Kill Devil Falls Page 5

  “Big Ed Scroggins. That’s my dad.”

  “Oh! I didn’t realize.”

  “Guess you didn’t notice his name on the paperwork?”

  “To be honest, my supervisor dropped the case on my lap around noon. I was in such a hurry to get up here, I didn’t have a chance to review any of it yet.”

  “But you know about Rita—the robberies and so forth?”

  “I know about her because she’s on the Most Wanted List,” Helen said. “But I haven’t been working the case, so beyond that, I’m no more familiar with it than your average crime junkie.”

  “Watch your step.” Teddy guided her around a deep fissure in the pavement.

  “This road is a mess,” Helen said.

  “Yep. And the county won’t be sending any crews for repairs anytime soon.”

  Helen wondered why anyone would want to live in such a ghost town. Miles from anywhere, isolated, with deadly chemicals in the very soil.

  “So your dad,” Helen said. “The sheriff. He’s on a call, where?”

  “Sardine Valley.”

  To Helen, it seemed like the town names up here had been chosen by a precocious child with a strictly literal grasp of nomenclature. Sardine Valley. Fiddletown. Poker Flat. Chinese Camp. Kill Devil Falls.

  “How did this place get the name Kill Devil Falls?”

  “Ah … now that’s a good little story,” Teddy said. “It started with a guy by the name of Franklin Stoppard. Ex-soldier, mountain man, explorer-type. Around 1850, during the Gold Rush, he and his partner were out prospecting when they got lost in the woods. They wandered for days till they came to a spot at the bottom of a ridge where a little waterfall ran into a pool of clear water. Stoppard noticed the pool was all glowing-like. When he got closer, he saw the floor of the pool and the rock behind the waterfall was veined with gold. Naturally, before they could take advantage, Stoppard and his partner was attacked by Washoe Indians. Stoppard escaped and made it down to the Yuba River. The partner wasn’t never seen again.”

  The town proper commenced another thirty yards ahead. It consisted of a dozen commercial buildings on either side of Main Street, packed tightly together. There was a mixture of brick, wood, and adobe-style architecture, with balconies fronting a few of the two-story structures.

  “Stoppard managed to take a couple of gold nuggets from the pool before running away, and when he got down to the river, he showed them to some prospectors. Of course, their eyes got as big as dinner plates and they agreed to follow him up to the waterfall. That was in the late summer. It wasn’t till fall that one of ’em finally came back down to the river, skinny as a reed, crazy as a loon, and with just a stump for a left arm.”

  “Sounds like a cheap horror flick.”

  Teddy nodded. “The one-armed guy said Stoppard led them up the mountain but couldn’t find the waterfall. They searched for weeks. Stoppard started mumbling to himself and acting more and more nuts. The group of prospectors eventually ran out of patience and took a vote. If Stoppard didn’t find the waterfall within one day, they was going to hang him from the nearest tree. Keep in mind, they was in the middle of the forest, so finding a tree wasn’t a problem.”

  Teddy led Helen left, onto a poorly maintained sidewalk. They passed a peak-roofed, wood-paneled building with faded lettering on the front window that read Auntie’s Antiques in Old West script. Helen took a quick peep through the filthy glass. The inside was empty, apart from yellowed scraps of newspaper on the floor, a three-legged table, and a Queen Anne cabinet with busted glass doors.

  “That night, Stoppard knifed most of the men in their sleep,” Teddy continued. “He kept a couple alive, including the one who made it off the mountain. He said it was ’cause they appeared to be the juiciest.”

  “I see where this is going.”

  “Yeah. He dragged these two around for a couple more days until, lo and behold, he actually stumbled onto the little clearing. Only there wasn’t no waterfall there, not really. Just a rock face with a trickle of water and a muddy pool at the bottom. No gold, neither. That’s when Stoppard really lost it. He tied the two prospectors to a tree and proceeded to make camp and build a fire. Then he killed the first one, roasted him up, and ate him.”

  Teddy was enjoying this. Helen pictured him relating the tale to a troop of Boy Scouts around a campfire, scaring the bejesus out of the little buggers.

