What You Don't Know

by JoAnn Chaney

  Hoskins touches the costume, rubs the silky fabric between his thumb and first two fingers. There’s dried blood on the sleeve, ground into the lace cuff.

  This room, full of Seever’s victims, Loren dressing like Seever, acting like him, it isn’t good. He’s worked with Loren for a long time, he’s seen the guy do some strange stuff, but not like this. This is obsession, plain and simple. Bad things are born out of obsession.

  “I know where he is,” Jenna says, sticking her head in the door. She has her cell phone in one hand, and her other keeps tucking her hair behind her ear, nervously.

  “Where?”

  “He’s over at St. Luke’s, on Nineteenth,” she says, and he’s already past her before she can finish, his car keys jingling in his hand. “Visiting with patients.”

  * * *

  “You ever been in love, Paulie?” Seever had asked him once. They’d been together every day for two weeks straight, Seever filling Hoskins’s ear with names and details and stories, half-truths and nightmares, about the victims and the murders and his childhood, more than Hoskins had ever wanted to know about Jacky Seever, more than he could stomach.

  “Yeah,” Hoskins said, leaning back in his chair, one foot balanced on the opposite knee. “Couple times.”

  “You want to tell me about them?” Seever asked, and winked. “Give me a few nasty details, something to keep me warm at night?”

  Seever held up his hands and shook them, made the handcuffs jangle on his wrists. He was handcuffed, and then chained to the table when he was in IR2, Hoskins made sure of it. The other detectives thought it was overkill, that Seever was nothing but an old man who’d passed his prime, but Hoskins had seen what he was capable of, and he didn’t trust him. Seever had recounted his childhood for Hoskins, he’d told him about the father he’d never had, the boys in high school who’d laughed and thrown rocks, he’d rambled on endlessly about his restaurants and his marriage, he’d made himself sound like a nice guy, a normal guy, but Hoskins still didn’t trust him. Because Hoskins knew that you could know things about someone without really knowing them, and that’s how Seever had operated his whole life. He’d put on his expensive suits, he’d worn his clown costumes, and people had never bothered to see past that.

  Seever was the wolf posing as Grandma.

  “I don’t think I’ll be sharing anything,” Hoskins said. “This is supposed to be about you, Seever. Not me.”

  “Oh, right.” Seever grinned. “Sometimes that slips my mind.”

  “Have you ever been in love?” Hoskins asked, curious. He expected that Seever would say he’d been in love a dozen times, a hundred, that he’d loved every person he’d murdered. That he was in love with his wife, that he was in love with Carrie Simms, and Beth Howard, and all of them, but Seever shrugged instead, as if puzzled by the question he’d asked himself.

  “I don’t know,” he said. He looked down at his wrists, gave them another shake. “I’d meet someone, work with them, and I wouldn’t be able to stop thinking about them. It’d drive me crazy, I’d become obsessed. Is that what love is? I don’t know. Maybe it is. I don’t know.”

  * * *

  Hoskins is almost sure it’s 2008 again, those days when they’d watch Seever clamber out his front door in a clown costume, and they’d follow him to the hospital and watch him entertain the kids, blowing up balloon animals and singing songs, and it almost seemed like he might be innocent, that a man who’d volunteer to help sick children couldn’t be capable of anything bad. But there was something off about Seever, something that didn’t quite jibe, even when his painted face was smiling and he was squeezing his nose and telling jokes, but Hoskins couldn’t put his finger on it, not at first.

  The realization came while he and Loren watched Seever prance around the children’s unit, giving horsey rides. It was his face that was all wrong, the makeup he’d smeared all over himself to create a mask. The paint around his mouth was too red, like blood, and the corners of his smile weren’t rounded, but had points as sharp as daggers. He looked like a clown who’d stick a knife in your throat and defile your corpse. Oh, people smiled when they saw Seever coming down the halls at the hospital, but Hoskins started noticing the way they turned their faces in distaste when he came close, like he was a bad smell, like deep down, subconsciously, they knew what he really was.

