Shred of Evidence

The first time I ever saw white crosses to mark the scenes of fatal crashes was the day we moved to New Hampshire. My wife, Lindsey, pointed them out as we drove along Route 101. She wasn’t impressed. “Oh my God. How fucking depressing.”

“I don’t know. It’s kind of nice.”

“Nice is keeping the dead where they belong. In cemeteries.” Lindsey pointed at a pink balloon tied to one of the crosses. “Happy Birthday? It’s macabre, Keith.”

I started to get pissed off with her. “Good. Maybe it’ll make people slow down.”

“Or creep them out so much that they drive faster.”

We’d moved from Long Island because we fought all the time. For me it was the commute and the endless stream of fucktards and the crush of constant development. I suspected Lindsey felt the same way. It wasn’t like she argued when I told her I’d gotten the patrol job in rural Epping, NH. Still, with her sniping at me now like she always did, I couldn’t help feeling like this was the beginning of the end after all.

I tried again anyway. “Look at some of the dates.” I pointed to a cross we were passing just then. “1965. What do you think happened?” My imagination saw a group of teens, girls with their hair flipped, guys with team jerseys. Bouncing around an old car in time to Jan & Dean, talking, laughing. Then: the crash, maybe with another car, maybe with deer or moose. Maybe with alcohol involved.

“More than forty years ago. Those kids’d be in their fifties. Popping pills, spending their kids’ inheritance on travel.” We’re better off without ‘em, she didn’t say.

That was the end of the conversation. We crossed into Epping and not long after that, pulled into the driveway of our new home. All I could think was, What a fucking stupid thing to argue over on the first day in our new life. But that was Lindsey. She didn’t get the deeper meanings of things.

* * *

She wasn’t always that way. We’d met in college. I was going to John Jay for criminal justice, and she was going for justice studies. I loved sitting in bars with her, debating over Heinekens, even though she was way more liberal than I was. She wasn’t like most women; she knew how to separate the debate from the personal.

It was a surprise when she got pregnant, but we decided to stick it out. She was due in September, so she took fall semester off. Figured she’d go back either in the spring, or the following fall, depending on how things went.

Then, halfway through the pregnancy, she lost the baby. That was an even bigger surprise. So much so that we eloped in Vegas as soon as her doctor gave us the go-ahead to travel. A fresh start, we agreed. Was it ever. She got pregnant again on that trip.

This time she carried the baby to term. A week before her due date she started bleeding. Our daughter was born via c-section during a February blizzard, lived for 12 hours, then died due to blood loss.

We left the hospital with the sun blazing overhead, melting the snow that had fallen during the storm. Lindsey said she didn’t want to try again, ever. Those were her exact words. I agreed. I thought she just meant kids.

Turned out she meant all of life.

We lived okay afterward. I got a job at the Suffolk County P.D. and we moved to Islip the following year. She never did get her degree, decided to go into real estate instead. We seemed happy. But there were no more friendly debates. Once I got her drunk enough to ask why not, and she told me nothing meant anything, could never make a difference. The morning after, she announced she’d quit drinking.

That was when I started to get pissed off with everything. The development on Long Island, the goddamn gangs. Parents moved out of the city to get their kids away from that shit and never guessed their kids were in too deep already, that the gangs would just follow. In a way I was just like them, and that was too bad, because before long I was collaring the little darlings every other night. It made me glad we hadn’t tried again. I couldn’t think of anything more pointless than to lose two babies, have one or two more, then lose them 16 years later to a fucking gang.

Still, the cost was a dried-up Lindsey, in every sense of the word. When it came down to the wire, I didn’t know if our choice was really worth it.

* * *

So we moved in the spring to the New Hampshire countryside. I started off right away on the 4 to 12. Busiest shift of the day, but I didn’t mind. It was a good way to get a feel for the community, the way the other cops worked.

Lindsey got her New Hampshire real estate license. “If I’m going to live in the middle of nowhere, I need a way to meet people,” was what she said. I was just as glad. She wouldn’t depend so much on me for emotional support.

Still, I wished I still felt more of a connection to her. The cops I worked with were civil enough toward me, but I was the only one on the force who hadn’t been born and raised in the area. Besides, I practically had to go undercover to cheer for the Yankees in fucking Red Sox country. I found myself relaxing the most when work was quiet. I liked the peace of a rural night under the stars, their light serene and pure across the hay and corn fields.

