Through it all, Nicola ate her toast and sipped her coffee, nodding occasionally but saying nothing. When he was done, Nicola watched his face, her thin lips pulled tight, her bright eyes appraising. “Do you think this podcast is going to help you?” she said. “Is that why you’re doing it?”
“I don’t know.”
Nicola put the last piece of toast into her mouth and took her wallet out of her purse. “Maybe it’s just because I’m older,” she said. “But I feel like you young kids would be a lot healthier—a lot happier—if you spent less time wallowing in sorrow over things that are inevitable.”
“What does that mean?”
“Parents are human beings. Human beings screw things up. It’s inevitable. Your situation isn’t special or dire or even all that unusual.”
He swallowed hard. “Maybe I didn’t explain it properly.”
“You explained it fine,” she said. “But I’m guessing you’re no perfect prince either, and as far as you and your mother are concerned, it’s a wash at best.”
Quentin opened his mouth, then closed it again. He had no idea what to say to that.
“You want my advice?”
“I suppose?”
“Get over it. Your mother did the best she could. Be grateful to her that you made it into adulthood alive, instead of blaming her for all the troubles you’ve brought on yourself.”
“That’s . . . that’s kind of harsh, don’t you think?”
She tapped at Quentin’s facedown phone. “When you get a chance, play back that recording you thought you were being so sneaky about. Take a listen to how harsh you sounded talking about your dead mother. Then we can talk.”
Quentin stared at her. She dropped a twenty on the table and started to stand up. “This ought to cover me,” she said, and he found himself thinking about how much her voice reminded him of Renee’s—Renee on the Mother’s Day tape, honeyed and calm, telling her daughter how much she meant to her.
“I didn’t mean to make you angry,” he said.
“I’m not angry, Quentin.” She gave him a warm smile. “But you certainly are.”
He looked at her. I am. He was angry almost all the time, though it was only recently that he was having trouble keeping it buried.
Nicola eased back in her seat. “Quentin?”
“Yes?”
“Did you tell the police everything?”
His eyes widened. His face flushed. For a few seconds, he felt as though he were in the midst of a nightmare. “What are you talking about?”
“Did you tell them everything about where you were the night the Blooms were shot?” She leaned against the table, her eyes beaming into his own. “Did you tell them what you saw? What you heard? What you did?”
He could feel the color draining from his face. Was this why she looked familiar? Had she crossed paths with him at the Blooms’? “How do you know where I was?” he said. “Have you been following me?”
She gave him a tight smile and stood up, her purse clasped in her arms. “I was actually just kidding,” she said.
Quentin looked up at her face, the fear creeping into her eyes. You wanted to confess. And you nearly did. Quentin grabbed his phone off the table. He checked the screen and slipped it into his pocket, trying to think of something, anything to say that was moderately reassuring. “It isn’t like that, Ms. Crane,” he said quietly. “It isn’t what you think.” But no one heard him say it. She was already out the door.
Fifteen
Quentin
ONCE QUENTIN WAS back in his car, he took a few deep breaths. There’s a story here, he told himself. Focus on the story.
He listened to the earlier part of his and Nicola’s conversation, scribbling down every name and phrase that might help in following up on Renee’s time in the foster home. Then he called Summer and read all his scribblings aloud to her: Brittlebush, Arizona. 1978. Bill (or William) Grumley. Nicola Crane. C-R-A-N-E. But that could be a married name. Renee White.
“You got some rest,” Summer said.
“A little.”
“You want to do Closure again.”
“I . . . I think it’s worth a shot.”
“Yes!” she said, then cleared her throat, back to business. “So how old were Nicola and Renee when they were in the foster home?”
“I think they were teens. Nicola said she is younger than Renee, but she didn’t say by how much.”
“Teens,” she said. “So you still haven’t found anyone who knew Renee as a child.”
“No.”
“This is getting strange.”
“Not strange enough to mean anything yet.”
“I beg to differ.”
“Renee Bloom is a private citizen.”
Summer didn’t respond. Quentin heard the clacking of a keyboard.
