stuffed in a closet somewhere, Peaches asked him to leave. In the lobby, Berliner reclaimed his own jacket in a huff. He was so upset that he didn’t realize until he was out in the snow that both his gun and his sketchpad of maps had been taken out of his pockets. Ray Mitchell, as Berliner should’ve assumed, was on Ali’s payroll. Berliner was unable to reclaim his stolen items.

Once he brought Taer up to speed, they decided to go back to Michigan and talk to Davis. Berliner hoped he could force Davis to reveal where the New Society had taken Nix. Taer stopped weeping and accessed a quiet, aggressive rage. She dressed in her thickest pair of jeans and a T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, and pulled her hair into a tight bun on the top of her head. During those hours after Nix’s abduction, Berliner said Taer was numb and inconsolable.

“She was really freaking out, but silent, which was unlike her,” Berliner said. “All that intensity she had — she just channeled it into making Gina’s kidnapping into this solvable problem. She’d seem fine, totally in control, then just burst into tears in a second. And yell at me if I tried to comfort her. She was so, so aggressive.”

Berliner and Taer traveled by train to Davis’s parents’ house. Davis’s father George answered the door. He led them to the living room, where the uncomfortable couches and lack of side tables exemplified the house’s overall uninviting quality. Davis was reading, slumped in an armchair. George quickly left for the evening, believing his daughter’s ex-boyfriend had come for a visit with his new girlfriend. George wanted to give his daughter space and avoid overhearing any awkward details.

In Davis, Taer expected to find a conniving operator, a young woman who had only pretended to be sad to deceive her and Nix, like the villain in a fairy tale. Instead, Davis was the same sad girl, mourning her mother and conflicted about her role in the war between the Urban Planning Committee and the New Society. When she saw Berliner, Davis broke down in tears and never quite recovered. Berliner took some whiskey from the kitchen and poured three glasses. After being in Davis’s parents’ house for ten minutes, he decided he hated it.

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” Berliner said, “but I do think a home can be imbued with a ghost-like presence from the people who’ve been left behind. Irene’s mom’s house definitely had that problem. It was the mostly ghostly house I’ve ever been in. I think Cait expected real horror movie shit to go down while we stayed there.

“It’s the worst feeling. Architectural uncanny. The house wasn’t, like, deep in the woods or on Fear Street ‡or something, but it had that feeling like when you’re all alone late at night walking down a street and all the windows in the buildings are dark. You feel weird déjà vu and then you realize why — you’ve seen this before, but it hasn’t happened to you. You’ve seen it on television. You’ve seen it in a movie. You are walking through, like, a pastiche of bad horror movies. You start fumbling with your keys because you expect to be fumbling with your keys and when you can’t find the right key on the key ring, you fully expect the ghost of Jack the Ripper or something to stick his hook-hand in your back. And then you find your key, and it’s behind the keychain card from Jewel-Osco §and everything’s fine once you have the lights on.”

Davis gave Berliner the details of her betrayal, speaking directly to him as if Taer wasn’t in the room — Davis had lied to him, spied on him, but most importantly, she had sent Taer and Nix in his direction so the New Society could follow Taer and Nix to the Urban Planning Committee headquarters.

Davis cried again and begged for forgiveness. Berliner asked where they would take Nix. To repent for spying and working against him, Davis told Berliner that the New Society had a property in Michigan, a lake house officially owned by Peaches’s maternal grandmother Roberta Parish. Schizophrenic and suffering from emphysema after a lifetime of smoking, Parish lived in a high-end senior care center in Ann Arbor. Peaches and the New Society had free reign of her lakefront property. Davis gave Taer and Berliner the address, and assured them that if Ali and Peaches had taken Nix anywhere, it was there. By that time, it was nearly 3 a.m. Taer wanted to leave immediately, but Berliner thought it would be better to sleep for a few hours and persuaded her to wait until the sun came up.

Taer passed out in the guest bedroom and Davis took Berliner to the screened-in porch, where she ripped holes in the fraying screens until Berliner became sexually overwhelmed, pinned her to the concrete floor, and pulled off her pants. They had sex several times that evening. ǁ

“I really did like her, a lot. She had this openness, where she would accept anything about someone she loved, but still remain true to her own desires,” Berliner said during one of our solo interviews. When he spoke about Davis, he was quiet with heavy regret. “I blamed Irene for getting Gina kidnapped and for hurting Cait. I wasn’t nice to her, that last time I saw her. I wish I’d been nice to her.”

The next morning, Davis’s father drove Taer and Berliner to the Hertz so they could rent a car, then he stopped at the farmers’ market. George spent a leisurely hour and a half choosing greens, melons, and tomatoes. When he returned to his mother’s house, he found his daughter hanging by her neck in her bedroom, blue in the face, and dead for at least half an hour.

* Wine and dérive— how Situationist of her! — CD

† Nix and Berliner recounted the events that follow to Cyrus during one of their dual interviews. Cyrus combined their account with Taer’s journal entry. — CD

‡ A reference to a series of horror novels for young adults written by R. L. Stine.

§ Jewel-Osco is a Chicago-area grocery store chain.

ǁ During my conversations with Nix and Berliner, I was able to pry from them some details of their various sexual encounters, which they hadn’t given to Cyrus. Maybe they were more comfortable talking to me about sex; maybe it’s because they, for some reason, decided to drink with me even though they wouldn’t drink with Cyrus. — CD

Nix woke up on a bare mattress, her legs covered with a purple duvet. Her head pounded and her vision was slightly blurry. As she struggled to sit up, someone handed her a plastic cup full of water. Disoriented, she thought she could smell pasta sauce, the kind from the jar Taer used to heat in the microwave to make spaghetti for Nix after she’d gone for a long run.

Nix vomited on the stained carpet below her makeshift bed. After she emptied her stomach, Peaches appeared and wiped her face with a warm washcloth while Ali cleaned the mess. Ali and Peaches spent the rest of the night making sure Nix didn’t fall asleep and slip into a coma. Ali had hit Nix over the head much harder than she had intended and Nix had a concussion. There was a ringing in her ears for the better part of twenty-four hours. Nix now jokingly refers to the concussion as her “sports injury.”

Ali and Peaches held Nix hostage in their crumbling, mostly unlived-in South Loop apartment. They kept her in the second bedroom, a bare cell of a room with concrete walls and windows obscured by blackout curtains. They cuffed and chained Nix’s ankles together with restraints they had purchased at a sex toy shop on North Lincoln Avenue called The Pleasure Chest.