  Hoskins shakes his head, trying to clear it, because he’s not crazy, he’s not—it’s 2015, and he’s coming up behind Ralph Loren, who’s swaggering through the hospital in a clown costume, and Loren’s done his makeup the way Seever used to, with all the sharp angles and all that red paint, too much red. Loren’s laughing, that stupid-ass donkey laugh of Seever’s, and Hoskins would like to pull his gun from the holster and shoot the clown right in the back of the head, his hand actually twitches toward his belt, but he grabs Loren by the shoulder instead, spins him around.

  “What the hell kind of game are you playing?” Hoskins shouts, and Loren looks surprised, and then guilty, although that’s gone so quickly it might’ve never been there at all. “Why are you doing this?”

  “Haven’t you figured it out by now?” Loren asks, brushing his white-gloved hands along his ruffled collar, making the lace stick straight out from around his neck. “I’m becoming Jacky Seever.”

  “Seever’s in prison,” Hoskins says through gritted teeth. “You’re wasting your time.”

  Loren’s mouth drops open in feigned shock.

  “How dare you,” he says, putting his hand on his chest in a lil ol’ me gesture. “I’m helping people here. And if it just so happens that I’m investigating a case at the same time, even better.”

  “You’re not looking for Jacky Seever,” Hoskins says, grabbing Loren’s arm, and two nurses who’d been walking toward them turn and walk the other direction so abruptly it would be funny if Hoskins were in a laughing mood. “You should be looking for Secondhand. He’s out there while you’re fucking around with this shit.”

  “You remember what I used to tell you?” Loren says, pulling his arm out of Hoskins’s grip. “I’m hunting, Paulie. Be vewy, vewy quiet. I think we’re close, vewy close. Did you know Alan Cole volunteered with Seever a few times? Dressed up like a clown too. Danced the motherfucking jig for the kids.”

  “You found him?”

  “Not yet,” Loren says, and he chuckles. He’s lost it, Hoskins thinks. This case finally sent him over the edge. “But we’ll have him locked up before the weekend. Scout’s honor.”

  Loren pops three of his fingers up in a salute and waggles his eyebrows, up and down, then grabs the red bulb on the end of his nose and honks it twice, sketches a bow, and skips away, his long clown shoes slapping against the tile floor.

  * * *

  “Where have you been?” the caretaker woman asks. He’s late, much later than he’d thought he’d be, because of the shit with Loren. “This will put me into overtime for the week.”

  “I’ll pay it,” he says. “How was he today?”

  “He urinated in the kitchen sink,” she says. “He said it was too far to walk to the bathroom. And he laughed about it.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “He did it all over the dishes I’d just cleaned.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m not sure what else I can say.”

  But she must not think Hoskins is sorry enough, because she leaves in a huff, without saying goodbye. All over some hot water, he thinks. Sooner or later she won’t come back and he’ll have to call the service again, ask them to send out someone else.

  “Is she finally gone?” Joe asks. He’s sitting on his bed like a kid, knees drawn up, the newspaper propped up on his thighs. “All day, all she does is nag. It’s like being married.”

  “It’s cold in here, Dad. You should be wearing socks.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Yeah, I know you are.”

  Hoskins gets a pair of clean socks from the dresser and starts to roll them over Joe’s feet, but the old man’s toenails
are long, and yellowed, so he stops and gets a pair of clippers from the bathroom. He could ask the woman to do it in the morning, but the last time he did that she’d ignored his request, so he won’t bother. He doesn’t want to get into it with her, it’s not worth his time.

  “Hold still, I don’t want to cut you,” Hoskins says. He sits at the end of the bed, takes Joe’s feet onto his lap. The old man’s heels feel weird in his hands—like sandpaper, rough and ridged, but somehow still soft.

  “All right, all right. You don’t have to pinch so hard.”

  “I’m not pinching.”

  “It tickles. Don’t touch there! Goddammit.”

  “Sit still. Quit acting like a baby.”

  “I’m not a baby.”

  “You sure as hell act like one. Don’t move.”

