Skewed

by Anne McAneny

  “Maybe not for you, but I was curious. Weird, indeed.”

  Three millimeters of Wexler’s cheeks turned red. It was all I needed.

  “Forget him,” Wexler said. “Betty’s house should be coming up any second. You sure you’re up for this? It might be disturbing.”

  “I’ve had a lifetime of disturbing.”

  “Okay. And I’d like to clarify for the record that I am not weird around you.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that.”

  Wexler turned into Betty and Leroy Fitzsimmons’s driveway. “Sheriff’s gonna meet us here.”

  I gazed at the home of my alleged photo mailer. Either my head wasn’t screwed on straight, or Betty’s white, clapboard farmhouse was sinking into the ground.

  “How the hell is that thing standing?” Wexler asked.

  “Crookedly?”

  “Makes me want to run over there with some two-by-fours and prop it up.”

  I squinted and tilted as Wexler parked. “Actually,” I said, “it’s an optical illusion. See? The roof on that side reaches lower to act as some sort of shade for that chicken coop. Looks like they added it on later so rain would run off and fill the water trough.” I pointed to the high side of the house. “And the mud has built up in a gradual slope over there. From a distance, it looks flat, but it’s angling toward the roof.” I adopted a children’s storyteller voice. “And that, children, is why the house looks so dang crooked.”

  Wexler nodded in agreement. “You do have that eye for all things slanty.”

  “I have a feeling I’ll need it today.”

  We clambered out into the unusually hot day, kicking up dust that rose in the air to coat the calves of our jeans. The sheriff pulled in behind us. Ridge must be one of those Twin Peaks towns where folks knew the moment a stranger entered. But when the thin sheriff smiled like we were old friends, all hints of insular freak-town went out the window. He looked like a well-aged Barney Fife who’d wised up and lost the doofiness.

  “Welcome to Ridge, folks. Glad you found us. I was at the post office when you drove by. Figured the Virginia plates might be yours. Got some cold drinks in my car if you’d like one.”

  We accepted an iced tea and a soda from his cooler and he led us to the front door.

  “Now, of course, Betty’s body is no longer here, and you probably don’t need the details of that mess—smell alone would’ve given you nightmares—but I guess you want to see the stuff in the basement. A bit more relevant to you, ma’am, since you’re the Haiku Twin and all.”

  I appreciated the lack of eggshells he walked on. “Great place to start, Sheriff. Thanks.”

  “I ain’t touched it. Figured we might bring in the FBI if this case is somehow related to your mother, but Detective Wexler here was pretty persuasive, so I promised you first dibs.”

  I smiled at Wexler, who humbly avoided my grateful eyes. “Thanks again, Sheriff. I know you didn’t have to do that.”

  “Well, if it’d been my mother and all . . .” His voice faded off.

  As he led us through the house, only two words came to mind: holy clusterfuck. No wonder Betty Fitzsimmons had come across photos of my mother’s dead body. I felt sure I could find pictures of John F. Kennedy slurping a Jell-O shot out of Marilyn Monroe’s belly button somewhere among the piles, along with enough rubber bands to make a bouncy ball bigger than Connecticut. I stepped over bundled newspapers from the 1970s, four full litter boxes, and three containers of coupons for products that didn’t exist anymore. Dino Pebbles, anyone?

  The odor, despite the removal of Betty’s body, reminded me of a crime scene two years ago where a four-hundred-pound informant had been slaughtered like a pig, his intestines braided like pork sausage—a warning to would-be informants that if you talked to the pigs, you got treated like a pig. I doubted many of the would-be informants had been clever enough to interpret the message, but I did admire the killer’s handiwork in a perverse way before excusing myself to be sick.

  “’Scuse the mess,” the sheriff said in an understatement so massive, I guffawed in its wake. Wexler managed to keep a straight face—and to breathe through his nose, something even I found impossible. It was all I could do not to pull out my bottle of Blunt Effects spray and hit the house with a squirt. That stuff could block out parfum de putrefaction, but it was no match for the local feline posse that had found a friend in Betty. Smelled like one of them had lost a battle with a skunk.

