by Chris Culver
Almost as soon as I hung up with Katherine, my phone buzzed, signaling another incoming call. I looked at the screen and answered before it finished ringing.
“Vince,” I said. “I just talked to Katherine. Seems like things are going okay.”
“Yeah, things are fine,” he said. “I wanted to call and tell you that I tried to get in touch with Isaac last night, but he didn’t answer his phone. Has he called you?”
“No,” I said. “You worried?”
“Not really. He’s probably with Samantha. You are okay with that, aren’t you? Isaac has been a little nervous about that.”
Samantha was Tess’s younger sister, and while we weren’t related, I loved her as if she were family.
“If the two of them are happy, I’m happy.”
“You talked to her lately?”
“I haven’t,” I said, shaking my head.
“You should,” said Vince. “If Tess saw you, she might have visited her.”
“I’ll try to get in touch with her.”
We lapsed into silence, and I sipped my coffee.
“What are you going to do now?” asked Vince.
“I don’t know. When things have sunk in and Katherine’s had a chance to think, I’m going to ask what she wants to do. If she tells me to go to the police, I will. If she tells me to leave, I’ll pack up my bags and get out of the city. Hopefully this mess will follow me.”
Vince took a breath. “Whatever happens, you’re not alone. Remember that.”
“I know. Thank you.”
We lapsed into another silence. Eventually, Vince cleared his throat. “I don’t know if you’re hungry, but I think there’s some bread in the fridge. I’m not at the house too often, so it might be furry.”
“I’ll grab something at Bread Co.”
Vince paused again, and I almost started to say goodbye, but he interrupted me before I could.
“I saw your gun last night. Are you always strapped?”
“Never. I don’t even wear it when I go to the gun range.”
“Could you use it if you had to?”
“I hope it doesn’t come to that.”
“But could you do it?” asked Vince.
I wanted to say yes without hesitation, but that would be a lie. “I don’t know.”
“Maybe it’s best you put it away. Accidents happen.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“You got a concealed carry permit for it?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “I never got around to it.”
“Then put it under your jacket and don’t get caught with it.”
“I will. And thank you for everything.”
“That’s what friends do,” said Vince.
I wished him well, hung up, and went to the bedroom for my firearm. On my way out the door, I filled Felix’s water dish and wrote Vince a note thanking him for putting me up for the night. It had been a nice morning. I doubted the rest of my day would go that well.
27
When I got home, I took a shower and then changed into clean pants, a freshly ironed white shirt, and a pair of brown socks, all the while thinking about that brooch Katherine had found. When I had time, I’d deal with it; right now, though, I needed to find Tess and Moses before either of them hurt someone else I cared about.
Before doing anything else, though, I went to my backyard and, once again, pulled my duffel bag out of my crawl space. I grabbed a bundle of hundred-dollar bills for Vince and reluctantly put my gun back in the bag. As I felt the textured handle, I remembered something potentially very important: my uncle’s gun wasn’t the only gun I had touched recently. Tess had taken me shooting, and if I had to guess, she did it because she wanted my prints on a gun and gunshot residue on my clothes and hands. I didn’t know what she had planned, but I didn’t think it would be amenable to my long-term freedom.
Once the gun was safely stored, I turned on Katherine’s laptop and made a pot of coffee. I still needed information more than anything else, and I wanted to talk to Tess. She hadn’t been kind enough to leave me a note telling me where she was, but she had to be staying somewhere and I highly doubted she was slumming it. I opened a web browser and searched for a list of the city’s four-and five-star hotels on a travel website. We didn’t have many, so even if I couldn’t find anything, I wouldn’t be wasting too much time.
I worked my way down the list, calling each hotel’s front desk and asking to be patched through to the room of Holly Olson or Lauren Hampton, the maternal-grandmother pseudonym she’d used in Utah. I got lucky half an hour later on a call to the Omni Majestic Hotel downtown. They patched me through to Lauren Hampton’s room, and I waited while her phone rang and rang, eight times total before a voicemail system picked up. I declined to leave a message, knowing that some conversations are best had in person.
I got in my car and drove east, toward the city. As I passed through the suburbs and into the city proper, I was reminded once again that St. Louis, at one time, thrived, becoming one of the largest and wealthiest cities in the country. We even hosted the World’s Fair in 1904. Unfortunately, and for various reasons, things went downhill from there, leaving us with the husk of a great city to remind of us of what we once were.
I parked on the street about a block from the hotel—free parking is still remarkably easy to find in downtown St. Louis—and got of my car. Tess hadn’t responded to any of my calls earlier, but maybe my being in her hotel would change her perspective.
I walked into the lobby and smiled at the receptionist before walking into the bar beside the lobby. At that time of day, my only company was a window washer with a grizzled beard and a face pockmarked by time. I nodded at him and called Tess’s phone as he squeegeed a layer of dirt and soapy water from the glass. As expected, as it had done every other time I called her, it went to voicemail. This time, I left a message.
“Hey, sweetheart. I’m in the bar of your hotel right now, and I was hoping I could talk to you. Give me a call back as soon as you can.”
