Daughters and Sons

by Tom Fowler

  My phone rang again. I considered spiking it into the wall until I looked at the caller ID. Melinda. “He found me again,” she said between ragged breaths.

  “Slow down. What happened?”

  “The stalker. He’s onto me again.”

  “Even where you were staying?” I said.

  “He found me walking around. I didn’t even go where I normally do. C.T., what am I going to do?”

  “Where are you now?”

  “I ducked into a restaurant,” she said. “He’s parked nearby. I can see his car through the window.” Her breaths still came quickly. “What am I going to do?”

  “What’s the name of the place?”

  “The Golden West Café. You know it?”

  “I’ll be there in ten minutes,” I told her.

  * * *

  More people in Baltimore should know and visit Melinda’s hiding place. Hampden could boast of many other attractions—as well as copious neighborhood charm—but none of its eateries stood up to the Golden West Café. I loved the eclectic menu and the fact they supported live music and performers, even though I’d never heard of a single artist who took the stage there. I called Melinda as I drew near. “Where is he?” I said.

  “On Thirty-Sixth. He’s just parked there, looking at me.”

  “OK. I have an idea. Sit tight for a few minutes. I’ll call you again.”

  A while ago, to close out a pesky case, a spy shop owner required a bribe to show me his receipts. In return for my contribution, I got the receipt I needed plus some gadgets. I’d snagged one of those gadgets as I left the house. This would be a great time to use it. I drove up Falls Road, past 36th Street, made a right onto 37th, then a right onto Hickory. I found a parking spot near the intersection of Hickory and 36th. Finding a place to leave your car in Hampden neighborhoods felt like parking in Federal Hill: you competed with residents for spots which should have been theirs, and sometimes they let you know it.

  I got out of the car and called Melinda again. “Do something distracting,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just cause some kind of scene for about a minute. I want everyone’s attention on you inside and not me outside.” I hung up and crouched behind a car on 36th, making my way down to the silver Benz. I dropped to all fours and crawled to it. If the stalker looked in the mirror, he would see me. Other patrons could see me from the restaurant. If Melinda made a scene, I would probably have less than a minute of invisibility while everyone rubbernecked the crazy girl in the restaurant. I took a small, nondescript black box about half the size of my pinky out of a jacket pocket. I scooted behind the Benz, reached under it, and stuck the small box to the inside of the frame.

  Then I crept backwards away from the car, crouched again, and skulked back down 36th. When I hit Hickory, I stood up, walked to the Audi, and called Melinda again. “How did the scene go?”

  “Well enough that everyone thinks I’m a nut,” she said. “I hope it accomplished something.”

  “It did. Get up and walk toward the bathrooms. Then leave via the back door. You’ll come to an alley. Turn left, and I’ll pick you up on Hickory.”

  “Got it,” she said and hung up. I drove the Audi across 36th and waited outside the alley. Melinda emerged a minute later and climbed in.

  “What was all that about?” she said.

  “I wanted to do something to his car, and I needed everyone to look at you,” I said.

  “What did you do?”

  “Put a GPS tracker on it.”

  Her eyes went wide, and she grabbed my arm, thankfully not when I needed it to change gears. “So we’ll find out who this asshole is?”

  “It’s the plan,” I said.

  Melinda sat back in the passenger’s seat and let out a deep breath. Tension left her body as her posture relaxed. “Where to now?”

  “You’re going to stay with a friend of mine named Joey. He works out of his house, so he’ll be home a lot, and he can protect you if things get ugly.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “He’s a good guy. Big heart . . . equally big stomach.”

  “Can I fuck him?”

  Now she sounded like the Ruby I’d first come to know. It only reinforced how far she needed to go to divorce herself from this life. “I guess it would be up to him,” I said, “but you don’t have to. He’s doing this as a favor to me, not for what he might get out of it.”

  “You really are no fun sometimes,” she said, a smile playing at the edges of her mouth.

  “As long as I keep you alive and stalker-free, you’re welcome to think what you want.”

  My words snapped her back to reality. “Thanks, C.T.,” she said. “Will you let me know who it is when you figure it out?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” she said. “I want to know who this guy is and why he’s stalking me.”

  “The why is something you may have to answer for yourself,” I said.

  “Isn’t it always?”

  I pondered Samantha’s case and found veracity in Melinda’s words.

  * * *

  The app to monitor the GPS tracker resided on my laptop, which I picked up from my house. I hid the device well. If he found it, then Melinda’s case could drag on far longer than I expected it to. I wanted to help her, but I also wanted to focus on Samantha’s murder. My thoughts flashed to my results. They could be displaying right now. I should check. I took a deep breath and made myself focus on the screen. The tracker moved, heading northeast away from Baltimore.

  I got in the car and followed its trail for miles of highway It stopped in Fallston, a swanky area of Harford County. I got there about a half-hour after my target. The silver Benz sat in the driveway of a small house bordering on swankiness. It needed more square footage and nicer construction to earn the title. Other homes farther down the street lorded over it. Houses at the front of the street ran small, as if the homeowners association decided to put the paupers away from the business end of the cul-de-sac.