  “Sheriff,” I said, “why do you think Betty mailed me the photos with no note of explanation?”

  The sheriff chortled. “Wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if Betty wrote you a note but forgot to stick it in the envelope. She could tell you the quirks and ailments of any animal in town goin’ back years, but she sent out Christmas cards more than once without the card. Just an empty envelope. Course, we appreciated it just the same. One time she invited a slew of us over for a cookout, and when we arrived, she’d plum forgot about it. That was Betty, God love ’er.”

  Betty’s state of mind might explain the address on the envelope that had been missing a few pertinent points.

  “Now, these stairs here,” said the sheriff, opening a door that promised a basement full of creepy-crawlies, “they’re a bit rickety. Be careful going down.”

  I flicked on my heavy flashlight and took the lead. The first stair let out a pained moan, clearly mistaking me for a sausage-intestined drug informant. I continued anyway, my torch illuminating the mostly barren space below.

  “Must have been Leroy who used the basement,” said the sheriff. “He was a bit tidier than his sister. Used to tell her she was puttin’ all the landfills out of business by keepin’ most of the garbage herself.”

  A dizzying sensation overwhelmed me. Was I having déjà vu? Where had I just heard a similar sentiment?

  “It’ll be over to your left, there, ma’am. Exactly where we found it.”

  I negotiated the final step and spotted the box on the floor, a location that had probably rendered the bottom inches of content unusable due to moisture. Then something reached out and stroked my face. After an embarrassing gasp, I pulled the offending string, which turned on a single forty-watt bulb overhead. It cast just enough light to be both helpful and eerie. My shadow fell squarely on the overstuffed box, dimming my final hope that the mailed photos might prove to be a big hoax by the Psycho-Ticks or their ilk.

  “How much do you know about this Leroy Fitzsimmons?” I asked the sheriff.

  “Knew him as a kid somewhat. He was older than me, but I used to go to his daddy’s church and he helped out there. Quiet kid, unless he was onstage. Had a little acting bug and usually got a good part in the church productions, until some other kids made fun of his voice.”

  A niggling uneasiness tapped at my brain.

  “Leroy came off as real smart,” the sheriff continued, “but maybe that’s ’cause he was smart enough to keep his mouth shut. Sometimes, you’d get the feeling he was judging you, but not too harshly. Just sort of makin’ up his mind.”

  “What about as an adult? Same way?”

  The sheriff scrunched his lips together and thought about that one for a moment. “Now this ain’t a real big town,” he said, “but I can’t say as I’ve seen much of Leroy as an adult. He joined the military right out of school, then made his way back, oh, musta been twenty-five years ago at least. Took jobs wherever he could get ’em. Handyman, electrician, general fixer-upper sort. He’d stay away for a week or two, finish a job, then come home. Tell you the truth, I don’t think Betty knew where he was half the time.”

  “Either of them married?”

  The sheriff suppressed a laugh. “Uh, no. I wouldn’t say either Betty or Leroy was the marryin’ type.”

  I sifted through the box while Wexler checked the rest of the basement. “Why’s that?”

  “Well, you m
ight say they were just a little off, bein’ raised by their daddy and all. He was one of them strict, by-the-book preachers. Not sure how he was at home, but church sure wasn’t much of an uplifting experience when Preacher Fitzsimmons took the pulpit.”

  “Fire and brimstone?” Wexler asked.

  “To put it mildly. But he died long ago. His wife had passed when Betty was just a baby.”

  I came across a pile of palm-size marble notebooks—miniature versions of the type kids used in math class. Releasing them from their purple rubber band, I opened the top one to see pages upon pages of tiny calligraphy, of such high quality it could have been printed by a computer. Several of the notebooks contained sketches, mostly of animals, and illustrations that could only be described as word sculptures, like the individual letters of detachment written over and over in a spiral that led to a fancy A in its center. It was titled on the bottom in a careless scrawl: Attachment. Another one showed random letters in a three-dimensional pyramid, topped by the head of a sphinx. Something told me the letters weren’t random, but damned if I knew what they meant. A third consisted of twelve synonyms for deceitful written in green and squeezed in between red-lettered synonyms for honest. He’d pressed so hard with the green pen that it had torn through the paper at one point. Of the dozen or so notebooks, most spilled over with letters and illustrations, but a few remained half-empty, awaiting Leroy’s next mishmash of dark verbal conceptions.