  “After Stoppard finished with the first guy, he cut off the second one’s arm and cooked that. But the one-armed prospector managed to slip his ropes when Stoppard was busy digging in the rock face and make a run for it. When he got back to Yuba, a posse was formed. They went looking for Stoppard but couldn’t find the clearing again. So they gave up, went back to working the river. In time, as the gold petered out in the valley, more of them began to search around here. And that’s when they started finding wild animals, coyotes and bobcats, with their faces all chewed off. And it wasn’t long before a couple more prospectors went missing. The local Indians said Stoppard had turned into a devil. They said once you developed a hunger for the flesh of humans, you just couldn’t fight the craving.”

  “Wendigo. Right? That’s what the Native Americans call a cannibal.”

  “I don’t think the Indians in these parts call it that. But same idea, yeah. Here we are.”

  He stopped in front of a two-story building. Facing the sidewalk, on the first floor, was a door and a rectangular window. A wooden sign dangled from a pole jutting out between two windows on the second floor. It read The Trading Post.

  “So what happened with Stoppard?”

  “The prospectors rounded up another posse. This time, they found the waterfall, and Stoppard, still chipping away at the rock face. All kinds of bones, animal and human, was sticking out of the mud at the bottom of the pool. The posse hog-tied Stoppard, stuck him in the hole he’d dug, and blocked it up with tree limbs and such. As digging for gold was their trade, they happened to have a couple sacks of black powder handy. So they packed ’em in with Stoppard and lit the fuse.”

  “Charming.”

  “Frontier justice. That was the end of Stoppard, and the end of whatever excuse for a waterfall we used to have up here. But since that time, this area’s been called Kill Devil Falls.”

  “And where exactly was this muddy pool and sad little waterfall?”

  “Not far. You go down to the end of Main Street, where the last few houses are, take a left, head down the hill a ways, cut left again, and it’s at the bottom of a ridge. Funny thing, when they blew up that rock face, they actually uncovered a vein of gold. Stoppard’s blood wasn’t even dry before they got to digging. That was the start of this town. And the Kill Devil Falls mine. Original entrance is still down there.”

  Helen shuddered. She told herself it was because it was growing chillier as the sun set.

  “Let’s get that coffee,” she said.

  Rita waited, seated on the narrow cot, wrists behind her back, cold, sharp edges of the cuffs biting painfully into her skin. Weak light from the front room’s lone ceiling fixture leaked through the iron slats of the cell door, casting a distorted checkerboard pattern along the floor.

  She held back tears. She’d had years of practice.

  Rita felt guilty about leaving Lee. And taking the money. And his precious Mustang. But since the death of her mother, she’d been alone in the world. Long ago, she’d learned there were no knights in shining armor, no Prince Charmings, no happily ever afters. She had no choice but to be selfish. Ruthless, even.

  Lee was destined to die of unnatural causes at an early age. Not Rita. She could escape the cycle of addiction, poverty, desperation. All she needed was one lucky break. The kind provided by three hundred and fifty-three thousand dollars in small bills stuffed into a black waterproof Allagash duffel bag.

  Turning state’s evidence on Lee was supposed to be the hard part. Testifying in front of him at court, seeing the look on his face. Knowing he wouldn’t tell the cops anything a
bout the money in order to protect her, even as she was condemning him to twenty years behind bars. She wasn’t proud of herself. But there was no sense in both of them going down.

  Unfortunately, Kill Devil Falls didn’t believe in lucky breaks and fresh starts. It had caught her in its web and wasn’t letting go. Like a fat greedy spider collecting flies just for the pleasure of watching them slowly squirm to death.

  Rita had realized early on that she and Lee wouldn’t last. He was too mercurial, couldn’t hold a conversation that wasn’t about drugs, money, booze, death metal, or slasher movies. He didn’t have the mental faculties or discipline to do something with his life, apart from drift aimlessly on a haze of pot smoke from one heroin fix to another. She didn’t need tea leaves or Tarot cards to foresee his inevitable end: a needle in his arm, probably in a cardboard box under a highway overpass.

  But he was so sweet to her at the halfway house, and sometimes, having someone care for you, listening to them snore softly beside you at night, feeling their arm draped over you like a shield, was enough. At least for a time.

