“I’m very disappointed about a limited tour,” Carl says. “Were there a lot of stains?”
Trudy ignores him, punches in the code on the lockbox, and pops it open. She extracts a key, and glances at her watch. “I’m just going to take you straight to the room where the murder occurred. If you’re spooked, there’s no point in going further.”
“I won’t be,” Carl says.
* * *
—
We enter a foyer that’s velvet with darkness and dust. The only daylight streams along the bottom of two front windows where the plywood runs at least three inches short. “Watch where you step,” Trudy advises. “The electricity’s turned off. We show this one in the daytime.”
Two circles of filthy stained glass throw some muted color from the top of an ornate staircase. As my eyes adjust, I can make out an empty sitting room to the right and a fireplace with its mouth bricked up. Trudy is already moving briskly down a long hall that stretches in front of us.
Vickie might have walked this hall to her death. I nudge Carl along like he probably nudged her. Trudy is whipping a flashlight at the walls and ceilings in tour guide fashion. I can’t make out her muffled words.
“Did you just say original shit-ass walls?” Carl asks.
We’ve reached a thick paneled door at the end of the hall. I know this beautifully carved door. In pictures, it was bound with yellow tape. Carl and I are stacked closely behind Trudy while she flashes her light at her keys, finding the one she wants.
“Shiplap walls, sir. Ship-lap walls.” She throws open the door and ushers us inside a long shallow room that runs all the way along the back of the house. Enough light seeps through the cracks in the outside wall that I can see the raisins of rat feces on cheap linoleum, the broken ribs of two old wooden chairs, the graffiti of a pink fluorescent cross on one of the plywood windows, the letters ADIH spray-painted on another.
“What does this mean?” Carl, already at the window, is tracing a finger over the H.
“Another Day in Hell,” I translate under my breath.
Trudy has moved deeper into the room. “Teenagers. Have to change the lock on the door once a month. The cops still have to do a nightly swing-by. It’s every hour on Halloween.”
When she flips her face around, I catch my breath. There’s a reason I couldn’t hear in the hall. A white mask smothers her nose and mouth. Only her eyes are visible. More concerning, she has lifted her shirt to reveal a triangle of pale stomach fat and a holster with a gun.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you. This is a special mask I’ve had made for my allergies. Who knows about the asbestos in these old places? I used to bring surgical masks for clients, but it got expensive and most are giving me the runaround. I haven’t sold a fixer-upper Victorian in five years.”
My eye is glued to her hand, now resting on a holster that looks a little like the one in my suitcase. This was not a time when I thought I needed to strap it on.
“My husband insists on the gun. You read the Internet, you know what happens to real estate ladies. There’s no need for you to be judgmental. You’d be lucky to have me sitting by you at a movie these days when a semi-automatic comes out of the dark.”
“I’m sure real estate…is a dangerous occupation,” I mumble. Carl is off in a corner, oblivious, in low conversation with a wall. I make out the word choke. And Art. He wants to choke Art?
“Well, he’s found the spot,” Trudy says, nodding at Carl. “You can’t imagine the weirdos and ghost hunters who’ve called and emailed. Vickie Higgins was a nice girl. She deserves every respect in death. She had a beautiful life ahead of her. Her husband still lives in the same house, on the next street over. I sold it to him the year before Vickie died. Vickie had fixed it up so cute, then his new wife came in and tore almost every bit of history out of that place. Did you know Vickie vanished on the first anniversary of their marriage? The steak was thawed on the kitchen counter and going gray when he came home for dinner. This house was empty. They didn’t find the scene for thirteen days.”
“She was stabbed right here, wasn’t she?” Carl asks from the far end of the room. “Blood sprayed all over. Sank right in the red wallpaper. It had an artichoke motif. You can see a little bit of it here, in this corner. All this texture would make an interesting photograph.” He draws his hands up to his face and clicks his tongue.
“OK, that’s it. We’re done.” Trudy’s weapon is out of its home. A Ruger. She’s gesturing with it toward the door.
Carl isn’t moving, mesmerized by the wall.
