by Bill Floyd
The nausea was back. I kept glancing behind me out that open door, which seemed miles away even though it was only a few feet.
On the other side of the room, the first drawer I opened revealed documents, all neatly sorted in laminated slipcovers. I picked up a Wisconsin driver’s license with Randy’s face on it. His name was shown as Gerald Hamby. Another ID, this one from Delaware, was for Wilson Hamby. I dug through and kept coming up with more: passports, bank cards, credit cards, all in fake names. I wondered if the bank cards were valid, if there was a monetary balance on the other end of them. (It was revealed at trial that he had several thousand in each account.) Randy had always been assiduous when it came to savings, so he probably had money to spare. I was starting to understand why he’d never let me in on the family finances. All his macho crap about it being the “man’s responsibility” was exactly that, but I’d never really fought him on it. I’d always been a little thankful I didn’t have to deal with that aspect of our lives.
Then I saw a folder with my initials on it. I opened it and more cards slid out into the drawer. Staring back at me from another Delaware ID was my own face, the same photo that appeared on my California driver’s license, except Randy had renamed me Debra Hamby. I riffled through the remaining cards and documents until they were all spread out on the countertop.
Inventory: five different ID cards for him, three for me. We were the Hambys or the Johnsons. I was Debra or Darlene. A passport was made out for Darlene Johnson, the same photo as on the other documents. I swallowed and thought quite clearly, like a voice was speaking aloud inside my head: He thinks you’re going to be cool with this. He thinks you’ll go along with it. He may think you already suspected. My immediate reaction, one that was purely defensive, simply to keep me from tearing my hair out, was to get furiously pissed. The sonofabitch had actually convinced himself that I would go along with whatever secret life he’d been leading, as though it were something everyone did, some pedestrian little indiscretion like our neighbors’ indulgences, Felicity Conrad’s fondness for Percocets or Dan Youngblood’s affair. Everyone knew these tidbits, all the neighborhood women dished on them whenever Felicity or Dan weren’t physically present. Such missteps were accepted as the natural price for a life of entitlement, a calm serene surface with sharks trolling underneath. Sharks, our neighbors could assimilate.
But when I began to understand that Randy thought so little of me, saw me as no more than a mousy enabler who’d be just fine with it all once he’d invited me into his confidence, it was like being slapped in the mouth. Perhaps he thought that with a bit of patience and explication, I could be made to see that the situation wasn’t so perverse after all, not so horrifying as I’d imagined …
And what, exactly, was so wretched about it? I still didn’t know anything other than that my husband was a gun nut with a whole batch of fraudulent documents stashed out behind the house. I had seen evidence of nothing more.
I put the documents back in the drawer, arranging them as closely as I could recall to how I’d found them. There was still that big, wall-length cabinet at the back of the shed. As I got closer, the drawing tacked onto the double doors of the cabinet resolved into clarity, and my breath locked up again. It was one of Randy’s sketches, much like the one he’d made of me when we were first dating, a thousand years ago: rudimentary and crude, pencil-drawn and shaded. But this one was of a boy who looked to be in his early-to-mid teens. The kid had a lifeless bowl of hair that lent him a mannequinlike aspect, something fake and contrived, a frowning mouth with thin lips, chubby cheeks, and a furrowed brow, as though his image had been captured at a moment of confused self-reflection. And then there were the eyes, somewhat averted from the viewer, creased with what might’ve been either anticipation or some secret but corrupt delight. Without coloration, there was no way to distinguish them from any other pair of eyes, except in that malefic expression. I didn’t recognize anything about the boy at all, but then I started thinking about it and the answer came even as I resisted its implications. I’d seen eyes bearing that sort of gaze before; in fact, I’d seen them on my husband only yesterday. This was his secret look, his ponderous mischief, his projection, himself as a younger man. Then I suspected even worse: maybe I was wrong, and maybe this was what he wanted Hayden to look like someday. Perhaps this was our son, an unhappy future vision of him trapped in his own father’s darkest shadow.
I opened the double doors slowly, pulling them out toward me, and everything went kind of sideways.
3.
An hour later, I stood pacing in the yard, muttering to myself for the pure noise of it, essentially to keep from going insane. When Todd Cline, the policeman and our old neighbor, stepped out of the shed after being inside for only a few minutes, he said, “I need to call for backup, and I need to get a warrant.”
“You can’t,” I said. “You know he’s got Hayden. You promised.”
He attempted a gentle smile, but he was pale underneath. The veteran cop, shaken. “I was humoring you until I could find out what you were talking about. Really, Nina, this is something we need to handle, right now.”
I barely remembered coming out of the shed after looking into Randy’s cabinet, at first stumbling and then running across the backyard to the house. I was able to call up vague images of myself flipping through the church directory until I found his number. What had I said to him? That, I couldn’t really remember, only how relieved I’d been that he was home. It seemed as though he’d said something about how the family usually went out for Sunday lunch, but they’d skipped it today because one of his daughters had a stomachache.