I hung up and sat down, feeling myself sink into the thick red padding of my barstool, waiting for a return call that didn’t come. She probably thought I was bullshitting her, so I walked to the front desk and asked for a piece of paper and an envelope, both of which the clerk willingly provided. I wrote down the time and the date and then scribbled a note on the paper.
Lauren,
Just wanted to let you know I had come by.
Steve Hale
The receptionist, as befitting an employee at a nice hotel, promised to give Lauren Hampton my note whenever she came back in. That done, I left the hotel and drove back to my house, where I spent the next several hours searching for whatever Tess may have hidden. Taped beneath a drawer on my desk, I found an unmarked bag of elliptical yellow pills that, after a Google search, I discovered were Percocet, a heavily regulated narcotic. With sixty-five pills in the bag and no prescription, that could have landed me in prison for a few years had the police found it.
In addition to the pills, I found a large-capacity thumb drive and the wrapping from a package of Polaroid film in an end table in my niece’s room. As soon as I looked at the drive to find out what was on it, I wished I hadn’t, for it contained some of the vilest pornography I had ever seen, the kind that would get me listed on a sex-offender registry for the rest of my life had anyone else seen it. I pulled the drive out of my computer and smashed it with a hammer in the garage, then burned the Polaroid film wrappings, wishing I could burn the memories of what I had seen as well. I had to hand it to Tess for that one; she knew how to hurt me. The drugs, a prosecutor might be willing to cut a deal with me over. Child pornography was another matter. If the police saw that and the empty Polaroid film package, I’d never see my niece again. It’d probably take a while for me to see daylight, either.
After a four-hour top-to-bottom search, I figured my house was clean enough. She might have hidden more, but if she did, hopefully I had found the wors
t of it.
28
At a little before three, I drove to Ashley’s school to pick her up. She looked happy to see me, but she seemed tired as well. She gave me a hug as soon as she came out, but she didn’t linger like she normally did, nor did she seem very interested in talking. I helped her with the seatbelt in the car and then periodically peered at her in my rearview mirror once I started driving.
“Are you okay, sweetheart?” I asked, about a block from the school.
Her lower lip trembled and tears appeared in her eyes. “I want to go home.”
“We’re going there,” I said, softening my voice. “We’re two or three blocks away.”
“No, I want to go home with Mommy.”
When she first moved into the house, Ashley broke down almost once a week asking to see her mom again, but she hadn’t done it for months. She didn’t deserve the stress she had been put under lately, but there wasn’t much I could do about it.
“We’ll see if we can get in touch with her, okay?” I asked. “No guarantees that we can find her, but I’ll try. Would that be okay?”
She nodded, but I don’t know if I convinced her. While she started her homework, I took my cell phone to the backyard. My sister didn’t answer her cell phone, but her roommate told me she had gone to some sort of music festival in Kentucky and wouldn’t be back for a few days. Reading between the lines and knowing her history, Rachel was high somewhere and wouldn’t be able to form coherent sentences even if I could get in touch with her. That was my sister: predictably undependable.
I found Ashley inside, still at the dining room table, her feet wrapped around the legs of her chair like tendrils from a vine and her head hunkered down so low that I couldn’t even see her eyes. Her reading textbook lay open in front of her, but she clearly wasn’t reading.
“Did you find Mommy?”
“I tried, but she was busy working.”
“She still lets me talk to her even when she’s at work. She says I’m important enough.”
“You are important enough,” I said, sitting beside her and putting my hand on her upper back. “But she can’t talk right now. She’s busy.”
Ashley crossed her arms and stuck out her bottom lip.
“You didn’t really try.”
“That’s not fair,” I said, trying to make my voice as comforting as I could. “I did try.”
“Mommy will always make time for me. She loves me.”
“She does love you, but she couldn’t come to the phone.”
Ashley looked up, red-faced and with tears on her cheeks. “You didn’t try hard enough.”
“I tried everything I could.”
“No, you didn’t,” she said, pushing herself away from the table. She sprinted upstairs, presumably to her bedroom, and I buried my face in my hands and sighed. I couldn’t blame her for being upset; had I gone through everything she did, I’d be upset, too. Maybe Katherine would have an easier time talking to her. I went to the kitchen and called my sister’s cell phone again, but like before, it went to voicemail.
“Hey, Rachel, it’s Steve. Please give me a call when you can. Your daughter misses you.” I paused. “But if you’re drunk or high, sober up first.”
I took my phone to the kitchen and plugged it in to the charger before climbing the steps to the second floor. Over the years, the plaster all over my old house has begun to crack and the paint has begun to chip away. Several of the families who have lived in the house before us added new skim coats of plaster to fix the old cracks, but they continued to show up, faster now than before. Eventually, Katherine and I would have to tear the building down to its studs to correct the problem, but even the thought left me feeling uneasy. Those walls, that cracked plaster, those countless layers of paint, connected my home’s past with its present, formed its memories and its backbone, its character. The cracks held it together.
As I trudged to my niece’s room, I heard her crying and I found myself wondering what it was that held my life together. The answer was far simpler than building supplies: it was Ashley; it was my wife, my friends, even my dog. And I was losing all of them one by one.
