What You Don't Know

by JoAnn Chaney

  It’s good, she thinks. Fast. But good.

  She emails it off to Corbin, then waits. Refreshes her email a few times, although it’s unnecessary. Corbin never seems to sleep, and he’s quick at answering emails. He hasn’t changed in the last year—four minutes after she sends the email, she has a response.

  This is good, the email says. Very good. I’ll pull some strings, run it in tomorrow’s edition. What else you got?

  And then, the last line, which makes her heart leap up into her throat:

  Welcome back.

  * * *

  Sammie and Dean are a couple who like to play games. Not sex games—after this many years of marriage there isn’t much of that sort of fun left in them. And they don’t play board games, or card games. Sometimes there are mind games, but that’s to be expected, especially with them.

  It’s really just one game they play, and it’s not even all that often anymore, not since they’re getting older and tired, and the few minutes before sleep are often a blur of face washing and teeth brushing. But they used to play it all the time, late at night, after the doors had all been locked and the lights turned off and the house was dead quiet, except for the occasional murmurs from the furnace. It’s always easier to play the game at night, when they are nothing more than two disembodied voices pushing through the dark. In the dark, they don’t have to see each other.

  This is a game of questions and answers, of endless possibilities. Sometimes they’re hypothetical questions, sometimes they’re not. They’ve played it since before they were married, teasing and laughing, poking at each other and ripping away the sheets so the cool night air would make their bodies ripple with gooseflesh. But sometimes this game turns serious, and they both get upset and angry, the bedroom seems too warm, even with the ceiling fan whirring ceaselessly above their heads.

  “Are you still in love with me?” Dean asks. She’d come to bed an hour before, after getting the email from Corbin. She’d snuck into bed, thinking that Dean was asleep, but now she can hear the flicker of his eyelids in the dark, up and down, the wet kissing sound they make as they open and shut.

  “What?” she asks, turning over, yanking the blanket out from where it’s twisted under her arm.

  “Are you still in love with me?”

  “Why would you ask that?”

  “Because I want to know.”

  “I’m married to you, aren’t I?”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” he asks. “Not everyone who gets married is in love.”

  “If I didn’t love you, I’d leave. I’d go find another man to be with.”

  “Would you?” he asks, sounding amused. She wishes she could see his face, even for a moment. “I think you’ve done that already.”

  This is about Hoskins, she thinks. Somehow, Dean knows she was with him. She wishes she could tell him the truth, tell him everything, but he’d lose his mind, and there’d be trouble. Because she does love Dean, no matter what he believes. She fell in love with him because he was quiet and strong-willed and seemed to have it together—not like so many of the other men she dated back in college, when the guys were more interested in getting wasted and taking care of their cars and seeing how often they could get laid. Dean had plans, even back then—he wanted to settle down, to buy a house and have a good job, to be an adult. She wanted those things too, but it wasn’t until after they married that she realized that being an adult wasn’t all that much fun, that saving money meant not spending it, that making plans didn’t necessarily mean they’d work out. She knows what Dean thinks: that when she’s unhappy it’s because of him. And it’s not true, not entirely, although he won’t believe her.

  “Believe it or not, you’re not the center of my universe,” she’d said once, when he’d started complaining that she wasn’t satisfied, all because she’d made the mistake of wishing out loud that they had the premium movie channels on the TV, when they couldn’t afford it. He accused her of being disappointed in him, in wishing that he made more money, that he had a better job, although she thinks those are thoughts that he has about himself, ideas he’s projecting onto her.

  “Maybe,” he’d said, “you wish you’d married someone else. Someone better.”

  The idea of being married to someone else has crossed her mind—who hasn’t had those kinds of thoughts? But would it be better to be married to someone else, or to be alone? In the end, her answer was always no, although Dean doesn’t seem to believe it, and she’s tired of pleading her case to him. I chose you, she wants to say, but doesn’t. I could have left anytime, I could be with Hoskins, but I chose you.

