The Gone World

ONE

“Hello?”

“Special Agent Shannon Moss?”

She didn’t recognize the man’s voice, though she recognized the drawl on the vowels. He’d grown up around here, West Virginia, or Pennsylvania—rural.

“This is Moss,” she said.

“A family’s been killed.” A quaver in his voice. “Washington County dispatch logged the 911 a little after midnight. There’s a missing girl.”

Two a.m., but the news was like an ice bath. She was fully awake now.

“Who am I speaking with?”

“Special Agent Philip Nestor,” he said. “FBI.”

She turned on her bedside lamp. Cream-colored wallpaper patterned with vines and cornflower-blue roses covered her bedroom walls. She traced the lines with her eyes, thinking.

“Why my involvement?” she asked.

“My understanding’s that our SAC communicated with HQ and they instructed him to involve you,” said Nestor. “They want NCIS assistance. Our primary is a Navy SEAL.”

“Where?”

“Canonsburg, on a street called Cricketwood Court, just off Hunter’s Creek,” he said.

“Hunting Creek.”

She knew Hunting Creek, Cricketwood Court—her best friend growing up had lived on that street, Courtney Gimm. The image of Courtney’s face floated from Moss’s memory like ice surfacing through water.

“How many victims are we dealing with?”

“Triple homicide,” said Nestor. “It’s bad. I’ve never—”

“Slow down.”

“I’d seen some kids hit by a train once, but nothing like this,” he said.

“Okay,” said Moss. “You said the call came in after midnight?”

“A little later,” said Nestor. “A neighbor heard commotion, finally called the police—”

“Do you have someone speaking with the neighbor?”

“One of our guys is with her now,” he said.

“I’ll make it there in a little over an hour.”

She gained her equilibrium before attempting to stand—her right leg still the lean, muscled leg of an athlete, but her left terminated in a conical mid-thigh stump, the end muscle and flesh there wrapped like a fold-over pastry. She’d lost her leg years ago when she’d been crucified in the deep winter of the Terminus—a transfemoral amputation, the Navy surgeons having cut away the part of her that had gone gangrenous. When she stood, she perched on her single foot like a long-legged shore bird, rocking on the pads of her toes for balance. Her crutches were within reach, Lofstrand crutches she kept propped in the gap between her bed and nightstand. She slipped her forearms through the cuffs and gripped the handles, propelling herself through her bedroom, a cluttered mess of clothes and magazines, loose CDs, empty jewel cases—slipping hazards her occupational therapist had warned her against.

Cricketwood Court…

A shiver passed over Moss at the thought of returning. She and Courtney had been like sisters through middle school, freshman year—closer than sisters, inseparable. Moss’s memories of Courtney were the sweetest essence of childhood summers—endless days spent poolside, roller coasters at Kennywood, splitting cigarettes down by Chartiers Creek. Courtney had died their sophomore year, murdered in a parking lot for the few dollars she’d had in her purse.

Headline News on the bedroom set while she dressed. She applied antiperspirant to her residual limb, then nestled her polyurethane liner against the blunt edge of her thigh, rolling it to her hip as if she were rolling on a nylon stocking. She smoothed the rubbery sleeve of any air bubbles that might have accrued against her skin. The prosthesis was an Ottobock C-Leg, a prototype—a computerized prosthesis originally designed for wounded soldiers. Moss slid her thigh into the socket and stood, the volume of her thigh forcing out air from the carbon cuff, vacuum-sealing the prosthesis. The C-Leg made her feel as if her skeleton were exposed—a steel shank instead of a shin. She wore slacks, a blouse the color of pearls. She holstered her service weapon. She wore a tailored suede jacket. A last glance at television: Dolly skulking in her hay-strewn pen, Clinton touting the newly signed human-cloning ban, promos for NBA on NBC, Jordan versus Ewing.

Cricketwood Court was a cul-de-sac, sirens flaring against row houses and lawns. A quarter after 3:00 a.m., neighbors would know something had happened, but they might not know what yet—if they peered from their windows they would find a confusion of patrol units, sheriff’s cars and Canonsburg PD, state police cruisers, investigations a web of jurisdiction by the time federal agents were involved. Moss’s cases tended to concern Naval Space Command sailors home on shore leave from “Deep Waters,” the black-ops missions to Deep Space and Deep Time. Bar fights, domestic violence, drug charges, homicides. She had worked cases where NSC sailors had snapped and beaten their wives or girlfriends to death—tragic occurrences, some sailors spiraling after seeing the terrors of the Terminus or the light of alien suns. She wondered what she would find here. The county coroner’s van was parked nearby. Ambulances and fire engines idled. The FBI mobile crime lab had backed over the berm into the front lawn of her old friend’s house.

“Jesus Christ…”

The house Moss remembered from her childhood was as if superimposed over the house as it stood—two films playing concurrently, a memory and a crime scene. Courtney’s family had long since moved from here, and Moss never thought she would set foot within her old friend’s house again, certainly not under these circumstances. A two-story end unit, the other houses in its row lined up like mirror reflections, each with a driveway, a petite garage, each front stoop lit by a single porch light, the façades identical down the line, brick topped by white vinyl. Growing up, Moss had spent more time here than at her own house, it seemed—she still remembered the Gimms’ old phone number. An oily sensation of one reality oozing into another, like a yolk pouring through a crack in its shell. She took a swig of coffee from her thermos and rubbed her eyes as if to wake herself, to convince herself that this coincidence of houses was real, that she wasn’t caught dreaming. A coincidence, she told herself. There used to be a flowering dogwood in the front yard that had since been hacked down.

Moss slowed her pickup at a sheriff’s blockade, and a deputy approached her window, a middle-aged gut and Chaplinesque mustache that would have been humorous except for the weariness weighing in his eyes. He tried to get her to turn her truck around until she rolled down her window and showed identification.

“What is that?” he asked.

“Naval Criminal Investigative Service,” she said, accustomed to explaining her agency’s initials. “Federal agent. We’re interested in a possible military connection. How bad is it?”

“My buddy was in there earlier and told me this is the worst he’s ever seen, just the goddamned worst,” he said, his breath stale with coffee. “Says there’s not much left of them.”

“Reporters been around?”

“Not yet,” he said. “We were told some news vans are on their way down from Pittsburgh. I don’t think they know what they’ll find. Quiet otherwise. Come on through.”

A lace of police tape cordoned off the lawn and driveway, stretching from a lamppost and looping around the house’s wrought-iron stoop railing. Some of the forensic technicians huddled near the garage, a smoke break. They watched Moss approach without the casual chauvinism or bald stares she sometimes encountered at scenes—their eyes were haunted tonight, glancing her way as if they pitied her for what she was about to endure.

The doorway was draped with a plastic tarp, but the smells of the house assaulted her once she ducked through, the cloying tang of blood and bright rot and shit mingled with chemical stenches of the techs’ solutions, the collection kits and ethanol. The odors seeped into her, a metallic tinge from the blood, her saliva immediately coppery as if she’d sucked on pennies. Criminalists in Tyvek crowded the foyer, busy with evidence preservation, photography. A nervous anticipation roiled Moss in the moments before her first view of a new crime scene; once she turned the corner and saw what she was dealing with, however, her nervousness dissipated, replaced by an urgent and sorrowful compulsion to reassemble the broken pieces as quickly as possible.

A boy and a woman lay on the floor, their faces smeared away in a mince of brain and blood and whorls of bone. Flannel pants on the boy, a jersey for a nightshirt—ten or eleven years old, Moss guessed. The woman’s nightgown was filthy with blood, her bare legs shading to plum where lividity had discolored her. Both had voided their bowels, the floor so sopped that shit and standing blood had pooled in the uneven runnels of the carpeting. The odors gagged her. The smells of the boy and his mother degraded them, she thought, their humanity debased by sewage stink and formlessness.

Moss had long ago learned the dissociative technique of viewing bodies through different lenses, divorcing the mutilation as much as possible from the personalities they once were—seeing her colleagues around her through the lens of humanity, seeing the bodies through the lens of forensics. Moss objectified the corpses. The kill stroke for the woman had been one of two blows to her head, either to her left zygomatic or to the parietal on the same side. The woman’s left pupil had dilated to a wide black saucer. Moss noticed that the boy’s fingernails had been removed, all of them. And his toenails, too, it looked like. She checked the woman and found that her nails had been removed as well. Someone—a man, no doubt—had killed these people, then knelt in the gore to pluck their nails from them. Or had he taken their nails before he’d killed them? Why had he done that? One of the technicians ran lengths of thread from the blood spatter on the ceiling and walls, creating a web of thread that delineated an area of convergence—it looked like the victims had been on their knees when they were struck, an execution. The room they had died in was bland, tasteless—nothing like the room Moss had once known, the comfortable, cavelike rec room kept by her best friend’s family. Oatmeal tones now, track lighting. Nothing on the walls, no artwork, no photographs; the room didn’t look lived in, it looked staged for resale.

“Shannon Moss?”

One of the men in Tyvek had paused in his work. Bloodshot eyes, nearly crimson, his dark skin ashen, VapoRub daubed beneath his nostrils in twin greasy streaks.

“Special agent, NCIS,” she said.

He crossed the living room on stainless-steel risers the investigators used like stepping-stones over the blood. He chewed gum, said, “William Brock, Special Agent in Charge. Let’s talk.”

Brock led her through the narrow kitchen, the few men gathered there no longer wearing their Tyvek, their shirts and ties rumpled from hours of work, their faces wan with sleeplessness. Brock, however, seemed tireless—like he would charge bullish until this killer was caught. Angry, almost scowling as he led Moss, as if personally offended by what had happened here. He was sizeable, his voice a resonant baritone in a room of hushed voices.

“Right through here, in this little den,” he said, pulling aside the flimsy accordion door of a room that branched off from the kitchen.

The rest of the house had been soullessly updated over the years, but the den remained unchanged, seemingly untouched since Moss had seen it last. The effect was unnerving—like this little patch had been forgotten when the rest of time had passed on. Faux-wood paneling, a gaudy light fixture that cast the room in amber. Even the particleboard desk and metal filing cabinets were similar, if not the same pieces left over. Courtney had once found a stash of letters in one of those cabinets that her parents had written as they were divorcing. The girls had sat on the front stoop and read them aloud to each other—Moss struck by how earnest, how almost childish a grown man’s letters to his wife could be, nothing different from high-school breakup letters, she’d thought, no difference at all. Nothing changes. The human heart doesn’t age.

“Do we have pictures of the victims?” asked Moss. “Anything recent? It’s impossible to tell what they might have looked like.”

“We have some albums,” said Brock. “Fotomat receipts and negatives. We’ll get them to you once they’re developed. Have you had a chance to see the entire scene? Upstairs?”

“I’ll need to see upstairs,” said Moss.

Brock folded closed the accordion door. “I need to talk with you, clear up a few things,” he said, taking a seat behind the particleboard desk. “The FBI’s deputy director called me in the middle of the night, pulled me from bed. I don’t receive calls from him on a regular basis. He told me there’s a federal crime scene in Canonsburg, told me to lock it down.”

“But that’s not all he told you,” said Moss.

Brock bared his teeth—meant to be a smile, an easing, but it looked like a pained expression. He wadded his gum into its silvery wrapper, replaced it with a fresh black stick. Licorice wafting on a cloud of breath. Moss noticed tooth marks on his pencil—maybe he’d quit smoking, she thought, or was trying to. Early forties, maybe mid-forties, muscular—a regular at the gym, she figured. She imagined him sparring, a boxer. She imagined him running miles on treadmills in empty exercise rooms.

“I’m struggling to understand what the deputy director told me,” said Brock. “To wrap my mind around what we’ve found here. He briefed me on a Special Access Program called ‘Deep Waters.’” Brock spoke the words like an incantation, a shadow of fear passing over his eyes. “A Navy program—a black project. He said our primary suspect, a SEAL named Patrick Mursult, is connected with the Deep Waters program, part of the Naval Space Command. He said to include Shannon Moss in the investigation.”