“If we’re going to even mention the idea that April Cooper might be Renee, we need harder proof or else it looks like malicious intent.”
“Duh, Quentin. Please stop mansplaining First Amendment law to me.”
Out of his window, he saw a family leaving the diner, a young woman in jeans, a pink T-shirt, and matching sneakers, holding the hand of a gangly boy in glasses who looked about eight years old. Mother and son.
The clacking stopped. “Brittlebush,” Summer said. “Sounds like a John Waters movie, am I right?”
Quentin forced a laugh.
“Actually, it’s a type of wildflower. The town is near the Arizona border, so it really wouldn’t be that long a drive. And it’s tiny. I don’t think it should be too hard to find out if this woman’s story checks out.”
“Good.”
“Nicola, right? Like the cough drop?”
“That’s Ricola.”
“Whatever. I’ll check it out. I’m assuming there’s no change in Renee Bloom’s condition.”
“Far as I know.” Quentin realized that he hadn’t checked since this morning. Since the shooting, he’d called the same intensive care nurse three times, and the last time, which had been this morning, she’d simply said, “Same,” and hung up on him. Quentin wasn’t making a lot of friends in Tarry Ridge.
“Listen,” Summer said. “I’ve got some news you’re going to like.”
“Yeah?”
“George Pollard has tentatively agreed to an interview.”
“Seriously?”
“Yep.”
“Wow.”
“His family still doesn’t know, so he’s asking if we can disguise his voice, not reveal his name . . . I’m fully expecting him to cancel, but I managed to pin him down.”
“When is the interview?”
“Tomorrow at five.”
“This is great,” Quentin said. “You’re great.”
“Aw shucks.” He could hear the smile in her voice.
“How did you do it?” His eyes stayed on the mother and her son. They’d reached their car now, and they were involved in conversation, the woman crouched down so she could look him in the eye. He figured she was giving him a good talking-to . . . until he saw that it was the boy doing the talking. Quentin wasn’t sure he’d ever experienced that as a child—a grown-up crouching down to listen to him.
Summer was saying, “. . . so now I’m stuck going to knitting group with George’s executive secretary.”
“You don’t know how to knit.”
“I’ve been watching how-to videos on YouTube. I think I can fake it. Oh . . . and I also overnighted you some reading material. The hotel should have it when you get back.”
“Summer?”
“Yeah?”
“Do I seem angry to you?”
“Well . . . are you?”
“No, I mean, do I seem like an angry person? Like . . . all the time?”
“Of course not.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
“Why would you ask me that?”
He drew a shaky breath. “No reason.”
She started to say something more, but he didn’t let her. “I’ll ta
lk to you later,” he said. “Let me know how everything goes.”
Once he hung up, he turned on the voice recorder and played back the rest of his conversation with Nicola. Listened to his entire, three-minute-long I-hate-Mommy harangue. Then he erased it. Nicola was right. It had been very, very harsh.
He was staying at an airport hotel in Newark, a big block of a building as generic as his rental car. He tapped its address into the GPS app on his phone and started up the car without turning on the radio. He watched the mother and son leave the lot in their SUV, listening to the rasp of his rental car’s engine and Siri’s barking directions and recalling, without wanting to, the one thing he hadn’t mentioned in his harangue: his mother’s death; his part in it.
As he pulled out of the parking lot and turned left on the busy road, following the directions leading up to the highway, he allowed himself to remember that afternoon six months ago: the acrid smell of Kate’s room in the so-called sober living house and the way he’d brushed her hair from her forehead, a tender gesture she’d never feel. He recalled how cold her skin had been and the glassiness of her eyes, like a light had gone off behind them. He recalled how he’d cried out and the helper had rushed in (What did she like to be called? The resident associate?), how she’d checked Kate’s pulse at her wrist and neck and said, without seeming to bear any responsibility, that it had been their third overdose that year. He remembered how he’d cried for his mother—not because he’d known and loved her and now she was gone, but because he hadn’t known her, and now he never would.
