The Best American Essays 2013 (11 page)

In Martinsburg, West Virginia, where the truck stop should be is a massive Walmart stretching flat and endless along a parking lot the size of a lake. Five years ago the truck stop was demolished, along with its restaurant. The only thing they neglected to take down is a website with the words
Martinsburg
TravelCenter of America
™ flashing like a beacon online.

The whole thing seemed so uncanny. Everywhere I looked, evidence of these girls was disappearing. I hadn’t been able to get a copy of Shana Holts’s police report because I was told there was no official suspect. Lisa Pennal’s full statement, it turned out, had been destroyed for file space. Now the whole Martinsburg truck stop had been swallowed by a Walmart Supercenter.

I knew from talking to the Martinsburg police that the truck stop had been under the jurisdiction of the Berkeley County sheriff. I called the office. A chipper recorded voice told me to press 1 for taxes, press 2 for guns—“all other callers stay on the line!” I finally spoke to a woman and asked if they had a homicide record for a girl who may have been found in the Martinsburg truck stop during the summer of 1985.

“We don’t have any records,” she told me.

I thought she meant digitized.

“I can come down,” I said.

“We don’t have any records.”

In the 1990s the Berkeley County sheriff’s department’s computer crashed and burned. The paper records had been destroyed for file space, and so nothing from the 1980s remained. I asked to speak to any senior officer who might have been there at the time. She told me there was only one and he had gone fishing.

I spent a week on the road in Appalachia, visiting truck stops, interviewing the older truckers and waitresses. At first I would ask about the girl in the dumpster, but no one had heard of her, so I asked if there had ever been any women found in truck stops. Wherever I went, I was told nothing “like that” ever happened, which was remarkable given the numbers of bodies the FBI had tracked over the past thirty years. The newspapers were equally silent. It seems our profound fascination with serial killers is matched by an equally profound lack of interest in their victims. One library archivist explained that I was looking for the kind of news nobody wanted to read. The girl, he said, “wasn’t one of our own. She was a drifter.” I’d never heard the word
drifter
used in earnest. It touched a nerve I didn’t know I had. I had been a drifter. If what he said was true, the trail I was on had disappeared into a field.

Out of desperation I made one last attempt and swung by a smaller truck stop in Hancock, Maryland. I spoke to a woman who had worked there a long time and told her about the dead hitchhiker while she fingered the gold cross on her neck and listened. Had she ever heard about it? I asked. She shook her head; then her eyes clouded some. “Wait a minute. There was that one girl. She was a prostitute. They found her near a dumpster behind the restaurant at the Gateway Travel Plaza in Breezewood. She had a stocking down her throat, I think. That was way back in the early seventies, though.”

It wasn’t the early ’70s, it was 1987, and the woman killed was nineteen-year-old Lamonica Cole. I found her in the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
later that night. She had been strangled at Breezewood. Another prostitute had been grabbed there as well, in 2006, but was found farther down the road with her throat slit. Neither of these women were the one I was looking for, but a sentence in the article caught my attention. It said there had been a string of prostitute murders in truck stops in the area beginning in June of 1985, which was right on the edge of my time frame.

The next morning I drove to the Gateway Travel Plaza in Breezewood, Pennsylvania. I thought that maybe in a truck stop where known murders had occurred, people would be more forthcoming. Maybe they would remember something the others hadn’t. I parked in front of the family travel plaza, then walked back past a sign that read
TRUCKS ONLY
. The store for professional drivers was clean and quiet. I asked around until I found someone who had been there in 1985. It was a woman, probably in her mid-fifties. She came over and gave me an open smile. I asked her the same question I was asking everybody:
Did you ever hear about a hitchhiker in a dumpster?

“No,” she said.

“Did you ever hear of anything like that at all, in other times, any other bodies of women found along this stretch of I-70?”

I was in the one place where I knew for certain women had been found, one less than a hundred yards away from where she was standing. “No,” she said, “I never heard of anything like that anywhere.”

Listening to her, it occurred to me that this investigation of mine wasn’t a detective novel. It was a ghost story. The prisms of Regina Walters, Shana Holts, and Lisa Pennal refracted into a set of icons—one in the back seat of a car laughing as she leans on the headrest, one with the shorn red-gold hair and an expression of resilience, one slightly crazy and ready to fight—each casting her own light, each a hologram of girlhood.