The scope of the possible world had opened for this man just a few hours ago, thought Moss, seeing Brock struggle to believe the unbelievable. He’d been brought into the secrecy of Deep Waters—but how much had he been trusted with? Moss remembered her first dreamlike glimpse of sunlight glaring off the hulls of the NSC fleet in space, like a spill of diamonds on black velvet—a sublimity few other people have witnessed. She imagined Brock taking the phone call at home, imagined him sitting on the edge of his bed listening to his superior describe what must have sounded like miracles.

“Mursult was… some kind of astronaut,” said Brock, his jaw grinding his licorice. “Deep Space—I understand deep space, I can understand we’ve been farther in the solar system than has been reported, but I don’t understand how. Quantum foam—”

So he’d been told about Deep Space but not Deep Time, thought Moss. Naval Space Command had a public face, had been involved in Star Wars under Reagan, line items in Department of Defense budgets along with the Air Force Space Division and NASA, but the bulk of its operations were closely guarded secrets. Moss had traveled to Deep Space, but she had also traveled to Deep Time—had time-traveled to versions of the future, not only to witness the Terminus but for her criminal investigations as well. IFTs, these futures were called, pronounced like the word “If”—inadmissible future trajectories. “Inadmissible” because the future was mercurial—the futures NSC traveled to were only possibilities stemming from the conditions of the present. She was prohibited against using evidence gleaned from a future to build a case for prosecution in the present because the future she observed might not ever occur.

“Think of me as a resource,” said Moss. “That’s why I’m here, that’s why you were asked to call me. My division within NCIS investigates crimes relating to the Deep Waters program.”

“I don’t know what to believe,” said Brock. “I don’t know what to believe about Patrick Mursult, about a black-ops space program—it all sounds… I don’t know how much of this I’m understanding.”

“There’s a missing girl,” said Moss. “She’s our priority.”

The reminder of the missing girl focused him, the thought of something actionable. “Marian Mursult,” he said. “Seventeen…”

“Marian,” said Moss. “We’ll find her. Let’s start with tonight.”

“Locals were first on scene,” said Brock, any fog of bewilderment dissipated now, “pegged our person of interest right away as Patrick Mursult—figured he killed his own family. Once Canonsburg PD found paperwork suggesting Mursult was a sailor, they called the reserve center, to keep the Navy in the loop. They ID’d him—served in the Navy during Vietnam, he must have been just a kid.”

“What else have you learned?”

“Your supervisor forwarded me a fax about Mursult from the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis,” said Brock. “Broad strokes about him, redactions. Navy SEAL in the late seventies. Served with the Naval Space Command since the early eighties. Petty officer first class, but his record stops in 1983. Turns out this guy has been living off the grid, everything under his wife’s name. His official status is missing in action.”

Moss thought, A sailor living off the grid—an NSC sailor MIA. A sailor lost to Deep Waters was a tragedy, but a sailor presumed lost suddenly appearing like this, living off the grid, was a national security threat. “We need to locate him immediately.”

“Can we find out anything more definitive about this guy?” said Brock.

“I’ll be working with my director, but NCIS is a civilian agency,” said Moss. “I have top-secret clearance, same as you, but information about Deep Waters is on a need-to-know basis, compartmented. We can only work with what the Navy tells us.”

Brock spit his gum into its wrapper, flicked the wad into the wastebasket. “Let’s focus on what we know,” he said. “The actor woke his victims, gathered them together in the family room before attacking them.”

“With what?” asked Moss.

“An ax,” said Brock.

She imagined the woman and boy kneeling—the wet thwack, pulling the ax free and swinging again. The annihilation of the family as simple as splitting wood.

“Any reason to doubt Patrick Mursult did this?” she asked.

“None,” said Brock. “But he might have had someone with him. The neighbor who called 911 mentioned a friend of his, a guy who drives a red pickup truck, West Virginia plates. We’re focusing on the truck, trying to find this individual. She described him as a nuisance, often blocked her driveway. The truck’s covered in bumper stickers. Let’s take a look upstairs.”

Moss followed Brock from the den. He ducked a line of police tape, led her upstairs, a climb she’d made countless times trailing Courtney, whose room had been the first on the right. The twisting metal railing seemed to spin against her palm, a familiar feeling. Self-conscious climbing stairs now, the movement of her prosthesis vaguely stop-motion, motorized. Brock paused at the top stair, watched Moss climb—he seemed to be spotting her, almost ready to try to catch her if she were to rock backward or fall. Moss had grown weary at these moments of awkwardness, when people first realized they were working with an amputee, trying to puzzle out how they should treat her.

“What happened up here?” she asked.

“His seven-year-old daughter, Jessica, escaped the initial attack,” said Brock. “Ran in here.”

Courtney’s room. Brock put his hand on the doorknob. “I have two daughters,” he said. “Two beautiful girls…”

He opened the door, let Moss through—returning to this room felt like curling back into a cocoon. She remembered coating these walls a pink called Bubblegum sixth-grade summer, slopping the roller from the tray, Courtney yelping whenever paint glopped from the ceiling into her black curls. She remembered puffing cigarette smoke through the window screen in the summer swelter, AC/DC on the turntable, Powerage until the record was scratched and couldn’t play past the first few seconds of “What’s Next to the Moon.” The room was lavender now, with a white dresser and a bunk bed—the Mursult girls must have shared this room. Zeppelin and Van Halen had been replaced with DiCaprio, Romeo + Juliet, but the room felt the same. Jessica Mursult’s body was in the corner, near where Courtney’s bed had been. The girl’s nightshirt was shredded, her back gouged with a deep cut between her shoulder blades that flayed out like gaping lips.

Poor girl. Poor girl…

“Are you all right?” asked Brock.

“Where are their nails?” asked Moss, her focus watery but noticing that the girl’s fingernails and toenails had been removed as well.

“You’ve gone pale,” he said. “Do you need to sit down?”

“I’m all right—”

She wavered, Brock steadied her, a hand on her back. “Thank you,” she said, though still unmoored. A heat of embarrassment flashed through her. Pull it together, she thought. “I’m… I don’t know what’s wrong,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

Brock shepherded her from the bedroom into the hall. “Listen,” he said, shutting the bedroom door, “a scene like this is hard for anyone to take, let alone if you aren’t used to it. It’s all right if you’re a little weak in the knees.”

“I have to tell you something,” she said. “This is… I’m having some trouble tonight, this is uncanny. I know this house.”

“Go on.”

“I grew up around here,” said Moss. “I practically lived in this house when I was a kid. My best friend lived here. Courtney. Her name was Courtney Gimm. This was her room. I spent a lot of time in this room. Her bed was right over there.”

“No shit,” said Brock.

“I’m unnerved by this, but I’m all right,” said Moss. “When Nestor called and said the crime scene was on Cricketwood Court…”

She steadied herself against the wall—touching the wall, she felt like she could tear this present world away and see her friend again, be with her friend as if no time had passed, as if she could step into the old bedroom, the gone world. Slap bracelets and jelly shoes, colored bands in Courtney’s braces.

“We used to hang out in the woods behind these houses,” said Moss. “We’d share cigarettes back there.”

Sunbathing on lawn chairs, sharing High Life. Courtney’s dad worked night shifts, so they had this place to themselves, her mom living up in Pittsburgh with her boyfriend. Pot some nights when Courtney could score, but most nights just staying up too late watching TV—school the next morning with bloodshot eyes. They partied with the other girls on the track team some nights. Neighborhood boys some nights. Some nights Courtney and Moss and whatever boys they’d picked up at the mall would get high and drink and fool around while Letterman played, nothing too serious, just petting and kissing and hand jobs, late nights ending with the smell of hand soap and semen.

“Christ, I lost my virginity in the room down the hall,” she said. Courtney’s brother, Davy Gimm—she could see his face as clearly as if she’d been with him just yesterday. A senior when she was a sophomore, when he took fistfuls of Moss’s hair and kissed her, when he ran his hands under her shirt and unbuttoned his jeans and placed her hands on him. Hardening in her hands. Feeling his weight press on her and feeling him push into her. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”

“Let’s get some fresh air,” said Brock. “Can you make it down the stairs?”

“I’ll be fine,” she said. “I’ll be down in a moment.”

Her first night with Davy Gimm had been in the small bedroom at the end of the hall, more of a closet or nursery than a proper third bedroom. Knives that Davy Gimm had bought from flea markets, she remembered, a poster of Christie Brinkley from Sports Illustrated. Lying on the creaking twin bed, his eager fingers searching beneath the elastic of her shorts, his wet breath heavy on her neck. Remembering the sound of his sleeping, lying awake as moonlight crawled across the swimsuit model.

Moss waited until she heard Brock’s voice from downstairs before she opened Davy Gimm’s old bedroom door—stepping into his room was like stepping into the cosmos, star clusters and the constellations of the zodiac bursting from the infinite darkness. She flipped on the light switch—maybe a part of her expected to see the swimsuit poster and the collection of knives, but she found the room of a little boy instead, walls covered with glow-in-the-dark star stickers. Foolish, regretting what she’d confessed to Brock—realizing she should have just kept her mouth shut, that she shouldn’t have mentioned anything about this house at all. Unprofessional, a moment of weakness. She saw the room not as it had been but for what it was: the room of a dead child.

She found Brock outside. The lawns of Cricketwood Court were touched with frost, crystals feathering the windshields of parked cars. An upstairs light in a neighboring unit had flipped on.

“Where was Marian through all this?” she asked. “Has anyone seen her?”

“All the neighbors know who she is, but she hasn’t been around,” said Brock. “Not since Friday. We’re waking friends and family, trying to track her down.”

“You mentioned that Mursult has a friend who drives a red pickup truck,” said Moss. “No one knows this guy?”

“No one,” said Brock. “Neighbors noticed the truck because it was often parked out on the street, but Mursult and his friend kept to themselves.”

“I think we should go ahead and create the Amber Alert,” said Moss.

“She might turn up,” said Brock. “She might be at a friend’s house. We’re checking everywhere.”

Amber Alerts were new, Moss reminded herself, not as familiar as they would become. “It will help us,” she said. “Someone might have seen her.”

Brock checked the illuminated dial of his watch. “Moss, your office is at CJIS, isn’t that right?” he said, pronouncing the abbreviation like the name “Jesus.” CJIS was the Criminal Justice Information Services building, the nerve center of the FBI—a newly minted campus, a crystalline oddity nestled in the middle-of-nowhere hills just outside Clarksburg, West Virginia. An FBI building, but without a Navy or Marine Corps installation in the region, Moss’s NCIS office was co-located there. “You live out that way?” he asked. “Out near Clarksburg?”

“That’s right.”

“My wife Rashonda’s at CJIS, in the print lab. Maybe you’ve crossed paths.”

“You’re Rashonda Brock’s husband?” Moss said. A few thousand with offices in the CJIS facility, but Rashonda Brock was well known, the deputy assistant director of the Laboratory Division. Moss’s office was near the facility’s day care, so although she had never met Brock’s wife, she saw Rashonda drop her daughters off most mornings, a flurry of kisses and hugs. “I think I’ve seen some of your kids’ paintings,” she said. “Brianna and Jasmine, right? Their name tags are hanging on a corkboard near my office. Purple dinosaurs—”

“Barney,” said Brock, smiling now, chuckling. “Everything’s Barney the dinosaur—Brianna’s room is covered with him.” Moss understood how Rashonda might fit together with Brock, Rashonda always radiant, a plump woman, tall—she must feel a warm sense of satisfaction whenever she drew laughter from this serious man.

“So you drove in from Clarksburg, thereabouts? That’s, what… an hour, an hour and a half from here?” he said, fishing out a key card from an envelope in his jacket pocket. He offered it to Moss. “We rented a block of rooms nearby—don’t make the trip home to Clarksburg tonight. You’ll need to be right back here tomorrow morning.”

“I’ll crash for a night,” she said, weighing the change in Brock’s demeanor. He’d softened since noticing her prosthesis, since mentioning his wife.

“Deep Waters,” he said, glancing skyward, though cloud cover occluded any chance of stars. “My boyhood dream was to be an astronaut. My grandparents took me to see a rocket launch at Cape Canaveral. It was the most beautiful sight I’d ever seen until my daughters were born.”