  After Lee shot El Psicopata, everything moved so quickly, with barely a moment to draw a breath. One minute she was sitting on the couch scrounging enough loose change for a pack of cigarettes, and the next Lee was showing her a garbage bag filled with drugs and money, telling her to pack some clothes because they had to split, like, right fucking now, and pushing her into the Mustang.

  She was too high on Oxy to object when he proposed, on the spur of the moment, to rob the AM/PM. It probably wouldn’t have made a difference either way—Lee was a natural-born desperado, and once he started, he wasn’t going to quit, no matter what promises he made. Robbery was in his blood, as much as the heroin he bought with his ill-gotten money. Even before the cops managed to ID them, Rita had resolved to ditch Lee before he got them both killed.

  The night their identities were broadcast on the news, Lee proposed hopping a boat to Mexico. She pictured him wandering the San Diego docks, the duffel bag of cash on his shoulder, propositioning random boat captains to smuggle them south of the border. She figured someone would call the cops, and the best-case scenario was prison. Worst case—her brains scattered across the pier, a meal for seagulls. So, when he decided their imminent departure was cause for a blow-out, she saw an opportunity. She kept him plied with beer and weed until he zonked. Then she grabbed the money, car keys, her cigarettes, and snuck out the door.

  A few hours later, she’d arrived on the outskirts of Kill Devil Falls and parked the Mustang on a trail off the access road. She’d slung the duffel over her shoulder and navigated through the forest to the edge of town.

  In her absence, Kill Devil Falls had barely changed, aside from slipping ever more into entropy. There had been a dozen or so families living in town when she was a kid. Now the only house that showed any signs of upkeep was Big Ed’s red farmhouse. Rita kept to the trees, picked her way toward the far end of Main Street, descended to the ridge where the mine entrance was located.

  As a teen, with hundreds of acres of open forest to choose from, perhaps it was strange that she’d chosen the mine as her refuge. After all, it was claustrophobic, pitch dark, creepy, dangerous. But it was the one place where he wouldn’t follow her. She fashioned a sanctuary from one of the rock chambers deep in the hillside and spent hours there, reading books by candlelight, smoking purloined Camels.

  Like everyone in town, she heard rumors that old man Yates still worked the mine. She occasionally found evidence of his presence in the tunnels—boot prints, empty beer cans, broken tools. But she never saw him, most likely because he dug exclusively at night. And although he must have known about her private lair, there were no signs that he ever entered it, nosed around. Which made sense. The chamber was a dead end, and Yates didn’t give a shit about her teenage drama. He was after gold.

  Now, all these years later, Rita found her hideaway pretty much the same as she’d left it. Lots of old candles and melted wax, crude wall drawings, tattered books. She picked up one of the moldering paperbacks—Flowers in the Attic. She remembered it well. Child abuse, murder, rape, incest. Jesus, she thought. The story of my life. She tossed the book into a corner.

  After secreting the money, she made her way out of the mine and started the long walk back to the Mustang. She chose a different path uphill, one a bit less steep. But she lost her way and wandered aimlessly for fifteen minutes. Eventually, she pushed through a tangle of underbrush and emerged into an unexpected clearing.

  The clearing was rectangular, ringed by pine trees, unnatural in its symmetry, devoid of weeds and other vegetation. Rita saw dozens of tiny depressions in the earth, lined up in neat little rows.

  On one side of the clearing sat a plastic shed, the DIY-type from Home Depot. The shed door was closed and padlocked. Beside the shed was a pile of detritus. Plastic tarps, broken gardening tools, brown and shriveled cuttings from some sort of plant.

  Rita halted, confused. Who would plant a garden way out here?

  A twig snapped. “Hold it,” a man said. Rita turned.

  Although she hadn’t laid eyes on him for more than a decade, she recognized Mike immediately. During her desperately unhappy adolescence in Kill Devil Falls, Mike, his best buddy Frank, and Teddy were the only kids around her age. Back then, Mike and Frank were skinny, runty, gross teenage boys, into guns, video games, comic books, country music, and weed. She was often the target of their crude sexual jokes, but a fear of her stepfather kept them from ever crossing a physical line with her.