  “Was Leroy some sort of artist, Sheriff?”

  “I believe he fancied himself such. Can’t say as I ever saw his work, though. Maybe upstairs?”

  I set the notebooks aside, wondering what it must look like inside Leroy Fitzsimmons’s mind.

  I picked up the next item in the box and unfolded it to its considerable size. A blueprint.

  “Oh, my God,” I said.

  “What’d you find?” Wexler said, holding a stack of papers he’d retrieved from a worktable in the corner.

  I showed him an architectural plan depicting the rear of a three-story structure.

  “You know the place?” he said.

  “This window,” I said, pointing, “allowed the sun to shine in on my dollhouse, and over here”—I pointed to the next window—“is where Jack would lean out and toss me a tin can so we could play telephone.”

  “You think Leroy was planning to break into your house?”

  I frowned. “Or he already did. This box goes way back and stays current. He has stuff about Jack’s recent campaign stops and articles about Grady getting out of jail. This guy had far more than a passing interest.” I looked at Wexler with controlled panic. “You think he was the third man?”

  “Could be. Look what I found.” He handed me a stack of papers. “His laptop is missing, but he’d printed these out recently.”

  It was information on the Abel family from one of those genealogical websites. In addition to the primary members of the Abel family, like Abner, Annelise, Jenna, and the rest, there were sheets on aunts, uncles, and cousins, including an obituary for Joann Banfield, wife of Humphrey “Hump” Banfield, whose survivors had included many nieces and nephews, including a special niece, Jenna. “Was he stalking my whole neighborhood?” I said, too overwhelmed to put the obvious together.

  Wexler’s phone rang and he glanced at the caller ID, his face tightening. “Let me take this.” He walked over to a corner to speak while I sorted the contents of the box in a daze. I knew what I was looking for now. Betty had sent me just two photos, but Mickey Busker claimed to have seen about a dozen camera flashes while getting his jollies in my childhood tree. I kept digging, placing a printout of Jack’s latest speech to my right, followed by a People magazine photo from when he dated a reality show star last year. Next came a photo of me that I’d submitted to an online photography group. Below that was a Google Earth shot of Field Diner, now converted to a convenience store, and blown-up photos of the diner and my house.

  With the next treasure to emerge from the box, everything in my body sank an extra inch toward the floor. I felt like a melting Popsicle as a shiver pulsated from my neck to my feet, where it turned around and rushed back up as a hot flush of anger.

  In my hand, I held the negatives of the two photos mailed to me, along with three of the kitchen, two of the far living room corners, one each of the flowered couch, the marble table, and the fireplace, and then one that made my jaw clench—a close-up of the apron covering my mother’s pregnant belly. The final negative showed a perfectly focused half of Grady’s collapsed body, just as Sophie Andricola had sketched it.

  I shoved the negatives back in their envelope and stood, fighting a severe bout of light-headedness. So Leroy Fitzsimmons—a man who meant nothing to me, from a town that meant even less—was the person responsible for tipping the first domino in the long and twisted path that had uprooted and toppled the Perkins family tree. But who the hell was this guy? Just some aimless drifter, some fly-by-night worker for hire? Could he actually be the Haiku Killer? Then again, weren’t they all nobodies until their vile actions became the stuff of public obsession, the next hungry monster to be fed and nourished by the sleepless and paranoid?

  Wexler emerged from the dark corner where he’d taken his call. Unaware of my discovery, he launched into his own update.

  “Bad news,” he said. “Nicholls checked out Hump Banfield’s cottage at the Aberdeen. The place was almost empty, like no one had been staying there. The clerk at the front desk said they didn’t even have a guest registered in cottage five.”