Moss had seen the flares of firelight streak across the dawn, rockets lifting and vanishing from view. “It’s always beautiful, every time,” she said.

“Get some sleep,” said Brock. “My team will continue through the night. Progress meeting at nine a.m. with everyone involved, and then we’ll do the presser.”

A desire to put distance between herself and that house prickled her shoulders, her spine, as she pulled away from Cricketwood Court, from Hunting Creek. The hotel Brock had booked was a Best Western nearer to Washington, Pennsylvania, but before picking up 79 she looped through the parking lot of the Pizza Hut that edged Chartiers Creek. Courtney had been killed here, November of their sophomore year. The Pizza Hut was as it ever was, unchanged since the last time Moss had swung through here, a brick building with a Quonset hut roof, two dumpsters around back, blue dumpsters illuminated by Moss’s headlights. Courtney’s body had been left between those dumpsters. Moss counted hours—nearing thirty-three since Marian Mursult had last been seen. Marian was seventeen, Courtney had been sixteen when she died. Moss drove to the hotel, thinking of her dead friend, thinking of the missing girl. Fingernails and toenails missing from the bodies of the dead. Had Patrick Mursult killed his family? Where was he now?

Moss kept her go bag in the trunk, two changes of clothes and a toiletries kit, ready to travel at a moment’s notice. She undressed in her hotel room, removed her prosthesis, removed her liner—a whiff of moist, pungent sweat knocked her awake for a moment. The shower was tricky without safety bars, but once the water had warmed, she sat on the edge of the tub and swung her leg in, sliding down the porcelain to sit on the nonslip mat. Hot water streamed over her. She washed her hair, using the full complement of shampoo, tried to wash away the smells of putrescence and blood. Without her crutches or wheelchair, she hopped across the hotel carpeting before slipping between the bed’s crisp sheets, bundling into the comforter. With the blinds drawn and the lights out, the room was miraculously dark. Cold. She turned over to sleep but saw the bodies of women and children unspooling in great bloody arcs and flowering wounds. A rising disgust and hopelessness burned acidic in her throat. She thought of Marian—still alive, please still be alive—but she didn’t know what Marian looked like, so her imagination filled with the image of Courtney Gimm and her mind raced to ax blades biting through bone and wounds that opened like mouths. Clammy, tossing against the mattress and tangled in her sheets, the smell of her prosthesis liner wafting over from across the room, sour. She sat up and fumbled in the darkness for the remote control. The local channels were all reporting about the family killed in Washington County, just outside Canonsburg. Moss squinted as the growing television brightness stabbed her eyes—aerial shots of the neighborhood roofs and film of the sheriff’s blockade, the deputy with the Chaplinesque mustache hitching up his pants near the sawhorses.

The Amber Alert was first broadcast nearing 5:00 a.m. Marian Tricia Mursult, seventeen, of Canonsburg, Pennsylvania. An image sun-kissed and freckled, cutoffs and a tank top, her straight hair the color of coal. Moss’s breath caught at the similarities between her friend and the missing girl—casually beautiful, each with that long, dark hair. Moss had been trained in time travel—accustomed to reliving future events as they played out in the terra firma of the present, but this déjà vu was something else, like she’d caught the world repeating itself, the house, the girls, like she had seen something she wasn’t supposed to see, the repetitive mechanics of cyclical time. Or maybe the similarity between the girls was something more rare, something like a second chance. She had lost Courtney, but she could still save Marian. Moss relaxed into bed, comforted knowing that people would be looking for the girl, that someone might already have seen her, might know where she is, safe, safe—but as she drifted off for only a few hours of sleep, Moss could almost feel the girl’s body grown cold.

TWO

Listless after Courtney died, Moss just shy of sixteen. The Gimms invited her to stand with them at the funeral home, an exhausting honor—awkward next to Davy in the reception line, Courtney lily white from concealer, laid out in an approximation of sleep. Courtney had always said she’d wanted to be buried in blue jeans, but they dressed her in a crushed-velvet dress with a high lace collar, necessary to cover what the makeup couldn’t hide of the slash across her neck. The stillness of the body so complete, so unnaturally still, that Moss almost expected her friend to sit up, to somehow stir or breathe.

Coming from the funeral home, Moss imagined that a version of herself had died and would be buried alongside Courtney. Despondent, isolated, uninterested in the new version of herself, the self who survived. She lived alone with her mother; her father had abandoned them when she was five. Friendly enough with her mother, but her mother was never around, either at work or at McGrogan’s for happy hours that melted into long nights of drinking. Moss grew inward, every night escaping to her room alone with her expanding collection of records: the Misfits, the Clash, the Sex Pistols, the Pixies, punk albums she picked from vinyl bins in CD stores—just lying in bed with her headphones in the dark, lost in soundscapes. Utterly wasted years, those remaining years of high school—drunk on Jack and Cherry Coke or whatever alcohol someone snuck in the parking lot at lunch. Vacant in her own skin, almost failing out of school but not quite—ready to just keep living at home if she had to, ready to work at the same telemarketing firm her mother worked for, but her track-and-field coach had taken notice, pulled some strings, secured a partial scholarship for Moss to attend WVU.

Three years after she lost Courtney, Moss was called to testify against her friend’s killer. She sat in the Washington County Courthouse wearing her mother’s work clothes, answering questions about the night her friend had died—Courtney’s parents listening to her testimony, Courtney’s mother weeping, Courtney’s killer listening unimpassioned. Moss never questioned her lack of empathy for the man who’d killed her best friend—a junkie, a vagrant. She’d wanted him to die, horrifically, or to serve life without parole, some sort of revenge, some sort of justice. She learned about the sentencing only later, the killer given twenty-eight years to life, but the sentence hadn’t seemed enough. Her rage at the idea that this man would live and might someday gain his freedom sliced through the fog of grief that had been suffocating her. The first semester of her sophomore year of college, drunken weekends and dorm-room dime bags gave way to coursework. She declared her major as criminology and investigation, secured an internship at the Washington County Coroner’s Office per her course requirements.

Intimidated by the internship at first, but the coroner’s office was an enjoyable way to spend an afternoon—the women there grateful for the help and eager to spoil her, chatting with her about birth control and music as she scuttled on her hands and knees reorganizing their filing cabinets. Dr. Radowski, the coroner, greeted her every morning but kept a cordial distance—an alcoholic, some of the clerks had told her, a homosexual, it was generally known, and while Radowski’s face was often glowing reddish when he arrived back from longer lunch hours, he was unfailingly kind. Some of her roommates had been appalled at the idea of what she was up to, squeamish at the thought of cadavers, but Moss readily scheduled classes around her internship and found she anticipated 12:20 every Thursday afternoon, when she would drive up 79 to Washington in her banana-yellow Pontiac Sunbird, to make it to the coroner’s office by one o’clock.

Nervous but not fearful the first time Radowski had allowed her to assist in an autopsy, dressed in a lab coat and goggles and gloves like a child playing scientist, standing only a few feet away as Radowski prepped the body, the decedent a sixty-four-year-old woman who’d been found only when the family in the adjacent apartment had called to complain about a smell. Moss’s first whiff of human putrefaction had taken root in her, a sickly-sweet pungency—but her curiosity made the leap over her disgust. The procedure had been surgical at times, scalpel slices and dissections, had been unexpectedly brutal when Radowski used hedge clippers to break through the rib cage and an industrial saw to cut through the skull, the sound a high-pitched squeal that powdered the room with dust. Radowski’s assistant had irrigated the woman’s viscera, running water through armfuls of colon in the sink, filling the room with the smell of feces—the same assistant cracked a joke when he found partially digested Twinkies in the woman’s stomach: “They would have lasted for eternity.”

Radowski allowed Moss to hold the woman’s heart. She cupped it in her gloved hands carefully, more like she was holding a bird with a broken wing rather than a dead muscle. Surprised by the heft of it, how much heavier a heart was than she would have imagined. Radowski had needed to scalpel through a protective sac in the cadaver’s chest to reach it, the pericardium, spilling fluid across the stainless-steel slab and onto the tile floor.

“Place the muscle here, please, so I can weigh it.”

Moss had done as Radowski instructed, setting the heart in a drip pan to drain.

“Take a look here,” Radowski said some time later, lifting an organ for her to see. “You’re looking at what amounts to the cause of death. The liver. Notice the deeper purple coloring, the texture like crushed charcoal. A healthy liver looks like a cut of meat you might pick up from the supermarket, pinkish and smooth. This is cirrhosis. She drank herself to death.”

Death is an unshared intimacy, Moss would sometimes think, finding a center of calm in the science of the morgue. Death and loss close company for her, her best friend dead, her father gone. The autopsy procedure helped bring closure to her experiences with mortality—death might still be a mystery, but the entirety of people’s lives could be summed up in file folders, in weights, in measurements.

Campus dorms in Morgantown, but summers she rented the upstairs unit of a Dormont duplex, commuting downtown to Pittsburgh to support herself. One of dozens in the secretarial pool at Buchanan Ingersoll, a law office in the USX Tower—her desk was cluttered with a boxy computer monitor and an electric typewriter, the steel shelves behind her a manila sea of alphabetized folders. A fashion plate back when she was twenty-one—military jackets with decorative epaulets, chunky gold earrings, glossy red lipstick, and leopard-patterned press-on nails. The older women called her “Madonna”—a compliment maybe. An hour every morning in the bathroom and several visits to the ladies’ room throughout the afternoon, teasing her hair, then blasting it with Aqua Net, fluffing her mane into puffed-out curls she gathered into a scrunchie. Coworkers gave her distance on smoke breaks, fearing her head might ignite.

Forensics and criminology textbooks during her lunches in Market Square. A waxed-paper basket of fried oysters and french fries on the afternoon she was approached by a man in a sports coat and a paisley tie. He took the chair opposite without bothering to ask permission to join her. He lifted the cover of her book, Introduction to Criminology: Theories, Methods and Criminal Behavior, 2nd Edition.

“Have you learned why men do what they do?” he asked.

Accustomed to businessmen and lawyers from Grant Street insinuating themselves into her company, men who thought downtown secretaries existed only to serve their pleasure, she’d been dismissive until the man showed his badge—NAVAL INVESTIGATIVE SERVICE, something she’d never heard of. Even then her first thought was that something had happened with her mother on one of her benders.

“We’re recruiting the best and the brightest,” he said.

Moss wondered what that had to do with her. “All right,” she said. “Yeah?”

He introduced himself as Special Agent O’Connor. “One of your professors put your name forward as a possible candidate for federal law enforcement,” he said. “She’s been impressed with your work.”

“Okay,” said Moss, wondering which professor, wondering if this was some sort of scam. “Don’t you have pamphlets to mail out or something?”

“I have you in mind for a specific division within NIS,” said O’Connor. “I wanted to meet you personally before I made the pitch. I don’t always recruit like this, but I already have reason to believe you’ll make an exemplary agent—still, I have to be sure to actually recruit you.”

A sales scheme maybe—give out her name and address and get hammered with junk mail and cold calls. Any minute now he’ll ask for twenty bucks to “ensure space in the program” or ask for a donation.

“My record can’t look that good to you,” she said, trying to call the man’s bluff. “I almost didn’t graduate high school.”

“Your past plays a role. I’m interested in your renewed focus, your dedication now. Some people wilt in high school, bloom in college—that suits me. I don’t want brilliant kids who will flame out in a few years. I read a paper you wrote about the responsibility of a strong society to defend the rights of the vulnerable, the victims of violent crime being the most vulnerable. Did you copy that from somewhere or are those your original thoughts?”

“I didn’t copy anything.”

“I found your paper moving,” said O’Connor. “Passionate. I’m interested in that articulate passion of yours, Shannon. I think your passion might see you through what I have in mind.”

“I had a friend,” said Moss. “She’s the reason I’m interested in criminal justice.”

“As it turns out, Shannon, I do have a pamphlet to give you,” said O’Connor. “You have—what, another year before graduation? By the time you apply, we’ll have reorganized from NIS into NCIS. If you’re still as passionate then as you are now, and if you decide to apply, send your application directly to me.”

