Текст книги "Within These Walls"

Автор книги: Ania Ahlborn

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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

4

LUCAS ROLLED THE U-Haul truck along the JFK departures curb, eased it to a stop, and shifted into park. His entire life was in the back of this box truck, all his stuff haphazardly crammed into cardboard boxes he’d picked up at the local Home Depot. He’d always known there was a chance Caroline would leave him to pack it all on his own—her things left to float around half-empty rooms—but there was a difference between maybe and certainty. Here, certainty won out in the end.

Caroline had filled a couple of suitcases with Jeanie’s summer clothes, but making room in her daughter’s closet was the extent of her involvement. Lucas hadn’t had the heart to beg her to reconsider her decision. Amid seemingly endless boxes and a mad dash to stay on Jeffrey Halcomb’s seemingly arbitrary four-week schedule, Lucas hadn’t allowed the magnitude of the situation to sink in. At least not until now.

The full weight of it hit him after Caroline asked for a ride to the airport, so nonchalant, no big deal. He had wanted to seethe through his teeth at her nerve. Why couldn’t she call the illustrious (and loaded) Kurt Murphy rather than bumming a ride with her soon-to-be ex? But instead of going off at the mere suggestion of carpooling, he had simply nodded despite their past ten days of avoidant silence.

He wanted to be pissed that Caroline hadn’t spoken so much as a handful of sentences to him for the past week and a half; wanted to rage at the fact that, while he had spent that time scrambling to get himself together—the boxes, the packing, the moving truck, the rental house—she hadn’t done anything but sit on the phone with her sister, talking about Italy while their marriage gasped its final breath. He couldn’t tell if she was pretending to be strong, or if she genuinely didn’t care.

And yet, now, sitting in the truck—Jeanie beside him and Caroline next to the passenger window—his thoughts were too muddled to be angry. They were foggy with how he was going to keep himself from falling apart. Distracted by the idea of Jeanie hating his guts, he wondered how he was going to cope with his daughter’s loathing over the next eight weeks. That, and the looming terror of how long it would take to see Jeanie again after she went back home, leaving him behind in Pier Pointe. How much time would pass before he saw his little girl again? Months? A year? Where would she be living? In Briarwood? Or would Caroline pack up the remainder of their things and ditch Queens for whatever neighborhood Kurt Murphy inhabited? His worries were stifling, his anxiety increasing its grip with every passing day. Lucas forced his thoughts of Caroline and Kurt canoodling in Rome to the furthest corner of his mind. He convinced himself that the salvation of his marriage would come in due time. But right now he had to focus. He was on a deadline. Halcomb was waiting.

Caroline slid out of the moving van, smoothed her skirt, and checked her makeup in the side-view mirror. She then gave her brooding twelve-year-old an unsure smile. It was the false grin a stranger would give a child after making accidental eye contact in the checkout line. Lucas stared at Caroline’s face from across the truck’s interior, marveling at the way her expression failed to reach her eyes. Jeanie remained slumped against the bench seat with her arms across her chest. Waves of unruly blond splayed across the front of a black Thirty Seconds to Mars T-shirt, not at all matching the sunny halo of curls that circled her head.

Lucas looked away from his wife’s distant stare, shoved open the driver-side door, and fetched Caroline’s luggage from the back of the truck. He met her on the sidewalk beneath the United Airlines sign while Jeanie glared at them both. The black eyeliner she’d smeared around her eyes in angst-fueled defiance reminded him of when she’d played the part of a raccoon in her second-grade school play. Except back then, the raccoon had been friendly. Now, the little varmint was rabid.

“Really?” Caroline asked, frowning at her glowering daughter. “You aren’t going to see me for two months and this is the good-bye I get?”

“You want me to be happy?” Somehow, Jeanie managed to narrow her eyes more than they already were. A moment later, she glared at her phone, her fingers flying across the touch-screen keyboard, constructing a text message with the fury only a preteen girl could muster.

Lucas kept quiet, leaving a few feet between himself and the truck. He’d spent the last ten days listening to Virginia and Caroline scream at each other, amazed at how similar they were when they were angry. It was only after Caroline would retire to their bedroom to watch one of her shows—True Blood or Mad Men or Game of Thrones—that Lucas would quietly knock on Jeanie’s door. They didn’t talk during these postwar visits. Mostly, he sat at her desk and stared at posters of bands composed of angry-looking youth—Paramore and Fall Out Boy, Panic! at the Disco and Gerard Way.

