“No, I’m asking you, father to father, if you knew who the man was who’d killed your daughter, what would you do?”

“I’d want to kill—”

“Not want.  What would you do?”

“I don’t know.  What do you want to do?”

“Beat you to death with my bare hands.  That’s what I want to do.  Not what I will do.”

Roger stood up, took six steps toward the tent.

Donald said, “Roger?  Where are you?”

“Right here, Donald.”

“You’re closer.”

“Listen to me,” Roger said.  “I want you to know that I am so sorry.  And I know it doesn’t do a goddamn thing to bring Tabitha back, but it’s the truth.  I was just so scared.  You understand?”

“Thank you, Roger.”

“For what?”

“Saying her name.”

Roger fired six times into the tent.

His ears ringing, gunshots still reverberating off the mountains, he said, “Donald?”

There was no answer, only wet breathing.

He went to the tent door and unzipped it and took out his flashlight and shined it inside.

Donald lay on his back, the only visible wound a hole under his left eye, and the blood looked like oil running out of it.

Roger moved the flashlight around, searching for a gun in Donald’s hand, something to mitigate what he’d done, but the only thing Donald clutched was a framed photograph of an auburn-haired teenager with a braces smile.

Three days later, seated at the same table they’d occupied a week before at the Grove Park Inn’s Sunset Terrace, they watched the waiter place their entrees before them and top off their wineglasses from a bottle of pinot noir.

The August night was cool, even here in the city, like maybe summer would end after all.

Near the bar, a tuxedoed man was at a Steinway playing Mozart, one of his beautiful concertos.

“How’s your filet?” Sue asked.

“It’s perfect.  Yours?”

“I could eat this every day.”

Roger forced a smile and took a big sip of wine.

They ate in silence.

After a while, Sue said, “Roger?”

“Yes, honey?”

“We did it right, yeah?”

It annoyed him that she would bring it up over dinner, but he was well on his way toward inebriation, a nice buffer swelling between himself and all that had come before.

“I don’t know how we could’ve been more thorough,” he said.

“I keep thinking we should’ve moved his car.”

“That would’ve been just another opportunity for us to leave evidence.  Skin cells, sweat, hair, fibers of our clothing, prints.  I thought it through, Sue.”

She reached across the table and took his hand, the karat diamond he’d given her twenty-four years ago sending out a thousand slivered facets of candlelight.

“Above all, it was for the girls.  Their safety,” she said.

“Yeah.  For the girls.”

The scent of a good cigar swept past.

“You’ll be able to go on all right?” Sue asked.  “With what…what you had to do?”

Roger was cutting into his steak, and he kept cutting, didn’t meet her eyes as he answered, “I’ve had practice, right?”

It was early October when it occurred to one of the forest rangers of the Pisgah district that the black Buick Regal with a Minnesota license plate, parked near the restrooms of the Big East Fork trailhead, had been there for a long damn time, which was particularly strange considering no one had been reported missing in the area.

Over several days, the sheriff of Haywood County spoke briefly with two estranged, living relatives and an ex-wife in Duluth, none of whom had been in contact with Donald Kennington in over a year, all of whom said he’d been on the downward spiral since his daughter’s death, that it had ruined him in every way imaginable, that he’d probably gone up into the mountains to die.

A deputy found it in the glove box—a handwritten note folded between the vehicle’s owner’s manual and a laminated map of Minnesota.

He read it aloud to the sheriff, the two of them sitting in the front seat as raindrops splattered on a windshield nearly pasted over with the violent red leaves of an oak tree that overhung the parking lot.

My name is Donald Kennington.  Please forward this message to Arthur Holland, detective with the St. Paul Police Department. 

The death of my daughter, Tabitha Kennington, brings me to these mountains.  I am writing this in my car on August 5th, having followed Roger and Susan Cockrell, of Eden Prairie, Minnesota, to Beech Spring Gap.  I have taken their photographs with a digital camera, along with pictures of their green Range Rover and license plate.  You will find my camera containing these pictures in the trunk of my car. 

At this moment, I do not know if Mr. Cockrell was responsible for killing my daughter in a hit-and-run six years ago.  I plan to meet the Cockrells tonight and find out.  To be clear, I intend no physical harm to Mr. Cockrell or his wife.  If Mr. Cockrell is responsible, however, we will see if I’m so lucky.  Does a man who runs down a young woman and leaves the scene contain it within him to murder in cold blood in order to hide his crime and his shame?

I suspect he does.  

The Cockrells will be thorough in disposing of my body, tent, backpack, etc., which makes this last bit of business a little tricky. 

My camp is in a small glade in the rhododendron thicket on the east slope of Shining Rock Mountain, approximately a hundred vertical feet above the meadows of Beech Spring Gap.  The glade is twenty yards across, with a large boulder in the middle.  Look for a flat, shiny rock in the grass.  My tent now stands over it, and I’ve made a tiny rip in the tent floor and dug a small, shallow hole in the ground under the rock.

Late tonight, if Mr. Cockrell admits his guilt, into this hole, sealed and safe in plastic, I will drop a tape recorder, and hopefully rebury it before he murders me.

An introduction to “Perfect Little Town”

I live in Colorado and frequently travel in the high country. It’s beautiful, which is why I live here, but I occasionally get creeped out. There are a handful of small, scenic towns in the Rockies which sit in high valleys, where the only way out of town is to drive over 12,000-foot mountain passes. These towns can actually become snowed-in during major winter storms. I was in one such town a couple years ago on a snowy night. Walking in the cold through the quaint, empty streets, I was overcome not only by the beauty, but the haunted isolation of the place. My mind starting racing—what if the passes were closed and I couldn’t leave? What if no one would rent me a hotel room? What if I’d had the misfortune of getting stranded here on the worst night possible, when this perfect little town unleashed its very dark secret?

perfect little town

-1-

They arrive midmorning, the Benz G-Class rolling down Main Street with its California tags and rear end sagging under the weight of luggage, and though the windows are tinted, we bet the occupants are smiling.  Everyone smiles when they come to our town, population 317.  It’s the mountains and fir trees, the waterfall we light up at night and the clear western sky and the perfect houses painted in brilliant colors and the picket-fenced lawns and the shoppes we spell the olde English way and the sweet smell of the river running through.

Parking spaces are plentiful in the off-season.  They choose a spot in front of the coffeehouse, climb out with their smiles intact, squinting against the high-altitude sun—a handsome couple just shy of forty, their fashionably-cut clothes and hair in league with their Mercedes SUV to make announcements of wealth that we all read loud and clear.