Find You in the Dark Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  FIND YOU IN THE DARK

  “A fast-paced, morbidly addictive novel of chilling infatuation. Ripley’s impressive debut is a rich and innovative thriller.”

  IAIN REID, bestselling author of I’m Thinking of Ending Things

  “A wickedly smart thriller that manages to be both chilling and wry. The page-turning plot . . . is thickened by a great cast of characters and Nathan Ripley’s fantastic eye for detail and dialogue. Just when you think you’ve got a grasp on it, the story twists to new and darker places.”

  AMY STUART, bestselling author of Still Mine

  “Crafty and dark, Nathan Ripley’s novel toys with the lines between predator and prey, his sentences as careful and considered as the crimes he depicts . . . a truly exciting new voice in the thriller world.”

  ROZ NAY, bestselling author of Our Little Secret

  “It’s not always easy diving into the mind of an obsessive protagonist, but Martin Reese’s fixation on finding dead bodies makes for one heck of an addictive thriller . . . an original, inventive take on what happens when you go looking where you shouldn’t. Start reading early in the day, or you’ll be up all night like I was! A standout debut novel.”

  JENNIFER HILLIER, author of Jar of Hearts and Wonderland

  “An unsettling exploration of obsession you won’t soon forget . . . a first novel that fans of Patricia Highsmith’s psychological thrillers and Thomas Harris’s cat-and-mouse suspense will devour. I certainly did.”

  ANDREW PYPER, author of The Demonologist and The Only Child

  to Sam Ruthnum

  BELLA GREENE LEFT HIS APARTMENT for what she knew was going to be the last time. He didn’t know that, would never believe his grip on Bella was so fragile after all the humiliations she’d gone through at his whim, but it was true. She wasn’t going back.

  She was outside his apartment building, which she’d left without making eye contact with the concierge. He had a Stalin mustache that was always flecked with brown cigarillo fragments and leered at her when she buzzed up alone, once asking her, “How much?” Bella had spat on his desk, a nice thick gob on the marble. He’d laughed at her and wiped it up.

  “Tell him when you go up, see if he believes you,” he’d said. Bella hadn’t bothered.

  There was a dry fountain outside the building, turned off some arbitrary day toward the end of summer. Bella walked by it, picking up speed as she got farther from the building. When she was nine, her mom had caught her picking through the change in a fountain for the silver coins. She’d gotten a slap on the arm for that, in front of the other moms and Marianne, her best friend at the time, who betrayed her at the end of the fifth grade to hang out with Kelly Robinson, a tall girl whose parents had cable.

  It was well past midnight, not much pedestrian traffic, but a slouching man coming out of a building identical to the one she’d just left smiled at her, and not just politely. Expectantly, like she had an offer for him.

  “No,” Bella said, walking past. This was the problem: she’d never gotten to the point of effectively taking back from these guys who constantly wanted to grab from her. Something. Anything. For a while she’d liked the free drinks, then the free drugs, then she found that the longer she stayed around the clearer it was that neither was free. Especially the drugs.

  That slouching guy was still following her. It had been half a block, Bella thought. He might just have been walking to his car, but there were eyes on her. She knew that. Had a sense for it. The guy upstairs, he was her first successful use: thought he was getting something out of her, some sort of bizarro sex challenge, but she was just pretending his pathetic desires and fantasies were extreme, going along with them as long as she felt she had to. Bella had needed a place to stay and someone stupid to talk to while she got free of it, the last piece of her old life: the people, the tapering grip of heroin, then methadone, even booze. She hadn’t had anything other than orange pekoe tea for three weeks. She’d shaken it—not just the stuff, but the life. She’d be in San Diego by the end of the week, out of Seattle and ready to invite her mom down for visits. Nice, normal, family visits, with none of the bullshit, the stealing. The lying.

  Bella rolled the leaves of her silver bracelet on her arm and felt the eyes on her again, this time from her right. An alley, some sort of truck or big vehicle in the shadows. A man leaning on the fender.

