You Can Never Tell

by Sarah Warburton

  Julia: Victim number eleven, Marcus Fontenot, was ex-military, a really big guy.

  Helen: Exactly. And there’s another reason we didn’t talk about yet. Those cameras and monitors. You and I know the police found cameras in the house next door and footage from lots of houses in the neighborhood. Michael claimed that earlier they’d found some of them in his home, but they looked old and the batteries were dead and they swept to try to detect any others, and they just figured it was something to do with the former owner. But Brady was there where they looked for the cameras. He’s the one who did the electronic sweep.

  Julia: He pretended to do an electronic sweep.

  Helen: We know that now. And I bet—I mean, Michael’s an engineer, he’s no fool. When he saw the video setup in that room, he had to think about his own home. Where his wife and baby were. So he’s in shock, he’s afraid for his life, and he’s afraid for his family. So he goes along with Brady, buying time so that he can get out of there. Which he does. He goes back, gets his wife and baby, they drive to the police station, and that’s how Brady’s caught.

  Julia: And the internet speculation—he must have known, he must have been involved, why was he there so long? He was there for over five hours.

  Helen: But not five full hours of murder. Not that fifteen minutes or whatever makes it better.

  Julia: Like how long is too long?

  Helen: But that’s where the speculation came from. The bottom line is that if he hadn’t gotten out of there, hadn’t gone to the police, I definitely believe more people would have died before Brady was caught.

  Julia: Brady and Lena. Up to this point, they were killing as a team.

  Helen: And that brings us to our next questions. Why did Brady approach Michael in the first place?

  Julia: Because Lena wasn’t there.

  Helen: And what exactly happened to her?

  CHAPTER

  18

  THE NEXT MORNING Michael headed off to work, squeezing into his car jammed next to mine in the garage and driving away with his head ducked as though he could avoid the press. I wished I had somewhere else to go, something else to think about, some escape I could call my “responsibility,” some job to take me out of these four walls. We had hardly spoken to each other since he’d gotten home from work yesterday, instead moving through the house like two wooden dolls. The daddy doll loaded the dishwasher, the mommy doll bathed the baby, and then they sat stiffly on the sofa until it was time to lie in bed.

  Not sleep. I thought I might never sleep again.

  Now Grace lay on her quilt, kicking her feet in time to my fingers tapping on my coffee mug.

  The police had asked me so many questions about Michael, and I had so many of my own. But I was afraid. Not of what the police were implying—I knew Michael, knew him to my bones. He left his email open on his computer, I knew the password to his phone, he called to let me know when he’d be late. I’d never wondered if he was where he said he was; he’d never kept secrets. Until now.

  This was Michael, who’d rubbed my back for hours the day after I’d been fired. Who’d never snapped at me or told me to pull it together. Who’d taken a new job and moved all the way across the country for me. And all the little things—how he kept a box of granola bars in his car to hand out to the homeless, how he texted me links to sweet or funny stories, how he didn’t hold a grudge, his anger always gone by the time the sun rose. And he hated true crime—dramas, podcasts, even news stories. While the world was wondering what had happened to the young mother and her two kids or if the roommate knew more than she was saying, Michael would just remark that the whole thing was “so sad” and then turn his attention back to making his immediate life better.

  I, on the other hand, had wasted so much time wondering what it meant that the coworker had lied to the police or judging the husband for having had an affair. And what had I gotten out of it? I sure wasn’t any more informed about human nature. Look at how easily Aimee had deceived me. And almost two years later, I didn’t know her any better or have a deeper understanding of why she’d framed me.

  As for Brady, either he was a complete monster, one who’d been in my home, eaten my food and fed me his, and seen me before, during, and after my pregnancy, all without raising any red flags, or my husband was lying. More than lying. Complicit, murderous.

  Because one fact wasn’t in dispute. A dead body had been found in the house next door. And now my husband had secrets, such heavy ones I was afraid they’d break him.

  My stomach was full of acid, my coffee cold, as I sat on the sofa watching Grace stretching her arms and legs, blissfully oblivious. I’d get the spackle from the garage and start patching the holes in our walls. I’d fix the damage I could fix. In a minute.

  Then from somewhere outside I heard a harsh grinding, a machine roaring to life with an earsplitting squeal. My breath caught, and I ran to the window. Through the gap in our back fence where the tiered garden used to be, I caught a glimpse of a yellow hard hat and orange safety vests. Construction workers in Lena’s backyard.

  I flung open the back door and stepped out. Even at this distance I caught a whiff of ground concrete and heat. They were busting up the pool.

  “Hey,” I shouted, waving my arms. But my voice was swallowed by the din of destruction. And then one of the workers flung a gray tarp over the gap in the fence, cutting off my partial view.

  The rosebush I’d planted was blanketed in a spray of dust, white like concrete or bone. Of course it wasn’t bone. I knew that. But the dead girl was everywhere I looked, behind Lena’s second-floor windows reflecting the morning light, behind the fence that shielded the side of the Vosses’ house from ours. There was only one reason I could think of. They were looking for more bodies.

