“I don’t know. Probably. He wants to stop what he’s doing and maybe I can help him do that. It’s the only thing I can do.”
“I think you should go to the police and tell them everything, even if they don’t believe you. Put it on record.”
“So you believe me now?”
“Yes! I mean, I believe that you’ve been talking with this creep, and he’s been telling you that he kills people, and that you believe him.”
“So now it’s him you don’t believe?” Hen was standing at the foot of the stairs, one hand on the bannister.
“I don’t know what to believe.” Lloyd took a deep breath, his mouth open. Hen noticed how dry his lips were, almost white at the edges.
“We’ll talk more tomorrow, okay?”
Hen slept a small amount just after dawn. The light in the room gave the undersides of her lids a reddish tint, and she pretended she was lying at the edge of the lake in the Adirondacks where her parents owned a bare-bones cottage. It was one of her happy places, surrounded by pines, the cool lake water still on her skin, the distant sound of a motorboat. Then she was awake, and the motorboat was actually a lawn mower somewhere on Sycamore Street. She sat up in bed, realized she’d forgotten to take her meds the night before, so doubled up on them now, then went and took a shower. Afterward, she dressed, but couldn’t bring herself to go downstairs and resume the conversation with Lloyd. It was exhausting and sad, and she was surprised to find that a part of herself didn’t really care all that much. The shock of his infidelity had already worn off, and she was somehow numb to it. What she really wanted to do was to go downstairs, tell Lloyd that he should just go to work, and they could talk some more later. She wanted to be alone and maybe go to her studio, and she wanted to continue her conversation with Matthew, find out more about his brother and what was going on there.
She lay back on the bed and listened to the house. She wondered if Lloyd was up yet, but couldn’t hear anything. Finally, she braced herself and went downstairs, expecting to see Lloyd still on the couch, probably still crying. Why did he get to cry so much? She was the one who got cheated on.
When she got to the first floor, the couch was empty, the single blanket lying on the floor.
“Lloyd,” she said aloud, and as soon as she said it, she realized he wasn’t in the house. She walked to the window that faced the driveway. The Golf was gone. There was no note in the kitchen, the place where he’d most likely leave one. Had he just gone to work, taking the car instead of the train? No, that made no sense. And if he had he would have let her know. He wouldn’t have left while she was still asleep upstairs. She pulled her phone out. No text messages, and no voice mail. She dialed his number, and as she started to listen to it ring, a familiar noise came from the living room, the opening notes of “Coronado,” the Deerhunter song Lloyd used as his ringtone.
She hit End on her phone and went and found Lloyd’s cell, underneath the blanket by the couch. And then she began to really worry. Had he gone to the police to tell them about Matthew? Or maybe he’d gone directly to Matthew himself. But that didn’t make sense, because why would he take the car to do that? He’s gone to pick up breakfast, Hen told herself. He’s driven to that amazing bakery in Dartford Center to get those apricot scones that I like and two large coffees, and he just forgot to bring his phone with him. She told herself this, but didn’t quite believe it. It was something else, something bad.
She went to the living room window and looked across to Matthew’s house. His car was gone as well, which made sense, since he’d be at school by now. There was nothing to see, but she stayed there anyway, looking out at her neighborhood, not knowing what to do next.
Richard
I didn’t know that blood could jump like that, almost like it wants to leave the human body, get as far away as possible. I’d read about it, of course, in books, and I’d seen it in movies, the way arterial blood will spray. But to see it in reality, to see the life of it, that was something . . . something I can’t even express in words.
Dad loved blood, too. I know that not just because he showed me that bra once when he returned from his business trip—the bra with the bloodstain on it, the bra I still have, hidden away with Dad’s things. No, I know it because after he broke Mom’s nose at the dinner table, and she just sat there, immobile, and let the blood run out of her face and spill out over everything—the broken plate, the porcelain tabletop, the dinner napkins, the linoleum floor—I caught Dad pulling one of the napkins from the laundry basket. It was brown and stiff from all the blood, and when he saw me looking at him, he winked and said, “Another souvenir.”
