I KILLED MY BROTHER WITH A PENNY. SIMPLE, BENIGN, AND PERFECTLY BELIEVABLE.
It happened at the tracks. Because, as life would teach me in the years to come, a speeding train was many things. Majestic, when it blurred past too quickly for the eyes to register anything but streaks of color. Powerful, when it rumbled underfoot like an impending earthquake. Deafening, when it roared along the rails like a thunderstorm dropped from the heavens. A speeding train was all these things, and more. A speeding train was deadly.
The gravel leading up to the tracks was loosely packed, and our feet slipped as we climbed. It was evening, close to six o’clock, the usual time the train rolled through town. The bottoms of the clouds blushed with a dying crimson as the sun settled under the horizon. Dusk was the best time to visit the tracks. In broad daylight, the conductor might spot us and call the police to report two kids playing dangerously close to the tracks. Of course, I made sure that scenario had already happened. It was essential to my plan. Had I killed my brother the very first time I brought him here, my anonymity in this tragedy would have been paper thin. I needed ammunition for when the police came to question me. I needed to create an irrefutable history about our time at the tracks. We’d been here before. We’d been seen. We’d been caught. Our parents had been informed, and we had been punished. A pattern had been developed. But this time, I would tell them, things had gone wrong. We were kids. We were stupid. The narrative was flawless, and I would later learn that it needed to be. The detective who would look into my brother’s death was an onerous force. Immediately suspicious of my story, he was never truly satisfied with my explanation of events. To this day, I am certain he is not. But my version of that day, and the history I had created, was watertight. Despite his efforts, the detective found no holes.
Once we made it to the top of the embankment and stood next to the tracks, I fished two pennies from my pocket and handed one to my brother. They were shiny and unblemished but would soon be thin and smooth after we placed them on the rails for the roaring train to flatten them. Dropping pennies onto the tracks was an exciting event for my brother, who had never heard of such a thing before I introduced him to the concept. Dozens of other flattened pennies filled a bowl in my bedroom. I needed them. When the police came to ask their questions, the collection of pennies would serve as proof that we’d done this before.
Far out in the evening, I heard the whistle. The faint sound seemed to catch in the clouds above us, echoing in the bloodshot cotton balls. The evening was darker now as the sun melted away, grainy and opalescent. Just the right mixture of dusk for us to see what we were doing but not enough to betray our presence. I crouched down and placed my penny on the tracks. My brother did the same. We waited. The first few times we’d come here, we placed our pennies on the rails and ran back down the embankment to hide in the shadows. But soon we discovered that in the evening no one noticed us. With each venture back to the tracks, we stopped running when the train approached. In fact, we crept closer. What was it about being so close to danger that filled us with adrenaline? My brother had no idea. I was quite certain. With each successive trip, he became easier to manipulate. For a moment, it felt unfair—as if I had stepped into the role of bully, a role my brother had mastered. But I reminded myself not to confuse efficiency with simplicity. This felt easy only because of my diligence. It felt easy only because I had made it that way.
The train’s headlights came into view as it approached—first the top light, and soon after the two ditch lights. I crept closer to the rails. He was next to me, to my right. I had to look past him to see the train’s approach. He was aware of me, I could tell, because when I crept closer to the tracks he matched my movements. He didn’t want to miss out. He didn’t want to allow me more bragging rights or a greater surge of adrenaline. He couldn’t allow me to have anything that he could claim as his own. It was how he was. It was how all bullies were.
The train was nearly upon us.
“Your penny,” I said.
“What?” my brother asked.
“Your penny. It’s not in the right spot.”
He looked down, leaning slightly over the tracks. The roaring train barreled toward us. I took a step back and pushed him. It was over in an instant. He was there one second and gone the next. The train roared past, filling my ears with thunder and turning my vision into a blur of rusted colors. The train produced a current of air that pulled me a step or two to my left and sucked me forward, willing me to join my brother. I braced my feet in the gravel to resist the tug.
When the last car passed, the invisible grip released me. I staggered backward. My vision returned, and quiet filled my ears. When I looked down at the tracks, the only thing left of my brother was his right shoe, strangely standing upright as if he’d slipped it off his foot and laid it on the rails.
I was careful to leave the shoe untouched. I picked up my penny, though. It was flat and thin and wide. I dropped it in my pocket and headed home to add it to my collection. And to tell my parents the terrible news.
I closed the leather-bound journal. A long tassel hung from the bottom, keeping my place for the next time I read from it during a session. The room was dead quiet.
“Are you shocked?” I finally asked.
The woman across from me shook her head. Her demeanor had not changed during my confession. “Not at all.”
“Good. I come here for therapy, not judgment.” I lifted the journal. “I’d like to tell you about the others.”
I waited. The woman stared at me.
