Tami Hoag - Down the Darkest Road

The hedge grew nearly up to the far side of the building. She had to press herself flat up against the siding to edge toward the small window in the middle of the wall. Even then branches snagged at her clothes and scratched at the side of her face like a thousand cats’ claws.

Her reward was a look inside an empty garage. If Ballencoa was home, he had parked in the street. But she had seen no van as she circled the block. Which meant she had time. How much time was the question no one could answer.

Emerging from the hedgerow, she quickly crossed the yard to the back door of the house. It was an old wooden door with nine small rectangular panes of glass in the top half. Attractive, but not secure.

Her hands were trembling as she dug inside the canvas bag. She had worn a pair of Leah’s riding gloves, supple leather as thin and tight as a second skin. She pulled out a roll of masking tape and began tearing off long strips and smoothing them over the small pane of glass nearest the dead bolt lock.

Ballencoa’s backyard was fairly private, with the big hedges on either side and the shed at the back property line. Across the alley a wooden privacy fence overgrown with morning glories closed off the neighbor’s view. Unless someone came down the alley, she was relatively safe.

She pulled the small hammer from the bag and hit it against the taped glass. Too lightly at first, then a little harder, then a little harder. On the third tap she felt the glass give way at the inner corner of the window. She worked her way around the pane, tapping the glass just hard enough to break it. The tape kept the pieces from falling.

With one side of the little window completely broken free of the frame, she carefully folded the taped shards back behind the unbroken portion of glass, then kept working with the hammer until the entire windowpane was in her hand—a flexible sheet of masking tape filled with glass.

Carefully, she wrapped the broken glass in a plastic bag and dropped it inside her canvas tote. With the glass out, she was able to reach inside the door and unlock the dead bolt.

She stopped breathing as she let herself inside Roland Ballencoa’s house.

The refrigerator humming was the only sound, save the pounding of Lauren’s pulse in her ears. She stepped into the tiny kitchen, taking in every detail—the original 1930s tile, the plain painted cabinets, the emptiness of the counters, the lack of ornamentation of any kind. There was not so much as a grocery list on the counter or a magnet on the fridge.

Inside the refrigerator was a bottle of Evian, a bottle of apple cider vinegar, a head of lettuce, a carton of cottage cheese. In the cupboard, wheat germ, bran, vitamins.

It struck her as odd that he was a health nut. It was hard to imagine him as being human with human needs like food and water. To her he was something . . . other. He fed on fear and drank in the despair of his victims. What did he need with vitamin B and a regular bowel? It seemed more likely that he slept hanging upside down inside a dark closet like a rabid bat.

She didn’t know what she was looking for as she moved through the bungalow, but she didn’t find it. She didn’t find anything in the dining room or living room. The furniture was sparse and spartan. There wasn’t a plant. There wasn’t a magazine. There were no shoes by the front door. There was no mail on the table, not a bill or a flyer or a letter from Ed McMahon promising Roland Ballencoa he might already be a winner.

There is no life here , she thought, pulling the cushions from the chairs and throwing them on the floor. There wasn’t even spare change or food crumbs in the creases of the sofa.

What did he do when he wasn’t being a predator? Did he read? Did he listen to music? Did he watch television? There was no sign of any of that. She imagined he had an array of violent pornography stashed somewhere. He undoubtedly had photographs of the girls he had stalked. He probably had videotape.

Her stomach turned at the prospect of finding photographs of Leslie, or movies of what he had done to her. As much as she wanted to find something here that could tie Roland Ballencoa to her daughter, she dreaded that prospect just as much.

She moved down the narrow hallway, only pausing at the door to the bathroom, loath to go inside, though she imagined it would be as spotless and lifeless as every other room here. The imagined sense of intimacy in that room was too much. While he had certainly breached every boundary of Lauren’s own house when he had broken in, she didn’t want the same experience. She would not be fondling Roland Ballencoa’s dirty underwear or crawling naked between his sheets.

His bedroom looked almost as uninhabited as the rest of the house. The bed was made with military precision. The first thing Lauren made herself do was get down on her hands and knees to look beneath it.

She half expected to see a body, to come face-to-face with the lifeless stare of someone else’s daughter. Or, if not a body, a box containing a victim—alive or dead.

There was no box. There was nothing beneath the bed. Not even dust.

Clothes were hung neatly in the closet in order: shirts, pants, jackets, light colors to dark. Shoes were lined up neatly beneath. Three pair. Socks and underwear were organized in a dresser drawer. T-shirts were folded exactly alike and stacked like a display at the Gap.

So orderly, Roland’s world. It irked Lauren that he could be this way when what he had done to her had thrown her inner life into chaos. He should have an idea of how that felt, she thought, and she began dismantling his orderly habitat, starting with the bed.

She tore the coverlet off first and flung it to the side. Pillows sailed to the floor. She yanked the sheets free of the tightly tucked corners, dragged them off and threw them to the side, stomping on them, grinding the dirty soles of her sneakers against the fabric.

It was juvenile, she knew. She was wasting time. But there was a certain rush and satisfaction in doing it. As she pulled his clothes from the hangers and out of the drawers, she briefly considered peeing on all of it, like a dog marking territory. But then it occurred to her that as perverted as Ballencoa was, he might find that exciting.

He had been more subtle in his invasion of her home. And yet she had thrown out the load of laundry he had handled. She had smashed the wine glass he had drunk from. She had stripped every bed in the house and refused to sleep on her mattress or let Leah sleep on hers. The sense of violation, of defilement, had been terrible, as bad as if Ballencoa had put his hands directly on her naked body.

Lauren stood back and looked at the mess she’d made, imagining how he would feel when he saw it.

How do you like that, Roland? I invaded your world. I touched your things. You couldn’t stop me.

She felt a small rush of power at the thought, and imagined that was what he had felt as he had moved through her house, touching her things. Feeding off that power, she pulled the drawers out of the dresser and turned them over, looking for something to be taped to the bottoms. There was nothing. She stuck her head inside the empty shell of the dresser and looked at the underside of the top. Nothing. She pulled the thing away from the wall and looked behind it. Nothing. She tipped it over and looked at the bottom. Nothing.

She went through the same process with the nightstands. Nothing. Sweating and cursing, she wrestled the mattress off the box spring, flipping it over. Nothing.

Angry and frustrated, she took the box cutter from her bag and sliced the mattress open down the middle like she was gutting a fish. Nothing. She did the same with the pillows, sending feathers everywhere. Nothing.