Other Resort Cities

by Tod Goldberg

  No one laughed, which surprised Terry, until he realized how disconcerting it must be to walk into your future, only to find someone already inhabiting it.

  As minute after minute passed, Terry began to grasp how little of his own future had been realized. What had he wanted as a child? What had he wanted most? His therapist told him that what he really wanted was a stable family, but Terry thought that was just the hourly rate talking, a good starting point to spend days and days dealing with his obvious Freudian anger. All Terry was certain of was that, at one time or another, he’d wanted to be more. More of what he did not know, but he was sure, sitting there with Seth snoring quietly across his lap, that he knew why humans were the only animals to keep pets: the opportunity to have both dominion and love without tangible responsibility. If you lose a dog it’s a shame, but it’s not a crime.

  He imagined what Liza would be like in twenty years if he and Seth just picked up and left in ten minutes. Then in five minutes. And two minutes. Would her life be more? Would she achieve beyond what, Terry realized, was likely to be a prolonged descent into white trash servitude? If you get abducted by your own father—or at least the man who decided he was your father—what are the odds that you’ll end up lecturing at Harvard on molecular biology versus the odds you’ll end up stripping at a “gentlemen’s club” in Portland, Oregon, the spit of some drunk trucker drying on your ass?

  By the time he’d carried Seth out to the Explorer and set him in the front seat, Terry Green had decided that the long coil of Liza’s life would be better held in someone else’s hand, someone who wouldn’t just let her disappear, or, worse, take her in the first place. And when he saw her there asleep in the backseat, still in the previous day’s clothes, and realized he hadn’t even bothered to bring her inside the night before, he couldn’t decide if he felt relieved or disappointed.

  Terry wakes Seth and Liza up at 7:00 with a handful of candy he’s stolen from the sales office. He’s already filled up the Explorer with the three pallets of bottled water he found in the garage of their overnight home, as well as a stack of frozen Lean Cuisines from the icebox inside the sales office, three Styrofoam take-out boxes from someplace called Thai Smile that smelled relatively fresh, as well as the office’s small microwave. He’s spent another ten minutes with a bottle of Windex wiping down the surfaces he and the kids touched in the model, but Terry knows this is probably overkill, especially since at least a hundred people have walked through the house over the course of the previous day. Still, Terry thinks, a decent person cleans up his own mess.

  “Where are we going today?” Seth asks after he gobbles down a handful of M&Ms.

  “California,” Terry says. “Maybe New Mexico. Maybe Utah. Let’s just get on the road and see where it ends.” Terry is trying to sound cheery and fun, but he’s aware that a weariness has crept into his voice, and he understands that eventually time and tide will catch up to him and neither will sweep him away. By now, Terry thinks, he must be national news. Liza and Seth are adorable. He is relatively handsome. There are photos of him and Seth in matching Little League uniforms. Liza even appeared in one of those baby beauty pageants. Christ. What were he and Polly thinking? It was long after that whole JonBenet shit, and yet they still did it, dressing her up like a fucking princess and taking her down to the Airport Marriott in Oakland so that she could lip synch to “I Will Always Love You.” She didn’t even place. What was she then? Three? He imagines Nancy Grace doing shows all about him. He imagines that alien-looking Greta Van Susteren interviewing his mother, his friends, his co-workers, the women he didn’t sleep with.

  “Can we go home?” Liza asks.

  “No, no,” Terry says. “We’re still on vacation. Aren’t you having fun on vacation? Isn’t this neat?”

  “I miss Mommy,” Liza says.

  “Me, too,” Seth says.

  Me three, Terry wants to say, though in fact he doesn’t miss Polly as much as he misses some memory of Polly, though he can’t say which one specifically. The weird thing, he knows, is that when he really presses for a concrete moment of their lives together, he normally ends up conjuring the baby powder smell of her deodorant, or the feeling her palm left on his back when she would absently place it there while they walked through Target looking for hand soap and his dandruff shampoo, or the strange ebullience he felt when her name popped up in his email in-box even after their divorce.

