You Can Never Tell

by Sarah Warburton

  But I was still carrying Aimee’s postcard with me. And I’d picked up a blank one depicting the skull of a Texas longhorn. I would send it once I decided what to write. If that friendship could be a lie, what guarantees did I have that these new ones would last?

  “You know,” I said to Dr. Lindsey, “if I could just understand why she did it, I’d feel better. It’s not like she had a gambling problem or a drug addiction; it’s not like she was desperate for money—”

  “You assume she wasn’t desperate for money,” Dr. Lindsey said mildly.

  “Well, there have to be easier, less cruel ways to get cash. Lower risk in every way. What makes a person behave like that?”

  Dr. Lindsey tucked a strand of glossy hair behind one ear. “So you think understanding Aimee’s motivation might make it easier for you to get past the fallout of her actions?”

  I thought over her words for a minute, then nodded. “Yes. I just keep turning it over and over, trying to make sense of it.”

  “What if you aren’t ever able to make sense of it?”

  I shifted in my seat. What was she trying to say? That people were unknowable? That she didn’t know the answer either? What the hell was I paying for if there weren’t any answers to be had?

  “You’re frowning,” Dr. Lindsey noted. The air conditioning seemed to be getting colder, and the quiet hush of the building roared in my ears.

  Wrapping my arms around myself, I felt like a fractious child. “It’s just, didn’t you go to school for this? To understand people and their motivations? What would you ask her if she were here?”

  Dr. Lindsey shook her head, her blunt-cut bob swaying. “Aimee isn’t here. The only person who’s here, the only person I’m concerned with, is you. Let’s say you did understand her motivation and it made you feel better, releasing you from this pain and anxiety. What then?”

  I didn’t understand. Her face was intent, and I could feel my heart fluttering like it had in the museum director’s office before I was fired. This was just another exam I was going to fail. “You want me to imagine what she could say that would make it all okay? Some motivation that would be good enough?”

  I knew I’d said the wrong thing. Dr. Lindsey didn’t look disappointed, not exactly, but she took a moment before speaking, and I could tell she was thinking of how to rephrase her question so even an idiot like me would understand.

  My eyes scanned the room again. If only she had a clock. If I just knew how close I was to getting off the hook. I’d come in thinking I was doing well, and now I just felt stupid again.

  And Dr. Lindsey sighed, a small one, but audible. “Our time is up, Kacy, but I want you to think about this. If I could wave a magic wand and make Aimee disappear, if everything she’d done had still happened but she was just gone—not still working at the museum, not posting on the internet—how would your life look then?”

  I thought of the postcard in my bag, still blank, ready like a curse I planned to work. If there were no Aimee … my mind was blank.

  I barely registered Dr. Lindsey walking me out to the waiting room, my trip down the elevator, even driving home. A world without Aimee might stretch to the horizon like the Texas sky.

  * * *

  I was in our hall bathroom, stripping the paper with orange-scented spray, when suddenly the floor seemed to buckle and I fell heavily against the wall, groping for something to hold me up. My fingers found the towel rack, but it pulled loose and fell to the ground as I spun around, vomiting into the toilet. Shit.

  When my stomach was empty, I went to the sink, washing my hands and rinsing out my mouth. My brow was sweaty, and I splashed water on my face.

  Food poisoning or the flu?

  The smell of the orange-scented spray that promised to dissolve wallpaper paste seemed overpowering. I left the supplies there on the floor beside the fallen towel rack. Lying down when you were sick wasn’t like lying down when you were depressed. I’d have a big glass of water and a nap on the sofa.

  By the time Michael got home, I was feeling better, but not better enough for the fumes. I’d tried once, but it had made my stomach clench and roll again.

  “Let me take a look.” He was in the bathroom a long time before he shouted out, “Kacy, come here.”

