6. WHAT'RE YOU DOING?

Street lights in Nowhere South Dakota were little to none.

And people wondered why so many girls turned up dead that summer?

Traveling at night required high beams and focus. Or, if you were me, a trip to see your father which landed you in the back of a coffee-n-creamer police cruiser so you didn't have to drive at all. I was chauffeured often by Deputy Bithell. I liked to run away and my dad always sent Bithell after me. It was kinda like having a sexy bus driver with handcuffs. I was attracted to the gun on his belt and the way he sat in the driver's seat: deep on his seat bones with his knees spread, an elbow on the door, right hand firmly on the wheel. He glanced at me in the rearview, then not at me, then at me again like I might slip the safety lock somehow and escape at a red light.

He wasn't tall, but his gruff attitude added a vanity inch or two; filling the shoulder seams on his khaki shirt, his chest pushing the lighter against the fabric of his front pen pocket. Menthol hung around him, moving with him, a barrier. If I sat directly behind the driver's seat and pushed my nose against the cage, I could breathe deep enough to clear my sniffles.

Sometimes, I'd talk to him:

"Jimmy."

"Yes, Fiona."

"How old are you?"

"Older than you."

"How much?"

Silence.

"That much, huh?"

Other times, I'd lean back on the duck taped vinyl upholstery and imagine him setting my lifeless body on fire; leaving the car to melt in around me as he thumbed himself a minty cigarette.

But on that night, his eyes didn't twitch, they held me in the mirror. Both of his hands had the wheel. Miles of black tarmac ran ahead of us, scored by high beams and hemmed by guardrails:

"Fiona," he said.

"What're you doing?"

I stared out the window at the pine trees crowding the road. The light hit them and they froze mid-step, waiting for the car to pass before they continued on undercover of darkness.

"Living." I said, but I didn't believe that was possible.

Bithell's gun was heavier than I expected. I pressed the symmetrical mouth to my temple, knocking on those blue-green veins that pulsed just beneath the surface as big as train tunnels. It smelled dank like greased metal and not like menthol and I pulled the trigger. Bang.

I pulled the trigger again. Close up. Bang.

I pulled the trigger again. Wide shot. Bang.

I pulled the trigger again—

"He's trying to keep you safe," Bithell said, turning onto my home property.

I put the gun back. The world would fog over, and I'd pull it out again soon enough. It played on loop. Jump cuts. Sad music. Too close. Too far. Then the reel would slip the projector and I'd still be in the theater: the blank screen on the wall, bits of fuzz and hair flashing twenty feet tall, and I'd shove that gun back in its holster to warm for the next show.

The car idled. Bithell rubbed his bristled chin. I couldn't tell which of us was in a cage, was he looking in while I looked out? Or was I watching him, a wild animal in a zoo.

I wondered if Freud had notes somewhere about girls wanting to fuck men that reminded them of their fathers. But then I realized, Deputy Bithell just reminded me of me.

"What do you know about it," I said.

"There's a killer out there, Fiona," Bithell said. "Do you wanna die?"

7. LUCKY STRIKE

A cigarette vending machine in Rick's Roadhouse kept the Jukebox company. They sat together in the corner, empty pockets waiting for a nickel or a dollar. The Jukebox played sad songs on command, and nobody bothered her because she didn't know anything different. If she did play, it was the house that asked. The cigarettes on the other hand, they got the most use. Just not from me.

Across the room, the vending machine was nothing special. A lump of brown on more brown that crawled up the walls as wood panels. The metal was scratched, and the corners dinged, brand names faded.

I finished my grilled cheese and watched him approach the corner. He wasn't looking for a song. Instead, he fished a few coins from his jeans and hovered over the cigarettes. He did it carefully, like every carton inside was a bird about to take flight, and slid the money into a waiting slot. He didn't belong in a truck stop. He was a piece of the outdoors; windburned cheekbones and short hair that laid every which way in a golden-brown tussle. His A1 bomber jacket was soft at the shoulders and elbows from hours as a second skin. His boots didn't track in cow shit because they had sand.

He came to Nowhere that summer. Sweeping in on a northbound breeze, pulling the scent of cheap gasoline and open road with him; on stage the moment he set a foot through the door. He wasn't local. I didn't know him or his name. But he smoked Lucky Strikes (my brand before I'd gone contrary) and that seemed a personal invitation.

I followed him onto the porch.

"Need a light?"

The porch rail faced the empty highway, a flat and unhappy road sticky in the sun. He turned at the sound of my voice. His fingers tapped a new cigarette against the box.

