Chapter 31

I woke to a bunch of missed calls and text messages from Carole.

The last time I'd heard from her was immediately after I was fired and I hadn't bothered to pick up.

"Millennials don't talk on the phone," I'd told her once, which she found ridiculous.

She hadn't left a voicemail after that last call, which meant that I never found out what she wanted and I didn't bother calling her back. I figured that I probably took one of her coffee mugs by accident.

It turned out that the reason Carole or anyone else hadn't left me a voicemail wasn't because I was friendless and alone, but because my mailbox was full, which she informed me of in the first of a long string of text messages.

Hannah call me back.

Are you OK?

Please tell me that you're not the body that was found.

My fingers went to the forum before my brain even registered the word "body." It was a reflex at that point, like breathing. My phone already knew where I wanted to go, which at times I resented. Algorithms were proof that there was more to love than simply predicting what someone wanted.

I didn't have to scroll to figure out what happened. The news presented itself to me like raindrops in a downpour.

Another body had been found in the ravine.

In the days after 9/11, I had a friend who repeatedly talked about the vacation her family had taken to New York two months prior to the attack.

"We were right there," she said. "It almost happened to us."

I didn't understand her fixation. There she was, fully intact, half a country away, and accepting comforting hugs like she'd been through trauma. There were enough people who died or who were almost dead or first responders who were still suffering health consequences years later. Why did we need to add to the tally? It was like she needed to figure out her relationship to the event in order to make it mean something.

I understood, in a realer sense, how she felt when I read the word "ravine." I reached up and touched my head and came away with a leaf, which I crumbled into pieces between my fingers. I had the uncanny feeling of being both alive and not, like a cat inside of a box that no one wanted to open.

I was right there. It almost happened to me. There was a twinge of disappointment, even though I was happy to be alive.

The forum was doing whatever the virtual version of screaming was.

"How could this have happened? William's in jail."

"Maybe he's innocent."

"It's probably a copycat."

"What is up with that ravine? It's like a magnet for death."

"This is a failure on every level."

I saw forum users that I hadn't seen in months, people who'd long since lost interest with no new murders to contemplate.

"What does this mean?" they asked. "What do we do now?"

They were upset, but they were excited too, or maybe that was just me projecting my own emotions onto them. That's what was nice about people online. They felt whatever I wanted them to feel, their emotions an extension of my own.

I went into the bathroom and splashed water on my face. There was a smudge of dirt on my forehead that I scrubbed away with a washcloth. I kept waiting for something to happen, a lightning bolt to appear in the blue sky outside of my window. Instead, the world continued as normal around me.

I remembered what Bentley had said that night in the bar, how he was worried that William could still hurt him even though he was in jail. It was too much of a coincidence for the murder to be totally random. Surely, it was connected somehow. One last-ditch effort from William to gain his freedom as though his power was so great that he could now kill women with his mind.

I had to give credit to Carole, who was the first and only person to check in on me after the body was found. She'd woken at her normal early hour to do her meditation practice in the quiet of the morning and, despite her best efforts, was unable to resist looking at her phone before she settled into contemplation. The news of the body caused such a rupture that she skipped meditating in favor of investigating my Instagram page, where she discovered a number of posts tagged in the Atlanta area and deduced that I was there because of William.

I was both touched and impressed by Carole's ability to figure out where I was and what I was doing, especially considering that she wasn't particularly skilled at using Instagram. Her own Instagram was entirely made up of poorly photographed pictures of her dog, Trixie, whom she'd adopted from a local rescue group.

You went to see him, didn't you?she texted.

Carole, as it turned out, knew me better than I thought she did.

It was difficult to get dressed while simultaneously refreshing the forum every few seconds to see if any more information had been released. I texted Dotty and Lauren a single word, courthouse, before getting in my car. There was a rumor on the forum that the police were going to hold a midmorning press conference.

The sidewalks leading to the courthouse were chaotic in a way that they hadn't been since the beginning of the trial. Police put up barricades to stop people from treading on the lawn, so people gathered wherever they could find space, some of them holding signs.

KILLERS INSPIRE KILLERS, said one.

LET WILLIAM GO, said another.

I wondered when they'd had time to make them. In times of tragedy, there were always some people who immediately turned to arts and crafts.

Dotty appeared at my side.

"Quite a development," she said.

"Yeah," I replied.

I couldn't decide whether I was a spectator or an actor. Dotty didn't know about my visit to the ravine the night before. No one did. I was the only person who knew how close to death I'd come and I was scared to mention it to anyone else lest I cast a specter of guilt upon myself.

Lauren joined us a few minutes later with a Starbucks cup in her hand. She was cheery.

"It's nice to know that William really is innocent," she said.

"Is that what you think this means?" Dotty asked her.

"Of course. What else could it be? Another woman died. The killer is clearly still out there."

"Or it's a copycat," I said, thinking of the forum.

"Or it's William's partner in murder," Dotty suggested darkly.

Lauren scoffed.

"Why can't you just take this as a good thing?" she said.