He jotted down his mailing address, Building 200, Washington Navy Yard, on the back of the glossy advertisement—men and women in windbreakers, sentinels on the deck of an aircraft carrier. Her father had been in the Navy, a sailor on the battleship USS New Jersey in the late sixties, but Moss knew little of his service.

A month before graduation, she mailed her NCIS packet along with applications to local police departments and to the district attorneys’ offices in both West Virginia and Pennsylvania. O’Connor called within the week, asked her to report to Oceana, Virginia, to begin the interview process—“Clear your schedule,” he’d said. Lost in daydreams of deployment aboard hulking ships cutting through steely ocean waters, imagining that her father’s naval experience somehow ran in her blood, she was surprised on the appointed day to find herself passing through the gates of the Apollo Soucek Field just as a squadron of F/A-18 Hornets screamed overhead.

O’Connor had recruited a class of twelve, Moss one of only three women, and within a few days two of the men had dropped out rather than endure the physical regimen the instructors demanded of them. Moss realized she wasn’t being interviewed but rather weeded out. Hours swimming in the tank wearing scuba gear over her bathing suit. Bouts of spinning in the g-force simulator bearing mounting pressure until her eyes rolled backward and she lost consciousness, only to wake and spin again. The recruits were given small meals and bunked together in a dorm with room enough only for six—one toilet to share among them, a carton of wet wipes instead of a shower. The spartan conditions frayed some nerves, but Moss adapted well enough, her track-and-field experience having trained her for endurance, conditioned a strength of mind over body. Only seven of the recruits remained at the end of five weeks, Moss the last woman. In a ceremony held in one of their classrooms, O’Connor presented each recruit with a choice: “Report to the Navy Yard, Building 200, and be welcomed with open arms to begin a fulfilling career as a federal law-enforcement agent,” he told them, “or stay seated.” One of the men did stand and leave, but the others remained at their desks, perplexed and excited as O’Connor handed out forest-green T-shirts and certificates printed with their names.

A reception with coffee and sheet cake in the hallway, instructions to change into their flight suits within the hour. After nightfall the graduates boarded a jet called Ogopogo, a sea serpent painted along its tapering nose cone—the jet was called a Cormorant, long and sleek, the color of obsidian, it looked like an SR-71 Blackbird but larger, the size of a small airliner. O’Connor and his class strapped into their seats and the Ogopogo lifted from the runway. Moss was utterly delirious when the Cormorant entered an accelerated climb and pulled from the tug of gravity. A crescent shine of earthlight, the scattered diamonds of city lights on the distant globe. Moss felt the dizzy bliss of weightlessness in her chest, her hair rising around her like a blond dandelion puff until she gathered it into a bun. O’Connor had been the first to unfasten his harness and float freely, his aged features suddenly childlike, the others following his example, whooping up the free fall like children on a trampoline. Moss rose from her seat and wept openly, gleeful, but her tears glommed like sticky balls over her eyes and stung until she wiped them with her sleeve and laughed.

The moonscape was a lake of darkness. They approached the Black Vale station, the lunar outpost like a secret city built into the Daedalus crater, a crater sixty miles wide and centered in the hemisphere of the moon that never faced Earth. The downslopes from the crater’s raised ridges were terraced, like massive stairs descending two miles to the wide basin floor. No one spoke as they caught their first glimpse of the lunar launching sites. The Black Vale was outlined with lights, the buildings and runways, the layout reminding Moss of the oil rigs of West Virginia and Pennsylvania, the flight tower a spire of steel and bright lights like the scaffolding of a derrick. Seven ships were docked at the Black Vale, massive vessels the size of Ohio-class submarines—sleek and angular, the ebony ships built as if from origami.

“Those are the TERNs,” said O’Connor, pointing out each of the seven ships. “Look there—”

Their engines were the Brandt-Lomonaco Quantum-Foam Macro-Field Generators, he explained, the military technology that allowed travel to Deep Space and Deep Time.

A cloverleaf of launch and landing pads spread out from the tower, networked with roads and taxiways that led to the hangars and a scattering of white domes, the dormitories and machine shops, offices and labs. O’Connor explained that the designs for the Naval Space Command ships—the Shrikes, the Cormorants, the TERNs—had been conveyed back from a point nearly six hundred years in the future, retrofitted for the nascent industrial capabilities of the 1970s and 1980s, when most of the fleet was built—skunkworks engineering projects carried out by Boeing and McDonnell Douglas, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. The Cormorants used enhanced Harrier engines for their reaction-control system thrusters, short bursts adjusting the ship’s roll, pitch, and yaw, the Ogopogo settling on Pad 4 like an insect alighting on a leaf. The views from every portal were vast plains of gray dust lit by floodlights. Everything fell slowly on the moon; in the weaker gravity, Moss fell like she was dropped through water. She was twenty-two years old, overwhelmed by the secrecy and miracles of the military, the complexity of the Naval Space Command operating just beyond the realm of public knowledge.

Dreamlike, those first few weeks of continued training, lectures in the sunlamp solarium, bunking in the dormitories, finding her way through the greenhouses and corridors and learning about the ships of the fleet. Moss was assigned O’Connor’s TERN battle group afloat the USS William McKinley and launched to Deep Waters. Within two months of her arrival in Virginia Beach, she had time-traveled to the Terminus of humanity and sailed the farthest reaches of the Andromeda Galaxy, bathed in starlight that wouldn’t touch Earth for another two and a half million years.

Newsmen glutted the Canonsburg Borough Building’s central hallway, reporters begging quotes about the multiple homicides and the missing child. The mayor’s office was housed in the Borough Building, as was the Canonsburg Police Department, but they seemed unprepared for the sheer amount of news interest, Moss thought, pushing past a throng of photographers. She showed her credentials to a police officer and signed her name to a printout list of authorized personnel before she was allowed through to the conference room. An older man, someone from the borough, noticed her prosthesis and stepped aside. He laid his hand on the back of her blouse as she passed, and she stiffened at the touch, too familiar, at this man’s fingers lingering on the contours of her bra strap. He smiled, gesturing her to go ahead—chivalrous, he must have thought, or fatherly, but his touch remained between her shoulder blades until she managed to separate herself to the far side of the meeting room. Still a few minutes before nine. Several of the joint task force had already taken seats around a horseshoe of a half dozen banquet tables. Moss recognized faces from the night before, FBI men mostly, but their demeanors had changed, the dolor of the Mursult deaths dissipated in the light of day, replaced by fresh hair gel and changed clothes, Styrofoam cups of coffee, doughnuts from white boxes on the back table.

Someone waved to catch her attention, a man with sandy blond hair, his jaw shaded by stubble that prefaced a beard. He had a warm smile, Moss thought, a smile that softened his otherwise rugged features. Bright powder-blue eyes—hooded eyes, thoughtful.

“Are you Special Agent Moss?” he asked. “Philip Nestor. We spoke on the phone last night.”

“Oh, of course,” she said. “Shannon.”

“I have a seat for you,” he said. “Brock asked me to take care of you.”

Bristling at being taken care of and unwilling anyway to negotiate the gaps between chair legs. “I don’t want to fight my way up front.”

“Oh, all right—okay, sure,” said Nestor, leaning against the wall beside her. “And not like that, not ‘taking care of you,’ more like a liaison,” he said, quick to read her tone. She remembered his voice from last night’s call—disturbed, edged with sorrow. Calm now. A nice voice, she thought. “Brock says you should have full access, but since he has a lot to juggle,” he said, waving at the room, “I’ll be your conduit.”

An outdoorsman, she guessed—he had an easy athleticism, unlike the gym rats with their burlier bodies. He wore chocolate-brown corduroys, a contrast to the gray or beige slacks his colleagues wore—shirtsleeves rolled to his forearms, a sweater-vest, and a tie, professorial despite the FBI tags he wore on a lanyard.

“I don’t remember seeing you last night,” she said.

“I was there—I saw you when you came in,” he said, “but I was”—gesturing to indicate a Tyvek suit—“taking photographs. You wouldn’t have noticed me. I have to ask you if it’s true, what Brock told me.”

Fuck, thought Moss, wondering at what had gotten around. “That depends on what he told you.”

“That you knew the family over on Cricketwood Court.”

“The family that used to live there,” said Moss. “My best friend lived there, years ago. I was over at that house almost every day.”

Nestor sighed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “That must have been a shock.”

“What else did he tell you?”

Nestor raised his hand, a gentle conciliation. “Only to be respectful, said you were taking it hard.”

The clamor of conversation silenced when Brock made his way to the lectern. His clothes were the same as from the night before, rumpled—he’d maybe splashed water in his face before this meeting, cologne, but he hadn’t showered, hadn’t rested. A film of exhaustion clung to him, his eyes underscored by plum-colored bags that stood out stark against his dark skin. He dimmed the room to half-light.

“Good morning,” he said, switching on the overhead projector, a block of light appearing on the whiteboard behind him. “I’ll keep this brief. Special Agent in Charge William Brock, FBI. My team will be working closely with Canonsburg PD and the Pennsylvania Bureau of Forensic Services in the murder investigation of the Mursult family and in the search for Marian Mursult. Our lead investigator is Special Agent Philip Nestor.”

Brock’s first transparency showed the image used for the Amber Alert.

“Marian Mursult,” he said. “Know her face. Thirty-eight hours gone.”

Brock sipped from a water bottle, paused in his talk until he registered all eyes on the image of the young woman. Silence except for the whirring fan of the projector.

“We already have significant media interest in this young woman, most likely on a national scale. She was last seen on Friday afternoon leaving her shift at Kmart in Washington, where she’s a cashier. Clocked out at seven p.m., and that was the last confirmed sighting we have. We have recovered her car from the parking lot—so she left with someone, or was taken. Her shift supervisor and her coworkers don’t recall anything unusual about that afternoon. She has no regular boyfriend that we know about. State police are following up with her extended network of friends.”

He switched the transparency. A cropped photograph of a man wearing a zippered blue sweatshirt, his hair dusted gray. He was smiling, squinting in the sunlight.

“This is the most recent photograph we have of her father, Patrick Mursult. Petty Officer First Class, United States Navy. Born 1949, August third. Patrick Mursult is on the board as our primary suspect both for the abduction of Marian and for the murder of his family. An arrest warrant has been issued. We do not have any solid information as to his whereabouts.”

Another transparency. A Polaroid, jungle fauna, Mursult in drab green, his skin tanned leathery—he looked like a child, Moss thought, despite the cigarette and the M16 slung casually over his shoulder.

“Triple homicide,” said Brock, showing a transparency of the woman’s blood-slathered face.

A close-up of a hand gloved in blood.

“The actor removed the fingernails and toenails from the woman and children,” said Brock. “That information is not to be given to the media. Is that understood? In case we’re wrong about Mursult, we’re holding this piece back to weed out false confessions that come through the tip line.”

An air of disquiet simmered in the room—the missing fingernails bothered the men gathered here, pushing these deaths from common brutality to something more bizarre, with unfathomable intention.

“Are you all right?” asked Nestor, his eyes troubled.

Moss asked, “Are you?”

Brock held his press conference a half hour later, the conference room’s whiteboard screened with an FBI backdrop. He focused on the only substantive lead they had, the neighbor statements about Mursult’s unidentified associate, a white male, bearded, who drove a red Dodge Ram with West Virginia plates. Brock described the truck as covered with bumper stickers, including a prominent sticker of the Confederate flag. Moss joined a few cops watching on the break-room television. She filled a mug with the oily dregs from the pot while reporters from Pittsburgh and Steubenville-Wheeling peppered Brock with questions about Marian Mursult, her family’s murder.

Moss drifted from the break room, found a vacant office in the downstairs bullpen. She dialed her supervisor’s direct line at NCIS headquarters. O’Connor had recruited Moss to NCIS, their afternoon over fried oysters, had mentored her during the training that followed, had sailed Deep Waters with her afloat the William McKinley—he had accompanied her on her first space walk, the two of them floating far from their ship, tethered to the hull like spiders suspended on silken threads. O’Connor was born only a decade before Moss, but he was well traveled in Deep Waters and IFTs, had already aged while the rest of the world stood still. His hair was a thatch of white curls, his face deeply wrinkled, but his deadpan glare broke easily into the crooked grin of a mischievous child.

