The game wardens and sheriff’s officers mostly saw to keeping people from hunting or timber harvesting on the preserve. For the most part, since it couldn’t be used for hunting, the extensive tract of land was ignored and forgotten.
For some reason long forgotten, her grandparents’ sixty acres hadn’t been included in the preserve, and, it being so isolated, they had been able to buy it for a price they could afford. Once her grandfather had the land, he did what he knew best: he built the cabin, as he and Angela’s grandmother called it, out of brick.
While he wasn’t a big man, laying brick and block his whole working life left him sinewy and strong. Vito Constantine was a gentle man but he possessed an air of quiet authority. People instinctively knew not to cross him.
Since the road going past didn’t go directly to anywhere important, people rarely came around their place. Once, a couple of young men who didn’t respect the no-trespassing signs ended up with broken bones and memory loss. All they could seem to remember when questioned by the police was having fallen off a ladder.
Over the years, her grandfather’s wolverine-like reputation had cast a spell of sorts over the property, so much so that even after his death people continued to avoid “the Constantine place.” It also helped that there was no hunting in the preserve, so people rarely had any reason to be in the area. Cars parked along the road running past the property and the preserve were easily spotted by the sheriff and wardens.
The property was a kind of outlier from Milford Falls, for all practical purposes a dead end with few reasons for people to be out there. That was one of the reasons her grandparents liked it. That’s the way Angela liked it.
Angela parked at the side, turned off the truck, and sat for a few minutes, eyes closed, enjoying the quiet, forested seclusion of her cabin. After a time, she got out and uncoiled the garden hose from up against the house, then dropped the tailgate and hopped up into the bed of the truck. She hosed out the lacings of her boots before turning her attention to blasting the nooks and crannies of the truck bed to clean out all the blood. She kept hosing water around until the water that ran out ran clear, no longer showing any trace of blood.
Once finished, she unlocked the heavy oak door to the cabin and went inside. The place wasn’t very big. It had a living room with a woodstove across the front with a kitchen behind to the left. To the right, behind the living room, was bedroom and bath. It wasn’t a big house, but it was all her grandparents had needed, all Angela needed. She liked the small, cozy nature of the place as well as the seclusion.
Between the bathroom and the living room there was a door that led down to the basement—far and away the most interesting room in the house as far as Angela was concerned.
At the back, between the kitchen and bedroom was a small mudroom at a back door. Angela opened an upper cabinet in the small mudroom and retrieved a nearly full gallon jug of bleach.
Back at the truck, she poured the bleach all over the bed, sloshing it into the corners and seams until she had used it all. She tossed out the empty jug, picked up the hose, and once again thoroughly washed out the truck bed.
Angela knew enough about forensics to be aware that there was plenty she didn’t know and would never know. She held no illusions that she was smarter than the police, or that she could cover up a killing and never be found out. She knew that there were experts who could recover evidence in ways she couldn’t begin to imagine.
That was the risk she had to run.
Her only safety was in being as careful as possible and above all maintaining a low profile. She did her best to fly under the radar by avoiding connections to trouble and avoiding all the various kinds of authorities. Owen’s was the only body she’d ever left to be found. She hoped that once the police found Carrie’s body they would be focused on the women Owen had killed, rather than on who killed Owen.
Angela knew that if there was ever reason to take a close look at her in connection with deaths, experts could always find something incriminating. So, she did her best not to ever leave anything for them to find. She also did her best not to give them a reason to look in her direction in the first place.
She didn’t want to be a needle in the haystack; she wanted to remain a needle in the boundless forest. It helped that she didn’t have friends and didn’t socialize. People generally didn’t know much about her other than what she let them see on the surface.
Once the bed of the truck was cleaned to the best of her ability, she got a spray bottle of cleaner and a rag and went about cleaning the inside of the truck, wiping away any fingerprints Owen might have left. She cleaned the door wherever he might have touched it when getting in or out of the truck, as well as the tailgate and sides of the bed he could have touched.
Angela knew that the police would eventually come around with a photo of Owen, asking if he had come into the bar. She would tell them the truth, that he had. They would want to know what he’d had to say. She would tell them the truth, that he’d hit on her and wanted her to come back to his motel, she said no, and he left after last round was called. Barry would corroborate everything she would tell the police.
Owen had been outside alone with her truck for quite a while, so she didn’t know where he might have put his hands. If the police did happen to find his fingerprint somewhere on the outside of the truck, she could always say that for all she knew it was because he had been looking to break into it. How would she know? She had been inside working and then cleaning up after the bar had closed. As long as they didn’t find any fingerprints inside the truck they had no reason to investigate Angela any further.
That was the key to her survival—make sure the authorities had no reason to ever look at her any further.
She worked on the truck until she was confident every surface inside was free of Owen’s fingerprints.
She let out a sigh as she flicked her rag back to lay it over her shoulder. It had been a long day. She was relieved to be home at her cabin in the woods, away from people.
When she had been a young girl, Angela had stayed with her grandparents often, either at their house in town or more often at their cabin in the woods. The house in town was on a small lot close to other homes that all looked alike. Angela loved being with her grandparents anywhere, but she much preferred the cabin, where there were no other people around and seemingly endless woods to explore.
When she had been younger, Angela’s mother, Sally, didn’t much care that her parents took care of Angela so often. In reality, a lot of the time Sally was so high she didn’t even notice that Angela was gone. Her mother rarely kept track of her.
Her grandparents, on the other hand, were protective of Angela and always knew where she was or at least where she was supposed to be. They were more like parents to her than her mother ever was.
Angela’s mother didn’t care about much of anything, except getting high. She wasn’t picky about what kind of cigarettes she smoked, what brand of beer she was drinking, what kind of booze, or who she slept with. She was much the same with drugs. She had used cocaine since long before Angela was born, and when meth became readily available and cheap she often turned to that. While she would snort, smoke, or shoot just about anything, meth became her drug of choice. But she would happily use cocaine if it was available.
Both would leave her wired for days. After being high for three or four days, she smoked weed to bring herself down so she could sleep. She occasionally shot up heroin to bring herself down enough to sleep. But then she could get into a cycle of using heroin.