The Night Swim Read online

  On the day I first met them, they walked into the hospital recreation room, their eyes only on me as I stood uncertainly while introductions were made. Before I could say a word Kitty embraced me with plump arms and the scent of jasmine. It was probably only a second or two, but I could have stood like that for hours. In her arms. For the first time since Jenny died, I felt safe. When Jenny died, my mother surrendered to death. Now I embraced life. I cherished it and protected it as if it were the sputtering flame of a candle. I couldn’t look back. Only forward. Or my life would be unendurable.

  In the months that followed I moved to Kitty and Henry’s graceful home across the state, near the Appalachian foothills. I wore pretty cotton clothes in shades of pastel and white. I slept in a cream four-poster bed in an upstairs bedroom. Henry painted the walls a dusty pink. Kitty plaited my hair and drove me to school and dance class and soccer practice. Nothing was too much for them.

  When my art teacher told Kitty that I had talent, Kitty arranged extra classes with a private teacher. She covered her living room walls with my creations, even those that only a parent could love. Time passed and we blended into a family. I can’t remember exactly when the adoption went through. I must have been around thirteen.

  During those first weeks, Kitty slept on an armchair in my room when I woke screaming during the night. Eventually they bought me a night-light. I used that night-light throughout my childhood out of politeness. It never stopped the nightmares. Not once.

  My night terrors became so bad that when I went to college my roommate asked to be reassigned. She said that she couldn’t live with someone who screamed as if she were being murdered. I learned to stifle my screams by burying my head in my pillow.

  I made an appointment at the college campus medical clinic and asked the doctor for a prescription for sleeping tablets. He suggested I consider therapy. I told him that I was just fine with the medication. I fooled him. I didn’t fool myself.

  7

  Guilty or Not Guilty

  Season 3, Episode 2: The Shortcut

  I’m starting to get a feel for Neapolis. The population here is just over ninety-six thousand. Around a quarter of that are the original townsfolk. The rest are imports, mostly military families—there are two military bases near town—and retirees. There’s a cottage industry of retirement homes for older folk drawn to this isolated but beautiful coastal strip by affordable beachfront property and the relaxed lifestyle of a sleepy seaside town.

  Before the relatively recent population spike, Neapolis was your classic small town. Everyone knew everyone. In fact, it still has that small-town vibe. The town is on a weather-beaten stretch of North Carolina coast. It gets pummeled by storms, and occasionally by hurricanes. Cartographers can never properly chart the coastline. It changes every year.

  The locals love their water sports: fishing, sailing, windsurfing, and sea kayaking. There are shipwrecks along the coast for scuba divers, and a golf course for those who prefer to keep their feet on dry land.

  Despite its beautiful beaches and laid-back atmosphere, Neapolis hasn’t taken off in a big way with vacationers. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because it’s never been able to shake off its blue-collar roots. Or maybe it’s because it’s hard to get here. There’s no commercial airport nearby. No train. It’s at the end of a dead-end offshoot that is itself an offshoot of Interstate Ninety-five.

  There’s a decent-size hospital. A courthouse and a local paper, the Neapolis Gazette. Flip through its pages and it quickly becomes apparent that the political bent here is more red than blue.

  Local cuisine? I’ll have to get back to you on that one, but I’ve been told the crabs around here are something special.

  They have a languid way of talking in these parts. As if they have all the time in the world. Which they sort of do, because the rat race feels very far away. Neapolis is surrounded by national parks, a marine reserve, and some expansive beaches. The locals say they’re the prettiest beaches anywhere. From what I’ve seen so far, they could well be right.

  Speaking of sweeping landscapes, you’ve probably heard background noise behind me as I talk. I’m not in the studio right now. Maybe you can figure out where I am?

  I’ll hold out the microphone so you can hear the ambient noise. Listen real hard.

  Can you hear it?

  It’s loud. Right?

  There’s a definite whoosh. Like a waterfall.

