“Do you think I’m crazy? Is that it? Do you think I’m having a . . . you know . . .”
“A breakdown?” Her hand was back on his arm again, now squeezing gently. “Of course not. If you say you saw him, you saw him. If you think he was wearing that shirt as a kind of sun protection, or do-rag, or I don’t know what, then he probably was. You’ve had a bad month, probably the worst month of your life, but I trust your powers of observation. It’s just that . . . you must see now . . .”
She trailed off. He waited. At last she pushed ahead.
“There is something very wrong with this, and the more you find, the wronger it gets. It scares me. That story Yune told you scares me. It’s basically a vampire story, isn’t it? I read Dracula in high school, and one thing I remember about it is vampires don’t cast reflections in mirrors. And a thing that can’t cast a reflection probably wouldn’t show up in TV news footage.”
“That’s nuts. There’s no such things as ghosts, or witches, or vam—”
She slapped her open hand down on the table, a flat pistol-shot sound that made him jump. Her eyes were furious, crackling. “Wake up, Ralph! Wake up to what’s right in front of you! Terry Maitland was in two places at the same time! If you stop trying to find a way to explain that away and just accept it—”
“I can’t accept it, honey. It goes against everything I’ve believed my whole life. If I let something like that in, I really would go crazy.”
“The hell you would. You’re stronger than that. But you don’t have to even consider the idea, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. Terry’s dead. You can let it go.”
“If I do that, and it really wasn’t Terry who killed Frankie Peterson? Where does that leave Marcy? Where does it leave her girls?”
Jeannie got up, walked to the window over the sink, and looked out at the backyard. Her hands were clenched into fists. “Derek called again. He still wants to come home.”
“What did you tell him?”
“To stick it out until the season ends in the middle of next month. Even though I’d love to have him home. I finally talked him into it, and do you know why?” She turned back. “Because I don’t want him in this town while you’re still digging around in this mess. Because when it gets dark tonight, I’m going to be frightened. Suppose it really is some kind of supernatural creature, Ralph? And what if it finds out you’re looking for it?”
Ralph took her in his arms. He could feel her trembling. He thought, Part of her actually believes this.
“Yune told me that story, but Yune believes the killer is a natural man. So do I.”
With her face against his chest, she said, “Then why isn’t the man with the burned face in any of the footage?”
“I don’t know.”
“I care about Marcy, of course I do.” She looked up, and he saw she was crying. “And I care about her girls. I care about Terry, for that matter . . . and the Petersons . . . but I care more about you and Derek. You guys are all I have. Can’t you let this go now? Finish your leave, see the shrink, and turn the page?”
“I don’t know,” he said, when in fact he did know. He just didn’t want to say so to Jeannie while she was in her current strange state. He couldn’t turn the page.
Not yet.
4
That night he sat at the picnic table in the backyard, smoking a Tiparillo and looking up at the sky. There were no stars, but he could still make out the moon behind the clouds that were moving in. The truth was often like that, he thought—a bleary circle of light behind clouds. Sometimes it broke through; sometimes the clouds thickened, and the light disappeared completely.
One thing was sure: when night fell, the skinny, tubercular man from Yune Sablo’s fairy tale became more plausible. Not believable, Ralph could no more believe in such a creature than he could in Santa Claus, but he could picture him: a darker-skinned version of Slender Man, that bugaboo of pubescent American girls. He’d be tall and grave in his black suit, his face like a lamp, and carrying a bag big enough to hold a small child with his or her knees folded against his or her chest. According to Yune, the Mexican boogeyman prolonged his life by drinking the blood of children and rubbing their fat on his body . . . and while that wasn’t exactly what had happened to the Peterson boy, it was in the vicinity. Might it be possible that the killer—maybe Maitland, maybe the unsub of the blurred fingerprints—actually thought he was a vampire, or some other supernatural creature? Hadn’t Jeffrey Dahmer believed he was creating zombies when he killed all those homeless men?