No Bad Deed

by Heather Chavez

  “That’s right.”

  “Why not?”

  I had reasons. Several, in fact. Earlier, the person texting me, who might have been Carver, had mentioned a fight between Leo and Sam. Then Perla had shown me “evidence” of Leo’s cyberbullying. That was after the alleged target of that bullying had attacked my son. I didn’t like where this was headed. Didn’t like it at all.

  “I’d rather the police focus their attention on me.”

  Audrey inched farther onto the console so that half of her body now rested on it. She leaned against me. I drew resolve from the warm weight of her. “Does not telling them count as a lie?”

  “It does.”

  “Did that guy do something to Dad?” Leo asked.

  Audrey’s eyes snapped fully open, her eyebrows buried in her bangs. “What do you mean? Daddy’s at a conference for teachers.”

  I took a breath, then another. Then I told my daughter that I had kept the truth from her. As I talked, I studied Audrey’s face, confused but expectant, then Leo’s, lips drawn tight in anger. No matter what I said, and even if Carver was arrested and Sam found, my children’s lives had permanently changed. The bedrock beneath them had shifted, split. Especially Audrey’s. Sam had given her part of his liver, and on his shoulders, she could touch the sky. Yet he had disappeared. Worse, he had gone missing while with her. I might be able to repair that fissure, but I would never be able to erase it. Its jagged edges would remind Audrey and Leo, forever, that their parents were fallible. Vulnerable. And that was the best case. The worst case . . .

  “I didn’t want you to be afraid.”

  Audrey scrunched her face. “But that’s a lie too.”

  “It is. I’m sorry.”

  “Daddy lied, too, on Halloween. He said he’d be right back.”

  Leo cut in, impatient. “You didn’t answer, Mom. Did that jerk hurt Dad?” Leo’s face may have been a younger version of Sam’s, but the edge in his voice he had inherited from me.

  I wanted to reassure him and his sister that their father was fine, but I couldn’t. I searched for words that wouldn’t sting but were more honest.

  “I think that man knows where your dad is.”

  “Then the police should find him and ask him,” Audrey said.

  I kissed my daughter on the top of her head. “That’s what they’re trying to do.”

  My voice was steady, so my children bought it. They believed. But I didn’t. I knew no one would fight as hard to find Sam or protect my kids as I would. As Perla had said earlier, sometimes you had to be an asshole. After the day I’d had, I would have no problem following that advice.

  On our way back to Zoe’s house, the heater in the rental car decided to malfunction. It hissed a stream of tepid air, which I directed toward the windshield. The defrost cleared stripes not quite wide enough to see through. I connected the stripes by wiping away the condensation with the sleeve of my sweatshirt. I was damned tired of things breaking.

  Audrey asked a couple more questions and then fell into silence. Leo was quiet, too, staring out the window, connected only to the earbuds he had fished from the glove box. I sneaked a glance at the back of my son’s head, a wall that discouraged questions and kept me from his thoughts.

  When I pulled the car up to the curb in front of Zoe’s townhome, Audrey ran ahead to knock. By the time Leo and I reached her door, it was already ajar, my daughter wrapped around Zoe’s waist. Boo bounced around their ankles.

  “I tried calling you,” she said, and it triggered a memory. The phone call I had meant to return before running into Carver.

  I swore under my breath, then excused myself, leaving the kids with Zoe, and got back in the car. I found a pay phone outside a convenience store a few blocks away. The handset was sticky and smelled like fermented berries.

  The woman who answered was warm in her greeting. “I’m glad you finally called, Cassie.” As if I should recognize her voice, which I didn’t.

  Fortunately, she picked up on my bewilderment. “It’s Helen, from Lake Park Drive?”

  The neighborhood where Sam disappeared. “I remember.” Now. “You saw Sam and Audrey on Halloween.”

  “She’s such a lovely girl, and your husband—so handsome.”

  “Thank you.” I tried not to sound as if I was rushing her, even as my pulse quickened. Fortunately, she got quickly to the point.