I clicked the lighter I'd stolen from my dad, a silver one he'd carried in Nam. There was a comforting thought etched on the smooth side, and I recited it to myself when the wallpaper moved and time stuttered backward. Lucky bent his face close to my fingers. He cupped his hands around my flame and the world, for a moment, was an outsider.

I flicked the lid closed.

"Thanks," he said. The way he held his mouth and looked at me—his eyes slightly creased, the lines like score marks in the corners above his round cheekbones—he knew just how handsome he was.

He gestured a hand toward my shirt. "Mickey Mouse?"

"Fucking fascist cow."

He laughed and offered me a cigarette.

I raised a hand. "I'm clean."

"Smart."

"Just poor."

He eyed me curiously. The few freckles on his nose peeped out from behind peels of sunburnt skin. He drove with the windows down.

"What is there to do in Nowhere South Dakota?"

"Wanna see a movie?" I said.

I let him pay so I could get in. And then I left him when he went for snacks and found a quiet spot to hide for awhile.

8. ROOM KEY

The truck didn't know me yet. The passenger seat couldn't hold my body right, and I shifted on the old leather to sit deeper on my seat bones. My knees were tough from falling, and I rested them on the dashboard. The open window bit my elbow from its hiding spot inside the door.

"Where you from?" I asked, watching the flat landscape go on and on and on like a long-winded sermon.

We were on our way to a mid-day matinee in town.

The Sheriff's station was in town too.

Lucky lounged on his door. The window didn't bite him. Nothing bad could happen to someone who knew they were okay inside and out. He drove with his wrist at twelve noon on the steering wheel.

"Here about," he said, licking his lips. "The family has been split for years. I go where I please now." He grinned at me. A pair of aviators sat on the bridge of his nose disguising his eyes. I could only see myself in them. "And you? You always lived Nowhere?"

"My whole life. I'll probably die here."

"We all die nowhere."

"I'll be murdered, you'll see. Have my neck squeezed like all those other girls."

His mouth flattened. I didn't need to see his eyes to know he was bothered. I wanted to say I was joking. But only just. I hadn't decided who would do the throttling: me with a rope of some kind, or a mystery killer.

Maybe, Deputy Bithell.

"They know who done it?"

I shrugged. "The papers been calling him the Lady Killer."

The tires filled the silence, vibrating my molars as they peeled off the tarmac at a shaky sixty miles per hour. There was dust on the windshield, bowed around two clean arches like plucked eyebrows. Grit coated the floorboards where the mats didn't cover. The keychain swayed above his knee. Attached to it was a room key. The metal tag read 20.

"I'll tell you who it is when they don't know who it ain't," he said. "A cop. It's always a cop. They're good at covering things up."

I squirmed. It wasn't an accusation, he didn't know about me. But there was the paint scraper and the VIN number and the coroner who got every weekend off now and no one in the department understood why.

"You seen the pictures?" I said out loud to shut my mind up. "Of the dead girls?"

"Sure."

"I look like them."

He glanced at me, then the road, then back at me again.

"Well shit, I never."

After that, it was easy to imagine my headline:

Fiona Mars Missing.

Went to the movies and never came home.

9. SILVERSCREEN AN ESSAY

There's a moment. A moment in the movie theater when the lights go off, the curtain rises, and the sloped aisle lights up like an airport runway, and you wonder: Will I be the same person I am now when I leave? Whatever unveils itself across a screen twenty feet tall isn't meant to stay up there.  It sprouts in the dark; cultivated in open minds, softened by sadness. Whatever you need, you find it on the silver screen. Tiny pieces of the world you hate, change inside a theater. And that reality is unalterable.

10. NIGHT WALK

It was night when an attendant finally found me two showings later. I was fast asleep in the front row of a movie I'd seen ten times before, my head on the crushed velvet wall. I'd slipped in during intermission and swallowed a dose of quacks. I was groggy when the attendant shook me into the real world, fettered by stale butter and body sweat and a gnawing in my chest that was trying to chew a hole right through me.

"Miss, do we need to call the police?"

I laughed.

The movie was a black and white. Scene changes lit the dark theater in flashes, lifting the sheet off the scattered audience, then dropping it, then lifting it without warning. No single person had long enough to spy another. They had to wait for the next spray of gunfire to try again. Searching out friends or victims with film-light sparkling in their glassy eyes.

You didn't see a girl alone in the theater. You didn't see girls alone anywhere these days if she was under nineteen. How a loner like me had gone unnoticed for five hours was a testament to why the girls in Nowhere were dying in the first place.