  I heard the fan going as I approached, and the orange chemical smell seemed a little less potent, but Michael wasn’t stripping the wallpaper or rehanging the towel rod. Instead, he seemed to be peering inside the wall, where the brackets for the rod had pulled out a chunk of plaster. His fingers were inside the drywall, groping around. Then he drew back his hand and held it out flat in front of me.

  A camera no bigger than a nickel. Tiny, barely more than a lens and a computer chip.

  “Who did this?” I touched it with a fingertip, carefully, like it might sting me. Then the implications rippled through me as though I really had been bitten. “Someone was watching us?”

  “I don’t know.” His face was grim. “But I don’t think it’s recording right now. Looks inert.”

  He set the camera down carefully on the counter and picked up the towel rack and the two brackets that had held it, each a circle secured by four screws. He set the bar and brackets together off to one side.

  Then he started patting the floor, collecting the screws.

  Frozen, my stomach churning again, I wrapped my arms around myself tightly. We’d been living in some creepy stage set, and every social media troll could be watching a live stream of me panicking right now. Maybe Aimee was watching. Could she have done this? I am calm. I am in control. I can handle this. Michael was concentrating, trying to figure out what was going on. I couldn’t lose my shit.

  But I was. I am freaking out.

  My knees almost collapsing, I crouched down to be closer to Michael or to hide my face, and together we found one screw, then two, another and another, until the seventh. And that was it. Along the edge of the counter, under the door of the linen closet, behind the base of the toilet. Only seven screws.

  Michael said, “The lens must have lined up with a screw hole.”

  I’d heard of peepholes in public bathrooms, but this was our house. It felt like someone was standing right behind me, staring at the back of my neck. “Call the police. We should call them. Or the alarm company? Unless someone there did it.”

  Michael frowned. “I’m going to check the master bath.”

  Just then, my phone buzzed with a text: Y’all want to watch the game?

  And he paused. “Is that Lena? See if Brady’s home. We could use some help.”

  I texted back: Having an issue. Can you & Brady come over?

  There in a sec.

  And a few excruciating minutes later—barely enough time for Michael to take off a single towel rack from the master bathroom—the front door opened and Lena called out, “Where are you?”

  “Down the hall,” I shouted back.

  She and Brady crowded into the bathroom while I explained what we’d found.

  Lena bent to get a closer look at the camera. “Shit, that is messed up. You okay, girl?”

  I nodded, afraid now that if I opened my mouth to say anything, only a bawl of fear and grief would come out. This house wasn’t safe, it wasn’t. Nowhere was safe. Michael was trying to get answers, and all I could do was fall apart.

  She put a hand on my arm and gave it a squeeze. “We’ll figure this out. Brady, y’all install nanny cams and things. What do you think?”

  “Looks like it was wireless. A little camera like these can’t transmit very far. But it shouldn’t have been recording. Even the best batteries on something like this won’t last longer than a year.” Brady flipped it over. “I seriously doubt this thing was still active. To be a long-term spy thing, it would have had to be hooked into a power source.”

  Lena patted me on the shoulder. “Probably it was just the old man. He always seemed like a total pervert.”

  Before I could ask who’d owned the house before him, Michael appeared
in the hallway, another camera in the palm of his hand. “Found this one in the master bathroom.”

  “Where?” I asked, but he didn’t answer.

  Brady took it and held it up to the light. “These aren’t cheap. How many are there?”

  “Two at least.” Michael pointed to what looked like a tiny hair sticking off of one corner. “And I’m not sure it wasn’t spliced into the electrical system. Could this be a wire?”

  The bathroom was too crowded with people, and our reflections in the mirror made it seem like dozens of people were looking at me, watching me, spying. “Could there be a camera behind the mirror?” I knew it wasn’t a one-way mirror, that was stupid, I knew our study was on the other side of that wall, but my face was getting hotter and my breath was shallow.

  “No.” Michael, absorbed in examining the camera he’d found, didn’t even look at me. “We’d see a nonreflective spot.”

