One of Us Read online

  “Rafe didn’t exactly wrong her.”

  “Rafe’s a good man. He’ll do anything for you except give even the tiniest bit of himself. Most women expect at least a little piece.”

  “Most women want all of it.”

  “Really?”

  She fixes me with an intensely probing gaze, the meaning of which I can’t quite determine. I’m reminded of the other day and how our first meeting had ended on a sour note. I don’t want to get in an argument with her again.

  Fortunately the trailer door bangs open and her brother with the viselike grip steps in.

  “You got any tape?” he asks Brenna.

  She goes to the desk and tosses a roll of reflective duct tape at him.

  He catches it and begins ripping off pieces he wraps around the cuffs of his sleeves and his pant legs.

  I silently congratulate myself on the fact that I’ve never had a job that requires taping my clothing so parts of my body won’t be chewed off by machinery.

  “How are you doing?” she asks him.

  “I’m fine. What kind of question is that?”

  “The kind of question a sister asks her brother when she’d like to know how he’s doing.”

  “Everything’s great.”

  He throws the tape back at her and stalks past me on his way toward the door.

  “Nice to meet’cha,” he mumbles.

  “Is anything wrong?” I ask her once he’s safely outside again. “You look upset.”

  “His wife lost her job,” she explains. “They have four kids. This job has been a godsend for him but it might not be here tomorrow. I don’t know what they’re going to do.”

  She pauses.

  “I look at their situation and all I can think is how lucky I am that my kids are grown and it looks like they’re going to be okay.”

  “You’re old enough to have grown kids?”

  “I got pregnant with my first right out of high school. They’re eighteen and twenty. My son’s in the army and my daughter’s a freshman at Pitt. She wants to be a doctor. We’ll see what happens. Not bad for a couple of yokels.”

  I glance at her to see if she’s smiling but she’s not.

  “I tried to explain that.”

  “I know what you were trying to say, but you didn’t have to be mean about it.”

  “People here were mean to me first.”

  Her frown deepens.

  “Listen to yourself. You sound like you’re five years old.”

  I open my mouth to protest but she won’t let me.

  “What about you? Any kids?”

  “No.”

  “Wife? Ex-wife?”

  “No.”

  “There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with you. You make a good living. You’re not bad looking.”

  “Why do you have to assume there’s something wrong with me because I’ve never been married or have any children?”

  “Most people do it, that’s all. Whether they should or not. Sometimes whether they want to or not. It’s what we’re supposed to do, so we do it.”

  “Is that why you got married?”

  “The first time? Pretty much. Plus I was pregnant.”

  “What about the second?”

  “Rebound guy. French. Met him in an airport coming back from one of my tours. The accent really got to me.”

  “You married a guy because of his accent?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “I once slept with a woman because she used the word ‘lain’ correctly in a sentence.”

  She giggles at me over the rim of her coffee mug, and despite the snow that’s begun falling softly outside the trailer window, my mind drifts back to high school and that last week before summer break when the girls were allowed to wear shorts. All those bare legs and round bottoms and flashes of soft bellies between bandanna belts and faded halter tops. They’d glide by with glitter-painted toenails sticking out from plastic sandals, laughing like Brenna and tossing their heads, filling the halls with the tantalizing smell of their fruit-flavored Lip Smackers and cheap roll-on perfumes, as unself-conscious as flowers, not understanding the meaning they brought to the world simply by being in it.

  I was never allowed anywhere near that particular garden until today.

  thirteen

  I LET BRENNA DRIVE ME back to Tommy’s house, and I tell her I owe her a favor.

  Mom’s in her reindeer bathrobe busy at the stove. Tommy’s sitting in his chair cleaning his rifle, wearing one of her hand-crocheted hats. It’s a green one with the word FORGIVENESS stitched across the border. Mom is wearing a purple TOLERANCE hat.

  My orange GOOD SENSE OF HUMOR hat has been given to the deer head.

  “You know you can’t shoot ghosts,” I tell him. “They’re already dead.”

  He glances up from his gun.

  “Raccoon’s been in my trash again.”

  “Do you want some breakfast?” Mom calls out.

  I walk over to her and see what’s on the menu.

  “You need to eat, Danny, or you’ll never fill out. Have some creamed dried beef,” she instructs, dragging a wooden spoon around a frying pan full of bubbling red and white muck.

  “Wonderful,” I say. “Our yearly salt requirement satisfied in one meal.”

  “When you have food you should eat it,” Mom explains. “We might not have any tomorrow. Or we might be dead or we might be held captive against our will.”

  She explains these scenarios without expression, apparently not the least bit upset by the possibility of any of them occurring. She obviously took her pills this morning. The medication helps control her illness but it also erases her personality. People’s identities are shaped by their beliefs, even if they’re wildly untrue; eliminate them and their lives become banal. My mother sees herself as the heroine in an epic tale of good versus evil, even though the extent of her good deeds might only be painting a garage or knitting hats, but when she’s medicated, she believes she’s weak and useless.

  “Do we have any cereal?” I ask.