  “Remember the Gardners’ house?”

  After Brooklyn’s story, I would never forget it. “Abandoned two-story, rotting jack-o’-lantern on the porch?”

  “That’s the one,” she confirmed. “This evening, I was talking to a neighbor, and he mentioned he saw Sam go into the Gardners’ house on Halloween.”

  She paused, and I reflected that pauses were rarely followed by good news. No one hesitated before telling you that you had won the lottery. Good news was breathless and eager. Bad news came slower.

  Finally, she said, “He wasn’t alone.” Another pause. “There was a woman. This neighbor said she and Sam seemed—”

  “Friendly?” I suggested.

  “Intimate.”

  I gripped the sticky handset until my knuckles lost color. I would probably lose skin when I tried to pry my hand free.

  “Did your neighbor mention anything about this woman’s appearance?”

  “Not much. He described her as attractive, a brunette, but otherwise unremarkable.”

  Helen’s vague description bothered me. Brooklyn? Or the young woman in the photo? Both were brunettes. Something else was there, too, but it was like trying to catch smoke with a pool skimmer.

  “My neighbor couldn’t be sure, but he thinks Sam might have been back at the house earlier tonight.”

  My heart raced, the go-to speed these days. Stupid stress hormones. “Is Sam there now?”

  “I’m sorry, honey, he isn’t. But if you want to take a look, I could meet you outside with a key. I used to water their plants, and I don’t think they’ve changed the locks yet.”

  I asked her to call Detective Rico and tell him what she saw, then thanked her for the information.

  Helen assured me there wasn’t need for my gratitude. “It’s what I would do if it were Bob,” she said. “In the meantime, I’ll call this detective, after I see if my neighbor can give me a better description of that woman.”

  27

  I beat Detective Rico to the abandoned house. On the doorstep, I closed my gloved fingers around the key Helen had given me, its metal edges digging into my palm. I wondered if I would need it. Sam and Brooklyn had managed entry, and they hadn’t had a key.

  I tried the door. The handle moved freely in my hand. I slipped the key into my pocket and moved into the house.

  I pulled a small flashlight from my sweatshirt pocket, but for the moment, it was as unnecessary as the key had been. Outside, clouds shrouded the moon, but a streetlight in front of the home cut through curtainless windows, illuminating my path. I kept the flashlight in my hand but didn’t bother switching it on.

  The house was large but uncluttered by furniture, making the search go more quickly than I had expected. I finished checking the downstairs and attached garage in a few minutes.

  I started up the staircase, each step hesitant. Though I had no reason to doubt the integrity of the steps, I still expected them to shift beneath my feet.

  Halfway up, at the landing, the staircase angled to the left, thwarting the streetlight’s glow. I paused on the steps and turned on my flashlight. I swept the beam up the stairs, toward the doors of the second-story bedrooms. One door was open, but the beam died at the room’s threshold. The other doors were closed.

  I took a moment to survey my surroundings. Nails trailed the staircase walls like drunken ants, marching up in an uneven line but going nowhere. Dozens of family photos had hung there once, the memories lingering in the outlines where the frames had protected the paint from the sun. Would the walls in my own home soon look like this?

  I kept the flashlight’s
beam at waist height as I climbed the last few stairs. I walked through the open door first. A bathroom. The shower curtain had been removed. I checked the drawers. Empty.

  Next, I checked the bedrooms that, judging by the pastel zoo animals in one and glow-in-the-dark stars in the other, had probably belonged to the children. In the room with the stars, a garbage bag sat propped in the corner. I dumped its contents on the floor. I unwadded each ball of paper, looked inside a child’s discarded sneaker, shook the broken action figures, even sniffed the discarded tube of acne cream. When I was done, I scooped the debris back into the bag. It didn’t feel right to leave a mess.

  I saved the master bedroom for last, and my heart thudded as I approached its closed door. I held my breath as I pushed it open.