29
Ashley had slammed her door so hard that the knob hadn’t caught. I knocked on the frame to let her know I was there before pushing the door open and watching as it soundlessly swung inward on well-oiled hinges. Ashley sat on the edge of her bed, a teddy bear clutched to her chest and tears nearly the size of dimes sliding down her face.
“Can I come in?”
She didn’t respond, so I stayed in the doorway. “Please talk to me, sweetheart.”
She hugged her teddy bear tighter. “No.”
“Would you talk to Aunt Katherine if she were here?”
“I only want to talk to Mommy.”
She wouldn’t even look at me. I took a step back. “I understand. Are you okay up here?”
“I’m fine.”
“I love you, and I want to see you. When you want to come down, I’ll be waiting.”
She didn’t respond, so I went downstairs to the kitchen, almost tripping on Simon’s favorite ball. We hadn’t told Ashley about Simon yet, mostly because I didn’t have the heart. Simon was her friend, maybe her only one in this strange, new home, and finding out that he was dead would break her heart so badly that only time, and a lot of it, would be able to mend it. I didn’t look forward to that. I made a cup of tea in the microwave and sat at the dining room table and listened while Ashley cried upstairs.
I used to think I’d make a pretty good parent, but I don’t know any more. While I waited for Katherine and Vince to come home to pick Ashley up, I did some dishes and swept up the kitchen. My niece came down as I knelt with the dustpan. She walked right to me and gave me a hug, something I needed more than I had realized.
“Hi, honey,” I said, putting my arms around her back. “Are you okay?”
She nodded against my shoulder. “Do I still have to do my homework?”
I smiled, but tried not to let her see it. “Yes. And if you start now, you can watch TV for half an hour when you’re done.”
She nodded again. “Okay.”
We walked to the dining room table and sat together for the next half hour. Normally, that time would have had at least one break in it to play with Simon, but thankfully, she thought he was in a pet boarding facility until we fixed our backdoor. Eventually, Katherine and Vince stopped by with cheeseburgers and French fries from a place on Manchester Road. It was my niece’s favorite meal, what she had subsisted on for several years under my sister’s care.
Vince stayed just long enough to give Ashley a hug before going home to get some new clothes, letting us sit down as a family to eat. We didn’t have fast food very often—less than once a month—so it was a special treat, and Ashley devoured hers. By the time she was done, she was smiling and laughing. If only we could all be so resilient.
After dinner and after she finished her homework, I set Ashley up with a cartoon in the TV room and met Katherine in the kitchen. Her eyes were tired and drawn and she wore less makeup than usual, but she still gave me a halfhearted smile.
“You said you had something to show me,” she said.
“It’s cold, but it’s a nice night. You want to go out and sit on the porch?”
“Sure.”
We bundled up and Katherine went out through the kitchen while I grabbed Tess’s journal. When I met my wife outside, the sun had just begun to set on the horizon. I sat on the deck chair beside her without saying a word.
Eventually, I cleared my throat. “I searched the house today. Tess put a thumb drive full of child pornography and a wrapper from Polaroid film in Ashley’s room, a baggy of pills in my desk, and this,” I said, opening Tess’s journal and handing it to my wife, “in the cold air return duct.”
Katherine flipped through a few pages. “What is this?”
“It’s Tess Girard’s journal, the one I told you about. Read from July 3rd to the letter she wrote me
.”
Katherine hesitated and then took the journal from my outstretched hand. After about two minutes, she covered her mouth, and within five, a tear fell down her face. By the time she got to the letter to me, her hands were trembling.
“You were telling me the truth,” she said, closing the book. “I believed you, but . . . I didn’t now. Maybe I should have known. In college, we thought Tess was depressed, but we never suspected this.”
“Before I saw the journal, Samantha and I thought she may have been manic but went undiagnosed.”
“The clothes, though,” said Katherine. “We should have seen that. She started wearing baggy clothes all the time. She even withdrew from active membership in our sorority. I don’t know if you knew that.”
I didn’t know that, but it fit the pattern.
“There’s more,” I said, standing. “I need you to hold on one second. There’s something else I need to show you.”
Katherine nodded, and I grabbed a flashlight from inside before descending into the underbelly of my house once again, fetching that duffel bag. When I brought it up, I laid it on the ground and unzipped it but held the flaps closed so Katherine couldn’t see inside yet.
“I need you to bear with me and not freak out when you see this.”
Katherine nodded, so I opened the bag and flashed the light inside. My wife gasped.
“Tess and I extorted two and a half million dollars from her stepfather before we set him up. She took a quarter million so she could set up a life for herself, and we bribed a witness at the trial with another quarter million. I kept the remaining two million in case this came back on us. I thought we needed resources in case Vince, Isaac, and I had to leave town.”
“So we do have money.”
“Yeah. Quite a bit of it.”
“And this is what they’re after?”
“Moses, probably,” I said. “I think Tess is still after revenge.”
Katherine closed her eyes. “Jesus, honey. Why did you actually think you could get away with this?”