I wonder if Dad ever saw what blood can really do when you unleash it. I wonder that a lot, and for a time I sought out unsolved murders, looking at the places where he used to go most frequently on his business trips. I always found something—every town in America has murdered girls in it, their murderers unknown—but I could never know for sure that it was my father who had done it.
It’s possible that I now know what he never did, that blood has a life all its own.
Matthew now knows about what I did to his girlfriend Michelle. He knew it the moment I left him the keys, of course, but he had to go and see it for himself. I watched him from a distance, wondering what he’d do about it once he found out for sure. Would he go straight to the police and turn me in? So far he hasn’t. At least not that I know of. I just don’t think he will. Mom never went to the police, and Matthew is the one in the family who’s most like Mom.
No, Matthew is much more likely to try to deal with me himself. Keep it in the family, he’d say. He killed Dad, after all, even though he swears to me that he didn’t. But we both know that it was him. Matthew got bigger than Dad by his junior year of high school. He “sprouted,” to use the word Mom liked to use. Dad must have noticed, because he got a little more careful around the house, a little more restrained when it came to the games he played on Mom. And Mom, never one to waste an opening, took advantage. I remember how she used to drop other men’s names into conversations. “Oh, Porter,” she’d say. “Ran into Dick Humphries this morning. He told me to tell you he hopes you’re feeling better soon.” This was when Dad had the bad back. It made him meaner, but there was less he could do about it. The last time he threatened Mom, grabbing her by the throat while she was doing dishes, Matthew shoved him so hard he went down on the kitchen floor and just stayed there for an hour, his back seizing up. Mom asked him if he wanted his dinner down on the floor.
The reason I know that Matthew was the one who shoved Dad down the cellar stairs was that Dad never went down there, at least not that I know of. Our cellar was just half the size of the first floor, a glorified fruit cellar, really, nothing down there but some moldy boxes containing the few keepsakes that Mom had taken from her parents’ house after they’d both finally died. There was one of those giant freezers down there, where Mom used to keep frozen meat and Swanson dinners, but it had stopped working one summer, and after Mom threw out all the spoiled meat, she’d never gotten it fixed or bought a new one. No one in the family went down to the cellar, so it made no sense when Dad was found at the bottom of the steps, dead from a head wound. It happened when both Matthew and I were at school, and Dad was home with the bad back. I know how easy it would have been for Matthew to sneak away from the school, cut through the woods to our house. Matthew was strong enough then, and Dad was weak enough, that Matthew could have carried him to the cellar stairs and thrown him down himself.
I was the one who found him, of course. My father, reduced to a rag doll with a head that turned the wrong way. There was no blood anywhere. All the death that happened to my father happened inside of his skin.
Michelle thought I was Matthew, of course, just like Sally Respel had. By the time she realized I wasn’t, it was too late. I was in her home, the door shut behind me. In the light of her sad apartment she could see my face.
I dream again about the dark house with its man
y rooms. I have the dream so often now that I know I’m dreaming when I have it. And I know that the person I’m looking for can’t be found. There are too many hallways and too many rooms, too many places for him to hide.
But I don’t really have a choice but to keep looking. The ceilings are low in this large house, and I’ve never given it too much thought, but there are no windows, just dark rooms that lead to other rooms. I tell myself to stop opening the doors, but I can’t stop even when I find terrible things in them: a rabbit split down the middle, but still alive; a Thanksgiving turkey, its cavity filled with spiders; our mother giving birth on the kitchen floor, but all that’s coming out is a river of blood.
Despite all this, I keep opening doors, keep hoping.
I’m in hiding now, even though it’s only Matthew who’s trying to find me. That will all change soon. The body will begin to smell and the neighbors will notice. Or someone will miss her and go check, and then I’ll be in hiding from the police as well. It’s only a matter of time.
Matthew calls me and calls me, even though he knows I’m not going to pick up.
