by Chris Culver
Try as I might, I couldn’t think of one, either. I kissed her forehead and then handed her the remote to the TV. “I bet you can find some cartoons. I’m going to talk to Jean and Terry.”
49
I watched to make sure Ashley had settled in before joining my in-laws in the guest bedroom. Terry hushed his wife as soon as I walked in, thereby telling me everything I needed to know about their conversation without having to say a word.
“What do you want, Steven?” he asked.
“When did Tess and Katherine leave?”
“Hours ago,” said Jean. “Tess said she’d call you. My husband and I were trying to figure out what to tell the police.”
I looked over my shoulder at Ashley and then back to Terry. “What’s your Wi-Fi password?”
“Why do you want our Wi-Fi password?”
“So Ashley can go upstairs and watch some cartoons on her iPad. She doesn’t need to hear us.”
Instead of telling me anything, Terry walked to Ashley and picked up the iPad. After a moment of typing, he whispered something to her, and she nodded and sprinted upstairs, the electronic device tucked under her arm. He walked back to us.
“I told her she could have a Popsicle if she could keep it off the furniture,” he said. “Now tell me what you’ve gotten my daughter into.”
I shared with them the basics of the story, emphasizing that Tess was an old friend of both of ours. Terry simply stared at me afterwards, his mouth opening and closing as if he wanted to say something but couldn’t find the words.
“How did you let this happen?” he asked, eventually.
“I didn’t let anything happen. Tess is crazy. It’s hard to predict what a crazy person will do.”
Terry held up a hand and started toward the stairs. “We’ve got to go to the police.”
I stepped in front of him. “If we do that, Tess will kill Katherine.”
“Get out of my way.”
I didn’t move. “I swear to God, if you go to the police, you’ll never see your daughter again.”
Terry stood straighter and blinked. “Are you threatening me?”
“No, I’m telling you the truth. Tess will kill her. I know the woman who took her. You don’t.”
He waved me off. “Get over yourself, Steven. We need help, not a writer who got in over his head.”
“I went to the police already in St. Louis. It made things worse, and it’s going to do the same thing here.”
He clapped, presumably to get my attention. Jean flinched. “The situation has changed. I will not trust my daughter’s safety to you.”
I considered pulling out my firearm and tying him to a chair again, but I didn’t think that would help our relationship much.
“If you go to the police, someone’s going to slip up and go to the press with the story. Whether we want it or not, the story is out of our hands at that point. Tess will hear it, and Katherine will get a bullet in her skull.”
Terry crossed his arms and leaned back. “How did this woman know Katherine and Ashley were here?”
“This is the logical first place to look.”
“How did she know where we lived, Steven?”
“Your address is on the Internet.”
He tried to step past me again. “I’m calling the police. I want you out of my house.”
I stared at Terry, hoping he’d back down. Instead, he puffed out his chest. I did a quick cost-benefit calculus in my head and reached to my side for my firearm. I didn’t pull it out of its holster, but I lifted my shirt enough for Terry to see it.
“Please sit down, Terry.”
At first, Terry’s eyes went wide, but then they narrowed to angry slits. “You’re not going to shoot me.”
I wanted to respond that I was willing to do just that, but my hands shook and my voice caught in my throat. I took a step back and allowed my shirt to cover my weapon again. “You’re right. I’m not going to shoot you. I’m not a murderer.”
“Then get out of my way,” he said, pushing past me and heading towards the stairs.
“Stop.” I looked at Jean as she spoke, surprised at the outburst. “Listen to Steven. I don’t want you to call the police.”
“He pulled a gun on us,” said Terry, stopping at the foot of the steps and turning to look at his wife and me.
“To keep you from doing something stupid,” said Jean. “You’re letting your pigheadedness keep you from seeing the truth. Steven didn’t let that woman into our house. You did, even against your daughter’s explicit request.”
“She was Katherine’s friend. What was I supposed to do? Ignore someone knocking on my door, and call the police?”
“That’s exactly what you daughter asked you to do.” Jean looked at me. “Steven knows this woman better than we do. If he believes she’ll kill Katherine if we call the police, then I trust his judgment.” She turned to me. “What can we do?”
I looked at Terry, half expecting him to continue the argument, but he remained near the staircase, his shoulders slumped and his face red. “Do you have somewhere to go for a few hours until this blows over?”
“Sorry, but this is our only house,” said Terry.
Jean ignored her husband. “Terry’s sailboat. It has a cabin. Ashley can use the Yacht Club’s Wi-Fi.”
“I would truly appreciate it if you could take Ashley there. I don’t think Tess would come back, but if she does, I want Ashley somewhere safe.”
“We’ll do that,” said Jean, nodding. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to stay here. If she comes looking for Ashley or you guys, she’s going to find me instead.”
“How are you going to get my daughter back?” asked Terry.
I looked at him. “Tess said she’ll call, presumably with further instructions. When that happens, I’ll call you, and you’ll call the police with an address. We’ll let them handle it.”
“That’s what we’ll do, then,” said Jean. She looked at Terry. “Won’t we?” He nodded but refused to meet his wife’s gaze. “In the meantime,” she continued, “I’m going to go upstairs and make some coffee.”
