Headlights(24)
* * *
“Can we play some music?” Tillman asks in the car.
“No music,” I say. “Podcast, or talk radio, or whatever. Or silence. No music.”
“You don’t like music?”
“No.”
“Who doesn’t like music?”
“Do you want to listen to something, or not?”
“Yeah. Okay. I got just the thing.”
He puts on a paranormal podcast about an abandoned mining town.
We pulled down the crime scene tape at the cabin. The ranger met us at the trailhead and gave us his info, but he didn’t know anything. Just recently took over in the office where they keep all the spare keys. But I might call and follow up later.
“You ever have any paranormal experiences?” Tillman asks.
As he says it, a shadow appears, then disappears, on the side of the highway.
“Why would you ask me that?” I say.
“Why wouldn’t I?” he says. Then after a moment, “I ask everyone.”
“No,” I say, gripping the wheel harder.
“Lot of ghost stories, ’round here,” Tillman says. “Cults, hauntings, cryptids. All kinds of wild stuff. Colorado’s a hotspot. I feel like it maybe has to do with the geothermal activity.”
“Hm,” I say.
“Lot of UFOs too, all kinds of stuff in the skies. All it takes is just keep lookin’ up.”
“Right,” I say, willing myself to breathe.
“You seem like someone who maybe doesn’t believe.”
“I—”
“You know it surprised me that Josie’s a believer, but—”
“Dude, respectfully, can you please shut the fuck up.”
He throws his hands up and sticks a toothpick in his mouth. “Jeez, man, she said you were weird about mirrors. Nothin’ about music or the paranormal. Anything else I should avoid?”
* * *
I drop Tillman off at the office as the sun slides behind the mountains. He steps out of the car and looks up immediately to the sky. Then he turns and starts to bend back down to say something else. Before he can, I pull out of the lot.
3
Dark blue-gray bleeds in to dampen the world, sweeping in a cold wind. Fall descends so quickly on us here. Winter, even faster. Then it sits, for months. Snow a thick numbing blanket that seeps into tendons and ligaments, fingers, toes, brains. Colorado winter unlike any other on earth, somehow simultaneously harsh and friendly. People from here will fight anyone who seems to imply that any other place might make them happier—California, say—that Colorado is not the happiest place on earth, that WE, COLORADANS, are not SO SO HAPPY.
A strange darkness, a snow-shifting haze. Eight of the top ten states of highest suicide rates are in the Mountain West. Tourists flock from all over to see the Rockies, to hike or scramble them, ski, snowboard, sled, horseback ride, take a gondola and drink a hot chocolate, in a hot tub at some resort. And those of us who live here, so insistent of our happiness, as we scrape ice from our windshields and pour salt on the ground, chain our tires. As we check for the locations of exits in our movie theaters and put in metal detectors at schools, as we glance up to the mountains for the weather, for the time of day. As we shore up our houses against disproportionately high levels of radon poisoning in the soil, try and keep it from seeping through the cracks into our lives to poison us.
Denver. Low red and brown brick buildings and houses. Always, that strange heaviness of the sky here, even on all our sunny days. A dirt-packed cow town at the western edge of the Great Plains, masquerading as a city, shadowed on the west by distant mountains that dictate everything about our lives. Our sports teams named for them, seasons determined by them. Always at the outskirts, those mountains always forty-five minutes away by car, at least. We the town of settlers who crossed all those plains just to give up before the good part.
Hannah Lawrence who lives in them.
Her drawing in my pocket. The way my palms sweat thinking about it.
Her face behind my eyes. Pulling at me.
My phone pings with another text from Frazier. I glance at it.
Everett Brown, environmental sciences professor at CU and the man who walked into Mama Tried wearing the skin of the John Doe we found taped in next to Hannah Lawrence. He is also, it turns out, a member of an online chat forum called DRIFTERS: SEEKING THE TRUTH and has been for the last five years. One of the chat rooms this Wizdumteller that Tillman flagged is a part of. Wizdumteller who kept saying the murders were going to start up again. I pull over and read through what Frazier sent. Before all this, I didn’t even know chat rooms were still a thing, but this one’s pretty active.
He lives with his wife in Erie in some new development called Rock Creek, and she teaches at a nearby public elementary school. He’s got one arrest for assaulting a cop at a climate demonstration in Boulder, otherwise clean record.
I call Jack, go over it all with him. I hear Emily in the background talking to the kids. I watch the black steel traffic lights change.
Everett Brown could have kidnapped Hannah Lawrence sometime forty-eight or more hours before he brought her to the Wander Inn—kidnapping location unknown, though we can probably rule out the cabin—and duct-taped her to the man he skinned. Cell records show Hannah’s phone has been off or dead for five days, but that could be normal for someone living her lifestyle. Everett’s phone was left at his house four days ago when he was last seen by his wife. The next time he was reported seen was at Mama Tried. After the motel room, Everett walked farther and longer than any of the others before him had walked, in order to get to the bar where Josie and I were sitting. He knew I was here, or someone did. Days are left unaccounted for. How can someone walk naked wearing a skin in the daytime without being seen?