The Ghost Network (30 page)

Davis cried again and begged for forgiveness. Berliner asked where they would take Nix. To repent for spying and working against him, Davis told Berliner that the New Society had a property in Michigan, a lake house officially owned by Peaches’s maternal grandmother Roberta Parish. Schizophrenic and suffering from emphysema after a lifetime of smoking, Parish lived in a high-end senior care center in Ann Arbor. Peaches and the New Society had free reign of her lakefront property. Davis gave Taer and Berliner the address, and assured them that if Ali and Peaches had taken Nix anywhere, it was there. By that time, it was nearly 3 a.m. Taer wanted to leave immediately, but Berliner thought it would be better to sleep for a few hours and persuaded her to wait until the sun came up.

Taer passed out in the guest bedroom and Davis took Berliner to the screened-in porch, where she ripped holes in the fraying screens until Berliner became sexually overwhelmed, pinned her to the
concrete floor, and pulled off her pants. They had sex several times that evening.
^ǁ

“I really did like her, a lot. She had this openness, where she would accept anything about someone she loved, but still remain true to her own desires,” Berliner said during one of our solo interviews. When he spoke about Davis, he was quiet with heavy regret. “I blamed Irene for getting Gina kidnapped and for hurting Cait. I wasn’t nice to her, that last time I saw her. I wish I’d been nice to her.”

The next morning, Davis’s father drove Taer and Berliner to the Hertz so they could rent a car, then he stopped at the farmers’ market. George spent a leisurely hour and a half choosing greens, melons, and tomatoes. When he returned to his mother’s house, he found his daughter hanging by her neck in her bedroom, blue in the face, and dead for at least half an hour.

*
Wine and
dérive—
how Situationist of her! —CD

†
Nix and Berliner recounted the events that follow to Cyrus during one of their dual interviews. Cyrus combined their account with Taer’s journal entry. —CD

‡
A reference to a series of horror novels for young adults written by R. L. Stine.

§
Jewel-Osco is a Chicago-area grocery store chain.

ǁ
During my conversations with Nix and Berliner, I was able to pry from them some details of their various sexual encounters, which they hadn’t given to Cyrus. Maybe they were more comfortable talking to me about sex; maybe it’s because they, for some reason, decided to drink with me even though they wouldn’t drink with Cyrus. —CD

Nix woke up on a bare mattress, her legs covered with a purple duvet. Her head pounded and her vision was slightly blurry. As she struggled to sit up, someone handed her a plastic cup full of water. Disoriented, she thought she could smell pasta sauce, the kind from the jar Taer used to heat in the microwave to make spaghetti for Nix after she’d gone for a long run.

Nix vomited on the stained carpet below her makeshift bed. After she emptied her stomach, Peaches appeared and wiped her face with a warm washcloth while Ali cleaned the mess. Ali and Peaches spent the rest of the night making sure Nix didn’t fall asleep and slip into a coma. Ali had hit Nix over the head much harder than she had intended and Nix had a concussion. There was a ringing in her ears for the better part of twenty-four hours. Nix now jokingly refers to the concussion as her “sports injury.”

Ali and Peaches held Nix hostage in their crumbling, mostly unlived-in South Loop apartment. They kept her in the second bedroom, a bare cell of a room with concrete walls and windows obscured by blackout curtains. They cuffed and chained Nix’s ankles
together with restraints they had purchased at a sex toy shop on North Lincoln Avenue called The Pleasure Chest.

The next day, Ali and Peaches took the cuffs off her legs, tied Nix’s wrists together, and walked her out of the apartment, down to an underground parking garage, and into the backseat of a black Escalade. They buckled her in and tucked a blanket around her shoulders to hide the restraints. They covered her eyes with an eye pillow. To the casual observer, she looked like she was napping in the backseat of the car. Nix asked them if they had done the same to Molly Metropolis, and they laughed at her. Then Ali started the car and pulled out of the parking garage. Nix couldn’t see Ali drive down the mostly empty lanes of I-90 East, cross into Indiana, and transfer onto I-94 East on a crescent moon–shaped route around the curved bottom of Lake Michigan. Her destination was a place that Nix, and most Chicagoans looking for an alternative to the crowded city beaches, knew well: Michiana.