  Except there’s no water here.

  I’m actually in the middle of a barren field of long wild grass. That whoosh you hear is grass swaying in the wind. We forget how loud nature can be when there are no car engines to mask the magical sound of a windblown field.

  I want you to hear the rustling of wild grass because I want you to hear what K heard when she walked through this very field on that fateful night.

  K is the name of the victim—sorry, alleged victim—in the case we will be following this season. This podcast follows accepted practice by media outlets to withhold the names of victims of sexual assault. So I won’t be using her real name in the podcasts. We’re going to refer to her as K.

  It was a Saturday afternoon. Nearly dusk. The sun was low and the light was ebbing. It was fall. The field I am walking through right now was burnished in rusts and dark autumn gold. Running along the side of the field is a row of dark green fir trees that give it a forbidding air reminiscent of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale.

  You’re probably wondering what brought a sixteen-year-old girl to a desolate field close to nightfall. It was something very simple that I bet happened to you all at least once in your lives: she missed her bus.

  K was heading to her best friend Lexi’s house for a sleepover. By the time she reached the bus stop, the bus had gone. Happens to the best of us, right? So K walked.

  She had two choices. She could walk along the main road. It would take three-quarters of an hour. Or she could cut through this field. It would take fifteen, twenty minutes tops. She chose the narrow track where I’m walking right now. You can probably hear my feet crunch on the dirt as I walk down the path.

  Let me describe where I am right now. On each side of the path is tall wild grass that reaches my waist. Maybe even higher. I’m just short of five foot eight, so that grass is pretty darn tall.

  If I spin around and look in every direction, all I see is long burnished grass and the forest beyond. There’s no sign of civilization. No houses. No roads. It feels stark and desolate in a way that kind of makes me nervous. I suspect K felt the same way.

  I have no reason to be scared. I’m here in the afternoon. The sun is shining, and my producer, Pete, who’s in the hospital recovering from a car accident, is on speed dial.

  That’s not how it was for K. She was here at dusk. Alone. Nobody knew she’d come this way.

  Slung over K’s shoulder was a backpack, heavy from the weight of beer bottles she’d brought from home. Her parents were out, so she scrawled a note explaining that she was sleeping at Lexi’s house. She left it under a magnet on the kitchen fridge.

  What K didn’t mention in the note was that Lexi’s parents were away until the following evening. They’d left Lexi’s twenty-year-old brother, Miles, in charge. He told Lexi he was out for the night and that she’d better invite a friend to keep her company. That’s why Lexi invited K.

  Through a series of texts between the two girls over the course of the afternoon, they decided they would throw a party. Nothing crazy. A dozen friends. Music. Beer. Maybe they’d all chip in money and order pizza. K was rushing to Lexi’s house to get ready for the party when she took this shortcut.

  I wonder if she found it menacing?

  I do. I saw a discarded crack pipe earlier. Right near me is an empty liquor bottle tossed on the path. It says a lot about the kinds of people who hang out here. At some point, K would have felt vulnerable. Perhaps she sped up. Moved from a fast walk to a jog. Maybe even a sprint. The beer bottles in her backpack would have rattled loudly as she ran do
wn the lone field, pursued by the wind.

  By the way, I walked both routes from K’s house to Lexi’s. I can tell you that from a personal safety perspective, both options have potential dangers. Sure, the shortcut through the field is isolated. But the main road isn’t exactly safe. It’s a quiet rural road. Several cars honked their horns when I walked that way earlier. One car slowed down and the driver leered at me as he drove by. At least it felt that way.

  Two men stopped and offered me a ride in their open-back truck. They seemed nice enough. They shrugged when I declined, and drove on. Fact is, though, that there wasn’t anything I could have done if they’d wanted to force me into their truck on that lonely stretch of road. I was at their mercy.

  It’s a coin toss which route is safer. The shortcut versus the main road. Heads you get there alive and well. Tails you don’t.

