Jed goes rigid as the bike starts to skid. He turns to look behind us and I turn with him, but all I can see are two bright white lights, a tall black chamber; then the grille is so close that I swear it’s underneath us. The bike twists and we bounce off the road, toward the edge of a cliff.
“Get the fuck out of this town!”
Episode 41:
Murder of a Jane Doe 1
**Graphic Content Warning**
She had been stabbed eighty-six times. The skin of her cheeks had been clawed from her face, down to the bone in places. The murderer bleached her fingernails, then gave her a manicure. They used a curling iron to style her hair, and left a postmortem burn on her forehead.
The women who found her said, “At first, I thought she was a doll, as silly as that sounds. My mind just couldn’t comprehend. I thought she was an enormous doll.”
The bike spins, flattening through the dirt. Jed drops his boot, drags his leg to pinwheel us to a stop.
I force myself away, wanting to get as far from the hot, clicking metal as I can. My knees shake, in delayed reaction, and I trip, falling awkwardly against a rock. Jed lifts his helmet and pitches it at the two little red lights glaring backward at us from the highway. They slip and disappear behind a curve, and the sound of the engine cuts out quickly. Everything is quiet.
“Fucking asshole!” Jed yells. “The goddamn, fucking assholes in this fucking place!” He rolls up his jeans, and I can see his leg is torn up, road rash where he slid to stop the bike. He sits down hard on a rock. “What the fuck is wrong with people?” He presses his finger to the wound and hisses. “Shit.”
My heart starts to race, swelling in my chest. “Do you think that was them?”
“Who?” he says, hissing again.
“The gang!” I blurt. My voice takes a slightly hysterical edge, and I try to quell it, but we were just run off the road. “The people Rachel talked about! The ones who ran her off the road.”
He raises a skeptical brow at me. I can tell he is not impressed by my apparent gleefulness. “I think it was an asshole—that’s what I think.”
“Maybe they know we were talking to Tasia, and the police—maybe they don’t like it!” I try to keep the victory from my voice, but I can’t help being a little proud. Maybe this is a sign that we’re on the right track. Maybe this is a warning that we’re getting closer to you.
He sets his leg down. “What do you mean, the police?”
“I talked to them this morning.” He shakes his head like I did something bad. “They weren’t helpful, if that makes you feel better. Officer Hardy. He told me to get as far away from the Bards as I could.”
“Ha.” Jed snorts. “That sounds pretty helpful to me.” His knee jerks as he starts to stand, so he rocks back down. “Hey, will you give me a hand here?”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine; I just can’t stand up.” I take his hand and guide him to his feet. He hovers beside me for a moment, hand on my shoulder, testing his leg.
“Are you all right?”
“I told you I was fine,” he says, and then he squeezes my shoulder once so I feel it melt down through me and he steps back, away. “That bike”—he points—“is not fine.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean”—he puts his hands on his hips—“I hope you’re wearing comfortable shoes.” My heart rate jumps again. “You can leave the helmet here. I’ll come pick this thing up once we get back.” Jed starts up the highway, testy on his bad leg.
“What about Addy?” I’m not quite sure what I mean. She is not here and she has nothing to do with this situation, but still I can’t help but consider her first, like she holds a primary spot in my brain.
“We don’t have a whole lotta options. We can’t call anyone without a signal. We could go back to Happy Camp and knock on doors, try to borrow a phone, but I don’t reckon you want to call up Addy for a ride neither.”
“How far is it?”
“I reckon it’ll take us about an hour, if we’re quick.”
“What if that truck comes back?”
He glares at me. “Sera, it was just a truck. People out here are like that. They come out here because they don’t like other people, and sometimes it shows.”
I follow behind him, wading in the light from his phone. “Is that why you came out here?”
“I told you why I came out here: I wanted a better life.”
“Then why did you stay when your wife left?” He bristles. I have gone too far. What was I thinking, saying that to him? But it’s like I can’t stop pushing; I can’t stop looking for answers. His wife only lasted a week. It was six months before he even tried to see her. You vanished and no one is looking for you. If this place had another name, it would be Apathy. Apathy County, locked on the Murder Line, in the dead center of Nowhere, USA. “I just mean, I would think you would have gone after her,” I say before I realize I’m not making things better. I have this insatiable need to know people’s dirty secrets. I need to understand everything, while everyone else can live with things never being resolved or explained.
“Well, this is nice.” Jed slaps his good leg. “I ride you all the way out here even though I think this whole idea that something happened to Rachel is downright crazy. We get into a goddamn accident, fuck up my bike and my leg and now what? You gonna tell me I’m a bad husband? I let my wife and my life slip away. You think I don’t know that?”
“I don’t mean . . . I let my life slip away too.”
“All right.” He throws his hands up. “Don’t go looking for your answers in me. Come to that, don’t you go looking for your answers in Rachel neither. You know that’s what all this is about, right? I don’t even know if I reckon you care whether something happened to her—you’d rather just get caught up in someone else’s disappearance instead of dealing with your own.”
I am quiet. I don’t think he’s wrong, but I hate to admit it. Maybe I did want to get lost in you. Maybe I wanted to disappear in your story.
We walk along the highway and for once my mind is quiet. There is no podcast playing on my phone, no crazy thoughts, no useless anxiety, just the cold and the mountains and the trees and the rivers and the knowledge that I messed up.
* * *
—
If I had to define the exact moment, the day I started to disappear, I think I could. It was the day the divorce became official, the day there was no going back, when I decided to be a woman, alone. But that’s not true. Because my ex would argue that for most of our marriage, I was already gone. So maybe it was the day I lost the baby. But that’s not true either. I think of the wedding, how it just went on and on. And everyone was so happy, and I was just there. And the happier they were, the more there I was. I go further back, to the day we met. I knew we would get married right away. I knew it like it had been chosen for me. I said to myself, Here is a man I can stand. Here is someone I can definitely put up with. So maybe it was before that. And I think of being young, how women are taught, piece by piece, how they fit into the world. But that’s not where it started either. I was born a woman. I was born to disappear.