Jessica Leonard
ANTIOCH
For Jonathan—keep reaching for the stars
1
BESS JACKSON LIVED in a small two-bedroom home with an open floorplan and an attached garage, which she’d originally purchased with a man. But that man wasn’t around anymore. Which is, in more ways than one, how she found herself arriving home at night in a car belonging to someone entirely different. This new man was named Greg, and while he wasn’t the first person she’d dated since she’d found herself the sole owner of her home, it still, years later, felt odd to be in this place with someone else.
“Should I walk you in?” Greg asked.
“You don’t need to do that,” Bess replied. The neighborhood was well-lit with houses that were a little too close to each other.
“Yeah, but maybe I should. I mean, you never know in Antioch. Vlad could be hiding in your coat closet. I’d better come in. Just to make sure you’re safe.”
Bess rolled her eyes and laughed; it was all a fun joke. But there was enough truth behind the joke to make her accept the offer. The Impaler Murders began in Antioch nearly two years ago, and as brave as Bess liked to think she was, it made living alone a little more ominous sometimes. Two years was a long time to be afraid. It made a person weary.
Once inside, Greg made a show of looking under her couch for any murderers. Before she could stop him, he poked his head into the garage and called out to potential serial killers. But his joke—which was already stretched thin—seemed to snap entirely when he saw the garage.
“What’s all this?” he asked.
“All this” was the overstatement of the year. Inside the garage there was only a lone card table, its top decorated with swipes of dust, a spiral bound notebook, and a pristine shortwave radio.
“That,” Bess said with pride, “is my shortwave, a Grundig Satellit 750.” She gazed lovingly at her radio, then at Greg with somewhat less admiration.
“What’s it do?” Greg said, less a formal question and more of a “Why am I looking at a radio?” rhetorical.
As far as first dates went, this was not Bess’s worst. Greg was handsome enough, although his precisely gelled blond hair and ample use of Axe body spray wasn’t something Bess usually looked for in a man. He’d been mostly polite to her and while he didn’t seem interested in her as a person, he had enough manners to try and fake it.
“It just, you know, listens. It searches.” Shortwave as a hobby wasn’t something easily explained. She wished he hadn’t seen the radio. Having her head impaled on a stick now seemed at least somewhat less exhausting than continuing a conversation with someone too polite to say they didn’t care.
“Huh,” Greg said, looking around at the empty white walls. The room had the musty smell of a dirt-floored cellar. She could tell he was sorry he’d offered to walk her in. He certainly hadn’t foreseen hanging out in a gross, empty garage looking at a radio. “Have you been doing this long?”
“Since I was fifteen. My dad got me my first radio.”
“Was it something you picked up from him?” Greg asked, and Bess heard the hope in his voice. Maybe it was a family thing. His family was into tennis, and perhaps her family preferred little radios.
“No,” Bess said, her eyes on the floor, for some reason sorry to be disappointing him. “I had this Amelia Earhart obsession. That really got me going.”
“Did she use one of these?”
“No, well, I mean, yeah, I guess maybe. But that wasn’t it. Do you know much about her?”
“Earhart? She was a pilot who crashed. That’s pretty much all my knowledge on the subject.”
“Yeah, and that’s basically it, but her disappearance is still a huge mystery. There are tons of theories about what happened to her. Some think she crashed into the ocean, but there are other people who think different.” She glanced back at the radio, trying to decide how to continue. The more rational part of her brain told her not to continue at all. But goddammit, once she got on a roll about Earhart theories she couldn’t help herself. A big part of her wanted to tell him everything even if he didn’t care. He wasn’t going to stop her, and it was so rare to have a captive audience. “So, one of the theories says a girl heard transmissions from Amelia Earhart the night she went missing. She heard them on her shortwave radio, but no one believed her. She reported it to the coast guard back then, but they dismissed it right away. So that’s kind of how it started for me. Learning about those transmissions.”
“It’s a conspiracy theory.”
“I guess. But no one can for sure prove or disprove it.”
“That’s what a conspiracy theory is,” Greg said.
“Okay, well, a conspiracy theory shaped my life.”
Greg shrugged. “It happens.” He stuck his hands in his pockets and walked to the radio. He pointed to a small glass ashtray sitting next to it. “Oh hey, fantastic. Do you mind if I…”
“Knock yourself out,” Bess said. It was the first time he’d alluded to being a smoker all night, and Bess wondered if this hidden vice accounted for all the Axe Body Spray.
Greg lit a cigarette from a pack he had hidden inside the inner pocket of his sports jacket and then tucked them away without offering one. “Tell me more. What does this girl hear on the radio?”
“She hears a lot of stuff. Things which later lead some people to think Amelia actually landed her plane off Gardner Island, but died there before she could be located or rescued.”
“I’ve never heard of Gardner Island.”
“It’s called Nikumaroro now.”
“I’ve heard of that even less.” Greg took a long draw from his cigarette and exhaled away from Bess and the radio. Ever polite. “But I want to know the conspiracy. Give me the weird shit. You didn’t get obsessed with radios for no reason. Not just because some girl said she maybe heard something neat once.”
Bess tried to think of an easy way to tell the story. Every detail of Betty’s notebook and the interpretations of what she claimed to hear was etched into Bess’s brain, but how much of it was actually interesting? And why was she still interested in being interesting? She didn’t have any real desire to ever see Greg again, but here she was, choosing her words carefully and trying to impress. Maybe she was polite too.
“Okay, so this girl, her name’s Betty, she hears a transmission while she’s cruising around on the shortwave and the voice says, ‘This is Amelia Earhart.’ And Betty always keeps a notebook with her while she’s messing with the radio because you never know what you might hear and sometimes she wrote down song lyrics and stuff because she was fifteen and that’s what kids do, I guess.” Bess paused for breath and looked at Greg, who was smiling at her like she was adorable—not in an attractive way, more like in a pitying way. She forged ahead. “So she writes down everything she hears and when some people who knew a thing or two actually got ahold of the notebook a few decades later, and read the things she said, some of it started to make sense. And it led some people to Gardner.”
“What parts made sense?”
“She wrote down ‘N.Y.’ a few times, which she later said was an abbreviation for New York City. Like, Earhart kept repeating New York City. Which doesn’t make any sense. Except it does when you think about how Gardner is a coral atoll and right there along it is the wreck of the SS Norwich City. Norwich City was a steamer that ran aground there in 1929. The wreck was a hazard, everyone knew about it. If she could see it and she was trying to tell people where she was, it makes sense that maybe she was saying the name of the ship. Not New York City, but Norwich City. You see?”