“O’Connor,” he answered.

“This is Moss. I need information about Mursult, if you can get it for me. The information I have was redacted. He’s listed as missing in action.”

“I have something for you,” said O’Connor. “I’ve been meeting with NSC through the night. Mursult turning up is a major problem, Shannon.”

“What do you have?”

“Patrick Mursult was a major player when NSC was part of Star Wars, flush with cash because of Reagan,” said O’Connor. “The early days, part of the broader DoD space initiative—before Challenger and the consolidations. Mursult participated in the air force’s Manned Spaceflight Engineers program out in Los Angeles, he also had his hand in the military floor at Johnson Space Center. But, Shannon, his record ends with the Zodiac missions. Are you familiar?”

“Twelve ships, deployed from the late seventies until about 1989. Before my time. Three of the ships are still commissioned.”

“Aries, Cancer, Taurus,” said O’Connor. “The other nine ships never returned, hundreds of lives presumed lost. Catastrophic. And the Taurus—”

“The Taurus discovered Terminus,” Moss said. “They were the first.” She had studied crime-scene photographs of the USS Taurus. The ship had launched in late 1986 but returned from a far-future IFT with a depleted crew, only a few survivors, the inside of their ship covered in crude pictures of dead men and warnings written in their own blood.

“Patrick Mursult is listed as missing in action because he was a sailor aboard the USS Libra,” said O’Connor. “The Libra is assumed lost, Shannon.”

Lost to Deep Waters, but appearing now. “How is that possible?” she asked. Moss had observed NSC launches, had seen ships launch to Deep Waters and return within a second, nearly instantaneous—the ships merely shimmered even though the crew might have sailed galaxies and lived for several years within that time. An uncanny sensation to see a man board a ship one moment as a young man and disembark the next moment grown to retirement age. Occasionally, however, an NSC ship launched but never returned—it would simply blink out of existence altogether. Those ships that blinked were assumed lost, irretrievably. They were either torn apart by debris or cast into a burning sun or devoured by a black hole, or more likely suffered a mechanical failure that had proved catastrophic or one of any other ruins—but the ships never returned and they never appeared in another location. If a ship blinked out, then the ship was lost and the crew dead, listed as missing in action only because their bodies would never be recovered. “If Libra was lost, then Patrick Mursult shouldn’t exist,” she said. “Or he was never on Libra. Maybe he’s a deserter? Or never made his assignment?”

“We need to account for Libra, we need to account for Mursult,” said O’Connor. “That’s why you were called in. We need to apprehend Patrick Mursult, find out his story.”

“Brock says the guy’s been living off the grid, everything in his wife’s name except for a few counterfeit IDs, a fake driver’s license,” said Moss. “We have witnesses who know Mursult personally—I don’t think we’re dealing with a false identity, or anything like that. He’s been living here in Canonsburg, right out in plain sight.”

“No one’s been looking for him,” said O’Connor. “As far as anyone knew, Patrick Mursult blinked along with everyone else on Libra. You can hide a long time when no one’s looking.”

“We have a lot of people looking for him now.”

“Shannon,” said O’Connor, “Special Agent Brock mentioned you have a personal connection to the crime scene—”

“Fine—I’m fine,” said Moss. “A childhood friend lived there. And the crime scene was horrific last night, but I’m all right.”

“I can offer you more agents, if you think you’ll need the help,” said O’Connor.

“I’m handling it,” she said, thinking of Jessica Mursult, the body gouged. Courtney Gimm’s bedroom, where Moss had dreamed of ditching Canonsburg. No one would ever leave that room. “I’m fine,” she said again. “I’m focused on Patrick Mursult.”

“What’s your take on this?” he asked.

She thought of the woman’s hand gloved in blood, the missing nails. “Right now this seems like a domestic situation,” said Moss. “I think we’ll find Mursult before too long—we have his face all over the news. Whatever his military situation, whatever the complications concerning Libra, you know as well as I do that this probably comes down to a question of money, or maybe an affair. Something quick and brutal but common. He took their fingernails—I don’t know why. Let’s consider more agents when we take him into custody. You should know that the missing girl’s a looker.”

“I saw the Amber Alert,” said O’Connor.

“I’d only expect media interest to grow once Marian’s picture makes the rounds,” she said, knowing that media scrutiny was anathema to NSC. “Won’t be too long before someone starts asking about Mursult, who he is.”

“We’re already on it,” said O’Connor. “FBI has been cooperative. Our directors have been talking—we have a memorandum of agreement on this investigation. They have the manpower to handle the media inquiries, lead the search for Marian.”

“They’re having a press conference right now,” said Moss, thinking that her mother might very well be watching. Damn, she thought—her mother a gossipy hawk for local misery, news stories of maimed animals, house fires, familial slayings. I should call her. Her mother would remember Cricketwood Court—all those afternoons dropping her daughter off at her best friend’s house. Once Moss hung up with O’Connor, she dialed her mother’s number. The line rang twice before clicking to the answering machine.

“Mom, this is Shan,” she said. “Mom, if you’re there, pick up. I’ll swing by the house tonight. Don’t worry too much about the news. We’ll talk soon.”

Nestor opened the office door with a soft tap.

“Let’s go,” he said.

Moss flipped her cell phone closed. “Where are we going?” she asked.

“We have the truck,” he said. “West Virginia state patrol just called it in. Come with me.”

The red Ram belonged to Elric Fleece, expired license, expired plates, an address somewhere off Barthollow Fork Branch, near Dents Run and Mannington. Local cops seemed to know him, a belligerent drunk they’ve had to chase away from bars, but no arrests—a Vietnam veteran, an unlicensed electrician who worked odd jobs for cash. Nestor drove Moss in an FBI Suburban, skimming past slower traffic on the interstate as shallow Pennsylvania hills gave way to the greater swells of West Virginia. Over an hour’s drive, discussion of Patrick Mursult shifted to personal chatter. Nestor was from southern West Virginia, grew up poor. A freelance photographer a few years before he fell into steadier fingerprint and crime-scene work with the Phoenix, Arizona, police department. Back home to West Virginia when his father was dying. Moss was circumspect in everything she offered of herself—she was drawn to share with Nestor, an attentive listener, but she knew how easily the covers for her life and career could fray.

“I guess I’m not much of a talker,” she had said.

“You’re guarded,” said Nestor. “I respect that.”

They came up on the junction with Barthollow Fork Branch and seemed to leave the world behind, swallowed by woodland. Barthollow Fork Branch tapered as they drove, the tree line butting against the road, reedy trunks, a canopy of branches that choked out light. Moss peered through the veil of woods to houses built far from the road, isolated places. They passed a series of houses propped up on cinder blocks—pastel siding faded and streaked with water damage from rusted gutters. Yards that looked like junk sales. Moss wondered what all these trees sounded like when they swayed. The road was little more than a mud path by the time they crossed a wood-plank bridge that bounded a dry creek bed. Nestor turned down a track that split away from Barthollow Fork, just two strips of dirt through the undergrowth.

“I can’t really see where I’m going,” he said. Moss felt the SUV’s tires run up against large stones and knots of growth, felt the SUV correct back to the furrows of the path. Branches reached across the road and slapped at the windows.

“Wait, wait, wait,” said Nestor. “Here we are.”

A flash of red as he brought them into a clearing—the rear hatch of the Dodge Ram. An older model, something from the eighties, but it fit the description, cherry except where rust had chewed the doors, the Confederate flag just one of dozens of worn and half-peeled stickers. THE SOUTH WILL RISE. A sticker of Calvin taking a piss on a Ford logo. A pistol, THIS TRUCK PROTECTED BY SMITH & WESSON. The gun rack a thing handmade from lumber nailed together, empty of guns but well worn.

“Look at that,” said Nestor. “What is that?”

Moss followed where Nestor pointed. “What the fuck,” she said, climbing from the SUV, spotting the skeletons in the woods. Sculptures. Stag skeletons taken apart and refashioned with wire so they looked like men with antlers, veined with copper. Four of them hung from the trees by their ankles, arms spread wide—upside-down crucifixions. Terminus, she thought. This guy knows the Terminus. The house was ramshackle, the roof sagging in like the place was melting. Moss followed Nestor up the front walk, a series of stone slabs half sunk in mud. A slew of rodents’ bones near the front door—groundhogs and squirrels mostly. Deer skeletons were laid out in the grass to dry in the sun.

“You think he’s here?” said Moss.

“I don’t know. The truck’s here,” said Nestor. “He could be taking a walk.”

“What’s with all the bones?” said Moss.

Nestor laughed. “Hell, I don’t know—”

The bright stench of rot hit Moss and Nestor like a rolling wave—death. Moss thought, Marian. She drew her weapon, Nestor did the same. The front door was a flimsy screen over a sheet of plywood, the plywood warped and crawling with flies that leapt buzzing as Moss pushed through. The smell was heavy, seemed to weigh bodily on her—coated her tongue, her sinuses, seemed to grow spongelike in her mouth. Death, wet fur, shit. Her eyes watered.

“Marian?” she called out.

The air was alive, humming—flies bumped against her, Nestor with her. A dim front room. A carpet of animal pelts covered the walls, striped raccoon hides, the slate gray of squirrel, groundhog browns—the realization lit that she was looking at a mural made of fur, of vales and hollows, the skin of white rabbits as snow-capped peaks. Mountains—a mural of mountains made of fur.

“Marian?” she called out, the rot-infused air pouring into her lungs as she breathed. A fly crawled across her lips—she flinched, blew it aside. She feared them, feared what the flies might mean—feared discovering Marian’s body. Not here, not here—

“FBI,” said Nestor. “Federal agents.”

Moss moved through into the adjoining room, gun leveled—a larger room with a corner kitchen and a television with foil-wrapped rabbit ears. Family Feud. Nazi flags draped the walls and were stapled to the ceiling. Black flags, SS in white bolts. Emerald flags with white stags’ heads, antlers cradling swastikas. Lunatic, she thought—but she was scared, like she’d found the gateway to Hell. Mountain Dew and Pabst empties covered the floor, writhing with black ants.

“Here,” said Nestor. “Over here.”

A hall extended to the back rooms of the house, a hall lined with mismatched mirrors hung in a random scatter. Something on the hall floor was wrapped in garbage bags, a body, the plastic so thick with slivers of white maggots and flies it looked as though the bag crawled. Nestor wrapped his hand in his sleeve, pulled at the plastic—Moss expecting Marian’s pale face, but the face was covered in black fur, toothless red gums, its black eyes like glass marbles.

“Jesus,” said Nestor, jumping back. “What is that? A fucking bear?”

Moss continued down the mirrored hall, her image a multitude of reflections. What is this place?—but on some level Moss understood the design, on some level recognition bloomed. The mirrors in the hall, her reflections—something about this place tugged at her memory, and she thought of snowy climes, hiking through drifts in her orange space suit, so cold the wind was sharded with ice. She passed a bathroom, then a bedroom—a mattress on the floor, a duffel bag at the foot of the bed. She followed the mirrors to the back bedroom, the master, and when she looked inside, she heard herself scream.

The man had hanged himself from a tree made of bones—a sculpture of a tree, bones and iron and copper wire, the walls and ceiling of the room paneled with mirrors so the hanged man’s reflection was an endless recursion. He dangled from skeletal branches, his face bloated, his tongue a purple bulge. Obese, his great white body wriggling with flies. Moss stepped closer, her weapon leveled but her hands shaking, and saw herself reflected with the dead man. This place was a representation—she was overwhelmed with the sensation of returning—the mirrored hall and the bone tree in the mirrored room uncovered memories Moss had worked to diminish over the years, the memory of her crucifixion, the roar of the black river beneath her. These rooms, however, were like a prodding finger. She remembered ice, remembered the air around her shimmering like a panoply of mirrors. She had seen the tree when she was in the Terminus, a tree the color of blanched bones, infinitely repeated. Fleece had reconstructed the scene as if he’d pulled the landscape from her mind.