  “What? How could that be?”

  “He must have broken in and made himself at home. It was pretty remote over by those cottages, and I don’t think they rent them out much anymore. Who would have noticed?”

  “That is bizarre,” I said, fighting a truth I already suspected.

  “There’s more. Nicholls drove over to the newspaper where Hump’s niece, Jenna Abel, works.”

  “Good. She’ll know where Hump is.” Doubt filled the gaps between my words, and even I could hear how lame they sounded.

  “She hasn’t seen her uncle Hump in two years.”

  Even though I hadn’t smoked since my teens, I’d have given anything for a long, slow cigarette right about then, just to give my body something to do besides panic. I leaned against the splintery post at the base of the stairs, wooziness coming on full force. “Did Jenna have a picture of her uncle Hump, by any chance?”

  “Nicholls sent one to my phone. That man in cottage five was not the real Uncle Hump.” He showed me the photo and I agreed. “Whoever he was, the man did his research and simply borrowed Hump’s identity for a while.”

  “Sheriff,” I said, “do you have a recent picture of Leroy Fitzsimmons?”

  “Not offhand, no. I could look through old church and festival photos, or we could search upstairs.”

  “No need,” Wexler said. “I think I have a picture of Leroy Fitzsimmons right here on my phone.”

  “How?” I said.

  “When Hump Banfield answered the door at his cottage this morning, I took his picture. Just a hunch. He had no idea I did it.” Wexler flicked to the photo and held his smartphone up to the sheriff.

  The sheriff leaned in close to the four-inch display of the man I’d known as Hump. “Well, dang, that’s Leroy, all right. Sure as I’m standing here. But what the heck’s he doing in a wheelchair?”

  I let my face fall into my hands as I sat down on the bottom step of the creaky staircase. At least my palms muffled my shout. “I am such an idiot! Leroy Fitzsimmons was impersonating Hump?”

  Wexler sighed. “The wheelchair was the only thing left in cottage five.”

  So Hump, aka Leroy Fitzsimmons, could walk. Hell, he could probably run—he’d run circles around me, anyway. Once again, Mickey’s words haunted me. “Sheriff, did Leroy have a limp?”

  “Matter of fact, he did have a
little hitch in his step. Lost a couple toes in a tractor accident. Not real noticeable, though, unless he got runnin’ at a real good clip, which I only saw him do once, in an egg-carryin’ race. Fund-raiser and all.”

  It was all I could do to raise my eyes to Wexler. “Leroy Fitzsimmons was the third man . . . the Haiku Killer.” My voice found both strength and shame. “I let him into my apartment! I made him tea!”

  Wexler sat next to me, our legs touching, his arm tight around my shoulders. I’d never felt smaller or stupider. “Janie, come on, you had no way of knowing.”

  “He tricked me from that first day at the hospital. It was all a setup.”

  “Betty must have found the pictures down here and sent them, maybe to warn you about her brother.”

  “Jesus,” I muttered, “he must have killed his own sister.”

  I could feel the wheels turning in Wexler’s head. “All this just to get his pictures back?”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “It wasn’t about the pictures. He could have taken those; he had them in his hands at my place.” My eyes doubled in size. “He’s after the haiku. That’s why he has all the pictures of my old house. He must think it’s still there.”

  “You’re right,” Wexler said. “It would be evidence against him. He must have figured that once Betty mailed you the photos, you’d start believing there was a third man, and you might start looking for that haiku.”

  I smacked myself in the leg. “With everything I told him, I probably already led him to it.”

  “Impossible,” Wexler said. “You don’t even know where it is.”

  “Well, one of us is going to figure it out. It’s a question of who gets there first.”

  “Excuse me,” the sheriff said, almost laughing with incredulity, “but what’s this all about? Y’all can’t think Leroy was tied up in that Haiku Killer stuff. Come on.”

  The sheriff came across as someone who wanted to appear skeptical but was secretly hoping it was true. A direct connection to the Haiku Killer would be more exciting in Ridge, West Virginia, than having the fattest pig at the county fair.