  I’m Rachel Krall. This is Guilty or Not Guilty, the podcast that puts you in the jury box.

  8

  Rachel

  The night clerk issued a strained “good evening” as Rachel entered the hotel lobby through the revolving glass doors and passed the reception desk. “Good morning” might have been more apt, given it was well after midnight, thought Rachel, flashing a tired smile in return. She had spent most of the evening in a studio she’d rented at the local radio station, recording her latest episode.

  As Rachel moved farther into the lobby, she understood the reason for the night clerk’s unease. An unruly group of real-estate conference attendees were drinking beer and shots bought before the hotel bar closed for the night. There was no staff around to break it up, except the night clerk and a porter, a gangly young man who was half-asleep.

  Someone in the drunken group finished telling a foulmouthed story as Rachel walked by. The raucous laughter that exploded after the punch line bounced off the faux marble walls. The porter glanced up unhappily, too intimidated to ask them to keep it down.

  One of the men stumbled drunkenly to the birdcage. He pressed his flushed face against the gilded bars.

  “Sing,” he bellowed. “Sing, goddamn it. What kind of stupid nightingale are you?”

  When that didn’t work, he sang a line from a song as his friends laughed. The bird was silent. The man whistled and then tapped the cage with his knuckles. The bird fluttered, visibly distressed.

  “If I heard your singing voice up close, Marty, I’d be terrified, too,” someone called out from their table. More laughter. It faded as Rachel entered the elevator and the doors closed.

  Rachel’s floor was dimly lit when she stepped out of the elevator and walked down the long carpeted corridor to her room, passing room service trays left for collection on the carpet outside hotel room doors. Rachel entered her room and locked the door behind her, leaning against it as she sighed heavily. It had been an incredibly long day.

  A sharp stab in Rachel’s stomach reminded her that she hadn’t had time to eat while she wrote and recorded the podcast all evening. She considered ordering room service but decided she’d make do with the food in the minibar. She ate a packet of cashews and drank a beer straight from the bottle as she listened back to the recording she’d just finished. Satisfied with what she heard, Rachel emailed the audio files to Pete to edit when he woke in the morning.

  Pete had insisted that he’d edit the podcast episodes on his laptop while in the hospital. He told her there was nothing in his job description that he couldn’t do from a bed. Anyway, he’d joked, it was the least he could do after picking the worst possible time to get himself almost killed. A few days before Pete had been due to travel to Neapolis, he was sideswiped by a delivery van while riding his motorcycle to work. His bike spun out of control and he was thrown into the street. He rolled into the gutter and promptly lost consciousness as the traffic light changed to green.

  A few seconds earlier, or later, and Pete would have been crushed to death before he could get clear of the incoming traffic. He was lucky, but not lucky enough to walk away unscathed. He’d sustained a fractured shoulder and multiple breaks in his left leg.

  Pete was in traction in the orthopedic ward, where he was expected to remain for a few more days before being sent home to continue his recovery.

  Pete had been with Rachel from the start of her journey into podcasting. She’d had a background as a newspaper reporter and zero experience making podcasts when she started Season 1. Pete taught her everything he knew about producing a podcast. In return, she gave him a crash course in investigative journalism.

  They made a good team. Rachel was intense and focused. She could occasionally be wracked with self-doubt, but she was incredibly tenacious. Pete knew audio production like he had been born mixing sound. If that wasn’t enough, he had a real knack with social media. Most important, he took care of all the distractions so that Rachel had the time to dive deep into an investigation.

  Rachel was quietly relieved at Pete’s determination to keep working despite his injuries. He’d done a huge amount of work setting up the new season, and she felt it was wrong to replace him with another producer.

  Rachel checked her computer. The audio files had gone through. She loosened her hair and arranged her pajamas for bed.

  A housekeeping attendant had come into her room to do turndown service while Rachel was recording at the radio station. The drapes Rachel had left open were drawn and the crisp sheets of her bed were neatly folded down. A miniature box of chocolates sat on her pillow.

