I Mean You No Harm

by Beth Castrodale

  Though some might think it cold to get rid of a loved one’s things just days after their death, Bette was taking a healthy step forward, to Layla’s mind. For her part, Layla was still holding on to a good number of her mother’s and grandparents’ possessions, more than seemed reasonable after all these years.

  “Ordinarily,” Bette said, “I’d be out thousands of dollars for these things. This way, I spend nothing but traveling money. And I’ll be getting rid of some useless stuff. No disrespect to Dad, but I don’t golf. And I got my own landscaping tools.”

  It was news to Layla that Vic had been a golfer—one of countless things she’d never known about him, most of which would probably never come to light.

  Marla stacked a couple of empty plates onto her own. “Well, I wish you’d at least wait until you’re feeling better. Until you’re sure you’re feeling better.”

  “I know, I know. You’ve said that a thousand times.” Bette lowered her head to her hand, let out a long breath. After a moment, she raised her head, looked Marla in the eye. “Sorry. I know you’re just concerned, and I appreciate that. But I am feeling better, really.”

  Marla looked Bette over. She didn’t seem convinced.

  “It’s just a case of the flu,” Bette said.

  Marla didn’t reply, just rose from the table and started clearing it. In her silence, Layla sensed continuing disapproval, and maybe also worry.

  “Hey,” Bette said, glancing from Layla to Jake. “How about some ice cream?”

  “Yeah!” Jake pumped a fist in the air.

  Layla’s appetite was gone, but for some reason, she said, “Sure.”

  In the end, Jake had three scoops of vanilla-chocolate chip, earning a clean-bowl award. Layla finished one scoop and let the second melt away. Marla stirred one scoop around and around, taking maybe three bites.

  Bette tasted a single spoonful, and that was it. When the last of the dishes were in the sink, she turned to Layla. “Ready?”

  “Sure.”

  Bette led Layla to the second-floor hallway. There, she opened a hatch in the ceiling, pulled down a set of wooden stairs, started up them.

  “Watch your head,” she called over her shoulder.

  By the time Layla reached the top of the stairs, Bette had flipped on the lights, revealing a bare-rafter attic, deeply sloped on either side. Boxes had been stacked left and right, into the angles of the roof, but the center of the floor was clear, aside from a yellow beanbag chair and vinyl ottoman.

  “I need to go fish this thing out,” Bette said. “Have a seat.”

  Layla did, choosing the ottoman. Reclining in beanbag chairs always made her feel vulnerable, and a little idiotic.

  Earlier, Bette had kicked off her cowboy boots. Now, as she tunneled into a stand of boxes, her bare feet and browned legs were the only parts of her that remained visible. Her legs seemed to belong to someone younger and stronger, still capable of the types of escapes Bette was said to have made as a teenager—from shop owners she’d ripped off, from detention homes. They looked capable, too, of chasing bad guys, if her current job ever required that.

  After a brief struggle and a “Shit!” or two, Bette emerged, a shoebox-sized box in her hands. With its padded lid and maroon-velvet exterior, the box reminded Layla of a jewelry case, the kind that might be found in an old-school bordello.

  Bette handed Layla the box and lowered herself into the beanbag chair. She seemed to guess what Layla was thinking: that Layla’s mental picture of a gold-plated revolver was perhaps not far off the mark.

  “Nothing in there’s gonna bite you,” Bette said. “Go ahead. Open it.”

  The lid was secured with a loop around a velvet-covered button. Layla unlooped the button and opened the box. Inside, she found something wrapped in red tissue paper. On top of this was a greeting-card envelope, bearing her name in familiar handwriting: her father’s. The last card from him had come two years and three months ago, on the occasion of her thirtieth birthday.

  Before then, they’d exchanged little mail beyond the brief flurry of notes that had led to the clandestine road trip—even though letters and cards were the only form of communication Layla’s grandparents had allowed between the two of them. Phone calls were forbidden, as if the sound of Vic’s voice might lure Layla into his world, possibly for good.