She walked past her husband and went upstairs. I wasn’t sure what I should do, but then I saw the tears on Terry’s cheeks and knew I needed to leave. Some things are best done in private. As I walked past him, he grabbed my arm but didn’t put much force into it. His voice was barely above a whisper.
“Please get my daughter back.”
50
Before she and the rest of the family left, I gave Ashley a hug and kissed her cheek. She wiped it away and said it was gross, making me smile for one of the very few times that night. After that, I made a pot of coffee and stayed up, staring at the phone and barely moving.
At twenty after one in the morning, with my eyes threatening to close, Tess called. I stared at my phone, disbelieving for a moment, as if it was an artifact from my dreams become corporeal. On the fourth ring, I snatched it from the table and blinked sleep out of my eyes.
“Yeah?” I asked.
“Hello, Steven,” said Tess. “How are you?”
“Good. Fine. Where are you?”
“Oh, is that how you want to do this?” asked Tess. “No foreplay? No fun? Just going to go straight to business?”
“I want my wife back.”
“All right, then,” she said. “If that’s how you want to do this, we’ll be all business from here on out. Your wife and I are in an abandoned home on South Springfield Avenue. It’s in Lawndale.”
I grabbed a pen and wrote the street on my hand. “I don’t know Chicago. Where is that?”
“Don’t you have GPS on your cell phone?”
“Yes, but it’s a cheap phone, and I don’t know the first thing about Chicago. If the phone stops working, I want to know where I’m going. Where is this house?”
Tess paused and clucked her tongue as if she were thinking. “It’s south of the Eisenhower Expressway and a couple blocks west of Douglas Pa
rk. And just a word of advice, Steven. If you hear gunfire, floor it and duck. The locals usually aren’t very good shots, but sometimes they get lucky.”
I wanted to ask why she took my wife there if the area was that dangerous, but I held back.
“What’s the house look like?”
“It’s an old brick house with plywood covering every window. It doesn’t have numbers, but you’ll know it when you see it.”
“How?”
“It’s one of the few on the street still standing.” She paused. “And remember what I said. Please don’t call the police. You’re trying my patience enough as is. Katherine doesn’t have to die—God knows, I don’t want to kill her—but I will if you don’t cooperate. Come to the house with the money, and we’ll talk about how you can get her back.”
“I’m on my way.”
Before Tess could say anything else, I ended the call and texted an address to Jean, but not the one Tess had given me. Within moments, she called me back.
“This is where Katherine is?”
Part of me wanted to tell the truth, but I couldn’t ignore the voice in the back of my head that told me that, as soon as I hung up, her husband would call the police. She might not want him to, but I doubted she could physically stop him.
“That’s what Tess said. She said that I’m to go there, give her some money, and she’ll give me Katherine.”
“How much money?”
“She’s not after money, so don’t worry about her demands.”
“Then what is she after?”
“Me.”
Jean paused, while Terry said something. “My husband wants to know what your plan is in case things go wrong.”
I put my hand over my firearm without thinking. “I’m going to do whatever it takes to get Katherine back.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I’m going to take care of it.”
Specifically, it meant I planned to shoot Tess in the head as soon as I saw her and could believe it wouldn’t result in Katherine’s being hurt. Hopefully, that’d be right as I walked into the room.
“Terry wants details.”
“He’s not going to get them. I appreciate you looking out for Ashley. If I don’t make it out of this, tell her that I love her.”
Jean started to say something, but I hung up and then muted the phone’s ringer so I wouldn’t hear if she called back. Traffic was light at that time of the morning, allowing me to make good time to Independence Avenue and into an urban neighborhood that looked like many of the nicer areas on St. Louis’s south side.
The further I got from the interstate, though, the more things started to shift. Stores, more and more often, had bars on their windows and gates over their doors. The people, too, changed. The further I drove, the more I found young people—mostly teenage boys—hanging out on street corners. Every few minutes, one, usually the youngest of the bunch, would dart off elsewhere, presumably to pick up drugs or money or to alert other groups that they had spotted something they didn’t like.
When I slowed near a stop sign, one of those boys approached my car, but I looked at him and shook my head, not even lowering my window. He formed his hand into a gun and held it so that the grip was parallel to the ground and then shot me. Had he really held a firearm like that and shot me– at least a semiautomatic pistol, the kind favored by gangbangers—the weapon would have ejected a shell casing directly at his forehead. I don’t know if he should have intimidated me or not.
As I neared South Springfield Avenue, I saw that Tess hadn’t lied when she described the area. My wife’s car was parked in front of a two-story home. The weeds out front reached waist-high, and someone had fastened a KEEP OUT onto a moldering piece of plywood covering a first-floor window. A forlorn safety light illuminated the street in a dull yellow. Save for a light peeking through a crack in the plywood covering one of the front windows on the second floor, I would have thought it was abandoned.
I parked on the street behind my wife’s car and called 911. I didn’t linger on the line nor did I identify myself. I simply gave the dispatcher the street name and told her I had heard shots fired. Hopefully their response time in that area was decent. After that, I knocked on the plywood sheet that served as the home’s front door.