  “Lucky Charms,” Mom replies.

  I sigh and look behind me at the boxes of cookies and snack cakes sitting on the table. On the way home from the hospital we made another stop at the Bi-Lo.

  I can’t stop my mind from drifting back in time to our own kitchen was filled with the dozens of cookies she used to bake. They were wondrous creations: peanut butter blossoms with Hershey kisses in the center; warm, gooey pecan tassies she called fairy pies; ginger snaps that smelled like autumn; thumbprints filled with dabs of glistening raspberry jam. But my favorites were the sugar cookies, the hearts and stars and bears and shamrocks frosted in every color imaginable and topped with sprinkles and gleaming silver candy balls.

  I never knew when I’d wake up in the morning or come home from school to find them already made or when she’d have me help her. Afterward we’d drive around town giving them to people. The trips would start out full of fun and good intentions, but one time we ended up far from home lost and out of gas, and another time she got caught up in the excitement of our mission and started driving too fast and hit a phone pole. I broke my wrist. She bloodied her nose and broke a rib. The car suffered the most damage. Dad took away her car keys after that.

  A vivid picture of her emerges, young and lovely, with shiny red hair like a new penny, pulled back in a ponytail. She’s rubbing her big belly, talking about how the next batch of cookies we make will be for Molly. (She already had her name picked out. She was certain the baby was going to be a girl.) How she won’t be able to eat them because she’ll be too little. She won’t have teeth. I laugh at this. I can’t imagine how weird she’ll look without teeth. Mom laughs, too. She ruffles my hair and tells me I will always be her special boy. Molly will be her special girl and she wants me to love Molly as m
uch as she does. I promise her I will.

  I dashed off to the school bus and left her behind, seeming painfully well and deceptively content, alone with the dozens of dazzling cookies she had made in the middle of the night stacked all along the countertops.

  When I returned home from my few hours of kindergarten, every single one had been destroyed. The kitchen was covered in crumb carnage. Mom sat at the table, her eyes as empty as the ones in Tommy’s deer head, her hands, her hair, her cheeks streaked with frosting and sprinkles. I burst into tears, not sure if I was more upset about the loss of the cookies or the loss of my mother yet again.

  They were ugly, she told me in her chilling monotone. She was worthless. She couldn’t do anything right.

  Tommy has put on his coat and cap.

  “Going to get the mail,” he tells us.

  On his way out, the phone rings and he snatches up the receiver without bothering to glance at caller ID. It’s an irrelevant service for him since he would never not answer a call. He enjoys berating telemarketers even more than chatting with friends.

  “Yes, this is Thomas McNab,” I hear him say. “He is. Sure you are.”

  He turns to me with a skeptical grin and holds out the phone.

  “Some joker wants to talk to you. Says he’s Walker Dawes. Probably one of your psycho pals from prison.”

  “Hello?” I say hesitantly while watching Tommy out the window make his way across the porch and down the icy steps with the help of his cane.

  “Yes, hello. Is this Sheridan Doyle?”

  The voice on the other end is smooth and refined with a tinge of affectation to it.

  “Yes?”

  “This is Walker Dawes.”

  An irrational fear courses through me. For a moment, I’m convinced I’m speaking to the original Walker Dawes, who could only be calling from the grave, or in his case from the cold, airless, marble interior of his family’s mausoleum. I can’t think of anything to say.

  “I hope you don’t mind me calling you at your grandfather’s home. I heard you were here taking care of him while he recovers from his recent illness.”

  “How did you know?”

  “Oh, little birdies. Spies. Snooping is my hobby.”

  “I’m sorry, but I’m a little confused. You don’t know me.”

  “No, but I know of you, and I’m sure you know of me.”

  “Yes . . .”

  “It’s because I know of you that I’m calling. I’d like to discuss something with you. It’s a little delicate so I’d prefer to do it in person. Will you be free later today?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Wonderful. Do you know where I live?”

  I’ve met and worked with and even befriended the rich and famous. I’m certainly not impressed or intimidated by this man’s wealth or his reputation, yet now that I’m being offered the chance to finally meet him I’m not sure I want to. I’m not flustered by who he is, but there’s a part of me that’s unnerved by what he’s always represented to this town.

  “If I head north, it’s the first fifty-room mansion to the left,” I reply.

  “Very good,” he laughs. “Actually, it’s fifty-five, but who’s counting?”

  He hangs up and I’m left staring at the phone, not completely sure what just happened but certain of one thing: I can’t wait to tell Tommy about this.

  I look out the front window and see him standing on the side of the road in front of his mailbox with a collection of bills and catalogs in one hand and a single piece of paper in the other held close to his face.

  His expression is almost fearful. He’s so preoccupied with what he’s reading, he doesn’t even look up when I open the front door and call to him.

  I run out and join him at the mailbox.

  “Danny,” he says simply and holds out the sheet of paper to me.

  I look at the words typed in the center of it.

  SHE’S INNOCENT. YOUR GRANDDAUGHTER’S STILL ALIVE.

