The Cave Dwellers

by Christina McDowell

  “Oh, now you want to see it?” Billy playfully pulls Bunny’s arms down, exerting twice the strength she has. He leans in to kiss her. The elevator abruptly stops, bobbles up and down; the door opens.

  “Guess we’re not getting married,” Bunny says.

  Billy pulls Bunny into his nautical-themed bedroom, trappings of a high school boy on the verge of manhood, sheltered and yearning for adventure. Bunny trails her fingers along his wooden desk. She notices an extra-large bottle of protein powder, leftover Halloween candy from a year earlier, and Abercrombie & Fitch cologne. His bed is made, crisp and smooth, and there’s a giant box of Goldfish under it, conveniently located for weekend hangovers. An Xbox is sprawled on the floor, Vineyard Vines collared shirts hanging perfectly in his closet. A yellow Gadsden flag is strung above the headboard of his bed, the coiled image of a rattlesnake above the words DON’T TREAD ON ME.

  Bunny tries to put her hand up Billy’s sweatshirt again and he flinches in pain. “Careful.” She lifts the shirt all the way up to reveal a white bandage under his heart.

  “Oh my God, your dad’s gonna kill you.”

  “He’d kill me if he knew a lot of things.” Billy moves his hand up Bunny’s pleated skirt.

  She pushes it away. “Hold on, I’m not done talking yet.”

  Billy takes his hand away, both hands up, not guilty.

  “What is it?” Bunny asks of the tattoo, inching toward the windowsill.

  “It’s a secret,” Billy says.

  Bunny shoves open the window and climbs out. “Come on, tell me.”

  “No!” Billy teases, following her.

  Bunny strolls along the balcony, looks at the moon then back to Billy, her elbow propped next to a stone gargoyle. “Has your dad seen that?” She takes a cigarette out of her pocket and lights it.

  “Are you insane?”

  “I meant your sweatshirt.” Bunny exhales, pointing to the logo: NYU.

  “Oh, not sure.”

  “When do you hear back from the academy?”

  “Don’t know.” Billy inches toward her; he wraps his hands around her waist, nuzzling his head into her chest. “Are we done talking now?”

  Bunny gently moves him to the side, walks to the other end of the balcony. “Not yet,” she says, teasing him.

  Billy sighs, leans over the windowsill, grabs his ukulele resting against the wall of his bedroom, and pulls it outside. He strums, completely avoidant of any discussion having to do with his father and the expectations coming for him after graduation.

  Bunny notices and changes the subject. “Who was your dad talking to outside this late?”

  “I don’t know, but my mom was being super weird in the kitchen.”

  “William…” A voice is heard through his bedroom window.

  “Shit, it’s my dad. Hide!”

  Bunny stubs out her cigarette on the railing and crouches down in the corner as close to the side of the house as she can. Billy hops inside, slamming the window shut behind him, leaving Bunny out in the cold.

  * * *

  Billy stands in front of the large glass window, the ukulele dangling at his side.

  “It’s late, Son, you should be in bed instead of playing that stupid-looking thing.”

  Billy sets the ukulele down behind him, turns around, and stands up straight. “Yes, sir.”

  “I need to talk to you about something very important. I’m speaking at the National Press Club tomorrow and I’d like you to come.”

  “What about school?”

  “I’ve already spoken with the school.”

  “Okay. Copy that, sir,” Billy replies.

  The general glances at his sweatshirt then turns to walk out of the bedroom, always brief, yet his presence powerful even with his back turned.

  “Good night, Son.”

  “Good night, Dad.”

  * * *

  Billy exhales—then tap tap tap; he has forgotten Bunny is still outside hiding. He turns around and bolts for the window.

  “What was that about?” Bunny asks, climbing back inside.

  “Nothing, he’s speaking at the Press Club tomorrow, wants me to go.”

