What You Don't Know

by JoAnn Chaney

  The medical examiner’s verdict: Ethan Hobbs was dead before he hit the ground.

  Dean’s old baseball coach would’ve been proud of that swing, he would’ve shouted and hollered if he saw it, he would’ve ripped his hat off his head and thrown it up in the air in celebration. Swing, batter-batter, swing, Dean thinks vaguely as he crumples to the ground, not far from his wife—it’s not only the pain that’s bringing him down but also the realization of what he’s done. Dean has kept his word to Sammie, that he would kill for her, if he had to.

  HOSKINS

  The car is registered to Glen and Ruby Wachowski. The vehicle hasn’t been reported stolen, but they’re an older couple, retired, no immediate family—exactly the type of people a criminal would target. Hoskins thinks of the pale, blurry face talking to Weber across the pumps at the gas station. That face could belong to the Secondhand Killer.

  Hoskins and Loren ride together to the Wachowski place, in Loren’s car, just like old times. There are a few close calls, when Hoskins grabs the door handle and curses because Loren drives like a bat out of hell, he’s going to kill them both, but Loren throws back his head and laughs, calls him an old lady.

  “Reminds you you’re alive, doesn’t it?” he says gleefully.

  There’s a car in the driveway—Sammie’s, the one Hoskins always called the Mitsubi-shit, and they don’t bother knocking, Hoskins kicks in the door and they rush in, guns drawn and ready to pump someone full of lead, but they’re too late, the exciting part is already over. There’s no chance for them to play hero. There’s a man on the floor, dead; Sammie, her eyes dull and her lips pale, is clutching her hand to her chest and Hoskins thinks she must be going into shock but there’s an ambulance behind them and the paramedics sweep in and take her away, and her husband too, who is weeping softly and has to be led from the house like a child.

  The dead man is on his belly—ignored by the paramedics since there’s nothing they can do for him, their business is with the living—so Hoskins and Loren flip him over—it’s harder than it looks even though the guy isn’t that big—and they take a good look at his face. It’s surreal for Hoskins, to see Seever standing above this kid, looking down at the guy who tried to pick up where he left off.

  “You piece of shit,” Seever says, and Hoskins’s eyes clear, and he sees it’s not Seever at all, but Loren, and the guy on the floor is the Secondhand Killer, and he’s finally dead.

  It’s over.

  WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW

  If this were a movie, the end credits would be rolling and the lights in the theater would be coming up and you’d be trying to decide whether you should wait until the massive herd of people creeping down the stairs is gone or if you should fight your way through, because the line for the bathroom is going to be long and the drive home is bumpy and you had a big Coke during the movie—not even the large but the extra-large, the size that makes other countries laugh and point and make fat-American jokes. But you wait, despite your throbbing bladder, because sometimes there’s something cool on after the credits—like the time all those superheroes were sitting around eating lunch after they’d saved the entire planet, no one saw that coming, did they? And honestly, you want to know what happened to these people after everything was said and done, you want to know it all, so you stay, you almost piss your pants but you stay, and you are not disappointed.

  * * *

  His full name was Ethan Rhodes Hobbs, and that’s what would’ve been printed on his gravestone—if he’d been buried. Instead, he was cremated, and his mother came all the way out from Minnesota to bring the ashes home. Ethan’s mother—one Patty Hobbs, née Haven—had always thought her son would end up in a bad way, but not like this. Ethan had been in and out of trouble all through school; he’d always been violent and sullen, and there’d been that incident with the girl, and that other time with that neighborhood dog—but she’d always blamed it on his friends, said Ethan was easily influenced, that he was a normal boy trying to find his way in life. But once she was told everything he’d done after moving to Denver, Patty was forced to revise her opinion.

  So Ethan’s ashes were given to his mother, and that night she’d slept in the hotel with the plain ceramic urn on the nightstand beside the bed. She thought it’d be nice to have one last night with her son, to say her final goodbye before she took him home and scattered his remains on the wind, and no one knows for sure what happened over that night, but when Patty Hobbs checked out of the hotel the next morning she stopped at the first fast-food restaurant she saw and tipped the entire contents of that urn into the trash bin sitting outside the drive-thru. She left Denver that same day, drove straight through to Minnesota with the empty urn on the seat beside her, but when she got home it was full again, maybe it was sand, maybe it was cigarette ashes, maybe it doesn’t matter.

