As I watched Salk study himself in the mirror, I kept waiting for some sign he knew I was there—a glance in my direction or some indication he was preparing for a fight. But there was none. He continued to practice smiling for a few more moments and then he replaced the photo on the mirror and left the room. When I heard the front door open and shut again I assumed he’d left, but even after I strained and heard what sounded like his car cranking up and driving off outside, I waited a couple of minutes before easing open the closet door.
I was tight with tension, with every creak of the floor sounding like a gunshot in my ears. I crept to the back door, constantly looking around for some sign that Salk had silently doubled back to trick me into thinking he had left. But no, he seemed to truly be gone. Peeking out the back door window, I made my way out onto the back porch and across his yard.
When I was back to my car I drove around to his street and Salk’s car was gone. I had no way of knowing where he had went, but I decided that was okay. While I didn’t have definitive evidence he was a killer yet, the strangeness I had observed that night made the idea a lot more credible. Tired, I went home and tried to get some sleep with little luck.
Two days later I received one of my distant newspaper deliveries. A twenty-year old girl had gone missing the night I had been in Salk’s house and he had left for parts unknown. It was nearly 200 miles away from here, but based on the timeline of when she was last seen, he would have had plenty of time get there if it was him. Even not knowing if he were to blame I felt terrible. Responsible. If I had done better, been smarter, I could have stopped him already or at least tracked him so I would know if he had gone to the girl’s town or not.
As it was, I was left with continuing to observe. That, and trying to find out more about Marcus Salk from his past.
I pulled his file in the admin office at the hospital and found that prior to coming to our town he had been at a hospital outside of Olathe, Kansas for a number of years. Not much other information beyond his curriculum vitae, which contained nothing out of the ordinary for an orthopedic surgeon. Still, it gave me a jumping off point.
I called the hospital in Kansas and worked my way to someone in human resources, telling them that I was with a large medical practice in Seattle that was considering extending an offer to a former doctor there and was checking through his references as part of the potential hiring process. The woman on the phone was friendly from the start, but I could tell there was a brief hesitation and change of tone when I mentioned the person in question was Dr. Salk.
“Well…I can put you in touch with the chief of staff if you want. He was chief back when Marcus was here too, so he can talk more about what kind of doctor he was. But I…well, I shouldn’t say anything.”
Her desire to gossip was almost palpable. “I understand, and I’m not trying to put you in a bad spot. But I don’t want to make the wrong choice on the guy either, so anything you tell me will be off-the-record. But it’d be a big help if you could give me any insight you have into him.” There was a moment of contemplative silence and then she went on.
“It’s just…Look, Marcus was a nice guy when he first came here, right? Joked around a lot, patients loved him, he had a sweet wife and he fit right in. Then him and his wife go on vacation to Europe one summer, this was six or seven years ago now, and when they got back he was different somehow.”
“Different how?” I asked, trying to keep the intense curiosity out
of my voice. I was supposed to be a mildly interested businessman, not
an obsessed stalker.
I could almost hear her shrug over the phone. “I don’t know how to describe it. He was still nice and would joke some, but it all seemed forced. He was off from how he had been before. Within a few months him and his wife were divorced and he had moved away. I guess he’s on the move again.”
“Yeah, we’ll see. You’ve given me a lot of food for thought. Hey, was his wife okay? I mean did everything turn out okay for her?
I could sense her hesitating again, and I was worried I may have pushed for more than she’d give. Luckily the gossip in her won out as she let out a small sigh. “Yes, I guess so, bless her heart. She still lives around here, so I see her from time to time. She doesn’t look happy though. I think Alicia really loved him, and whatever came between them, I think it hurt her a lot.”
I could feel the rage building in me again as she spoke. “Yes, losing someone you love like that, it kind of destroys you. I…thank you. Thank you for the help, you’ve given me a lot to go on.”
“Don’t you want to talk to the chief?”
I gave a small laugh I didn’t feel. “No, I think I got what I needed right here. Thank you again.” When I hung up the phone, I sat with my head in my hands for some time. My thoughts were swimming in the blackness of my mind like pale, blind cave fish. I would catch glimpses of their pallid scales and hear the occasional ripple or splash as they stirred the water, but these ghost impressions left me with little in the way of a solid idea or plan. The things that felt most real to me were my pain and my anger, and it was getting harder to hold them in check.
Still, I had to be sure. I took a few days off and drove to Olathe to try and track down Salk’s ex-wife. She wasn’t going by her married name any longer, so the phone directory was of little use. I called the Kansas medical board and got a residential mailing address that he had never changed. This led me to a nice brick home in a small suburban neighborhood not far from Salk’s former hospital. As I went up to the front door I could see that the paint around the door and on the shutters was peeling, and the air of disuse and being unoccupied grew so strong as I approached that I felt sure I was knocking at the door of an empty house.
But only seconds after I knocked a woman in her forties opened the
door. She looked at me warily as I fought down the urge to tell her
that I knew her. In a way it was true. She was the girl from Salk’s
picture.
Swallowing, I pushed forward with my story. “Hi, ma’am. My name is Peter Elliot. I was hoping I could ask you a few questions about your former husband.” I tried to smile and seem non-threatening, but I could see her running the mental calculus of the likelihood I was a thief or rapist. After studying me further she nodded and stepped aside.
“Come in I guess. Is Marcus in some sort of trouble?” We stepped into a foyer cluttered with stacks of books and magazines, and as we spoke she led me down a path to a living room that was even more filled with row after row of books.
