What You Don't Know

by JoAnn Chaney

  Oh, she was afraid. Yes, she was. She was twenty years old and still a virgin, had never gotten to second base, even with Jacky, who didn’t seem to have all that much interest in petting. He’d kiss her when they went to the movies, but he’d pull away when things got too heavy, and he’d hold the popcorn on his lap, looking embarrassed.

  She gestured, lamely, tugging at the hem of her wedding dress. She’d heard about doing it from girls at school, but it’s not as if hearing about it was the same as the actual act.

  “I don’t know,” Jacky said. He looked at her, then at the door, and for a minute she thought he was going to run. She’d never seen him nervous before, even when her father had promoted him from dishwasher to head cook, with more promises of management. Owner, her father had said. He’ll be running it all in no time.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Should I turn out the light?”

  “I don’t know. Yeah, I guess.”

  He came to bed once the lights were out, came to her, his skin smooth and cold under her fingers. He was trembling, and finished fast, his breath hot in the cup of skin between her neck and shoulder.

  “I didn’t know,” he said.

  “Know what?”

  “Nothing. Nothing.”

  * * *

  Jacky will only have butter in the restaurant, and at home. Real butter, not margarine or oleo, not even the good stuff no one can tell isn’t butter. She tried to fool him once, to replace the stuff in their butter dish with margarine, thinking that he’d never know the difference and she could save money on groceries, but somehow he knew, he knew even though she’d thrown the evidence away. And not even in their own trash but in one of the bins outside the grocery store. She’d leaned way over the side of the can, shoved the empty box way down deep, covering it over with greasy bags of fast food and crumpled newspapers, looking over her shoulder as she did it, as if Jacky might be standing right behind her in the parking lot, watching her, knowing exactly what she was up to. She covered her tracks, did everything perfectly, but somehow Jacky still knew, and he’d thrown the nice crystal butter dish they’d gotten as a wedding gift at a wall and screamed at her for lying, for trying to trick him, and flecks of spit had gathered at the corners of his mouth.

  He’d picked up all sorts of quirks like that after the wedding, mostly about things at the restaurant. Her father, who handed the keys and the deed over three months after they were married, says it’s good. That it shows Jacky’s a discerning man. He’s got what it takes to make the restaurant run properly. And even though it hasn’t been that long since he took over, Jacky’s already talking about expanding, taking out a loan and opening up a second location, in a newish building where there used to be a barbershop, and a bar.

  “Do you think that’s a good idea?” she asks, but Jacky doesn’t answer. He doesn’t pay much attention to her these days, and she understands, he’s busy at work, making a living to support her. He needs space, she thinks. But the only time he really seems to see her is when he wants it, fast and hard, and then he lets her keep the TV on while he takes care of his business, and she’s glad for that, because she still doesn’t understand the appeal of it, even though the women on her soaps love to taunt men with it, and it’s all the men seem to care about.

  * * *

  A year passes before she catches pregnant. She’s exhausted during those first few months, so she spends most of her days on the couch with the TV on, watching Erica Kane prance through life in Pine Valley, her feet propped up on a pillow and her hands roaming over her belly. It’s not changed much, still flat and taut, but she can feel the tiniest push, a little extra something nestled under her belly button. She sees pregnant women every day, at the grocery store, out walking through the park, and she wants to be one of them, to have a round belly and wear those ridiculous smock tops that balloon out at the waist. And then there’ll be a baby, a boy who looks like Jacky, and later they can have a girl. One of each flavor. She’s already started buying clothes, tiny socks and bottles of tearless shampoo, and the checkout girl doesn’t ask but she has to know, she looks at those things and then at Gloria’s belly, beaming, and it’s like they understand each other without saying a word.

  And then, as quickly as it happened, it’s over. She wakes up one morning thinking that she must’ve had an accident because there’s a wet spot in the bed, she hasn’t done that since she was very small and her father had hung all the bedding outside so the entire neighborhood could see she was a bed-wetter. But when she throws back the covers all she sees is red. It seems to her in that moment that the entire bed is filled with blood, an ocean of it; it’s actually not that much but it’s enough, and the baby is gone. The doctor tells her to rest, that they can try again soon, that these things happen all the time. Jacky is sympathetic at first, but he’s confused by how upset she is, how sad, and says that he doesn’t understand why she’s acting like this, over something she never even had.

