Remember Me Like This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 by Bret Anthony Johnston
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Johnston, Bret Anthony.
Remember me like this : a novel / Bret Anthony Johnston.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-4000-6212-6
eBook ISBN 978-0-8129-9616-6
1. Missing persons—Fiction. 2. Kidnapping victims—Fiction. 3. Families—Psychological aspects—Fiction. 4. Texas—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3610.O384R46 2014
813′.6—dc23
2013022805
www.atrandom.com
Jacket design: Base Art Co
Jacket image: Emmanuelle Brisson / Getty Images
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Prologue
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Part Two
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Part Three
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Part Four
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Epilogue
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
Well, when one has no one, nowhere else one can go.
—Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
I’ve lain with the devil
Cursed God above
Forsaken heaven
To bring you my love
—PJ Harvey, “To Bring You My Love”
Prologue
THE HARBOR BRIDGE CROSSED OVER THE PORT OF CORPUS Christi. It was a high steel arc, tall enough to grant barges and freighters access to the ship channel, and stood where the old drawbridge once did. The city had hosted a contest to name the bridge, and the winner, a housewife who lived out by the oil refineries, was given the honor of riding in the first car to drive across. That was in 1959. She wore a pillbox hat and white satin gloves. She posed for pictures with the mayor. Years later, when she died, her family walked to the top of the bridge and scattered her ashes over the lilting water.
The structure was long and mellow, like a downturned crescent blade. A lattice of girders rose above the bridge’s suspended deck, and the crisscrossing beams threw complex shadows on the lanes. After decades of sustained wind and salt from the bay, the joints were starting to erode and loosen. Rust flaked the girders. Each year, if the city could scrape together the money during the holidays, the bridge was strung with Christmas lights. An image of its illuminated reflection on the water had long commanded the cover of the Corpus phone book. A handful of couples had been married at the top, delinquent teenagers stole bowling balls to roll down the lanes or lob off the side, and a small group of citizens met on the first weekend of every month to walk the mile that the structure spanned. The walkers started on the south side and crossed over to North Beach on the railed walkway that edged the bridge. At the foot of the walkway hung an engraved sign from the Coastal Bend Church of Christ: FEELING DESPERATE? “EVERYONE WHO CALLS ON THE NAME OF THE LORD WILL BE SAVED.” ROMANS 10:13.
So, on the first weekend of September, it was the group of walkers who saw the body in the bay before anyone else. They didn’t immediately comprehend the sight. The water was ragged and dirty from the previous week’s storm, and the body floated facedown; it looked like a person snorkeling, except an arm and leg were bent at odd, harsh angles. One of the walkers retched and kneeled on the walkway. Another started praying. Another dug in her pocket for her phone. The rest of the group stared and speculated and tried to trick themselves into thinking the person might have survived the fall. No one could tell if it was a male or female, or how old, and none of them thought of Justin Campbell, the boy who’d gone missing years before. They knew only that the broken-up body was part of them now, that the memory would insinuate itself for the rest of their lives. Two Coast Guard cutters were soon speeding toward the ship channel, and police cruisers were parking on both sides of the port. A few of the walkers stood at the top of the bridge to watch, but most descended without a word. They walked single file, knowing they wouldn’t return to the bridge, and held on to the rail as tightly as possible.
1
MONTHS EARLIER, THE JUNE HEAT ON MUSTANG ISLAND WAS gauzy and glomming. The sky hung close, pale as caliche, and the small played-out waves were dragging in the briny, pungent scent of seaweed. On the beach, people tried holding out for a breeze from the Gulf, but when the gusts blew ashore, they were humid and harsh, kicking up sand that stung like wasps. By midday, everyone surrendered. Fishermen cut bait, surfers packed in their boards. Even the notoriously dogged sunbathers shook out their long towels and draped them over the seats in their cars, the leather and vinyl scalding. Lines for the ferry stretched for half an hour, though it could seem days before the dashboard vents were pushing in cool air. Porpoises wheeled in the boats’ wakes, their bellies pink and glistening.
After the short pass across the Laguna Madre, the ferry docked on the north jetty and drivers moved onto the mainland through the small, flat town of Southport, Texas. They passed an anchor-shaped monument embossed with the words WELCOME ABOARD, then the tackle shops and bait stands and the old rust-pocked pickups where men sold shrimp from ice chests. To the west, behind the leaning palm trees with their husks as dry and brown as parchment, the soapy bay fanned into the horizon. There was the public boat ramp and marina and the half-razed Teepee Motel, now nothing more than a cluster of concrete teepees hemming a drained kidney-shaped pool. A faded vinyl banner for the upcoming Shrimporee sagged over the diagonal parking places on Main Street, then popped and opened up in the wind; the Shrimporee was in September. On the asphalt, puddles of heat appeared, shimmered, evaporated. The seafood restaurants and a spate of garishly painted souvenir shops lined Station Street, then just before the town yielded to the blacktop highway came the Whataburger and H-E-B grocery and Loan Star Pawnshop, whose rusted arrow marquee sign announced, WE BUY WINDOW UNITS! The pawnshop’s crushed-shell parking lot was crowded this time of year—shrimpers hocking tools between good hauls, surfers hunting for wet suits, men from the Coast Guard quibbling over fishing rods. Today, the last Wednesday of the month, a man was trying to sell one of the pawnbrokers an old Cadillac, a cream-colored Fleetwood Brougham. The hood was raised and the ragtop was lowered, and the men stood in the pale sun—squinting, hag
gling, appearing stranded to everyone who passed.