I’d been on patrol a little more than three months when I saw the first one, a white gauzy form that flitted into the long grass at the roadside. At the time I dismissed it as a trick of my passing high beams. Two weeks after that, though, I saw another one. Same road, different location. This time the figure vanished on top of the white cross before I passed it, so there was no way I couldn’t say I imagined it. I’d seen a ghost.

I avoided the white cross roads after that, though it was hard because the crosses were everywhere: main roads and small ones alike. It wasn’t long before the odds came up: I was dispatched to a single car crash on Moody Pond Road. The place where I’d seen them.

The car had collided head on with a massive old oak tree. It was a bad scene, Chevy Chevelle crunched up to the windshield. Coming around the sharp bend, I wondered why more white crosses didn’t dot the ground in front of the tree.

Two volunteer firefighters had gotten there before me. They stood like guards, doing and saying nothing, as I approached the scene. “Not much we can do,” one said before I could ask what they were doing. “She’s gone.”

I wasn’t surprised. The victim had gone through the windshield, judging by the huge hole at the center of the spiderweb cracks.

“Suicide,” said the other one.

I tried to figure out if he was serious. “How do you know?”

“Shelly Sampson. Lived alone for years.”

“Ever since her husband died, right?” said the younger one.

The older one shook his head. “Son.” turning to me, he added, “Lost her husband Mick in a farming accident. Lost her son Mick Jr. in Kuwait eight months later. Did okay with the farm on her own, but only what she needed to survive. Guess it just got to be too much. Too lonely.”

I wondered if he’d been in love with her once. If I’d ever get to know these people as well.

When I cleared the scene, the dispatcher sent me to dinner. I had to gas up the cruiser, too, so I went to the Big Apple a few miles up the road.

I saw her as I came out of the store. At least I was pretty sure it was Shelly Sampson who stood across the street, watching me. It wasn’t like in the movies, where she was all bloodied the same way as the body in the wreck. Instead, and this was the detail that was movie-like, she was dressed all in white. Her eyes were totally blank and yet fixed on me.

I wasn’t scared, though. I should have been, but I wasn’t. Instead I got the feeling that Shelly wanted company. I left the cruiser at the pumps and walked across the road with my meatball sub.

She disappeared as soon as I crossed the yellow line. I paused. Had I spooked her? Was she still there? I took out my flashlight. It wasn’t so much that I thought I could see her, as that I figured a cop walking onto the farmland across the street was bound to attract the store clerks’ attention. I flashed the bright white beam around the cornfield with its plants that came up to my waist. Ripe for harvest? I couldn’t tell. Such a city boy. I refocused my attention, even though I felt silly and a little crazy too. “If you want company, I’ll come back another time,” I told her. “Now isn’t really good.” Then I felt like an ass. She was dead because no one ever made time for her in life. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll eat dinner with you.”

I saw a flash of white behind a shrub to my left. I followed. Sat on the big flat rock behind the shrub, turned off the flashlight, and ate the entire sandwich. Shelly sat beside me, motionless, but I could tell she was glad for the company. I finished the shift feeling strangely fulfilled. Like I was meant to be there for her.

The next night it was the same thing, though not with Shelly Sampson. I was up on Route 101 when I saw two of them standing like hitchhikers on the roadside, behind them a white cross decorated with fresh flower garlands. I pulled over, turned on my blues and stepped out. “Evening,” I said. Looked up at the cross. A five-year anniversary.

They didn’t answer. Maybe they couldn’t, or maybe they didn’t need to. After a few minutes they vanished. Again I felt they were glad for the acknowledgment.

I wondered if the other cops saw the ghosts, or maybe they were elaborate hoaxes designed to haze the new guys. But no one said anything that supported that theory, and I didn’t ask. It didn’t seem right to.

It also didn’t seem right to tell Lindsey. She might say I needed drugs, or worse, she might ask if I’d ever seen our babies. I didn’t think she would, but sometimes she got in these weird moods where she’d look out across time and space and not talk to me. So I kept it to myself, thinking the dead were all just lonely and that was why they appeared to the living, and I wondered which living: did everyone see them and not tell? Or did they appear only to those with baggage? Or to people with one foot in the next life?

