by Ronald Malfi
As I approached the Delaware River on my way to Pennsauken, a hot ball of lead began to cultivate itself in the center of my queasy stomach. It seemed my excitement had begun to sour into apprehension the nearer I came to James de Campo’s residence. Driving across the Walt Whitman Bridge into Jersey, the faces of all those dead girls turned on a great wheel inside my head. By the time I reached the Jersey side, I felt as if I was going to throw up. First exit I came to, I veered off the highway, pulled into a gas station parking lot, and managed to open my car door just in time to dispatch a trembling, bitter ribbon of acid onto the pavement. When I was done, I went into the gas station and bought a travel-size container of mouthwash and a bottle of water. Over the next fifteen minutes, as the sky purpled with the threat of a storm, I sat in the car and listened to your shitty eighties music. I was trembling. And when my cell phone trilled, I nearly jumped out of my skin.
It was my sister Trayci. I stared at her name and number on the screen until the call went to voicemail.
2
Lafayette Street was a rundown residential strip of roadway situated beside an industrial park, and was flanked on both sides by one-story houses that looked like boxcars cut loose from a train. The houses stood against a backdrop of transmission towers equipped with flashing beacons at their tops. Telephone lines drooped like garlands only about eight feet above the sidewalk.
The storm had arrived, pounding out of the sky with a vengeance, by the time I pulled the Sube up to the curb in front of James de Campo’s address. It was a brick-fronted ranch house with an overgrown front yard and a prominent NO SOLICITING sign posted behind the panel of glass in the front door. A bathtub Madonna rose up like a phoenix from the weeds, weather-washed to a spectral white, except for her outstretched hands, which looked grimy with moss. Two vehicles sat in the driveway—a white Hyundai Sonata and a red Toyota short-bed pickup. No brown sedan.
On the drive over, I had concocted a story that I hoped would prevent James de Campo from slamming the door in my face at the sheer mention of the circumstances surrounding your sister’s murder. Perhaps he’d be compelled to hear me out if I told him his name featured prominently in your notes—notes for a book you were planning to write about the unsolved murder of your sister. If I led him to believe that a book was going to be published, he might agree to talk to me, if only to get out his side of the story. At least, that was my hope. It was the best I could come up with.
I waited for the thunderstorm to lessen to a drizzle before I got out of the car and walked up the wobbly concrete pavers toward the porch. I noticed that there were bars on the front windows. There was no doorbell so I knocked. I could hear a television blaring from inside. Overhead, thunder rolled across the sky; I managed to blade my body so that I was protected under the narrow awning of the porch from the drizzle spitting down from the clouds.
The door opened partway and a woman peered out at me. She was in her sixties, bleached blonde, with a year-round tan. She wore a loose-fitting terrycloth robe that gaped at the front, exposing the upper portion of a leopard-print bra and a silver crucifix nestled between her freckled cleavage. She eyed me with unmasked suspicion. “No soliciting,” she said, tapping a curled fingernail against the glass pane in the door.
“I’m looking for James de Campo.”
“You with the IRS?”
“No, ma’am. My name is Aaron Decker. I married a woman named Allison Thompson. She’d been writing a book about the death of her sister back in 2004, in Woodvine, Pennsylvania, and I was hoping to speak to Mr. de Campo about—”
“Holy shit, you got some balls,” the woman said, cutting me off. “You don’t fool me. Get out of here or I’ll call the cops.”
“Ma’am—”
“That girl is the devil,” the woman said, her face tightening.
“What?”
“We don’t want nothing to do with her. I’ll call the cops myself.”
“I think you’re thinking of someone else…”
“Oh, sure. You think I’m a moron, buddy? Get lost.”
“I don’t understand.”
“What do you want? What are you doing here?” Holding her robe closed with one hand, she peered past me at the Sube parked in the street. “Where is she? Where is she?”
“Allison’s dead,” I said. “She died back in December.”