Recently the New Jersey State Supreme Court handed down a statement on memory, describing it as complex and often unreliable. The ruling went on to question the admissibility of eyewitness testimony. “Human memory is not like a video recording,” they said. And they’re right. It’s more like a set of still photos. I remember coming down through the Blue Ridge Mountains in a truck with its brakes on fire and dropping over Chester Gap in the middle of the night when it was still hot and the air was loud with the chirping of bugs. I remember sitting in the drizzle in a truck while the crime-scene tape was strung around a dumpster. I remember driving around Ohio howling along with Bruce Springsteen and buzzed out of my brain on Diet Cokes and being sad that the ride ended because it was a safe one and I had almost been able to be myself for a second, but that second had passed. I remember a fuel island in the blue morning light and a driver with a white shirt that stood out like a flag, and later, in another ride, taking the turn back east, then south, and a gray day just before a storm so pressurized my ears hurt. And I remember being in the woods off I-95. I only ran about a hundred yards before I turned and hid, because I didn’t know if I was being chased and needed to see. I crouched on netted twigs and breathed into my shirt to muffle the sound. The woods were blue in the gray light, which was either dusk or a coming storm. At the center of everything was my own breath. The birds went silent, and I didn’t know what it meant. I watched the truck idle on the side of the road until it finally pulled off.

One snowy night several months later, I was hitchhiking through Amherst, Massachusetts, and a carful of students from Hampshire College picked me up and let me stay with them. In the morning they talked me into applying to the college. I was accepted, and that provided a thin strip of pride on which to stand while I made contact with my family. My mother was happy to pay for school. Being sixteen and in college is an easier thing to talk about. It was a solution that worked for both of us and looked like redemption but didn’t last. The dissonance between my emotional world and the one around me was still too great, and soon I left again, but in a more sanctioned way. I hitchhiked in Europe and settled in Vienna for a few years. I lived among artists in the Lower East Side squats. These are narratives we know. Unlike those of other young women on the road, my story was now recognizable.

When I got home from West Virginia, a letter from Rhoades was waiting. It said he would see me if I promised never to say that I had seen him or what had passed between us. It was just the kind of promise a sexual predator or child molester would try to extract. He also wanted $500. I wrote him back and told him that journalistic standards wouldn’t allow me to pay for interviews. I expected that to be the end of it, but I got another letter. Young was right. Rhoades liked to think of himself as an “expert,” and now Rhoades suggested he be paid as one. But an expert in what, I thought—killing? At the bottom of the yellow legal paper, scrawled in all caps, he wrote, “IT WASN’T ME!!!” I looked at the letter. He may be right, but certainly not because he’s innocent. I imagined for a moment flying to Illinois. I go through the paperwork, get fingerprinted and led through a channel of air-locked doors into a room with him. He’s there with his neatly pressed shirt and colossal arrogance. We do the interview, but I don’t take notes. It doesn’t matter what he says. After all, it’s just going to be his word against mine. And who’s going to believe him? That’s where my fantasy ends, in a game of “Who Is Credible Now?”

The same week that I got the letter from Rhoades, the senior officer from the Berkeley County sheriff’s department who had been fishing returned. He said that no girls had ever been found in a dumpster at the Martinsburg, West Virginia, truck stop, and I had no reason not to believe him.

One story Debra Davis told still haunts me. She was on a trip with her husband, Bob, the last she ever took in his truck. They were heading west on I-10 and stopped somewhere in Arizona at a busy truck stop. By the restaurant door was a young woman with a baby, trying to get a ride. Debra said she looked about eighteen or nineteen and desperate. Debra wanted to give her money or do something. Her own sister had been on the street, and she was overwhelmed by the woman at the door and didn’t want to just walk away. Rhoades saw what Debra was looking at. He came around behind her and grabbed her shoulders. He turned her slowly toward the girl and pointed. “You see that, Debbie,” he whispered in her ear. “She’s one of the invisible people.”

