Rory starts setting up his video game.
“You okay?” he says.
“I’m fine.”
He doesn’t answer. Bloody Hell VII is booting up.
I leave, because I have to get to a tennis lesson. I have canceled far too many recently.
Down the road, at the club, a middle-aged woman is waiting for me. She has straight dark hair, a deep tan, and an accent. Kekona is Hawaiian. When she gets frustrated, she curses in pidgin.
Kekona is a retired widow, which means she has a lot of time to pay attention to what everyone else is doing. And she gossips about it. Because of Kekona, I know who is sleeping with whom, which couples are breaking up, who is pregnant, and which kids are getting into trouble. Sometimes, it is more than I want to know. Sometimes, I just want to teach tennis.
Today, I learn one of Rory’s teachers may be having an affair with a student’s father. It is disturbing, but at least she isn’t having an affair with the student. She also has news about the McAllister divorce, which has been going on for more than a year now, along with a new rumor about a possible reconciliation. She is quick to label that one as “probably unreliable, but you never know.”
Thirty minutes into our one-hour lesson, she mentions Lindsay.
This is unusual, because Lindsay was not found within our little community of Hidden Oaks, nor was she a member of the country club. Lindsay lived, worked, and was found twenty miles away, which is outside Kekona’s gossip zone. Most of the time she stays inside the Oaks, deep within its gates, where she lives in one of the largest houses. She lives less than a block away from where I grew up, and I know Kekona’s house well. Or I used to. My first girlfriend lived there.
“There’s something weird about this girl in the motel,” Kekona says.
“Isn’t there something weird about all murders?”
“Not really. Murder is almost a national pastime. But then again, normal girls don’t just show up dead in abandoned motels.”
Kekona says what I’ve been thinking all along.
The motel still baffles me. I don’t understand why Millicent didn’t bury her or take Lindsay’s body a hundred miles out to the woods, or anywhere but here, near where we live, in a building where she was sure to be found eventually. It doesn’t make sense.
Not unless Millicent wants to get caught.
“Normal girls?” I say to Kekona. “What’s a normal girl?”
“You know, not a drug addict or a prostitute. Not someone who lives on the fringe. This girl was normal. She had a job and an apartment and, presumably, paid her taxes. Normal.”
“Do you watch a lot of those police shows?”
Kekona shrugs. “Sure, who doesn’t?”
Millicent doesn’t. But she does read the books.
I send my wife a text:
We need a date night.
Millicent and I haven’t had a real date night in more than ten years. The phrase is our code, because at some point we sat down and came up with a code. Date night means we need to talk about our extracurricular activities. A real conversation, not just whispers in the dark.
* * *
• • •
BETWEEN THE TEXT and date night, there is Rory’s suspension. He has been at home alone all day, and in Millicent’s fantasies her son has been reading a book to improve his mind. Instead, he has been playing his new video game, courtesy of me. There is no sign of it when I walk in the door. Rory is setting the table in silence.
He looks up at me and winks. For the first time, I do not like the person my son is becoming. And it’s my fault.
I go upstairs to take a quick shower before dinner. When I come back down, Jenna has appeared. She is making fun of Rory.
“Everyone was talking about you today,” she says. Jenna types into her phone while she talks. She always does this. “They said you’re so stupid you had to look up the spelling of your own name. That’s why you were cheating.”
“Ha ha,” Rory says.
“They said you’re too stupid to be older than me.”
Rory rolls his eyes.
Millicent is in the kitchen. She has changed out of her work clothes and is now wearing yoga pants, a long sweatshirt, and striped socks. Her hair is piled on top of her head, secured with a giant clip. She smiles and holds out a bowl of salad for me to put on the table.
The kids continue to bicker as she and I put the food out.
“You’re so stupid,” Jenna says. “They say I got all the brains in the family.”
“You sure didn’t get any beauty,” Rory says.
“Mom!”
“Enough,” Millicent says. She sits down at the table.
Rory and Jenna shut up. They put their napkins on their laps.
It is all so normal.
When we are done eating, Millicent asks Jenna and me if we will take care of the dishes. She wants to go over Rory’s schoolwork with him to make sure he got it all done today.
I see the panic in his eyes.
It is going to be a long evening for Rory; I can hear it from the kitchen as Jenna and I clean up. I rinse, she stacks the dishwasher, and we talk a little.
Jenna babbles about soccer, going into details I cannot possibly understand. Not for the first time, I wonder if I should become more involved and volunteer to be an assistant coach or something. Then I remember I just don’t have the time.
She keeps talking, and my mind wanders to Millicent. To our date night.
When the dishes are done and Rory is out of excuses, everything winds down for the night. Rory goes to his room to do the homework he didn’t do earlier. Jenna chats and talks and texts all at the same time. When it is time to go to bed, Millicent takes both of their computers. She takes them every night at bedtime so they won’t stay up and chat with strangers on the Internet after we’ve gone to bed. I think there are strangers on the Internet at all hours, but I do not argue with her about this.
