1120 Dunham Drive: A Clint & Jennifer Huber Mystery

by Edward Trimnell

  Jennifer tucked the card away in her purse as if it were a secret love letter. She suddenly felt all the more anguished over her failure to read Clint’s signals last night.

  She pushed the flowers to the front left corner of her desk, wondering how much they had cost. This had been an impulsive, but incredibly sweet gesture on Clint’s part. They had been a couple for fifteen years. Today was not a birthday, nor any other special occasion.

  Clint wasn't perfect—no man was—but she was lucky to have him.

  On the far side of the office, she saw Jim stand up and walk over to the window of his enclosure, unabashedly eying her and the flowers. It took all of Jennifer’s resolve to resist a sudden urge to make an obscene gesture at him.

  She did, however, meet his stare with one of her own. She felt a momentary sense of victory when Jim turned away and went back to his desk.

  As would have been the case in any office, the flowers had attracted some general attention. Any excuse for a diversion from the workday.

  “It must be nice to get so much male attention,” Angela said. Her reference to generic “male attention” rather than her husband’s attention implied that Jennifer was getting male attention from any number of sources.

  Jennifer let Angela’s remark go unanswered.

  Some time later, after Angela had gone off to a meeting, Jennifer heard her personal cell phone ringing.

  She removed the phone from her pocket, expecting a call from either Clint or Gladys. But the number on the phone’s ID screen was a local one that she didn't recognize offhand.

  “Jennifer Huber?” a male voice asked.

  “Yes. Who is—?”

  “This is Chris Whitaker. We met a few weeks ago. You and me and your husband. I assume you remember.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Well,” Whitaker paused, as if trying to formulate his spiel. “I’ve been thinking since we met that night—about Marcia Vennekamp.” Whitaker laughed. “And that crazy-ass mother of hers—excuse my language.”

  “Consider yourself excused, Chris.”

  “Well,” Chris went on, “I was wondering if you would like to get together again. You and Clint kind of hit me out of the blue that night. Like I said, I’ve been giving this matter some more thought—mining my memory banks, if you will. And I have some more information that you might find helpful.”

  “Absolutely,” Jennifer replied.

  Even as Jennifer responded, she reflected that really she should have told Chris no thank you—that their problems had stopped and she and her husband were letting the matter go.

  Then came a thought of the missing Josie Taylor—the girl who might have been killed by the previous occupant of her house. An image came to mind: Deborah Vennekamp—twenty years younger and even more vindictive—choking the life from Josephine Taylor.

  And so for the second time in as many weeks, Jennifer agreed to a lunch date with a man who was not her husband.

  Clint had been invited, of course; but she knew that he wouldn’t want to attend another meeting with Chris Whitaker. Clint had made his dislike of Whitaker quite clear.

  She told Whitaker that Clint would be unable to attend. This seemed to give the musician a momentary pause, but he didn’t object.

  “Fine by me,” Whitaker said.

  This wouldn’t be a date, either, of course; but that would make no difference to any coworker who might happen to see her and Chris Whitaker eating lunch at the Applebee’s two exits down the highway from Ohio Excel Logistics.

  “Applebee’s it is, then,” Whitaker said, bringing the conversation to a close. “I’ll see you around noon.”

  48

  Jennifer’s discussion with Chris Whitaker began over lunch without many preliminaries. After all, the two had already met just a few days ago.

  Whitaker made no mention of the fact that Clint was absent this time. Jennifer felt guilty for meeting with this man without her husband—even though she equally suspected that her feelings of guilt were unnecessary. This was strictly business—in a manner of speaking. Moreover, Clint was out of town and wouldn’t have wanted to be here anyway.

  “Did you know that Marcia is working at the Wendy’s in Mydale now?” Jennifer asked. “This frankly surprises me, given that she used to be a National Merit Scholar.”