  Layla’s hands began trembling, rattling the envelope. She tore it open and pulled out a card, the front of which was a black-and-white photograph of a little girl, maybe four years old. She sat on a stool and held a mirror to her face, her free hand touching her cheek.

  Inside, the card was blank, except for more of her father’s writing:

  Dear Layla,

  I wish you could know how often I have thought of you over the years, despite all the distance between us which I know I’m responsible for. I realize what’s in this box doesn’t come close to making up for all you lost and all the things I never did for you. I can only hope it helps some.

  I’ve been checking out the paintings on your website and it’s clear you’ve become a gifted artist, just like your mom. I have no doubt she’d be as proud of you as I am.

  Wishing you many more years from now, happy ones.

  Love,

  Your Father

  Layla’s eyes welled—more for her mother than for him, she was sure. Even he must have understood that “all you lost” excluded him, mostly.

  Still, the change in his writing got to her, the wavering lines suggesting an unsteady hand. It was clear he was dying when he wrote these words, and aware she’d be reading them after he was gone.

  Layla set aside the card and wiped her eyes, then took the tissue-papered bundle from the box. Its shape and weight, the feel of it in her hands, suggested the contents and sent her heart pounding. Unwrapping the bundle, she saw that her guess had been right: she was holding five stacks of bills, one hundreds—the top ones, at least.

  Layla looked up and found Bette staring at her intently, as if waiting for a reaction. Bette did not look idiotic in the beanbag chair. She slouched into it as if it had been made for her, as if the world could fall to shit all around her, and she’d be just fine.

  Eventually, Bette broke the silence. “It’s fifty thousand bucks. Count it, if you want.”

  Layla felt electrified, and close to throwing up. From disbelief? From discomfort wrestling with joy?

  “I can’t accept this.”

  “Why?” Bette sat up, as much as she could in the beanbag chair.

  “Take a big guess.”

  The paid death notice mentioned only one line of work for Victor Doloro: landscaping. It did not mention the source of income that played a starring role in the longer obituaries and in countless news stories from years ago: a three-state burglary ring he helped to run, for which he’d served a ten-year prison sentence.

  “It’s clean money,” Bette said.

  “Then why’s it hiding in a box, in your attic? Why didn’t Vic keep it in a bank?”

  Bette hesitated, just a beat. “Tax reasons, complicated ones. Trust me, it’s clean.”

  That was within the realm of possibility, Layla supposed. She hadn’t caught wind of Vic getting into any fresh trouble since his release from prison in 2009—not from the news, not from Internet searches, not from her grandparents, when they were still alive. Even so, holding fifty thousand dollars’ worth of crisp bills felt wrong to Layla.

  “If there’s no problem with this money, why couldn’t you talk about it over the phone?”

  Bette glanced aside, looking less sure of herself. “That’s just what Dad always told me—‘Never discuss money over the phone. You never know who else might be listening.’”

  Layla’s stomach turned again. “Who do you think might be listening?”

  “No one. I guess Dad just made me kind of paranoid about stuff.”
>
  Surely there was a long, troubling story behind Vic’s advice to Bette. Maybe multiple stories. Now, Layla stared at the money, trying to think clearly.

  “It’s really nice he thought of this, of me. But maybe you could use the money for yourself, or Jake. I don’t even have a kid.”

  That made Layla think of the “child support” money Vic had sent her grandparents irregularly over the years. She remembered them arguing about it when they thought she wasn’t listening.

  We don’t need his filthy money.

  It’s for Layla, not us.

  What’s the difference? It’s still filthy.

  What do you propose we do with it, then? Throw it out? Give it away?

  “You might someday,” Bette said. “Anyhow, Dad already gave me my fifty thousand. And I accepted without one iota of guilt, or suspicion. Maybe you should, too.”

  Layla wondered whether Bette’s ease with the money had something to do with her own less-than-pristine history.