“There are more. I didn’t stop after my brother.”
I paused again. The woman continued to stare at me.
“Would you mind if I told you about the others?”
She shook her head again. “Not at all.”
I nodded my head. “Excellent. Then I will.”
A FINGERNAIL MOON FLOATED IN THE MIDNIGHT SKY, ITS TARNISHED sheen intermittently visible through the foliage. The moon’s erratic presence penetrated the interlocking tree branches with a pale glaze that painted the forest floor in the lacquered finish of a black-and-white film. Visibility came from the candle he carried, the flame of which died every time he picked up his pace and tried to jog through the woods. He tried to slow himself, to be careful and deliberate, but walking was not an option. He needed to hurry. He needed to be the first to arrive. He needed to beat the others.
He cupped his hand in front of the candle to protect the flame, which allowed him a few uninterrupted minutes to scan the forest. He walked for a few yards until he came to a row of suspicious-looking trees. As he stood perfectly still and scanned the tree trunks, looking for the key he so desperately needed, the candle’s flame expired. There was no wind. The flame simply died, leaving a plume of smoke that filled his nostrils with the scent of burnt wax. The sudden and unexplained eclipse of the candle meant the Man in the Mirror was close. By rule—rules no one ever broke—he had ten seconds to relight the candle.
Fumbling with the matches—the rules allowed only matches, no lighters—he struck a matchstick across the phosphorus strip on the side of the box. Nothing. His hands shook as he swiped again. The match broke in half and fell to the dark forest floor. He reached into the matchbox, spilling several others in the process.
“Dammit,” he whispered.
He couldn’t afford to waste matches. He’d need them again if he made it back to the house and into the safe room. But right now he was alone in the dark woods with an unlit candle and in great danger, if he believed the rumors and folklore. The tremors that gripped his body suggested he did. He steadied his hand just long enough to make a smooth sweep against the phosphorus, which caused the match to light in a sizzling blaze. The eruption gave off a cloud of sulfur-tinged smoke before calming to a controlled flame. He touched the match to the candle’s wick, happy for the light it provided. He calmed his breathing and watched the shadowed forest around him. He listened and waited, and when he was sure he had beaten the clock, he returned his attention to the row of trees before him. Slowly, he made his way forward, carefully shielding the flame as he went—a lighted candle was the only way to keep the Man in the Mirror away.
He made it to the huge black oak tree and saw a wooden box at its base. He fell to his knees and opened the lid. A key rested inside. His heart pounded with powerful contractions that rushed blood through the bulging vessels in his neck. He took a deep, calming breath, and then blew out the candle—rules stated that guidance candles could stay lighted only until a key was found. He took off through the woods. In the distance, a train whistle blew into the night, fueling his adrenaline. The race was on. He crashed through the forest, twisting an ankle and unsuccessfully shielding his face from the branches that whipped his cheeks. As he continued through the woods, the rumble of the train shook the ground beneath him as it roared past. The vibration brought more urgency to his steps.
When he reached the edge of the forest, the train was charging along the tracks to his left in a metallic blur that erratically caught the reflection of the moon. He broke free from the dark foliage and took off toward the house, his grunting and panting overtaken by the roar of the train. He made it to the door and pushed inside.
“Congratulations,” a voice said to him as soon as he was through the door. “You’re the first one.”
“Sweet,” he said, out of breath.
“Did you find the key?”
He held it up. “Yeah.”
“Follow me.”
They crept through the black hallways of the house until they came to the door of the safe room. He inserted the key into the doorknob and twisted. The lock surrendered, and the door swung open. They entered and then closed the door behind them. The room was pitch black, much worse than what the forest had offered.
“Hurry.”
He fell to the floor and, on his hands and knees, felt along the hardwood until his fingers came to the row of candles that sat in front of a tall standing mirror. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the book of matches. There were three remaining. He struck a matchstick along the edge of the box, and the tip ignited. He lit one of the candles and stood to face the mirror, which was covered by a heavy tarp.
He took a deep breath and nodded to the one who had met him at the door. Together they pulled the tarp from the mirror. His reflection was shadowed by candlelight, but he noticed the horizontal lacerations that cut across his cheeks and the blood that streamed down from them. He looked eerie and battle worn, but he’d made it. The rumbling evaporated as the last train car passed the house and continued off to the east. Silence filled the room.
Looking in the mirror, he took one last breath. Then, together, they whispered:
“The man in the mirror. The man in the mirror. The man in the mirror.”
A moment passed, during which neither blinked or breathed. Then something flashed behind them. A blur in the mirror between their reflections. Then a face materialized from the darkness and came into focus, a pair of eyes bright with ricochets from the candle’s flame. Before either could turn, or scream, or fight, the candle’s flame went out.