I gestured around. “You’ve got quite the collection.” She had moved a stack of newspapers off a worn-looking sofa and gestured for me to sit down.
She shrugged, looking disconsolate. “I think I slipped from being a collector to a hoarder about two years ago. I need to clear all this junk out.” She looked used up and small in her pale blue bathrobe as she sat down in an old recliner. Her sad eyes looked thoughtfully distant for a moment before coming back to me. “So is he? In trouble?”
I smiled. “I don’t know yet honestly. I’m just looking into him for an interested party, and my understanding is that you two were together for years.”
A brief look of pain crossed her face. “Yeah, we were. Childhood sweethearts if you can believe it. I thought we’d always be together.”
I leaned forward. “If you don’t feel it’s too personal, can you tell me what changed? Did Marcus change?”
She picked at some dried skin on her lip nervously. She suddenly seemed very uncertain. “I…Fuck it. Yes, he did. He changed all of a sudden.”
“Do you know when or why?”
She nodded, her eyes focusing on me as anger lit the edges of her face. “I know exactly when. We had just come back from a trip to Europe. Something we had wanted to do since high school. Had a great time too. We had landed in Atlanta and were waiting for our connecting flight to Topeka. That’s when he got sick.”
“Got sick? Sick how?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. He had gone to the bathroom near the terminal, and when he came back he said he didn’t feel well. His head and neck were hurting a lot. He felt nauseous. By the time we landed in Kansas he said it had passed. But…” She sighed. “This is pointless. You won’t believe anything I’m going to tell you anyway.”
I grimaced slightly. “I will. Please. I can’t go into detail, but this is really important, and I’ll listen to anything you tell me with an open mind.”
She looked at me for several moments, again weighing. Finally she nodded and went on. “He was different from then on. At first I thought he was still sick or jet lagged. Then I thought he was stressed or having a mid-life crisis. But those were all just excuses really. Because I was thinking it from the night we got home from the airport.”
“Thinking what?”
“That it wasn’t Marcus anymore.” She held up a hand. “I know how that sounds. Believe me. But I knew that man. I had known him and loved him since I was 10. It was like whatever happened between us landing in Atlanta and taking back off…it swallowed him up. He still sounded like Marcus, and I could see him trying to act like him. But it was wrong somehow. False. It felt like someone who knew a lot about Marcus was trying to impersonate him.” She gave a harsh laugh. “I swear to God, he even smelled different. I told my mother that and she set me up with a therapist right away.”
I didn’t know what to do with all of this. What she was saying was incredible, in the literal sense of that word, but I found myself believing her. Even if she was wrong, I didn’t think she was lying to me. “So what are you saying? You don’t think it was him anymore? What does that mean?”
“I don’t know. Believe me, I’ve spent years wondering about it and I still don’t know the answer. But something changed, and not in the normal “oh people change” way. He was not right. I would see him sometimes when he didn’t know I was around, and he was entirely different. His face would be slack, his eyes would be dead. He looked like some kind of terrible doll.”
I thought about my night in the closet and suppressed a shudder. “Was he ever violent or abusive towards you?”
She shook her head. “No, never. Never said a harsh word to me. Actually had less of a temper than he had before, but he’d always been sweet back when he was himself too.” She rubbed at her eyes for a moment before continuing. “But it didn’t matter. I tried talking to him about it at first, tried to see if I could help, but when I finally accepted that it wasn’t him anymore, I found myself just getting more and more withdrawn. More and more afraid of him.”
“What made you afraid of him?”
She stood up, jamming her hands in the pockets of her robe as she began to pace around the open patches of floor in the room. “You ever been to an aquarium with sharks?”
I nodded.
“You know how they’ll swim by, looking at you all calm and placid,
but you know that behind that black eye they aren’t calm or placid.
They’re just not ready to eat yet and they know there’s glass in the
way. That’s the way I came to feel when Marcus was here. He would
glide around me silently in the mornings and at night, his eyes seeing
and not seeing me at the same time. And he was always calm, always
grinning his fake shark grin. And maybe it was my imagination, but I
felt like whatever hunger he had, it was growing. And the glass holding
him back was getting thinner.”
I realized I had been holding my breath and I let it out. “So you divorced him.”
She gave a small, sad smile as she sat back down. “Yes, it was very easy. I told him I wanted a divorce, he said that sounded just fine, and he moved out the same day. Aside from signing papers in a lawyer’s office, I never saw him again.”
“Okay. But why did you stay here? Stay in the same house? Weren’t you worried he might come back?”
Her smile grew slightly. “Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? On the one hand, yes I’m scared of seeing Marcus showing back up one day. But what if it was the real Marcus that came back? What if I had moved, changed my name, made sure he couldn’t find me, and then it was the real Marcus, somehow back as randomly as he was taken away, and he came looking for me? What if he couldn’t find me?” Her voice grew thick at the end, and I reached out to grasp her shoulder. I didn’t have any real words of comfort or wisdom for her, and being around her pain just reminded me of my own.
Standing, I looked down at the girl that had once been Alicia Salk. It made me hate Marcus even more to see what he had done to her. “I don’t have any easy answers for you, Alicia. I just…I don’t think that Marcus, your Marcus, is coming back. I don’t know if that helps or hurts you, but maybe it will make it easier for you to move on.”
She looked up, her expression bitter. “It doesn’t help. And I know you mean well, but I’d like you to leave.” I nodded and headed outside. I turned to say goodbye, but the door was already closed behind me.
When I got back home the following morning, I found a follow-up article on the missing girl. She had been found behind a middle school a few miles away from where she was abducted, and she had been torn apart.
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Credits
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