Michiana is an awkwardly shaped lakeside region, with a cultural center in South Bend, Indiana and territory across the borderland areas of both northern Indiana and southwestern Michigan. The boundaries of Michiana are composed of about sixty square miles of lakeside area, but the region’s true heart, its thematic core, is the invisible border between Michigan and Indiana, which visitors and summer people cross and re-cross with a kind of geographical blindness. Above all else, Michiana is characterized by a lack of boundaries and a feeling of neither here nor there. It is fitting, then, that over half of the residences in Michiana are vacation houses or second homes.

Full-time inhabitants know exactly where Michigan stops being Michigan or Indiana stops being Indiana. Parents know where the school district of one state ends and another begins. Summer visitors know the farmers’ markets are better on the Michigan side but the hamburgers are better in Indiana. Adolescent boys know where fireworks are legal to buy and use and where they aren’t.

The New Society chose their location headquarters cleverly. Not only did the Michiana House give them a place to retreat to, away from Chicago’s urban battleground, but the lakeside backstreets are also some of the most topographically complicated matrices of roads to be found in the tri-state area. In comparison to Chicago’s grid of streets, the Michiana residential avenues are something out of
Alice in Wonderland
. Some curve like snakes, some zigzag. Dozens of cul-de-sacs, dead end streets, and crescents twist through the landscape. Occasionally, one of the crescents meets the same street twice and creates two crossroads with the same name—for example, there are two different intersections of Hillside Trail and Birchmont Trail. These lakeside streets form an asphalt labyrinth, and the New Society had a house in the middle of the maze.

Driving the Escalade, Ali navigated the labyrinthine streets expertly. She turned down a small trail-like street, half a block east of the beach. The asphalt was dusted with a fine layer of icy sand that crunched under the SUV’s tires. She approached a house that nearly straddled the border between Michigan and Indiana and pulled into the driveway. The dancers each grabbed one of Nix’s arms and carefully walked her up the house’s small, cracked staircase.
*

Like many lakefront homes, the value of the property was in the location, not the building itself. The flooring was warped. To Nix, it smelled like unwashed laundry, mildew, mold, and dirty dishes. The house was cluttered with knick-knacks, some kitschy and cheap, others expensive and delicate.

They removed Nix’s blindfold and led her through the first floor; Nix saw the dining room and living room, both crowded with overstuffed bookshelves. Ten or fifteen women and men in their early twenties sat at the dining room table or on the couches in the living room. Some worked on laptops, some of them examined the maps on the table, some of them crowded around a big iMac. Some of
them greeted Ali and Peaches with little waves. They had left their half-empty coffee mugs and teacups everywhere. Platters of fruit, vegetables, cheese, salami, and pastries balanced on top of stacks of books. They stared blankly at Nix when she asked them for help, and covered their papers with their arms so she couldn’t see what they were working on.

Stacks of newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets lined the walls. Between the piles and above them, the fading wallpaper was speckled with water stains. The thick carpet curled up in the corners of the room. The huge table was missing a leg; concrete blocks kept the thing upright and shouldered the weight of the table’s contents: a massive collection of maps and blueprints, as well as the iMac’s twenty-seven-inch screen and two external hard drives. The living room was equally stuffed with books, newspapers, and maps.

Ali and Peaches hurried Nix to the staircase and led her up to the second floor. The wooden flooring was so warped from years of humid summers and damp winters that it actually sloped under Nix’s feet. She tripped over the top stair and, with her hands still tied behind her back, couldn’t catch herself. She banged her chin on the warped wood and began to bleed, then cry from the shock of the pain. “Embarrassing,” Nix recalled to me. “But I was very scared.”