It had been Dean who had suggested Quentin do a podcast on the murders. He’d told Summer about the idea first, the two of them conspiring behind Quentin’s back as though they were planning a surprise party, then cornering him one night at the bungalow, when Summer had been over for dinner. “It will help you get closure.” One of them had said it, Dean or Summer. At this point, he wasn’t sure which.
It had made some sense at the time, Quentin supposed. He never would have agreed to it if it hadn’t. But now that dinner at the bungalow felt to him like the opening scene in an endless nightmare—the murders, the fallout from them now occupying his every thought, every dream. Closure. What a joke. Mitchell Bloom’s line of shrink-interrogation couldn’t have been more on the nose.
Battling traffic on the Cross County Parkway, Quentin thought about April Cooper and Gabriel LeRoy—how they’d ruined not only his grandfather and his mother, but ruined him too, turning him into the kind of person who doesn’t let an old man know that his only daughter is dead. Your mother put you up to this, Reg Sharkey had yelled at him. And Quentin hadn’t corrected him. He’d been so full of hate, he hadn’t said a word.
By the time Quentin reached his hotel, he was back to his mother’s overdose—the part that he never allowed himself to think about, the one part of it that he hadn’t told anyone, not even Dean. She’d still been alive when he showed up at the sober house. He had seen her sitting up in bed, her eyelids fluttering—and immediately, he’d known what was going on. It had happened before, twice. He had been angry at the people at the sober house for allowing her access to sleeping pills to the point where she’d been able to hoard them again, angrier still at Kate for planning it this way, right before his weekly visit, as though she were forcing him to save her. Forcing a man to save her, because no man had ever done it voluntarily.
He’d pulled out his phone to call 911, just as he had the other two times, and she’d whispered to him, just as she had then. You’re better off without me. Let me go.
And this time, he had. He never pressed send on the 911 call, didn’t attempt CPR the way he had two other times before. He just stood over Kate, watching the life spill out of her, the way April Cooper had watched Kimmy Sharkey fall to the ground.
Relieved. That’s how Quentin had felt. He may have even smiled.
He had felt that way until she was gone, until he brushed the hair from her forehead and gazed into her glassy, wide-open eyes and thought, What have I done? What kind of person am I?
Quentin got out of the car and walked through the hotel parking lot, his vision thick with tears, not for himself but for Dean, for Summer, for anyone else who was deluded enough to believe in him.
“Mr. Garrison,” the front desk clerk called after Quentin, as he made his way through the antiseptic-smelling lobby to the elevator. Quentin’s cheeks were wet. He was a mess. Whatever the guy had to say to him could wait for later. “Mr. Garrison! Mr. Garrison! Mr. Garrison!”
“What?” Quentin shouted it so loud, his voice went hoarse.
There were a few people in the lobby—a family of three, an elderly couple. They all froze in place staring.
Quentin walked over to the front desk, his head down, his fists clenched. The mother drew her child closer as he passed.
“Jesus,” the elderly man whispered. “What a nut.”
“Sorry,” Quentin said to the clerk, though it hardly seemed enough. It’s not me, he wanted to say. Because this wasn’t him. He wasn’t like this. Something was happening to him here on the East Coast. Something dark inside him, surfacing.
Without a word, the clerk held up a FedEx package, his name and the address of the hotel scrawled on the front in Summer’s impatient handwriting. “Thank you,” Quentin said, remembering it now—Summer telling him over the phone about overnighting him reading material. “I was just . . . I went to a funeral today . . .” he said. “I’m a little out of sorts.”
The clerk didn’t respond, and Quentin didn’t blame him. He wouldn’t have. He headed for the elevator, his face wet and burning, guests whispering behind his back.
Once he got back into his room, Quentin put the package aside, opened the desk drawer, removed a piece of stationery, and wrote a long letter to Reg Sharkey. He put it into an envelope and found Reg’s address in the contacts on his phone. He took it downstairs and left it with the desk clerk, giving him enough money to send it first class, plus an extra twenty for “putting up with me being such an asshole,” which finally earned him some eye contact and a smile. “No worries,” the guy said.
