What You Don't Know

by JoAnn Chaney

  He hated Gloria Seever too, but he also felt sorry for her, because when he went to her house, hoping to speak to her, there were three words spray-painted across her front door—YOU KNEW, BITCH—and he thought it must be hard to live that way, with everyone thinking you were guilty and despising your very existence. But that didn’t mean she had to slam her door right in his face when he’d knocked and said he was with the Post, so then he’d been forced to stand out on her front step and press his nose into the spot where the door met the frame and yell, more out of frustration than anything else.

  “Please!” he’d shouted. “I need this!”

  And then the door had pulled open again, maybe it was the desperation in his voice that brought Gloria back, he’d dated women like that, who operated solely on sympathy, who’d do anything if they felt sorry for you.

  “Come back this evening,” she’d said. Her mouth was pinched so tight that a sunburst of lines radiated out from the center, pointing out in all directions, and he realized that she was in her robe and slippers, curlers in her hair. “Around seven. I’ll talk to you then.”

  * * *

  So here he is, his tank filled and his hands freshly washed to cut the smell of gasoline, sitting on one end of Gloria Seever’s sofa in her pristine living room. She’s very prim, this woman, with her ankles demurely crossed and the heavy strand of pearls around her neck. There’s a silver framed mirror on the wall behind her, hanging above a side table, and he can see a spot on the back of her head where the hair has parted and her scalp shines whitely through, and his own face. He looks wan, frightened, crouched on the flowered cushions. He has the strange urge to grab one of the pillows from beside him and hold it to his stomach, the way he did when he was younger and he’d constantly be sporting wood, although he doesn’t have an erection now, and being in this house makes him feel like he might never have one again.

  “Thirsty?” she asks, and he doesn’t have a chance to answer before she starts gathering refreshments anyway, bringing them in from the kitchen. Weber can remember hearing that she’d attended every day of Seever’s long trial, that she’d never cried, never showed any emotion. She was cold. Jacky Seever was a scary bastard, but Weber had to wonder what kind of woman it took to be married to him.

  “I don’t know anything about these new murders,” she says before he has a chance to ask his first question. She was bent over the coffee table, pouring tea into fine china cups and taking cookies from a tin and arranging them on a plate. “If that’s what you’re here to ask me about.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “And I don’t know anything about the things my husband did.”

  “You don’t?”

  “No,” she says. Puts her cup down, right in the center of the saucer, so there’s not the slightest sound. Gloria Seever is a careful woman.

  “Then why did you agree to talk to me?”

  “You said you need this. And I need this too.” She takes a cookie off the plate—vanilla with pink sugar frosting—and presses her lips to it. Not a bite, but a kiss. “I want you to write about me, that I’m innocent. That I never knew about any of the things my husband did.”

  Weber pinches the web of flesh between his thumb and pointer finger, the same way his mother always did. She said it was a pressure point that would relieve a headache, but he never did buy it. Still, he keeps doing it.

  “All right,” he says finally, sighing, and flips open his notepad. This is completely pointless, no one is going to believe that Gloria Seever was in the dark about anything, and he doubts that anyone even cares at this point, but he’ll go through the motions anyway, because sometimes a story sprouts out of nothing. “Let’s see, where should we start? You go visit your husband at the prison, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” she says, smoothing her skirt down over her knees.

  “And how do those go?”

  “We talk, catch up.”

  “About what?”

  Gloria’s thin shoulders rise up and down in a fluttery, nervous motion.

  “Nothing much. I tell him if anything’s happened to me. Jacky tells me about the other inmates, and the guards. What he’s reading. What he’s painting.”

  “I didn’t realize your husband still painted.”

  “Oh, yes,” Gloria says, jumping to her feet. “He’s prolific. Someone broke in a few months ago and stole most of the work I’d brought home, but let me show you what I have left.”