  “Keep looking,” Bella called out, walking on, before stopping and turning to face the guy again. He leaned his torso back, out of reach of the light, and laughed a little. Bella walked toward the alley.

  “You get off on scaring women? You that kind of creep?” She came a step closer to the guy—he was wide across the chest, tall, his face still hidden. She didn’t expect him to be so fast. Guys that size never were.

  There was a pain in her neck as he gripped her by the shoulder and his other hand whipped toward her throat, a feeling altogether unlike the punch she was expecting. Deeper than an insect sting, but the rush of injection afterward was profound, hot, almost calming. She’d never pierced that particular vein before.

  Bella Greene didn’t fall to the pavement: the man caught her and lifted her backward, into the dark.

  CLEANING UP THE DIG SITE took longer than usual, leaving me little time to sleep. I grabbed two hours in my tent and was on the highway to Seattle by four a.m., with a thermos of coffee and some of those legal speed-drinks truckers use. I would have been at the club an hour ago, if the traffic had cared about getting my daughter from swim practice on time as much as I did.

  I checked the rearview to make sure I’d ditched every piece of my equipment, and that only camping gear was visible in the back. Nothing was sticking through. My scrapbook was under, not on top of, the backseat where Kylie would throw her gym bag. Looking for traces of dirt or worse on the fabric of the seats, I almost missed an old Camry turning illegally across my lane. I tapped then slammed my brakes, accepting the honks from behind me and kept going, finally pulling up at the curb.

  “You’re late,” Kylie said, falling into the front seat and throwing her gym bag overhand into the backseat, nicking my eyelid with the strap. She waved out the open door at Danielle, or Ramona, or one of the other fourteen-year-old girls on her team—after practice, they all looked eerily identical, with their wet hair gathered and tucked into wool hats and their collars pulled up. Sliding her schoolbag to rest at her feet, Kylie looked hard at me. Driving to the Seattle Athletic Club at five in the morning for half the week and five in the afternoon for the rest of it is only sane behavior under very specific conditions. Vanity couldn’t have gotten me to do it. Love, probably not—not the wife-kind of love I had for Ellen, anyway. For Kylie, I did it, sometimes to my own surprise. I’d been late eight times in the past two years, and this was the ninth.

  There was enough resemblance between us—the dark eyebrows, light blue eyes—and between her and Ellen—the narrow nose and the wide mouth, equally suited to smiling or abrupt dismissal—that getting stared down by Kylie was like being in trouble with my wife and confronting a disappointed reflection at the same time.

  “Leave before anyone sees you, Dad. Screeching tires.”

  I pulled out at normal speed, but got the message. “Sorry. I drove right here from the campsite. Would have cleaned up at a truck stop if I knew I was going to embarrass you.”

  “Where were you again?”

  “Place near Tacoma. Beautiful.” I had indeed registered and paid in full for a slot at a campsite in Kent, near Tacoma, setting up a small tent there before setting off for my drive to California, just to have a paper trail if I got asked later, by Ellen or anyone else. Anytime I went on a dig it was a cash-only affair. Usually I “forgot” my phone
charger, letting that GPS tracker we all carry fade to a dead-battery flicker by the time I was a few miles from the city. Other times, when I knew Ellen would be calling me, I disabled anything that would make me trackable. Twenty years of working in tech had left me with a skill or two, not just a bunch of money.

  “You’re late, and you stink,” said Kylie.

  “You stink, too.”

  “Chlorine isn’t a stink. It’s a scent.”

  “I smell of pines and fresh air and the glory of the outdoors, not the stuff they put in a pool to neutralize pee.”

  “You smell like unwashed old man, Dad.” She was looking at her phone, and I was looking at the road, but I could feel her holding laughs in, just like I was. For the last year or so, this was what getting along had sounded like: an enjoyable exchange of insults, not much meant by either party. I’d never picked her up right after a trip to the field, and I was surprised how quickly one responsibility synched into the next. Next to the part I played in making Kylie, my digs are the best thing I’ve done with my life. Nothing that has happened since I started looking and finding has ever shaken me in that belief.

