Alter Ego

7

Stride was restless. He didn’t go home.

Instead, he drove north out of the city on Jean Duluth Road until the buildings, traffic, and people disappeared around him. It didn’t take long to leave civilization behind in Duluth. There was nothing but small towns and dense forest all the way to the Canadian border. Sometimes he felt as if the city were the last pioneer outpost, holding back the encroaching wilderness. It was grayer up there. More primitive. And more ominous.

His headlights guided him. He had to be cautious about deer at night, as John Doe had learned too late. This far north, he had to think about wolves, too. Stride stayed on the road until it ended, and then he turned onto Highway 44 and continued into the middle of nowhere. There was nothing on either side of him but evergreens crowding the pavement. He passed no homes and no crossroads. A few snow flurries kept him company by skittering across his windshield.

He knew where he was going, but he didn’t really know why. He hadn’t been to this place in years. He hadn’t even thought about going back until Chris had mentioned it. This was the part of the Northland where Art Leipold had owned hunting ground. This was where three women had died.

Instinct guided him. He remembered what he was looking for and knew when to slow down. Ahead of him, through his headlights, he saw a spur road snaking off the left side of the highway. It was a dead-end road that didn’t get much attention from the plows. Stride turned onto the road, and the tires of his Expedition chewed through the packed snow. He went slowly. Every so often, a rusted mailbox leaned into the road. A couple of recluses lived up here, but not many.

He drove until the road ended at a yellow gate marked with “private property” and “no trespassing” signs. On the other side of the gate was an old bridge over the Cloquet River that wasn’t likely to support the weight of anything other than foot traffic. That was the border of Art Leipold’s land.

Stride pulled to the gate and stopped. He wasn’t alone.

A red Toyota Yaris was parked in the tall weeds. Chris was right. The killing ground from years earlier had become a tourist attraction for beer parties, ghost stories, and teenage make-out sessions. Beyond the gate, he could see that the deep snow was riddled with footprints.

Stride got out of the truck and walked around the gate. The ribbon of river water was frozen solid under the bridge. He listened for the noise of whoever had come there in the Yaris, but the only sound was the creepy rattling of tree branches in the wind. He remembered where he was going. Even if he hadn’t, the overlapping footprints in his flashlight beam showed him the way. The trail went north into the pines, and it was so narrow that he had to turn sideways in places and duck to avoid the low-hanging branches. Snow dusted his hair and melted down his back like cold fingers.

He didn’t have far to go. The cabin was built only a hundred yards into the forest, but the cold and night made it feel like a long trek. He still didn’t know why he had come back after so many years. Maybe, like Chris, the movie made him want to confront old demons.

Ahead of him, the trail widened. A tiny clearing had been hacked out of the woods. The cabin was in front of him, or what was left of it. His flashlight lit up beams scarred into black charcoal by fire. One wall had fallen, and so had most of the roof. Snow and dead brush pushed up to the door. Much of the forest had burned, too, but nature had begun to bring it back to life. Saplings had squeezed in on the ground, and the branches of the surviving pines spread overhead like the open arms of a priest.

He remembered.

Here, in here!

Mags, get a lock cutter out here now.

Is the ambulance on the way?

Water, we need water.

She’s alive, she’s alive!

His voice echoed down to him over the years. He remembered ripping open the cabin door much the way Dean Casperson had done it in the movie. Every second counted. He remembered the cage itself, built of steel mesh and covered with sound-resistant foam. You could stand next to it and barely hear someone screaming inside. He remembered the microphone wire that had been used in recording the messages to him.

Save me, Jonathan Stride.

He remembered dragging Lori Fulkerson from the cage, her muscles atrophied, her hair dirty and brittle, her lips desiccated. Later, the doctors said she would have died if they’d reached the cabin even two hours later. It was that close.

They’d found the bodies of the other three victims buried in the woods behind the cabin. Kristal Beech. Tanya Carter. Sally Wills. He’d been too late for them. They’d died in the box. Along the way, terrible things had happened as they dealt with hunger, thirst, and desperation. Stride had never shared the graphic details with anyone else. Not even Serena.

