The Laughterhouse: A Thriller

by Paul Cleave

  “Who? Caleb Cole? He’s the man everybody is looking for, and if you’re here then you must know we used to know him. But not anymore. We can’t help you.”

  “Can I come in? There may be something you can tell us that might help find Ariel or Caleb.”

  He slowly nods. He has thick gray hair that bounces when he does, something that other men his age must be jealous of. “Okay.”

  The house is warm and there’s lots of modern lighting and showroom colors, and when I sit down in the living room all I want to do is put my feet up and take a nap, just a quick one, maybe only six or seven hours. Mr. Chancellor sits opposite me, and his wife comes and joins him. Both Chancellors are in their late fifties and are dressed ten years beyond their age, with Mrs. Chancellor wearing a dressing gown that covers every inch of skin from the neck down and looks like it would make a great job of cleaning the car. Her hair is brown with a few streaks of gray running through it, and she has a hair clip in the side of it that looks heavy enough to damage her neck. She offers to get me a coffee and I tell her it would be great. Giving up coffee almost lasted half a day. I figure that’s pretty good. There are pictures of Ariel on the walls, but none of them are the same woman I saw this morning. These are pictures of another Ariel, a daughter from a different life. The living room is hot, there’s a heat pump blasting warm air. There’s a crime show on TV. The forensics leads are well-rounded people, finding hairs in one scene with microscopes, then kicking down doors in another. The TV is on mute so for the time being they have to arrest their suspect in silence.

  “Ariel works the streets,” Harvey says, “has done for a long time. We tried to stop her and we tried to get her help, of course. I mean, what parents wouldn’t? I say that because it’s important to us you understand that, that you don’t think we abandoned our daughter. The more we tried the worse it got. She used to run away a lot. Not right after the thing with Jessica, but about a year later. Within months she was a different girl. Losing Jessica that way, it changed her. It wasn’t until she was around thirteen that she really started blaming herself. I think that was when she finally understood what had happened. She hated James Whitby and she hated herself.” He looks around for his wife, then smiles at me when he seems to remember she isn’t there. “Coffee won’t be too long,” he says.

  I nod and don’t say anything, wanting him to continue. One of the forensics leads on TV has just shot somebody. That’s the thing about TV—the bad guys often end up dying. I wonder if that’s how it will end for Caleb.

  “We got her counseling and it didn’t help. She was prescribed antidepressants and the day she got them she took them all. We got her to the hospital just in time. The doctors said another few minutes and she wouldn’t have made it. They said that as it was, it was a miracle she did.”

  I think about the word miracle again, and part of me is afraid that the miracles in this world are limited and that Ariel Chancellor has used one up that could have gone to my wife. It’s a stupid selfish thought, but there it is, unmasked and real.

  “After that she would sneak out at night and come home drunk. She started fooling around with the boys in her school. She was expelled from high school at fifteen when she was caught having sex with two students at the same time for a handful of change in one of the science labs. We got her into another school and the same thing happened two weeks later. She ran away more and more, and each time we found her she was higher than the last. When she turned seventeen we hardly ever saw her again.”

  He gives me the speech and is candid about it in the way a man can be when he’s given the speech so many times there is no more shame in it, not that there is shame at what his daughter did—she was a victim of a crime—but perhaps shame in the fact they couldn’t help her. He doesn’t sound disappointed, doesn’t sound upset—just accepting that this is the way life turned out.

  “He used to write to her,” he says. “Caleb, from jail.”

  “Write about what?”

  “About how much he loved her and how much he hated her. About prison life, about his daughter, about the son he never had, about his wife.”

  “You still have the letters?”

  He nods. “We wanted to throw them out, but we always thought one day we might need them.”

  His wife comes back into the room carrying a tray with three cups on them, catching up on the conversation. “I’ll go and get them, shall I?”

  “I think they’re in the closet,” he says, “up on the top shelf behind the jigsaw puzzles.”

  “They’re in the spare bedroom,” she says, “under the bed in a box.” She puts the tray down on the coffee table and walks back out.

  Harvey gives me the eye roll and half shrug. “This is why it’s so important to be married at this age,” he says.

  I nod. I will also be married at his age, and before today I thought Bridget would never be able to tell me where I left my favorite T-shirt—but maybe that isn’t going to be the case.

  “I see you know what I mean,” he says, giving a small laugh.

  “Sorry?”

  “You were smiling,” he says.

  “Tell me about the letters.”

  “In the beginning they were okay,” he says. “In them Caleb says how sorry he is Ariel went through what she went through, and how he was thankful both girls hadn’t died. Then they became angry. So angry I was amazed he was allowed to send them. I made a complaint and the prison said there was nothing they could do because he was getting the letters out without them being screened. They said it happens all the time, inmates handing the mail to other inmates who are being visited by family, and they said it was a violation of his rights to take away his ability to write. Can you believe that? A guy is writing to my daughter about how he wishes she had been raped and murdered instead of his own girl and the prison authorities say he’s the one with the rights?”

  I wince at hearing those words. “That’s what he was saying?”