  At the end of our block, I asked Kylie something I should have asked her back at the pool so I could prep.

  “How’s Mom? Things were good while I was away?”

  “Noooope,” Kylie said, popping in her fourth piece of the near-flavorless natural gum Ellen bought by the case in an attempt to keep aspartame and sugar out of the family’s bloodstreams.

  “Oh,” I said. Ellen’s car, a VW from last year, was approaching the house from the other side, the sun coming down behind it and beaming orange light through the back window to silhouette her head. I slowed down and let Ellen get into the garage long before I hit my blinker and turned in.

  Ellen was waiting for us inside, a grocery bag in each hand and the leather strap of her purse in her mouth. While Kylie deliberately took her time getting her stuff together, I got out of the Jeep and walked over to Ellen, hopping up the two steps to the door that opened into our house, feeling the stiffness in my legs and arms from the strain of digging for hours and then sitting down for a long drive. I took both grocery bags from her and she keyed us inside.

  “Am I in for another high-tension week?” I asked Ellen, being quiet even though Kylie was still sitting in the Jeep and likely would stay there until her mom and I were in the kitchen and she could safely bypass us both on her way to the upstairs shower.

  “Oh, I didn’t realize the point of all of this was to minimize impact on you, Martin. Real sorry.” She smiled midway through telling me off and gave me a kiss.

  Ellen wasn’t good at maintaining the exasperated spouse stance, even if she’d had plenty of time to practice. She’d stopped being my girlfriend and started being my wife eighteen years ago.

  “You stink,” she said.

  “Your wonderful daughter said the same thing.”

  “We got in a small fight on Saturday. Should have been a mini one but we were both tired and it got out of hand. She wanted to sleep at Jhoti’s house after they went for dinner. The dinner was planned, the sleepover wasn’t, so I said no.”

  “Firm no?” I started emptying out one of the paper bags item by item, avoiding the tomato sauce spatter and sticky milk-glass rings on the counter: the tidiness of the kitchen, in particular, tended to fall off when I was away in the woods. Ellen was watching me, so I just upended the bag and let the produce tumble out for sorting. I’m good at faking carefree.

  “With sleepovers or late nights out, all my no’s to her are firm, Mart, you know that. I didn’t think I needed to bicker about it with her or you anymore. It’s just the way it is.”

  “Yeah.” I slit a small plastic bag of plums open with my thumbnail, which still had a rim of dirt under its white crescent, a leftover from disposing of the dig tools. I was always thoroughly gloved-up when I was doing the actual work, never leaving any of my skin free to flake over or touch my finds. The fruit tumbled into a wooden bowl on the counter, covering up a shrinking, aged lime. “But I think we’ll all have to talk again about this, and soon. She’s hitting fifteen in what—five weeks?” Before Ellen could answer, I added, “You were totally in the right, stick with the plan this weekend—not that you need me to confirm. What we need to talk about is if we can be more flexible on future plans for her, not last-minute changes. She’s not a kid.”

  “I was less worried when she was a kid,” Ellen said, without the half-smile that I guessed most parents would add. She could tamp her fears down, but the worry was always there, a pressing anxiety I could feel as a static pulse in the room when she didn’t know where Kylie was. She was stocking the fridge, still wearing the wet waterproof shell that transformed her upper body into a rumpled cylinder, disguising the combination of elegant dress and ultrafitness she’d moved toward after Kylie was born. I hadn’t given birth to any figure-destroying children, but was the proud, or at least unashamed, guardian of a healthy gut I bottle-fed with pilsner every evening.

  I heard Kylie’s feet on the stairs and took the chance to dodge out. “I don’t know if that’s true, but I get what you’re saying. Going to unpack the Jeep,” I said. “You two play polite until I get back so we can all fight together, okay?”