  Bunny wraps her arms around him, looks him in the eyes. She understands that Billy doesn’t want to talk about his father, that the general thinks his love of music is a waste of time, the expectations he has for and of his son—to go to West Point, the U.S. military academy, to follow in his father’s and older brother’s footsteps. What neither she nor Billy understands is how those expectations will inevitably tear them apart. Love, they will come to learn, will never be enough.

  Bunny places Billy’s hand up her pleated skirt. He looks into her blue eyes and kisses the fair freckles on her nose as she exhales with innocence and pleasure. Billy smiles, backing her up to the foot of his bed. “Shhh,” he teases. “Be very, very quiet.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Officer Gomez and Officer Nevins are parked outside the Wells Fargo bank in Cleveland Park typing up a police report before they begin their midnight shift. Nevins looks more like a teacher’s assistant at Georgetown University than a cop. White, average build, blond hair, and he wears wire glasses that slide down his nose, while Gomez, shorter, stockier, is Latino with a handsome jawline. They spend most shifts “chasing the radio” in the wealthy suburbs, rescuing old people who fall down a lot.

  Officer Gomez is swiping through his Tinder app when an old white man—popped collar, silver hair—approaches the vehicle and taps on the window.

  “Here we go,” Gomez quips, cracking the window just enough so the old white man can see his eyes clearly.

  “There’s a homeless man sleeping inside the ATM area of the bank right now,” says the old white man, noticeably perturbed.

  “Has he caused you any harm? Has he attacked anyone?”

  “Well, no,” says the old white man, “but—”

  Gomez cuts him off. “Sir, he’s in there because it’s cold outside.”

  The old white man is now leaning toward Gomez’s window, gazing beyond him and into the eyes of Officer Nevins in the driver’s seat, obviously hoping for a different answer than the one he doesn’t like. There is a long and uncomfortable pause before the old white man responds, “So what are you gonna do about it?” He’s crossing his arms now.

  “Sir, unless we get a call from the bank, we are not permitted to go inside and remove him without cause. He’s just sleeping.”

  The old white man huffs and puffs. “Ridiculous!” he says, shaking his head. But he is the old white man who is a progressive! Who voted to help the homeless! To build shelters, not put them in prison! How can this be? Disgusting, he thinks, a homeless man sleeping in the ATM area of his bank.

  “Have a good night, sir.” Gomez would tip his hat if he had one. The old white man storms back to his Audi sedan parked behind them.

  “Every fuckin’ time,” Gomez says, rolling up his window.

  “Take a look at this.” Nevins pushes the computer screen on the dashboard to face Gomez, who looks up from his phone to review the report when—

  The radio crackles to life: “Dispatch for two-one-two-two-one, reports of fire, address is five hundred Wildwood Drive, armed suspect reported, district fire department are on their way.”

  Nevins throws his backpack in the backseat and adjusts his glasses.

  “Go, go, go,” Gomez says, watching as a fire truck and ambulance speed past them in the opposite direction. Before Gomez can buckle his seat belt and Nevins can turn on the engine, two more fire trucks follow with a second ambulance, speeding faster.

  “Woo!” Gomez yells. “We got a big one. Let’s go, let’s go!”

  Nevins turns on the siren before skidding across all lanes, chasing the ambulance in front of him. They turn on Massachusetts Avenue; as they cut around the ambulance, they see a young white girl riding her bike along the sidewalk, a backpack slung over her shoulder: Bunny Bartholomew.

  * * *

  A glass streetl
amp explodes; shards of glass shatter over the windshield as Nevins approaches the flames engulfing a nine-thousand-square-foot colonial mansion. Black smoke billows through weeping willows warping around Wildwood Drive, naked limbs blowing toward Rock Creek Park. A place no longer safe for children to play, no longer safe for tourist horse-and-buggy rides or walking dogs.

  The ambulance and fire trucks are blocks behind them. Most nights it’s a game for the officers, to race their fellow servicemen and -women, but not tonight.