As Ali and Peaches marched Nix deeper into the dark house, Nix began to feel as afraid of the house itself as of the people in it. “The floors were creaking and, I swear to god, a light bulb was flickering, like something was haunting it,” Nix said. “Not like, the ghost of a murdered child or something, but like there was this ephemeral rotting horrible thing in there. And I wanted to leave, I wanted to leave so badly. I’ve never wanted something as much as I wanted that. It is a strange, almost psychic feeling when you realize something life-changing and terrible is happening to you while it’s happening.”

Ali and Peaches walked Nix to the end of the hallway, through a bedroom with someone asleep, though faintly stirring, in the bed. They led her into the adjoining bathroom, which had no windows
and only the one door. Crowding the doorway so that she couldn’t slip past, they untied her hands and locked her inside.

Nix spent three and a half hours alone in the bathroom. For the first half hour, she tried to escape by breaking through the door, succeeding only in bruising her left arm, shoulder, and foot; breaking off two fingernails; and badly scraping the palms of her hands. Teeming with energy and adrenaline, she ran in place for the next twenty minutes trying to come up with an escape plan. She couldn’t think of anything. Then, for a little while, she gave up.

The next two and a half hours felt unimaginably long. She recalled Taer’s preferred method for curbing anxiety, a hot bath and a glass (or two) of wine. Nix couldn’t drink the wine, but she could take a bath. She stripped down, filled the bathtub with hot water, and got in. She soaked until the water went cold. Exacting the only kind of revenge she could on her captors, she emptied and refilled the bathtub until she had used all the hot water in the entire house.
^†

As the hot water lulled Nix’s exhausted body into a state of semi-consciousness, she knew she was making herself even more vulnerable, but she fell asleep in the pool of cooling water. That was how Ali and Peaches found her. Nix woke up when she heard the door open.

Once Nix was dressed, Ali questioned her. Unfortunately for Ali, she had made a critical mistake. Ali had assumed that Nix was the one encouraging Taer to look for Molly, that Nix was in charge of their search. Ali had also assumed Molly had told Nix her secrets
and given Nix essential information about Berliner and The Ghost Network. Peaches distrusted Molly so much she thought Molly had told Nix things that Molly had refused to tell her. But the dancers were wrong. Nix knew nothing that Ali and Peaches didn’t know. She couldn’t remember the combination to the lock on the Urban Planning Committee’s steel door.

Ali asked Nix to confess Molly’s endgame. If she didn’t, Ali warned, something violent would happen to her. Nix told Ali she didn’t know what Ali was talking about. Ali asked Nix to tell her where she had hidden Molly Metropolis’s notebook. Nix refused to answer. So, Peaches pulled a Swiss Army knife out of her pocket and cut Nix’s left pinkie and ring finger at the root, nearly severing the digits from her hand.

“For a second, I didn’t feel anything. Then it hurt so much I couldn’t stop screaming,” Nix said. “I could feel my heartbeat in my hand and with every pulse more blood came out. I was so scared, and Peaches, she was laughing at me.”

Casares had been an EMT before interning at SDFC and joining the New Society. He crudely anaesthetized Nix and sewed her fingers back together. He bandaged the cut on her chin. He gave her a Vicodin and made her a bed with pillows and couch cushions in the bathtub. Nix fell asleep or passed out. Casares spent several hours in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet, reading
The Clash of Kings
, making sure Nix didn’t start bleeding again, while Peaches slept in the bed in the next room.

In the early morning, around 5 a.m., Peaches walked into the bathroom, waking Nix in the process. She took Casares into the bedroom. Nix heard the two of them have sex. They didn’t make an effort to keep quiet and at one point, Peaches moved them from the bed to the wall the bedroom and bathroom shared. She made sure Nix could hear the sound of each and every thrust.