Within These Walls

by Ania Ahlborn

  How long will she think she and Jeff are a thing? they had likely wondered. When will she catch him in the act, and who will the lucky girl be?

  Office pools had been started over less.

  You moron. That self-deprecating voice reared up from the cobwebbed corner of her mind, louder than ever. You stupid little girl. Why don’t you just kill yourself? Spare yourself the embarrassment. They’re better off without an idiot like you around. Because really, how could you be so fucking dim-wittedly dumb?

  She crumpled back into her seat beside the machine and sobbed. The humiliation and betrayal crashed over her in debilitating waves. She felt obtuse enough to stick her head in the washer and drown herself. Her brain made an immediate leap to the medicine cabinet ­upstairs—the master bathroom had once held relief. Under Jeffrey’s orders, Avis had continued to pick up Audra’s pills at the clinic. But they were confiscated as soon as she stepped out of the facility. Jeff would pour them out the open car window or crush them under his boot heels, grinding them into the pavement. The fact that her source of help was gone only made her burst into another fit of hysterical tears.

  Avis would have been happy to live out the rest of her life in the laundry room, but Kenzie slunk inside and quietly took a seat on the floor beside her. He watched as she wiped at her face with someone’s dirty T-shirt. When she finally gathered up enough courage to look at him, he gave her a pensive smile.

  “It’s always strange the first time,” he said, doing her the favor of not asking what was wrong. He’d figured her problem out on his own. Hell, for all Avis knew, they were laughing at her as she wept behind a closed door. Was she still Avis if they were all snickering behind her back? Was Avis the type of girl to be the butt of someone’s jokes? She shook her head and tried to put on a miserable smile. Kenzie reached out and placed a long-fingered hand on her knee for comfort, then scooted a little closer. His hand drifted down her leg to cup her calf. “When I first found out, I walked in on Clover and Gypsy,” he said. “Thought they were gonna kill me.” He cracked a widemouthed grin, then barked out a jarring laugh at the memory.

  She soaked up spit and tears with cotton that smelled of sweat.

  “It’s our way, see? We gotta love each other. Being this way, it makes us stronger, more unified. You know, like a team.” When she didn’t respond, he gave her a quizzical look. “Don’t you feel closer to Jeff after you two started sleepin’ together?”

  Her heart jumped into her throat, nearly escaping in another spasm of sickness. Did everyone know that she and Jeff were having sex? She squeezed her eyes shut against the sudden pounding in her head. There’s something very wrong here, she thought. This isn’t the way it’s supposed to be.

  “It’s no big deal, Avis,” he said. That name. “You don’t gotta be embarrassed. Everyone belongs to everyone. Monogamy is selfish, like ownership. You don’t want to be owned, right? That’s slavery.” He glanced over his shoulder, then leaned in, motioning for her to bring her tear-swollen face closer to his. Audra wasn’t interested in secrets. She’d had her fill. But she moved closer anyway. “Even so, we still have our favorites.”

  She pulled away from him, feeling sicker than ever. “Oh.” The single syllable came out flat and hollow. Was being a favorite good enough? Could she handle the nonexclusivity if somewhere, in the back of her mind, she knew she was Jeffrey’s top choice?

  Kenzie backpedaled. “What I mean is . . . look, I’ve been around for about three years now. I haven’t ever seen Jeffrey spend as much time with one girl as he’s been spendin’ with you. I’m telling you, you’re the one.”

  Was she? A guy like Jeffrey would have never gone for Audra Snow, but if she was his favorite, maybe she had transformed into someone new after all.

  Avis—Audra?—blinked at the awkward, gangly boy in front of her. He was daddy-longlegs tall and skinny as a twig. His legs were bent every which way in the small amount of space the laundry room provided. She hardly ever saw him anywhere other than beside the living room stereo, flipping through the record crate.

  “Really?” Trying to regain some composure, she wiped at her nose and sniffled.