On the sidewalk, the kiosk sign hung above me like a wall of fragile stars, I stretched my back and thought of the boy I called Lucky. Had he finished his movie without me? Or left, angry. I had an idea he was spectacular when angered.

A cigarette was what I wanted. The edge of the Quaaludes made the street soft. It had rained. Puddles caught the lamp lights and the neon window signs like a path of hellish mirrors. I walked on the curb to avoid shattering them. The storm drains smelled swampy, but I didn't mind...

The town was a different animal at night. And I liked it. The dank soil trapped in the cracks of cement and tarmac like dirt under a fingernail. The quiet on the intersections. The old newspapers bleeding words as they wasted away discarded. I could finally breathe.

I swiped a cigarette pack from a convenience store while the clerk rang up a customer and tucked them in my shirt pocket. When the thrill of walking alone wore down, and nothing happened to threaten my life or anyone else's, I turned up at the Sheriff's station.

"I thought you didn't smoke."

I spread my knees and leaned back in the waiting room chair. "On the contrary, Jimmy."

Phones rang. Officers in brown shunted papers. The lights were strainingly bright compared to the night walk I'd taken, and it was hard to look alluring with my face scrunched.

"If you won't stop, then at least do it in your father's office."

It was silent with the door shut. The blinds on the partition window looking out onto the station's main floor were shuttered. The office was not unlike my dad: closed off on the outside, an unboxed mess on the inside.  Files scaled his desk top, and there was a cork board in the corner under a warm yellow lightbulb. Everything else was dim.

The dead girls were pinned to the board. I walked over to examine the faces again. The faces that looked like mine. I ran a finger along a red strand of yarn that connected one to the other on push pins.

I stopped on Busy Hutch.

"For fucksake," I mumbled.

"Watch your language."

My dad closed the door behind him again and shuffled the files on his desk. My mouth pinched together as I listened. Busy's pale lips were sewed shut around her teeth. The longer I stared, the more I could make out her skull underneath.

I tore the picture free.

"Why is she up here?" I said and threw the glossy 8x10 on the desk.

"Fiona."

"She has nothing to do with this."

"She has similar wounds as the other four—"

"There's a difference, she wasn't strangled!"

"She was!" he snapped and then closed his eyes and took a breath. "It could look that way with the right paperwork. I'm trying to make this go away, Fiona."

Fee-o-nAH.

I picked up the photo and tossed it at his chest. I was short. Like my mother. And he was tall like the decrepit tree behind our house.

"You said I did this—"

"It was an accident."

"You can't change it! You can't disappear it like you did mom. Are you going to disappear me next, huh? The last piece of evidence. Maybe Jimmy will do it so you don't have to. What if I told you he's been screwing me. All those times you sent me home with him. Right in the front seat."

"Stop."

"What if I told you I wanted it."

"STOP."

He didn't believe me. I curled my lip, "Your life would've be better if I'd never been born."

His jaw tightened. "Are you high?"

"No. Maybe."

"For fucksake..."

He rubbed his forehead. My dad carried weights no one could see, but I read between the lines on his brow and the parentheses enclosing the corners of his mouth. I'd put those lines there the day I was born. I knew the stories behind them. I'd written the addendum. I'd added another right now.

"Why are you here?"

I dropped into a chair and crossed my arms. "I was out with a boy."

This he believed. I knew he'd be upset. I knew for a moment, I'd be all he would think about, even in anger. So I said it.

I was more than a passing note or a pile of dishes.

"Someone I know?"

"He's not from here."

It was his turn to yell.

"Jesus! I'm here seventy hours a week putting pinholes in prom photos of dead girls your age, and you decide to go on a date with a drifter? Do you want to die?"

The cigarette smoked in my fingers, but I didn't touch it. I was looking again at the board and the photographs tied up with strings.

"What are those?"

I pointed the stub of the cigarette toward a close-up photo of what looked like circular smudges on grainy paper. The ash tumbled off onto the office carpet, but I kept pointing.

"Burns," Dad said, and sat down. His desk chair squeaked. "The victims were tortured before they were..." he gestured at the air near his throat.

This was the longest conversation we'd had in two months.

"That wasn't in the newspapers."

"No. No it wasn't."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

He moved the glass ashtray toward the front lip of his desk top. "Because I thought you'd quit."

I was mesmerized by an idea blossoming in the seeded field of my luded mind.

"Could the Lady Killer be a cop?"

He adjusted the nameplate on his desk, Sheriff D. Mars, and picked up the receiver on his beige rotary phone.

"It's time you went home, Fiona," he said.

And rang for Deputy Bithell.