The Laughterhouse: A Thriller

by Paul Cleave

  “Hello, Tabitha.”

  “Caleb?”

  He nods. “I need your help.”

  “My help?” Her face goes through a myriad display of emotions before setting on confusion. “When did you get out of prison?”

  “A while back. I just need to talk to you,” he says.

  “I’m hungry,” Katy says. “And cold. Can we come inside?”

  Tabitha crouches down in front of Katy and composes a smile. Octavia murmurs something into his neck and he can feel a line of drool touching his skin but she doesn’t wake up.

  “My name is Tabitha,” she says, “what’s your name?”

  “Katy with a y,” Katy says.

  “Wow, does the y go at the start?”

  “No, silly, it goes at the end!”

  “Pleased to meet you, Katy with a y at the end,” she says, and offers her hand. Katy with the y takes it.

  “I’m scared,” Katy says.

  “Scared? Of me? You have no reason to be scared of me.”

  “Scared of him,” Katy says, and points at Caleb, and Tabitha’s smile disappears. “I don’t know where Melanie is and my dad is locked in the car and . . . and I need to pee,” Katy says, crossing her legs and bouncing up and down. “Badly.”

  Tabitha stands back up. “Caleb, what is she talking about?”

  “You haven’t seen the news?” he asks.

  She shakes her head. “I make a point of never watching the news. Ever. Why? Who are these girls?”

  “He kidnapped us,” Katy says, “and I really, really need to pee.”

  “The bathroom is through there, sweetie,” she says, and steps aside and Katy disappears into the hall. They both watch her disappear, then Tabitha turns quickly toward Caleb. “What in the hell is she talking about?”

  “Can we come in?”

  “No. Did you kidnap these girls?”

  “I haven’t hurt them.”

  “Caleb—”

  “They’re Dr. Stanton’s kids.”

  “What?”

  “Dr. Stanton—”

  “I know who Dr. Stanton is,” she says. “Where is he?”

  “In the trunk.”

  “Oh my God,” she says. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m punishing those who hurt us.”

  “Us?”

  “The people who didn’t defend you,” he says. “The people that let Jessica die.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  So he tells her about the lawyer, the teacher, the jury foreman. He tells her about Victoria Brown. Tabitha starts shaking. He tells her about taking the children to the slaughterhouse and leaving one of them behind.

  “Oh my God,” she says, when he’s finished.

  “These people killed Jessica,” he says.

  “No, Caleb, they didn’t. James Whitby killed your daughter. Those people, these girls—”

  “Please, Tabitha, let us come inside. Let me explain it to you.”

  “No, no, you can’t be here.”

  “Please.”

  “Let me think,” she says, putting her hand up to her face. After a few seconds she starts nodding. “I’ll hear you out,” she says, “but only if you leave the girls with me.”

  “Okay,” he says, knowing it won’t be the last time he lies today.

  She leads him through to the living room. It’s a nice place. Nice furniture too. Not expensive, but cozy. There are lots of pictures on the walls, way more than Ariel has and these are framed, lots of family photos, lots of pictures with friends, smiles in all of them. None of them with her and a man looking intimate but there are many with her and another woman. In some they are embracing, in others they’re holding hands and smiling at the camera. In all of them her face is tilted away from the camera slightly as she tries to hide away the scar.

  He doesn’t understand it. How can she be so normal?

  How can she have been so happy over the years?

  He lays Octavia down on the maroon-colored couch. Her eyes are still closed.

  “Let me get her a blanket,” she says. She leans down behind the couch and grabs hold of a woollen blanket and is about to cover the girl up.

  “First, can you change her diaper?” he asks, putting the bag down on the floor.

  “What?”

  “Her diaper. It’s wet.”

  “Why don’t you do it?”

  “I’m not very good at it.”

  “What makes you think I am?”

  “Because—”

  “Because what? Because I’m a woman?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Fine,” she says, and she unpacks the bag. She lays the blanket down on the floor and undoes the nappy.

  “You seem so normal,” he says. “You’ve moved on?”

  “Yes,” she says.

  “How can you forget what happened to you?”

  “I haven’t forgotten,” she says, for the first time elevating her voice. “It’s part of who I am now.” She reaches up and traces the line of her scar, brushing back her hair in the process. James Whitby had given her that with a single slice of his knife. It runs from the side of her left ear around her jaw and under her chin. She seems to catch herself touching it, and quickly lowers her hand. “I help others,” she says. “Other women and children who have been through similar things. I’m a rape crisis counselor. I know what women have been through. I can relate to them and I can help them.”

  “You surround yourself with other people’s pain?”

  “Do you remember what you told me in jail?” she asks, tossing the used diaper into a plastic bag. She wipes the baby dry and throws the wipe in with the diaper before tying the bag closed. She repositions the replacement. “Well?”

