EIGHT
By the time Angela reached the turnoff onto the long, winding drive up to her cabin back in the mountains, the truck’s heater had gotten her warm and mostly dry. There was a gap for her drive in the substantial barbed-wire fence along the road.
The barbed-wire fence, with no-trespassing signs posted at regular intervals, was intended to keep people out, rather than keep anything in. A determined person could, of course, use a wire cutter to cut through the fence. The height of the fence was meant to be a statement that the signs meant business.
Angela put the truck in park at the opening through the fence, unlocked the padlock, and dropped the cable with a sign that had a white skull and crossbones against a black background above the words “NO TRESPASSING.” It was a sign not easily missed, and its serious appearance was not frivolous. Once she drove in, she parked again and pulled the cable back across the opening, locking it with the padlock. Angela didn’t like visitors any more than her grandparents had.
A half mile up the winding one-lane drive past a meadow and then back into thick forest, the brick cabin came into view. It was tucked into pines growing in the craggy rock that began ascending behind and to each side. The small, hunkered-down building looked sinister in the pale, foggy moonlight. She liked it looking sinister.
Most locals were afraid of the place. Trespassers had, in the past, tended to have “accidents.”
Built by her grandparents, Vito and Gabriella Constantine, the place wasn’t the usual backcountry cabin. Most of those were little more than wooden or log hunting shacks deep in the woods. But hunting was not allowed in the preserve around the property, and her grandparents had long ago posted no-hunting signs.
Her grandparents called the place their cabin, even though it was built of brick, because that was the local naming convention for places people had back in the woods. The solidly built little house had really been their retreat, their second home.
Vito Constantine had been a bricklayer and a union steward. He’d helped build many of the old, sprawling manufacturing plants in Milford Falls that were now mostly graffiti-covered shells with broken windows. After saving for most of his life, he’d bought the commercially useless sixty-odd-acre leftover parcel of land and put his cabin in the recess between mountains.
The vast, surrounding preserve had been established by one of the wealthy factory owners back when he had more money than he knew what to do with and rocky land could be had for next to nothing. He’d had grand ideas about eventually donating it to the park service, but after the factories closed he left the area and lost interest in the project. The preserve remained intact, managed by a small trust he’d established that nowadays rarely kept tabs on it.
The game wardens and sheriff’s officers mostly saw to keeping people from hunting or timber harvesting on the preserve. For the most part, since it couldn’t be used for hunting, the extensive tract of land was ignored and forgotten.
For some reason long forgotten, her grandparents’ sixty acres hadn’t been included in the preserve, and, it being so isolated, they had been able to buy it for a price they could afford. Once her grandfather had the land, he did what he knew best: he built the cabin, as he and Angela’s grandmother called it, out of brick.
While he wasn’t a big man, laying brick and block his whole working life left him sinewy and strong. Vito Constantine was a gentle man but he possessed an air of quiet authority. People instinctively knew not to cross him.
Since the road going past didn’t go directly to anywhere important, people rarely came around their place. Once, a couple of young men who didn’t respect the no-trespassing signs ended up with broken bones and memory loss. All they could seem to remember when questioned by the police was having fallen off a ladder.
Over the years, her grandfather’s wolverine-like reputation had cast a spell of sorts over the property, so much so that even after his death people continued to avoid “the Constantine place.” It also helped that there was no hunting in the preserve, so people rarely had any reason to be in the area. Cars parked along the road running past the property and the preserve were easily spotted by the sheriff and wardens.
The property was a kind of outlier from Milford Falls, for all practical purposes a dead end with few reasons for people to be out there. That was one of the reasons her grandparents liked it. That’s the way Angela liked it.
Angela parked at the side, turned off the truck, and sat for a few minutes, eyes closed, enjoying the quiet, forested seclusion of her cabin. After a time, she got out and uncoiled the garden hose from up against the house, then dropped the tailgate and hopped up into the bed of the truck. She hosed out the lacings of her boots before turning her attention to blasting the nooks and crannies of the truck bed to clean out all the blood. She kept hosing water around until the water that ran out ran clear, no longer showing any trace of blood.
Once finished, she unlocked the heavy oak door to the cabin and went inside. The place wasn’t very big. It had a living room with a woodstove across the front with a kitchen behind to the left. To the right, behind the living room, was bedroom and bath. It wasn’t a big house, but it was all her grandparents had needed, all Angela needed. She liked the small, cozy nature of the place as well as the seclusion.
Between the bathroom and the living room there was a door that led down to the basement—far and away the most interesting room in the house as far as Angela was concerned.
At the back, between the kitchen and bedroom was a small mudroom at a back door. Angela opened an upper cabinet in the small mudroom and retrieved a nearly full gallon jug of bleach.
Back at the truck, she poured the bleach all over the bed, sloshing it into the corners and seams until she had used it all. She tossed out the empty jug, picked up the hose, and once again thoroughly washed out the truck bed.
Angela knew enough about forensics to be aware that there was plenty she didn’t know and would never know. She held no illusions that she was smarter than the police, or that she could cover up a killing and never be found out. She knew that there were experts who could recover evidence in ways she couldn’t begin to imagine.
That was the risk she had to run.
Her only safety was in being as careful as possible and above all maintaining a low profile. She did her best to fly under the radar by avoiding connections to trouble and avoiding all the various kinds of authorities. Owen’s was the only body she’d ever left to be found. She hoped that once the police found Carrie’s body they would be focused on the women Owen had killed, rather than on who killed Owen.