  Nevins gets out of the car, covering his mouth with his forearm. “Jesus! Gomez!” he yells above the approaching sound of screaming sirens, the deep sound of the fire truck horn penetrating his gut. He takes out his gun. Gomez darts toward the back of the house, leaving the car door open, coughing, squinting up at the violent flames bursting through crown molding above expensive windowpanes, charred drywall falling into the dead boxwoods below. The fire is coming from the second level.

  “I hear screaming! Someone is screaming! Gomez!!!”

  Nevins, coughing and swallowing, grabs the radio attached to his chest as he moves closer to the front door. “Two-one-two-two-one, for dispatch this is Officer Nevins, we need backup, I repeat, we need backup!”

  Gomez sprints to meet him. Nevins stands with his ear to the door, trying to pinpoint exactly where the screaming is coming from.

  “Do you hear that?” he asks Gomez, a moment of silence between them and the crackling fire when suddenly the front door blows open, knocking Nevins and Gomez to the ground.

  * * *

  Gomez sits on the curb breathing into an oxygen mask while Nevins is taken into an ambulance with severe burns on the side of his face. A body is dragged out of the mansion by a lone fireman as a dozen others attempt to tame the fire; the body is a woman.

  “She’s breathing! She’s breathing!”

  Blood smears the sidewalk as a stretcher is rushed to her side. The firefighter snips the woman’s top, maneuvering around what look to be stab wounds amidst the burns. In order to preserve the evidence, he carefully places the remnants of her clothing on top of a plastic bag.

  Seconds later, another firefighter wobbles empty-handed out of the mansion, red-faced, covered in soot, smelling of acid and unknown chemicals. He falls to his knees and vomits.

  The fire chief walks over to him. The fireman is hyperventilating in between gasps: “Sir, I have a daughter, I cannot tell you what I’ve just seen.” He hawks up saliva and spits into the ground. He repeats, over and over, “I have a daughter, I have a daughter, I have a daughter.…”

  * * *

  It is written in the papers that David and Genevieve Banks, Audrey, and the housekeeper were brutally tortured before the house was set on fire. The bodies of Mr. and Mrs. Banks were found chained together, charred and limp, gags in their mouths, shadows of their lives dancing across the wall in front of them. Audrey had been beaten with an autographed Ted Williams baseball bat. Mr. Banks’s vintage samurai sword from a work trip to Japan was used to slice her up, then what remained was left to burn.

  It had been the housekeeper who managed to call 911 after being beaten and burned and left for dead; the lone woman, still breathing, still trying to do her job, and eventually dragged out of the house by one of the firemen. She’d died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. There were no survivors.

  But what was more disturbing than the murders themselves was the fact that not one neighbor stepped outside to see if everyone—anyone—was okay. Not one. They didn’t notice when the midnight flames tore through the roof. The gut-thumping sirens driving by merely woke them from a bad dream, or caused the switching of sides of a pillow until they fell back into a peculiar slumber. It was only the next morning, when the news crews showed up—and the FBI—that the Washingtonians emerged, standing protected behind their hedges and fences, mouths agape, hugging their spoiled children.

  No one in Washington wants to be part of a scandal. The consequences are fatal, socially and economically. Survival in this town requires playing chess, and playing it well. Every move calculated. Never being vulnerable, or someone will inevitably prey upon your weakness and turn it into shame. One wrong move could have you ostracized from all social events, removing any chance for leverage and power moves.

  Take the Dobkin family, for example. Mr. Dobkin, a financier, threw a million-dollar wedding for his daughter, and instead of hiring a local wedding planner, chose a celebrity wedding planner. The goal is Town & Country or a New York Times wedding announcement, not the Daily Mail. Turned out said celebrity planner sued for nonpayment, splashing the tabloids with epithets like greedy, cheap, and fraudulent. It was a nasty game of telephone before Mrs. Dobkin was eventually pushed to the outer circle and then picked off for good. Removed from the boards of directors of her charities—she couldn’t keep up with her philanthropic commitments. Mr. Dobkin lost all their money after that in a bad deal. Eventually their house foreclosed and they were forced to rent in Annapolis, Maryland.