This statement did not appear to alleviate the woman’s suspicion; if anything, her eyes narrowed further.
“Please,” I said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. What happened? Did something happen between Mr. de Campo and my wife?”
Some species of laughter erupted from the woman’s throat. It sounded birdlike and raw. “Did something happen? Who do you think I am?”
“Ma’am, I have no idea what you’re talking about. I swear.”
“What’d you say your name was?”
“Aaron Decker.”
“Your wife tried to kill my husband, Mr. Decker.”
I opened my mouth to say something more, but nothing came out. I thought I’d misheard her.
A metallic clacking sound issued from somewhere behind her in the gloominess of the house. A shape ambled into view, a swarthy, plodding silhouette with broad shoulders and big arms. A man’s voice accompanied it, rough as a foot callous: “Who is it?”
“The devil’s husband,” she said in a strange singsong voice, shoving the door open while stepping aside. This wasn’t an invitation for me to enter, but to allow the figure inside the house to get a better look at me. “Some guy who married Allison Thompson. Her.”
The man shambled into the doorway. He used a walker, which accounted for the metallic clanking I’d heard, and he moved with evident difficulty although he otherwise seemed to be in good shape. It was James de Campo, all right, though he looked like he’d aged a hundred years since the yearbook photo had been taken. He still wore his hair slicked back and curling behind his ears, but it had gone the color of smoke. His face was thinner and crosshatched by the scars of childhood acne, something that wasn’t readily visible in the yearbook photo or in the mugshot Peter Sloane had included with his paperwork. A steel-colored goatee wreathed his mouth, neatly trimmed. I might not have recognized him at all if it hadn’t been for his eyes—the same sly, calculating eyes from the yearbook photo. Predatory eyes. It was proof that age does not dilute the people we are.
“James de Campo,” I said.
“I hear you right, son? Allison Thompson’s dead?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Tell me how.”
“She was killed in a mall shooting back in December.”
“Was she the shooter?” de Campo asked. There was no trace of sarcasm in his voice. I noticed a droop to the left side of his mouth, as if he’d suffered a stroke and never fully recovered.
“Of course not. What the hell is going on?”
“Come in out of the rain,” he said.
“Jimmy,” said the woman, clearly displeased, but he ignored her.
I entered the house, careful to stand dripping on the tiny floor mat in the cramped little foyer, while the woman in the robe and leopard-print bra maneuvered around me to close the door. There was a living room with a ratty-looking sofa and recliner against one wall and a large bell-shaped birdcage containing two ashy-gray cockatiels in one corner. The TV was on but muted, some televangelist with a ventriloquist dummy’s plastic face and a three-piece suit, and there was a smell in the air of staleness and desperation.
“This isn’t a good idea, Jimmy,” the woman said, peering past the NO SOLICITING sign and out into the street. It was as though she did not believe me, and expected to find you standing out there on their lawn.
“I’m full of good ideas,” Jimmy responded. He clanked over toward the recliner and, with some difficulty, managed to drop his considerable bulk into the chair. He was wearing a green New York Jets sweatshirt and loose-fitting sweatpants with holes in the knees. His slippers looked orthopedic—delicate fabric equ
ipped with straps and clunky soles. “Sit,” he grunted at me, motioning toward the sofa.
“I’m putting clothes on,” announced de Campo’s wife, and she hurried off down the hallway.
I sat on the sofa, a smell like unwashed laundry and body odor wafting up from the cushions. De Campo snatched the TV remote from a side table and clicked off the set. Hanging on the wall above the TV was what looked like a paint-by-numbers portrait of Jesus Christ, as if done by a careless child with little artistic ability. Christ’s eyes were a startling, wolfish yellow, and appeared to dribble in streams down His sunken cheeks.
“The hell are you doing here?” James de Campo asked. “And don’t feed me no shit about writing some book.”
I glanced down at my hands, which were clutched together between my knees in a nervous tussle. “Carol Thompson,” I said. “Allison’s sister. I’m sure you remember what happened to her back in 2004.”
