Unspeakable Things by Jess Lourey
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I was one of a few hundred kids to come of age in Paynesville, Minnesota, in the 1980s. I grew up thinking that every small town had a curfew siren that warned the children indoors at 9:00 p.m., that Chester the Molester was a common nickname for the bogeyman, that Peeping Toms were not unusual. I had my own problems at home, some childish, others much more serious, but the rumors of a man hunting children became the backbeat of my preteen and teen years.
I graduated high school in 1988 and moved to Minneapolis.
When Jacob Wetterling was abducted on October 22, 1989, from St. Joseph, Minnesota, thirty miles up the road from Paynesville, I was preparing to drop out of my second year of college. Those rumors from my early years (don’t go out at night or Chester will get you!) rushed back into focus. Pictures of Jacob were everywhere. People came together to search for that sweet-faced eleven-year-old who’d been abducted by a masked man with a gun. Days passed into weeks into years, and Jacob was never found. Not until a local blogger began writing about the potential connection between Jacob’s disappearance and the abduction and release of eight boys in and around Paynesville in the ’80s was Jacob’s abductor arrested, twenty-seven years later. He led authorities to Jacob’s remains.
The experience has haunted me. It’s haunted many of us in the Midwest, upending what we thought we knew about rural communities and the safety of children. The true version of events has been told well in other places, most notably in season one of the In the Dark podcast. It was the emotional repercussions of those events that I needed to give voice to. I needed to create coherence out of my memories of growing up in chronic fear. When Cassie McDowell, the fictional heroine of this story, came to me and begged for her story to be told, I saw my chance.
While the story is inspired by real people and events, it is entirely fictional. However, it’s my hope that the character of Gabriel honors the goodness in all nine of those boys.
Thank you for reading.
PROLOGUE
The lonely-scream smell of that dirt basement lived inside me.
Mostly it kept to a shadow corner of my brain, but the second I’d think Lilydale, it’d scuttle over and smother me. The smell was a predatory cave stink, the suffocating funk of a great somnolent monster that was all mouth and hunger. It had canning jars for teeth, a single string hanging off a light bulb its uvula. It waited placidly, eternally, for country kids to stumble down its backbone stairs.
It let us swing blindly for that uvula string.
Our fingers would brush against it.
light!
The relief was candy and sun and silver dollars and the last good thing we felt before the beast swallowed us whole, digesting us for a thousand years.
But that’s not right.
My imagination, I’d been told, was quite a thing.
The basement wasn’t the monster.
The man was.
And he wasn’t passive. He hunted.
I hadn’t returned to Lilydale since that evening. The police and then Mom had asked if I wanted anything from my bedroom, and I’d said no. I’d been thirteen, not stupid, though a lot of people confuse the two.
Now that his funeral had called me home, that cellar stink doubled back with a vengeance, settling like a fishhook way deep in my face where my nose met my brain. The smell crept into my sleep, even, convinced me that I was trapped in that gravedirt basement all over again. I’d thrash and yell, wake up my husband.
He’d hold me. He knew the story.
At least he thought he did.
I’d made it famous in my first novel, shared its inspiration on my cross-country book tour. Except somehow I’d never mentioned the necklace, not to anyone, not even Noah. Maybe that piece felt too precious.
Or maybe it just made me look dumb.
I could close my eyes and picture it. The chain would be considered too heavy now but was the height of fashion in 1983, gold, same metal as the paper airplane charm hanging off it.
I’d believed that airplane necklace was my ticket out of Lilydale.
I didn’t actually think I could fly it. Big duh, as we said back then. But the boy who wore the necklace? Gabriel? I was convinced he would change everything.
And I guess he did.
CHAPTER 1
“Fifteen two, fifteen four, and a pair for six.” Sephie beamed.
Dad matched her smile across the table. “Nice hand. Cass?”
I laid down my cards, trying to keep the gloat off my face and failing. “Fifteen two, fifteen four, fifteen six, and a run for ten!”
Mom moved our peg. “We win.”
I shoulder-danced. “I can give you lessons if you want, Sephie.”
She rolled her eyes. “In being a poor sport?”
I laughed and dug into the popcorn. Mom had made a huge batch, super salty and doused in brewer’s yeast. That had been an hour earlier, when we’d started game night. The bowl was getting down to the old maids. I dug around for the ones showing a peek of white. Part-popped old maids are worth their weight in gold, taste-wise.
“Need a refill?” Dad stood, pointing at Mom’s half-full glass sweating in the sticky May air. Summer was coming early this year—at least that’s what my biology teacher, Mr. Patterson, had said. Was really going to mess with crops.
He’d seemed bothered by this, but I bet I wasn’t the only kid looking forward to a hot break. Sephie and I planned to turn as brown as baked beans and bleach our dark hair blonde. She’d heard from a friend of a friend that baby oil on our skin and vinegar water spritzed in our hair would work as well as those expensive coconut-scented tanning oils and Sun In. We’d even whispered about finding a spot at the edge of our property, where the woods broke for the drainage ditch, to lay out naked. The thought made me shiver. Boys liked no tan lines. I’d learned that watching Little Darlings.