  I jotted down the address: 12124 Rochelle Drive. The Benz now showed a rear plate, so I noted it, too. Then I left before the homeowners took offense to a mere Audi besmirching their fine neighborhood. I arrived home, ignored my curiosity at the ISP results, and focused on finding out who Melinda’s stalker was. First, I used the BPD’s network to run his license plate. It gave me a name I looked at a few seconds before I believed. I needed to be certain, so I used an MVA search to match the address. Same name.

  Jackson McMurray. Melinda Davenport’s former step-brother.

  The family weirdness hit a new level.

  * * *

  I drove to Joey’s house and called to let him know I was en route. When I got there, Joey and Melinda sat at the kitchen table. They both looked like someone roused them from a deep sleep. I briefly wondered if they woke in the same bed before a shudder drove those thoughts from my mind. Each of them sipped coffee from a mug. I poured myself one before I joined them at the table.

  “What’s going on?” Melinda said.

  “I found out who your stalker is,” I said.

  Her sleepy eyes looked more alert right away. “That’s great! Who is it?”

  “Before I tell you, we might want to have this conversation in private.” I looked at Joey. “No offense.”

  He shook his head. “None taken. I understand.” He got up from the table, went into the living room, and turned on the TV.

  “What was that all about?” Melinda said. “You trust Joey to look after me but not to know who he’s protecting me from?”

  “When was the last time you saw Jackson?” I said, not answering her question.

  “Jackson?” She frowned. “It’s been a few years.” The furrowed brow remained on her face. “I guess I can’t be surprised you found out about my family. Why do you ask?”

  I sat and stared at her. She looked back. The frown pulling her eyebrows down did a sudden reversal. “Oh, my god!” she said. “You’re saying J
ackson has been stalking me?”

  “I am.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I followed him to his house,” I said. “The plate on the silver Benz is registered to him at the address I saw.”

  Melinda put her head into her hands. It took me a few seconds to realize she was crying. In lieu of tissues, I grabbed a few napkins from Joey’s counter and handed them to her. She peeked out from behind her fingers, nodded, and took them. The bawling continued a few more minutes.

  I waited as Melinda’s crying grew softer, and the sobs came less frequently. She wiped her eyes a few times and cleared her throat to compose herself. “Why did it have to be Jackson?” she said, her voice a shade above a whisper.

  “I’m afraid I need you to answer the question,” I said.

  “It’s complicated.”

  “So I gathered.”

  Melinda took a drink of her coffee. “Fuck, I wish this were stronger right now.” She paused. “I wish I were stronger right now.”

  “You’re doing fine,” I said to reassure her.

  She needed another swig of coffee. “Jackson’s mother married my father. You already know that.” I nodded. “We were both sixteen. He was a couple months older.” Something resembling a smile cracked her face, but it disappeared immediately. “He was really cute. He told me I was cute, too.” She shrugged. “Things just . . . sort of happened from there.”

  “You had sex with him.”

  She nodded. “It took a couple months. I think we felt the attraction while our parents were dating. Once we were both under the same roof, it was hard to see him and not . . . you know. We were careful. Our parents liked to socialize a lot and be important, and we were old enough that they’d leave us at home. So they’d go out on the town, and Jackson and I would stay home and fuck.”

  I suppressed another shudder. Melinda and Jackson weren’t related by blood, but their relationship still creeped me out. It felt too Game of Thrones for me, even if it stopped shy of being incestuous. I wondered at the damage a relationship like theirs could do. Did Melinda become Ruby because of her affair with Jackson and its inevitable aftermath? I needed a few more semesters of psychology to puzzle it out. “Did this go on for a while?” I said.

  “Yeah. They went out a lot.”

  “But your parents eventually found out.”

  “I guess they had to at some point,” she said.

  A large part of me didn’t want to ask the next logical question. This grossed me out. I needed to know, however, so I said, “What happened?”

  “We were both eighteen. Seniors in high school. Consenting adults. Jackson dated a couple girlfriends, I went out with a couple boyfriends, but none of it lasted. Anyway, our parents went out again. Jackson cancelled a date so we could . . . anyway, they came back way earlier than we expected.” Melinda closed her eyes. “They caught us in the shower.”

  I blew out a deep breath. The rift in the family traced its genesis here. This must have set Melinda on the path to becoming Ruby. For the first time, I realized how difficult it would be to reverse. “What happened afterwards?”

  It took Melinda some time to answer. She used another swig of coffee to buck herself up. “They knew they couldn’t leave us alone. My father blamed Helen, of course. She blamed me for corrupting her little boy. Jackson and I didn’t blame anyone. We were just two teenagers.”

  “But you didn’t love each other.”

  She shook her head after a moment. “On some level, maybe. Not in the conventional sense. Like I said, it was complicated.”

  “This is what drove your family apart,” I said, not phrasing it as a question.

  “Yeah. Daddy tried to bring in some expensive shrink. He paid a lot for discretion. When you’re Vincent Davenport, you can’t have it get around that your daughter has been fucking her step-brother. The shrink was an asshole, though. None of his shit worked. Daddy and Helen couldn’t get along. He still blamed her, and she still blamed me. Neither of them even thought how unnecessary it was to blame anyone. We were two good-looking, horny teenagers thrust under the same roof.” She shrugged. “What did they expect?”