  Oh, they haven’t had a perfect marriage, but Dean—and Hoskins—are the only men who’d never treated her like nothing more than a piece of ass. Dean listened, and he’d encouraged, and he’d always tried so hard, and she wishes she could be honest with him, but he’s so afraid. So insecure.

  “I’m writing again,” she says. “Corbin called, because of those women who’ve been killed. They think Seever might be connected.”

  “You’re writing again.” Dean shifts his feet under the covers, away from her, so they’re no longer touching. “About Seever.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you think that’s a good idea?”

  “Why wouldn’t it be? I’ve been waiting for a chance like this.” But she understands what he’s asking. He wants to know if she’ll be seeing Hoskins, if they’ll be sleeping together again. He’s apprehensive, and maybe that’s to be expected, after everything she’s done.

  “I guess.”

  “Have you ever hurt someone?” she asks, pushing the words out of her mouth and into the dark, because she has to say something, and that’s the first thing she thinks of.

  “Physically?” Dean says, surprised. “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “What happened?”

  “In the third grade I shoved another kid into a wall, he got a bloody nose.”

  “Not kid stuff. Like, lately.”

  “Lately? No.”

  She stretches out, touches her toes to his, then pulls away again.

  “Would you ever kill someone?”

  There’s a long pause, so long that she’s sure he’s fallen asleep again.

  “Yeah,” he finally says. “I would. If I had to.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Like, in self-defense,” he says. “If someone broke in and tried to hurt us, I’m entirely within my rights to defend myself.”

  “How politically correct of you.”

  “And I’d do it for you.”

  “What?”

  “I’d kill someone if you wanted me to,” Dean says. “Sometimes I feel like that’d be the only way to get your attention. Start murdering people so you’d have a story to chase.”

  She doesn’t say anything, but his words set off a faint alarm in her head, make her think of something else, although she can’t think what. They’ve both said strange things under the cover of dark, admitted to things they wouldn’t normally. Instead of another question, she gently pushes him over to his side, so his back is facing her, and she presses against him, their bodies perfectly aligned, and she pushes her forehead into the spot where his neck widens into his back, and they fall asleep that way, like one body under the covers instead of two.

  HOSKINS

  He goes straight to his car when Sammie drops him off, sits behind the wheel and watches what’s going on. The crowd has mostly dispersed, driven away by the lack of excitement, but there are still plenty of cameras, lots of media. Lots of cops going back and forth on the property, pairs of them walking down the street. They’re going to be at it all night, going door-to-door through the whole neighborhood, asking every resident for their whereabouts, if they’d seen anything suspicious. There is a process to catching a killer. There are steps. They’ve secured the crime scene; now it’s time to find a witness. That was always the part Hoskins hated the most—pounding the pavement, ringing doorbells and trying to coerce p
eople to remember things. Most people walk through life wearing blinders; they don’t see much besides what’s in front of their own face, but it has to be done, because there’s always a chance that someone saw a strange car parked out front, or a guy they hadn’t seen around before.

  And there will be more cops inside, he knows, taking photographs and dusting for prints and looking for any bit of evidence they can, because it’s almost impossible for a perp to not leave behind DNA, unless they’re incredibly careful. And this guy—he was careful, he’d kept Simms locked up with him for days and no one had suspected a thing, but maybe he hadn’t been careful enough. Loren had said the last two victims—Abeyta and Brody, Hoskins had to remind himself, because it’s so easy to think of them as bodies—had both been raped, but the medical examiner hadn’t been able to pull anything off them. The guy could’ve used a condom, or their time in the water had washed everything clean. But this time it might be different, and he’d left something they could run through the database and hope for a match. But it might not matter if they find his DNA, because even if the guy left a fucking bucket of semen on the front doorstep, if they don’t have him on file already, it’ll be a wash. It’s hit or miss, Hoskins thinks. Sometimes worth the trouble, but not typically a lot of help in making an arrest.

  A part of him wants to stay, to get back into the thick of things right away, but he’s spent so much of the last few years running from Seever that he can’t. Even if he tried, he doesn’t think he’ll be any more use tonight; it’d be best to go home, to nurse his sore head and bruised face, come back to the investigation in the morning, when he’s thinking straight, when he can do the job right.