THE DETECTIVE STEERED HIS CAR PAST THE YELLOW CRIME SCENE TAPE already securing the perimeter and pulled into the chaos of red and blue lights. Squad cars, ambulances, and fire trucks were parked at odd angles in front of the brick pillars that marked the entrance to Westmont Preparatory High School, a private boarding school.
What a goddamn mess.
His commanding officer had been short on details other than that a couple of kids had been killed out in the woods at the edge of campus. The situation was ripe for overreaction. Hence the presence of the town’s entire police and fire departments. And, from the look of it, half the hospital staff. Doctors in scrubs and nurses in white coats glowed as they walked in front of the ambulance headlights. Officers talked to students and faculty as they poured through the front gates and into the circus of flashing lights. He noticed a Channel 6 news van parked outside the crime scene tape. Despite the bewitching hour, he was sure more were on the way.
Detective Henry Ott climbed from his car while the officer in charge brought him up to speed.
“The first nine-one-one call came in at twelve twenty-five. Several others followed, all describing some sort of mess out in the woods.”
“Where?” Ott asked.
“At an abandoned house on the edge of campus.”
“Abandoned?”
“From what we’ve learned so far,” the officer said, “it used to be a boarding house for faculty but has been empty for several years since a Canadian National rail line went up that sent daily freight trains past that part of campus. It was too loud, so new faculty housing was built on the main campus. The school had plans to develop the land into a football field and track-and-field course. But for now, the house just sits abandoned in the woods. We talked to a few students. Sounds like it was a favorite hangout for late-night parties.”
Detective Ott walked toward the gates of Westmont Prep, and then through the entrance. A golf cart sat parked in front of the school’s main building; four giant pillars rose up to support the large triangular gable that glowed under the spotlights. The school’s logo was engraved across the surface of the stone.
“Veniam solum, relinquatis et,” Detective Ott said, his head craned back as he looked up at the building. “Arrive alone, leave together.”
“What’s that mean?”
Detective Ott looked back at the officer. “I don’t really give a shit. Where are we headed?”
“Climb in,” the officer said, pointing at the golf cart. “The house is on the outskirts of campus, about a twenty-minute walk through the woods. This’ll be faster.”
The detective clambered into the golf cart, and a few minutes later he was bouncing through the woods on a narrow dirt path. The trunks of tall birch trees were a blur in his peripheral vision, the light from the moon was gone, and as they drove deeper into the woods, only the golf cart’s headlights offered any glimpse of where they were headed.
“Jesus Christ,” Detective Ott said after a few minutes. “Is this still part of campus?”
“Yes, sir. The old house was built a ways from the main campus to give faculty privacy.”
Up ahead, the detective saw activity at the end of the narrow path. Spotlights had been set up to brighten the area, and as they approached the end of the dark canopy of forest, it felt like exiting the mouth of a giant prehistoric creature.
The officer slowed the cart before they reached the exit. “Sir, one more thing before we get to the scene.”
The detective looked over. “What is it?”
The officer swallowed. “It’s quite graphic. Worse than anything I’ve ever seen.”
Woken in the middle of the night, and stuck somewhere between the buzz he’d fallen asleep with and the hangover that waited, Detective Ott was short on patience and had no flair for the dramatic. He pointed to the edge of the woods. “Let’s go.”
The officer drove from the shadows of the path and into the bright halogen spotlights. The crowd here was smaller, less hectic and more organized. The responding officers had enough sense to keep the horde of police, paramedics, and firefighters to a minimum out here at the crime scene to reduce the chance of contaminating the area.
The officer stopped the cart just outside the gates of the house.
“Holy Christ,” Detective Ott muttered as he stood from the golf cart. All eyes were on him as the first responders watched his reaction and waited for his instruction.
In front of him was a large colonial house that looked to come from a century long past. It was cast in the shadowy glow of the spotlights, which highlighted the ivy that crept up the exterior. A wrought iron gate squared off the perimeter of the house, and tall oak trees stretched up into the night. The first body Detective Ott saw was that of a male student who had been impaled by one of the shafts of the wrought iron gate. Not by accident. Not as though he were trying to scale the gate and had inadvertently fallen onto the tine in the process. No, this was intentional. Almost artful. The young man had been placed there. Lifted carefully, then dropped to allow the spear of the gate to rise up into his chin and through his face until it poked through the top of his skull.
Detective Ott pulled a small flashlight from his pocket and headed toward the house. That’s when he noticed the girl sitting on the ground off to the side. She was covered in blood with arms wrapped around her knees and rocking back and forth in a detached state of shock.
“This wasn’t a couple of kids screwing around. This was a goddamn slaughter.”
