“Hey,” I said gently. “Look what we found.”
Steph was lying with her head propped against the window, wrapped up in the blanket I’d put around her. Her face was pale. She looked peaceful. It still took me a long time to realize that, at some point in the last few hours, Stephanie had died.
She is buried in the woods near where I live. Her mother passed away a few years back, her father never reappeared. I’m the only person left to care. The world notices your passing, then turns back to the remaining group of revelers at the bar and orders another round.
I keep on the move. I have a cabin, but I spend long periods away from it. I walk, for days at a time, in broad circles along unpredictable routes. I stay a while near some hill town thirty miles away, then walk in the opposite direction to somewhere else. I spread the custom of my presence. I always come back, however. I’m not going to leave her alone for long.
I’ve grown a beard, and my hair is ragged. My nose got broken in a fight outside a bar, so I don’t look quite the same as I did. It will do for now.
I used Internet cafés and libraries to track unfolding events down in Florida. It made the national media for a while, but it’s instructive how short the news cycle is. There’s always something else, another ring in the circus to stop us from looking too closely at any particular show. A war here, a celebrity death there, a recession, a crisis, something shiny going past. So much so that it might even make you suspicious.
Marie Thompson survived her wounds. The deaths of her husband and Hazel Wilkins were accurately ascribed to the actions of John Hunter, disgruntled former local resident and convicted killer. Tony was much mourned, celebrated far and wide as one of the last big characters of the Florida boom years. Hazel didn’t get the same coverage, on account of being just some old woman.
The deaths of Deputy Rob Hallam, Karren White, David Warner, and Emily Griffiths remain unsolved. As the bodies of all but Warner were found in the house of a couple who’d vanished, the media spent a day enthusiastically vacillating between claiming that Mr. and Mrs. William Moore were further victims, or else the murderers, egged on by circumstantial evidence relating to the purchase of a handgun used as a murder weapon. Once the stuff on my Facebook page became public, however, Steph rapidly joined the list of (assumed) victims, and I was shoved right into center stage—with David Warner emerging as a kind of shadowy accomplice/mentor figure who’d outlived his usefulness and met a grisly end in the apartment of one of my other victims, with whom I’d become obsessed.
The media were far too excited to look hard for inconsistencies in all this, being more interested in me being the first nutcase to unravel semipublicly via a social networking site. That was how Warner and I met, apparently, and then started to feed into each other’s obsessions, creating a spiral of virtual insanity that eventually spilled out into the real world. Searching questions were asked about the online community’s responsibility to keep an eye on its members, and hand-wringing editorials written about the need for the interactions of distant others to be monitored. It was a big deal. I had my own logo on the news.
Then it all faded away, and now the only ones who still care are a few conspiracy Web sites. According to these, I am either dead, or still alive, a stooge framed to divert attention from foreign policy shortfalls and/or rising CO2 levels, a ranking member of a hidden elite, an actual psychopath but with supernatural superpowers, or I never actually existed in the first place. I prefer the last theory. To me, it has the ring of truth.
The cases remain open, as does speculation regarding the purpose of the structures discovered underneath David Warner’s house. A small and powerless local pressure group, formed from relatives of missing women in the area, has called to have the building demolished so that its foundations can be examined. So far they have been totally unsuccessful. As the house has now been purchased by a holding company belonging to an unknown man based on the West Coast, it seems likely it will remain that way.
David Grant sold Shore Realty and left the state. The Breakers is still open for business. Marie Thompson lives by herself in that big apartment overlooking the ocean. Adrift in the present, queen of a diminished domain. Friendless, I hope.
Certainly alone.
A month after it had started to go quiet, I saw an article in the Longboat Gazette, and another lodged in the online version of the Sarasota Times. Local lawman Sheriff Frank Barclay had been found dead in his house, victim of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. A collection of child pornography was discovered on a hard drive in the basement. I doubt it was his. I doubt also that his final moments were quite as they were portrayed, or how he would have wished. I think he shouldn’t have said as much to me as he did. I believe my telling Cassandra what he’d said was what got him where he was going.
I can live with that.
To the outside world, the two stories are unrelated, Barclay’s death merely one of those nasty things that nasty men deserve. We’re all pebbles on a beach. One lying here, one over there, another handful down by the tide line. They’re all brought there by the same ocean, though, quietly moving us to and fro when everyone’s asleep. Whichever way you’re looking, there’s a lot more going on behind your back than there is in front, where you can see. Count on that.
Only one other loose end remains, courtesy of a girl playing her own version of the game. That loose end is lying low. For now.
I have not been in contact with my mother. At first I kept away because I didn’t want to put her in the position of knowing anything that might lead the police—or anyone else—to me. But the more time I spent alone, the more questions I started to ask. How well did I know her, in fact? There was no question she’d been there all the time I’d been a child. But it could be that while I was down in Florida she’d become different, that she could have been approached. It could even be that it had always been that way. Did I even have proof that I was actually her son? People tell you things, but that doesn’t mean they’re true. From there, further questions. Did my father really die of a heart attack? He’d always been very fit and healthy before. Did there come a time when, for some reason or other, it became better that he was no longer around?
Silly ideas. Probably. But are we ever more than details around underlying determinants over which we never have anything more than illusory control? The couple who go to church like clockwork but put on masks to record homemade S and M videos for sale on the Internet; the man whose alcoholic (and unfaithful and violent) wife presents so functionally to the rest of the world that he feels he’s living in a dream; the mother whose angelic-looking child runs her ragged every morning to the point where she sits in the car for ten minutes—after she’s finally uploaded her daughter to school, chatting with the other moms, who all seem to have everything so together—and sobs her heart out, fingernails cutting crescents into her palms.
We’re all of us living Stepford lives, pretending in ways we don’t even realize, having faked it for so long that we don’t remember we’re doing it, or why. But sometimes the edifice collapses, and we want nothing more than to burn down the entire world, just for some peace from the lies.
I have scoured the Internet for mention of the Straw Men. I don’t even know whether there’s anything there to be found. It could be that was just part of Cass’s game, a red herring, an injection of apparent meaning into a meaningless narrative. The only thing I found was a paperback thriller. I read it. It was about a shadowed conspiracy of well-connected murderers, people killing others because that’s what they do, and because they believe it’s our natural way of life. It was a decent read, but it was fiction. Part of the game, too, perhaps, something planted to muddy the waters, to reassure us that these things only happen in stories and could not possibly exist in real life.