  Joe sits for a moment,

  “I’ve got money, you know. Savings.”

  Hoskins straightens up, looks at his father.

  “Yeah, I know,” he says. “So?”

  “We could take that money, get me a spot at one of those retirement places,” Joe says. “There’re some nice ones in town.”

  “We’re not doing that,” Hoskins says. “I’ve seen some of the shit that goes on in those places. You can’t trust anyone. It’s better for you to stay here.”

  “There’d be people taking care of me.”

  “I take care of you.”

  “I know.”

  “You used to say how you’d rather die before moving into an old folks’ home,” Hoskins says. “What made you change your tune?”

  “You’ve got a lot going on. You’ve gotta work, get a woman. I have a feeling I’m the worst cockblock there is.”

  Hoskins smiles a little at that.

  “It’s not like you’ve had too many chances to put your blocking skills to the test.”

  “True.” Joe pauses. “That woman tell you I pissed in the sink?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I did.”

  “Why’d you do it?”

  “I wanted to make her mad. It was quiet today. We needed some excitement.”

  “Got it.”

  “This going crazy business isn’t all bad, you know,” Joe says. He’s looking at the newspaper again, running the tip of his pencil along the crossword clues. “It’s really not that bad at all.”

  SAMMIE

  Corbin said she had a week to write another article, and it’s done, but she hasn’t emailed it over yet. Instead, she’s tinkering with it, moving around words, deleting, and then adding back in again, second-guessing herself, worrying that it might not be good enough, that it needs another tweak. She’s never felt this way, but she’s also never had to compete with anyone before, she’s only ever had to worry about keeping her own head above water. She’s on her lunch break, sitting in the food court with her laptop open, trying to ignore the crowds swarming all around her and pecking at the keyboard and wishing something bad would happen to Chris Weber. Not that she really wishes for anything to happen to him, it’s more like when she’s driving and gets cut off, and hopes that the other driver will get pulled over and have to pay a big ticket while she lays on the horn and waves her middle finger around—that’s what she wishes for Chris Weber. That he’d suddenly take ill—nothing fatal, of course—or decide to give up writing altogether, and then her life would suddenly be easy, and Corbin would have to accept her work, no questions asked, and she could stop worrying.

  “You don’t look very happy,” Ethan says, pulling back the chair across from her and sitting down. He’s carrying a tray with his own lunch, it looks like he means to stick around, so she shuts her laptop and pushes it to one side. “How’s the writing going?”

  She crinkles up her nose.

  “It’s okay.”

  “What’s your next article going to be about?”

  She sighs, traces a finger on her laptop’s apple icon.

  “I visited Seever in prison,” she says.

  “You visited Seever?” Ethan says, impressed. “Like, sat down and actually talked to him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wow. What did you talk about?” Ethan’s leaning so far over his food that his collar is nearly dipping into his bowl of clam chowder, his face is rapt, she’s definitely got his attention. It’s silly but it makes her feel good, because when was the last time she had anyone interested in what she had to say, so fascinated that it’s like they’re wearing blinders, like the rest of the world no longer exists? The last time anyone had listened to her the way Ethan is now was when she’d read her work out loud at the Tattered Cover, when the room had been so quiet except for the sound of her own voice and she could almost feel the audience straining to hear her words, to catch every inflection, every breath she took. No one is all that interested in hearing her talk about her work these days, even Dean is uninterested, he’s a little hostile about it, because he’s been through this before, he ended that period of his life with the knowledge that his wife had been unfaithful, so that’s to be expected. “Has he heard about the Secondhand Killer? What does he think?”

  “If I told you I’d have to kill you,” she says, teasing, and Ethan doesn’t like this, not at all, but she hardly notices because she’s looking over his shoulder, searching; it feels like someone is staring at her, hard, and her eyes skip right over him before snapping back, because Jacky Seever blends right in, he always has, that’s how he got away with killing for so long.