  “And worse, let me tell you,” he says, a slight nod while he talks, and the slight nod is just enough to make the words spill out faster. “The letters would change in tone. One would arrive and say he didn’t blame Ariel in the least, another would arrive and call her a slut, that it was her fault his daughter had died, that if she had been any kind of friend she wouldn’t have run away and left her there. And the worst thing—well, the worst thing is we kept reading them. Honestly, I couldn’t tell you why.”

  “I’m guessing Ariel never saw the letters?”

  “No,” he says.

  Mrs. Chancellor brings in the letters and hands them over. They form a fat stack, held together by a rubber band, the corners and edges discolored and twisted. The coffee is still too hot to pick up. I pull out the top letter. Cole’s handwriting is barely legible.

  “It’s because of his broken fingers,” Chancellor says, nodding toward the letters.

  Caleb had winced when I shook his hand at the cemetery after I jump-started his car. Those same hands found the strength the following day to wrap themselves around my throat.

  “Before all of this happened, how well did you know him?”

  He gives a slight shrug. Harvey Chancellor is all about slight gestures. The small nod, the small shrug, the small laugh. I hope for his wife’s sake he makes up for it in other ways.

  “We knew him and his wife. We met them because the kids were best friends. You know how it is, when children grow up together you get to know their parents. Caleb was a good guy. I liked him. I didn’t know him that well, but we’d see him at birthday parties and school events, and of course every weekend or so one of us dropped one of the kids off at the other’s house for playdates. He loved his family, no doubt there. They had plans—they were having another baby, I remember that. His wife, God, she was lovely.”

  “Really lovely,” Mrs. Chancellor says, and she’s sitting on the armrest next to Harvey on the couch. “And stunning too. A real beauty. She never had a mean thing to say about any of the othe
r parents or students, and she certainly had plenty of opportunity to. Some kids are real shits, excuse my French,” she says, “but it’s true. Have you ever met a couple that is so happy, so deeply in love, that you get the feeling they’ve never fought a day in their lives? Marriages always take work,” she says, “as I’m sure you know,” she adds, looking down at my hand and seeing my wedding ring, with no idea exactly how much work my marriage is taking, “but their marriage didn’t seem to take any. It’s a rare thing, and you tell people that and they tell you you’re wrong, that no marriage can be like that, but I swear theirs was. The Caleb we knew over those years, he died back then just as his wife and daughter did. The man who wrote those letters, he isn’t anybody we ever met. He’s a stranger and a monster and we pray for him, Detective, we both pray for him.”

  “These people he’s killed,” Harvey says, “why them? Who are they?”

  I run off the names for him.

  “I don’t recognize any of them,” he says.

  “Should we?” his wife asks.

  “One was Whitby’s lawyer,” I say. “One was the foreman of the jury. Another was a character witness for the defense. The other one we believe is somebody your daughter was acquainted with on a professional level. And Dr. Stanton is the man who said James Whitby could be cured.”

  Harvey goes pale.

  “Those poor girls,” Mrs. Chancellor says. “They must be scared out of their wits. The news said one of them was found okay, is that true?”

  “It is,” I say, answering her, but I’m looking at Harvey. Harvey looks physically ill, like all the bones in his body have become poisonous.

  He notices me, makes a slight swallowing gesture, then says “I don’t know where Ariel is, or have any idea where Caleb may be.”

  “Caleb is looking for her,” I tell them. “If we find Ariel, we may find Caleb.”

  “You probably think we’ve given up on her,” Mrs. Chancellor says, “the way we let her work the streets, but that’s not true. We love her, and if we could bring her home we would.”

  “She’ll die on those streets,” Harvey says, and his voice breaks a little as he says it, for the first time showing some real emotion toward his daughter. Part of him must still see her as the little girl in the pictures on the walls. “I don’t . . .” he says, and he chokes up, and in the tradition of Harvey Chancellor, he only chokes up a little, “I don’t doubt it.”

  His wife gives him a look, one that says a whole lot of things—it tells him she loves him, that she feels bad for him, that she wishes he wouldn’t think that way even though both of them do.

  “When you find her, tell her to come home, will you?” Mrs. Chancellor says, still looking at her husband.

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “I’ll see you out,” Harvey says, and we all stand.

  When I step outside, he follows me and closes the door behind him. I turn toward him. “One of those names didn’t sit well with you, Harvey. Why don’t you tell me what you couldn’t say in front of your wife?”

  “Listen,” he says, and then he says nothing, giving me nothing to listen to but the night, a car passing by one street over, somewhere there is water running, and somewhere somebody slams a door. I let him fight with what he has to say, knowing that if he doesn’t get there I’m going to shake it out of him.

  “I’m listening,” I tell him, after a long ten seconds have passed.

  “The thing is, I’ve seen you in the news over the last few years,” he says, and I wonder where this is going, whether I’m going to have to defend myself. “Two serial killers have died and you’ve been with each of them when it happened. The man who killed your daughter disappeared.”

  “He fled the country,” I tell him.

  “I’m not trying to accuse you of anything,” he says, “but my point is I get the idea you’re the kind of man who does the right thing and not necessarily the legal thing. Am I right in thinking that?”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “Just answer the question, son,” he says.