  Mike was still skinny, runty, and gross. He wore a straw hat and a ridiculous pencil-thin mustache. He held a crossbow, its arrow pointed at her belly.

  “Hi, Mike,” she said.

  “Do I know you?”

  “Sure. It’s Rita.”

  “Rita?”

  “Rita Crawford, dumbshit.”

  “Rita … holy cow!”

  “Can you … uh … ” She waved at the crossbow. He narrowed his eyes.

  “What are you doing up here, Rita?”

  “I’m just passing through, Mike. Honest. I was just leaving.”

  “Why you nosing around the woods?”

  “I wasn’t. I was just trying to find my way back to my car. It’s parked outside of town.”

  “Where you coming from, just now?”

  “From … down the hill.”

  “What were you doing down the hill?”

  “What’s with the twenty questions?”

  Mike kept the crossbow pointed at her belly. Rita held up a hand.

  “Okay, listen. I’m going away for a while. A few years, probably. I just came back to … to see the place one last time. I’ve done that and I’m ready to go. So, if you don’t mind, I’ll just—”

  “I think you’d better come with me.”

  “What’s the problem, Mike? Why are you hiding in the bushes with a crossbow?”

  “We need to go see Frank. This way.”

  He motioned with the crossbow.

  It came to her. The clearing, with its symmetrical rows, the dead clippings next to the DIY shed. Way out in the middle of the woods. Mike and Frank were weed farmers. And growing this many plants, on county land to boot, was probably worth a three-to-five-year stretch.

  “Ahh … I get it. Seriously, Mike. I’m the last person to rat out your little enterprise here to the cops. I mean … I’m sure you’ve heard I’m a wanted woman.”

  Mike smiled, his teeth chipped and yellow. “A wanted woman.”

  “How about a little honor among thieves?”

  “I ain’t no thief.”

  “No, no, it’s just an expression. What I’m saying is … armed robbery … pot farm … You say po-tay-to … I say pa-tah-to … ”

  “Let’s talk to Frank.”

  “Mike—”

  “Now, goddammit!” He pointed the arrow at her face.

  “Okay, Jesus. Chill.”

  So they trampled through the woods to the double-
wide trailer where Frank and Mike lived. Frank walked out the door, totally freaked out.

  “Rita fucking Crawford. Holee shit! I saw you on, like, one of those America’s Most Wanted shows. Fucking A, girl!”

  “How you doing, Frank? Like I told Mike, I was just on my way out of town. I’m in kind of a hurry.”

  “Well, now. Maybe we should turn you in. Is there some kinda reward?”

  “If you turn me in, I’ll tell them about your pot farm, Frank. How’d you like that?”

  Frank’s grin evaporated.

  “Not much.”

  “Then let’s just go our separate ways and each keep our little secrets.”

  “What’s it worth to you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Me letting you go?”

  “I suppose it’s worth about as much to me as it is to you that I don’t tell anyone what you got going in the forest.”

  “How about a blowjob?”

  “What?”

  “Is it worth a blowjob? One for me, and one for Mike?”

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  Frank laughed.

  “If I had a pretty mouth like yours, I might just do that.”

  Rita was starting to get butterflies, worse than when she’d sat behind the wheel waiting for Lee to come out of whatever joint he was robbing. No one knew she was up here. Mike and Frank could chain her up in the cellar of one of the abandoned houses and rape her to death over a period of weeks.

  “Frank … come on.” She showed him her winningest smile. “Be cool. I’ll tell you what. I have a few hundred in my pocket here. I’ll give it to you. Just cut me loose.”

  “Maybe we should tell Teddy.” Frank turned to Mike. “Think we should tell Teddy?”

  Mike shrugged. “I mean, Teddy’s a sheriff.”

  Rita was shocked. “That little shit?”

  Frank nodded. “Yeah. He’s the law around these parts.”

  “What about … Big Ed?”

  “Oh … he’s still the actual sheriff. Teddy’s just a little old deputy.”

  She really, really didn’t want them telling Teddy and Big Ed she was in Kill Devil Falls.