  But it’s not Seever, it’s Loren, in a nice suit with his hair all slicked back, he’s already played this trick before, she should know better, but it’s not something a person can get used to, having him all dressed up like a man she’d once known, a man who she’d once held in her body, a man who’d killed so many. It would be an unpleasant shock if she’d caught only a glimpse of Loren dressed like this, making his way through the swelling crowd, shopping or eating, but this is worse because he’s staring right at her, he’s watching her, waiting for her to notice him. Loren winks when their eyes meet, slow and flirty, the way Seever always did it, and her arm jerks in surprise and knocks into Ethan’s tray of food, upends his bowl of soup, and there’s a moment of chaos while they clean, Ethan inhaling irritably as he mops up the mess, and when Sammie looks up again, searching, Loren is gone.

  GLORIA

  They’re married for a few years when Jacky gives her a credit card, a rectangle of plastic to use instead of cash out of the bank account. She can use the checkbook too, if she needs it, but he prefers her to use credit, because it makes things easier.

  For accounting reasons, he tells her. You don’t have to write anything down. I’ll look it over when the statement comes.

  How much can I spend? she asks.

  Jacky shrugs.

  Just don’t go crazy, he says. You should be fine.

  At first, it’s scary to shop, to go up to the register and wait for the employee to ring everything through and then give her credit card a swipe, and then there’s a long moment of waiting while the computer hums and thinks and the cashier stares at the screen and Gloria thinks that this is it, this time the cashier will take out of a pair of scissors and cut up the card and tell her to get lost, that she doesn’t have enough money to pay for any of it, that she never will. It’s her worst nightmare, that second before the computer spits out the receipt for her to sign, when it seems like the whole world is made of glass. But the card never comes back declined, it always goes through and the cashier smiles and hands her a pen to sign and Gloria smiles back, more than relieved that everything is still okay.

  * * *

  There are always people at the house, sometimes professionals from one of the different clubs Jacky belongs to, other business owners looking to network, or sometimes kids from one of the restaurants, teenagers who come over for dinner and stay late, watching TV and drinking beer with Jacky, talking and smoking and laughing about sports and movies and everything, because Jacky can make conversation about anything, that’s always been
one of his gifts.

  Ever since he took over the restaurant, Jacky likes the house full of people, the floors groaning under the weight of shuffling feet and thick with the smell of perfume and cigarettes, he was never like that before, he always liked their privacy, he liked to come home from work and eat dinner and relax, read the paper and watch the news. It’s called networking, he says, it’s for the business. But she thinks this change might be because they’ve never caught pregnant again, even though they’ve been trying for ten years, even though the doctor says there’s nothing wrong with either of them, and their plans for a family are quietly shelved, then disappear altogether. The house is too big, too empty without the happy sounds kids would make, and he wants it to fill it up, kill the silence.

  So he puts out an invitation to everyone, and at first not many show up, but Jacky keeps pushing, keeps cajoling, and more and more come, until every night is a party at the Seever house, plenty of food and beer, Jacky sitting at the head of the dining-room table like a king, his face red and jolly, and it all seems so ridiculous and sad, and there’s something desperate about it too. She doesn’t like Jacky very much when there are other people around—she actually doesn’t like him at all, with his deep, gusty laugh and moronic jokes, and she feels embarrassed for her husband, because he’s busy making a fool of himself, although no one else seems to mind. They all think he’s one helluva good guy, a real gas, like her father used to say. They laugh and slap him on the fat of the arm and sit around her nice cherrywood dining-room table and eat and leave behind wet rings with their glasses because they won’t use the coasters she puts out every damn night.

  You should join us, Jacky tells her, but she won’t. She cooks the food, puts it out on the table before they all sit down, and then cleans up, after everyone has moved to another room, so they don’t watch her picking up their messes and wiping up their spills, like a maid in her own house. She loads the dishwasher, wipes down the tables and counters once, and then again, and heads upstairs, puts her hair up in rollers and applies her cold cream. She doesn’t like the noise, their talk about people and places she doesn’t know, will never know. She’d rather be in her own bed, tucked down under the comforter with the ceiling fan whirring companionably overhead.