Ultimately I decided it didn’t matter, and I went looking. Not ghost-hunting like on TV. That shit was insulting. Instead I’d go out in a field for a walk after work. I’d figured out that eventually someone would notice my cruiser parked where it had no reason to be, so instead I’d park on the shoulder or a two-track. Then I’d spend about an hour in the company of whoever joined me. It relaxed me after work.

More importantly, it gave me a sense of purpose. My job often seemed pointless, like when crime victims blamed me for not being there fast enough to prevent the situation, and Lindsey’s job kept her for longer and longer hours. The dead, though, needed someone not to forget about them.

* * *

It was early August when I got dispatched to the domestic violence call. After the dispatcher was finished with the official information, my sergeant called me over Channel 2. “The Aldens are frequent flyers. Every two weeks when the money runs out, Axel beats Candy, blames her for spending it all. Just arrest him and bring him to county. He’ll show up with flowers tomorrow and she’ll take him back. No big deal.”

Of course it’s a big deal, I wanted to argue. Didn’t New Hampshire have the same DV laws as New York? What about the one time he punches her the wrong way and she dies? But I held back. I’d be better off saving it for Candy Alden.

The Aldens’ trailer sat by itself just outside of town, the other side from where Lindsey and I lived. It was an older double-wide, two-toned with white on the top half and brick red on the bottom half. I could hear the yelling from the driveway, inside my cruiser with the windows rolled up and the a/c blowing. It made me wonder who’d called it in, if anyone had at all, or if this was so routine here in the sticks that Dispatch just sent cops out here when the right time rolled around.

I got out. Slid my baton through its loop, made sure I had my OC spray ready, and mentally ran through a few scenarios as I walked up to the back door. By the time I rapped on the glass with my knuckles, I was ready.

Another unit rolled in behind me. Good, I thought, I can take one while he takes the other. “Police,” I told Axel Alden when he asked.

He opened the door. “What’s the problem, Officer?” Total fucking script.

“Got a report of a disturbance here.” I tried to sound normal, force the shaking from my voice, because I’d just seen another of those white shapes. It flitted from one room to another behind him.

“Candy,” Alden called.

She appeared instantly. Wearing a gauzy white summer dress trimmed with eyelet lace. Real, human. I wondered if the dress was new, the reason for tonight’s fight, if she’d just wanted her man to take her out somewhere. Now she floated toward me, shoulders hunched, chin lowered, looking up at me from right below a fringe of dark bangs.

I wanted to kill him for making her look that way.

“How ya doin’, Axel,” the other cop said behind me.

Axel looked over my shoulder and grinned. “Howie.” He shouldered past me on his way down the steps. The wooden-framed screen door banged shut behind him. Candy and I stood alone, staring at each other through the grimy screen.

“C’I come in?” I asked her, reaching for the door handle.

She shrugged. Turned away from me so her skirt flared at her ankles. Her shoulders shook so hard that one worked loose of the wide neckline. Bruises bloomed on her skeletal upper arm.

She went to the sink. I was looking at her back. “Get you a glass of water?” she asked in a soft voice that matched the bangs.

“No, thanks.” I opened the door, stepped inside. “How you doing?”

“I’m all right.” She reached into the dish rack. I couldn’t tell what she was doing or thinking or feeling. She could just as well be reaching for a gun, finally sick of the cops hauling her man off to jail. The skin on the nape of my neck prickled. I laid a hand on the butt of my weapon.

Then she turned on the tap. Water rushed into the glass. She turned it off and faced me, dark eyes huge above the rim. She was pretty, small bones, her summer tan already fading. I noticed he didn’t leave a mark on her face. I wouldn’t either.

Her eyes dropped to my waist and I realized I was still holding my grips. I took my hand away. My face, I was sure, glowed.

“So what’d you hear?” She took a sip.

“Excuse me?”

“You’re new. What’d the other cops tell you ‘bout Axel and me?” Her voice was a teenager’s, high-pitched but not unpleasant. Not like Lindsey’s brassy Queens tone.

I owed her the truth, even if it meant letting her keep the upper hand, which I wasn’t sure I’d ever had. “You fight regularly. He hits you. But he always apologizes.”

She pinned me with those big eyes until I got to the last part. Then her stare fell away and my boots got the heat. “He always apologizes,” she muttered.

I’d added it in case she got defensive about the hitting. “Not that—look, if it bothers you, why do you stay with him?”