  “Yeah-huh,” Kenzie said. “He likes you a lot, Avis. Jeff is picky. He only sleeps with some girls once. Robin and Lily, they got initiated—everyone gets initiated—but that was the end of that for them.”

  “Initiated . . .” She muttered the word to herself. Kenzie didn’t seem to hear her.

  “Besides, Jeff talks about you a bunch.” He blanched, then gave her a strained look. Don’t say anything.

  “I won’t tell,” she said, immediately garnering a sigh of relief from the all-angles boy. “What does he say?” she asked, hoping that the ego boost would help her crawl out of the emotional hole she’d stumbled down. But this time Kenzie shook his head. He’d already said enough, possibly more than he should have.

  “We aren’t supposed to gossip.”

  “But we’re supposed to keep secrets?”

  He suddenly looked conflicted, his face going ruddy. His lips—which he pressed into a tight line—turned pale. A moment later, his hand moved from Avis’s calf back up to her knee, then farther up until she stopped it midtravel. Her reaction caused him to pause, to cant his head and study her in an animalistic sort of way. It was then that she noticed just how awkward Kenzie was. His head looked too big for his body, as though he had once lost a lot of weight and had never been able to gain it back. She remembered what Jeffrey had said about how most of the group would have ended up strung out on drugs or dead in a back alley. Kenzie had a definite post-junkie look. Even his teeth appeared oversized, like big white Chiclets squares pushed up into his gums.

  Avis didn’t find Kenzie at all attractive. If anything, he struck her as a little creepy, all spindly and thin like a skeleton wrapped in cloth. But she knew if she pushed him away again, he’d leave her to the laundry while reporting the rejection to Jeff. Rejecting Kenzie, no matter how unsightly she found him to be, was a direct affront to the entire family. If she wanted to be part of the group, she had to do as she was told. They expected her to love everybody . . . not only Jeff.

  She imagined Jeffrey explaining it to her in a way that would make the situation strangely appealing. This is what makes us different from everyone else—what makes us special, what fulfills our souls.

  Who was she to argue against the beliefs of the group that had swept her off her feet? They held the key to the happiness that she’d basked in for the past month. If physical love was a part of that equation, who was she to say it was wrong?

  “Can it be just us?” Her pulse whooshed in her ears. “Please?”

  Kenzie looked down to her hand on top of his, as if contemplating her request, and finally gave her a slow nod. “Okay,” he said. “But only because it’s the first time.”

  And so she rose from her chair, quietly closed the laundry room door, and snapped the lock into place.

  When she looked back, Kenzie was already fumbling with the buckle of his belt.

  Aldous Huxley sadly stared up at her, halfway kicked beneath the washing machine. A Brave New World, indeed.

  WASHINGTON STATE POLICE ACCIDENT/INCIDENT REPORT

  REPORTING OFFICER: Eugene Vetter

  BADGE NO: 2874

  DATE OF INCIDENT: April 1, 1986

  TIME: 11:54 PM

  INCIDENT LOCATION: US HWY 101, 4 MI N of Schneider Creek, Thurston County

  VEHICLE(S) INVOLVED: Silver 86 Lincoln Continental

  INJURED PARTY #1: Terrance Roosevelt Snow, deceased

  INURED PARTY #2: Susana Clairmont Snow, deceased

  REPORT: I received radio confirmation of an accident while just south of Taylor Towne, doubled back, and arrived approximately ten minutes after the call. Upon seeing the vehicle in question, I immediately radioed for paramedics. The vehicle appeared to have been heading north on U
S 101 during initial impact. Markings on the driver’s side of the car, as well as damage to the back bumper, suggest a possible sideswipe situation. Closer inspection of the damage suggests the second vehicle involved was red in color. Upon approaching the vehicle, it became clear that the car veered off the road after said impact and hit a tree. The vehicle sustained extreme damage, most likely traveling at an excess of 60 MPH when impact occurred. Both driver and passenger were unresponsive. The driver was slumped against the steering wheel with severe bleeding and facial trauma. The passenger was partially ejected from the vehicle via the windshield with severe bleeding, possible skull fracture, and multiple lacerations to the face, neck, and arms. Paramedics arrived on scene at approximately 12:08 AM. Paramedics marked both driver and passenger dead on the scene shortly after arrival. No witnesses.