  She bleeds for a week, and every time she goes to the bathroom she searches the toilet bowl before flushing, although she doesn’t know what she’s looking for. There’s nothing but urine and clotted blood and other bits she doesn’t have a name for, but she keeps looking anyway, expecting something more.

  * * *

  Marriage, she thinks, is a careful balancing act. If you put too much weight on one side, lose your focus, everything falls.

  “Don’t touch me,” she tells Jacky. It’s been nearly six months since the miscarriage, but she doesn’t want to try again. She’s careful—sleeps fully clothed, always goes to bed before Jacky, quickly moves out of the way when she feels him getting close.

  “I need you,” he says. She found a magazine under his side of the bed not long before, where it had dropped after he fell asleep. On the cover was a photo of a woman, naked and tied, a black rubber ball jammed into her mouth. The woman—and every other woman in the magazine, all tied up and being whipped or pinched or hurt in some way—looked terrified.

  “I’m not feeling well right now.” She didn’t say anything to Jacky about the magazine—she’d been finding things like that for a while now, surprises he’d left behind. It was like finding a big green booger wiped on the bottom of a chair, she’d thought the first time. A nasty, crusty thing that had been left behind, and it was worse because it was Jacky doing it, it was her husband doing those disgusting things. “I need to go to sleep.”

  She turns over in the bed, tucking her hand under her cheek, but Jacky isn’t letting her off this time. He grabs her shoulder, pins her back on the mattress. A hank of her hair gets caught in his watchband and rips right out of her scalp, making her shriek in surprise.

  “What are you doing?” she says, but he’s busy, working on the drawstring of his pajama bottoms with one hand and holding her down with the other. “Let me go.”

  She pushes at him, tries to fight him off, but Jacky’s stronger than she is, and his arms are longer. When she manages to sink her nails into the meat of his cheek he slaps her, hard, and she puts her hands over her face and cries, sucking in air so hard she can hear it wheezing through the cracks in her fingers.

  “Let me see your face,” Jacky says, grabbing at her wrists and trying to pull her hands away, his hips not slowing down, and she realizes that this is turning him on, that she’s like one of those girls in the magazine, she’s scared and crying and trying to get away, and Jacky doesn’t just like it, he loves it. She doesn’t let him pull her hands away, even when he pinches her, taking flesh in between his fingers and squeezing until the skin squirts out of his grip and she screams, but she doesn’t lower her hands. “I want to see your face.”

  * * *

  Jacky doesn’t wake her up when he leaves for work the next morning, so it’s almost noon before she gets up, smeary-eyed and groggy. She slept like the dead, but she’s still exhausted. She pads into the kitchen, turns on the coffee machine, and watches it slowly drip into the pot, not not
icing that her robe is untied and open, and that she’s naked beneath, or that she’s swiveling her hips back and forth, tufts of her pubic hair skimming the lip of the counter. And she certainly doesn’t notice the dried blood on her thighs.

  She thinks her husband might’ve raped her. Or not. Can that even happen? She’s not sure.

  She slops the coffee over the mug’s rim when she pours, burning the back of her hand. She could leave Jacky. Ask for a divorce. Those things happen. She doesn’t know any women who’ve actually left their husbands, but she’s seen it on TV, knows it’s possible. All day she thinks about this, about leaving, and she gets a suitcase out of the hallway closet and puts a few things in—just some panties and blouses, a few pairs of slacks. If she packed all her clothes, she thinks, that means she’d made up her mind, that she was ready to go.

  But she’s still not sure.

  Later that night, when she’s sitting across from Jacky at the dinner table, watching him shovel food in his mouth, she decides she has to say something. That’s what women are supposed to do, aren’t they? Speak their minds? Get their feelings out in the open? She thinks she might’ve read that tidbit of wisdom in a magazine somewhere—probably in the waiting room at the dentist’s office. Clear the air, it said. Work things out. Or be a modern woman, and leave. She didn’t need a man who’d treat her badly, the magazine had said.