Jeanie had been a happy-go-lucky girl up until her tenth birthday. That was when he and Caroline really started having problems. Their fights had bloomed from heated whispers to full-volume barn burners, no doubt audible through the walls after bedtime. But Jeanie never asked about her parents’ problems and they never sat their daughter down to talk them over. They were unable to discuss their grievances between themselves, let alone with their kid.

And so, Jeanie’s favorite colors of pink and yellow were replaced by black and red. She tore Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift from the walls and pasted up in their place boys who looked more like girls. It was Caroline’s worst nightmare: her baby girl had gone dark. Lucas was left to speculate why Jeanie seemed to prefer his company over her mother’s. Was it because he didn’t ride her about her eclectic taste in clothes and music? Or was he deemed “okay” because he happened to write about the darkest types of humankind?

Over the past few days, there had been no drama between Lucas and Virginia. There were only quiet inquiries about whether her cell phone allowed her to call her friends long-distance, whether she’d like Washington, and if—since both he and Mom were ruining her life—he’d take her to the Imagine Dragons concert in Seattle or Portland or wherever they could get tickets. She had been planning on going with her friends, but since her father was dragging her to the end of the world, alternate plans would have to be made.

“Come on, Jeanie.” Lucas nodded, goading her to give her mother a proper farewell. Jeanie exhaled a dramatic sigh, slid out of the truck, and offered her mom a hug as genuine as Caroline’s distant smile.

“Have fun on your trip.” Her words dripped with sarcasm. Before Caroline could reprimand her for acting like a condescending brat, their daughter climbed back into the van, slammed the door, and rolled up the window to avoid any more talk.

Caroline blinked a few times, as if the swing of the door had blown something into her eye. “Well,” she said after a long pause, unable to disguise the slight tremble in her voice. “That was nice.”

Lucas wished he could hate Caroline as much as it seemed their kid already did. It would have made everything easier, black and white. But he reached out to touch her arm instead, his gut telling him to comfort his wife. “It isn’t personal; you know that.”

Caroline nodded faintly, then cleared her throat, as if doing so would somehow help her regain some composure. “That angst is going to be fun for you,” she said. Her smile was cold, challenging. “Hope you’re up for it.”

He twisted up his face at the thought of Jeanie throwing herself around the new house. Emotional. Blasting her whiney, screamy music at all hours. Music that made him feel suicidal, homicidal, and painfully old, five years before hitting forty. He remembered his own father griping about the music that came flooding out of his room. There were a couple of afternoons where he and his pop had waged war—Depeche Mode and New Order vibrated Lucas’s walls while his old man tried to drown out “that electro-synthesizer crap” with Johnny Cash and Creedence Clearwater Revival.

Lucas decided then and there that, if he only had Jeanie for eight weeks, he’d school her in how to be properly dark: Nine Inch Nails, the Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees. He had traded in the band shirts and Doc Martens for button-downs and casual oxfords long ago, but he’d never fully outgrown the sexy, sullen pull of despondent musing. He’d simply disguised it as a career.

“It’ll be okay,” Lucas said, trying to convince himself far more than he was attempting to lend Caroline assurance. “She’s a good kid.” And when he was done with her, she’d also be a good kid with a further-reaching penchant for the darkness that Caroline had rejected long ago. It was a cheap jab, one that used his and Jeanie’s common interest to his advantage. He’d break out those old boots and his vintage T-shirts all in the name of being “the cool dad.” If it meant keeping his kid close, he’d do whatever it took.

“Yeah, well, she’s also a hormonal tween.” Caroline fumbled with the pop-up handle on her rolling bag, avoiding eye contact by keeping herself distracted. “But what am I saying? You love angst.”

He stared at her hand, at the way her fingers held the luggage pull in a tense fist. Maybe she’d miss him. Now that it was time to part ways, she’d possibly realize that not being with him and Jeanie would be tough—much harder than she had expected. It could be that age-old adage was right: absence makes the heart grow fonder. This was, perhaps, the very therapy they needed to reconnect.