"I don't think the dead woman would think of it that way," I replied.

Lauren was silent for a long time after that. She'd forgotten that there was a woman involved, that there was anyone besides William in the world.

The Thompson family was nowhere to be seen. Likely, they were sequestered somewhere with William, trying to wrap their heads around the latest occurrence. Mark was always so certain that William was going to be found innocent. He was probably glowing at this latest body, proof that maybe his son wasn't the killer that everyone wanted to make him out to be.

Please tell me you're okay, Carole texted again, and I realized that I'd forgotten to respond. She seemed like a person from another lifetime, like when a friend from the fourth grade tried to add me on Facebook.

I'm okay, I replied without giving any additional details.

At ten, the police released the available information, which as always was unsatisfyingly sparse. The body was found in the early hours of the morning by an employee who was enjoying an early morning cigarette before his opening shift at a nearby coffee chain. The body hadn't tumbled as far as the others and he'd been shocked to see pale white skin amongst the leaves. The body, I gathered, had arrived sometime after my visit. The killer and I, like ships passing in the night.

The police went through a list of questions.

No, they didn't know if the murder was connected to the others.

No, they couldn't say if it would lead to a mistrial.

Yes, the jury had been sequestered as soon as possible.

Yes, they'd identified the body; it was that of a woman named Kelsey Jenkins.

The forum found out everything there was to know within minutes.

Before she was murdered, Kelsey Jenkins was a bartender. She had the right look for the profession, with big boobs and a tiny waist. There was something retro about her appearance, with her outdated hairstyle and streaks of chunky blond. Kelsey hadn't gone to college. She recognized that she didn't like school, but loved making drinks. She graduated from high school, started waitressing, and as soon as she could, she began tending bar.

It wasn't difficult to figure out who the regular bar patrons were. Drunk people love taking pictures. The beauty of a drunken picture is that it's easy to feel cool while the photograph is being taken, only to look back later and discover that everyone looked like a disaster.

It was reported that a lot of the bar patrons were secretly or openly in love with Kelsey. I wondered if she liked it, all that love. It was a bar that catered to an older crowd, though young people did occasionally come in. Her admirers complicated things. The more people who were in love with a woman, the more people who became suspects when that woman was murdered.

There was the regular that everyone used to call Lizard, but now that he was sober he wanted to be called Gary. He still went by the bar in the afternoons and drank a Coke and smoked too many cigarettes. Even sober, Gary suffered from a loose tongue and was more than willing to tell anyone who asked what they wanted to know.

"Everyone loved Kelsey. What's not to love? She was hot and we were all drunk," he said in one quote.

There was the guy at the bar who kept a list of women who frequented the bar that he wanted to have sex with, none of whom he'd actually managed to woo, though he continued to show other bar patrons the list like a fucked-up kind of vision board. I knew, without even asking, that Kelsey was at the top of the list.

The longtime divorced guy who at one point was a recently divorced guy and couldn't shake the label of "divorcé." He got kicked out of the bar for spurts of time because he suffered from anger issues that were probably part of the cause of his divorce. He would've been a good suspect if only he wasn't in a period of being banned.

The kid who had recently turned twenty-one and didn't have many friends his own age and so he hung out at the bar with people a decade older than he was and mistook their age for wisdom.

The guy that Kelsey was friends with who stayed at the bar long after closing. They had probably hooked up at some point.

The guy who was still angry that she'd thrown him out and forbidden him to come back.

Her ex-boyfriend who still stopped by sometimes. He reminded me of Max with all his tattoos and his cool punk look. I hated the way that my jaw tightened at the thought, my heartbreak like the scar on my arm that continued to ache even years later.

The forum was thrilled with all the new suspects. No one stated it like that, but I knew because I was thrilled too. If my life had previously felt like it was ending, this body was a new beginning.

If Kelsey hadn't been thrown into the ravine, her death never would've been connected to the murders of the other four women. She was surrounded by so many men, men with so many motives and so much liquor. The problem was the ravine, the ways in which the wounds on her body matched the wounds of the other women, including details that hadn't been released to the public, things that the detectives had kept as a gotcha card. It was like finding a mouse in the house when another mouse was already in the trap. Things were always more complicated than they initially seemed.

I lamented and cherished my timing. If only I'd stayed in the ravine longer, I might know the identity of the killer. Conversely, if I'd stayed longer, then I too might be dead. The deaths of the women continued to circle around me. William was my boyfriend, yes, but the women were another kind of relationship that society was reluctant to define. How it ached to be so close to the truth and yet without resolution.

I can't figure out how Kelsey Jenkins is tied into everything. Sometimes I feel like you're two different people in one; a lover and a killer, a man in prison and a man on the hunt. The question is, How can you continue to kill while you're behind bars? The question is, Were you ever a killer to begin with? The question is, How do I fit into it all?

I showered for a long time, taking advantage of the large hotel water heaters to wash every last trace of the ravine off me.

Of course I will stay with you no matter the outcome of the trial,I wrote William, doubt already starting to set in as I recorded the words.