“We’ve been waiting for you,” called Tess. “We’re upstairs.”
51
Tess’s voice was faint, but not whispered, more like she was far away. I pushed on the plywood and felt it swing open on hinges screwed onto the right side. Grime-caked hardwood floors ran from the front entryway and to a parlor on the right side of the building, while a decrepit staircase led to the second floor. Mattresses and garbage covered the floor. Homeless people had evidently taken residence, and judging by the smell, they weren’t very particular about where they relieved themselves.
“Is there another way up?” I called, putting my foot on the first step and feeling the tread sag.
“No,” said Tess. “The staircase is more stable than it looks. Don’t worry.”
It’d have to be more stable than it looked to support my weight.
“You sure about that?”
“It held Katherine and me.”
I took a step up and then another, feeling the stairs creak and sway beneath me. When my Uncle Simon left me his gun, I never thought I’d actually use it for its intended purpose, but I didn’t hesitate to remove it from its holster and check to ensure that I had a full magazine.
It was darker on the second floor without the light through the front door, and the smell of urine was stronger. Something squished under my feet. I didn’t want to look.
A hallway led off the second floor landing, and light spilled beneath a door on the right side. Tess hadn’t laid traps for me before, but I found myself stepping lightly anyway.
“Where are you?”
I knew which room Tess was in, but I wanted to get a sense of where within that room she was in case I had to go in shooting.
“It’s the only room with a light.”
She still sounded far away, which meant she probably wasn’t right by the door.
“I’m coming toward you now.”
“I’m glad to hear that.”
There were seven doors along that hallway. I wanted to check each of them for additional guests, but Tess would hear my footsteps and know something was up. My hands trembled, so I squeezed the butt of my pistol hard and stopped in front of her door.
“I’m here,” I said. “I’m coming in now.”
“This isn’t a book. You don’t need to narrate everything you do.”
I twisted a pitted metal knob and pushed the door open with my foot. Inside, Tess sat on one end of a dusty red couch, a book casually open on her lap and a gun held to my wife’s temple. Silver tape bound Katherine’s hands, feet and mouth, while tears streamed down her cheeks. I wanted to run to her, throw my arms around her, and whisk her out of that room. Instead, I stayed in the doorway, feeling as impotent as I ever have in my life.
“Put the book and the gun down, Tess,” I said, infusing my voice with strength I didn’t feel.
“I’m reading,” she said, not even bothering to look up. “And I’m almost finished. If you want, I’ll even read aloud. Katherine wasn’t interested.”
“The police are on their way.”
She slowly closed the book. “I thought I was clear about that.”
“You were. Katherine’s parent’s called them,” I said, lying. “They overheard our conversation and said they were going to call as soon as I left. There was nothing I could do.”
Tess looked up at me and shook her head, scolding me. “For a man who writes novels for a living, you have an astoundingly limited imagination.”
“What would you have me do?”
“Any number of things. Just going off the top of my head, you could have shot them, drugged them, cut out their tongues, broken their legs and taken their phones, beaten them unconscious, locked them away
somewhere, or even simply left them tied up. You had so many options, and yet you still chose wrong. You have so much to learn. I hope you’re willing.”
“I’m just here for my wife.”
“And I just wanted to see my mother’s cold, rotting corpse. Sometimes life doesn’t work out.”
“You don’t want to do this,” I said, shaking my head and stepping forward, trying to figure out a way that I could somehow get between the two of them before either of us were shot. “You like Katherine.”
Tess looked at Katherine and opened her eyes wide, almost appearing to swoon. “No, Steven,” she said. “I adore Katherine. She was a wonderful friend, and I’m sure she was a wonderful wife.”
I took another step forward. Katherine was still a good ten feet away. Even if I was confident that I could wrestle the gun out of Tess’s hand, I couldn’t reach her. “You don’t want to kill her. I’ve learned a lot about the real you in these past few days, and nothing I’ve seen says you’re a killer. You don’t want to start with Katherine. I wasn’t kidding when I told you she’s pregnant.”
Tess kept the gun pointed at Katherine, but she turned to face me. “Do you want me to congratulate you?”
“No, I want you to put down the gun.”
Tess sighed heavily and then blinked, her eyes distant. “Katherine’s pregnancy is going to make things more difficult.”
“All you have to do is put down your gun. I’ll put mine down, too. I’ll only give you the money if you put down the gun.”
Tess stayed still, but then she focused on me. She softened her voice. “Believe me, I didn’t want this to happen. Until my dying breath, I will regret what I’m about to do.”
“Please,” I said. “Everybody wins if you put down your gun. If you don’t, we’ll all walk away losers.”
“I wish I could,” said Tess. “But we’re not done with the lesson. It’s the first of many you’ll learn tonight: nobody is exactly who they seem to be. Whether you believe it or not, vile beasts wearing human flesh surround you every single day of your life.” She paused. “Sometimes I think I might even be one of them. Now,” she said, straightening her white blouse. “I don’t see any money. You’ll need it, so I hope it’s in your car.”