Once the kids are in bed, Millicent and I go to the garage for our date night.
Eleven
WE SIT IN Millicent’s car. She drives the nicer one, a luxury model crossover, because she often drives clients around while showing them houses. The leather seats are comfortable, it’s roomy, and with the doors shut, the kids can’t eavesdrop.
My hand rests between us, on the center console, and she puts hers on top of it.
“You’re nervous,” she says.
“You aren’t?”
“They won’t find anything that leads to us.”
“How can you be sure? Did you think they’d find her?”
She shrugs. “Maybe I didn’t care.”
It feels like what I know could fit in my hand and everything I don’t know would fill the house. I have so many questions but don’t want to know the answers.
“The others have never been found,” I say. “Why Lindsay?”
“Lindsay.” She says the name slowly. It makes me think back to when we first found her. We did that together: We looked, we chose, I was a part of every decision.
After I went hiking with Lindsay a second time, I told Millicent she was the one. That was when we first devised the code, our special date night, except we didn’t meet in the garage. While a neighbor watched the kids for a little while, Millicent and I went out for frozen yogurt. She got vanilla, I got butter pecan, and we walked through the mall, where everything was closed except the movie theater. We stopped in front of an upscale kitchen store and stared at the window display. It was one of Millicent’s favorite stores.
“So,” she said, “tell me.”
I glanced around. The closest people were at least a hundred yards away, in line to buy movie tickets. Still, I lowered my voice. “I think she’s perfect.”
Millicent raised her eyebrows, looking surprised. And happy. “Really?”
/>
“If we’re going to do it, then yes. She’s the one.” She wasn’t the only one; she was the third. Lindsay was different because she was a stranger we chose from the Internet. We picked her out of a million other options. The first two we didn’t pick at all. They had come to us.
Millicent ate a spoonful of vanilla yogurt and licked the spoon. “You think we should, then? We should do it?”
Something in her eyes made me look away. On occasion, Millicent makes me feel like I cannot breathe. It happened right then, as we stood in the mall deciding Lindsay’s fate. I looked away from Millicent and into the closed kitchen store. All that new and sparkly equipment stared back at me, mocking me with its unattainability. We could not afford everything we wanted. Not that anyone could, but it still bothered me.
“Yes,” I said to Millicent. “We should definitely do it.”
She leaned over and gave me a cold vanilla kiss.
We never said anything about holding Lindsay captive.
Now, we are sitting in the garage having another date night. No frozen yogurt, just a small bag of pretzels I have in the glove compartment. I offer them to Millicent, and she turns up her nose.
I get back to the reason we are sitting in the car. “You must have known Lindsay would be found—”
“I did.”
“But why? Why would you want her to be found?”
She looks out the car window to the stacks of plastic tubs filled with old toys and Christmas decorations. When she turns back to me, her head is cocked to the side and she is half smiling. “Because it’s our anniversary.”
“Our anniversary was five months ago.”
“Not that one.”
I think, not wanting to screw this up, because I’m supposed to know. I’m supposed to remember these things.
All at once, I do. “We picked Lindsay a year ago. We decided.”
Millicent beams. “Yes. A year to the day that she was found.”
I stare at her. It still doesn’t make sense. “Why would you want—”
“Have you heard of Owen Riley?” she says.
“What?”
“Owen Riley. Do you know who he is?”
The name is not familiar at first. Then I remember. “You mean Owen Oliver? The serial killer?”
“That’s what you called him?”
“Owen Oliver Riley. We used to just say Owen Oliver.”
“So you know what he did?”
“Of course I know. You couldn’t live here and not know.”
She smiles at me, and, as sometimes happens, I am lost. “It’s not just our anniversary—it’s Owen’s,” she says.
I think back, scouring my mind for events that happened when I was barely an adult. Owen Oliver showed up the summer after I graduated from high school. No one paid attention when one woman disappeared, and no one paid attention when the second woman disappeared. They noticed when one was found dead.
I remember being in a bar with a fake ID, surrounded by friends the same age. We drank cheap beer and cheaper liquor as we watched the first body being uncovered. Nothing ever happened in Woodview. Certainly nothing like the murder of a nice woman named Callie who worked as a clothing store manager. She was found inside an abandoned rest stop off the interstate. A trucker found her body.
At first, it was just the gruesome murder of one woman. I spent that summer watching, riveted, as the news and the police and the community tried to come up with a motive.
“A drifter” became the acceptable answer. Everyone felt better believing the killer wasn’t a resident, even if it meant this outsider kidnapped Callie and kept her alive for months before killing her. We believed it anyway. Even I did.
When it happened a second time, we all felt betrayed. It had to be one of us.
No one knew it was Owen Oliver Riley. Not yet. We just called him the Woodview Killer.