“What’s it to you?”
Because I didn’t have an answer for that, I said, “Your wife. What did she mean when she said Allison had tried to kill you?”
“Pretty much that,” he said, quite matter of fact. “First time, she showed up right there on our porch. Raving like a lunatic. Like a madwoman.”
“First time?” I said.
He ignored me. “I didn’t even recognize her. Had all her hair chopped off and dyed black. Been a few years since I’d seen her, as it was.”
“When was this?”
“Hell, it was years ago. I remember she was eighteen at the time, because she could’ve been charged as an adult for what she done to me.”
“What’d she do?”
“Came at me with a knife.” He rolled up the right sleeve of his sweatshirt to reveal a puckered whitish-pink helix of scar tissue, about three inches in length, running along the inside of his forearm. “Never thought I’d see that girl again in a million years. She’d been a kid last I’d seen her, and like I said, she didn’t look the same no more.”
“How’d she find you?”
“Good question. Never got around to asking. Was too busy trying not to get stabbed. Also, she wasn’t in the… well, she wasn’t in the best frame of mind. Brenda wanted me to send her away but she was making a scene on the porch and she wouldn’t leave. I told her to come in and we’d talk. Not that I had anything to say to her, but I didn’t want her out there rousing the neighbors and getting the police involved. Anyway, she didn’t want to talk. She wanted to lecture me on what a piece of shit I was. She also wanted to poke me in the gut like a rib-eye. Picked up a steak knife that was on the kitchen counter and came at me like Jack the fucking Ripper.”
He mimed a jabbing motion at my belly, causing me to jerk backward on the sofa. The cockatiels squawked and fluttered about in their cage.
“I wrestled the knife from her, but not before she split me open”—he traced a finger along the scar on his forearm—“and then I threw her out in the street. She stood out there screaming at the house, chucking rocks at the windows. Busted two of ’em. Brenda called the cops. By the time they showed up, Allison had left, but the police, they eventually picked her up at a gas station or someplace nearby. Asked me if I wanted to press charges.”
“Did you?”
“I don’t much like dealing with police,” he said.
“Why’d she attack you?”
“Because she’s fuckin’ crazy.”
“Mr. de Campo, I spoke with Peter Sloane earlier today. He was the detective who’d been investigating Carol Thompson’s murder back in 2004. He was—”
“I remember who he is,” he said flatly.
“Sloane said you picked up and left Woodvine soon after Carol was killed.”
“Rumors were going around. I lost my job. Had to move on.”
“This would be your job as a custodian at the high school?”
He grunted a noise that approximated an affirmative response.
“But you and Lynn Thompson were engaged.”
“Carol’s death changed things. I didn’t want to be there no more.”
“Why did Allison come here? She must’ve wanted to hurt you for a reason.”
James de Campo leaned forward in his chair. It looked like it pained him to do so, and I thought I could hear the creaking of his body. He massaged his right knee with one large hand as he spoke. “Why don’t you ask me what you came here to ask me, buddy, and quit with the bullshitting.”
I swallowed what felt like a mouthful of sand, and said, “Did you kill Carol Thompson?”
Something like a bitter grimace flashed across his face as he reclined back in the chair. “You’re as nuts as your dead wife. No. I never touched the girl.”
“That’s not what I heard.”
“Yeah? Well, fuck you.”
“Furnace, West Virginia,” I said. “Holly Renfrow. Newburg, Maryland. Gabrielle Colson-Howe. Vineland, New Jersey. Lauren Chastain. Bishop, North Carolina. Shelby Davenport. Whitehall, Delaware. Megan Pollock.”
“Son, you are nuts. What the hell are you talking about?” he said, and even as I continued to prattle off names and locations, I couldn’t help watch him rubbing one hand down the length of his right leg, an aggrieved, pained expression beneath the genuine confusion and mounting agitation on his face. My certainty dwindled to a brief pinpoint of light. I glanced at his walker and at his orthopedic slippers and tried to imagine him dragging Holly Renfrow into the woods beyond the overlook, negotiating along that perilous slope of hillside that concluded in a drop down to the Potomac River. A slope on which I’d lost my footing and nearly sent myself over the side. It seemed it’d be a physical impossibility for him.