  “I’ve heard about Marcia,” Whitaker said, taking a sip of his iced tea, “even though I make a point of staying away from her. And yes, I’ve heard that she acts like this not-too-bright woman who works in a fast food restaurant. Well, let me tell you something, Jennifer: Marcia is a lot smarter than she lets on.”

  Jennifer recalled how Marcia had lied to her.

  “Let me tell you a little more about Marcia Vennekamp.”

  “Go on,” Jennifer said.

  Whitaker clenched his lips, obviously at a loss for words. While he might be skilled at performing onstage, he wasn't much of a speechmaker. Or perhaps he was simply uncomfortable talking about old memories that he would have preferred to leave behind.

  Or maybe—like Tom Jarvis—Whitaker was trying to put a favorable spin on past actions of his own that were far from aboveboard.

  “Let’s put it like this,” Whitaker continued. “Marcia was not only more intelligent than she let on, she was also very possessive.”

  Jennifer shrugged. “Lots of teenage girls become possessive when they’re in love for the first time. Lots of teenage boys too, for that matter.”

  “Not like Marcia Vennekamp. She—well, this is kind of embarrassing—but I’d might as well tell you…

  “Marcia never got along very well with her mother. But I found out the hard way that she and her mother have a lot in common. I didn't want to say this the other night—I thought I’d told you enough to get the point across about that family. But now I’m thinking that maybe I should: Marcia threatened to cut off my—my manhood—if I ran around with any other girls.”

  Chris gave Jennifer a wince and an embarrassed smile at the euphemism for his genitalia. “Yes; that’s right—just like her mother did. I’m sure you remember that story I told you about Deborah, coming into my room at night and drugging me with chloroform? Well, it wasn't too long after that, when I received a similar late-night visit from Marcia. Only there was no chloroform this time around, and the issue was me seeing girls other than Marcia Vennekamp.”

  Whitaker blushed, clearly humiliated. “It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? How many teenage boys receive the same intimate threat in a two-month time period from two women in the same family?”

  Jennifer sat back against her side of the booth and pondered what Chris had just told her: It was a stretch, on one hand, to reconcile the present-day image of the passive, slovenly Marcia Vennekamp with the clever, manipulative, and potentially violent image that Chris Whitaker had created. The woman who had been so obsessed with the progress of her frozen pizza could not possibly be the same woman who had once been a straight-A student, could she?

  And could that same woman, at the tender age of seventeen, really have threatened Whitaker with a do-it-yourself castration?

  But then, Jennifer had seen at least part of the evidence online for herself. And she couldn't forget how casually Marcia had lied to her.

  Could it be that her entire identity was an elaborate lie? But to what end? When people pretended to be something they weren’t, they almost always aspired to a higher status—not a lower one.

  The waiter brought their lunches. While they ate, Chris elaborated on the theme of Marcia Vennekamp being a deceptive, manipulative girl who might—if pushed—be capable of violence.

  But except for the (possibly exaggerated) account of her threatening Chris’s genitals, the guitarist was short on details. While they had been dating, Marcia Vennekamp had followed Chris around, he said. In an era right before the widespread proliferation of cell phones, she insisted that Chris call her on her family’s landline every night.

  The same might be said of any teenage girl in the
throes of her first love.

  “What happened when you broke up with her?” Jennifer asked. “That is—I’m assuming you broke up with her, right?”

  49

  April 1994

  Deborah Vennekamp sat at the kitchen table, alone in the house at 1120 Dunham Drive.

  Outside, the torrents of a spring rainstorm made the night a distinctly inhospitable environment. She could see the thick rivulets of rainwater streaming down the blackened windows. The wind made the bushes outside crack together. The wind rattled the gutters.

  Her family should be here with her tonight. They should all be together on a night like this, all together in this beautiful house, which should have been their sanctuary of unity and solidarity against a callous, uncaring world. Instead, her loved ones were all elsewhere, on various missions that were drawing them further apart rather than closer together.

  Richard was out late again—no doubt with his little tramp, whose existence Deborah no longer doubted. She had smelled the tramp’s perfume on Richard’s laundry.