I followed him back to his house after he went to Country Squire. I watched him get out of his car, and I saw the way he looked toward his neighbors’ house with something like longing. What has he told the neighbor? I peered through their window, and all I saw was some guy tossing and turning on the living room couch. I could feel the woman, though, Henrietta, in the house. She’s cast some sort of spell over my brother. I know this much. I get it. I finally saw her up close during Open Studios at Black Brick. Matthew didn’t know I was there, but I was. She wore tight black pants that showed her ankles and a large oxford shirt, the sleeves rolled up, and I bet she told herself that she looked like an artist, that all the men wandering into her studio weren’t imagining what was under that oversized shirt and under those pants, that they were interested in her children’s drawings. She crouched by one of her presses, pulling out a large sheet of paper, and I saw the skin above her pants, skin that looked as though it had never seen the sun, and her delicate rib cage.
I imagine all the blood that that skin, thin as tissue paper, must hold. I imagine she’s warm.
If I really wanted to get Matthew’s attention, then I think I killed the wrong woman.
Part 3
Brothers
Chapter 32
Instead of panicking, Matthew remained calm. He left Michelle’s apartment the way it was, but not before he called Michelle’s number one more time and listened as her phone rang from her kitchen counter, where it was plugged into a charger.
He unplugged it and slid it into his pocket, then slowly backed out of the apartment, making sure to wipe anything he might have touched with the sleeve of his sweatshirt. When he got to the hallway, he locked the door, then moved as fast as he possibly could out to the apartment courtyard and his car. He drove away, finding himself on a back road surrounded by woodlands on either side, his headlights providing a tunnel of light against the black. He came to an intersection, and a sign pointed him toward Dartford. He knew where he was now, passing an ice-cream stand that was only open during the summer months, a place he’d been with Mira on several occasions. He pulled into its empty parking lot, dousing the lights, and walked steadily toward the back of the single-story ice-cream stand. There was a small dumpster and two or three picnic tables. Where the gravel ended, a weedy field began, bordered on one side by a stone wall and on the other by a line of trees, dark against the purple sky. Matthew walked a hundred yards out into the field until he got to a section that was particularly rocky. He crushed Michelle’s phone between two flat rocks he found, shattering it so that he had to search through the weedy grass for fragments, then buried the busted phone and the keys underneath a larger rock he’d pried from the earth. The moon had crept out from behind clouds, and in its silvery light he could see earthworms moving in the damp black soil under the rock. He carefully put it back, then walked another hundred yards toward the line of trees. Just beyond the trees was a wire fence that marked the edge of a cow pasture. Matthew leaned over the fence and was violently ill. When he was done, he saw that one of the cows clustered together had turned her head to look toward him. Then the moon went back behind a cloud.
He drove home, trying not to think too hard about what he was going to do, trying to keep the panic from rising.
He doused the lights of the Fiat just as he pulled into his driveway, aware that it was very late and not wanting to be spotted by neighbors. He looked toward Hen’s house, noticed that the living room lights were still on, wondered briefly what had happened after the husband came home and found the two of them talking on the porch. Her husband had looked concerned, of course, his dull eyes taking in everything slowly, passing from Matthew to Hen and back to Matthew, not quite knowing what to think or to say. Was he smart enough to see the intimacy between them? Did he think they were having an affair?
Back inside his dark house, Matthew paced, briefly allowing himself a fantasy of killing Lloyd. They were in a spotless white room—maybe it was an upscale hotel room in Boston—and Lloyd was wrapped in duct tape so tightly that the only part of his body he could move was his eyes. Matthew lifted him and put him in a deep bathtub, turned on the water, and watched Lloyd drown, watched all the swagger and lustfulness and arrogance disappear from those eyes as he began to realize exactly what was happening. The fantasy was only a little bit distracting, because Matthew knew that in all likelihood he’d never be able to enact it. Those days were long gone, thanks to Richard. Matthew did jumping jacks, then climbed the stairs to the second floor.
If I act like nothing happened—if I brush my teeth and wash my face and tuck myself into bed—then maybe nothing did happen.
