What You Don't Know

by JoAnn Chaney

  “Yeah, I guess she did leave a long time ago,” Joe said. He shakes the paper out of the sleeve and it falls open automatically, and there on the front page, in big black letters across the top, is a headline Hoskins never thought he’d see: SEEVER IS BACK. So much for Chief Black’s wish to make an arrest before people can go nuts—if anything can push the public into a frenzy, it’s something like this. He scans through the article, quickly. It’s mostly about Seever, and how Carrie Simms was connected to him, and there’s a name for this new murderer, because that was what reporters always did. They liked to give killers snappy nicknames, and this one might be the worst he’s ever heard: “The Secondhand Killer.”

  “Oh, shit,” Hoskins says. He’d known Sammie would write the story, that it would run, but not this fast, and not like this. This is fearmongering in the worst possible way, and she’d promised it wouldn’t be like that, and he’d taken her word for it, when he should know better. The story takes up half the first page, credited to Sammie and a guy named Chris Weber, although it’s only Sammie’s photo that’s been printed beside the byline—her old photo, the same one they always used before, the one that makes her look like Miss America. “You bitch.”

  “I think it’s about time you stopped being so pissed off about your mom.”

  “No, Dad. It’s not that. I don’t give a shit about her.”

  “Yeah, you do,” Joe says, sighing. There’s yellow splattered down the front of his shirt—eggs from the morning before. He’ll have to remind the caretaker woman to have Joe change his clothes. “We both do.”

  “Nope.”

  “Didn’t you say she’s running a strip club now?”

  “I think it’s a bar.”

  “Oh.” Joe starts to scratch the dry spot on his wrist again, but sees Hoskins watching and folds his hands together. “I bet she doesn’t wear a bra to work. That woman never did like to wear a bra.”

  “I don’t know,” Hoskins says. For a moment he thinks he might laugh, but then it passes.

  “Never a bra for Carol,” Joe says, sighing again. He leans back in his chair, closes his eyes. “I wish she was here. I’d like to see her.”

  “You still love her?”

  “Nah. I want to remind her that she’s old as fuck and shouldn’t let her tits hang out anymore.”

  * * *

  There’s a cut under Trixie’s eyebrow, shallow and raw.

  “How’d you get hurt?” he asks, taking the coffee she’s holding out to him. “It looks bad.”

  “I tripped,” she says, looking away. A lie, he knows. Over the years he’s come to understand that there are clumsy women, but not as many as anyone would have you believe. The cut on Trixie’s face wasn’t made by the tub or a door, or whatever other foolishness she’d try to make him believe if he pressed her. That was done with a hand, something with a ring on it, a big stone, probably, flat and dark, the kind that glitters meanly and will have blood dried into the prongs.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Would you tell me if you weren’t?”

  She smiles at that, and the dimple on her chin makes an appearance. It makes him think of the girl in the closet, killed by her own mother. She’d had dimples in her school picture, the one the news had run, the same one that’d been blown up and framed for her funeral. He rubs a finger down the bridge of his nose.

  “Probably not,” she says, and that’s also like the dead little girl, because she’d never said one word, she’d gone to her first-grade class every day and never once asked for help, never once said anything was wrong. No one suspected a thing, she was smiling until the very end and then she was dead. “I’m fine.”

  He pulls away from the window and parks in a spot where he can still see the shop, he can see Trixie leaning out the window and passing out the cups of coffee. He has a headache, and at first he thought it was from lack of caffeine but now he thinks it’s because of everything. Loren and these new murders, Trixie and the cut on her face and the girl in the closet and Seever, because everything leads back to Seever, at least for him it does, and maybe it’ll be that way forever.

  SAMMIE

  “What the hell is this Secondhand Killer business?” Sammie says. She should be getting ready for work, putting on her makeup and fixing her hair, but she can’t focus, because Corbin has run her article like he promised, but he’s also made a few of his own additions, and added Chris Weber’s name to the byline, as if they’d worked on the piece together, like they were partners. She’d called Corbin first thing, let the phone ring until he finally picked up. “I didn’t put that in.”

  “I did,” Corbin says. “Actually, it was Weber’s idea.”

  “Weber?”

  “Yeah, he’s been trying to come up with a nickname for this guy. You like it?”

  “No,” she says, trying to keep the angry tremor out of her voice. “If I’d known you wanted a name for this killer, I would’ve come up with something myself.”

  “Listen, I wanted to run the piece this morning, and I needed something fast. Weber had already worked it up. What’s the problem?”

  She bites her lip. Corbin’s amused, she can hear it in his voice, but she might be pushing her luck. It’s the first piece she’s had published in a year, maybe it’s better to let it go. It’s not so much about the name, although it’s bad—you might as well call him the damn Sloppy Seconds Killer—it’s because Weber came up with it.

  “I was surprised,” she says. “You ran my stuff—does this mean I’m back on staff?”

  “You have a week to get me another piece,” Corbin says. “I’d take something sooner, if you could crank it out that quick. But I’ll need it soon—Weber’s got a lot of stuff lined up. Enough to print daily.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “I’m going to call you a freelancer for now. Prove yourself, I might bring you back on. Do this right, there’s an empty office down the hall from mine—it could be yours.”