“Just don’t go all Salinger and lock yourself up,” she warned. “Take her into town, to the mall and the movies. Do normal things. I don’t need her any weirder than she already is.”

Lucas bit back a comment, on the verge of blaming their daughter’s strangeness on both Caroline and himself. They hadn’t been able to get their shit together with each other and now their kid was perpetually pissed off. Whatever weirdness Jeanie had wasn’t his fault, it was their fault. But his thoughts were derailed, his defensiveness thrown off-kilter. Kurt Murphy hovered just inside the terminal, watching them part ways through the sliding glass door.

Caroline noticed Lucas staring into the terminal. She looked over her shoulder, lifted a hand and gave Kurt a wave, then turned back to Lucas. “I need to go. I should have checked in twenty minutes ago.”

“Yeah,” he said. “International.”

Her eyes dropped down to the space between them, as if inspecting the tips of her ballerina flats. He had watched her pack a pair of heels into her carry-on. She’d change out of those flats as soon as she stepped off the plane. Overwhelmed by the urge to grab her and kiss her as hard as he could, he wanted to beg her not to sleep with that pedantic prick.

Please, Carrie, don’t leave me. Don’t leave us. Don’t give up.

But before he could make his move, the muffled thud of bass slithered from inside the U-Haul’s cab. Both he and Caroline turned their heads to watch their daughter’s blond hair fly. She was dancing in her seat to a song that had come on the radio—music therapy. When Jeanie was sad, the music was loud. Lucas had a feeling it would only get louder in the coming weeks.

Watching Jeanie through the window, Caroline’s features went somber. Lucas took the opportunity to pull her into an embrace, pressed his lips to her temple, and whispered, “I love you,” against her skin. She relaxed for a modicum of a second, then pulled away from him with a backward step. After all, Kurt was watching. She’d have to talk him down if she expressed too much emotion.

I have to put on a good show for Virginia. You know how it is . . . keep the kid happy, keep everything normal.

“I’ll miss you,” Lucas told her, his throat suddenly dry, his fingers reaching for her hand as if to pull her back, to keep her from going.

Will you miss me, too ?

“Keep her safe,” Caroline said, then turned away, focusing on her bag.

“Carrie.” He was desperate to hear it, he needed to know.

Just tell me you still care, even if it’s just a little bit. Tell me there’s still a chance.

Like an exotic animal displayed behind airport glass, Kurt shifted his weight from one shiny loafer to the other. His sport jacket hung off his well-built frame with a mannequin’s casual elegance. He looked too clean, too well-groomed, the type of guy who had a spa day every two weeks. Facials. Manicures. Waxes. Shiatsu massages penciled in as meetings. Martinis at two in the afternoon and sixty-dollar entrées written off as a business expense.

Don Draper, he thought. That’s why she likes him. He’s Don fucking Draper in the flesh. A cartoon character. He isn’t real. Or maybe Kurt was less Mad Men and more American Psycho. Perhaps, the moment Lucas turned his back, Kurt would filet his wife just like the guys he wrote about; men who had killed countless wayward girls. Poetic justice?

All at once, Lucas grabbed Caroline by the arm, startling her with the sudden contact. “I love you,” he repeated, just in case she hadn’t heard him the first time.

“I know.” She frowned, averted her eyes. “Me too.”

He let his hand fall to his side in defeat.

Caroline walked away, her rolling suitcase hissing along the concrete.

5

VEE WASN’T STUPID. She knew her mother was having an affair. Whoever that Kurt guy was, her parents had refused to talk out their problems. It’s what they had taught her to do—use words, not fists—but they were both hypocrites. And now Vee was on her way to some weird town in a state on the opposite side of the planet. Her summer was completely ruined. Her entire life was a total, hopeless, unrecoverable void of a train wreck. She’d never forgive her parents for this. Never get over it. Never.

She had smelled the creep on her mother’s clothes—unfamiliar cologne clinging to her like a residual ghost. She saw “the other man” in the slump of her father’s shoulders, in the way her dad watched her mom from a distance. His sadness brimmed over so full it was a wonder it hadn’t drowned him completely.

Her parents thought she was weird because they were too busy screaming at each other to pay attention to her. It was her mom, mostly. Vee had heard her blame her dad for Vee “going goth” like it was a genetically transmitted disease. But had they stopped to ask the real reason for her metamorphosis, they would have discovered that all this commotion was not about them but about a boy named Tim.