The wait between the time I hung up and the time he arrived was crystal clear in my memory. It was the worst twenty minutes of my life, up until that point.
Cline pondered a moment and continued. “Nina, I don’t know what to tell you. We’ll do everything in our power to ensure Hayden’s safety, but first of all we need to locate Randy and get as many men on him as we can. Can you call him, see where he is?”
“I can call, but we won’t know if he’s telling the truth. He could be watching us right now, for all I know.”
“The thought had crossed my mind,” Cline admitted. He took my elbow and steered me back to the house, leaving the shed door hanging open. “Listen, I really need to call this in, though. I’ll explain the situation to my boss and we’ll get some other people involved.”
So I stood there, feeling like I was going to collapse, literally, like every connective tissue in my body would spring free of its moorings and I’d be reduced to a pile of quivering guts on my nicely swept and polished kitchen floor. Cline called the station from his cell phone and spoke with some urgency. After a minute or so he asked me to call Randy. “I need your permission for us to track the call. If he’s on his cell, we might be able to locate him, at least generally. Do you think you can talk to him without letting him know that I’m here?” he said seriously. “I need to be sure you can do that.”
I wasn’t at all sure, but I had to know where Hayden was … and that was as far as my mind would allow me to go. I called from the house phone and Randy picked up on the second ring. Cline moved up close to my ear, and I held the phone out a little, so he could hear.
Randy sounded like he was smiling. “How is your morning, Nina?”
“I feel like I’m hungover. Where are you guys?” My voice amazingly steady.
“Well, since the park near our house was cordoned off with the police tape and all, I brought Hayden to Wesley Park, over near the City Center complex. You know where I’m talking about?” Cool and cheery, like he’d never left the key, like he wasn’t holding our son as a bargaining chip.
“I’ve been there once or twice.” I felt my throat clenching, and swallowed quickly. “So, how is the little guy?”
“He’s fine. Sitting right here on the seat beside me.”
“So you guys left the park?”
“We’re in the car. Do you want u
s to come home, Nina?”
For a moment I didn’t understand him. Todd Cline was holding his cell phone up and spinning his index finger, telling me to keep rolling. I improvised. “I think I’m ready to talk, if that’s what you mean.”
“I’ve wanted to talk to you for so long, babe.”
I held a hand up to my forehead, feeling the damp sweat condensing. “Don’t you think you can trust me?”
The pause lasted longer than I liked, but now Cline was giving me an OK sign. Randy said, “It’s kind of a big deal. I’m still not sure you understand.”
“I just know I want you guys back here,” I said.
“Forty-five minutes.”
“That long?”
“It won’t seem that way. And, babe? Thanks.” He hung up.
I put the phone down and said, “Oh, God, he’s going to kill Hayden, isn’t he?”
Todd Cline patted me awkwardly on the arm. “I don’t think so. HQ said they tracked his signal and he’s about a half hour away. Not quite to City Center, but far enough that we can get things ready. I’m gonna go out front and meet the others. I’ll stay where you can see me, though, and we’ll tell you how we think you should handle it before he shows up. We’ll run through the scenarios. Okay?”
I nodded, reeling in every sense of the word.
He touched me again, this time to steady me. He leaned me against the counter and said, “You did the right thing by calling me. You might have saved someone’s life, maybe more than one.”
“You were in there,” I said, unable to keep myself from reaching out and gripping his shirt; I needed a physical mooring. “Was it what I thought it was? In the petri dish or whatever?”
He hesitated, then nodded. “It looked like the ones I’ve seen. It’s always hard to tell, when they’re not connected to anything else.”
I retained only flash images. If I tried to concentrate on them, which I most certainly did not want to do, but couldn’t help as my mind kept circling compulsively back, I got only pieces, no sense of the whole. I remembered the sketch of the teenaged boy. I remembered opening the cabinet. There was a computer monitor, silent and blank, and the keyboard tray on a slide-out shelf below. The inner walls of the cabinet papered with color photos: sometimes isolated parts of a face or body—a gashed chin, someone’s bloody teeth, muscle pulled back and exposed; other photos showed scenes that seemed posed, almost tableaux, torn bodies and hanging flesh on polished hardwood floors, on soaked bedsheets. They were like the pictures in the true crime books I’d read while I was pregnant, except no part of them was blurred or pixeled out; this time I saw the faces connected with the savaged flesh. The empty eye sockets. The sockets with objects inserted where the eyes had been; smooth geodes, dice turned to sixes, tiny springs, even one that appeared to have the bulb of some flower sprouting where there had once been sight.