  26

  * * *

  IT WAS THE second morning that Jeanie refused to talk to him—though there was one slight improvement: she’d bothered to come downstairs for breakfast. They sat across the table from each other. Jeanie kept her head bowed over her bowl of cereal, surfing the web on her phone. Lucas chewed his bland toast smeared with cheap grape jelly—the kind that rolled around on top of the bread rather than spread the way it was supposed to. The bruise beneath her eye looked better, and perhaps it was just the blue glow of her screen, but the girl herself looked as though she hadn’t slept in days.

  “Jeanie?” Lucas waited for his kid to reply, to at least look up at him. It took her a minute, but her eyes eventually flicked up from her phone. “Can we talk?” She looked down again, flicked her thumb across her screen, and shoveled another spoonful of soggy Cocoa Puffs into her mouth.

  “Look, I know I screwed up,” he said. “All I can say is that I’m sorry, and that we’re going to move as soon as I can find us another place to go.”

  She shot him another look, sat up in her seat, abandoned her spoon against the rim of her bowl, and sighed. “No,” she said.

  Ah, she speaks. “No, what?”

  “No, I don’t want to move.”

  He gave her a skeptical look.

  “Why don’t you just write your book?” she asked, her tone flustered, as though his stalling was cramping her style. “You wanted to move here, right? Because this house is, like, you know . . .” She waved a hand in the air. A crime scene. “Just do what you came here to do and forget about it.”

  Do what you came here to do. That was easier said than done. Lucas dropped his toast onto his plate and leaned back in his seat. He glared at the table’s wood grain, contemplating whether this would be the right time to discuss future plans—the possibility of the book not getting done at all, the potential of him getting a job other than writing full-time, of doing something else for a while.

  “What?” She could see the trepidation on his face.

  “I was just thinking that maybe this whole thing isn’t the best idea.”

  Jeanie stared at him.

  “You know that guy I was supposed to talk to? The one in prison?”

  She gave him a pensive nod.

  “Now he won’t talk to me even though he said he would. He completely bailed on me.”

  “So you’re just going to give up?”

  Lucas grimaced. “You’re not hearing me. I don’t know that I have any other real option, kiddo.”

  She looked away from him, stared down at her hands. A moment later, she was gathering up her bowl of half-eaten cereal and trudging toward the sink. She stood there for a while, peering out the window at the orchard just beyond it. It reminded him of how Caroline had acted the night he had told her that he wanted to move to Washington to write, how she had gripped the edge of the sink before turning to give him a look of disbelief.

  “Let’s go somewhere today,” he told her, his fingers crossed for a truce. “We can go down to the beach, see what’s going on . . .”

  Jeanie didn’t respond. He watched her shoulders slump as she continued to stand there, seemingly transfixed by the copse of cherry trees. Just when he was sure she wasn’t speaking to him again, she turned and frowned at him from across the kitchen.

  “I think you should try harder,” she said. “Giving up isn’t going to get Mom back.”

  He sat in stunned silence as he watched her step out of the kitchen, hardly able to believe what he’d just heard. Jeanie was prone to bouts of moodiness, but her statement right now had been unusually cruel.

  That angst is going to be fun, Caroline had warned. Back at the airport, he had been sure that he and Jeanie shared a bond that Caroline didn’t understand. He’d been certain that, no matter how cranky Jeanie got, she’d spare him the worst of it. Sitting at the breakfast table with half-eaten toast decorating his plate, he realized that he had been dead wrong. Welcome to the teenage years, pal.

  But Jeanie was right no matter how much it stung. He couldn’t just give up. He still had a week and a half left to reach out to Jeff, to get into Lambert and get that goddamn interview.

  You’re a writer, Lou.

