On some level I wonder if stopping Seth Howell is the worst thing I’ve ever done with my life. It’s a thought I have every day, and I wish he were here to answer it for me. We don’t have enough true teachers in this world. And, thanks to me, we lost one more.
* * *
Note: The print run of Emil Chadwick’s book was withdrawn and pulped pending the resolution of a lawsuit against him by Revisioniste, the production company run by Blanche Potter (née Varner) and Jaya Chauhan. Revisioniste’s lawyers claim Chadwick serially fabricated his accounts of the August 2018 events in Stilford leading up to Seth Howell’s failed mass shooting.
Documents submitted to the court, including official police reports, suggest that Chadwick did indeed exaggerate his role in stopping Howell, and failed to completely admit to his foreknowledge of the shooter’s plans. A criminal legal case was launched after the civil lawsuit, after suggestions in Chadwick’s book led to his email and phone records being subpoenaed, and it was discovered that Chadwick had been in regular contact with an email alias of Seth Howell, as well as with two other suspects who communicated in language redolent with allusions to Chuck Varner’s Your Life Is Mine cult.
Chadwick hanged himself in a Los Angeles holding cell on August 17, 2019, while awaiting the arrival of Stilford Detective Ron Pargiter, who was set to interrogate him that day. Chadwick’s two anonymous correspondents remain unidentified.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
* * *
WE DID OUR small premiere for The Empty Men in LA, exactly two years and three days after Ron Pargiter and seven other cops blew Seth Howell into pulp. None of them grazed me, and most of my medical worries came from the bite I’d taken out of Seth’s face. The blood tests came back clean.
The official premiere was at Sundance, and over the next several months we would be at TIFF, Tribeca, all the festivals that had said “maybe next time” to us with our previous movies.
“You were right,” Jaya said, hanging up the phone in our tiny office space after we got confirmation that we were running in competition at Cannes. “I don’t know if we were supposed to make this thing, but everyone wants to see it.”
“We were supposed to make it, Jaya. I know it.” I smiled and hoped she would, too, but she just nodded, looking at the ground. It had kept us together, the making of this digital creature of light and sound, our shared decisions of what to conceal, what to say. We could be honest with each other, completely, by knowing exactly which lies we were going to tell together.
The premiere was on the studio lot at Fox, in a beautiful screening room booked by the streaming overlords who had bought The Empty Men and guaranteed us budgets for our next three projects. I watched pictures and video of Chuck and Crissy on the screen, and felt no fear, only the cool remove I always felt when I looked at my own work. They were mine, now, mine entirely, and would always be. I wore the same skirt and top I’d worn in New Orleans, forgetting that the cigarette ash stain had never fully washed out, so I had to keep a light jacket on all night. I was sweating a little, but Jaya wasn’t. With the movie out in the wild, she was herself again, introducing her mom to all the execs, true crime writers, and directors who’d gently begged for tickets. Jill Gudgeon had tried to get in touch with me, to come out to this and to interview me for her swipe at a late-career masterpiece book about Chuck, her son, and me, but I’d replied with a restraining order.
We’d had Padma out in Los Angeles for the past couple of weeks, using some of our production budget to get her a rental apartment that was out of all of our price ranges. On the second night, which was the first night ever that I’d seen her have more than three glasses of wine, I almost thought about telling her about that night, of what happened with Neesh, Crissy, and me. It wasn’t in the movie, but I thought, for a moment, that she should know. About how little I deserved to be free, let alone in her presence, let alone part of her daughter’s life. She certainly deserved to know. Maybe Jaya saw what I was thinking, because she looked at me for a long moment from the kitchen, where she was trying to solve a broken cork issue.
I kept my mouth shut.
Instead, we talked about Seth. About the parts that had made it into the movie, the enormous battle we’d had in editing it to make sure that Chuck Varner, Crissy, and Seth emerged as pathetic, without even a trace of glamour or that weird celebrity glory that is almost impossible to separate from mass violence.
I controlled every word or gesture Chuck made in the movie, every piece I allowed to be shown. I owned him now.
“I can still—sorry, Ma,” I said to Padma, “I can still taste his spit.”
“You can’t. That’s just a memory that you’re mixing with a sour taste from another memory. Old milk, bad breath. It’s nothing to do with him. He’s nothing. Like that man,” she said. “That man” meant Chuck when Padma said it in that tone.
“Maybe.”
“Do you ever feel safe?” she asked me. She had the same way Jaya had of asking a question that was meant to start a conversation leading to a sort of thesis statement, a mutually agreed upon life philosophy.
“I did when I heard the guns fire. I thought that even if the bullets hit me, at least it wasn’t him killing me, you know? Sick.” I touched her arm to remind her and myself that I was here, that neither Seth nor any of the others had killed me.
“No,” Jaya said from the kitchen. “You’re not sick, you’re a sane person reacting to a sick situation.”
Padma nodded, and I went on.
“But right afterward, I didn’t feel safe. Because that’s Chuck. And Seth. And the rest of them. The Chadwicks and the other worms.”
“Complicated,” Padma said, and then laughed. I laughed with her, remembering how I’d dealt with all of these feelings for the first time, after the mall, and for the second time, after Neesh. I’d just put the feelings away and never looked at them again until I was forced to.
And that’s what I would do after this documentary run was finished, after the interviews were wrapped, after everyone knew where I came from and what I’d done. I would make that woman who made the movie and talked to the reporters into myself. I would be that person who wasn’t bothered any longer, who could look deep into the past and come out with a piece of documentary art and an effective set of sound bites in a junket interview.
I’d pretended I was a totally different person twelve years ago, and eventually, it came true. I would just need to pretend again, and someday I would wake up as myself.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Laurie Grassi, Rakesh Satyal, Loan Le, David Brown, Lauren Morocco, Nita Pronovost, Adria Iwasutiak, Jessica Rattray, Ellen Whitfield, Michael Heyward.
Samantha Haywood and Stephanie Sinclair.
Kris Bertin, Mark Morrison.
Chris Ferguson, John T. Edge.
Andrew Sullivan, Patrick Tarr, Chris Harper, Sam Wiebe, Chris Brayshaw, the Ruthnum family, Raj and Vindhya Rathore, Buddy, Ashley MacCuish, Martha Sharpe, Ben McNally, Type Books, Book City.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
NATHAN RIPLEY is the pseudonym of Toronto resident and Journey Prize winner Naben Ruthnum. Find You in the Dark, Ripley’s first thriller, was an instant bestseller. As Naben Ruthnum, he is the author of Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race. Follow him on Twitter @NabenRuthnum.
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Find You in the Dark
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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This Simon & Schuster Canada edition June 2019
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Interior design by Carly Loman
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Ripley, Nathan, author
Your life is mine / Nathan Ripley.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
I. Title.
PS8635.I65Y68 2019 C813’.6 C2018-905910-9
C2018-905911-7
ISBN 978-1-5011-7909-9
ISBN 978-1-5011-7910-5 (ebook)
Your Life Is Mine Page 23