  “Oh, that’s not necessary—” he starts, but she’s already gone, in another part of the house, in one of the bedrooms, he can hear her rustling around, sifting through boxes and papers. Weber leans over to grab a cookie, and the toe of his shoe hits something. At first he thinks it’s the coffee table, but it’s instead a wood frame with a canvas stretched over it, a painting, shoved under the table. He slides it out and holds it up.

  “Oh my God,” Weber says. He was expecting a landscape, or a few dancing clowns, not this. The subject of this painting is a nude woman, lying on her side with her arms curled up beside her head, her hair spilling over the floor—mermaid hair, he thinks—and the woman might be sleeping, or she might be dead, because there’s blood, there are two fingers missing on her left hand and they’re spouting smears of red paint. Finally, he looks at the woman’s face—she’s beautiful, even with her eyes closed, and she looks familiar, like someone he knows—

  “It’s Samantha Peterson,” Gloria says. She’s standing, other canvases under her arm, watching him, for God knows how long. “She and my husband were involved, once. Jacky might’ve been in love with her.”

  Weber looks at her, shocked, then again at the painting. It is Sammie, he sees it now.

  “You know, he’s never once painted me,” Gloria says, sitting down. She’s sad, and jealous, he can’t blame her. This woman has stood behind her husband for so long, through everything, and he’s obsessed with another. “He likes to paint her. He made that one a long time ago, and I’ve hung on to it. All this time, I’ve kept it with me.”

  “I’m sorry,” Weber says, it’s a stupid thing to say, but nothing else comes to mind.

  Gloria makes a choking sound, low in her throat, and he half rises from the sofa, concerned; she looks like she’s having a great shock, a stroke or a heart attack, an aneurysm, although he wouldn’t know the difference. Her mouth is slack and her eyes open so wide he can see the red pools surrounding the whites, and he then he catches a flicker of movement in the mirror and glances up, and at first none of it seems to make sense, because there’s a man standing behind him, it’s the man from the gas station, the one who’d recognized him, and he’s holding a golf club with both hands, raised over his head like an ax, and that seems so ridiculous that Weber smiles, he feels his cheeks creaking up as if they were made of stiff leather and sees his reflection do the same, and then he hears the man say something—or maybe it’s his imagination, some nonsense about birds—and then the man brings the club down, with enough effort that the tendons in his neck are standing out like ropes, and the metal head of the club comes down with a scream and buries itself into Weber’s skull with a crunch.

  If this were a movie, the screen would now be fading to black.

  ALRIGHT, ALRIGHT, ALRIGHT

  GLORIA

  “Time to wake up.”

  Gloria moans, tries to pull back from the hand stroking her face, but she’s pinned, and when her eyes flutter open it’s Jacky, a few inches away from her face. She tries to scream, but a hand clamps down over her mouth, and another pinches her nose shut, cutting off her air flow, and she struggles, tries to break free, but she can’t. He’s too strong. He always was. “Wake up, sweetie-pie.”

  She nods frantically, because she needs a breath, the darkness is already creeping in around the edges of her vision. And he’s as good as his word. Once she stops struggling he lets her go, and she takes a long gasp of cool air. She can also smell Jacky—the manly, excited sweat of him, but that doesn’t matter so much. The only th
ing that matters is that she can breathe.

  “Good girl,” Jacky says, rubbing his fingers through her hair. She’s laid out on the couch, her head up on one arm and her feet propped on the other, and it occurs to her that the last person to sit here was Chris Weber, that nice young man from the paper, but what had happened? And then she remembers—the golf club whistling through the air and the crunch of bone. Gloria had screamed, she’d screamed until it felt as though her chest were ready to burst, and then there’d been the merciful darkness. She pinches her eyes shut, trying to get the image of Weber’s last moments out of her head, but Jacky slaps her, lightly, on one cheek and then the other. “Oh, no you don’t. I want you to look at me.”