  “I don’t give a shit about having an office.”

  “I’ll remember you said that. Weber’s been on the phone all morning, told me he’d scored an interview. Something good, I guess.”

  She looks at the clock, dismayed. She has forty-five minutes to get to work, and then she’ll be stuck there for at least six hours. She’d call in sick and spend the day pulling together another article, but she can’t afford to. They have bills to pay, they need to eat. That’s the problem with chasing a dream, she thinks. Reality is always right behind you, nipping at your heels. And its teeth are sharp.

  “A week?” she says. “Okay. You’ll have something in a week. Less than a week.”

  * * *

  You can make a person believe anything. She knows this is true. She’s seen it herself, done it herself. She does it at work every day, makes the women who come in believe she’s interested, that she’s checked in while she rubs lotion on their skin, dusts their faces with powder, tells them how good they look. And these women, most of them who’ve never felt beautiful for a single day in their lives, they take her words, tuck them away and hang on to them, come back when they need more kindness.

  Like today, for instance, when Sammie can’t help watching the clock, when she’s anxious to finish up and jump in her car. Every minute that passes puts Weber that much further ahead, and if there’s one thing Sammie hates, it’s falling behind. She’s so absorbed in her impatience that she’s not listening to the woman in the chair in front of her, a client who comes in every week and buys anything Sammie puts into her hands, but she isn’t there for makeup, she’s there because she’s lonely, she wants to talk, to tell Sammie about her life, about her doctor’s appointments and her son’s eczema, about the way her brake pads keep squealing no matter what the mechanic does.

  “You’re a good person,” the woman says, and this catches Sammie off guard, because she never talks about herself here, never interrupts the unending flow of words that come from some of th
e women.

  “You don’t even know me.”

  “I don’t need to know you. I can tell.”

  Sammie pauses, caught in one of those moments when it seems like something is wrong, or missing, or that somehow this moment is important, and she feels like she should say something, although she doesn’t have a clue what that might be. And then someone in the store laughs, high-pitched and abrupt, breaking the magic of the moment, and Sammie brushes more color onto the woman’s cheeks, feeling vaguely confused, like she’d lost something, although she doesn’t know what it is or even what it’s called.

  * * *

  They let her go home early when she begs—fifteen minutes, and the manager acts as if she’s been granted a huge favor—and she literally runs out the door, out the back, where the employee parking lot is. She stops when she hears someone yell her name, even though there are tiny shards of ice whipping down from the sky and the temperature is dropping like a stone in water. It’s Ethan, the kid from the sandwich shop, hurrying out the door she’d come from, popping open an umbrella.

  “Let me walk you to your car,” he calls, and then comes running up, stopping close beside her and stooping low, so the umbrella shields her from the snow and wind, and it’s suddenly dim under the cover, and they’re standing very close.

  “What’re you doing out here?” she asks, yanking her scarf over her mouth. “It’s freezing, go back inside.”

  “I’m waiting for Kelly. She should be off any minute,” Ethan says. “But if you don’t want me to walk with you, I’ll stay here and wait.”

  “No, that’s not what I meant,” she says, looping her arm through his. The umbrella doesn’t help with the cold, but at least she’s out of the weather—instead, the ice is peppering against the nylon canopy above them, sounding like grains of sand. “I’m glad you saw me.”

  He smiles, and it lights up his face, but she doesn’t see it—she’s too busy looking down, making sure she’s taking careful steps on the icy ground. If she’d seen this smile, Sammie would’ve pulled away, because it’s the look of a kid in love, and she doesn’t want to lead him on, doesn’t want him to think there’s a chance they’ll ever be together.

  But she doesn’t see his face.

  “I saw your article in the paper,” he says, raising his voice against the wind. “It was amazing. So well written.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Can I get your autograph before you get famous?” he says, and with a flourish pulls a copy of the Post out, and hands her a pen. She tries to scribble her signature across the front, but the paper is already wet from the snow, ruined. “Oh, don’t worry about it. I bought a few copies—I’ll get you to sign some other time.”

  “Okay. You’ll have to excuse me, I have to get going—”

  “This is so exciting,” Ethan says. He’s smiling, beaming at her, and she doesn’t think she’s ever seen him so pleased. “I know it’s your writing, but reading it makes me feel like I’m a part of the whole thing. It’s stupid, I guess.”

  “No, it’s not,” she says, squeezing his arm and then quickly yanking her hand away, because Kelly is hurrying up behind them, her eyes narrowed against the wind, and she doesn’t look happy to see them together. “Listen, we’ll have to catch up later—”

  “Yeah, sure. I’ve got to get going anyway.”

  She runs the rest of the way to her car, turns on the engine, cranks the heat as high as it’ll go, and waves at Ethan as he turns to Kelly. Her lipsticked mouth is moving furiously, the words spilling out between her red-rimmed lips, and Ethan isn’t even looking at her but down at the ground, his face buried deep in his coat’s collar, hidden from the cold.