Her friend Heidi had gotten Vee into melancholy music after hearing her brother Tim play it on his computer. Then Tim showed them the Ouija board he kept hidden at the back of his closet behind a pair of old skateboarding decks, and Vee’s new obsession was born. She had been reluctant at first, but you don’t act like a chicken if you want to impress a guy like Tim.

It wasn’t that ghosts and death and alt-rock hadn’t interested Vee before she had fallen for her best friend’s brother, but Tim’s affinity for the darker side of things helped push her over the edge. She was vying for his attention, and winning the affection of a high school kid was a lot easier when she could talk about the same bands; when she could look the part rather than come off as a poseur. She’d gone so far as to show him a picture of her dad when he was a kid—the dark hair, the trench coat, the killer boots she’d spied in the back of her parents’ closet when she went snooping for money. Tim had taken one look at the high-school-aged Lucas Graham and thought it was awesome that Vee had been raised by a freak. When she dropped that her father wrote about serial killers and unsolved murders, she’d blown his mind and won a full-on “in” with Tim and his high school friends.

But that was all ruined now. And ironically, it was her dad’s fault. The man who had helped her win a plum spot among a group of older kids was the person who was stealing her away from them. And while Vee knew she’d be back at the end of the summer, eight weeks was an eternity. In eight weeks, Tim could discover a dozen new bands and find himself a girlfriend—a girl way cooler than her. Two months was plenty of time for Vee to lose her hard-earned place next to the boy she swore she was starting to love.

“Hey, Jeanie, get the map,” her dad urged.

Vee glared out the window for a moment longer, then grabbed her backpack out of the foot well. She rifled through it as the truck bounced along the highway toward the Pennsylvania border. Her dad had designated her as the official direction-keeper, and she had looked up their route on Google Maps while he had been busy packing up the last of his stuff. His eyes had just about fallen out of his head when she told him it was a forty-two-hour trip. Pulling the printed directions out of a purple pocket folder decorated with black Sharpie swirls, she smoothed their route across her lap and wrinkled her nose at the crooked blue line that cut across its top.

“Eight hundred miles today,” he told her. “We have to keep to the schedule.”

“How long does eight hundred miles take?”

“Twelve hours at least.”

She groaned at his answer.

“It says forty hours on your map, but that’s regular car speed, kid. This truck doesn’t go that fast.”

“Forty-two hours,” Vee corrected, then slumped against the bench seat. By the time they’d reach their destination, Tim Steinway wouldn’t even remember her. Virginia who?

She didn’t want to imagine some cool, dark-haired girl hanging off his arm when she finally got back home. Needing a distraction, she tossed the map printout onto the bench seat between them and gave her father a sidelong glance. “So, what did the guy you’re going to write about do?”

Her dad frowned at the steering wheel. It was obvious he didn’t want to talk about it, but Vee wasn’t about to give him a choice. If she had to endure the possibility of losing Tim, had to deal with eight weeks of pure exile, she deserved to know what kind of a criminal was at the root of ruining her life.

6

KEEPING THE SUBJECTS of Lucas’s books a secret when Jeanie was younger had been easy, but the older she got, the more questions she had. Caroline used to tell her that Daddy wrote about monsters and ghosts. It was as accurate a description as any little girl would need. But Jeanie wasn’t so little anymore. Monsters and ghosts only repelled kids who were afraid of the dark, and Jeanie had proven that she liked the nighttime far more than she enjoyed the daylight.

“Did your mother bring that up?” It was the first thing that came to mind.

Caroline had always been good about not mentioning the specifics of his projects. Hell, she was the one who demanded he never breathe a word about his topics anywhere near their kid. Lucas had made a point of not keeping galley pages of his work anywhere in the house where Jeanie could find them. Any time he received a fresh shipment of new releases, he’d mail them out to friends and longtime readers. The leftovers ended up in the trunk, driven out to local libraries and cafés, all to spare his kid an accidental discovery. The copies he kept for himself were locked in a gun safe in the back of a bedroom closet. But now, with things between him and Caroline the way they were, it wouldn’t have surprised him to discover she had brought up Jeffrey Halcomb while packing up Jeanie’s things, if only to make his life more difficult than it was already going to be.