  The same pool where I’d swirled my foot through the water, the same pool where I’d felt the dawning of hope, connection, friendship, and a future.

  I couldn’t look.

  Wheeling around, I fled inside and collapsed on the sofa, wrapping my arms around myself.

  Grief ran under and through my fear for Michael, like dark veins through marble, different from anything I’d felt before. With Aimee, I’d been unprepared, blindsided by her betrayal, grieving a friendship that had never existed. But this was something deeper.

  How could anyone be so violent, so vicious? Aimee had destroyed my career; Brady had destroyed lives. There was a time I hadn’t understood the difference, but now the obliteration of a second chance, another day, a future was all too clear. This wasn’t a scar across the growth rings in a tree trunk; it was the whole oak burned twig to root. Families left with nothing but memories. The way I would have been if Brady had killed Michael.

  I could imagine Brady as a killer. The easy way he struck up rapport, the way he used a wink to make a moment slightly uncomfortable and then grinned, as if taking pleasure in it. At least, that was the way it seemed now. Back then, the grin had seemed to say, Just joking, everything’s okay.

  And I wasn’t grieving just anonymous lives; I was grieving Lena. Every day without that distinctive knock on the door, every hour without her haphazard texts, every minute wondering what had happened to her.

  The vibrations from the machines ran through me, reverberating as strongly as my breath. If it was this powerful in my body, it must be too strong for Grace; it might damage her hearing. But she was quiet, arching her back a bit as if trying to discover the source of the sound that filled our home. I picked her up. We’d go to the far side of the house, the nursery.

  There I could still hear the noise, but it didn’t buzz through nerve and sinew. I set Grace in her crib under her mobile with its trembling paper stars. She looked surprised, and then her brows drew together. She already knew what the crib meant, and she wasn’t sleepy.

  “Just give me a second,” I told her. “I’m trying.”

  I ran back out and scooped up her bouncy chair, a roll of paper towels, and the spackle and putty knife I’d set out e
arlier. She was almost crying when I got back, but once she was settled in her chair with its arch of cheerful stuffed shapes, her world was all right again. I wished I could fix everything that easily. But the hole in the nursery wall next to the light switch was proof. I’d let her down. I hadn’t seen the signs of danger. All I could do now was repair the visible damage.

  Tentatively, I spread a little spackle, but it just fell inside the wall. I’d need something to give it support. I tore off a sheet of paper towels, wadded them up, and stuffed them in the cavity. This time the spackling compound stuck to the paper towels, and I spread it out across the edge of the drywall.

  My own grief was a hole, the absence of Lena. And I could imagine only two choices, both of them paths that led to darker places. The first was that she had never gone on a trip. The police had checked with her aunt, and not only had Lena not visited, but there’d been no plans for nor talk of a visit, not according to the aunt. Those texts Lena had sent me didn’t mean she was alive. They could have come from anyone.

  No, not anyone. From Brady.

  The thought I was avoiding, coinciding with the first path, was that Brady had killed Lena, the same way he might have killed a dozen others. That he’d used her phone to buy himself some time or delay suspicion. That he’d disposed of her body before he’d started dismembering the young woman, the one Michael had seen. After all, a killer who could do that to a stranger, a human with whom he had no history, would be more than capable of doing it to his wife.

  My hand trembled, and the edge of the putty knife scored the spackle. I scooped more up and pressed it on, then scraped it smooth again, willing my hand to be steady.

  My friend with her flaming hair, her larger-than-life personality, her laugh that rolled like thunder, was dead and buried somewhere she might never be found. That was an absence that couldn’t be filled, a loss I couldn’t wrap my head around.

  But there was a second path, one the police were also considering. I could tell from the questions they’d asked, the way they’d walked me through my calendar, examined my texts with Lena, asked about specific dates and places.

  Lena could have been involved as well. No, not involved; that was just my mind trying to mitigate her responsibility. Lena, my friend, might be a killer like her husband.

  This patch was as smooth as I could make it, but the texture wasn’t the same as the wall around it. I picked up the plastic tub and read the directions. Let dry, then paint. Grace had dozed off, her head lolling on its side. I’d see if we had the right color.

  When I opened the garage door, the heat rolled over me. Paint cans from the previous homeowners were lined up against the wall, along with a box of leftover tile and some spare shingles. Our garage wasn’t neat and orderly like Lena and Brady’s. Some unopened boxes still sat in a corner, along with the bikes we’d brought but hadn’t ridden since the move, Grace’s stroller base, and a jumble of miscellany—an old pair of Michael’s running shoes, a battered tool box, empty packaging and old Christmas decorations and unused gardening tools and bug sprays.

  Our neighbors’ garage had been spotless and well lighted, just like the inside of the trucks Brady’s contractors used. Each truck had a laminated inventory of its contents to be checked before every call. That was Lena’s doing. She was the reason Brady kept expanding his business. She was the reason Michael and I didn’t own a power drill. I knew exactly where she kept hers in its designated slot in her highly organized garage.

  Some of the questions the police asked had been about their relationship. Had she seemed afraid of Brady? Did it seem like she was excessively willing to please him?