  “Okay, let’s start checking the rest of the house.” Brady dropped the camera onto the bathroom counter next to its twin. “We’ll do a visual today and a real RF scan tomorrow. I should probably buy a sweeper for the home electronics truck anyway. I can add it as an optional additional service.”

  I blinked to settle my eyes, but the LED glare of the lights in the windowless bathroom and the lingering fumes made this seem like a bad dream. I needed a way to make it okay, to solve it. “I’m going to find the packet of manuals and contracts that came with the house. Maybe it was some guy with the alarm company or something.”

  “Don’t worry.” Lena put her hand on my arm. “Brady’s on top of all this electronic stuff. Like he said, the batteries are probably dead anyway. Seriously, that old guy was a psycho. I bet he was doing something perverted, but it’s all okay now. Fucker’s totally dead.”

  In a kitchen drawer, I found the warranty information for our air conditioner and furnace, the instructions for our stove, and the HOA agreement. There was a company listed on the alarm, the same company we’d called to set up monitoring when we first moved in.

  Lena opened the panel of our alarm system. “Everything here looks normal.”

  “What about that red light?” I pointed to the little box in the upper corner of our back wall. “There’s another in the master bedroom. Let’s rip those down.”

  “Hold up.” She grabbed my arm as I started to drag a chair over. “That’s part of your alarm system. Should just be a motion sensor, a laser across your back wall. A good idea when you’ve got these high privacy fences like we do. You can call the company, but if you rip ’em off, you’ll have the police here double time. Let Brady take a look.”

  The feeling of being watched—no, scrutinized—struck me again, and I felt a wave of dizziness just as Michael came out of the back room.

  “You look pale. When did you last eat?”

  “I had lunch …” I hadn’t told him about getting sick. “I threw up earlier. Too many fumes from the wallpaper stuff.”

  “You need to keep the fan on, and maybe open the door to the garage to suck some of it out.” He ran a hand over my forehead, and I leaned into the comforting warmth of his fingers.

  “Is there any way to tell where it was transmitting?” If these cameras were live, if they still worked, Michael would have called the police. He was calm, and I could be, I had to be, too.

  “I don’t know. We’ll keep looking tonight, and then I’ll do some research.”

  Brady shouted something from farther down the little hallway, and Michael ran to join him. They’d found another.

  This wasn’t one anomaly; it was a major issue with our house.

  When I looked at Lena, she was watching me with a steady gaze. “You were sick earlier?”

  “A couple hours ago. I’m sorry, I should have said. I don’t think I’m ill. Just fumes.”

  She didn’t smile or look away as she considered me. Then she seemed to snap out of it. “You probably need to eat something. I’ve got soup at home, or we can order pizza if you think you can keep it down.” And I could feel the warmth of her concern again.

  At the thought of food, Chinese food specifically, my nausea subsided, but my unease remained like a cloak over my shoulders.

  Four cameras total. The two bathrooms and one in each of the small bedrooms. One had been hooked into the ceiling fan, the other into an outlet near the baseboard. Who wanted to monitor people’s ankles?

  So many thoughts flooded my mind, from the charitable—fancy child monitoring system—to the heartbreakingly awful—human trafficking and porn.

  Before bed, Michael checked every outlet, every screw, every piece of hardware anywhere in our master bedroom and bathroom. Over Chinese food, he and Brady had ordered an RF scanner with overnight shipping, but tonight we were on our own.

  I’d eaten enough lo mein and scallion beef for eight people, and I felt great. Strong, powerful. The blackout curtains made it impossible to see or be seen, I told myself. The cameras were some leftover artifact from the past, nothing to do with us.

  When I fell asleep, I dreamed I was in the darkened museum after hours. Only the security lights were on, and the corridor I followed took me in a loop past the same three rooms over and over.

  In the distance, I could hear the footsteps of a security guard and the jingling of the keys of his belt. Then I remembered I’d been fired, I wasn’t supposed to be there, so I hurried around a corner, only to find myself just ahead of him, but in the same hallway with the same three galleries.