  “Why don’t we call Mommy when we get to the next city?” Terry says. “Maybe she and Landon are finally home. Would you like that? Maybe we’ll do that.”

  In Quartzsite, just ahead of the Arizona border with California, Terry stops at the massive Flying J truck stop and pays an attendant twenty-five bucks to let the kids shower in the “trucker’s only” shower stalls while Terry stands guard. After the kids get out, he’ll plop them down inside the arcade for a few minutes while he looks for an Explorer whose license plate he can steal. He figures it will take them another eight hours to get back to the Bay Area. And then? You spend an entire lifetime thinking about who you’re about to become, and then one day you realize who you are and nothing seems to line up exactly. Terry understands this to be true now, understands that if he wants to fight fires he’ll have to beg to be placed in one of those programs where convicts get to fight the most dangerous, life threatening fires; understands that if he could find the little black box inside his head, he’d try to restore the system back to about 1989. Three days after graduation from high school and he and Polly and the entire just-graduated senior class of Northgate High School were on a cruise ship bound for Mexico. It was an absurd choice, this cruise, as Terry had never felt like he really fit in with the other kids. Oh, he’d had plenty of friends, had even been somewhat popular, had played varsity baseball, had been active in student council, had been one of the guys everyone liked, though it was clear he wasn’t admired as such. Which was fine. But this cruise—a seven day affair—would be his undoing, he knew. Could he be trapped on this floating city of other people’s lives without, just once, trying to slip into another room? It was all about proximity and opportunity, Terry understood, and he’d been able to quell his sneaking need around the neighborhood by simply getting to know his neighbors over the course of eighteen years. After having found reasons to enter all of the homes on his cul-de-sac—a cup of sugar for cookies was a general suburban need not even the childless neighbors could deny, he found—the allure had abated some. More and more often, however, entire city blocks began to spike his interest. What was going on in all those homes? What were the people he could see only as shadows against blinds saying to each other? What did their furniture look like? Were the beds against the wall or under the window? Who still had a black-and-white television that they actually used? Who used liquid detergent and who used powder? Who still used a wooden cutting board? Did the dogs get to sleep on the beds of the children? Did all the clocks have the same time on them? Did their VCRs blink 12:00? Would they even notice he was there? Could he live inside an inhabited house and never be found? Could he will himself invisible?

  It was a test. Terry believed then that if he could spend seven days without breaking threshold, he could do anything. If he could not be himself, his true self, for seven straight days, it was reasonable to assume that he could assimilate into a life of normalcy, even if it meant living inside an alien skin.

  Terry lasted five days, though he reasoned that it should have been expected that he’d sneak into Cooper Donovan’s room, particularly since he had a fairly good idea that Polly was fucking him, too. And the fact that it was true—that she was indeed fucking him, and that he listened to it all from underneath the bed—made it all forgivable. Polly was drunk. Cooper was drunk. And that Polly tearfully told him all of it as they stood watching a famous Mexican blow hole, La Bufadora, gave him a sense of true validation. Other people’s closed-door lives were just as sordid and disappointing as his own; even if the life belonged to the woman he loved.

 
; So he decides his next move. He will take the children back. He will place them inside their beds while Polly and Landon sleep. He will hide his children in their own home, so that when they wake up they might just think it was all a terrible dream, that the last month spent sleeping in model homes across the West was a shared delusion. First, he’ll take them to Lippert’s ice cream parlor in Pleasant Hill, a place they used to go to as a family for birthday parties, and he will pour a healthy dose of cough syrup into their root beer floats. He’ll use the key Seth wears around his neck to unlock the backdoor—he’ll wait until at least 3:00 AM, until even the most fervent insomniac finally buckles under and takes an Ambien or Tylenol PM—and he’ll carry Liza in first, to make sure, to not fuck it up again. He might sit for a moment alone with just Seth in the car, because Terry realizes that he’s infected this poor seed of his with his own particular brand of sickness, just as he’s sure someone infected him. His mother? His remarried-five-times father? You can blame your parents for only so much, Terry knows, but he imagines he’ll spend a few final moments with Seth whispering directives into his ear on how to live a good life, that he’ll be like Marlon Brando showing up to tell Christopher Reeve’s Superman how to be Superman even though he’d died twenty-five years and eight thousand light years previous. And then he’d carry Seth into his bedroom, would tuck him in tight, would kiss him once on each cheek, would maybe cut a small lock of his hair off and keep it in a locket, something to look at while he drove across America. He figures that he might just get off, that it might be a gray area of the law if you kidnap your own children and then return them, particularly if you haven’t done something awful to them along the way.