  She opens her eyes again, but this can’t be Jacky, it’s dim in the room, the blinds are drawn and it must be a trick of the light, a trick of her mind. She looks at Jacky, but it isn’t him, not really. Jacky is fat and old now, he’s far past his prime. And Jacky is in prison, don’t forget that. He’s hours away from here, sitting alone in a cell, behind a locked door and four walls of concrete. This isn’t Jacky but somehow it is. This man is Jacky when he was young, Jacky when they were first married, in those first few years when everything seemed so uncertain and exciting. It is Jacky, but then she blinks and it’s not, it’s only a boy wearing torn jeans and a sweatshirt with his hair parted sharply to the right, like Jacky always did.

  “What did you do?” she whispers, and the boy smiles, there’s something in his eyes that is missing, something that is dead, and she never saw Jacky like this. But then she thinks of what she found in the garage. That girl, blindfolded, and she’d known Gloria was there, she’d asked for help, and Gloria had turned and left, she’d gone back into the house and locked the door and kept her mouth shut. Gloria had never seen Jacky look like this, but that girl surely had—and what about the rest?

  “This is our little secret,” the Jacky-boy says, and he slips a hand up her skirt, and she slaps him, claws at his face, but he means serious business, and he is strong, and in some ways it is like the other time Jacky hurt her, but in other ways it is worse, because she thought she was safe, she thought it would never happen again, but now she knows better.

  It’ll never be over.

  SAMMIE

  Dean wasn’t there when she got home, the house was empty and cold, and it had that smell a place gets when no one has been there all day. Like dust, she thinks. The flat mineral smell of water standing in toilet bowls. The furnace whooshed to life when she opened the front door, and she screamed in surprise, then laughed at herself, a little too loudly. It was unnerving, to hear all the sounds of life around her, even when she was still. The humming of the fridge, the slow drag of the wind against the siding. And a clicking sound, it reminded her of Dean clipping his toenails, and she spent an hour wandering through the house, trying to catch up with that sound before it finally disappeared.

  She tried to call Dean’s cell phone, but he never answered. She didn’t know who else to call, or what to do. If your husband goes missing, what do you do? Search for him? She almost did that, walked out to her car with her key in her hand, and then turned around and went back inside. Denver was a big city, and he could be anywhere. She had no idea where to begin. There were hundreds of places to hide in the city, thousands, and it would’ve been a waste of time. Dean was angry, he was hurt, and maybe it was best to let him be that way, to wait until he came home. He knew how to find her.

  So she went to bed. The sheets were ice-cold and she couldn’t seem to warm up until she lay on her stomach and crossed her hands under her belly, with her face toward the big numbers on the digital clock. She fell asleep that way, and when she woke up she was sure it was morning, but only ten minutes had passed. She tried to call Dean again, but it had stopped ringing altogether, and went straight to voicemail.

  “Goddammit,” she said after the beep. “I know you’re angry, but don’t do this. Come home so we can talk about it.”

  Twenty minutes later:

  “I’ve seen Hoskins a few times, but it was only because of this stuff I’m doing for the paper. But nothing’s happened, Dean. I swear. Nothing happened.”

  And then, later:

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  She doesn’t get out of bed until the watery gray sunlight is peeking through her blinds, even though she’s been awake for hours. There’s no sound of a car in the driveway, or a key in the door. She pads to the bathroom and sits down on the cold toilet. Lowers her head down to her knees. Almost. She’s not as flexible as she used to be.

  She starts the coffeepot, sits on the sofa. The Christmas tree is still in the box, pushed halfway under the coffee table, winding pieces of packing tape holding it all together. She nudges it farther under the table with her toe. They usually put up the tree on Thanksgiving, opening up the boxes of ornaments they’ve collected over the years and snapping the plastic branches together, but somehow they’d forgotten it this year. They’d eaten their turkey and stuffing, and the can of cranberry sauce with the ridges still cut into the jellied sides, the same as they always did, but instead of putting up the tree they’d gone to bed, and a few days had passed before Sammie remembered what they’d forgotten. It’s hard to start a tradition, to create a thing you come back to every year, but it’s so easy to let it go. To give up and let it disappear, like it’d never existed at all.