  But that was nonsense. Lena hadn’t been afraid of anyone, and she sure as hell hadn’t seemed in thrall to Brady. If anything, she had been the one driving their business and arranging their home. Maybe he’d resented that and one night he’d just lost his temper. Maybe she’d learned what he was doing and he’d killed her to keep her quiet. Maybe.

  I thought uncomfortably about my older sister, Charlotte, how surprised I’d been to hear her marriage was over. Maybe I didn’t know anything about relationships. Maybe the friendship I’d thought I had with Lena had been a lie like my friendship with Aimee. Maybe she hadn’t chosen me because she liked me. Maybe she’d been stalking me.

  I was standing where two paths diverged, but this wood wasn’t yellow, it was pitch-black. One path would plunge me off a cliff; the other would dump me into a swollen river, and there was no way back out again. And there might be a killer out there, wearing the face of my friend.

  Snatching the handle of the can marked INT and a screwdriver from the toolbox, I hurried inside, locking the door behind me like I’d never done before.

  The press was there on the front lawn of Lena’s house and ours. I couldn’t flee the noise of the destruction next door by walking Grace around the neighborhood in her stroller or even checking the mail. And all those people out there—the crime show commentators, stringers from the national news, and maybe just some true-crime junkies—they didn’t have any answers for me, only more speculation.

  Just like I probably was the subject of speculation for my neighbors.

  I set the paint and screwdriver in the nursery next to the spackling gear. One hole down, at least half a dozen left. I might be able to fill them all before Michael came home.

  My phone was suddenly a leaden weight in my pocket, its stillness further proof of Lena’s absence. I could check the news, see if anything additional had been published. Had the police found more bodies, had Brady confessed anything, did they have any idea what had happened to Lena? I could feel the eagerness inside, right alongside the sick fear that I’d see what I’d seen the last time I checked. The front of my own house.

  Nothing I wanted to know had been released. If this were a television program, some investigative journalist or freelance detective would have bribed their way into the police station or found a jailhouse informant. Instead, the people on my front lawn were searching for answers I didn’t have.

  And we paid to live in this stupid neighborhood with its manicured lawns and trash can curfews. If we could get fined for putting our recycling bins out too early, surely these vultures weren’t allowed either.

  I couldn’t do a damn thing about the police, but the news crews would have to go. Furiously, I searched on my phone for the homeowners’ association number and called, only to get a voice mail. Should I identify myself? Would it make me look guilty to complain? Before I could chicken out, I blurted, “I’m on Evening Primrose and there are reporters everywhere, blocking the street and making noise. Do something about it.”

  I hung up, my face hot. I hadn’t identified myself, but I’d taken action.

  Grace squawked, waking to the realization that she was hungry, and I bent to scoop her up, my heart pounding against her. She’d just finished nursing when I heard voices on the street outside, then a knock on the door.

  I peeked through the beveled glass at a figure on the front step and a police car in my driveway.

  My mouth dry, Grace dozing in my arms, I opened the door to an officer in uniform, about ten years older than me. In a thick Louisiana accent, he asked, “Miz Tremaine?”

  When I nodded mutely, he offered me a business card. “I’m the designated officer for this community.”

  My arms tightened around Grace.

  But then the officer removed his sunglasses. His eyes, under heavy black brows, were kind. “I understand you’ve been having some trouble with the news people. Now, I’m all for free speech, but the HOA has some regulations in place to keep the streets from being clogged up.”

  “That was fast. I just called.” Maybe I shouldn’t have said that, but something was rising in me. My call had made things better. First I’d get rid of the reporters, then I’d work on the bigger problems.

  He nodded. “I’ve been meaning to get out here. We’ve had a couple of calls. There’s plenty of families with young children or those who just pl
ain don’t want their homes featured on television. And this street’s pretty narrow. And right now nobody’s living next to you anyhow, which means the burden of that harassment is falling on you and your little one. You’re entitled to some protection, in my book.”

  As he was talking, Rahmia came down the opposite side of the street. I hadn’t seen her since the night everything happened. Now her eyes widened, and her steps slowed as she walked past. She probably thought I’d fooled her, just the way Lena had fooled me.

  That was our life now. Even the nicest constable in the world couldn’t make things okay. Clearing the reporters would only remove the visible proof that all my neighbors, all of Sugar Land and Houston and beyond, all of Texas had a taste of what had happened, and now they were thirsty to know more.

  I knew Michael was innocent, I knew trauma could heal, and I knew it was up to me to get us both out the other side. If finding the truth was the only way through this nightmare, I would get those answers, and the rest of the world could choke on them.

  C2C TRANSCRIPT

  9

  Helen: So why did Brady Voss get caught? Up to this point, he’d been committing murders and he hadn’t even had a close call. He wasn’t devolving, he was making smart decisions, varying his hunting grounds, his victim types, and his disposal sites.

  Julia: Pacing himself. Twelve victims chosen from six different counties, all spaced about six to eight months apart.

  Helen: There’s actually no reason to believe he wouldn’t have—couldn’t have—continued what he was doing. Maybe even for years. All he had to do was keep on keeping on. But then he invited Michael Tremaine over—

  Julia: Do we know that?