  Then Terry notices how very quiet the Flying J truck stop has become, how very alone he is standing in the hallway outside the shower stalls, how clearly he can hear Seth and Liza laughing and talking and splashing, when before all he could hear were the sounds of truckers and families pouring around him, their conversations meeting him in quick thrusts of language, the kinds of conversations he’d like to replicate sometime, conversations about going and coming, about getting somewhere, conversations he’s imagined a million times. And in his mind, Terry Green begins to press the reset button over and over again, closing his eyes against the growing cacophony of sirens in the distance, tries to focus on the knock-knock joke he can hear his son telling his daughter (Knock Knock. Who’s there? Shirley. Shirley who? Shirley you know this joke.), tries to make a choice, tries to find a reason, tries to keep it together just a moment longer, tries to tell his children, when they walk out and ask him what is going on, what is happening, Daddy tell us what ’s wrong, that everything is fine, that everything is going to be just fine, that everyone is going home.

  Granite City

  They disappeared during the coldest winter on record. There was no special episode of America’s Most Wanted. No jogger stumbled on a human skull. Instead, it was Scotch Thompson’s bird dog, Scout, who came running down Yeach Mountain with a human hand in her mouth. And just like that, James Klein and his family were found.

  “Damndest thing I ever seen,” Lyle, my deputy, said. “All of them stacked up like Lincoln Logs. Like they were put down all gentle. Terrible, terrible thing.” We were sitting in the front seat of my cruiser sipping coffee, both of us too old to be picking at the bones of an entire family, but resigned to doing it anyway. “You think it was someone from out of town, Morris?”

  “Hard to say,” I said. “It’s been so damn long, you know, it could have been anybody.”

  James Klein, his wife Missy, and their twin sons, Andy and Tyler, fell off the earth sometime before October 12, 1998. Fred Lipton came over that day to borrow back his wrench set, but all he found was an empty house and a very hungry cat.

  “You think it was some kinda drug thing, don’t you?” Lyle said, but I didn’t respond. “You always thought Klein was involved in something illegal, I know, but I thought they were good people.”

  “I don’t know what I think anymore, Lyle,” I said. A team of forensic specialists from the capital was coming down the side of the mountain, and I spotted Miller Descent out in front, his hands filled with plastic evidence bags. I’d worked with Miller before and knew this wasn’t a good sign. What Scout the collie had stumbled onto was a shallow grave filled with four bodies, along with many of their limbs. The twins, Andy and Tyler, were missing their feet. James and Missy were without hands.

  Miller motioned me out of the cruiser. “Lotta shit up there,” he said. Miller was a tall man, his face sharp and angular, with long green eyes. He had a look about him that said he couldn’t be shocked anymore; that the world was too sour of a place for him. “Like some kinda damned ritual took place. Animal bones are mixed up in that grave, I think. Need to get an anthropologist up here to be sure, but it looks like dog bones mostly. Maybe a cat or two. Snow pack kept those bodies pretty fresh.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “What’s the medical examiner say?”

  Miller screwed his face up into a knot, his nose almost even with his eyes. “Can I be honest with you, Sheriff Drew?”

  “Sure, Miller.”