THE THIRD EPISODE OF THE PODCAST HAD DROPPED EARLIER IN THE day and in just five hours had been downloaded nearly three hundred thousand times. In the days to come, millions more would listen to this installment of The Suicide House. Many of those listeners would then flood the Internet and social media to discuss their theories and conclusions about the discoveries made during the episode. The chatter would generate more interest, and new listeners would download earlier episodes. Soon, Mack Carter would have the biggest hit in pop culture.
This inevitable fact pissed Ryder Hillier off in ways that were indescribable. She had done the research, she had sounded the alarms, and she was the one who had been looking into the Westmont Prep Killings for the past year, recording her findings, and posting them on her true-crime blog. Her YouTube channel had 250,000 subscribers and millions of views. But now, all of her hard work was being overshadowed by Mack Carter’s podcast.
She had seen right away that the Westmont Prep story had legs, that the official version of events was too simple and too convenient, and that the facts presented by law enforcement were selective at best, and straight-up misleading at worst. Ryder knew that with the right backing and some smart investigative reporting, the story could draw a huge audience. She had pitched her idea to studios the previous year, after the case made national headlines and was open and shut before any real answers were given. But Ryder Hillier was just a lowly journalist, not a bona fide star like Mack Carter. She didn’t have the All-American face or the strong vocal cords, and therefore none of the studios had paid any attention to her pitch. She was a thirty-five-year-old journalist unknown outside the state of Indiana. But she was sure her articles about the case, which had run as a feature in the Indianapolis Star and were referenced by several other outlets, as well as the popularity of her YouTube channel, had something to do with the sudden interest in Westmont Prep. Mack Carter didn’t shift from prime-time television to a Podunk town in Indiana by chance. Someone, somewhere, had been paying attention to her findings, and they saw opportunity and dollar signs. They commissioned Mack Carter—the current host of Events, a nightly newsmagazine show—to run a superficial investigation and to produce a podcast around his findings. His name would draw attention, and the podcast would draw millions of listeners on the promise that the great Mack Carter, with his proven investigative skills and hard-charging attitude, would find answers to the Westmont Prep Killings, which had been too cleanly closed. But in the end, he wouldn’t prove a goddamn thing other than that, with the proper sponsorship and tons of upfront cash, a podcast could grow from the ashes of tragedy to become a lucrative endeavor for everyone involved. So long as that tragedy was disturbing and morbid enough to draw an audience. The Westmont Prep Killings qualified.
Ryder wasn’t going to allow the reality of Big Business to deter her. Quite the contrary. She’d worked too hard to give up now. She planned to piggyback on the success of the podcast. She wanted to pull Mack Carter in, to show him the cards she was holding. To gain his interest and make him take notice. Her YouTube channel provided a decent income from advertisers, and her gig at the paper paid the bills. But in her midthirties, Ryder Hillier wanted more from her career. She wanted to break out, and attaching her name to the most popular true-crime podcast in history would bring her to another level. And the truth was, Mack Carter needed her. She knew more than anyone about the Westmont Prep Killings, including the detectives who had investigated it. She just needed to figure out how to get Mack’s attention.
Like hundreds of thousands of others, she had downloaded the latest episode of his podcast. She put the buds into her ears, tapped her phone, and took off down the running trail as Mack Carter’s practiced voice rang in her ears:
Ryder shook her head as she jogged. Even the goddamn intro had her hooked.
RYDER HAD MADE IT THROUGH HALF OF THE EPISODE DURING HER run. She was anxious to finish it but had an article due the next day. She wrote a weekly true-crime column for the Sunday edition of the Indianapolis Star. It was one of the paper’s most popular columns, always generating long comment threads for the online edition, and popular news websites commonly linked to it.
After a shower, she pulled on jeans and a tank top and sat at her kitchen table, where she opened her laptop. She wrote for an hour, until 10:40 P.M., putting the final touches on an article about a missing South Bend man. There had been some recent developments in the case having to do with the timing of the man’s life insurance policy, which brought his wife under suspicion. Ryder was trying her hardest to finish the article, but the writing came slowly, and she was frustrated with her lack of concentration. Mack Carter’s deep and practiced voice rattled in her head, and all she wanted to do was get back to the podcast. Finally, she succumbed to her temptation, pushed her laptop aside, and tapped her phone to resume the episode.
Eerie music chimed from her phone and pulled Ryder back to the present, and away from Charles Gorman’s house, where Mack Carter had brought her with his alluring voice and vivid descriptions. The music quieted, and she heard Mack Carter’s voice again.
AN ADVERTISEMENT BLARED FROM HER PHONE, AND RYDER TAPPED the screen in frustration to quiet it. She nearly threw the phone across the room. Mack Carter hadn’t discovered a goddamn thing in that safe, and Ryder didn’t need to wait for the next episode to hear him say it. It was a cheap bait and switch, an embarrassing self-promot. . .
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