  * * *

  Carrie Simms’s mother lives in the Happy Trees Mobile Home Park, which is a misnomer, because Sammie doesn’t see a single tree in the whole place, and if there were, she can’t imagine they’d be happy. She’s seen nice trailer parks, with well-kept homes and lawns and swing sets, but this is all concrete and desperation. There’s a pile of loose trash near the front gate, weighed down by snow, and a ditch of standing water that might be a pond, but probably isn’t. Simms’s mother—Delilah Simms—lives in Number 15, a faded pink trailer down at the end of a long street. There’s an aluminum silver Christmas tree in the front window, a wreath made of plastic holly berries pinned to the door.

  “Mrs. Simms?” Sammie says to the woman who answers her knock. She has dark hair, but it must be from a bottle, because her roots are gray. “My name is Samantha Peterson. I’m a reporter with the Post.”

  “Is there something he forgot to ask me?” the woman says. She doesn’t look like she should live here, Sammie thinks. She’s well put together, wearing a pantsuit and a simple gold chain, but she’s also tired-looking, as if life’s been too much for her.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Mr. Weber—did he send you with some more questions?” She glances at her watch. “I don’t have the time to speak right now, and I don’t know what else I could possibly say. I haven’t spoken with Carrie in almost four years.”

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” Sammie says, backing down the steps. This is not how she imagined this would go, but what else could she have expected? It’s standard procedure, SOP. Someone is killed, you interview the family. Get what you can out of them. Readers eat up family stories—the more emotional, the better. Of course Weber would’ve made this his first stop. “My mistake, we do have everything we need.”

  She runs lightly to her car and pulls away without buckling her seat belt, because Simms’s mother is still watching her, one hand resting on the tarnished doorknob, the other arm crossed over her waist and cupping the opposite hip, as if she’s in pain. Sammie drives until she can’t see the pink trailer anymore and then pulls aside. Her stomach is turning, but even if she pushed open the door and leaned out there is nothing in her stomach to bring up, except the half cup of coffee she’d drunk hours before. She swallows the gathering saliva in her mouth, once and then again, and her stomach settles.

  Talk to the families, that was standard. Weber would write a nice piece about the emotional impact on the family, a real sob story, even if he had to stretch the truth. He was going by the book, doing exactly the same things she’d do in his position. He was already outpacing her, and he’d keep ahead unless she started doing things differently, and she’s drawing a blank now. The victim’s family—done. She’d tried to get a hold of Simms’s landlord, the man who’d discovered her body, but she’d had no luck on that end. She could hunt down the families of the first two victims, Abeyta and Brody, but she has a feeling that Weber already has those bases covered. She despises the guy, but he’s not stupid—and that makes her hate him even more.

  A dog lopes by, picking its way carefully over the snowdrifts. She unrolls her window and whistles. It is brown and skinny, too skinny. No collar, but it still pricks up its ears, looks in her direction and starts barking. It doesn’t stop, even after she rolls her window back up and drives away, but chases her for a while, snapping at her bumper.

  * * *

  Dean is still at work when she gets home, and the house is empty, cold. She sits at the kitchen table. It’s old, they’d picked the table and chairs up at a garage sale for ten dollars when they were first married, and Dean had fixed it up; he’d spent hours sanding it down and staining it, he’d called it his labor of love, and she’d laughed and kissed him heartily on the mouth. It’d looked new when he was done, but now it’s worn and beaten; there are water rings left on the top and stains on the cushioned seats. She wonders how it got that way, how she’d never noticed it getting so run-down.

  She digs her cell phone out of her purse and opens up the Internet browser, types in a few words. The icon spins for a moment, considering, and then pulls up pages and pages of information, two hundred fifty million results. It’s amazing, how easy it is to find anything online now, without hardly any effort at all.

  She sees what she needs, taps on it, and h
er phone automatically dials. She doesn’t know why it had never occurred to her before, she needed Ralph Loren to remind her, but she has access Chris Weber will never have. She is approved to visit Jacky Seever.

  “You’ve reached Sterling Correctional Facility,” the automated voice says in her ear. The voice is sexless, robotic. She can’t tell if it’s supposed to be a man or a woman. “If you know the extension of the party you’re trying to reach, please dial it at any time. Our visiting hours are Wednesdays, ten to one…”

  GLORIA

  “If you’re tired, we can go to sleep,” Gloria said. It was their wedding night, a year after their first date. It had been a long day—throwing a bouquet and dancing and cutting the cake and standing up in front of all those people, Jacky knew so many people and it seemed like he’d invited everyone he could, something her father wasn’t very happy about because he was footing the bill. It was finally over, and they were technically on their honeymoon, although they weren’t leaving Denver at all, just staying at the Brown Palace Hotel for a few nights, in the Roosevelt Suite, which had sounded awful fuddy-duddy to Gloria but had turned out lovely. “We don’t have to do anything tonight. Unless you want to.”

  “What do you mean?” Jacky was watching her from the foot of the bed, his bowtie flapping loose around his neck. He’d spent the entire wedding in a state of hyperactivity, he’d danced and talked and laughed more than she’d thought anyone was capable of, but now that they were alone he was quiet, looking at her in a way she didn’t quite understand. For a moment she thought it was fear, but that seemed silly, because why would he be afraid of her?