  “Your ME about threw up when she saw all them bodies,” he said. “You know, I was in Vietnam so this doesn’t mean so much to me. I’ve seen things that’d make your skin run, but she just, well, I think she was a little bothered by the whole thing. You might want to have them bodies cut up by some more patient people upstate.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.

  Miller smiled then and scratched at something on his neck. “Anyway,” he said. “You still playing softball in that beer league?”

  I never knew how to handle Miller Descent. He could be holding a human head in one hand and a Coors in the other and it wouldn’t faze him.

  “Not this year,” I said.

  “Too bad,” he said, and then he shuffled his way back up Yeach.

  I didn’t get home that night until well past ten o’clock. I brewed myself a pot of coffee and sat at the kitchen table looking over notes I’d written when the Kleins first disappeared, plus the new photos shot up on the mountain. Since my second wife, Margaret, died, I’d taken to staying up late at night; I’d read or watch TV or go over old cases, anything to keep me from crawling into that lonely bed. But that night, my trouble was not with the memory of a woman who I loved for the last thirty years of my life, or my first wife, Katherine, whose own death at twenty-four still haunted me, but for a family I had barely known.

  The Kleins moved into Granite City during the fall of 1995. James Klein was a pharmacist, so when he and his wife purchased Dickey Fine’s Rexall Drug Store downtown, everyone figured it was going to be a good match. Dickey had gotten old, and going to him for a prescription was often more dangerous than just fighting whatever ailment you had on faith and good humor.

  James and Missy were in the store together most days. James wore a starched white lab coat even though it wasn’t really required. It inspired confidence in the people, I think, to get their drugs from someone who looked like a doctor. Missy always looked radiant, no matter the season, standing behind the counter smiling and chatting up the townspeople and, when skiing season started, the tourists who’d come in for directions or cold medicine.

  All that to say I never trusted them. I’d known the family only casually, but I knew them well enough to know that they were hiding something. James sported a diploma from Harvard inside the pharmacy, and Missy looked like the type of woman who was best suited for clambakes at Pebble Beach. They were not small town people—they drove a gold Lexus and a convertible Jaguar—and Granite City is a small town. I never had cause to investigate the Kleins, never even pulled them over for speeding, but I aimed to at some point, just so that I could look James in the eye when I had the upper hand, when my authority might cause his veneer to smudge. That chance didn’t come.

  I picked up a photo from the gravesite, and there was James Klein’s face staring up at me. Miller was ri
ght: the bodies had been well preserved by the snow pack. The skin on James’s face was tight and tugged at the bones. His eyes had vanished over the course of the year and a half—eaten by bugs or simply by the act of decay—but I could still picture the way they narrowed whenever he saw me.

  His body lay face up, his arms flung to either side of him. He was draped on top of his wife, his hands chopped from his arms, wearing his now drab gray lab coat. Shards of bone jutted from underneath his sleeves, and I thought that whoever had done this to him had taken great pains to make him suffer.

  For a long time I stared at James Klein and wondered what it would be like to know that you were about to die. Andy and Tyler, the twins, must have known all too well that their time on Earth was ending before it ever had a chance to begin. They were only twelve.

  I stood up, stretched my arms above my head, and paced in the kitchen while I tried to gather my thoughts. After the family had initially disappeared, I’d searched their home with Deputy Nixon and Deputy Person. We didn’t find any forced entry or signs of a struggle, but we did find bundles of cash hidden in nearly every crevice of the house. All told, there was close to half a million dollars stashed in shoeboxes, suitcases, and file cabinets. The money was tested for trace residues of cocaine, heroin, and marijuana but came up empty.

  For almost three months, we searched for the Klein family. In time, though, winter dropped in full force and even James Klein’s own mother and father returned to their hometown. I told them not to worry, that we would find their son and his wife and their twin grandsons, but I knew that they were dead. I knew because there was $500,000 sitting in my office unclaimed, and no man alive would leave that money on purpose. And so, as the months drifted away and my thoughts of the Klein family withered and died in my mind, I figured that one day when I was retired someone would find them somewhere.