  * * *

  When he gets home, Joe’s asleep on the couch, a melting bowl of ice cream balanced on his lap. “He’s been hiding tuna cans again,” the caretaker woman says before she leaves. “He’s been digging in the trash and hiding them in his room. He won’t even let me wash them out first.”

  Hoskins gets a trash bag and goes to his father’s room, and the smell of fish hits him, overpowering the musky aroma of old man. The empty cans are stacked in the closet, starting in the farthest corner, where the suit his father used to wear to church hangs, wrapped in clear plastic and knotted at the bottom, to keep the ends from dragging. There are dozens of them—when did Joe have a chance to eat this much tuna? Hoskins gets on his knees, starts putting the cans in the bag, trying to be quiet about it, so by the time Joe realizes what has happened these flat tins will be far away, buried under a mound of other garbage.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  Joe’s voice scares the hell out of him, the same way it did when he was fifteen and had brought a girl home with him, and they’d been in his bedroom, fooling around, because Joe shouldn’t have been there, he usually worked late into the night, but he came home early that day, Hoskins never found out why, and he caught the two of them in the middle of their funny business. He’d stormed into the bedroom, shouting, and he’d put the girl out of the house, but gently.

  “I’m throwing all this junk away.”

  “Get out.”

  “You can’t live like this.”

  “I’m a grown man. I’ll live any way I damn well please.”

  “These have to go, Dad.”

  “No.”

  Joe’s eyes are shining, he’s breathing hard. He’s never been a violent man, never used his fists or was mean, is hardly ever rude or angry, but Hoskins thinks he might be ready to fight now, that there’s a good chance the two of them will end up on the floor, rolling around, swearing and punching, all over a bag of cans, their insides smeared with drying tuna.

  “I need those, son,” Joe says, instead. There’s no fight in him, none at all, and Hoskins realizes that the shine in his eyes isn’t anger, it’s tears, because he’s ready to break down. “Please.”

  “Why? It’s nothing but trash.”

  Joe sits on the foot of his bed—not sits, really, but more of a sink, slow-motion and graceful, and he’s crying, thin old-man tears that run down his face and over his huffing lips.

  “But I need them.”

  Seever cried when they arrested him, real tears, and Hoskins thinks it might be the only time he ever saw the man being sincerely himself, with all the bullshit wiped away. He didn’t want to leave his home, didn’t want to be pushed into the back of the patrol car parked in his driveway. They’re mine, Seever had said, weeping. His forehead was mushed into the window, and he’d left behind a big smeary mark on the glass. They’re mine.

  “Why are you doing this to me?” Joe asks, covering his eyes. His hands are veined, spotted. Trembling. “Please don’t do this.”

  Hoskins doesn’t know what to say, how to make this better. He’s still holding the trash bag, and when he moves for the door the cans shift, clinking against one another with hollow metallic chimes.

  SLOPPY SECONDS

  HOSKINS

  December 3, 2015

  He tries to be quiet in the mornings so he doesn’t wake up Joe, creeping around his own house like a thief. He’s careful not to slam the bathroom door or to drop anything in the shower, and he usually shuffles around in socks and puts on his shoes last thing, but it doesn’t matter, it’s a shot in the dark, because there are times Joe is already awake, waiting at the kitchen table, his hands folded together patiently. Hoskins isn’t sure what he’s waiting for, and Joe doesn’t seem to know either—he was never the type of man who’d wait to be served, he’d never had a woman around to make coffee or iron his clothes—no, Carol Hoskins was a real flake, she’d been seventeen when Hoskins was born and she’d only put her life on hold long enough to marry Joe and shit out a baby, and then she was gone. As far as Hoskins knows, his parents are still married, and he sometimes wonders if Joe’s been waiting all this time for Carol to come back, to be ready to settle down. It doesn’t look like it’ll happen, though—she’s had forty years to come back and she never has—and Joe has gotten used to doing everything himself, but he still waits.