The cockatiels clanged around in their cage, disconcerted. I could smell them.
“Allison came here raving like a madwoman,” I said. “Your words. Why?”
De Campo reached into the collar of his sweatshirt and produced a bronze medallion on a slender gold chain from around his neck. He leaned forward so I could get a good look at the triangle embossed on the medallion. I made out the words Unity, Service, Recovery. “That’s five years, seven months sobriety,” he said, not with pride but with a sense of regret that seemed to come up from a wellspring deep inside him. “I wasn’t the cheeriest motherfucker back when I knew those two girls.”
“You broke my wife’s leg.”
“You know,” he said, tucking the medallion back into his sweatshirt, “part of the Twelve Steps is asking forgiveness of those you’ve hurt, but what they don’t tell you is you probably won’t remember half the shit you done. So there’s that.”
“So you’re saying what? That Allison came here to confront you because you were a piece of shit to her and her sister when she was growing up? That it wasn’t because she thought you killed Carol?”
“Hell, she knew I didn’t kill her sister. She came here because she was fucked up in the head. Sister’s death messed her up pretty good and she didn’t know what to do about it. Maybe she blamed me because it was easy to blame me—I got one of them faces, I guess—but she knew I had nothing to do with it. You should’ve seen her when she showed up here on my porch. She looked like some homeless kid been eating outta trashcans. She was angry. That night Carol died, me and Carol, we’d been going at it, all right? Arguing. I don’t know. I was drunk and she was running around the neighborhood like a cat in heat. Maybe I laid hands on her; I can’t remember, but I’ll own it. That’s why she left the house. She wouldn’t have been killed if we hadn’t been fighting—that’s about the whole of it, least as far as Allison was concerned, right? So, yeah, sure, I’ll take the blame. Allison had no problem blaming me for it. Took a swipe, got some blood, there you go. I thought maybe that was the end of it, and maybe that’s why I decided not to press charges. Honestly, I don’t know. I was still drinking pretty heavy back then.”
“But it wasn’t the end of it, was it? You said that was the first time. What else is there? What else happened?”
“Happened,” screeched
one of the cockatiels, startling me.
James de Campo grimaced again, either from the pain in his throbbing right knee or from the memory of what he was about to tell me.
3
One evening back in 2013, before James de Campo had yet to embrace the comforting glow of sobriety, he had finished his custodial shift at the AMC theater in Pennsauken Plaza and had stopped on his way home at a local bar called the Cougar’s Den. True to its namesake, the place was populated primarily by middle-aged women in tight-fitting jeans, their cleavage on full display, their hair teased into an imitation Elvis pompadour. Jimmy had come here to ogle these women while knocking back vodka tonics with the authority of a squadron commander. After about an hour, he was seeing double and chatting somewhat morosely with a woman who sported a visible Van Halen tattoo upon the canvas of sparsely freckled flesh above her left breast. At some point, the woman vanished for the ladies’ room, running a set of acrylic fingernails along the nape of his neck as she departed, but then she never returned. That was the rub of it. For Jimmy de Campo, it sometimes seemed like the ladies’ room at the Cougar’s Den was a black hole into which random bimbos and middle-aged, sex-hungry divorcees were occasionally and inexplicably dispatched.
When he looked up from his fifth or sixth vodka tonic, he met the stately gaze of a young woman seated at a lone table across the barroom. Her features, delicate, were illuminated solely by the glow of a flickering candle in a glass jar seated at the center of the table. She was fairly attractive, what with her long, inky ringlets of hair and her ghost-white complexion, but it was the fact that she was the youngest woman—the youngest patron—in this place by at least three decades that commanded Jimmy’s attention.