  And Ethan? Most of his ashes ended up twenty miles outside of Denver, in the Tower Landfill out in Commerce City, mixed in with the shitty diapers and empty milk cartons and mildewed newspapers and buried under layers of soil and sand and rock. But before the garbage men came, some of Ethan’s ashes were picked up by the winter wind and were sent whirling through the city, and those bits of Ethan Hobbs are there still, they’ll be dancing in the streets of Denver forever, because you can burn evil, you can cut it and crush it and think it’s gone, but you’ll never be rid of it completely, not really.

  * * *

  What Dean never tells anyone, partly out of shame and partly because he’s not sure how to put it into words: He’d almost let Ethan Hobbs kill his wife. He’d considered this when he saw Sammie on the floor and Ethan kneeling over her, cutting away her fingers—oh, he wouldn’t have left her entirely, he would’ve gone out to his car and called the police and waited, but she would’ve been dead by the time they arrived, there’s no doubt in his mind. It was only a single stray moment, lasted no longer than a heartbeat, but he’d still thought it, and afterward, when Ethan’s dead and Sammie’s recovering in the hospital and people are calling him a hero, saying he’d saved his wife, he feels like a coward, he feels guilty, and that’ll stay with him for the rest of his life. He’ll never tell Sammie, though, because he loves her, and this one time he’s not a disappointment.

  * * *

  Three days after Ethan’s death, the police break down Gloria’s front door. They’d come to follow up, to tell her that Chris Weber’s killer had been found, but she never came to the door, and wouldn’t pick up her telephone. It smells like something’s gone bad in there, the cops tell one another. She might’ve fallen. Broken a hip and couldn’t get up, doesn’t have anyone checking on her. Those sorts of things happen all the time. So they kick in the door.

  But they weren’t expecting the carpet to be soaked through, and there is something floating on the surface of all that standing water, like the scum of grease on a pond. Later, the medical examiner will tell them that it was skin they’d seen, thin layers of epidermis that had been flayed away from the flesh by the pounding jets of water from the showerhead. The shower’s still running, they can hear it quite clearly, and when they push open the bathroom door one of the officers stumbles away, gagging wetly on his own breakfast. It’s not only the smell, although it’s worse in the bathroom, stronger, but it’s more the sight of Gloria Seever, who has swollen up like a balloon, her skin gray and pulled taut, splitting in certain areas where the maggots are already roiling and feeding. The shower curtain is ripped down—she fell, the examiner later guesses, when all those pills took hold she lost her balance—and she’s half out of the tub, stiff and swollen as a waterlogged piece of wood, but the worst part, the absolute worst is her mouth, wide and gaping and cracked, partly open, so it no longer looks like a mouth at all but a bottomless maw, hungry and demanding and angry.

  Later on, they’ll have to identify her by her teeth, since the rest of her is so bloated and warped that she’s not recognizably Gloria Seever. She no longer even looks human—she’s more like a monster. And mayb
e—probably—she would’ve taken some comfort in that.

  * * *

  Ethan Hobbs had thirty-one of Seever’s paintings in his possession, he’d turned the Wachowskis’ dining room into his own personal art gallery. He was the one who’d broken into Gloria Seever’s home and stolen them, and if the police had taken her burglary report seriously, if they would’ve launched a full investigation, they might’ve arrested Ethan Hobbs before he was able to kill anyone, but that’s life—there are the paths you take, and the paths you ignore, and that’s that.

  The paintings were of the clowns Seever liked so much, frolicking and grinning and blowing up balloon animals, and landscapes, one of the night sky. Harmless, and worthless. The violent paintings had all sold at the gallery or were taken by police, and Gloria had kept the one of Sammie hidden, and maybe that was best, because if Ethan had seen it to begin with, if he’d realized what Seever had intended for Sammie, she might’ve been his first victim, not his last.

  At least, that’s the theory Loren and Hoskins come up with.

  * * *

  The pinkie and ring finger on her left hand are gone. Most times it doesn’t bother her at all, until she catches someone staring at her mutilated hand, wondering what the story is behind it, and she’ll tuck it behind her back, out of sight. The fingers sometimes ache, even though they’re gone. Phantom pain, the doctors call it, and she’s tired of being haunted by things that aren’t really there.