“Let’s go,” said Nestor, putting his hands on her shoulders, leading her from the room. “Marian’s not here. Let’s go.”

The Brooke County sheriff blocked off the property at Barthollow Fork Branch, barred access until the FBI Mobile Crime Unit arrived. They pulled the body of the decomposed black bear from the house and dragged it to the woods before cutting down Elric Fleece, an operation for several men because of the corpse’s girth. The bear had been disassembled—skinned, boned, the organs removed. The technicians documented Fleece’s residence like a crime scene, but the opinion spread quickly that his death was suicide, that he’d been hanging from the bone tree at least a full day, if not longer. Moss watched the men carry Fleece’s sheet-wrapped body on a gurney, load it into the back of an ambulance for transport to Charleston for the autopsy. Everywhere I look will be turned to ice, she thought, and it was almost as if she could feel the ice encroaching from some future time. She walked the edges of Fleece’s property, out into the woods, where she followed a path that led to the four skeletons hung from branches by their ankles. They had been crafted with horrific ingenuity—the copper wire wrapping the deer bones hinting at veins and musculature. How had he known about the Terminus, the hanged men? Moss imagined Patrick Mursult haunted by the future death of the world, whispering his visions to Fleece—or maybe Fleece had seen for himself, maybe he was another sailor aboard Libra appearing now, an apparition. NSC sailors suffered a high rate of suicide. Moss had observed several autopsies of men who had hanged themselves or cut open their own wrists, or who had ended their lives with a self-inflicted gunshot wound, broken men who couldn’t readjust to the creeping pace of normal time. O’Connor would be able to verify if Fleece was NSC, but Moss felt increasingly certain here was another sailor whose record would read “missing in action.” She heard footsteps—Nestor tromping through the underbrush, coming for her.

“Hey, are you okay?” he asked. “You disappeared out here.”

“Collecting my thoughts,” she said. “You ever see anything like this before?”

Nestor’s forehead rippled as if the question had been a stone tossed into the lake of his thought. “That room reminded me of something my dad used to talk about,” said Nestor. “This recurring dream he called the ‘eternal forest.’ Come on, let’s get away from these statues—or whatever they are.”

They walked together along the path, through the shallow woods back toward Fleece’s house. “What dream?” she asked.

“We lived in Twilight, this little coal town. My dad worked the mines, always had dreams he was in the dark,” said Nestor. “So he wakes up in the night screaming—I hear him get up, and he comes into my room, sits on my bed, and looks at me. I was nine or something, just hoping he would think I was asleep, but he was drunk, and he says he was caught in a cave-in and he couldn’t get out through the mine, so he crawled deeper until the mine ended and he came out into a forest. He tells me about the trees like they were there in my room, like he could touch them.”

“The eternal forest,” said Moss.

“There are doors in the trees,” said Nestor. “And when he opened a door and stepped through, he stepped into a whole new forest. He said he was lost, and he asked me to find him. I told him I would and waited until whatever dream had a hold of him started to clear and he left my bedroom. He went to the bathroom, and I heard him back down the hall. I heard him start to snore and knew he was asleep. I never went back to sleep.”

“You were nine?” asked Moss, imagining the child, imagining his father.

“Sometimes he talked about this dream like it was a place you could go to, like it wasn’t a dream at all, so when I saw those mirrors…”

She wanted to unburden herself, but she said, “Don’t think about Fleece’s bullshit. You don’t want this in your head.”

She steeled herself before reentering the house. Even though the immediate sources of putrefaction had been removed, the other odors remained: the fur walls, the festering garbage bins. The techs had pulled cardboard boxes from Fleece’s front closet. Moss wore latex gloves, picked through the contents. She found an album of yellowed photographs, of Vietnam—pictures of PBRs, the four-man river patrol boats called swift boats. Mekong and Rung Sat, labels in blue ballpoint. Navy, in Vietnam—a connection to Mursult, she thought. She wondered if Mursult and Fleece had served together. Matchboxes filled with dead spiders, beetles, one of the other techs discovered a pillowcase stuffed with dead birds. Filth, she thought. His “art” covered the walls, not only the large mural made of animal hides but framed pictures, photographs he had doctored. Two hung in the bathroom. A still image from the Zapruder film, the moment Kennedy was struck by the second bullet, his face fleshy pink and opened outward, like his face was a door with a hinge. Fleece had painted a halo around Kennedy, oxidized brownish blood radiating from the president’s head. In the other picture, he’d painted seven halos over a photograph of the Challenger—the explosion puff a burst of cloud and shuttle pieces in curlicues of smoke, odd trajectories.

“We found something,” said Nestor. “Over here.”

Nestor had been working in the smaller of the two bedrooms, a relatively clean room—the mattress on the floor had been made, the sheets and comforter tucked tightly at the corners. The largest of Fleece’s doctored photographs hung here—she recognized an enlarged photograph of Fleece’s Vietnam swift boat, but it had been coated with crescent-shaped nail clippings and the nails and claws of animals. A plumb line of sorrow dropped through her—she thought of the fingers of the Mursult family, their fingernails removed. The picture was labeled, This is the Ship of Nails that will Carry the Bodies of the Dead.

“We’re figuring Mursult stayed here,” said Nestor. “That this is his stuff.”

The contents of a black duffel bag were spread out across the mattress. A few thousand dollars in stacks of twenties, clothes, toiletries, a pager. Twenty-four Polaroids were laid out in a grid—graphic in their portrayal of a woman. A black woman, thin. Her face was never shown. Her breasts were beautiful, thought Moss, her belly taut—Moss studied the smooth, dark lines of the woman’s thighs, the images of her genitals, how she spread herself pink. Intimate rather than pornographic—pictures no one other than the photographer and the subject were ever meant to see. They had been taken in a cabin, it looked like, not here. A rental cabin, maybe. The walls were exposed lumber, a glimpse of a bedside table, a pad of paper, a phone.

“Can you ID the woman?” she asked.

“No.”

“What makes you think Mursult?” she asked.

“The first few numbers we recovered from the pager are Mursult’s home phone number,” said Nestor. “I’m thinking he called himself a couple of times, made sure the pager was working.”

They stepped outside. Nestor was staying to oversee the evidence collection, but he made an arrangement with one of the sheriff’s deputies to ride Moss back to Canonsburg. Late afternoon, the day bleeding away from them.

“Did you catch the picture of the boat?” asked Moss.

“The fingernails? Yeah,” said Nestor. “We’ll have our guys test the fingernails, see if any of them are from the Mursult family—it will take a while. I don’t see this guy Fleece being able to kill three people without using a gun, though, do you? Out of shape—he didn’t look like he could have caught them or defend himself if any of them fought back. The wife, Damaris Mursult, was athletic. The son—”

“I’ll bet the autopsy says he’s been dead too long to be our guy anyway,” said Moss.

“What was that he wrote on the picture? A ship of nails?”

“A ship of nails to carry the dead,” said Moss. “I don’t know. Jesus Christ, we’ve seen a lot of death today.”

“Are you religious?” asked Nestor.

“What?” she said—she realized she’d blasphemed, was worried she might have offended him. Several men she’d met in law enforcement were Christians, evangelicals. “I’m sorry, I—”

“My faith is the only thing that sustains me,” said Nestor. “Thinking about the boy and girl, thinking about Marian. It breaks me, but I believe in eternal life, I think of how God will care for these victims, and it helps me—it helps me stay focused. I imagine a new life for them. Do you believe in the resurrection of the body?”

Moss thought of all of humanity in a funnel leading to a singular point.

“No,” she said.

THREE

Her mother still lived in Canonsburg, in the same house Moss had grown up in, a little blue house on the steep hills northeast of East Pike, just a few blocks up from the Sarris candy factory. Her childhood had been scented with chocolate. Moss popped two wheels onto the sidewalk whenever she parked, angling the wheels, setting the brake. She made her way along the weedy path to the side door and unlocked the dead bolt with the same key she’d used since middle school.

“Mom?” she said.

“Up here,” said her mother.

Surprised to find her mother home, figuring she might be at McGrogan’s—almost every night after her shift at the call center, her mother changed into stone-washed jeans and a tight top and rambled downhill to the bar, walking so she wouldn’t have to worry about driving home. Everyone knew her mother to see her, she was always ambling about the neighborhood to find cigarettes, to find a drink, a forty-four-year-old often lit after last call, bumming in empty lots with other barflies too stoned to want to go home. A character, a regular. McGrogan’s was an off-and-on bar, some nights quiet with nothing to do but watch the news on the TVs and chat up the bartenders, other nights so full you had to shuffle sideways just to get to the bathrooms. Her mother had her usual stool, at the corner of the bar where she could relax with her back to the wall and see what developed. Her hands were rippled with veins, and her natural hair had dulled to the color of wheat bread, but she could still turn heads if she wore the right outfit and the lights were dim. Moss looked at her mother and saw herself in a few years. The irony of traveling to IFTs was that Moss’s body aged in these futures even if the terra firma of the present had seemed to pause, waiting for her. Chronologically, Moss was only twenty-seven, born in 1970 when her mother was seventeen. Biologically, though, Moss was almost forty, just a few years shy of her mother. Moss and her mother never mentioned their ages to each other, however, even though Moss was certain her mother must have noticed the contracting gap between them—a sibling more than a daughter, a weirdness too disturbing to discuss or even acknowledge. No intimacy had ever developed between them, though, no sense of equal footing—their experiences too divergent, their lives lived in such different places. Moss was taller, toned, serious, while her mother was brassy—people invariably figured they were sisters the rare times they went drinking together.

Her mother was at the kitchen table tonight, already in her pajamas, flipping through a Reader’s Digest.

“Not at McGrogan’s?” asked Moss.

“I saved you some chicken if you’re hungry,” said her mother.

“I already ate.”

“Eat more,” her mother said. “Shiner’s been going around with that girl from… wherever the hell she’s from—South Fayette or somewhere. I don’t want to drink with them tonight. Deb wants to start going to that new place I told you about—what’s it called? I tried to call you. Anyway, I made the chicken.”

“I’ve been working,” said Moss.

“Trying to find that girl? I couldn’t believe it, the news made it seem like that family was killed over in Courtney Gimm’s old house,” said her mother.

“Yeah,” said Moss.

“The same house? Is that what you’re working on?”

“Looked like that family was already trying to sell the place. They couldn’t have been the people who bought the house from the Gimms, right? Someone named Mursult?”

“No, no—they must have been renting,” said her mother. “Her brother, what’s his name?”

“Davy.”

“He’s the one that enlisted? I think he started renting out the place after his dad moved to Arizona. I ran into Davy—must have been a few years ago—’93 maybe? ’94? I think he said he wanted to hold on to the place, draw some income if he could. I’m so nebby but can’t never remember what I’ve nebbed about.”

“They use a referral service to find housing for one another,” said Moss. “Military families.” She had been rattled at finding the crime scene at Courtney’s house, the chilling synchronicity of her present and past braiding, but it was just a coincidence, she reminded herself. Davy Gimm had listed the house for rent, and another Navy family had moved in—a referral service. Talking with her mom settled things, made her feel like she was rousing from an unpleasant dream to find the waking world as normal as it ever was.

“What happened?” said her mother.

“I don’t know,” said Moss. “Domestic abuse, I think.”

“Awful,” said her mother. “I’ve been following the missing girl’s story on the news because of Courtney—made me think of Courtney.”

“Marian Mursult,” said Moss. “Reminded me of Courtney, too. The hair.”

“I was going to mention her hair,” said her mother. “Courtney had that beautiful hair, all those curls.”

Growing up, Moss thought of her mother as just another Guntown drunk, a wreck, but now she saw her mother was wounded, a perspective that came with age, when everyone settled into the same slew of adulthood, when everyone was wounded and could more easily overlook the wounds of others. Moss picked at the Shake ’n Bake, tough and dry. She found rum in the liquor cupboard, mixed it with Cherry Coke. Her mother poured herself vodka.