ACROSS TOWN, IN THE VILLA DEL SOL CONDOMINIUM COMPLEX, Eric Campbell stood under a cool shower, listening. He thought he’d heard his phone buzzing, but either it had stopped or he’d been mistaken. He’d left the phone next to his watch and wedding band on the nightstand. He opened the shower curtain, leaned out, waited. The only sounds were the water pulsing through the showerhead and the air-conditioning unit whirring outside, so he drew the curtain and rinsed off. The afternoon sun slanted in through the bathroom’s skylight. He wondered if they’d break a hundred degrees today, if they hadn’t already. He was glad to have parked his truck in the garage.
The condo belonged to Kent Robichaud. He was a surgeon, and although he and his wife, Tracy, lived on Ocean Drive in Corpus, they’d bought the condo in Southport to be closer to the marina on weekends. They were in their late thirties, originally from the Midwest; they owned a twenty-footer named Thistle Dew. Eric liked Kent. He tried not to think about him when he spent afternoons with Tracy. With summer school in session, they’d gotten into the routine of him coming over after his Wednesday class. Tracy would drive in from Corpus and read the weekly Southport Sun in her breakfast nook until Eric’s truck appeared on the street. Then she’d click open the garage door and make her way to the bedroom, undressing.
Eric always checked messages before stepping out of his truck. Usually there weren’t any. At home, Griffin would still be sleeping, or he’d be playing videogames and waiting for the afternoon to cool off enough to go skateboarding. If Griff wanted to leave the house, he had to call his mother or father for permission; when Eric had thought he heard his phone in the shower, he assumed it was his son. His younger son. Griff had just turned fourteen. Of course, Eric worried it was his wife calling, but he also knew better. Laura rarely dialed his number anymore. Wednesdays were her early shift at the dry cleaner’s, but she had, for the last few months, been driving to Marine Lab in Corpus after work. She volunteered a few times a week, stayed out there until dinner. Later, sometimes. When she came home, she was dog-tired and smelled of frozen herring. She wore an expression, so transparent to Eric (and, he feared, to Griff), of practiced contentment. She would update them on Marine Lab—currently, they were rehabbing a bottlenose dolphin that had beached on the National Seashore—then listen to Griff and Eric talk about their days; Griff usually told them about his skateboarding, and Eric spoke of his seventh graders or other faculty members. If there was nothing to report, he’d invent a sweet or comic story to buoy their spirits. On Wednesdays, he always steeled himself for the question of what he’d done after class, but Laura never asked. It was just another thing they didn’t discuss. Eventually she would excuse herself from the table, kiss Griff on his head, then retire to the bedroom. More often than not, the sun was still in the sky, syrupy and molten, coppering the early-evening surfaces.
When Eric shut off the shower, there was only the steady hum of the air conditioner. Tracy might still be lying across the bed, her eyes closed and her dark hair wild on the pillows, or she might have already stripped the sheets and taken them to the washer. He dried himself with a thick towel, stepped too carefully from the tub. For years, he’d had an unfounded fear of falling in the bathroom, of cracking his skull on porcelain. He’d known no one who’d suffered such a fall, and yet the risk felt familiar and menacing, as if he’d suddenly grown ancient and infirm in the shower. In Tracy’s bathroom, the vanity was marble-topped, sharp-edged and expensive. The whole condo brimmed with upgrades—Saltillo tile, a Viking range, one air-conditioning system for the first floor and another for the second. Every week, the lavishness sullied him; he wouldn’t let his gaze settle on anything. Now, pulling on his boots, he wished he’d already left.
VILLA DEL SOL HAD BEEN BUILT AFTER SOUTHPORT LOST ITS BID for the naval station. Most of the sandstone condos were owned by people from Corpus or by snowbirds, silver-haired retirees who wintered on the coast and caned their way through the souvenir shops on Station Street. “It’s snowing,” Laura used to say when they’d get stuck behind an elderly driver. They lived in a three-bedroom ranch, a few blocks from the house where Eric had grown up and where his father still lived. Their house was drafty, in need of a new roof, double-mortgaged to put up the reward money. Every couple of years he had to raise the foundation with bottle jacks.
But when Villa Del Sol first opened, Eric had driven Laura and the boys to an open house. Justin was nine, Griff was seven. Everyone wore church clothes.
“Who can afford one of these?” Laura said in the living room of the model unit. “No one we know.”
“We’re not that far off,” Eric said, trying to sound assured. “Besides, no charge for looking.”