“I’m not an idiot,” Jeanie muttered. “I know what kind of things you write about. Killers and stuff.”

“And how do you know that?”

“It’s called Google,” Jeanie said flatly. Lucas held back a self-satisfied smirk. He had once asked Caroline what she thought would happen when Jeanie decided to look him up on the Internet. She had waved a dismissive hand above her head, as though the thought of their daughter taking the time to research her own father was ludicrous.

“Anyway, I looked up your books on Amazon, and then I looked up the guys in your books on Wikipedia. They’re all, like, ax murderers. You didn’t think I’d ever find out?”

“Of course I knew you’d find out,” he said. “You’re a smart kid.”

It had been plain stupid of Caroline to think they could protect their daughter from the darkness of his interests forever. But before he could dwell on the fact that his little girl knew he made a living off of other people’s pain, his thoughts twisted toward an even scarier thought: if Jeanie had googled him, what else was she looking up?

“I’m hardly a kid, Dad.”

He kept his attention on the road, but he could hear the eye roll in her voice.

“So, who is this guy you’re writing about? What did he do?” She pushed her hair behind her ears, waiting for the story while Lucas squinted at the highway.

Even when talking about his projects with Caroline, it had always been awkward. She’d been just as into The Cult and Dead Can Dance as he had, but she’d always found Lucas’s fascination with the dark and dangerous to be a bit too all encompassing. Like maybe he was harboring an inner psychopath that was itching to get out—a dark passenger à la Dexter Morgan.

His own parents considered his work deplorable, not that they had said as much, but Lucas knew it just the same. When he had started college, he had done so with the hope of becoming a criminal profiler. But his love for the written word had overridden his interest in police work. When he told his parents he wanted to be a writer in the middle of his sophomore year, Barbara and Harold Graham hit the roof. A writer? his dad had barked. More like a piss-poor teacher getting shot at by his own ghetto students. Now that’s a future! Lucas moved out several weeks later, finally tired of taking shit from them about what he wanted to do with his life. That had been nearly twenty years ago, but his pop still muttered contentions beneath his breath during every family gathering.

Writing about tragedy like that, his father had stated the last time they had gotten together. It’s no wonder your career is on the rocks. People don’t want to remember the folks that make our world ugly. They want to forget, and that’s why they aren’t buying your damn books.

“Don’t you think I deserve to know?” Jeanie asked. “He’s the reason you’re moving, right? The reason you’re dragging me out here with you?”

“Dragging you?” Lucas didn’t like what that implied, as though she was his captive and he was the worst father in the world.

She shrugged, said nothing.

If he didn’t tell her, she’d only hate him more.

“Okay,” he said, squaring his shoulders and pushing back against his seat. “But not a word, all right? Your mother will kill me.”

“Like I even talk to her,” Jeanie murmured.

“Well, you should talk to her.”

“Whatever.” She dismissed the suggestion with a glance out the window. “You know she doesn’t even like me, right? I don’t know why she bothered having a kid.”

“That isn’t true.” The defense came tumbling out of him without so much as a beat of hesitation; his tone, sterner than he had intended. “Your mother loves you.”

“Oh yeah, then why . . .” Jeanie’s words trailed off. Rather than finishing her statement, she coiled her arms across her chest, pulled into herself, and went quiet.

She didn’t need to finish her sentence. Then why would she run off with another guy? If she loved me, loved us, why would she be doing this? It was the very question he wanted to find the answer to, but dwelling on it would only make things worse. Lucas tightened his grip on the steering wheel and sucked in air. Change the subject, he thought. Don’t talk about Caroline. You’ll end up saying something you’ll regret.

“Jeffrey Halcomb, he’s the bad guy,” Lucas began. “He’s the one I need to see.”

“You’re seeing him?” Jeanie perked beside him, her silence abandoned. “You mean he’s not dead?”

“Nope, he’s in prison. He manipulated people into following what he said, and in the end, he convinced them all to kill themselves. This guy has a special ability: the power of persuasion. He can make certain people do or believe almost anything.”

“But not all people?”

“No, not all people. You know how we all have different personalities?”

Jeanie nodded. “Some people are more gullible than others,” she said.