* * *
—
On the lawn, the sun splinters the spell of the house. Trudy ushered us out pronto. Now she is back to the practical matters of stripping off her mask and re-holstering the gun like she’s done this a hundred times. I turn to Carl. “Why don’t you give Barfly a bathroom break? The leash is on the backseat floor. I’ll finish up here with Trudy.”
Carl makes the cuckoo sign with his index finger and points at Trudy, whose head is down as she fiddles with her holster. “I’ll be with you in a minute,” she is saying. “Don’t want to blow a hole in my lady parts even though I don’t use them much.”
When she looks up, I’m holding out a fifty-dollar bill. “Please don’t be insulted,” I say. “We didn’t come to waste your time. Maybe you and a friend can have a nice dinner on…Dad and me. It’s a beautiful house, but I can tell my father would be fantasizing all the time about what happened here.”
The money hangs in the air while she considers my motives and her teeth scrape at what’s left of her lipstick. Most of it is now a bloody smear inside the mask dangling off her wrist.
I’m sure she doesn’t believe me. It’s clearly a bribe.
“Oh, why the hell not? My sister and I might go into Marlin for dinner this weekend.”
“Terrific. Thank you again.”
“Wait. I don’t like to let inaccuracies go. There was no red wallpaper in that room. It was blue. And Vickie Higgins was shot in this house, not stabbed. They dug eight bullets out of the walls. And she wasn’t found here, she was never found. There was, however, enough blood to declare her dead pretty much on that alone. And then there was all that business near the Orviss Crypt where her parents put up a fancy stone and buried a coffin that’s waiting for a body that has never shown up. But I expect you know all about that.”
I nod. Texas ghost websites say Vickie’s wedding veil floats over her empty grave, sometimes in the sunshine. Ridiculous.
Trudy’s expression switches to pity. “Back there in the house, your dad might have been remembering anything. The time his grandmother lost control of her mixer and red velvet cake batter spattered all over the place. I feel for you, hon. I see all the warning signs. My mother got morbid at the end. Paranoid. Thought someone was following her. She opened a can of French-cut green beans and tried to go after my sister with the lid. My sister was a bitch. Never wanted a single dish or a potato peel left in the sink at any hour of the day. Grabbed the glass of tea out of your hand to wash it before you got the last drink out. That doesn’t change my advice on your dad. Watch your back.”
22
It’s a game of chicken, whether the real estate agent or I will drive off from Bloody Victoria first. I pretend to be settling Barfly in the backseat until she waves her hand like a white flag of surrender and pulls away.
I wait another five minutes before maneuvering the same street corner. Trudy’s yellow MINI Cooper is nowhere in sight when I park in front of the baby Victorian where Vickie Higgins used to live. One block over and two blocks down from where Vickie Higgins died.
Way too close, I think.
Yet this is still the address of Jon Higgins, once the newlywed husband of Vickie. I’d checked and then checked again. Trudy had basically confirmed it a few minutes ago. Most of the Victorian femininity of this house has been stripped away just like she said. Only a tiny gingerbread detail over the front porch survived. Fog gray siding, alum
inum, let-no-scrap-of-air-in windows, a boxy addition—all changes that cheapen it.
There’s a Fisher-Price basketball hoop in the driveway and a fancy pink tricycle locked to the porch railing. The pristine St. Augustine yard is outlined with the three-inch-deep edging of an anal-retentive landscaper. Maybe a few blocks, a new wife, and two kids are enough to make Jon Higgins forget his ugly past is a short dog walk away. Or maybe he doesn’t want to.
There’s nothing to gain by jumping out of the car. Jon Higgins didn’t respond to my letters, email pleas, or calls to the secretary in his law office. It doesn’t appear that anyone is home anyway. I just want to see again for myself where Vickie left the steak to turn gray. I want to know whether stopping here will inspire Carl to say something. Whether the striking colors of the house when Vickie lived here are imprinted in some corner of his brain.