  One was completely dark and seemingly empty; another had a found-art installation, long paper spirals formed from recyclables hanging from the ceiling, spinning slowly with the air conditioning. And the final one had a statue in a spotlight, a riff on Winged Victory, a woman without a head, formed from stiff paper instead of carved stone. The folds of her chiton gathered around her smooth, taut belly, and I heard Aimee’s voice behind me: “If you can’t imagine a world without me, maybe you need a belly as big as the world?”

  I woke again before dawn, and as I sat on the sofa facing down the red light of the motion sensor, my fingers folding paper stars, everything seemed so clear. How had I not thought of it before?

  I must be pregnant.

  C2C TRANSCRIPT

  6

  Helen: Of course, we’re not talking about a single killer. I think that could have skewed the victim profile too, since there were two perpetrators.

  Julia: Well, what other serial killer “teams” do we know about?

  Helen: The most famous in the Houston area would have to be Dean Corll, known as the Candyman or the Pied Piper. His two partners—Brooks and Henley—were both teenagers, and together they lured over twenty-eight young men to their death. A fracture in their relationship led to Corll’s death and the revelation of his crimes.

  Julia: It’s always the infighting that breaks up the band.

  Helen: A few years later in Los Angeles, the Hillside Stranglers were active. Cousins Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono raped, tortured, and killed ten women and girls. This is another case where the older individual—here Angelo Buono—might have influenced his younger partner. After their tenth murder, Bianchi followed his ex-girlfriend to Washington State. Less than a year later, he kidnapped and killed two university students, and the police caught him.

  Julia: But all of these serial killers are men, and we’re talking about a husband and wife.

  Helen: Don’t worry, my friend, we’ve got precedents for men and women killing together all over the world. Gerald and Charlene Gallego murdered ten people in California in the late seventies. Rodolfo Infante and Ana María Ruíz Villeda killed eight women in the early nineties in Mexico. David and Catherine Birnie murdered four women in the mideighties in Australia. And in England the most famous serial-killing couple has to be the Moors Murderers—Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. And the debate is always power dynamics, whether the husband or wife was driving the action.

  Julia: If there was a sexual component, I’d have to say the husband.
Also, ick. Super ick.

  Helen: And that’s certainly something that defense attorneys have claimed. Charlene Adell Gallego testified against her husband; Ana Villeda claimed she only watched the murders.

  Julia: The couple that preys together, stays together? So if she said, “No more killing; I’m out,” maybe she’d be her husband’s next victim.

  CHAPTER

  11

  I DIDN’T SLEEP AGAIN, instead filling the box on the sofa with multipointed stars. My little stack of glossy paper was getting low. I’d been experimenting with how many points I could put on a star and whether I could adjust them after I’d popped them into shape. Somehow, despite my experience as an art historian and museum employee, art had been something I’d only studied, not anything I’d thought I could make.

  But these little paper pieces, sort of “proto-art” or maybe even just a “craft,” were easy for me, comforting to my hands, and the more of them I made, the more natural it felt to manipulate them and deviate from the pattern.

  And they dissipated my anxiety.

  My fingers folded and creased as I let my mind roam.

  Michael and I had talked in a general way about having a baby. Initially, while we were dating, we’d had the “do you want kids” talk. When we bought this house, it had been obvious to assume one of the two extra bedrooms would be the nursery.

  After the night last week that I’d spent with Elizabeth, when Michael had made his way back from the trip to West Texas with Wyatt, we’d discussed it. How scary it would be to lose a child. How much we hoped everything would be okay for our friends. Wyatt had said they’ve been trying for about two years. The next step was a fertility specialist.

  I thought about Elizabeth, her colorful kitchen, how careful she was—not just in life, but with people. She’d be a good mother.

  And then I imagined my own child. Coloring papers or folding them into shapes. Swimming in Lena’s pool. I’d been four when my younger sister, Molly, was born, but all three of us girls babysat when we got older. I knew something about kids. Maybe I’d be a good mother, too.