  * * *

  David Banks was a quiet man; his weapon of power was silence, and buried beneath it was a family line of money so deep, it was hard for anyone to follow. He preferred a low profile as one of the wealthiest men in Washington. When you googled his name, the only article that came up was an obscure PDF—something about the wiring of funds to some bank in order to pay Ariana Grande for a surprise appearance at one of Audrey’s birthday parties—and it was on page four or five of the search. He wore Brioni suits and collected vintage Ferraris. Rumor was that he’d had a garage built on the property of his château in the South of France to hold all sixty of them. Mr. Banks’s family money originally came from American oil. His grandfather had got in early with the Bolger Brothers back in Texas in the mid-twentieth century, then expanded into several industries such as plastic ware, textiles, and cement: things no human ever thinks about. So that’s why Mr. Banks bought Mrs. Banks a line of linens—the brand that Jackie O and Princess Margaret used for their master bedrooms, children’s rooms, and guest rooms—something a little more glamorous than Tupperware. She wanted to do something with her time other than organize benefits and luncheons at the Sulgrave Club and the Cosmos Club for the arts. She wanted it to be glamorous and provide social status beyond Washington.

  * * *

  Genevieve Banks was the epitome of chic. She never left the house without stockings or her signature Yves Saint Laurent hot-pink lipstick with Chanel beige lip gloss slathered on top. She was no dummy. A buyer for Lord & Taylor in her early twenties, she’d met Mr. Banks when he was still a young lawyer. “I just knew he would make a lot of money on his own,” she would say to her girlfriends, as if his family money weren’t the reason she’d decided to marry him. But there would always be money—and she deserved some sort of prize for it. Mrs. Banks was a girl of good breeding: educated, Ivy League parents (though her parents didn’t come from money, they were intellectuals, upper middle class). She was “good enough” to marry up, but she never felt good enough. Not many people knew this, but she was often a jealous person, competitive with her friends; it made most wonder if she even had any real ones. She was the kind of woman who knew how to find a man and, more important, how to keep him. When she and Mr. Banks had sex, she often sounded like she was tasting apple pie for the first time: “Mmm, mmmm, mmmmm!” She embodied a whole new vision of “fake it till you make it.”

  * * *

  When Mrs. Banks became more notable in the Washingtonian social circle, hosting book parties and election parties and fundraisers for nonprofits like Teach for America, then moving up to hosting events at the French and British Embassies, she became known not just in Washington but through the social ranks of New York. This made Mr. Banks nervous because he couldn’t control her or keep his family contained anymore, which meant he would have a harder time protecting them: Washington Life, New York Social Diary, the Washington Post Style Section, The Glam Pad blog, Facebook, Instagram!

  * * *

 
And Audrey, poor thing, was Little Miss Popular, because it was becoming easier and easier to pay for friends, creating a curated virtual path into the life of a rich kid whom everyone could envy and want something from (Instagram stories on private jets: prayer hands, heart emoji!). Which, of course, posed an even greater risk of breaching the privacy Mr. Banks tried so hard to protect—something the old families of Washington coveted. A “quiet” reputation was desired among the elite of the elite. Those whose old money and manner lurk through the cobblestone streets of Georgetown, Kalorama, and Capitol Hill; those whose names can only be found in the exclusive Green Book—a discriminative, secret diary founded by the niece of Edith Roosevelt’s social secretary—the names of Very Important People. Everyone inside it is wealthy, everyone inside it is powerful, and everyone has a reputation to protect. The pecking order at the top, the aristocratic bloodlines woven into the fabric of Washington, generation after generation after generation, only socialize within their inner circle, which is impenetrable—turning a blind eye to those who come and go on the political merry-go-round, yet rooted within the very foundation America was built upon.

  * * *

  But what they have failed to understand is that the world is changing. It wasn’t until the Banks family was murdered that everything about their legacy was called into question.

  * * *

  They’re called the Cave Dwellers.

  CHAPTER SEVEN