Angela knew that if there was ever reason to take a close look at her in connection with deaths, experts could always find something incriminating. So, she did her best not to ever leave anything for them to find. She also did her best not to give them a reason to look in her direction in the first place.
She didn’t want to be a needle in the haystack; she wanted to remain a needle in the boundless forest. It helped that she didn’t have friends and didn’t socialize. People generally didn’t know much about her other than what she let them see on the surface.
Once the bed of the truck was cleaned to the best of her ability, she got a spray bottle of cleaner and a rag and went about cleaning the inside of the truck, wiping away any fingerprints Owen might have left. She cleaned the door wherever he might have touched it when getting in or out of the truck, as well as the tailgate and sides of the bed he could have touched.
Angela knew that the police would eventually come around with a photo of Owen, asking if he had come into the bar. She would tell them the truth, that he had. They would want to know what he’d had to say. She would tell them the truth, that he’d hit on her and wanted her to come back to his motel, she said no, and he left after last round was called. Barry would corroborate everything she would tell the police.
Owen had been outside alone with her truck for quite a while, so she didn’t know where he might have put his hands. If the police did happen to find his fingerprint somewhere on the outside of the truck, she could always say that for all she knew it was because he had been looking to break into it. How would she know? She had been inside working and then cleaning up after the bar had closed. As long as they didn’t find any fingerprints inside the truck they had no reason to investigate Angela any further.
That was the key to her survival—make sure the authorities had no reason to ever look at her any further.
She worked on the truck until she was confident every surface inside was free of Owen’s fingerprints.
She let out a sigh as she flicked her rag back to lay it over her shoulder. It had been a long day. She was relieved to be home at her cabin in the woods, away from people.
When she had been a young girl, Angela had stayed with her grandparents often, either at their house in town or more often at their cabin in the woods. The house in town was on a small lot close to other homes that all looked alike. Angela loved being with her grandparents anywhere, but she much preferred the cabin, where there were no other people around and seemingly endless woods to explore.
When she had been younger, Angela’s mother, Sally, didn’t much care that her parents took care of Angela so often. In reality, a lot of the time Sally was so high she didn’t even notice that Angela was gone. Her mother rarely kept track of her.
Her grandparents, on the other hand, were protective of Angela and always knew where she was or at least where she was supposed to be. They were more like parents to her than her mother ever was.
Angela’s mother didn’t care about much of anything, except getting high. She wasn’t picky about what kind of cigarettes she smoked, what brand of beer she was drinking, what kind of booze, or who she slept with. She was much the same with drugs. She had used cocaine since long before Angela was born, and when meth became readily available and cheap she often turned to that. While she would snort, smoke, or shoot just about anything, meth became her drug of choice. But she would happily use cocaine if it was available.
Both would leave her wired for days. After being high for three or four days, she smoked weed to bring herself down so she could sleep. She occasionally shot up heroin to bring herself down enough to sleep. But then she could get into a cycle of using heroin.
The police had been to their trailer many times. When they showed up they frequently ended up arresting Sally and some of the other people in the house. Sally rarely spent more than a night in jail. Vito always refused to bail her out, but he would come pick up Angela. By hook or by crook, Sally always got out. Either the charges were dropped or she was given probation.
She got into heroin at different times, and several times had gone to the emergency room with an overdose. Some of those times it had been Angela who had to call 911. Each time the hospital brought her back to life.
Several times, to stay out of jail, she had gone to rehab. When she got out, and was off heroin, she was almost immediately drawn back to meth. Angela didn’t want her mother to die, but she envisioned that if she did, Angela would then be able to live with her grandparents and not have to be near Sally’s friends.
The living room of their trailer was often filled not only with a boyfriend but with strangers, mostly men, often snorting drugs from the mirror on the coffee table, or smoking crack, or shooting up. Sally preferred to live her life in a stupefied state.
That often led to trouble for Angela. The people hanging around the house would frequently offer Angela drugs, encouraging her to try this or that, and then laugh when Angela only glared as she went past them to the refuge of her bedroom.
Sally didn’t work. She scraped by on welfare checks, child assistance, food stamps, and a variety of other assistance programs. She got all the needles she needed from clean-needle programs. People came around the trailer park handing them out like candy on Halloween. If she had no money to buy drugs, her male “friends” who always seemed to be hanging around their trailer, her sketchy boyfriends, or a dealer was always willing to provide drugs in exchange for sex. More than once Angela peeked out her bedroom door to see several naked men strutting out of her mother’s bedroom.
Angela knew that one of those slimeballs, or any one of the random men just like them, had fathered her. Who, exactly, no one knew. It was a matter that was rarely discussed, not because they thought it was shameful, but because it was as unknowable as it was unimportant.
Sometimes, when she had been in bed under the covers, she heard the men drinking with Sally out in the living room joking about who Angela looked like. There was never agreement. Someone would throw out a name and everyone would laugh, or groan “No way!” Angela’s father was just one of the random tweaker boyfriends, or a friend of a friend who had some money, or some shady drug dealer her mother fucked for some meth.
That union of two dysfunctional, unstable psychos had resulted in a pregnancy.
The seed that had been planted from that union of degenerates grew and developed in a continual broth of drugs and alcohol.
Angela was the mess that resulted, the little girl born broken.