  “What happened to Helen?”

  “Daddy made them leave. He paid her to go away and never contact us again. I don’t know where she went.”

  “And Jackson?” I said.

  “He blamed me for us getting caught. Like it was my fault they came home early. He would try to get with me on the sly, but we never really stood much of a chance. Daddy installed alarms on our bedrooms, so we couldn’t even sneak down the hallway in the night. When it was obvious Jackson and Helen needed to leave, Jackson and I . . . had a fight.”

  “When you say a fight—”

  “He hit me. Called me a whore . . . all of that.” Melinda paused to collect herself with a few deep breaths. “Once he realized what he’d done, he tried to apologize. He said he’d come back for me.” She shook her head. “I guess I pushed a lot of that out of my mind. Suppressed it or whatever.”

  “You couldn’t presume it was him,” I said. I sipped my coffee. It was lukewarm.

  “But I should have realized it was possible. That night . . . I don’t know, he sounded obsessed. ‘I’ll find you. I’ll come back for you.’ I think he thought he was rescuing me from a bad situation.”

  “He might really feel he is now.”

  “Jesus, I didn’t think about that.” She put her head in her hands again. “He found me, C.T.,” she said in a muffled voice. “He found me. What am I going to do?”

  “For now, you’re going to stay here. He doesn’t know where you are, and he doesn’t know I know who he is.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I need to talk to some people,” I said. “The rest is going to depend on what Jackson does.”

  Melinda whisked her head out of her hands. “Don’t kill him,” she said, her eyes looking like a puppy’s when begging for scraps. “Please.”

  I frowned in surprise. “You care about him?”

  “In some weird way, yeah. I don’t want to be with him again. I’m not even sure I want to see him again. But I don’t want him to die. Promise me you won’t kill him.”

  I shook my head. “I promise I’ll do everything I can not to kill him. It’s the best I can do. If he pulls a gun on me, all bets are off.”

  “I can’t go back to work, can I?” Melinda said after a moment.

  “You need a career change,” I said. “We can figure it out once this mess is settled. For now, stay here with Joey and don’t go back to any of your old stomping grounds. Don’t even talk to anyone. Don’t give Jackson an easy way to find you.”

  Melinda nodded, but her eyes looked at something far away. “It wasn’t him in the alley,” she said, “when Joanie got beaten up.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yeah. Jackson was taller . . . is taller.”

  “So he hired someone to do it,” I said.

  “You think he paid someone to beat me up?”

  “Maybe he paid someone to scare you. The thing is people who take money to scare others don’t have a lot of tactics in their inventories.”

  “I didn’t think he’d want to hurt me,” she said in a small voice.

  “He might not. Maybe the guy who beat up Joanie was supposed to pummel whoever happened to be with you.”

  “Poor Joanie. It’s all my fault.”

  “You didn’t send someone to beat her up.”

  “But I slept with Jackson. Something told me I shouldn’t, and we kept doing it. Look what happened.”

  “You can’t blame yourself,” I said. “Jackson is the one who’s done all this.”

  Melinda gave me a resigned nod and looked at her coffee mug. “It’s empty,” she said after a moment.

  I thought it wasn’t the only empty thing at the table but kept it to myself.

  Chapter 20

  I pondered Melinda's history as I drove home. She’d entered into a sexual relationship with her
stepbrother. Before Jackson, she grew up as the daughter of a wealthy, influential man. Boys would have tried to impress her with gifts her family wouldn't get her. I wondered if the association of a gift as a payment for gratification got imprinted onto her mind early in her teen years. I remained convinced Melinda possessed the smarts and moxie to do a complete career change, but she also carried a lot of baggage. She couldn't be a smiling secretary overnight.

  I parked my car, went inside, and plucked a cold IPA from the fridge. Melinda became Ruby because of a bad family situation. Part of it was her own doing, but she couldn't control the way her parents reacted. Her father tossing his wife and stepson out struck me as the typical overreaction men of privilege and power display. They're so used to bows of servitude and obsequious nods they lash out and fly to an extreme when something disrupts life on Bucolic Avenue. What would the neighbors have thought about Melinda and Jackson's ongoing tryst? I knew it weighed on Vincent Davenport's mind when he made his decision. It was easier to explain his wife moved out than the truth behind her abrupt departure. I wondered how he explained Melinda's "disappearance" to the caviar crowd in his neighborhood? The foundation served as a good cover at least.

  All this pondering didn't lead me any closer to solving anything, but it did drain my IPA. I tossed the bottle into the recycling bin and figured I would call it a night. Looking at my results would only make me stay up and obsess about them. I could do more for Samantha and her memory after a night's rest. I started to head upstairs when my doorbell rang. Fast knocking immediately followed.

  I fetched the nearest handgun I had, which happened to be the .45 and endured the persistent rapping until I got to the door. I looked out the peephole to see Shade on my doorstep. One of these days, I would have to take myself out of the phone book. "I know you're in there, man!" I heard him say. I rolled my eyes, tucked the .45 into the back of my jeans, and opened the door.