Page 46 of Snow Creek

I’m reeling. We had no family. We never did. Mom said that her parents and siblings died in a car crash when she was a little girl. Seven, I think. Though now I am beginning to question everything I thought I knew. And as I do, my eyes take in a sentence that no one should have to read.

Your father is Alex Richard Rader. He is a serial killer. I was the victim who got away.

I want to scream, but I don’t. Tears stream down my face and I half-glance at the bank’s camera trained right at me. I feel scared, paranoid and very, very angry. The words feel toxic. Serial killer? Victim? Got away? Each syllable comes at me like a bullet to my temple. I almost wish they were bullets. Abruptly, my skin feels dirty and itchy. My hands are shaking. She could have told me. Sheshouldhave trusted me. She made our vagabond lives utter hell. Why didn’t she just go to the police? She had always said that her stalker was an ex-boyfriend, a man who had come into her life after my father. She’d been kind to him and he just wouldn’t let up. We were living in military housing in Fort Lewis, south of Tacoma, then. I was barely out of diapers. She said that the police on the base refused to do anything to help her, that her stalker hadn’t broken any laws. And yet she felt so threatened that she thought that being on the run was the only solution for our safety. I want to laugh out loud now about the absurdity of her story, but she’d been so unbelievably convincing. Every time a freak would stalk and kill someone when a restraining order had been put in place, she would point to it as an example of the world we lived in—and the danger of living life out in the open.

“No one can help a victim until it is too late. It’s a chance we’re never going to take,” she’d said on those occasions.

I bought into it. I guess the drumming of the same thing over and over ensured my complete acceptance. Like those kids we had seen on TV years ago. They had no other frame of reference for the world. They believed everything they were told. Even when the stories were stretched to breaking point, they still believed.

I know what I know, honey. So please give me that. I know that Alex has killed three girls and those cases were never truthfully solved. I also know why. I know his friends on the police force tampered with evidence. I know all of this because he told me when he held me captive when I was sixteen. I could draw you a picture about what happened during those dark days, but I don’t think I need to. You were conceived in the worst horror imaginable. But I would never want to live without you. I don’t see him when I look into your eyes. I see the face of the daughter that I will always love.

If you decide to try to find me alive—I know I can’t stop you— you will need to follow his trail. I don’t know where he is. I don’t know where I am. But I do know two things: I have seven days. He killed each girl after holding them for seven days. A week. Look into the victims’ pasts to find me.

* * *

I go back to my office, to the bottom desk drawer and pull out more paper, clippings from various newspapers. Though the images have yellowed with age, any one of them could have been a ringer for my mother. Shannon Blume, sixteen; Megan Moriarty, sixteen; Leanne Delmont, sixteen. All were from the Seattle-Tacoma area. All of these murder cases were attributed to different men. All cases were closed. According to the newspaper clippings, none of the men who killed any of the girls was named Alex Rader.

I scoop it all up and return to the kitchen table and restart the tape. I hear my voice talking about my confusion, how stunned I was that one of the other items in the safe deposit box was a gun.

Me: I didn’t get it. I didn’t really get any of this. I was confused, shocked.

Dr. A: Of course, you were, Rylee. You’d been traumatized in multiple ways within a very short time. You were piecing together bits and pieces that had been your life up to that point. You were a strong girl. Incredibly so.

Me: I didn’t feel so strong. I felt sick. I kept thinking over and over that who your parents are don’t need to define you and the rest of your life.

Dr. A: Yes. And look at you now. You’re in college. You’re moving forward in ways that you might have not ever imagined.

Me: (crying softly).

Dr. A: You will be fine, Rylee.

Me: I hope so.

Dr. A: I know so.

Me:Thank you.

* * *

I’d continued telling the story of how we made our way to Idaho to see our unheard-of Aunt Ginger. How I felt disoriented. So much had been crammed into my head, a mass of loose ends that felt like they’d coagulated inside my throat, that I could barely speak. I remember sitting in the back of the second car. I let Hayden have the window. He was tired, and I was hoping the monotonous beat of a rolling train would lull him to sleep. It worked. I pulled out the envelopes and papers from the safe deposit box and consumed the information on each page as if I were a human scanner. I am, sort of. I’ve always had the ability to remember things. I know that I possess a photographic memory. I never say so aloud. It sounds too conceited, but I do. While I took everything inside, while I felt the gun in its paper wrapper, I was thinking over and over about what was happening to Mom. I was so angry at her for the lies she’d told me. I felt foolish too. I imagined the father I never knew, the soldier, and how he’d fought for our country. He was a hero. When I was small, I used to pretend that I was talking to him on the phone all the way across the world. He was dodging bullets, bombs. He was facing death inside some burned-out village in the Middle East, but he stopped everything to talk to me. I saw my father as a kind of superhero worthy of respect, love, and a movie. All of that had been a figment of my imagination.

My stepfather was a good guy. Decent. Yet still a mystery.

Why would he take us on? There had to be something wrong with a man who would carry such a burden as to live on the run with my mother, me, and later, Hayden. I loved him in the way that one loves a trusted pet; one who might bite you, so you never get too close. He was solid. Caring. Yet he wasn’t my dad. He was Hayden’s dad. My stomach roils as I think of him nearly pinned to the floor of the kitchen with a knife, like some moth specimen in biology class at South Kitsap. I want to cry for him right now. He deserves that much, but I don’t.

I can’t think of anything but my biological dad and who he was. He was not dog-tag material. He was not the hero. Far, far from that. He was the villain, the worst, most despicable kind ever. The feeling that overtakes me right then as Hayden sleeps in the seat next to me is a mix of sadness, anger, and confusion: If I’m not the daughter of a hero, but the daughter of a killer, then what kind of person am I?

* * *

I sit motionless for a very long time. I almost don’t know the girl on the recording, what she’s thinking, where she’s going. How she plans to use that gun. It’s scary. Even though she’s a stranger to me, I know she is still deep inside me. I don’t blame her for what she’s about to do. I wish that I had one of Maxine’s cats right now. I’d hold it in my arms and tell it how much it means to have someone you can depend on. I’d pet it softly and take in the purrs, the motor-like sounds that would reassure me that there was more good to the world than the evil that seems to surround me.

I pour another tepid glass of wine and head for bed, hoping that slumber will give me relief from what I know is about to come.

Not from the Wheaton case.

I can handle that.

It’s what the tapes are about to disclose.

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