  Alongside the box was a letter from the hotel, informing her that the tourist brochure she’d requested was attached. Someone on the hotel staff must have mixed her up with another guest she thought as she opened a glossy leaflet attached to the cover letter.

  It was a brochure of the local cemetery, which the front cover described as one of the town’s heritage highlights. According to the brochure, the cemetery dated back to the Revolutionary War and there were a number of graves of historic interest.

  The brochure included a double-page spread with a map of the cemetery on one side and a list of notable graves on the other. Rachel’s heart skipped a beat when she saw that a name had been added at the bottom of the list. Someone had written Jenny Stills in blue pen. A corresponding grave was circled with the same blue ink on the map.

  This time Hannah had crossed a line. There was something insidious about the way this message had been sent to Rachel, left on her bed. It was as if Hannah wanted Rachel to know that she could get to her anywhere, even in the privacy of her hotel room.

  If this was supposed to intimidate Rachel then it failed badly. It infuriated her. She marched to the lobby. The drunken guests from earlier were gone, their used shot glasses strewn across their tables. Discarded beer bottles lay on their sides, amber liquid trickling out. The night clerk at Reception looked up in surprise as Rachel approached.

  “I’m in room four-oh-one-four,” Rachel said. “Do you know why this brochure was left in my room?”

  The night clerk took a moment to retrieve the computer records associated with Rachel’s room. “There’s a note in the system that says you called the reception desk at six P.M. and asked for the brochure to be brought to your room,” the clerk said with a neutral expression that didn’t quite hide the fact that she thought Rachel was a raving lunatic for making a fuss over a brochure.

  “It wasn’t me,” said Rachel. “I didn’t contact the hotel today at all.”

  “Then it must be for another guest and our staff mixed up the room numbers,” said the clerk, confused at how such a mistake might have happened. “Either way, I’m terribly sorry for any inconvenience.”

  Rachel knew it wasn’t a mix-up and she didn’t like the situation one bit. First the note on her windshield. Then the letter skewered to the jetty with the blade of a pocketknife. Now a tourist map left on her hotel room pillow with Jenny Stills’s grave clearly marked on its pages.

  “Do you record all your calls for training and quality purposes?” Rachel asked the clerk.

 
“Yes, we do, ma’am.”

  “I’d like to listen to the call from earlier in which I supposedly called to request the brochure,” Rachel said.

  The clerk retrieved the recording of the call from the computer and played it back for Rachel, who had to lean over the counter to hear the audio properly. A woman had called the hotel and in a poor attempt at mimicking Rachel’s voice had asked for a brochure that had been left for her at the concierge’s desk to be brought up to her room.

  “Does that person sound like me?” Rachel asked when the recording was over.

  “No, ma’am. It doesn’t,” said the reception clerk, swallowing nervously. “It’s very strange. I’ll ask the manager to look into it first thing in the morning.”

  Rachel asked the clerk to note in her file that moving forward, nobody had her permission to enter her room other than the morning cleaner. No turndown service. No room access. No mail or messages left for her in her room. She’d collect it all in person from Reception. “And, please,” she added, “make sure that my room number is not divulged to anyone.”

  With that she went back to the elevator, her eyes blurred from exhaustion. When Rachel reached her floor, she walked down the corridor, passing the peepholes of one closed door after the next. The room service trays had been collected. Only one tray was left lying on the carpet. It was on the floor right outside Rachel’s door.

  Rachel picked up the tray and removed the stainless-steel cloche to reveal a hamburger and fries. It was exactly what she would have chosen if she’d ordered room service. Under the cutlery was an envelope. With her name on it.

  Rachel turned around. The corridor moved out of focus as she looked down the long, silent passageway of flickering lights and rows of peepholes that seemed to be watching her. The elevator chimed, but the doors didn’t open.