  “About last night—” she starts, but Jacky won’t let her finish, because he suddenly has an awful lot to say, even though he hasn’t said a word since sitting down.

  “I don’t know what I was thinking,” he says quickly, standing up and coming around the table to her. She flinches away when he tries to hold her, and she sees the pain in his eyes. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. We haven’t been together for so long, and I’ve been wanting you so badly.”

  I guess he does it because he loves me so much, her mother had said.

  “I’ll move into the guest room until I find somewhere else to live,” he says. “I won’t touch you again.”

  “I don’t want you to do that,” Gloria says. This is not going the way she thought it would, not at all. It’s one thing if she plans on divorcing him, but it’s something completely different if he’s trying to leave her. How could he do this? He’s in the wrong, after all. Isn’t he? Isn’t he?

  “I don’t think you’re attracted to me anymore,” Jacky says. He looks ready to cry. “If there’s something wrong with me, if you don’t want to be with me, I understand. There’re a lot of men out there—”

  “I never said anything like that.”

  “But you didn’t enjoy it last night.”

  “I never said that.” She can’t believe the words coming out of her mouth. The lies. But is she lying, telling him that she enjoyed his crushing weight on her body, the sandpaper-pain as he forced his way between her legs? She doesn’t know. It’s like she can’t remember anything anymore, and the only thing she feels is an overpowering need to hold on. She had all sorts of intentions, but they’ve jumped ship. “When did I say that?”

  “I guess you didn’t,” Jacky says slowly. “But you’ve been so cold to me lately, I thought—”

  “How about you don’t assume anything about me,” she snaps, scooping more green beans out of the bowl and thumping them down on his plate. “I’ve got my own mind, and if I don’t like something I’ll let you know.”

  “All right, then,” he says. “You’ll let me know.”

  “I’ll let you know,” she says firmly, and then says it again. She remembers the half-packed suitcase upstairs, excuses herself from the table, and goes up. She doesn’t bother taking out the clothes but sticks the suitcase back in the closet, quietly, so Jacky won’t know what she’s doing, so he’ll never know.

  * * *

  The next day Jacky brings her flowers, and he keeps doing it, a new bouquet every few days. He buys whatever’s in season—daisies in the spring, mums in the fall. Carnations all year long. Tall, fresh flowers, their heavy heads drooping over the sides of a glass vase, their delicate stems barely able to hold them upright.

  “I don’t need a new vase every time,” she says. “If you bring the flowers wrapped in paper, they’ll be fine.”

  But he doesn’t listen, and keeps coming home with more glass vases, and she feels bad tossing them out with the trash, so she instead stacks them in one corner of the garage, in a careful pile. They get dusty there. Dirty. She doesn’t touch it, this precarious mountain of glass that grows bigger every week, but sometimes she goes out into the garage to look at it, the bottoms of her bare feet cold and dirty on the concrete, her arms crossed over her breasts. After the first few times, she noticed that spiders would climb inside the glass, not knowing that they’d never be able to get out again, that they’d end up dead at the bottoms, their legs crinkled up close to their bodies, the whole rest of the world right there, close enough to see, but still not close enough.

  THE HUNT

  HOSKINS

  December 7, 2015

  It’s quiet in the basement without Ted in the office next door, and it seems darker than usual. Probably a psychological thing. When he gets in there’s a manila folder on his chair; inside there’s a few handwritten pages of notes, done in Loren’s fancy Palmer script on unlined computer paper, and a yellow sticky note on top. Take a look? it says. This is the best the numbnuts on the task force could come up with. I’m out today, headed down to Pueblo. We got a call that Cole might be down there, hiding out.

  Hoskins shuffles through the pages, runs his fingers down the cover memo, and laughs. Numbnuts, Loren was right about that. If the task force can’t come up with a better list of suspects than this, the whole damn city is in trouble.