Again she looked me head-on. “Where’m I gonna go?” For the first time, I thought she might be a little drunk. “When we got married, he brought me here from a foster home up in Intervale. I was just 18 and he told me I’d never have to move around again. And I haven’t. It’s just been me in this trailer for five years.”

So she had no family. “You got a friend you could stay with?”

“In this town? Where he could find me if he spit far enough?”

“Well, how about tonight?”

Again the stare at the floor. “I guess.”

Meaning she knew someone she could call, but it would be a major inconvenience. What kind of friend made a person feel like an asshole when they really needed help? I couldn’t help thinking I’d only ever seen that happen among women. “If you stay here, you going to be okay?”

A wry smile twisted her lips. “Always am.”

I thought about giving her my card, telling her to call me if she ever needed a shoulder or a restraining order, but my bet was that the other cops had already tried that. Instead, I was starting to think Candy Alden had only one way out.

I took a quick look around the trailer. “Montecristos.” I pointed to the box on the kitchen table. “My dad used to smoke those.”

“They stink. I hate that he took up cigar smoking.” Candy nudged her chin toward the door. “He gets them at a discount at the smoke shop in Portsmouth where he works. I think he does it just to piss me off.”

I bet smoking was the least of the things he did to piss her off.

* * *

I came off duty Labor Day weekend to find Lindsey had waited up for me. Not like her at all. “What?” I sounded pissy. I was pissy. Staties had been running DWI checkpoints all weekend and needed us to pick up the slack on crashes up on 101. There were three of those. One fatal. I spent an extra half hour at the scene, doing paperwork I could’ve done at the station. But the college kid who died needed the company. He looked stunned, like he’d known it would happen eventually but not this soon.

So Lindsey waiting for me signaled nothing good. “What?” I repeated, pissier this time, because she hadn’t said a word and I wouldn’t be able to sleep until she let down whatever hung in the air between us.

“I met someone.” She averted her eyes, glanced quickly at me, averted them again.

“You. What?” Numb. I felt numb.

“I met someone. Another realtor. A colleague. His name’s Bret and he lives in Exeter.”

The numbness turned to buzzing. “How long?”

“Few months.” The clipped reply told me it had to have started not long after we moved, probably right when she got her license. Still, she may as well have sucker punched me when she said, “I’m moving in with him.”

The buzzing turned into a rage that filled my head, blinded me. She’d already given up on so much. Now she was giving up on the one thing we had left together, even if it was just a shell.

She again looked at me. This time tears had formed in her eyes. “I hope you can find someone to spend time with.”

I didn’t tell her I already had.

* * *

The next weekend, I traveled out to Manchester. Found a little smoke shop that sold every variety of cigars, including the Montecristos. They were common enough, and I could’ve gotten them in Portsmouth, but I didn’t need Axel—or anyone else—to remember me.

At work that night, I smoked one. It tasted awful. Bitter and smoky like a greenwood fire.

I drove out to the Aldens’ trailer. It was a warm night, just this side of muggy. All the windows were open, the big one in the back of the trailer open the widest. I cruised by, looking the whole thing over. No dog. Quiet neighbors. A woods bordered the park; on the other side, I knew, was an equipment rental business. No one would notice me coming into the park from that side.

In case they did, I dressed like one of them. Stained ripped jeans, plaid flannel shirt over a wife-beater, baseball cap over my high-and-tight. If I got caught I’d act like a drunk leaving his girlfriend’s house. This trailer park might be quiet, but it didn’t mean the people didn’t pull the same shit as everyone else.

I didn’t get caught. I got up close to that bedroom window and looked inside. Candy Alden was sprawled prone and naked across the sheets. I couldn’t tell if the dark spots on her pale skin were shadows or bruises. More importantly, she was alone.

Shit. Where was Axel?

I backed up. My plan wouldn’t work if she was alone.

Then a toilet flushed. Snuffling like a hog, Axel came back into the bedroom. He got on top of Candy and started pumping her like she was a blow-up doll. I wanted to puke. I almost lit them up then and there.

Instead I waited until I heard Axel’s rattling snores. Then I reached up and cut the screen. I lit one of the Montecristos. Held aside the screen flap and looked inside to gauge my distance. Candy hadn’t moved. My gut flipped and I wondered if she was already dead. It didn’t matter. I flicked the smoldering cigar onto the bed.

I didn’t stick around to find out what happened. Everyone knew trailers were tinderboxes.