  He had to try harder, couldn’t allow himself to lose sight of the point: he wasn’t doing this for himself, he was doing this for them. If he gave in now, it was like telling his kid that even the most precious things weren’t worth fighting for.

  And there was nothing more precious than family.

  27

  * * *

  EVERY NUMBER LUCAS tried for his final lead, Sandy Gleason, came up dry. The first two were disconnected. The third belonged to a person who claimed to have never heard of Sandy at all. The fourth was Sandy’s place of employment—a small mom-and-pop dog groomer that had gone out of business a year before. As if he might get a different answer the second time around, Lucas tried all three disconnected numbers once more before slumping back in his seat.

  Scoring an interview with Sandy Gleason would have almost been as good as talking to Jeffrey Halcomb himself. Lucas wanted to know about Jeff’s attempt to get her pregnant. He wanted to figure out if Halcomb’s advances toward Sandy had been a onetime thing, or whether he had a thing for trying to knock girls up. He also wanted to know if Jeff had mentioned anything about the Veldt, Kansas, incident that resulted in his excommunication. Had Halcomb mentioned a belief of being able to bring people back from the dead? Had he somehow convinced his small tribe of followers of that very idea, resulting in the suicide of eight? Or had the whole back-from-the-dead thing been made up by Veldt to excuse Pastor Gregory Halcomb of any wrongdoing . . . because what kind of a man exiles his own son from the town of his birth?

  When Lucas’s final lead resulted in nothing but disappointment, he sat staring at the linear wood grain patterns of his desk. That all-too-familiar dread was creeping back into his blood, poisoning him with anxiety from the inside out. He was at the end of his rope. His options were spent. If he wasn’t able to get in to see Halcomb within the next few days, his chances of talking to Halcomb twice were whittled down to once. And if he couldn’t get into that visitation room even once, the entire project was screwed. By then he’d be packing up his stuff, ushering his kid out of a goddamn house he should have never agreed on dragging her to in the first place. For all he knew, the current owner of the house on Montlake Road was in on Lucas and Jeffrey’s deal. Maybe as soon as Lucas vacated the premises, the property management company would alert the owner, who in turn would let Halcomb know. Boom, suddenly Lucas was in breach of their little contract and Jeff wasn’t obligated to see or hear from him ever again.

  The possibility of the home owner being in on the deal nagged at him. Grabbing his cell, he called the property management company and asked for the owner’s information. This could have been a lead he’d nearly let slip through the cracks. But the damn place was listed under an LLC, not an individual name. It seemed that someone had done their homework to conceal their identity. Lucas could only hope that they had done so because of the house’s dark
history and not because of what he and Jeff had going on.

  Hitting yet another dead end, Lucas clenched and unclenched his jaw, trying to keep his frustration under control.

  But the sudden memory of Kurt Murphy standing in the airport terminal waiting for Caroline pushed him over the edge.

  His wife was gone. His relationship with his kid was fading. He still didn’t understand the point of Halcomb promising him one thing and doing the opposite.

  His leads were gone. The project was dead.

  He was fucked. Everything was fucked.

  Abruptly, he rose from his chair. His arms shot out in front of him and did a violent sweep across the top of his desk. Papers flew in a burst of fluttering white. Books that had been at the corner of his desk hit the side wall, and his lamp crashed to the floor. The only thing that survived the onslaught of Lucas’s anger was his coffeemaker, the machine standing steadfast and true like the Little Engine That Could.

  You are Lucas Graham.

  He squeezed his eyes shut.

  You can do anything.

  “Fuck!”

  It nearly startled him how loudly and forcefully the profanity shot out of his throat. It had been a full-fledged yell, a thunderous exclamation skirting a scream. What if Jeanie heard? He couldn’t bring himself to care, sure that his daughter had yelled that very same word at least a few times in her short life. Not that it mattered. He’d blown his chance at nurturing that relationship when she found him out. Because what kind of a father forced his kid to reside at a major crime scene? What kind of a dad was comfortable letting his preteen daughter live in a house steeped in blood, in a possible satanic ritual, in undeniable cult sacrifice?