  The suspect is a man, the papers say. No shit. Age eighteen to fifty-five, which seems like a pretty big gap to Hoskins. Caucasian. A man with deep-seated sexual perversions and an inferiority complex, which Hoskins guesses covers most of the men living in Denver. After this is a list of suspects, men to check out. It’s a short list. Every investigation has to start somewhere, it’s not just something that happens; a case is built, brick on top of brick, until another door opens up and a new possibility is revealed. But these names—they’re a joke.

  The first is Tom Bird, a local businessman in the running for the upcoming election for mayor. He’s been spending a lot of time shaking hands and kissing babies, and he’s done quite a bit of grandstanding about the crime rate in Denver, promising it’ll dip lower when he’s elected. Hoskins takes a pencil, draws right through this name. If Bird had gone to the trouble of murdering three women to draw attention to his platform, he should be running for the fucking president, not mayor.

  Next is Pastor Jack Pelton, who’d spent the last twenty years playing big-time to the Bible thumpers in town, until he was caught in an undercover sex sting involving underage girls not long before. His church had given him the boot, but Pastor Jack was on the rise again, because everyone likes a repenting sinner. Church attendance always went up when people were scared, and could Pastor Jack be trying to throw a scare into Denver just to get more asses in the pews? Hoskins drew a line through this name too. There were easier ways to fill the collection plate.

  Person of Interest Number Three: Frank Costello, Esq. Jacky Seever’s lawyer, who’d represented his client in court and collected his fee, but his business had gone down over the years. He’d had a good hike after Seever’s trial, and maybe that’s what he was looking for again—getting Seever’s name back out there would be advertising gold. But Costello is about seventy years old, and he’d broken his hip twice. Hoskins didn’t think the guy would be able to take down a toddler, much less a full-grown woman. Another strike.

  Next is Dan Corbin, the editor in chief over at the Post. Circulation at the paper is down, hell, everyone knows that, the Rocky Mountain News had disappeared a few years ago and the Post looked like it was headed in the same direction. A huge story involving Jacky Seever, three dead women, with Sammie Pet
erson, former star reporter on the case—it was a wet dream come true for Corbin. But Hoskins has met Corbin—he’s a loser, the kind of guy who’d be too afraid to go skydiving so he’ll watch videos online about it instead. He was safe. A guy who’d deny that he ever jerked off and then go home and do it into a sock in the back of his closet. The kind of guy who’d spent his whole life hiding behind words.

  Another line, right through Corbin’s name.

  He knows what Loren and his team are thinking—that the Secondhand Killer is doing this for some kind of gain. Financial, maybe. Or notoriety. Seever’s name held a lot of weight in Denver, any mention of him makes people sit up and take notice. But Hoskins had been inside Simms’s house, he’d seen her body. He’d seen the marks left on her, those bloody shoe prints on the carpet. And the words. Simms makes him think of the time he’d gone out to a place in Texas, a couple hundred acres where corpses were left out to the forces of nature, so doctors and detectives and anyone who had a good enough reason could go to see how a human body decomposes. They called it the body farm, which had struck Hoskins as a helluva awful name when he went out to visit. It sounded more like a strip club, and he doesn’t remember much from his time there, except for the dead woman laid out in a field of wildflowers, the hem of her dress fluttering in the breeze, the empty holes where her eyes had once sat pointed toward the sky. A cage had been put up around her, made out of chicken wire. To keep the animals out, someone had said. So she wouldn’t get dragged off.

  “Every one of these bodies has something to tell you,” the guy in charge had said during the tour. “You just have to figure out how to listen.”

  Hoskins has six photos of Carrie Simms saved on his cell phone, mostly extreme close-ups. Looking at them makes his head pound, and he thinks it might be time for a break, time to go outside and walk a few laps around the parking lot. There’s one picture of the gashes around her wrists, left by the twine that’d held her, another of the backside of her skull, caved in like a hollow gourd. One of her right hand, the last three fingers missing. The others are the same, except the final one; he must’ve taken it by accident when he was moving, because it’s blurry, like a painting done with watercolors and then smeared when still wet. It’s Simms’s face in the photo, and it’s blurred enough that she still looks alive, she almost seems to be laughing, or maybe she’s screaming.