  Unlike the other rooms, this bedroom was furnished, barely. A single pair of plaid curtains hung in the window that faced the street. A king-size bed remained, although it had been stripped of its linens. I stood there, frozen, staring at that bed. I tried not to think of a reason it alone would remain in the otherwise empty house.

  I turned away from the bed toward the walk-in closet. Even the poles had been removed, their holders unscrewed from the walls.

  I opened the door to the master bathroom. Sadness lived in the other parts of the home—the picture nails, the discarded toys, a single forgotten mug in the kitchen—but in the master bathroom, there were glimpses of rage. One hole in the wall was the size of a fist, another one the shape of a boot. Someone had also thrown a hammer at the shower’s glass door, shattering it. The hammer remained in the puddle of shards.

  In the rest of the house, the parents may have hidden their fury over the foreclosure from their children, but here, in their sanctuary, it had been unleashed.

  I touched the hammer-cracked tile of the shower walls with my fingertips. Dry. But I wasn’t really checking for moisture—I was avoiding that big bed in the master bedroom.

  I returned to the bedroom and moved closer to the bed. The mattress sagged in the middle, and the right side bore a body-shaped stain a shade between yellow and brown. There were no pillows, no sheets. The box springs remained, but there was no headboard.

  The bed was the only piece of furniture in the room, and the only item visible except for the single pair of curtains that hung on the street-facing window. The window that looked out onto the side yard was uncovered, its glass cracked.

  Both windows were fully open, and neither had a screen. With no breeze, the curtains hung limp, but the cold seeped around their edges. I was glad for my sweatshirt. Lately, I had been prone to feel any chill more acutely.

  I dropped to my knees and focused my flashlight under the bed. I steadied myself before looking beneath.

  I identified small foam bits in the corner as earplugs, so I left them. Other than small tumbleweeds of dust and hair, the only other items I could see were a sock, a plastic hanger, and a ball of wadded-up paper.

  I stretched my arm and, with a moderate amount of effort, managed to fish all three items from beneath the bed. I surveyed my “evidence”: the child’s sock had a hole in the toe, the hanger was cracked, and the paper ended up being a department store receipt for pants from the year before.

  Nothing that would prove Sam had been here. But hadn’t that been what I had wanted—to cast doubt that my husband had been on this bed with another woman?

  I closed my eyes and pictured Sam’s face. The dense brows that knitted together when he was thinking. His smirk. The calluses that were the only hard part of him. When frustrated or angry, Sam wasn’t the type to yell. Instead, he would fix things. After one recent argument, Sam had sanded and refinished our dining room set.

  Though less than a minute had been lost in concentration, I suddenly felt vulnerable, my back tingling as if I were being watched. I bolted upright, hitting my head on the edge of the metal frame that held the box springs. I rubbed the back of my head.

  No one watched me. At least as far as I could tell.

  My hands were icy as I slid them under the corner of the mattress. I meant to heave it to the side, but I had forgotten how heavy king-size mattresses could be. I ended up shimmying it sideways in an awkward series of stops and starts, until gravity aided me by pulling it the rest of the way to the floor.

  My breath came in heavy bursts, though not because of exertion.

  A small plastic wedge of yellow and red sat at the corner of the box springs.

  Sam had been here.

  I picked up the zombie teeth he had modeled Halloween morning. The last time I had seen him.

  I stared at the piece of plastic resting on my upturned palm. It was smeared with reddish-brown paint.

  But of course it wasn’t paint. It was blood.

  28

  I knew I should call Rico to make sure he was on his way, but I was frozen, transfixed by the bloody teeth I held.

  I supposed I was being dramatic. It wasn’t as if the small chunk of plastic dripped blood. Only a smudge barely recognizable as blood. Still, it was my husband’s blood, and I fought the urge to wipe my palm on my jeans, or throw the teeth on the mattress where he may have lain only hours earlier. With someone else.

  I tried to make that last part matter to me, and later it might, but all I saw was the blood. There was now no outcome I could imagine that ended in anything other than tragedy.