A year ago in a Dallas diner, Vickie’s mother had shown me a photo of her youngest daughter, smiling, right by this porch, perched on a ladder with a paintbrush in her hand. “Vickie was so proud of her Painted Lady,” she’d told me. “Painted it green with pimiento-colored shutters and named the house ‘Olive.’ She wanted every historical detail accurate to 1890s San Francisco. She couldn’t make up her mind at first. Should it be purple and peach? Aqua and gold? And on and on. She found California newspaper editorials from back in the old days that warned the trend in violent color clashes was going to incite neighborhoods to madness. Sometimes, I wonder if they were right. If the paint job drove somebody to kill my daughter.”
Vickie’s mother had revealed these details well into our two-hour conversation, when our eyes were already red. She’d shown me the photo of Vickie’s wedding dress that wound up stuffed by its lonely self in a casket in a hole in the earth because Vickie, like my sister, was never found.
Vickie’s mother hadn’t recognized Carl in a six-picture lineup I laid down on top of a paper placemat with word-cross games and tic-tac-toe.
We’d met fifteen miles from her house. She’d thought this would be a safe way for her to satisfy the strange young woman who dialed up and begged to meet because someone she loved disappeared into the ether, too. Of course, I already knew exactly where she lived: a brick ranch-style home in Plano that fit with her teacher’s pension, right next door to her oldest daughter, who had slammed her door in my face two years earlier.
After one cup of coffee, I wasn’t worried. Vickie’s mother wanted to talk about her daughter, no matter what my motive or how much of a liar I was, at whatever risk to herself.
“Heads up,” Carl says.
* * *
—
One of the doors to the detached garage is beginning to scroll up. Someone either coming or going. The answer squeals into the driveway—a green Prius that slams short. A skinny, red-faced woman in black yoga pants and a tight pink top is barreling out of the driver’s side toward us. I’m guessing it’s DeeDee, Jon’s second wife, the woman who took a thoughtless gray eraser to Vickie’s house. She’d taken another eraser to the wrinkles on the Facebook profile picture I’d found. Like Trudy.
“Trudy just called to warn me about you,” she’s screeching. “Get the hell off our property before I phone my husband. Or get the cops.”
She’s already at my car window, leaning in, providing me intimate knowledge of every rough patch on her unmade face, the skunk of her yoga sweat, and the dutiful boiled egg she had for breakfast.
Several photographs of Vickie, blond and pale and pretty, lay sorted in one of the containers in the trunk. This woman is a lesser Vickie, a poorly sketched reproduction. Vickie’s mother told me that she’d met Jon’s second wife at the memorial ceremony after her daughter was declared dead in absentia. Jon deserves that woman, she told me bitterly. He always worked too late. The blame was subtle but furious.
“Technically, we are not on your property,” Carl announces to DeeDee. “We’re on the street. And we don’t know a Trudy.”
“You son of a bitch. Trudy told me the kind of car you drive.” DeeDee reaches into the car and clinches my ponytail in a painful hold.
“I’d let go if I were you,” Carl warns. “More for your sake. She’s tougher than she looks.”
The woman maintains her grip on my head. “I’m sick of Vickie being my fucking shadow.”
“Did you ever think that you are Vickie’s fucking shadow?” Carl says coolly. I try to shoot Carl a warning look, but I can’t turn my neck. DeeDee’s grip is unrelenting.
He is right about one thing. I know how to break her vise. I’m just not ready to do it. Carl’s mind has sprung to life again. Maybe he recognizes this house. Remembers Vickie. Maybe he did all along.
“You know that Nicole Lakinski, who went missing in Waco?” Carl asks her. I feel a warm drop of his spittle on my cheek.
“Are you listening to me, old man? I don’t give a shit.” DeeDee’s shriek travels the street, quiet and still except for the merciless humming of air-conditioning units.
“Nicole and Vickie had an interesting personal connection,” Carl persists.
“What connection?” DeeDee and I ask almost simultaneously.
“It’s a detail not revealed at the Waco trial. My lawyer and the prosecutor didn’t seem to think it benefited either side.” Carl reaches over and seizes her wrist, still attached to my ponytail. “You might want to ask your husband why.”
The muscled knot in his forearm works like a twitchy nerve. He’s holding firm.
“I recognize you now,” DeeDee says slowly. “You’re that photographer who got off. The serial killer. I read that you were homeless. Locked up in some halfway house.”