  “Who would do this? Who could be this mean?” he asks in a mystified pleading tone, too sad to be angry. “It must be a prank.”

  He hands me the envelope. It’s typed, too. There’s no return address and it has a Barclay postmark.

  This isn’t the first time someone has anonymously harassed us because of my mother’s crime. Back when it happened, Tommy’s house and truck were vandalized. Someone spray-painted “murderer” and “baby killer” on his front sidewalk. Someone threw a rock through one of his windows. Yet even at the height of my mom’s notoriety, no one ever sent a note like this one. No one ever claimed she was innocent, and certainly no one suggested that my sister was alive.

  “After all these years,” Tommy says, shaking the note at me. “What do you think it means?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He puts a trembling hand on my arm and he’s suddenly a confused, vulnerable old man who needs my help and I don’t like it. I don’t know what to do. I never realized until this moment how much I’ve always depended on him to be able to weather any indignity or assault, to be invincible and eternal like the hills.

  Tommy holds the piece of paper out to me again.

  “Could it be true?” he says.

  I know how much he’s always desperately wanted to believe in these words, but there’s no denying the fact that Molly was killed. Her body was found buried in our backyard. Mom’s the only one who could have done it.

  I put my arm around his shoulders and we walk back into the house together. My cell phone is ringing when we get inside. It’s Rafe.

  “Have I got something to show you, Danno,” he says.

  fourteen

  I NEVER USE THE WORD “wow,” but it’s the only word that comes to mind.

  “Wow,” I say.

  “Is that your professional opinion?” Rafe asks.

  “Level-four disposaphobe.”

  “Huh?”

  “That’s the psychiatric term for a hoarder. Level five is the most severe, but she had some boundaries. She kept the floor relatively clear and her compulsion was very specific. She was attracted to color, sparkle, and childish objects that represent happiness and fantasy.”

  “Reminds me of . . .” He pauses and scratches his head. “What’s the name of those stuffed animals? My girls used to play with them. They were all different colors and had a cartoon about love and sharing. If you watched more than thirty seconds of it you wanted to go outside and kick a cat.”

  “Care Bears,” I provide.

  “Yeah, that’s it. It looks like a bunch of Care Bears puked all over her house.”

  Marcella Greger lies on the floor in front of her couch next to an overturned coffee table. She’s flat on her back, staring at the ceiling, her arms at her sides. She could be meditating except for the pool of blood soaked into the carpet, spreading out behind her head like a black halo.

  During all my years of working with violent criminals, I’ve never actually seen any of their handiwork in person. I’ve looked at countless crime scene photos, none more gruesome than the ones taken of Carson’s victims: four little boys between six and eight years old—around the same age he was when his mother was first arrested for prostitution—their throats neatly, deeply slit from ear to ear, the wounds gaping open like grins beneath their real mouths, which were set in grim lines of pale blue rigor. Their severed genitals lay in tidy little bloody piles where their Adam’s apples would have eventually bulged if they had lived long enough.

  I never asked him why he did what he did. Serial killers rarely offer explanations. By delving into their backgrounds and asking about everything else in their lives aside from the murders they commit, a good psychologist can usually find the answers that they didn’t even know themselves.

  Carson developed a habit of asking me questions about my own life that I came to discov
er was his way of answering mine.

  On the day I spread out the photos of his victims in front of him and asked him to explain what he saw, he studied them without emotion then looked up at me and asked, “Why didn’t you ever have kids?”

  I understood immediately that he saw his slaughter and castration of boys of a certain age to be no different than my failure to procreate. We were both sending messages to our mothers.

  I will never forget those photos, yet their grisliness didn’t move me the way Marcella’s body does.

  Death can’t be fathomed through sight, I realize. It can’t be seen but must be felt, since it is the absence of something, not the presence.

  Rafe starts to unwrap a Jolly Rancher, stops, and puts it back into his pocket. It’s blue.

  He takes out another one.

  “The niece found her,” he starts explaining. “She comes by once a week to check on her. Doesn’t have a family of her own. Nothing valuable in the house. Smalls and Razzano went through it. Doesn’t look like anything’s missing.”

  “How could you tell?”

  “Her purse is here. Wallet. Credit cards. Some cash. Car’s in the garage. Door was unlocked but the niece says that’s normal. I’d say she’s been dead since yesterday,” he finishes.

  “Did you find a murder weapon?”

  “A rainbow.”

  He says this in deadpan. I decide not to question him further. Considering the house she lived in, his answer seems appropriate.

  “I’d say it was a single blow considering the lack of blood spatter. No rage. Nothing personal. Cold and calculated. I found this lying next to her and this under the couch.”

  He shows me a recently used coffee mug and a glass smudged with lipstick. A few drops of what smells like bourbon cling inside it.

  “Do you think this means she knew her killer?” I ask. “It looks like she was having a drink with someone. The lipstick doesn’t belong to the victim.”

  “Yeah. She’s not wearing any.”

  “And it’s too expensive.”

  Rafe stops clacking his candy against his teeth and gives me an amused stare.