  He nods. He remembers all of it. She was the first visitor he’d had in a while, and the last one he ever had. His parents had visited regularly and then less regularly and then death made things permanent. His friends had visited regularly in the beginning too until it became just too awkward. Seven years ago one of the guards came and got him. Told him somebody was there to see him. He figured it would be a reporter, maybe somebody writing a book. Or a lawyer coming to tell him something he didn’t want to hear. It would kill a few minutes, and there were worse ways in jail to kill a few minutes.

  “You told me I owed it to Jessica to live for both of us,” she says, “that I had to experience twice as much, to do all the things she would never be able to. You told me I had to be good to people. To help people.”

  “And do you remember why you came to see me?” he asks.

  “Of course I do.”

  “Then tell me.”

  “Why? What’s the point?”

  “Because I want to hear you say it. I want you to remember that we’re on the same side.”

  She shakes her head. The nappy is done up and she adjusts it, then lays Octavia on the couch. She puts the blanket over her, tucking it beneath her chin.

  “I want you to remember that you were about to throw your life away for some accident that—”

  “It wasn’t an accident,” she says.

  In jail she told him she didn’t remember much of what had happened when Whitby took her, that the doctors told her she had repressed it and that one day it would come back. He told her that doctors don’t really know what they’re talking about, and if they did Jessica would still be alive. She agreed. He was glad she agreed. He liked her. Then she told him a week earlier she had been out shopping at the mall with her friend. She had gone to the bathroom. Standing in front of the mirror fixing her makeup had been Victoria Brown. Nobody else was in the room. She didn’t even think, she just acted, and she moved in behind Victoria Brown and shoved her head forward into the sink as hard as she could. Caleb liked her even more then. She felt bad at what she had done. She never intended to put the woman into a coma. She never intended anything. She never even knew where the rage had come from. They agreed then that the doctors had been right—that the pain of what had happened to
her had all come back in that moment.

  He told her not to feel bad. She told him she did. She was going to go to the police. He told her turning herself in wasn’t going to help Victoria. He told her she had done a good thing by stopping somebody making money from defending child rapists, that her incarceration wasn’t going to make Victoria wake up from her coma. He told her she would be throwing away her life, and she said it didn’t matter. He believed her, but he also knew from experience that she didn’t really understand what throwing away her life really meant.

  “Back then . . .” he says, and for the moment he is back in jail with its cold walls. She had sat opposite him and said nothing and he had matched her word for word. The silence wasn’t weird. She smiled and her face changed, it was a sad smile but in the movement of flesh and skin her scar disappeared and she was beautiful, there was no doubt she was beautiful, then she said something that made him, for the first time, feel less alone. “You thanked me for what I had done,” he says. “You thanked me for killing James Whitby. If he were still alive, would you want me to kill him?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “My parents were strong. They looked after me and got me the help I needed. Now I return that help to others. I wish you’d been strong for your family.”

  “I was strong. I did what nobody else was prepared to do. And that strength helped you and your family move on.”

  “That wasn’t strength. Look at where it got you. You could have moved on with your family.”

  “Moved on? My daughter was murdered. People don’t move on from that.”

  “That’s not how I meant it,” she says. “But some deal with it. Some better than others. You don’t forget what happened, but after time you can still have a normal life.”

  “A normal life,” he says, and it’s all he ever wanted. Normal changes when you get the call that your daughter has gone missing.

  “A, b, d, b, d, f, c,” Katy says, staring at them from the hallway, half of her face poking around the edge of the doorway. When she sees them notice her, she steps into the room. “This is a nice house,” she says, “but smaller than mine. Do you have any cookies?”

  “We have some,” Tabitha says.

  “Chocolate ones?”

  “Yes.”

  “I like chocolate ones, but Daddy doesn’t let us eat them much.”

  “Your daddy’s a wise man,” Tabitha says.

  “Not that wise,” Caleb says.

  Tabitha throws him another angry glance and he realizes unless she paces herself she’s going to run out of them. She picks up the plastic bag with the diaper, then takes Katy’s hand and leads her into the kitchen. She tosses the bag into the trash, washes her hands, then takes a packet of cookies from the pantry and tears it open. She offers one to Katy, then one to Caleb. He waves them away.

  “Are there any toys here?” Katy asks.

  “There are some stuffed toys in my bedroom. Why don’t you go in there and play with them?”

  Katy disappears, and Caleb and Tabitha move into the dining room. He leans against the wall and she leans against the table.

  “You have a girlfriend?” he asks, looking at one of the photos next to him.

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Is she here?”

  “No, but she’ll be back soon. What are you planning on doing to the girls?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Are you going to kill their father?”

  “No.”

  “No?” she says, her forehead forming a row of half a dozen creases. He doesn’t think he has heard anybody ever sound as disbelieving.

  “I’ve killed four people in the last two days,” he says, and she flinches. “I have no reason to lie.”

  “Four?”

  “There was another one last night.”

  “Who?”

  “Nobody important.”

  “I’m sure they were important to somebody.”