  Marcia was out chasing after Chris Whitaker. The hoodlum wanted to break up with her daughter, and what was her daughter doing? She was chasing after Whitaker in desperation, as if her life depended on that boy’s affections, which Deborah knew were worth nothing.

  Deborah had taken matters into her own hands. She had noticed that her exhibitionist next-door neighbor, Janet, had been traumatized by the disappearance of her cat. Chris Whitaker also had a cat. Deborah had therefore retaliated against him in the same manner.

  Then, to make sure that no doubt remained in the boy’s mind, she had paid Whitaker a late-night visit with a knife and a bottle of chloroform solvent solution. She had found both items among Richard’s building supplies.

  Whitaker had duly taken the message and had ended his relationship with Marcia. To that extent, the situation had gone according to Deborah’s plan.

  But Marcia had failed to see the bigger picture. Like the child that she was, her only concern was the momentary disappointment of her break-up with Chris.

  Marcia had also sensed her mother’s involvement in Whitaker’s recent misfortunes. She had wasted no time in leveling accusations.

  “Mom—how could you do that?” Marcia had screamed. She even appealed to her father, but Deborah and shrugged and insisted on her innocence.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Richard had upbraided his daughter. “Your mother doesn't go around killing people’s pets.”

  Marcia never mentioned Deborah’s late-night visit to Whitaker. Apparently her ex-boyfriend had been too embarrassed or frightened to reveal it. But that would have been easy for Deborah to deny—because it was so outlandish, if nothing else.

  Deborah, moreover, had been in similar jams before. That put her several steps ahead of both Whitaker and Marcia.

  While still a child, Deborah had learned how to get away with murder—or almost murder.

  Deborah had gotten in serious trouble, as a little girl of ten, when she pushed another girl down a flight of stairs at Peabody Elementary School in Cleveland, Ohio.

  There had been a major brouhaha, involving the police and lawyers, and several psychologists. But the evidence against Deborah had been fuzzy. Deborah claimed that although she was standing directly beside the girl when she took her tumble, the girl had tripped.

  The little girl, whose name was Martha Holmes, had had it coming. Martha Holmes had put on airs. Martha made snide remarks about Deborah—about the second-hand sweaters and skirts Deborah was forced to wear because her alcoholic father was perpetually out of work, about Deborah’s habit of standing by herself in the schoolyard, lost in a series of deep daydreams that were impenetrable to others.

  Martha Holmes survived her tumble down the stairs. With the resilience of the young, she even made a more or less full recovery. Yet she had still walked with a pronounced limp the last time Deborah saw her—on the date of their high school graduation almost forty years ago.

  But there were no more remarks about Deborah’s secondhand clothes, or her penchant for daydreaming. On the contrary, Martha made a habit of studiously avoiding contact with Deborah during the remainder of their school years together.

  The little shove down the stairs had taken care of Deborah’s Martha problem; and the slaughter of the unfortunate tabby cat had taken care of Deborah’s Chris problem. But now there was a new problem on that front: her daughter wouldn't let go of the silly boy.

  She still had the problem of Richard’s tramp, too. That would be a more difficult and serious problem to solve, because it involved Richard, who was not as easy to manipulate as their daughter. He might believe a convenient lie concerning a dead cat. If his tramp turned up missing, he would not be so easy to deceive. (And Deborah, for all her conviction about the importance of “taking the necessary action”, wasn't sure if she was ready to step over that line. This was why she had thus far taken no real measures to learn the identity of the tramp; she didn't trust herself.)

  Her son, David, was another problem that she needed to work on. Deborah knew all about his chasing after Josie Taylor, that girl who lived in a trailer with a single mother on the wrong side of the tracks. To make matters worse, it was obvious even to Deborah that the relationship was one-sided. The girl was luring her son with something—most likely sex, or the promise of it. In the next few days she planned to pay an unannounced visit on Maxine Taylor, the girl’s mother. She would set the woman straight, and tell her to keep her little whore away from her son.