MATTHEW VOLLMER

FROM
New England Review

O
N THANKSGIVING
MY
FATHER
asked me if I wanted to visit the Nazi. That’s what my father—a dentist to whom the Nazi had entrusted the care of his teeth—called him, what he’d always called him: “The Nazi.” As in: “Did I tell you who came into the office this week? The Nazi.” And: “Did I tell you that I talked to the Nazi?” And: “You’ll never guess what the Nazi told me.” And so on.

The Nazi to whom my father referred was not a real Nazi—and, as far as I knew, my father didn’t call him “the Nazi” to his face. Neither had this so-called Nazi served under Hitler in World War II. Back then, the Nazi my father knew had yet to be born. And though my father had a pretty good idea of where this Nazi’s sympathies might lie, all my father said about him was that he had money, that he’d written a book about the Wewelsburg castle in southern Germany (the one that Heinrich Himmler had attempted to restore); that he’d built a castle of his own in a remote location in the mountains of southwestern North Carolina; that he, like my father, had an affinity for snakes, had fed white mice to copperheads he’d kept in terrariums; that he’d taken to leashing one of these serpents and walking it as one would a dog; and, finally, that his curatorial impulses and an affection for artifacts once belonging to members of the Third Reich had led him to build a private underground museum in the belly of the aforementioned fortress—a vault of ominous artifacts that my father convinced me I needed to see.

I’d spent a good part of my childhood visiting my father’s dental patients, many of whom lived deep in the mountains, in houses that might or might not have electricity or phones. During one visit I’d watched a man yank intestines from a slaughtered hog. I’d been towed, with my sister, down a gravel road on a wooden sled roped to an ox. I’d gathered eggs in shit-strewn barns, run cobs of corn through grinders that worked by cranking a handle and spinning a wheel so that the kernels poured out of one rusted chute and naked cobs out of another. I’d been bucked from the back of a horse; I’d been charged—no kidding—by a yak. I’d sat on a quilted bed in the front room of a house owned by a man who, at sixty-some years of age, had not only installed his first phone but had also been receiving, as a result, vulgar calls from a woman who lived down the road, words so filthy he claimed he wouldn’t repeat them.

But I had never before visited the Nazi.

After my father and I had driven out of town, on a narrow two-lane road winding past ramshackle houses and trailers using sheets for window curtains, over narrow bridges spanning rushing streams and onto a gravel road where we passed multiple signs announcing that we were now on private property and that potential trespassers would be shot; after we’d reached the heavy-duty chain-link fence running the length of this property; after my father had dialed the Nazi’s number on his cell phone; and after the front gate glided backward on lubed wheels—we drove inside and the house came into view. The Nazi’s house did, in fact, resemble a castle. It wasn’t exactly Neuschwanstein, but it had rock walls and turrets and wooden doors with wrought iron hinges and arched windows. It had a fountain and an impressive series of stairs leading to the front door. The whole thing looked like something a government—though certainly not our own—had erected centuries before.

We left the truck. I had the feeling we were being watched, that our movements were being recorded—that somewhere inside the castle, a bank of TVs flickered, monitoring different zones of the Nazi’s estate.

My father grabbed me by the arm. “See that house over there?” he said. He pointed to the mountain opposite the one where we were standing. Glass glinted through the trees. I could make out a roof.

“Yeah,” I said.

“He bought that.”

“Who bought it?”

My father said the Nazi’s name.

“Why?” I asked.

“Privacy,” he said.

“Privacy?” I repeated. “What does that mean?”

My father shrugged. “I guess he doesn’t want anyone seeing what he does over here.”

I frowned. “What does he do?” I said.

My father made a face and shrugged.

I could not think about the Nazi, could not reflect upon him and his ilk, without also thinking about other people with similar ideas who had retreated to secret places in our mountains. While these mountains—which belong, in name, to the Blue Ridge—might have lacked the remote and indifferent grandeur of, say, the Rockies, they had other notable qualities, and precisely because they exist in a temperate region and are well watered by frequent rains, they have produced a semi-penetrable jungle of trees and shrubs—more varieties of plants, in fact, than anywhere else on the continent, home to all manner of wild creatures, from bear and deer and grouse to ticks, serpents, wasps, and skinks. So dense are these forests during the warmer months, so thick and verdant, that in many wild places a human who wishes to pass through them must do so either by crawling on his or her belly or by peeling back layers of briars and limbs and leaves.