Nine dead women later, he was caught. Owen Oliver Riley was a thirtysomething man with strawlike blond hair, blue eyes, and the beginning of a paunch around the middle. He drove a silver sedan, hung out at a sports bar, and volunteered at his church. People knew him, had spoken to him, had sold him goods and services, and waved to him as he passed. I stared at his picture on the TV, thinking that couldn’t be him. He looked so normal. And he was, except that he had killed nine women.
Owen Oliver was initially charged with one murder; the rest of the charges were pending, due to lack of evidence. Bail was denied. Owen Oliver stayed in jail for three weeks, right up until he was released on a technicality. The warrant for his DNA sample had not been signed at the time the police swabbed the inside of his cheek. Even his court-appointed lawyer could drive a truck through that discrepancy. And he did.
With the DNA thrown out, the police had nothing. They were still scrambling for evidence when Owen Oliver walked out of jail. He was so normal-looking he blended right back in with society and disappeared.
When he went free, I was overseas and I still heard about it. That was one of the few times I heard from my parents before they died. When they did, I returned home but had no plans to stay, until I met Millicent. Back when she first agreed to go out with me, I assumed it was because she was new and didn’t know anyone else.
Sometimes, I still think that.
By then, Owen Oliver was long gone. But every year, on the anniversary of the day he was released, his face is back on the news. Over the years, Owen grew to be our local monster, boogeyman, serial killer. Eventually he became a myth, too large for life.
“It must be seventeen years since he last killed someone,” I say.
“Eighteen, actually. Eighteen years ago this month, his last victim disappeared.”
I shake my head, trying to put the pieces together in my head. As always, Millicent does it for me.
“Remember when Lindsay first disappeared? When people were looking for her?” she says.
“Of course.”
“So what do you think will happen when another one goes missing? Like one of the women on our list.”
One by one, the loose ends start to come together. If another woman disappears, the police will start to think we have a serial killer. Millicent has resurrected Owen to blame our work on him.
She is setting up our future.
“That’s why you kept Lindsay alive for so long,” I say. “You were copying him.”
Millicent nods. “Yes.”
“And he strangled his victims, didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
I exhale. It is both physical and psychological. “It was all a setup.”
“Of course it was. When the police start looking, and they will, they’re going to look for Owen.”
“But why wouldn’t you tell me? For a year?”
“I wanted to surprise you,” she says. “For our anniversary.”
I stare at her. My lovely wife.
“It’s demented,” I say.
She raises an eyebrow at me. Before she can speak, I put my finger against her lips.
“And it’s brilliant,” I say.
Millicent leans in and kisses me on the tip of my nose. Her breath smells like the dessert we had tonight. Not vanilla this time. Chocolate ice cream and cherries.
She slides over the center console, straddling me in the passenger seat. As she pulls off her sweatshirt, the clip in her hair comes loose and her hair tumbles out. She looks down at me, her eyes dark as a swamp.
“You didn’t think we were going to stop, did you?” she asks.
No. We can’t stop now.
I don’t even want to.
Twelve
WHEN IT STARTED, it was about Holly. And it was because we had to.
On that brisk fall day when the phone rang, our world shattered. The phone call had been about Holly. She was going to be released from a psychiatric hospit
al.
I was not hearing right. That’s how I felt when Millicent first told me her sister had not died in an accident at the age of fifteen. She had been committed to a psychiatric hospital.
It was late that Saturday night, after the kids had been calmed down and fed, and had gone to sleep. Millicent and I sat in our living room, on the new couch we were still paying off on the credit card, and she told me the real story of Holly.
The first time was the paper cut. I already knew that story, about how they had been making collages of their favorite things.
“She did it on purpose,” Millicent said. “She grabbed my hand and sliced it with the paper. Right there.” She pointed to the spot between her thumb and index finger. “She convinced our parents it was an accident.”
A month passed, and six-year-old Millicent had almost forgotten about it. Until it happened again. She and Holly were in Holly’s room, playing in what they called the Purple Pit. Millicent and her sister had created their own little world, using dolls, stuffed animals, and plastic model horses, and they called it the Purple Pit. The name referred to the color of Holly’s room. Hers was lavender, and Millicent’s was yellow.
While they were in the Pit, Holly cut her again. This time she used a sharp piece of plastic she had broken off another toy.
The cut was on Millicent’s leg, down near her ankle. She screamed as the blood trickled onto the rug. Holly stared at it until their mother came into the room. Then she started to cry right along with Millicent.
The incident was dismissed as another accident.
Over the next couple of years, Millicent suffered a number of other accidents. Her father thought she was clumsy. Her mother told her to be careful.
Holly laughed at her.
The more Millicent told me, the more horrified I became. Some of what I had seen now made sense.
The bite on her arm, blamed on the dog. Two small discolored marks that never went away.
A broken finger slammed in the door. It was still a little bent.
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