Only then, when he was back in his room, did he think about opening the package Summer had sent.
Inside was an old paperback book, accompanied by a note from Summer that simply read: FOUND IT! Quentin looked at the book. The cover had bursts all over it: A special from the editors of The Asteroid! The true story of the Killer Lovers! Soon to be a Movie of the Week! And in the midst of them all, the title: The Inland Empire Killers: ’Til Death Do Us Part.
“God, you’re so good, Summer,” Quentin whispered.
He opened the book and read, losing himself in the lurid prose, the carefully chosen details. Gabriel LeRoy’s lisp, how it had made him subject to bullying as a kid; the long walks a fourteen-year-old April Cooper liked to take, pushing her baby sister, Jenny, in a stroller, in a bid to escape her stern, somber home. The bloodlust that had consumed April and Gabriel both, making them forget their weaknesses as individuals and turning them into a single, murderous entity, “a two-headed monster, fueled by rage.”
He read until the sun began to set and his room grew dark, feeling as though he were on the run with Gabriel and April—Gabriel gripping the wheel of one of many stolen cars, the jumbled thoughts running through his brain as April egged him on, encouraging his madness, driven mad as she was by the untimely death of her mother and the feeling that her stepfather loved Jenny—his biological child—so much more than her . . . He devoured it all, facts and fiction, direct quotes and clear instances of poetic license and paragraphs, pages, where you couldn’t tell the difference, truth and lies bleeding into each other, all to tell the best possible story. Much like a podcast. Much like life.
Quentin was in the final third of the book and feeling bleary-eyed and hungry when a paragraph jumped out at him:
The blood from the gas station murders barely washed from their hands, the killer couple found solace in a roadside diner, where Gabriel rel
ished a plate of steak and eggs and a side of apple pie, washed down with a cheap beer. April’s last meal on the road was more delicate: cinnamon raisin toast and cream cheese, with strawberry jam. “She said her mother used to make it for her,” recalls Gretchen Philips, the waitress who served them. “She said it was her favorite dish.”
“Comfort food,” Quentin whispered.
He removed Nicola Crane’s business card from his pocket and stared at it: A name. A phone number. A P.O. box. The utter lack of information. And he’d never asked her about that—something he normally would have done. He’d gone on and on about himself, his family, without learning about hers. Had she engineered that?
He thought of Nicola’s voice, the honeyed sound of it, so similar to Renee’s. He recalled her tanned, lined face and her sturdy body, but with something so familiar beneath those years of workmanlike muscle, the skin like broken-in leather. Something Quentin knew.
He turned to the middle section of the book and stared at the winter formal picture—April Cooper in her ruffled dress, pale and bony and unformed.
“Is that you?” he whispered to April Cooper’s serious young face. “Is that you, Nicola?”
Sixteen
June 16, 1976
2:00 A.M.
Dear Aurora Grace,
There’s this ride at Disneyland. It’s called Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, and it’s supposedly for little kids. Here’s how it goes: You get in this car with a cute little frog, and everything seems like it’s going to be loads of fun. But the problem is—and this is a huge problem—frogs can’t drive. They can’t even reach the pedals. So, you and the frog end up on this horrible trip where you’re nearly crashing into trees and making fire hydrants explode and getting chased by cops . . . until finally you get into a deadly car accident and you both wind up in hell.
Does that sound like a little kids’ ride to you? (I’m not kidding about the hell part either. The very last part of Mr. Toad is orange and red flames and little red demons dancing around and everything.)
Anyway, one of my earliest memories is going on that ride with my mom. My real dad had left years earlier, when I was just a baby. Papa Pete wasn’t in the picture yet, so it was just her and me back then. I was maybe three or four and when the car started swinging around, I got so scared I started to cry. By the time we got to hell, I was sobbing. But Mom put her arms around me and hugged me tight and said, “It’s only a ride. It’s not real. Nothing like this could ever happen.”
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