  She should write the book, Corbin says. And the articles. Everything, as soon as she’s able. There’s no more competition, because Weber is dead, and besides, she has the story of the year. She was Seever’s lover, she reported his arrest, she was the one who got away. The girl who lived.

  But the words seem to have dried up.

  Dean goes back to work and she stays home, watches a lot of TV, takes a lot of naps. Dean has taken the kitchen table out to the garage and is sanding it down when he has free time. He’s going to refinish it, put new fabric over the seats. He’s going to make it beautiful again, but it will take time. All good things take time, he says, watching her. For the first time, her husband has gray in his hair, at the temples.

  Six months after Ethan’s death, she sits down at her computer. Slowly types in a word, pecking at the keyboard with her pointer finger. Seever. All of this is about him, it started with him and ended with him, and she thinks it might be time to suck the poison from the wound and get rid of him, once and for all. Write about Seever and Ethan until they’re both worked out of her system. It’ll be slow work, but that’s life, isn’t it? You get dressed one pant leg at a time, you live one breath at a time.

  And Sammie, she’ll heal one word at a time.

  * * *

  And what about those fingers, you might be asking? Between Seever and Ethan and all the death they left in their wake, that’s a helluva lot of missing digits. What happened to them all? That, unfortunately, will remain a mystery for all time, because it doesn’t look like either of the two men who know the actual truth are talking.

  * * *

  Glen and Ruby Wachowski are found in their basement, near the furnace. The police found evidence that Ethan had held the others—Abeyta and Brody, and Jimmy Galen—down in the basement as well; he’d turned the place into his own personal torture chamber, where he could do whatever he wanted without interruption.

  And Ethan had also started doing art in the basement. He’d set up an easel, bought watercolors. There are dozens of paintings, but they’re nothing like Seever’s. They are crude, sloppy. Mostly they are houses, brown boxes with curlicues of smoke rising from the chimneys, big loopy clouds in the sky and a smiling yellow sun in the corner.

  Those paintings, they are the work of a child.

  * * *

  Frank Cho, the man who owned the guesthouse where Carrie Simms was murdered, had it torn down not long after her death. It was bad luck, he thought, to leave such a building standing, and he was probably right. Thirty minutes before the cottage was torn down, Cho walked through it one last time, stepping carefully over the bloodstains left on the floors, and stopped to read the words still scribbled on the bedroom wall.

  It’ll never be over.

  Those words didn’t mean anything to Cho, although the police had fussed over them enough, he’d heard them arguing over how they’d ended up there, until finally they’d let the matter drop. None of them ever guessed that it was Carrie Simms who’d written the words above her bed, balancing on her mattress not long after she first rented the place. Seever had first said the words to her in the garage, although she didn’t remember it, but some part of her must have, because they echoed through her dreams, they drove her crazy until she got them out of her head and onto the wall, but every time she looked on the phrase she felt an unsettling anticipation, as if she were waiting for something, although she didn’t know what.

  Ethan first read the words after he’d knocked Carrie Simms unconscious, when he was sitting on her chest and listening to her rattling breath drawing in and out and waiting for her to wake up again. He puzzled over them, then forgot them entirely. He was busy with other matters, you see.

  So the little house was torn down and the debris was carted away and Frank Cho sold the entire property for much less than it was worth, but he felt a pressing need to get away, and he wanted to move closer to his family. Particularly his granddaughter, a pretty nine-year-old who called him Pop-Pop, and when she disappears a year from now, vanishes into thin air on her walk home from school, Frank will listen to his daughter’s haunted cries and look at his trembling hands and remember those words on the wall, and he’ll think that it’s true, it’ll never be over, that there’s never an end to suffering.

  But perhaps it’s best to save that story for another day.

  * * *

  Detective Ralph Loren finally stops dressing like Seever. He puts away the three-piece suits and the tinted glasses, throws away the hair gel. Loren goes back to normal for him, which isn’t very normal at all, and for the first time, Hoskins is thankful for it.