Stride directed his flashlight beam into the open, burned interior of the cabin. He was startled to find a bone-white face staring back at him like one of the walking dead. He wondered for an instant if he was dreaming, but he wasn’t. It was Lori Fulkerson. She was the one who’d driven here in the Toyota Yaris. She stood in darkness in the same place where she’d been held prisoner eleven years earlier.

Lori was pointing a gun at him.

“Who are you?” she screamed. “Get out of here!”

Stride turned the flashlight toward his own face. “Ms. Fulkerson, it’s Jonathan Stride with the police. You’re safe. Put the gun down.”

He didn’t hear an answer.

“Ms. Fulkerson? There’s no reason to be alarmed.”

He waited again, and finally her voice murmured out of the black night, barely audible. “Okay. I’m okay.”

He pointed his flashlight toward the ground. He stepped closer, through the missing wall, inside what would have been the entrance of the cabin. Lori was six feet away. The cage would have been right there where she was standing. He watched her slip the gun into her pocket.

“Why are you here?” he asked.

She said nothing. He didn’t like what he saw in her face. Her skin had no color. Her lips were pushed tightly together and blue with cold. She wasn’t dressed warmly enough for the night. Her dark eyes had the fury and fear of someone who’d never gotten over what was done to her, and she trembled like a deer that was ready to run. She was tall and stocky with tight brown curls on her head. She’d been twenty-two years old when she was imprisoned, so she was only in her early thirties now. She looked much older.

“Ms. Fulkerson?” he said again.

The trance she was in seemed to break. She slumped and could barely hold herself up. He went to grab her, and she was ice cold.

“Come on, let’s get out of here,” he said.

Stride coaxed her arm around his shoulder and helped her toward the forest trail with an arm around her waist. Her trembling turned into out-and-out shivering. Her knees were weak, and she stumbled as they inched through the snow. He bent her down when the branches were low. She didn’t say a word. When they finally broke from the trees near the river, he took her to his Expedition and guided her into the passenger seat. He got in and made the truck’s heater roar. He grabbed blankets from the rear seat and draped them over her shoulders and lap.

“Let’s get you to the hospital,” he said.

“No.”

“You may have hypothermia.”

“I’m just cold. I wasn’t out there long.”

Stride didn’t like it, but he left the truck in park. He noted that the heat had begun to revive her. Her voice was stronger and clearer. She stretched out her fingers. Color came back to her face.

“Do you have any water?” she asked.

He didn’t comment on his sense of déjà vu. He found a plastic bottle of water that was mostly frozen and unscrewed the cap. He made sure she dribbled only a little between her lips.

“What were you doing out here?” he asked.

“I come out here sometimes. This place draws me back.”

He slipped a hand inside the pocket of her coat and found the revolver and made sure it was secure. Without asking her permission, he unloaded the bullets and put them away in his jacket. “Why the gun?”

“Protection. You meet strange people out here.”

Stride didn’t doubt that was true, but he wondered if the gun was really for protection or was for something else. He wondered how many times she’d brought it with her. He wondered how many times she’d stared into the barrel with her finger on the trigger. The past didn’t give up its grip easily. Horror had a way of coming back like a virus.

She looked at him unhappily and then looked away, as if she could see what he was thinking.

“How are things going for you, Lori?” he asked pointedly.

“You don’t have to worry about me.”

“Of course. I’m just expressing my concern.”

“Well, don’t.”

Lori had never been a warm person, even after he’d rescued her. She was prickly and hard to like. He didn’t know how much of that was her natural personality and how much was a reaction to the time she’d spent in the cage. She was a loner. As far as he knew, she’d never been married. He didn’t know much about her family background.

“Are you getting help when you need it?” he asked. “I’m not asking for details; I just want to make sure you know about resources—”

“Trust me, I’ve burned through most of the shrinks in Duluth,” Lori interrupted. “My head should be the size of a walnut by now. Same with antidepressants. Nothing makes it go away.”

He didn’t say anything more, because anything he said would make things worse. He’d had to remind himself years ago that not every victim was a saint.

“So they’re making a movie about you,” Lori went on with acid in her voice. “You must be pretty impressed with that.”

“Not in the least.”

“Oh, come on. It’s got to be a big ego thing.”

“There’s nothing about what happened back then that I want to remember. Three women died. You nearly died, too.”

Lori shrugged. “Well, Art Leipold hung himself. So at least one good thing came out of it.”

