“Isn’t it beautiful?”
He turns to me, looking surprised that I’m here. Like he’d been just as lost as I was taking everything in. His focus remains on my face for an extended second.
“Yeah.”
I smile at him before returning to my crouch near the deer.
“Wouldn’t it be easier to just take his head?” Colin asks above me.
I nod at the deer, thinking that’s probably the smartest thing to do.
And then I whip my machete out and make a bloody mess.
8
Colin
What in the name of all that is holy.
Chloe Stark is something else. Never in my life have I imagined her collecting dead animals to preserve and display like a fifty-year-old taxidermist.
When she’d said she needed help lifting a body, so many thoughts ran through my head. The main one being:she can’t be serious.
She was serious. Just not in the way I would have expected. Although, if it were a human body, would she really have invited me to tag along? Still, I climbed into her car because any chance I have to spend time with her is a chance to find something incriminating.
We drove to her house with the windows down, the deer head teetering back and forth on its antlers every so often. The airflow didn’t entirely alleviate the smell, but it helped a bit.
“You’re going to want to wear this.” Chloe uses her free hand to extend a gas mask in my direction. “I have an air scrubber forcing most of the smell underground, but some of it still…lingers.” She urges me to take the mask when all I do is eye it curiously. It seems a bit like overkill, a full-faced gas mask for a couple dead animals and all, but who am I to know what they smell like rotting in a basement? I eventually take it from her, watching as she sets the deer head down by its antler to put her own mask on, before continuing to her basement door.
This is the main room I’ve wanted to lay eyes on for months. For years, actually.
When her mother went to prison, I’d stopped by her house a few times to try and catch her in the middle of something. Peeking in windows, lurking around the perimeter while attempting to avoid being caught. I’d seen this door through the window of her garage and convinced myself that it’s where her misdeeds take place. I’m slowly realizing that it’s actually where herprocesstakes place. Though maybe it’s not just animals that disappear down there.
Chloe presses her thumb to the fingerprint sensor on the basement door handle until it flashes green and the deadbolt unlatches, and I follow behind her as we descend the stairs.
When we pulled into the garage a minute ago, she pulled her powder blue Bug right up next to what I remember to be her mother’s Suburban. It was never here before in all the times I’d come by, so I was a bit caught off guard to see it. And also intrigued. I shuffled that piece of knowledge into the Chloe Stark evidence box in the back of my brain. I’ll need to stick a GPS tracker in that vehicle, as well.
As her basement comes into view, Chloe sets the deer head on a metal table in the middle of the room, and my gaze carries around.
The concrete walls are painted black, as are the tables that line them. There are various tools attached to a wall on one side of the room that look more like dentist tools—small, metal, and sharp on one end or both. On the other side of the room is a wall that displays various animal skulls, the bleached-white skeletons uplit by small lights, casting shadows on the wallbehind them. It’d be hard to tell what each of them were exactly if not for the small pictures beneath each skull showcasing what the animal was while it was alive, including scenery similar to the type we witnessed today.
Chloe moves around the room in my periphery as I approach the wall, studying the little skull on display closest to me. It’s oblong with a wide hole where its nose would have been, as well as eye sockets, and a row of teeth with sharp canines extending down the jaw. It’s completely unidentifiable to me, but it’s a skunk, according to the small canvas underneath it that I’m realizing is not a picture, but an incredibly realistic painting.
The skunk is painted in such detail, you can see each hair on its body and each pore on its little pink nose. The grassland surrounding it is tall and vast, like the grass we were hiking through earlier, with a few bushes in the background with berries on them. The sky is painted to look more like a sunrise than the sunset we’d seen this afternoon.
It’s vivid and realistic, each detail in the environment accounted for from the rays of sunshine cast across the field to the bluejay flitting through the sky in the distance.
“Did you make this?” I point to the painting and turn back to Chloe, the deer head gone from the table and in its place a dead possum—or what’s left of it.
“Maeve did,” she replies, her voice muffled through the mouth of her respirator.
She seems distracted with the animal in front of her, so I take advantage of the opportunity to be in her private space, moving around the room in search of clues.
There are barrels similar to the one Grayson Tyler was purchasing at the hardware store, tubes sticking out of the back and feeding into a drain running through the concrete floor. I approach the metal racks against one wall, eyeing the rubber gloves, cleaning supplies, and bundle of freshtoothbrushes sticking out of a jar. I lean in, inspecting it for human tissue or hair of some sort.
Nothing.
Returning to the other side of the room, I lean my back against the table that lines the wall as Chloe cleans the remnants of skin tissue and muscle fibers off the little skeleton.