  Joe isn’t at the table this morning, though, and that’s good, because things are easier when the old man’s asleep. Like the thermostat. When Joe’s still asleep, that’s his first stop. It’s on the wall of the tiny dining room, which seems the stupidest possible spot to put a thermostat, but maybe that was the standard when the house was built. He doesn’t know. He changes the temperature every morning, at least for a little bit, because Joe always looks at the thermostat, at least once a day, usually in the mornings.

  Seventy-eight? Joe had shouted the first morning after he’d moved in. It was March, and even though it was spring the nights were still cold. Sometimes freezing. You stupid, Paul? Do you know how much the gas bill is going to be?

  You’re cold, Hoskins had said, but that only made his father angry, and Hoskins remembered all the times when he was a kid, when his dad would see how far into the winter season they could go before firing up the furnace, and then he’d keep the heat in the house so low they’d expel hazy clouds every time they let out a breath. And if Hoskins kept the front door open a second longer than necessary when he was going outside, or if any of the plastic sheets taped up over the windows was peeling up at the corners, Joe would spend the rest of the day in a severe state of piss-off, and nothing would make it better. You need to be comfortable.

  I’ll put on another sweater, Joe said, so Hoskins ticked the thermostat down to sixty-three, what his father considered the perfect temperature, and watched as the numbers took a dive and his father huddled deeper into his wool sweater, his lips turning a gummy purple shade. Hoskins didn’t argue. It wasn’t worth it, never was. Instead, he compromises, because that’s what he does, he’s always been that way. So he gets up early, turns down the heat so his father will think it’s been there the whole time, and then once the old man’s up and around, absorbed in something else, he cranks it back up again. It could backfire anytime, all his father has to do is walk over to the thermostat at a
ny point during the day and he’ll see what’s going on, he’ll take a look at where the dial is sitting and know, but it hasn’t happened yet.

  He’s been meaning to buy a new coffee machine—he still has the old kind that uses the tissue-paper filters and a glass pot with the scorched bottom. One day, he figures, the damn thing’ll break and he’ll have to spring for a new one, one of those fancy stainless-steel jobs he’s seen that takes only plastic pods, and will make just one cup at a time. He turns the dial on the thermostat, then starts the coffee. He hates doing it—pulling out the filter, rinsing out the pot, dropping in fresh grounds—he tries to remember to do it at night before they go to bed, so all he’ll have to do in the morning is flip a switch, but he never manages to get to it. He’s rinsing the pot—the damn thing always has grounds swishing around the bottom of it, no matter what he does—when Joe shuffles into the kitchen, rubbing his eyes. The old man’s hair is wild, sticking in every direction, but he refuses to get it cut. They buzzed it all off when I enlisted, Joe always used to say. I decided then I’d have long hair for the rest of my life.

  “Is Carol here?” Joe asks, scratching absently at his wrist, where the skin is raw and torn from being worked over by his nails. Colorado winters are hard and dry, and tough on the old man’s skin. He’s carrying the newspaper in his arm, cradling it like it’s a baby wrapped in a blue plastic sleeve. “I thought I heard her.”

  “Dad, stop,” Hoskins says, gently pulling his father’s hand away, and Joe looks at him, surprised, as if he’d forgotten his son was there at all. “You’re only making it worse.”

  “Where’s Carol?”

  “She’s not here.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Mom’s been gone a long time.”

  Carol’s not gone, not exactly. She’s not dead, but she definitely isn’t here, not anywhere near here, not if she can help it. The last he’d heard, Carol was out in Nebraska, running a pool hall with her latest boyfriend. Hoskins had last seen his mother when he was ten, and all he remembers from that visit is her long tan legs and her laugh, throaty and hoarse from cigarettes and late nights. She’d sometimes send postcards, or photos of her standing beside whatever guy she was fucking, and Hoskins had always hid those from his father, not wanting to see the hurt on his face. Once, she’d sent Hoskins a package for his birthday, but when he’d peeled the box open it was empty, and he’d never figured out if she’d done it on purpose, to hurt him for being born, or if she’d just forgotten.