  I realize I’m holding my breath. I let it out loudly. “Mr. Chancellor, Harvey, if you have something to—”

  “Just answer the question, son, and this can go a whole lot quicker.”

  “The right thing.”

  “Always?”

  “I’ve answered. Now what is it you want to say?”

  “There’s another letter.”

  “What?”

  Chancellor is nodding as he talks, only now the gesture is much bigger. “Caleb wrote my daughter another letter.”

  “What kind of letter?”

  “It would be six, maybe seven years ago. My wife, she doesn’t know about it. Nobody does. There’s something in it that I should have taken to the police back then, but I didn’t want to see anybody else hurt.”

  “Who?”

  “If I show you the letter, do I have your word you’re only going to use it to try and find Caleb, and nothing else?”

  “I can’t promise anything like that without seeing it,” I say.

  “Then forget I said anything,” he says. He reaches back for the door, but he doesn’t turn away. “And before you threaten me, I don’t have the letter. I threw it out and can’t really remember what it said, and by the time you fuck around with trying to find it it’ll all be too late to help anyway.”

  “There are two girls’ lives on the line here,” I remind him. “One of them is eight years old, the other one only one.”

  “I know. And another girl’s future. I don’t say this lightly, Detective. You have no idea how much I’ve gone through this in my mind over the years, always settling on an answer, then asking the question again just when I thought I was comfortable with it. Just hurry up and give me your word and then you can go and save them.”

  I don’t know what is in the letter, but I know I’m not leaving here without it. “Okay, I promise, it stays between you and me.”

  He stares at me and says nothing.

  “I mean it,” I tell him. “I promise it’ll stay between you and me.”

  “Wait here.”

  He disappears. I stand on the doorstep getting colder. A few minutes go by. No doubt he thinks the letter is in one place when it’s in another. I pace the path up and down from the street to his door. My hands and feet are cold. I’d sit in my car and wait if it’d be any warmer than outside. Instead I sit on the front step and look at the letters he gave me. They’re hard to read because I can’t focus on them correctly. The letters seem a little blurred until I hold them further away from my face the way my dad used to do before he got glasses.

  The letters are like Harvey said, the first one is dated three months after Cole was sentenced to jail. In it Cole tells Ariel he thinks she’s a brave little girl for dealing with what she went through, and he’s proud of her for running home and getting her mother to call the police. The second is almost a repeat of the first, only in it he wishes Ariel had run faster, or gone into the first house she saw rather than waiting to get home.

  His third one describes what it’s like in jail. He had a very different experience from what I had. We were kept in different parts of the prison: I was in a high-risk ward with pedophiles and other prisoners with targets on their backs; he was in a high-violence ward because he was a cop killer. It’s not until the fourth one that the tone changes. He asks Ariel what she had been wearing on the day, who she had been flirting with, why she had brought the attack on herself and then deflected it by running away and leaving Jessica behind. There is a lot of hate and anger in the words, and Mr. and Mrs. Chancellor had every right to complain to the prison. The next letter he forgives her, only to change his mind in the following one. Prison gave him lots of time to think. It was making him crazy.

  He calls her an angel. A slut. A princess. A whore.

  Harvey Chancellor finally opens the door behind me. I stand up and he hands the letter to me along with a reminder of what I promised.

 
“What’s in here?” I ask.

  “Victoria Brown,” he says. “We’ve heard her name on TV today, but it didn’t mean anything. But her job, that does. She’s not mentioned by name, but she’s in there,” he says, nodding toward the letter. “It was written after her assault.”

  “And you didn’t tell the police?”

  “No, I didn’t go to the police, Detective Inspector,” he says, sounding pissed off at me, “because the person who did it, she was innocent too. She didn’t ask for any of this. And you believe in payback, don’t you? That’s why I’m telling you, and that’s why you’re going to keep your promise.”

  “Because?” I ask, looking down at the envelope.

  “Because the person who put Victoria Brown into a coma,” he says, “is the little girl all of this started with. It was Tabitha Jenkins.”

  CHAPTER FORTY

  The door swings open and Tabitha Jenkins gives Caleb a smile. It’s been seven years since the first and only time he saw her.

  She has dyed her hair. She used to be blond, now it’s dark brown, the style still the same, and it looks good on her. It hangs over the side of her face and he can’t tell if she still has the scar Whitby gave her. She’s tanned too, from summer days spent in the sun, maybe working in the garden since the yard is full of well-groomed plants. She’s wearing worn jeans and a tight T-shirt and this little girl from all those years ago who visited him in jail is all grown up.

  On her part, at least at first, there is no recognition. He can tell she thinks she’s looking at a complete stranger. The smile on her face when opening the door is still there, and it widens when she looks down at Katy, and widens even more when she looks at Octavia, who is asleep again, resting on his chest with her head on his shoulder and his arm beneath her. He has a bag slung over his shoulder with diapers and wipes in it. Then her smile falters as she takes another look at Caleb.

  “Can I help . . .” she starts, her words turning to fog in the air, but then it comes to her, Caleb can see it happening as her eyes grow wider. A woman like this having gone through what she went through, he’s surprised she even opened the door.