“Anyway, I’m meeting Cheryl down at McGrogan’s tomorrow night,” her mother went on.

“Cheryl from work?” said Moss. “I thought you were over each other.”

“I sold the most subscriptions this past month, so I promised I’d take Cheryl out with the gift certificate they’re giving me, fifty bucks. By the way, I saw your subscription to Homemaker’s Companion lapsed, so I signed you up for a renewal. Helped push me over the top.”

“I hate those things.”

“That ain’t the point.”

Her mother at the call center, pushing magazine subscriptions. Moss drank her rum and Cherry Coke in the living room, took her place on the leather love seat, her mother reclining on the full-size couch. Moss had almost gone to work for the call center—her mother had pulled some strings with the manager, but Moss had blown off the chance. That near miss of a career was one of the few true forks in the road she’d traveled. Fashionable to think of a “multiverse” consisting of infinite directions, infinite paths, but the forking paths weren’t truly innumerable, she knew; there were only so many options available to most people, especially girls who grew up poor. Had she taken the job at the call center, she could have turned out just like her mother. She would have made a good alcoholic, she always thought. Call centers and bars and sleeping with whoever was willing to pay her tab for the night—sometimes she thought of that lifestyle with disgust, other times she found comfort in the daydream, wishing she could have just lived a regular life of men and stress and shit jobs. A quarto-size framed picture of Moss’s father stood on the mantel above the television. His smile was more a smirk, but the glint in his eye hinted he’d keep on laughing forever, wherever he was. Moss had grown up with this strange, formal picture of her father as a young man who was younger in the photograph than her memories of him—he had been in the Navy, and in the photograph he wore his dress whites. When she thought of the call center or thought over the ways her life might have been different or wondered why she had joined NCIS, she sometimes told herself she was searching for her father—but that was a bullshit answer, she knew it. He had left the Navy before she was born; he had left the family when Moss was five.

“We can watch The X-Files,” said her mother. “I know you like that show.”

Sunday nights were Scully nights, but tonight’s was a repeat—“Fallen Angel,” the episode a Mulder episode, so Moss told her mother to flip channels if she wanted. Her mother a newshawk, Headline News interrupted by CNN’s BREAKING STORY banner. RAPPER DEAD was blunt enough, though they followed with a headline released from the L.A. Times: GANGSTA RAP PERFORMER NOTORIOUS B.I.G. SLAIN. Four shots fired through the side of his SUV. A black GMC Suburban roped off by police tape. Her mother sat up. “Oh, damn,” she said. “Damn it. I’ve got to call Shelly. She loves him.”

“I think I’m heading to bed,” said Moss, her mother waving good night but staring mournfully at the screen. Moss’s old bedroom had been converted into her mother’s junk room over the years, but the spool-turned Jenny Lind bed that had once been her grandmother’s had been kept, and the bookshelves still had a few of her old books: The Black Stallion, A Wrinkle in Time, some Choose Your Own Adventure books with the death-scenes dog-eared. The rocking chair was covered with boxes of clothes. She turned out the lights, thinking she would fall immediately asleep, but the news of the rapper’s death bothered her, mixed with the heaviness already in her heart. Moss felt like the world was dissolving. She had the sensation of constellations disappearing from the sky. “Nestor,” she said, thinking of the immortality of souls, the resurrection of the body—Nestor’s naïvety, the ignorance of his faith, but still trying the sound of his name, how it started on the tip of her tongue and worked its way back.

In the darkness of her bedroom, surrounded by familiar shadows, she imagined the world around her buried under snow and blizzard winds, the only warmth the pocket beneath her comforter where she lay curled. The muffled sound of the distant television, the sound of her mother’s voice speaking on the kitchen telephone. Sounds from her childhood. Easy enough to convince herself she was still just a child, a little girl in her bed, that her entire life was nothing but a strange dream, and if she were to wake now, she would wake years younger, everything as it was twenty-five years ago. She felt like an interloper on her own past and so reached to touch her left thigh, run her fingers along the bumps of bone and scarred skin tissue of her stump, reminding herself of who she was now. Her mother must be calling everyone about the news she was watching. Moss loved the sound of her mother’s laughter—how casually she made lasting friendships, how she gave of herself freely, unguarded. Moss too easily became entangled. She tossed in the twin bed, thinking. Thinking again of Nestor. Never able to spark casual relationships like her mother, never one for trysts—Moss’s infatuations developed suddenly, her emotions came with thistles, like a bur. Once a photographer, he had mentioned, and Moss wondered at that—she wondered who he was, if he was always so pious. Anyway, annoyed at how he’d reduced the deaths of children to Christian bathos about eternity, but nevertheless she wondered at the women in his life, wondered if there was one. She tried to remember if he had worn a ring. Nestor. The glare of headlights on her ceiling, fragmented by her window, made her remember mirrored images of Elric Fleece and skeletons in the trees. A ship named Libra disappearing into Deep Waters, lost sailors returning. A dissected black bear swathed in maggots. A trick Moss had taught herself for falling asleep was to imagine a river of black water—she would stand naked before wading into the river, the water creeping to her knees, her thighs, black as ink against her white skin, stomach, her breasts, and soon the water would be above her head, the wavering sunlight disappearing over her, falling deeper into ever expanding darkness. When she drowned, she slept.

A telephone ringing. The tone of her cell on her nightstand.

“Hello?” she said.

“This is Brock.”

Red digits hovering in the dark, 2:47.

“One of our guys just called about the pager you and Nestor recovered at Elric Fleece’s residence,” said Brock. “Figured something out.”

“Tell me.”

“We found saved pages. No phone numbers, only codes. We haven’t figured out what most of the codes are, but we did find a few that repeated—143 and 607. My guys tell me codes like these are shorthand for ‘I love you’ or ‘I miss you,’ things like that. Teenagers use them.”

Mursult and the woman in the Polaroid photographs scheduling times to meet, maybe using codes learned from his daughters.

“Having an affair,” said Moss. “There were twenty-four pictures of a woman.”

“We checked Mursult’s home-phone records against the pager and found a correlation,” said Brock. “Several times when the pager received the code 22, he placed a call to the Blackwater Falls Lodge, down in Tucker County.”

Blackwater Gorge was familiar—a section of the massive Monongahela National Forest, touristy and accessible because of the stunning waterfalls like pearls on the string of the Blackwater River. Moss had once stayed for a week in the lodge, exploring the miles of trails through the gorge, grueling treks with her prosthesis over uneven terrain, searching the Red Run branch of the Dry Fork River where she had been rescued from her near death in the Terminus. She had looked for the part of the river where she had hanged, had searched for the ashen tree she remembered, the burnt-white tree that had seemed to repeat, but she never found the site of her crucifixion. She’d returned to the cabins around Blackwater Falls often in her summers, losing herself on the trails, gazing for hours at the crashing eddies and whirlpools of the Elakala Falls—reminding herself of the beauty of the world, when it was so easy for her to remember this landscape as desolation and ice.

“That lodge is a few hours from here, but would be a good place to meet someone,” she said. “Romantic, remote.”

“Mursult called the lodge dozens of times, twice in the last month,” said Brock. “I called over to the lodge, but the clerk didn’t have records for anyone named Patrick Mursult. I’ll call the Tucker County Sheriff’s Department first thing in the morning, see if they can send someone out.”

“I’ll head over,” said Moss, doubtful she’d be able to get back to sleep. “I’m in Canonsburg. I can make it out there. I need to head home out that way.”

Her mother snoring from across the hall. Moss crept downstairs, feeling like a teenager again, sneaking out in the middle of the night—she remembered which stairs creaked, knew where to put her weight to stay silent. She brewed a pot of coffee in the kitchen, splashed water on her face to wake up. Marian Mursult was three days gone, last seen this past Friday; Monday morning would dawn in just a few hours. A bottle of aspirin above the sink—Moss took the pills with coffee. She drove the dead-hour interstates, Canonsburg to 79 South, West Virginia, allowing images to swirl in her mind, glom together, the Challenger in the immensity of the sky, a ship for the dead built of fingernails, the forest in winter. The interstate was a river of asphalt illuminated by streetlamp light. She was aware that the mountains grew around her, but she couldn’t see them—they were gargantuan darkness, snuffing out the stars.

A serpentine cut through pinewoods that opened into a parking lot—only a sparse few cars parked here. The lodge was built like a longhouse, red-roofed, with an exposed-stone chimney stack crowning the front entrance. Moss made her way through the vacant lobby, a dropped ceiling and a cream tile floor, the front desk the color of natural cherrywood, everything bathed in garish fluorescence. Moss lingered for a few moments at the unattended front desk, peering behind the counter into an empty manager’s office.

“Hello?” she said.

The murmur of a distant television. She followed the sound around to the hotel bar, where varicolored liquors lined the mirror-backed shelves. A young woman sat alone, drinking coffee, looking over a Vogue piece about the Spice Girls. She was willowy, in knee socks and a skirt embroidered with a forest scene, deer and rabbits, wildflowers, her lip and eyebrow pierced with silver rings, her hair voluminous save for the shaved sides, dyed a jolting shade of electric blue.

“Excuse me,” said Moss.

“Sorry,” said the young woman. “I should be at the desk.”

“Are you in charge here?” asked Moss.

“Checking in?” she asked. “We should have rooms available.”

Maybe in her early twenties, just out of college, or maybe this was a student job. Fine features and dark, lovely eyes. Moss held out her identification.

“NCIS,” she said. “I’m wondering if you can answer a few questions for me, maybe help me out.”

“Are you, like, a cop?” the young woman asked.

“Naval Criminal Investigative Service,” said Moss. “I’m a federal agent investigating crimes relating to the Navy.”

That explanation often calmed people who might otherwise have feared becoming entangled in police business—NCIS something remote, harmless-seeming to people with no connection to the armed forces.

“Like the FBI?” she asked. “Someone just called here a little bit ago.”

“I’m not the FBI,” said Moss.

“I’ll see what I can do,” said the young woman. “I can serve alcohol, if you want a drink. Or coffee. I just brewed a fresh pot.”

“Coffee, thank you. I don’t normally keep these hours.”

“I feel like a vampire sometimes,” she said, heading behind the bar to pour Moss’s cup. She set out sugar and a carton of half-and-half. “Petal, by the way.”

“Petal?” said Moss. “That’s beautiful. Shannon.”

“Skeleton crew tonight,” said Petal. “Got the lobby to myself. More staff will show up closer to breakfast.”

“You work here regularly?” asked Moss.

“Most nights,” said Petal. “Two nights off a week, not necessarily together. Hard to plan a life with no real weekends. And it’s boring. I’m glad you showed up, gives me something to do.”

“Do you know someone named Marian Mursult? Or Patrick Mursult?” asked Moss.

“They aren’t familiar names,” she said.

“I believe Patrick Mursult may have stayed here frequently,” said Moss. “What kind of information do you keep on file about your guests?”

“Basic stuff,” said Petal. “Name, how many people are checking in. That sort of thing. Credit-card number, unless they pay with cash.”

“Phone calls from the room? Incidental costs, damages?”

“Sure,” said Petal.

Moss showed Petal a photograph of Mursult. “Do you recognize him?” she asked.

Petal scrutinized the picture. “No,” she said. “But I don’t have a lot of contact with our guests at my hours. Most people check in before I’m here, check out after I leave—and most of the time they’re out through the forest, hiking. I see people occasionally at breakfast if I stick around to eat.”

“I have dates this man would have stayed here over the past year or so,” said Moss, “and the phone number he used to make the reservations.”

“The phone number wouldn’t be much help,” said Petal. “The dates, though—we could try to cross-check by date.”

“You can run a search like that on the computer?”

“Oh, no,” said Petal. “Our computer system is nonexistent. Ever play Memory?”

They set up in the lounge on either side of a glass table, sitting by a fire that Petal had kindled in the stone fireplace, several file folders arranged between them by date. Each folder contained a stack of receipts from past occupants, some handwritten—Moss started with the lightest folder, flipping through names, credit-card numbers, room numbers—information blurring together as she read. No “Patrick Mursult.”