  She picks up the phone, calls Dean. No answer. Calls the art gallery, following up on her lead. It goes straight to voicemail. Calls the county jail and police department and Hoskins’s cell, wanting an update, but there’s either no answer or no one will cooperate. There’s nothing more frustrating than sitting in your own home, punching numbers on the phone and expecting results and getting stonewalled. She doesn’t have anything else to do but sit and wait; she can’t leave because Dean might come back, but she should go, she still needs a piece to turn in to Corbin and there’s no story here in the four walls of her own home.

  All of it pisses her off, Dean and Corbin and Weber and Hoskins and the whole situation, and the tree’s still in its box, just to top it all off. If Dean were here they could put it up right now, but he’s not, because he’s angry at her for something she didn’t even do.

  A text comes in, makes her phone beep and she lunges for it, snatches it up. It’s from Dean.

  I’M MARRIED TO A WHORE, it says, and that’s all, because Dean knows it would hurt her, that single word, he’d called her that once before, during their weekly session of couples therapy, and she hadn’t cried but she’d been upset, and now it makes her furious, because she didn’t do anything and she can’t even explain herself; she knows that if she tries to call or text him she’ll be ignored.

  The coffee machine beeps to let her know it’s done, but she ignores it and goes back to the bedroom, yanks on a pair of jeans and boots, a sweater. She’s not thinking of the Secondhand Killer or Hoskins or Corbin or how she needs to head to work soon—she’s so angry that everything else has been booted from her head, she can’t focus on anything else except that one word, whore, that’s what her husband thinks she is, and maybe she’ll have to prove him right, so he can see that she doesn’t care what he thinks, she’ll show him.

  HOSKINS

  He’d spent the night in a cell at the jail, lying on a thin cot that’s hanging from a freezing concrete wall, and dreamt of Sammie. This isn’t unusual, because he dreams about her a lot, but it’s never like this—usually Sammie is laughing or fighting with him, or holding his dick, sliding it slowly into her mouth—but this time Sammie is dead, she’s on the floor and her skull is smashed in on one side, so her head has the misshapen look of a deflated basketball, and it’s not just blood oozing out of her head but yellow stuff too, and when he sees that several of her fingers have been cut away Hoskins opens his mouth to scream, but then there’s a hand on his shoulder, shaking him awake, and it’s the same cop who apologized for arresting him, Craig, and his eyebrows are drawn together over his hawk n
ose, worried.

  “Wake up,” he says, shaking harder. “You’re having a bad dream. Wake up.”

  Hoskins sits up, his head swimming.

  “What’s going on?”

  “It’s time for you to go,” Craig says. “Your bail’s been posted. Here, I brought you some water. You look sick as a dog.”

  * * *

  “Where have you been?” Ted is in his face the moment the elevator opens onto the basement. “I must’ve called you twenty times.”

  “Thirty-one, actually,” Hoskins says, going straight into his office and tossing his paper sack of belongings onto the desk. Ted is right behind him. “I spent the night in jail.”

  “You were arrested?”

  “I didn’t stay for the five-star accommodations.”

  “Why were you there?”

  “It’s not important. What’s been going on here?”

  Ted eyes him with what seems to be pity. Looks at his wrinkled slacks and the blood still smeared into his knuckles, and it looks like he has more questions, but instead he presses his lips together in a disapproving line.

  “I searched online for mentions of Seever, about him cutting off his victim’s fingers.”

  “What’d you find?”

  “Nothing,” Ted says. “I must’ve looked through thousands of links and images about Seever, and none of them mention fingers.”

  “Dammit,” Hoskins says, sitting at his desk, heavily. He got sleep, but it wasn’t great, and he can feel his bones creaking in protest as he moves. “I was sure you’d find something.”

  “Well, there is this one website I’ve heard about—lots of crime-scene photos, torture porn. People sell the real nasty stuff to that site for big bucks. But I wasn’t able to check it out.”

  “Why not?”

  “You have to pay to be a member. And I don’t have my own credit card—my mom gets all the statements. And if she knew I was looking at that kind of stuff, she’d kill me.”