Barfly is beginning to bark—one short yip and then a rapid-fire burst. I don’t want him to break open his stitches. I definitely don’t want a neighbor to call the cops. DeeDee’s eyes dart from me to Carl. She struggles against his clench. Every tiny hair at the top of my scalp is screaming.
“Tell anyone about me and I may pay you another visit,” Carl says. “Do you like having your picture taken?”
Enough. I hit the window button and watch it glide up. “Sorry,” I mouth as DeeDee yanks her arm free from Carl and stumbles back.
I really am a little bit sorry for her. A dead woman, no matter how sweet she was in life or how very dead now, is a tricky bitch.
DeeDee can paint the outside of her house whatever the hell color she wants, but dead Vickie is still making calls inside. She decides how good DeeDee’s sex life is and how often her husband will say I love you. How angry DeeDee might get at her kids, how ignored or spoiled they will feel, which toys will be broken and when and why.
Whether DeeDee will stop at one glass of wine or three, will sleep two hours or seven, will bother to put on makeup and make the bed and stack all the mindless pillows. No matter how much yoga DeeDee does, it will be Vickie who decides how deeply she is allowed to breathe.
Maybe DeeDee wasn’t always a ponytail-puller. Maybe Vickie wasn’t as much of a cherry pie as her mother said she was. The dead are always washed clean.
I don’t speak to Carl until DeeDee is a little stick figure in the back window. I’m certain her little stick fingers are dialing trouble, but I halt the car abruptly in the middle of the road anyway.
“Is that true? Is there a connection between these missing women? Did the prosecutor bury evidence?” The Nicole Lakinski case lives and breathes inside me more than any of the others except my sister’s. That’s because there was so much to devour: depositions, trial transcripts, newspaper and Internet stories. I bought more than a few Shiners for the cops who were the primaries. I flirted and crossed the line with men I shouldn’t have. And, still, I may have missed the biggest piece.
“Not that I know of,” Carl says. “Remind me. Who else do you think I killed?”
23
The moon is a giant orange ball playing hide-and-seek with a bank of night clouds. Soothing, if driving this pitch-black country road didn’t feel like being buried alive, if the tires
weren’t moaning against the asphalt, if I didn’t think there was a serial killer sleeping beside me. I’ve tried the radio, but it’s full of deafening static.
Every now and then, I hit a surprise rut, which jolts my nerves. It’s also saving me from nodding off. Barfly is knocked out in the back with his evening painkiller. Carl swallowed his pills or at least pretended to. He’s slumped on a feather pillow propped against the door. At his feet, a small pile of rocks and pebbles he “panned” out of a Kohl’s parking lot. “Gold,” he told me.
He had insisted on buying a 100-percent-down pillow and a 500-thread-count American flag pillowcase, and another pillow and sleeping bag for Walt, which he arranged neatly across the floor of the backseat. “Like a bunk bed,” he told Walt. Or Barfly. Or both. Another $310.24, blown.
I think about all those video cameras that recorded Carl and me in the Kohl’s home goods department, at the register, in the parking lot, when all I really wanted to do in Bryan, Texas, was quietly retrieve a new rental vehicle and double-check a hotel reservation.
I’d changed clothes at the Whataburger where we stopped for a late lunch. Goodbye to the Ann Taylor sundress. My costume for the next act was a jean skirt that rides high, a tight white tank top, a red push-up bra, and four-inch cheap strappy sandals. I freed my long hair, stuck in the nose ring, circled my eyes with black liner.
At the Avis car center down the road, I had confidently flaunted my second fake driver’s license. The hair in the picture was blond and mine was still Cherry Cola but I’d decided it was worth the risk.
I giggled and flirted and lied and asked the cute guy named Mike behind the counter if he’d read the sci-fi thriller where red-haired girls are like Kryptonite to one of the main villains. My boyfriend loved that book, I told Mike. I dyed my hair red because it made him happy. We are going on a hunting trip to Oklahoma, but after that I may break up with him. He is already talking about me getting a boob job, when aren’t my breasts nice enough?
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