  * * *

  One spring afternoon Hoskins drives out to Sterling Correctional Facility. Seever is in the hospital wing, confined to his bed—he had a heart attack not long after getting the news about Gloria, and about Secondhand, crimes that had nothing to do with Seever but had everything to do with him, and he’s been bedridden ever since. It’s still about a year until his execution, if it doesn’t get caught up in legalities and pushed back, but Hoskins has a feeling Seever won’t be making it to his own execution. Seever’s a man on his way out, his heart getting one beat closer to finally bailing. In his hospital bed Seever looks more like one of the victims they’d pulled from his crawl space than his old self.

  “Hey, you fat fuck,” Hoskins says, and Seever’s head turns on the pillow to look at him, but there’s no flare of recognition, no answering gleam. This man in the bed isn’t Seever—this is a pale specter, a man who’s been giving bits of himself away—to Hoskins and Loren, to Sammie, and Ethan, little slivers that stuck with them like rusty needles, jammed in their hearts and wouldn’t let go—and there’s not enough left here to make a whole man. Not anymore. “This is it. I came to say goodbye. I’m never gonna waste my time thinking about you again.”

  Seever’s lips are moving, he’s trying to say something or maybe he’s delirious, but Hoskins doesn’t stop to listen, because he doesn’t care. He’s wasted too much of the past few years dealing with the damage Seever has done to his life.

  He leaves the prison, points his car back toward Denver. He needs to check on his father, but Joe’s adjusting well to the old folks’ home, he’s better than he’s been in a long time, he’s happy. Hoskins’ll stop in and see him, then he’ll go home, put his feet up, and watch some TV. Take a nap and meet Ted for drinks, do some work. He wishes he could forget Seever, forget how Sammie looked on the floor of that house, her eyes distant and shiny as Dean screamed, and Ethan Hobbs, on his side, a single runner of bl
ood leaking from his nose. Hoskins wants to forget it all, but he’ll be happy enough if it would blur and fade, like a photograph left out in the sun. That would be enough.

  FADE TO BLACK

  JACKY

  Summer 2007

  He throws one big party during the summer, holds it in his backyard, a place he’s made perfect for people to gather. When they first moved in, the backyard was nothing but rocks and sand, and it took years and a goodish amount of money to level things out and put down sod and plant trees and have the pond dug, but anything that looks effortless is always expensive. But even with the perfect backyard, it takes time to get set up for the annual summer barbecue. Tables have to be set up on the lawn, fairy lights strung through the branches of the shrubs, tiki lanterns plunged into the ground, floating candles set loose on the pond. And the food—there’s always more than enough, because if there’s one thing Jacky doesn’t like, it’s the thought of people not having enough to eat, of having anyone walk away from his house and not be bursting at the seams.

  The barbecue invitations go out three weeks before, and this year it’s a luau theme, and Gloria is wearing a grass skirt and passing out those flowered necklaces at the door. And there’s a pig, an actual pig with a metal pole jammed right down its mouth and poking out its ass, and it seems to be grinning, pleased as punch to be included in the ceremonies. But there’s a grill too, for anyone who doesn’t care for pork, where Jacky stands and flips hamburgers and hot dogs, chicken legs soaked in BBQ sauce. Everyone stops by to speak to him, at least once, because Jacky’s the master of ceremonies at these things, he’s the man of the hour, the Grand Poobah. They tell him how much they appreciate the party, how much everyone looks forward to it all year long. They hug Jacky, clap him on the shoulder, slap him on the fat of the arm. And Jacky glows from the pleasure of it, of all these people having a good time because of him, what he’s done, and he stands at the grill with a spatula in one hand and a cold beer in the other, looking out over the crowd, watching the pretty girls spin to the music and the men put their heads close together and laugh, and he’s not thinking how low he’ll be tomorrow, how he’ll shut himself in the guest bedroom and lie in the dark for two days straight, how he’s already hidden three bags of potato chips and boxes of malted balls under the bed because that’s all he’ll want, he’s been through this before, he knows what to expect. He’s not thinking of that now, because right now the sun is out and the breeze is cool, and nothing smells bad, no one’s going to complain today, the only thing anyone can smell is the roasting meat, and Gloria is waving at him, smiling, her wedding ring catching the light. And soon it’s late in the afternoon, the sun is low and the wind has picked up but people still keep showing up, parking three blocks over, sometimes more, but Jacky doesn’t mind, he waves everyone in, saying that everyone’s welcome, there’s always room for one more.