When I backed into the rolling chair, I’d nearly screamed. I realized I had my hand over my mouth. I’d always thought of that as an overly theatrical gesture, something you only saw in movies, but there in the shed I found it to be completely involuntary, like my body was trying to keep from breathing something in, some contamination that, if not immediately lethal, would certainly doom me to a life of quarantine. The birds outside were in a raging cacophony, sounding as if they’d gone feral and were tearing at one another, sharp hooked claws gouging feathers and beaks and black little birdy eyes. Battering wings. After I moved the chair aside, I made the door and started running. I had to find the phone, I had to call someone.
Because it wasn’t just the photographs. Beside the computer was a shallow glass dish, maybe three inches deep, half filled with some milky liquid. A pair of stainless-steel hemostats propped up against one edge. Caught in the clamps, sitting in the center of the dish, was a globe the size of a Ping-Pong ball, pearly and shot through with burst vessels. A clot of tissue distended where the steel squeezed it, ropy leakage like something you’d see in an egg white. I recognized it as soon as I saw it, even though I’d never seen anything like it before. My mind simply relayed the information: That’s a human eye sitting there in whatever that is; oh, God, it’s some kind of preservative. An X-Acto knife was balanced on the other side of the dish across from the hemostats. I saw small, thin slices cut and laid to one side on the desktop, like he’d been parsing it.
Todd Cline looked at me now and nodded again. “He wants to be caught, Nina. That’s what these guys do eventually, they snap and they need to be gratified and publicly recognized for what they feel to be superhuman accomplishments. A profiler came and talked to us about this kind of stuff a few years ago, after what happened with the Renaults.”
I acted as though I hadn’t comprehended. I was defaulting to suburban housewife. “‘These guys’? Jesus, Todd, we’ve sat beside you in church.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “But what’s out there in that shed … He hasn’t had some kind of sudden breakdown.”
And he was right.
He left me there in my kitchen with the knowledge that he was right, that this had been going on for a long, long time, maybe Randy’s whole life. Certainly for most of his life with me. And then there was the thing Cline had mentioned and I’d deflected, the thing that I knew he had seen and the damning detail I couldn’t seem to unsee. One of the photos on the wall, this one tacked up near the top, was right about at eye level for someone who sat at the computer and visited God only knew what sort of Internet sites. It was a picture of a small boy, his neck at an impossible angle as he lay among the dead leaves on a patch of nondescript dirt in some godforsaken unknown. The eyeless stare, the forever silenced scream, the face of Tyler Renault.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Randy pulled into our driveway that afternoon at five minutes past two. I was standing on the front porch, waiting, trying to hold myself together until I could get my hands on Hayden. From my vantage, I could see down the street from our cul-de-sac all the way to Maple Avenue, the main artery leading out of the neighborhood toward town, and I’d watched that intersection in agony, pacing, certain up until the very moment his car appeared that he wasn’t coming back ever again. That I’d never see my son again. That I would have to bear all of this alone.
All down the street, the sense of a lazy summer day prevailed: Tony and Sheila Johnson sat on their side deck, two houses down, Sheila reading a magazine as Tony blabbed on his cordless phone; across from their house, Betsy Morrison kept an eye on her infant son as he splashed in a kiddie pool; Max Flores labored behind his lawn mower, shirtless, his hairy back a target for clinging grass and mosquitoes. Todd Cline had moved his Expedition down the street a couple of driveways and parked by the sidewalk. When I looked at the SUV, I could see no sign of him, even though I knew he was there. Obliviousness reigned, except in my head, where it had counted for so much for so long.
Cline had directed me to pull my Accord out of the garage and park in the center of the driveway, effectively blocking it off. Randy drove up behind my car and cut the engine on his BMW. I heard him engage the emergency brake. I was already walking across the yard to meet him.
He opened his door and looked questioningly at my parking job.
“I was thinking of washing it,” I said quickly. Tremors in every word.
His face, up until then, had exhibited a brief instant of strange, new trust that made me feel as if I’d been punched in my heart. As soon as he looked into my eyes, though, his expression changed to one of disappointment; a rueful, reproachful glare that said he’d expected more of me. He stood by, motionless, while I opened the back door of the BMW. Hayden was strapped into his child seat, waving his arms happily when I leaned in. The tears came hot and beyond my control as I wrestled with the straps until I had him loose and in my arms.
When I emerged, Randy was lingering there, only an arm’s length away, hands clenched by his sides. He saw my tears and said, “Did you really think I would hurt him?”
I was already backing away, moving toward t
he house without ever taking my eyes off him. Randy’s face hardened. He started after me.
Another vehicle door slammed, just down the street. Todd Cline, twenty yards away when he got out of his Expedition, called Randy’s name.
My husband turned and saw the officer coming. Cline wore his service revolver in plain sight on his belt. “Hey, Randy. You mind if I have a word with you?”
I was frozen now, watching as Cline closed the distance. I whispered in my little boy’s ear, the soft, precious little ear that couldn’t yet translate that I was telling him everything would be all right, Mommy was here, Mommy would keep him safe. I kissed his head and smoothed his hair. He knew something was going on, because he started to wail and cry.