“That’s exactly right. Sometimes people are so vulnerable they’re willing to do or believe anything. All the person telling them to do or believe that thing has to do is promise them something they want.”

“Like money?”

“Well . . . more like love or companionship or a place to belong. He would look for people who were pretty desperate—runaways who didn’t have a place to live, loners from broken families who were eager to have a friend. He . . . collected them. It took him years. And the longer these people stayed with him, the more they saw him as the key to their own happiness. They believed whatever he told them so that he wouldn’t abandon them, and eventually they began to seriously believe in the things he told them.”

“Like what?”

“Well, that’s the whole trick of it. Nobody really knows for sure.”

“What do you mean, nobody knows? He’s in prison, right?”

Lucas nodded. “Yeah, but he’s not talking.”

“Well, why don’t they just, like, squeeze it out of him or something?”

“Squeeze it out of him?” He cracked a faint smile. “Just give him the ol’ boot heel, huh?”

“He did something bad, right? So, why would he have the choice of not talking about it? How come he wouldn’t have to tell, like, a judge or the court or the cops or something?”

“Because he’s still got rights, kiddo.”

She didn’t like that answer. “Well, that’s dumb.”

“Dumb or not, that’s the way the justice system works. Just because you’re in prison doesn’t mean people can make you do what you don’t want to do.”

Jeanie remained silent for a long while, as though chewing on this newfound fact. Lucas couldn’t help the grin that tugged at the corners of his mouth when he caught her expression. She looked more serious than he’d ever seen her, her eyebrows pinched together and her mouth pressed into a terse line.

“So . . . how many people did he kill?” she finally asked.

“Ten.” That number wasn’t entirely accurate, but he didn’t want to discuss the details of infanticide with his twelve-year-old kid. “And he would argue that he didn’t kill them; they killed themselves.” Again, not completely true. The way Lucas saw it, sacrifice was the same as murder, but many argued that Audra Snow had been a willing participant in Halcomb’s ritual. In Lucas’s mind, however, it didn’t matter whether Audra had offered her life to Jeff Halcomb or not. He had still been the one who had cut her open from pelvis to sternum. He had spilled her blood. He was responsible for taking that life, even if a valid argument could be made against the deaths of the others.

“People have been theorizing about what happened for thirty years now. Halcomb had a lot of followers, some that ended up losing interest or getting scared by the things he said. So when this happened, the suicides, some people decided to speak up. But Halcomb has never said a word about it. I mean, nothing.”

“And you’re going to go see him?”

Lucas’s stomach churned at Jeanie’s inquiry. The mere idea of meeting The Man made him sick with nerves. When he had torn open Halcomb’s letter on the sidewalk outside their house, he had hardly believed what he held in his hands. He had read it a good six or seven times before blasting into the house and calling his agent. For a true-crime writer, a washed-up true-crime writer, that letter was a goddamn miracle. It was as though the sky had opened up and the Creator himself had said, Fix your life already, dummy. Here’s a project anyone worth their salt would kill for and it’s all yours, Lucas; don’t fuck it up.

“Dad, what if he makes you do something?”

Lucas blinked, then gave Jeanie a sidelong glance. “What? No, he won’t.”

“But how do you know? Those people that died? They probably didn’t think they were gullible, either. And then they met him.”

“Except there’s a difference between those people and me, Jeanie. I know what he can do. It’s a magic trick. If you know how the trick is done, it doesn’t work, right?”

“I guess,” she muttered. “Like Criss Angel.”

Lucas’s mouth quirked up into a smirk, but his amusement was short-lived. No matter how he tried to reason it away, Jeanie’s concern was sound. Even John Cormick had voiced his doubts.

What makes you think this guy isn’t screwing with you, Lou? He hasn’t spoken to anyone about the case in three decades, and suddenly he wants you? No offense, but that’s weird, right? That’s like really fucking weird, Lucas. You’ve got to be careful, here.

But those doubts, the potential danger of it, hadn’t hit him until now. Halcomb still had the same power. Lucas knew the trick, and yet Halcomb had worked his magic without their ever meeting face-to-face.

You want my story, you live in my house.

Lucas hadn’t hesitated. He had simply picked up the phone and left a message with the front desk at Lambert Correctional.

Yes, he had said. Please let the inmate know that my answer is yes.