The boys were in the courtyard, hunting rocks. Griff had recently started collecting them, because Justin did. Laura watched them through the bay window. She said, “Guess what Justin asked me last night.”
“If Rainbow could sleep inside?” he said. Rainbow was their black Lab, a dog Eric had bought from a man selling puppies out of his truck bed on Station Street. Rainbow was a good, affable dog, but she’d recently been relegated to the backyard after Eric woke to find her chewing one of his boots.
“Yes, but something else,” Laura said.
“About cusswords? The other day he asked me if there were any he could say without getting in trouble.”
“He asked me to marry him.”
“Oh,” Eric said. “Smart boy.”
“You don’t think it’s weird?”
“He’s got good taste in women, is what I think.”
Laura paced across the room with her hands clasped in front of her. She looked like a woman in a museum, taking care not to bump into exhibits. Were she a stranger, Eric would’ve been struck with longing as he watched her languid movements. His wife—it still shocked him—was beautiful. She returned to the window to watch the boys.
“What are we doing here, honey? We’re not—”
“I thought it’d be fun,” he said. He crouched in front of the fireplace, trying to figure if it worked. Just for show, he thought.
“I don’t want to live anywhere else. Neither do the boys. We love our house.”
“It was just something to do.”
“Sometimes I worry you feel like you need to give us more.”
He couldn’t remember not feeling that way. Though he hadn’t yet told Laura, he’d just agreed to teach summer school. His plan was to surprise everyone with a vacation over Christmas break. The boys had never left Texas.
“We have everything we need,” she said. Outside, Griff was trying to show Justin a piece of limestone he’d found.
“What did you tell him?” Eric asked, pushing himself up from the fireplace.
“Who?”
“Your suitor.”
She smiled as if he’d paid her a compliment. Her eyes stayed on their sons. “I said I loved him very much, but I was already married.”
“He must’ve been heartbroken.”
“Crushed,” she said. “Utterly crushed. But then I helped him sneak Rainbow into his room and he seemed to recover.”
WHEN ERIC STEPPED FROM THE BATHROOM, TRACY WAS STANDING with her back to him. She peered through her bedroom blinds, watching the two sisters who owned the condo across the courtyard. The women were in their eighties, stooped and wire-haired. Tracy loved spying on them. She’d wrapped herself in a sheet that puddled around her ankles and exposed her back. The knuckles of her spine looked like shells in sand. Laura’s body, he thought, might resemble Tracy’s now; she’d lost weight over the last four years. Twenty pounds, maybe more. And ever since Justin had gone missing, she’d let her hair grow out, a protest of sorts, or a show of solidarity. She’d stopped shaving her legs and under her arms, too. Eric couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen his wife naked.
“I think the sisters’ air conditioner’s busted,” Tracy said. “They’re just sitting at the kitchen table, fanning themselves.”
>
He was tempted to say he’d walk over and take a look, but checked himself. He didn’t want to run into the sisters later. For old girls, they got around just fine. They drove a Lincoln Continental. Eric said, “After I leave, tell them to have someone check the Freon.”
“Sexy handyman,” she said. “I was just going to visit the pawnshop and see if your father had a window unit I could buy for them.”
“He had two yesterday. They’re marked at eighty, but he’s only got thirty into them. He’ll take sixty.”
“You’re just full of helpful information. Give me ten minutes to repay you?”
Eric slipped his phone into his pocket, clasped his watch around his wrist. He put his wedding band back on and said, “I need to head out.”
Tracy raked her fingers through her hair, then parted the blinds again. She said, “How’s the whale this week?”
“Dolphin,” he said, correcting her. “Running a fever, I think.”
“Poor thing.”
“I need to pick up some new flyers and make the rounds.”
“They don’t last long, I guess.”
The flyers hung in most storefronts in Southport, taped among the rummage sale notices and advertisements for windsurfing lessons. They were also posted from Corpus to Ingleside and all the way up the I-37 corridor into San Antonio; there were a few donated billboards, too, one standing just outside Southport. If the flyers went unchanged, the sun bleached the image and the words. Eric checked them vigilantly. In the last four years, he’d put forty thousand miles on his truck, most of them within a twenty-mile radius. Today he wanted to leave a stack of flyers at the Alamo Fireworks stand out on the highway. Early on, the flyers had generated a lot of leads; now, they were down to four or five a month, usually from crazies or pranks. They’d used Justin’s fifth-grade yearbook photo. In it, he wore a western shirt and his hair was too short. Eric had cut it in the garage the night before; then to make amends for the botched job, he’d handed Justin the clippers and let him go to town on his father’s head. When they’d come inside, Laura had said, Did y’all use the lawn mower instead of scissors? and Griff had fussed until Eric and Justin took him into the garage and buzzed his head, too. For months, clippings from his sons’ hair would wisp onto the workbench like daddy longlegs. When the detective wanted a DNA sample, Eric spent hours on his hands and knees in the garage, but turned up nothing. It was Laura who’d simply pulled strands of hair from the brush on Justin’s dresser.
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