“Read the names out loud so I can hear them,” said Petal. “Or—don’t bother with the names, let’s stick to credit-card numbers. I have an idea. Give me the last four numbers, and I’ll write them down, we’ll check for duplicates.”

“All right,” said Moss, unaccustomed to receiving this level of engagement, but Petal seemed particularly game, readying her notebook, starting a new column next to a poem she’d been writing. Moss read out the credit-card numbers, and Petal checked each number against her list, looking for repeats. They worked for nearly forty minutes, taking a break only to refill their coffee.

“Wait, wait—can you give me that last one again?” asked Petal.

Moss repeated the number and Petal said, “Here we go. Yes. I found a match, here. Patrick Gannon.”

“Patrick Gannon,” said Moss.

Moss jotted down the credit-card number that “Patrick Gannon” had used to make his reservation. He hadn’t reserved a room in the lodge but rather one of the cabins along the south rim of the gorge: Cabin number 22, the same number as the code on his pager. She had him. She checked all the past receipts—the number of guests was listed as two, though there was no information on the second guest.

“Anything unique about that cabin?” Moss asked. “About the name ‘Gannon’? Maybe someone you work with might have an idea about him? Might remember him?”

“I’ll ask around when the morning shift clocks in,” said Petal, tying her bright blue hair into a loose knot. “Let me check the file for Cabin 22, see if we’ve kept any notes about it.”

“Are you in college?” asked Moss as Petal gathered up their paperwork.

“I’m working a few years,” said Petal, “not sure if I want to go to school. I wanted to backpack across Africa, but my dad found me this job.”

“Consider a career in law enforcement,” said Moss. “You’re a natural. You’ve been a help tonight.”

Petal replaced the files of room receipts in the management office before stepping behind the front desk, opening up the three-ring binder labeled CABINS. She flipped to the back, scanned a series of forms. “Wasp’s nest in Cabin 22 in 1983,” said Petal. “Looks like it was taken care of.” She opened another three-ring binder labeled CHECK-IN, said, “Oh, shit. Gannon’s checked in right now. Cabin 22.”

“Tonight?” said Moss. A prickle of adrenaline. She thought of Marian, wondered if she was in one of the cabins, possibly held here.

Petal checked a pegboard full of keys on the rear wall, checked again in her binder. “He made the reservation Friday night, checked in Saturday, and has the cabin through the week.”

A Friday-night reservation—he’d booked his cabin just as Marian had been kidnapped. “I need to get there,” said Moss, no moment to spare if she might recover Marian here, now. “I can follow one of the roads that lead from the parking lot?”

“About a mile from here,” said Petal. “It’s tricky in the dark, I can take you over.”

Petal threw on a pea coat, brought Moss through the administrative office to the garage, where she found a golf cart spattered with mud. They left the garage and rode along the cabin path, a winding strip of concrete lit only by the dim wattage of the golf cart’s front light. Moss gripped the crossbar as Petal drove, taking the bends quickly. The stars were thick out here, without the diluting light of cities. Orion and the Dippers were clear, but the sky was dominated by the silvery flare of the comet Hale-Bopp, the cosmic ice and burning tails like a thumb smudge of light.

Two dozen cabins were situated near the gorge rim, each private, separated by dense hemlocks. A few were booked, Moss figured, seeing cars tucked into the woods, but most of the cabins stood empty—March was still too cold for most people. Petal drove around to one of the distant cabins. “Here’s 22,” she said. A Wrangler was parked in the gravel patch, the spare tire draped with a POW*MIA cover. No lights. The cabin seemed consumed by night.

“Petal, go ahead and wait back here, all right?” said Moss, standing from the golf cart. Petal bundled up in her coat, lit a cigarette. Marian might be here, thought Moss. She picked her way along the mulch path to the cabin. The night was so opaque she could barely see Petal and the golf cart, could see only the orange tip of her cigarette bobbing like a firefly. Moss knocked on the door, waiting a few moments. Nothing stirred inside the cabin, no lights snapped on, no movement. She knocked harder.

“Special agent, NCIS,” she said. “I need to speak with Patrick Mursult.”

Silence. She unsnapped her holster, ready to draw. Moss knocked again, no answer. Or maybe there was no one here—the cabins were small enough she should have heard movement if someone were inside.

“Do you have keys?” Moss called back.

“Yeah,” said Petal. “I have to open the door for you. I can’t hand over the manager’s keys.”

Moss watched the cigarette tip bob closer. Petal had a ring of keys, squinted to find the one marked 22. “I wish I had a flashlight,” she said, stepping around Moss, feeling for the cabin lock with her fingers. Moss heard the key slide in, heard the lock unlatch. Petal stepped inside just as Moss was smacked by the odor of blood.

“Petal, don’t—”

Petal flipped on the lights, and when she registered the wash of blood, she screamed, her cigarette dropping from her mouth. Moss took the girl by her shoulders, held her, led her from the cabin, “It’s okay, it’s okay—go back to the office, call 911—”

“I’m all right,” said Petal, her voice bubbling with hysteria. “I’m all right, it’s fine, I didn’t see it, I didn’t see—”

Moss put her hands to Petal’s cheeks, steadied her. “Listen to me, listen,” she said, and registered the moment when Petal regained herself. “Go back to the office, call 911,” said Moss. “My cell won’t work out here. I need you to do this for me, okay? Call 911.”

Moss waited until she heard the sound of the golf cart’s motor diminish before returning to the cabin. She crushed out Petal’s cigarette, smoldering on the floor. She closed the door behind her. The cabin’s interior was wood, with exposed ceiling beams. Patrick Mursult’s body was beside the bed, his head resting on the mattress, his wrists tied behind him with a belt. Someone had shot him through the back of the head, an execution. Blood had sprayed from the exit wound, dousing the headboard with blood that glistened in the room lights.

She checked the rest of the cabin. There was no one else here, no sign of Marian. Mursult had been staying here alone. She spotted a gun on the floor, a Beretta M9. Could be a service weapon, she thought, wondering if the Beretta had been Mursult’s or if his killer had left it here. But even if it was his service weapon, the NSC SEALs she worked with strongly preferred the SIG Sauer P226. The M9 might have been the weapon Mursult was originally issued back in the mid-eighties. An older gun.

She heard sirens piercing the silence long before they arrived. The first on scene was an ambulance from the Broaddus Hospital, Moss waiting outside the cabin, waiving off the EMTs so they wouldn’t contaminate the crime scene. When the Tucker County sheriff arrived, Moss asked him to radio in, ask for the FBI. Deputies woke the few others in the cabins, taking their names, contact information, asking them what they might have heard, what they might have seen. An FBI unit from the Clarksburg field office arrived, already in contact with Brock, who was on his way down from Pittsburgh.

No cell reception here, but Petal let Moss use the office telephone. The lodge office was stuffy, with a minuscule metal writing desk and a calendar of the Blackwater Falls photographed in different seasons. Moss dialed for an out line—at this hour O’Connor must be asleep, she figured, so she tried his home number rather than NCIS headquarters. She thought of him now, wisps of white hair, sandpaper stubble, sitting up in bed and shuffling through his vast house in Virginia, chasing down the ringing telephone before his younger wife’s sleep was disturbed.

“O’Connor,” he said.

“Moss,” she said. “I located him. Patrick Mursult’s dead. I’m calling from the Blackwater Falls Lodge, in West Virginia. He had a cabin here.”

“Homicide?” O’Connor asked.

“He was shot through the back of the head,” said Moss. “Wrists tied behind him. An execution. I don’t think Mursult killed his family—someone hunted him down, killed them all. We still have no leads about his daughter.”

“The FBI will handle the search for Marian,” said O’Connor. “Our primary concern remains Patrick Mursult—and Elric Fleece. I spoke with Special Agent Nestor earlier, pulled Fleece’s record. Navy, Electrician’s Mate—submarines in the late seventies, NSC in ’81. Zodiac.”

“Libra?” asked Moss.

“That’s right. We need to find out what these men were involved in, why they weren’t on the ship. We need to know about Libra. I’m meeting with the NSC director tomorrow, Admiral Annesley.”

“There’s something else,” said Moss. “Fleece had seen the Terminus, or knew about it, his place was… his property was decorated with sculptures of the hanged men. I think he had seen the future. Remember when I lost my leg, I had that confusion about the reflections? Do you remember, I thought I’d seen myself—”

“Of course,” said O’Connor, that time of her life delicate between them—how what should have been a routine training exercise in the Canaan Valley had resulted in the loss of her limb. He’d been inconsolable when the medical staff of the William McKinley mentioned amputation as the only way to save Moss from gangrene and had been present during the two surgeries needed to remove her leg at the thigh.

“This man, Fleece, had made a sculpture of the reflections,” she said. “I can’t explain it, but he knew. I’d been thinking Mursult never sailed on Libra, never made the assignment, but if Fleece knows the Terminus…”

A pause on O’Connor’s end. “We need to get out ahead of this investigation. It’s spreading like wildfire, we have to contain it,” he said. “I have to move you to the future on this one.”

Moss’s jaw clenched at his words, her shoulders tightened. Traveling to IFTs took a toll on her body, years of her life spent in futures. She had lost relationships the last time she was called on to travel, had a boyfriend she imagined a life with, but when she traveled, she had left her boyfriend’s bed one morning and returned within the week aged four years, distant from him, her heart and mind already long past the moment she’d been living.

“Just give me a few more days,” she said. “We have leads. There are pictures of a woman—”

“I’m moving you on this,” said O’Connor. “I have to. Mursult turning up like this, and now Fleece. They’re a national security risk, Shannon. We need to know about these men now. We need to know about Libra.”

Twenty years from now, this current investigation will have concluded—everything happening here will be history; with any luck, whoever murdered Mursult and his family will have been captured, Mursult’s missing-in-action status will have been explained, his connection to Libra understood. Moss might arrive twenty years from now and be handed a folder with every question answered, every opaqueness made clear. A framed photograph of the Blackwater Lodge staff stood on the desk—Moss picked out Petal, her hair not blue in this picture, her natural color a dark shade, almost black. Marian, thought Moss. You can find Marian.

“All right, I’ll get ahead of this thing,” she said. She was unable to slide backward through time to prevent Marian’s disappearance, the butchery to her family, but she could travel forward to learn what had happened to her or what might happen to her. Maybe I can save her, she thought. Maybe we’re not too late. “I’ll go,” she said. “I’ll leave from here, can make it to Oceana by midmorning.”

“I’ll make arrangements,” said O’Connor.

Moss found Petal at the front desk. The young woman had been crying, her eyes pinkish, but she had collected herself. Already this world, terra firma, seemed to Moss like a distant recollection, like it belonged to a past age, bathed in a haze of memory. Even Petal seemed like someone remembered from long ago. Moss handed her one of her business cards, said, “This is my name, here. Shannon Moss. When the sheriff’s department or someone from the FBI asks you about what happened tonight, make sure you talk with Special Agent William Brock of the FBI. Tell him everything.”

“Brock,” said Petal. “Okay.”

“You’ve done great,” said Moss. “Hang in there.”

Moss pulled away from the Blackwater Falls Lodge. She turned on the radio to drown out her thoughts, the tuner scanning, picking up static channels. Moss listened to the white noise, the night burning with stars. The vast body of heaven, the body of the woman in the Polaroid photographs. There had been a woman who’d met Mursult in the Blackwater cabin, who had known him, had been intimate with him. Who was she? Moss thought of that unknown woman, she thought of Marian. She thought about the search parties that would comb through these woods in the coming days, men and women searching tight grids, looking for a sign of the girl somewhere among the pines. Maybe they would find her, maybe they would pull Marian’s body from the soil, or maybe they would find her months from now, wasted away and desecrated by wildlife, or maybe they would never find her. The pinewoods stretched out like a vast dark sea on either side of Moss. She thought of Marian, she thought of Courtney. She imagined Courtney wandering alone, lost among the pines—her thoughts of Courtney were so vivid Moss felt she could almost see her, a blur of white among the subsuming darkness of the woods, a girl lost, lost and so far from home, lost in the eternal forest, lost forever.