Stride didn’t know how to respond to such raw pain. Eleven years had gone by, but it might as well have happened yesterday.

“The actress who’s playing me keeps calling,” Lori continued. “She wants to meet me. She says she wants to know what it felt like to be in the cage. She invited me to visit her on the set tomorrow.”

“Is that why you came back here tonight?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. It’s not like I need a reminder.”

“You don’t have to talk to Aimee Bowe,” Stride said. “On the other hand, maybe it would help to have someone else try to understand what you went through.”

“It’s not like some Hollywood blonde can spend ten minutes with me and get inside my head.”

“You’re right,” Stride said. “Nobody will ever know the truth except you.”

“Yeah. Me and the ones who died. Sad little club, huh?”

“You’re alive,” Stride pointed out softly.

Lori didn’t look at him like being alive was any prize. “My mother thinks I should talk to Aimee Bowe. She says it would be good for me. She says I’m still in the box and maybe it would help me get out. She told me to be brave. Like she has any idea what that’s like. At the first whiff of trouble, she runs away. Did you know my mom walked out on my father when I was ten years old?”

Stride shook his head. “I didn’t. I’m sorry.”

“She took me away from him. Moved us across the country. I never saw my father again. When he died, she didn’t even tell me about it for six months. Six months! She got married again, and she and my stepfather pretended I had brand-new parents. Like the past was nothing, you know. Like I should just forget it. Well, that’s not me. First chance I had, I got out of there and got the hell away from them. I went to business school when I was eighteen, and when I was done with that, I moved back to Duluth. I figured I’d be happy coming home. You want to guess how well that turned out?”

The venom in her voice filled Stride with sadness. He hated to see a young life destroyed, and he hated that there was nothing he could do about it. He was a fixer, but some things couldn’t be fixed.

Lori opened the truck door. “I’m leaving now.”

“I wish you’d let me take you to the hospital, Ms. Fulkerson.”

“You can’t make me, can you?” she asked.

“No.”

“Then good-bye, Lieutenant,” she retorted. She climbed down into the snow, but before she closed the door, she leaned back inside. Her eyes were bloodshot. Her voice cracked with despair. “Two hours, right?”

Stride cocked his head in puzzlement. “I’m sorry, what?”

“Two hours. The docs said I would have been dead in two hours.”

He nodded. “That’s right.”

“I wish you’d been late,” she said.

It was after midnight by the time Stride made it back to the matchbox cottage on Park Point where he lived with Serena and Cat. The house was on the other side of the sand dunes from Lake Superior, and the lake was oddly quiet. Most of the year he heard the thunder of waves twenty-four hours a day, but sometimes the long cold of January built enough ice beyond the beach to dull the noise.

He let himself into the dark house. The first thing he did was check on Cat, who was asleep in the corner bedroom facing the street. She didn’t wake up. Her breathing was soft and regular. He stared down at her pretty face, which was lost in a tangle of chestnut hair. It was hard to be mad at her even when she did foolish things. He closed the door softly and let her sleep.

Stride took a shower and then tried to get into bed without disturbing Serena. It was impossible, because the old timbers in the floor always groaned. She murmured a drowsy greeting at him. He slipped into bed behind her, slid an arm around her waist, and kissed her neck. Those were the moments that reminded him how good it was to be married again.

“You’re late,” she said. “You want to talk?”

Normally, he would have pretended to be tired and let her go back to sleep, but not tonight. He’d told her about Art Leipold before, but he found himself talking about the case all over again. How personal it was. How the voices of the women got inside his soul. How much it made him question whether he was really ready to be in charge of the detective bureau.

Eventually he fell silent, but he kept thinking about what the women had gone through inside the cage. He remembered the bodies of the other victims and the details of the autopsies. He knew what they’d done to themselves. Unspeakable things. Desperation drove people to dark places.

“We never released the details publicly,” he murmured. “Some of the things the women did in the box were — disturbing. No one else needed to know.”

Serena turned around to face him. “But you know.”

“Yeah. I wish I didn’t.”

They couldn’t see each other in the darkness. All he could feel was her warmth. She put her hands on his face and kissed him softly, over and over, until he kissed her back. Then, in silence, she wrapped herself up in his body and made him forget for a while.