  The camping stuff I stowed in various places in the garage. I always returned lighter than I had left, because I ditched the digging gear, probes, and metal detector in various dumpsters on the way back, after carefully treating everything with solvents, bleaches, and other corrosives fierce enough to chew through the paint on steel and definitely to destroy any genetic traces. Anything I camped in or sweated in and brought back never came anywhere near the actual site of a dig; my focus when I was at work out there was absolute, but the rush of being right, of finding what I was looking for, could get so powerful I had to have a strict procedure on every dig. That meant setting up camp at least three miles away from each site, digging from early afternoon into dusk, going more gently when I thought I was near enough to bring out the brushes. I’d never broken anything yet, and I was proud of that. It showed respect.

  The garage was peaceful, as quiet as the air around me last night, when all I could hear was the silvery chop of my shovel cutting into the dirt above the bones I knew I was about to find. I rehearsed a few lines in my head for the call to the cops I’d be making later that night; I’d been running a few variants on the drive back, testing out what they sounded like in my own voice, a voice I could never let the police hear.

  I folded and buckled the last bit of tenting and was left with just the ticking sound of our car engines, mine finally relaxing after the long haul from Northern California that had left me more tired than I could ever explain to Ellen. A syrupy can of Red Bull from the flats of canned goods on the shelves above my stowed camping gear would have to do the work of wiring me up. I opened up the back door of the Jeep and slid out the big, mid-2000s Apple PowerBook I used as my scrapbook, safely cased in a padded canvas slip.

  Inside, I took the scrapbook to my enormous desk at the end of the hall and unlocked the bottom drawer. Slipping the scrapbook inside, I fought a deep compulsion to flip it open.

  “Can you check if the City Light payment went through?” Ellen called, her voice curving around the hall from the kitchen, where she was probably sitting on the counter eating one of the plums, or rooting around in the little clothes basket she kept in there for quick postwork changes into comfort wear.

  “Look on your phone,” I called back, locking the drawer and testing it with a quick, light pull.

  “I don’t trust the stupid app. Just do it, okay? And when were you planning to throw this lime out?”

  “That’s your lime,” I said. “I thought you were holding onto it. Any limes I buy I put in the fridge, which is where limes belong.”

  “Smartass,” she called, then lapsed into silence, waiting for me to actually enter the room to go on with the conversation. I wasn’t ready yet. Talking to Kylie could pull me bac
k into the world rapidly after a dig, and it had, but I still needed a second of total peace to reset my brain to domestic mode, my internal parallel to Ellen’s change of clothes. My desk faced a blank wall that I wouldn’t allow any paintings or photos to invade. No distractions, just me and that huge block of oak with its four canyon-deep drawers. Only the bottom drawer stayed secure to keep my scrapbook from prying eyes. Not that there were any of those in the household, other than my own. Ellen wasn’t into snooping. She was as trustworthy in our home as she was behind her desk at the credit union, and it didn’t occur to Kylie that her dad’s business could contain anything of interest. I shut my eyes, got where I needed to be, then stood.

  “You seen my phone charger, the kitchen one?” I said, rounding the corner.

  “It’s in here, genius. The kitchen,” Ellen said while I fumbled the plug off the counter and into the socket. “You going to be cooking?” I could feel the gaze and turned to it. She’d worked a regular eight-hour day but looked more tired than I was.

  “I’m not, and neither are you.” As my phone buzzed back to life I pressed it onto speaker and dialed the Szechuan place in the strip plaza a few blocks away, a place that mainly did takeout but delivered for us, because I tipped twenty bucks. “Salt and pepper squid, yeah, ginger beef—”

  “Lemon chicken,” Kylie almost screamed from the top of the banister, with a desperation that even got her mother to forget they were fighting for a moment and laugh.

  “Lemon chicken,” I said into the phone, pretty sure the guy on the other end had heard her anyway. Kylie thumped back into her room, and I turned to Ellen with a look on my face that must have been apologetic.

  “What?”

  “I’m going out tonight. Meeting Keith for a beer,” I said.

  “Cop Keith? So you’re out camping for two days, you come back, and we lose you right away to the police?” This time there was a slight pout in her voice, but it was still miles away from real complaint.