Sure enough, the next night when I came on duty, the whole shift was still talking about it. And Candy was waiting for me across the street from the park. I ate dinner with her sitting in the passenger seat. I could tell she was grateful I’d saved her, that I was here for her now. Would I always? Time would tell, but for now it was just her and me—and the rest.

I spent my dinner breaks with Candy for two weeks straight after that. Sometimes other dead would join us. Axel was never among them.

It wasn’t what I thought it would be, though. Candy wasn’t—well, she wasn’t Lindsey.

* * *

I took the midnight shift and started to use the rest of the time to figure out my wife’s new life. I’d follow her to Exeter in the evenings and spend a few hours trying to figure out how to get her back.

It would have to look like an accident, like Candy’s death. That would be a lot harder. Neither Lindsey nor the boyfriend smoked, and their vehicles were in mint condition. Arson investigators were too slick not to catch a dryer or electrical fire that had been manufactured.

Then a freak Halloween nor’easter was forecast, and I realized maybe it would be easier than I thought.

It was a blizzard much like the one that made a tragedy of our life together. So appropriate. I sat down the street from her new house and dialed her cell phone. It was 10 p.m. and the snow had started to fly half an hour ago. “Lindsey,” I slurred when she picked up. She never shut off her phone before 11.

“Keith? What are you doing?” Her tone, sharp. She was annoyed. But also worried.

“Think I drank too much… Linds… I love you, babe.” I dropped the phone on my lap, left the line open. Through the receiver I heard her tinny little voice call my name a few times. Then silence. I looked up the block and waited.

He came outside with her, reaching, grasping in his shirt sleeves. But she twisted away, jumped into her car and backed out fast. I saw her fishtail a little into the street. Yup. This would be easy.

I followed her along the roads until Epping. She drove erratically, fast and then slow, nothing to do with the conditions.

A deep ravine ran under the road. I waited until a half mile before we got there. Then I edged up on her bumper. She sped up. My speedometer read 45, so she had to be doing at least 50.

No one else was in sight. BRIDGES FREEZE FIRST, read the sign 200 feet from the ravine. I edged up again. This time I managed to tap the corner of her bumper. She slid away from me. I watched her fishtail toward the bridge, the gap between the shoulder and the guardrail. Her taillights disappeared into the swirling snow.

I kept going. I could have stopped, but what if someone else happened by? What if she’d survived and recognized me? I just had to take a chance.

On the bridge my tires hit ice. I could feel it in the wheels, which suddenly sounded rough. The rear bumper skewed ever so slightly. Good thing the Suffolk County P.D. had trained me for this. It was nothing to get the car driving straight again.

Still, I couldn’t help thinking how ironic it would’ve been for me to wipe out and end up with Lindsey in more ways than I’d counted on. Maybe it wouldn’t have made any difference, but for me it did.

I got back home, got ready for work, and went on duty. I wasn’t surprised that the hunt was already on for Lindsey. Her boyfriend had gotten worried and called the station, complete with story about me. “I have no idea what he’s talking about, Sarge,” I said when he asked. “Do I look drunk?”

“So who was it?” was his answer.

“Beats me. Maybe a ghost.” I snagged a piece of chicken corn from the bowl on his desk. “Look, Sarge, I don’t mean to be flip. I just can’t believe this guy I don’t even know is using me for an excuse.”

“Yeah.” Something in his mind didn’t match. I could see it in his eyes. But it had been two hours and four inches, and wind whistled past the windows at forty miles an hour. The wind chill had to be in the single digits. Even if she survived the wreck, the odds of her surviving the weather were slim.

Sure enough. They found her the next morning. The front of her SUV had crumpled, but she’d tried to escape out the back. Hypothermia had taken her as she struggled up the slope.

After the funeral I went back to the ravine. She was there, glaring at me. I’d wondered if she’d be reunited with our babies, and she was. She held them in her arms. The three of them stared right through me.

“Oh, stop.” I pulled out the white cross I’d brought to erect there, along with an autumn arrangement. The whole thing had cost me almost a hundred bucks. “What was I supposed to do, Linds? I missed you so much. I just wan—” My throat choked up. “I just wanted my family back.”

Sometimes she brings the girls. Sometimes the others join us. Sometimes I can’t meet them because of a call, but I see them on the side of the road, like wisps of fog, watching. I always feel like they’re waiting, though for what, I don’t know. What I do know is that none of them needs to be lonely anymore. And neither do I.