  “Can I sleep on this?”

  “Of course,” Bette said.

  As she re-wrapped the money and returned it to the box, Layla thought of the other bit of business she’d hoped to get to tonight. Though she and Bette were tired, what time would be better? Tomorrow would be another full day, with few or no opportunities for a private conversation.

  “I need to ask you one more thing.” Layla set down the box and reached into her back pocket, withdrew another envelope. From this, she removed the drawing, handed it to Bette.

  “Does this guy look familiar to you?”

  Under the bare-bulb light of the attic, Bette studied the sketch, one of many that Layla’s mother, Sara, had done long ago, apparently during lulls in her waitressing shifts. Some of the drawings, made on sheets torn from ordering pads, were still lifes—on-the-fly renderings of sugar or napkin dispensers, of butt-filled ashtrays, of artfully stacked bussing tubs. But mostly she drew customers: “counter laggers or boothies,” Sara had called them in her diaries, which Layla had read multiple times since she’d received them as an eighteenth-birthday gift from her Grandma Alice. “Maybe it’ll feel a little bit like your mom’s talking to you,” her grandma said at the time.

  Now, Bette was taking in all the features Sara had rendered so precisely with her soft-lead pencil: the down-turned eyes, the dark, widow’s-peaked hair, the blank, unsettling gaze. He reminded Layla of her high-school chemistry teacher, but with a serious dose of creepy.

  Bette read aloud the words penciled beneath the drawing: “I hereby exorcise you.” She cocked an eyebrow. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  That was the truth. But Layla had some theories.

  “To answer your question, no,” Bette said. “This guy doesn’t look familiar to me.”

  She held out the drawing, and Layla took it back.

  “What about the nickname ‘the Wolf.’ Or ‘Mr. Wolf.’ Do you remember Vic mentioning anyone by that name?”

  “Hmmm. Not that I can recall.”

  “And it doesn’t ring any bells with you?”

  “’Fraid not, sorry.”

  Bette settled back and got an appraising look on her face, a look Layla imagined her turning on suspicious-seeming strangers during her security-guard gig. “Where’d that picture come from?”

  Layla took one last glance at the sketch before tucking it back into the envelope, then into her pocket.

  “It seems my mother drew it, during one of her waitressing shifts. I found it just a few days ago, while going through some old stuff.”

  Vic’s death had prompted Layla to return to her own attic, which held whatever physical reminders she had of her parents—mostly of her mother. For the first time in years, she went through a box of her mom’s clothes, wondering whether she might finally be up for wearing some of them. She wasn’t.

  At the bottom of the box was Sara’s wallet. Before, Layla had found it empty of everything but Sara’s license, a ticket stub, and a few photos: two of Alice and Roy, one of Layla, none of Vic. Still, she decided to give it another look, running her fingers through the slots reserved for credit cards. In the last of these, something crackled, and she pulled out a folded square that turned out to be the drawing. It had never made it into the box that held her mother’s other sketches; those had become more familiar to Layla than any of her own.

  “I wondered if he could be this guy my mom mentioned in her diaries. ‘The Wolf’ was the only name she gave for him.”

  Bette flexed her bare feet, calling attention to her faded tattoo anklet: green barbed wire threaded with roses.

  “I wish I could be more helpful,” Bette said.

  “I know. I’m only asking you these questions because Vic’s not around to answer them.”

  “Why?” Bette asked. “I mean, what’s the connection between him and all this?”

  Layla paused. She was about to venture onto uncomfortable ground.

  “You know he used to hang out where my mom waitressed.” It was how they met.

  “Yep.”

  Layla went on with details from her mother’s diaries, which her grandparents had shared with police, years before: “Sometimes Vic brought friends along”—business associates is what Vic called them, according to Sara. “One of these guys, it seems he wasn’t really a friend, or maybe he was an ex-friend. Anyhow, he showed up a few times when Vic was at the diner, until they had some words. Then this guy vanished. Until a few months after my mom and Vic split, after Vic moved back to Reedstown”—seventy miles to the west of Sara and just over the Ohio–Pennsylvania line: enough to make him feel very far away, Sara had written.