It didn’t work. Matthew lay in bed and thought about what was coming next. The police would discover Michelle’s body, and because of her relationship with Scott Doyle, they’d instantly think the two murders were connected. It’s possible they wouldn’t, the murders being so different—but, no, that was just wishful thinking. They would. They’d link Scott’s and Michelle’s deaths together, and once they did that, then they’d remember that one of the first suspects brought in after Scott Doyle’s murder had been Matthew Dolamore, who worked with Michelle Brine. Not just in the same school, but in the same department. Matthew could hear Dylan Hembree’s voice: “Oh, they were always talking. Some people thought there might be something going on there. Plus, I remember a weird conversation when Matthew invited her to go to a bar with him, maybe it was even some night Scott was playing in the C-Beams.” Of course the police would come back to him, and he wouldn’t have an alibi this time. Not for Michelle’s murder, anyway. And then the police would talk with Hen again, and maybe this time they’d believe her. She’d even tell them that he mentioned Michelle to her. And the closer they got to him, the closer they got to Richard.
Matthew could imagine one other scenario. What if he could convince the police that Henrietta Mazur killed Scott Doyle and Michelle Brine, that she did it to frame him for the murders, that it was all part of her weird obsessive fixation with seeing murderers everywhere, that she wanted to be right just one time. He thought it could work, but he’d never be able to do it, never be able to do that to her. She didn’t deserve it. But what about Lloyd? What if he managed to get some evidence—a single hair, for example—and sneak back and leave it at the scene of the crime? It would be like killing two birds with one stone. Even if it turned out that Lloyd was never convicted, it would confuse the police, throw them off the track. The more he thought about it, the more it seemed like a good idea.
An hour before school began, Matthew got out of his bed. He hadn’t slept at all, and all the muscles of his body ached. He worried for a moment that he was sick and touched his fingers to his forehead, but thought that he’d probably just been tensing his body so much that he’d exhausted it. In the shower, he slowly rotated his head as far back as it would go, his neck joint crackling and s
ending darts of satisfying pain down his back. He needed to sleep and let his body heal, but he also knew that he needed to go to work, that he couldn’t do anything out of the ordinary now.
It was cold outside, the front lawn wet with dew. Half the sky was gray with clouds, and half was a milky blue. He got into his car and turned on the engine, flipping through radio stations until he found a classical music station far to the left of the dial. He couldn’t listen to normal human voices this morning talking about the weather or politics or postseason baseball. The windshield was fogged on the outside, and he flicked his wipers on, then rolled down his passenger-side window. He allowed himself one quick glance toward the neighbors’ house and saw a figure in the window move away just as he was turning his head. That’s Lloyd, he told himself. Hen told him everything, about our meetings and what I said, and now he really does believe her, and he’s keeping an eye on me. That’s okay. If he comes after me he won’t know what hit him.
Matthew drove slowly out of the driveway, turned left on Sycamore Street. There were two ways he drove to Sussex Hall. The fastest was along Route 2, but he often took back roads, picking up Littleton Road in Dartford Center. Today he headed to Route 2, moving slowly, keeping his eyes on his rearview mirror. It was when he was halfway to school, having just gone through the Concord rotary, that he spotted the light gray Golf about three cars behind him. It didn’t necessarily belong to Lloyd—this part of the world was full of Volkswagens—but Matthew knew that it did. He turned off on the exit that would take him to school. The Golf did as well. He wondered what Lloyd was planning on doing. Was he just following him to see where he went? No, Matthew decided, Lloyd was going to confront him in the school parking lot. He could picture it already, Lloyd sputtering out, “Stay away from my wife or I’ll fucking kill you,” or something like that, while other teachers and students gawked. So instead of driving through the main entrance like he normally did, Matthew went through the second entrance, the driveway that looped around toward the back of the school. He was hoping the back lot would be empty and it almost was, just a few cars parked there, probably belonging to the custodial staff. Matthew pulled up next to the loading dock, waited thirty seconds, then watched as Lloyd’s Golf rounded the corner tentatively, pulling in two spaces away.
Before She Knew Him Page 21