  Why couldn't David take an interest in a nice girl, someone like that Brittany Spurlock? There was no guarantee that she would take an interest in David, but had her son even tried?

  No, he had gone directly to the bottom of the barrel, and he was playing the fool for a worthless piece of trailer park trash.

  A sharp gust of rain and wind pelted the windows. The storm was out there, and it wouldn’t leave her or her family alone. She had a series of problems: Chris Whitaker, Josie Taylor, and Richard’s as yet unnamed tramp.

  All three of them were existential threats to her family; and all three of them deserved to die.

  Deborah would prefer that they simply go away on their own. If push came to shove, though, she would take the necessary actions.

  While Deborah was contemplating necessary actions, her daughter was taking what she considered to be necessary actions of her own. Marcia was standing on the front porch of the house where Chris Whitaker lived with his mother, banging on the door, waiting for Chris to answer.

  She knew that Chris was home, because his tan Ford Escort was parked in the driveway. It was a cheap car, really; but she now remembered with longing all the times that she had ridden in it with Chris. In retrospect, she had taken so many of those hours for granted. She wished that she could have them all back, to replay and savor once more.

  She hadn’t been invited to ride in Chris’s Escort of late. Chris had not only broken up with her in a terse phone call, he had also avoided her at school.

  Marcia knew what Chris’s behavior implied: that she was some kind of a freak or something. She was only a sixteen-year-old girl, after all, and Chris—while not a jock—was over six feet tall and more than capable of standing up for himself. When he behaved like he was afraid of her, her resentment always boiled over, which caused her to engage in behavior that made Chris even more afraid.

  She had slipped inside his house one night. (She knew that Chris and his mother were both lax about locking doors; they had little to steal, after all.) Then she had given Chris a little scare with one of her father’s many knives.

  That was probably taking matters too far, she now admitted. Chris, though, had pushed her over the line. It wasn’t really her fault.

  Chris’s mother’s car—an old Chevrolet Monte Carlo with rust around the wheel wells—was mercifully absent from the gravel driveway. At least she wouldn't have to deal with Chris’s mom, then. There was bad blood between her and Deborah (mostly Deborah’
s fault—well, entirely Deborah’s fault), after Deborah had angrily telephoned the woman one night and warned her to “keep your whoremongering son away from my daughter.”

  Some of that inevitable ill will had been transferred onto Marcia, as Marcia saw Mrs. Whitaker frequently, while Deborah never did. There were no more friendly hellos when Marcia came to the house with Chris. She might have been a door-to-door salesperson or an itinerant preacher.

  But after the incident with the cat, it became clear that Marcia was as much a persona non grata at the Whitaker household as Chris was at 1120 Dunham Drive. Marcia therefore interpreted the woman’s apparent absence tonight as the removal of one half of a hostile audience. And Chris was the only one who mattered, anyway.

  She began knocking on the door. (The doorbell, she knew from previous visits, had been broken for years. But Mrs. Whitaker didn't want to pay to fix it, and Chris wasn't exactly handy with any tool that wasn't a guitar.)

  Marcia pounded twice on the door. Then twice more. She told herself that she wasn't overdoing it; the rainstorm was making so much noise that Chris could barely hear her even if she hit the door with a sledgehammer, which didn't seem like a half-bad idea right now. Why was Chris doing this to her? What right did he have to hurt her this way?

  She was about to pound the door once more when she heard footsteps in the rear part of the house, where the bedrooms were located. Chris was going to talk to her, then.

  Maybe if everything went well, there would be a full reconciliation. Then she would give herself to him again tonight, as she had done four times before everything went crazy and all those misunderstandings had occurred. He would lead her back through the house, to his cramped bedroom with all the rock band posters and the dust-covered trophies from Chris’s brief and distant stint with little league baseball.

  But when Chris came to the door his expression revealed that he was in no mood for reconciliation. He seemed to have moved past his fear; he was just plain annoyed at her now—angry, even.