  If Bette sensed where this story was heading, she didn’t show it. Her security-guard look remained, inscrutable.

  “Then he showed up again, with no other purpose than to bother my mom. That’s the way she put it in her diary.”

  Bother was too benign a word. He stares at me, Sara wrote, like I’m something in the dessert case.

  “She hated that she had a name tag, because he started using her name in almost everything he said to her.” Well, hello, my pretty Sara. What are you serving today? “His name, or the one he gave her, was ‘Mr. Wolf.’ But she called him ‘the Wolf,’ understandably.

  “It got to the point where he just wouldn’t leave her alone, and finally the manager told him to get lost. This was one of the last things she wrote about in her diary. Before … you know.”

  Before she was killed, Layla would have said. Not Before she killed herself.

  Layla wasn’t even two at the time of her mother’s death, and for years her grandparents tried to protect her from the details of what had happened. It wasn’t until high school that Layla learned that her mother’s body had been discovered in a local forest, hanging from a tree. Her grandparents never wavered from their conviction that Sara had been murdered, and that the killer had wanted her death to look like a suicide. But they never got anywhere with the police. More than once, her grandpa said, “There’s not a single doubt in my mind: The cops here are every bit as dirty as the ones in goddamned Reedstown. Crooks pay ’em off and get whatever they want.”

  In Reedstown, an investigation of the police department had sent several top officers and subordinates to prison, not long after Vic went there himself. Some of them were found to have benefited from the same burglary ring Vic had been involved in, others from trade in confiscated drugs.

  Layla said, “My grandparents always believed this Wolf guy was responsible for her death. At the very least, they thought he should have been tracked down and questioned. But when they shared their suspicions with police, the cops said they weren’t aware of anyone by that name.”

  Bette’s security-guard expression softened. “They didn’t ask my … They didn’t ask our father about this guy?”

  At the
time of Sara’s death, Vic was already in police custody. He’d been brought in for questioning about a series of burglaries—part of what would become his undoing, years later.

  “They said they did. They said he didn’t know anyone by that name.”

  Layla’s grandparents weren’t sure what to doubt more: that police had asked Vic about the Wolf or that Vic had claimed not to know him. She wasn’t sure what to believe herself. But she hoped that if Vic were alive, and if he knew anything about the Wolf, anything about the man in the picture, he’d tell her. Years in prison had come between then and now, and, Layla hoped, years of regrets about “all the things I never did for you.” But maybe those were only pretty words from a dying man.

  “Once my mom’s death was ruled a suicide, the cops considered the case closed. They didn’t want to hear anything more from my grandparents.”

  “I’m sorry,” Bette said.

  Layla lowered her head, glimpsed the velveteen box of money. She wished it held something that would be easier to leave behind.

  “Anyway,” she said, “I’m seeing this drawing as one last chance, even if it’s a long shot. I mean, if this guy in the picture is the guy from the diaries, and if he’s still alive—maybe it’s one more way to find him, learn more about what really happened.” Once again, Layla imagined him with gray hair and sagging skin. He’d probably be in his sixties, just as Vic had been.

  Bette scratched her ear, its edge scarred from piercings past. Now, she wore just single diamond studs. “You really think it could be the same guy?”

  “It’s just a hunch, but a strong one. Kind of hard for me to explain.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  In the little time she’d had between finding the drawing and driving here for the funeral, Layla Googled old news stories about her father, looking for ones with pictures, then studying the photos for anyone resembling the man her mother had sketched. No luck so far. But when she returned home, she’d do more research, look for additional photos. And she’d give the police another try, though she doubted they’d have any interest in reopening the case. Already, she’d done a cursory search for private investigators.