  “Not to me,” he says.

  “They must have been important enough for you to kill.”

  She has a point.

  “If you’re not going to kill the doctor, why do you need him?”

  He shrugs. “I want Stanton to walk in my shoes for a little while. I want him to know how it feels to lose a daughter.”

  “So you are going to hurt his children.”

  “No.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “He’s only going to think I’ve hurt them.”

  “So the girl you left at the slaughterhouse, he thinks you hurt her?”

  “Yes.”

  Her frown gets deeper. “He thinks she’s dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh my God, Caleb! That’s awful. Is that part of walking in your shoes?”

  “Yes,” he says, “and it’s sure as hell better than what happened to Jessica.”

  “And you need Katy and Octavia because you want to keep making your point, but you’re planning on letting them go, and you’re planning on letting him go too?”

  “Yes.”

  She sits down at the dining table. “This is insane, you know that, right?”

  “It’s what needed to be done.”

  “You’ve killed four people.”

  “They were bad people.”

  “They were good people doing what they thought was right,” she says. “We need people like that to bring balance to this world.”

  “If you believed that you never would have put Victoria Brown into a coma.”

  She hangs her head and directs her words at the table. “I’ve changed since then.”

  He moves toward her, puts his palms on the opposite side of the table, and leans forward. “You help people now, that’s admirable. Now it’s time for you to help me.”

  “With what?”

  “You can start by remembering some of that hatred toward Mrs. Whitby. I want you to help me get to her,” he says, knowing she’ll never agree, but that isn’t why he’s come here. He’s come here because he needs somewhere to stay. But right now he just wants her to be on his side. And one thing he’s learned in life is that sometimes if you ask for something more than what you want, you may just get what it is you’re after.

  “You what?”

  “She’s being watched by the police. I can’t go anywhere near her. But you can.”

  “You want me to attack Mrs. Whitby? To try and kill her? Is that what you want?”

  “Yes,” he says, fully aware of how that sounds.

  “And for that I’ll spend ten or twenty years in jail.”

  “No you won’t. I’ll make sure of it.”

  “And how are you going to do that?”

  “Because you’ll tell them I made you do it.”

  “And how are you going to make me do it?”

  “Easy. You just tell them I was threatening the children.”

  She stares at him so hard that he takes his hands off the table and straightens up. “Are you . . . are you threatening these children?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “I’m not going to help you, Caleb,” she says.

  He nods. “Then I want you to let us all stay here. It might take a day or two, but the investigation will slow down and the police will lower their guard, and when they do I’ll be able to get to her. But tonight and tomorrow I’ll have no chance, and I don’t have anywhere else to go. Please, Tabitha, I’m desperate.”

  “You can’t stay here. Anyway, Wendy will be home soon and what am I going to tell her?”

  “Tell her the truth. Tell her it’s something you need to do, that you owe me for not telling the police it was you who put Victoria Brown into a coma.”

  “I should have told them myself.”

  “But you didn’t. It would be awful if they found out.”

  She looks at him, getting the implied threat, and suddenly he feels bad for saying it. He holds up his hand. “I didn’t mean I’m going to tell them,�
� he says.

  “As long as I help you.”

  “No, no matter what happens, I’ll never tell them. You’re the only other person who stood up for what was right.”

  “You can’t stay here, Caleb,” she says. “And I should have gone to the police back then.”

  “Then this life,” he says, spreading his arms, “wouldn’t be yours. Your girlfriend would be with somebody else, standing in photos hanging on some other woman’s wall. The people who come to you for help, they would go elsewhere and maybe they wouldn’t have somebody care about them the same way you do. The people you’re helping, are you really going to turn your back on them? Is that what you want?”

  “What I want is for you to leave, and for you to leave alone.” She gets up from the table and moves toward him. “The others can stay.”

  “No.”

  “Please, Caleb,” she says, and she reaches out and puts a hand on his arm and it takes him back to that day in jail when she cried after he told her she had to live for Jessica too. He had put a hand on her shoulder and a guard had come over and physically separated them. Caleb had shoved him. The guard fell over and that gave Caleb five seconds to hug Tabitha. She returned the hug. It felt amazing. She promised she would always remember Jessica and honor that memory. Then two guards separated them. They forced him back to his cell. They beat him when they got there. They broke one of his ribs.

  He was thankful for her visit.

  She never came back.

  Her touch now relaxes him. He doesn’t feel so alone. “You can’t carry on like this. It will kill you.”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  She pulls away her hand and puts it to her mouth. “Oh my God, you don’t want to live through this, do you?”

  He can hear Octavia snoring softly from the living room. Katy is in the hallway staring at them, the cookie in her hand. There’s a bite mark out of it but she isn’t chewing—she’s motionless, listening. He wonders how much of the conversation she has heard. He can’t let her talk to her father.

  “The only thing I have to live for is justice. When I have that, there is nothing left.”

  “You’re going to kill yourself?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “Then what?”