  The longer I stared at the rust-colored blot on my palm, the more my hand shook, until the plastic teeth bounced off and landed on the floor.

  Though my hand was empty, I kept my arm, bent at the elbow, extended, my fingers frozen.

  Using my left hand, I pulled my phone from my pocket and fumbled to dial Rico with my thumb.

  I hung up when I heard the car. I moved to the window and looked between the crack where the curtains met. No need to make that call after all—the police were already there.

  The police cruiser arrived first, then the tech who took my gloves as evidence.

  I had wanted to run out the back door, or at least dispose of the gloves, but those were the choices of a guilty person. I was merely desperate. As I talked with Detective Ray Rico, I hoped that desperation didn’t show.

  Rico’s jacket was pressed, but his white shirt had wrinkled since the last time I’d seen him. He wore no tie. When he saw me noticing, he smirked.

  “Long day,” he said. “Heard you had a run-in with Carver at the hospital.”

  “Surprised I didn’t see you there.”

  “I thought I could catch a twenty-minute nap at the station.” He motioned toward his wrinkled shirt. “It’s hard to keep up with you.”

  Despite his slightly disheveled appearance, Rico’s eyes remained sharp, and his questions came quickly.

  “You entered through the front door?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you borrowed a key from a neighbor?”

  “From Helen.”

  “I thought you said the door was unlocked.”

  “I borrowed the key but ended up not needing it.”

  I uncrossed my arms. I had read somewhere that crossed arms made a person seem guilty, and I couldn’t risk that. Especially since I had walked out to meet the police with my husband’s blood on my hand.

  “Tonight’s the first time you were in possession of that key?”

  That seemed an odd question, but I answered it quickly. “Yes.”

  “And you don’t have any other keys to the property?”

  As I shook my head, it hit me: Rico might be able to arrest me for trespassing. Was that why he was so interested in how I had entered the house?

  “Explain again what brought you here.”

  There was no malice in his voice, but his gaze remained pinned to mine. Though we had met only days earlier, the creases below his eyes seemed to have grown thicker, the circles darker.

  “Another neighbor”—I paused to fill in the name but realized I’d never been given one—“he told Helen he’d seen Sam going into this house on Halloween, and again earli
er this evening. She called me.”

  “What’s this neighbor’s name?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What’s Helen’s last name?”

  I didn’t know that either, so I pointed across the street to Helen’s house. “She lives there, in the yellow one-story.”

  While Rico jotted something in his notes, I slipped my hand in my pocket to retrieve my phone, intending to show proof of Helen’s call. Then I remembered that Perla had my old phone—the one Helen had called—and my return call had been placed at a pay phone.

  Fortunately, I’d memorized her number. I gave that to Rico, as well as Perla’s contact information.

  He made note of both, then said, “Tell me exactly what Helen told you.”

  As I recounted the brief conversation, I again wondered why the neighbor’s description of the woman bothered me. Attractive, brunette, and unremarkable, he’d said. As Sam’s wife, of course I was bothered by mention of the “attractive” woman he may have been sleeping with. But it was more than that. A doubt burrowed into my brain, too deep for me to grab.

  Rico stopped taking notes. “Why didn’t you call the police? After running into Carver Sweet at the hospital, I would think you’d have called.”

  “Helen called.”

  But my spine prickled, and I knew before Rico said it. “We didn’t get a call from anyone named Helen. We did, however, get a call from someone reporting an intruder at this address. Do you own a gun, Cassie?”

  His voice was soft, and this was the first time he hadn’t addressed me as Dr. Larkin, but I took no comfort in his casual approach. When I was eleven, I had tried to escape the neighbor’s dog through a hole at the bottom of our fence. But I had misjudged the size of the hole and got stuck. While the neighbor’s dog had mercilessly licked my exposed ankle, the broken planks had pressed against my back, their jagged teeth forcing me against the dirt. Each attempt to wriggle free made the vise tighter, until I could draw only shallow breaths.

  I felt the same now.

  “I don’t own a gun,” I said, with a rough voice I barely recognized.