“Mr. Mitchell?” When he turns around, I see he’s aged considerably. Yellow-stained wrinkles falling into his salt-and-pepper mustache. His T-shirt’s emblazoned with a hunting rifle and the slogan Guns don’t kill people, I do. “Hope we aren’t catching you at a bad time. Abby Williams. You and I spoke briefly on the phone…?”
“I remember. I remember you from back when, too.” He sizes me up, sweeps his eyes over Portland, and turns back to his motorcycle. “I thought I told you I didn’t have anything to say.”
The years haven’t softened his personality. But he hasn’t ordered us to get out yet. That’s a start.
“I’m still having trouble tracking Kaycee down,” I say. “I really think it would be helpful to speak to her.” The Internet is proving to be no help. So far, all I know is she might have settled in New York or San Francisco or anywhere in between.
“Like I said on the phone, you’re barking up the wrong tree. I haven’t talked to her since she ran off—with five hundred dollars of my money, too.” He doesn’t look up, just keeps working the rag.
“You’re a Harley man, Mr. Mitchell?” Portland asks, casually reaching for the matte black helmet that’s sitting on the workbench next to a pile of bolts.
“Yup.” Mitchell spits. “You know anything about bikes?” He asks as if he highly doubts it.
Even I’m surprised when Portland shrugs. “A little. My dad taught me to ride when I was a kid. I used to have a 2009 custom Ultra Classic. Sold it to help pay for law school.”
Frank Mitchell actually does a decent impression of a normal human being. “An Ultra Classic, huh?” He looks at me. “Those are built for long rides—nine, ten hours at a stretch. Bet he thought he was gonna go cross-country.”
To my utter shock, Portland nods and looks at the floor, sheepish. Frank Miller laughs. “I’m working on a Fat Boy out back. I’ll show it to you, if you want.”
I make a mental note to kiss Portland as soon as possible.
“Can I use your bathroom?” I blurt out, with fake desperation. “Sorry. I had two coffees this morning…”
Mitchell’s eyes barely flick in my direction. “Through the kitchen in back.”
The back porch is cluttered with old machine parts. The downstairs is blocky and functional and contains a bedroom pungent with the smell of old sweat and alcohol; the kitchen, buzzy with flies; and a grimy bathroom where the toilet seat wears a pink furry cover that matches the rug beneath it. I wonder briefly who picked it out, and when. Mr. Mitchell’s voice comes through a partially open window—soft but crisp, like I’m listening to a ham radio. Portland’s still got him talking.
The last room’s a sort of office, or maybe junk room is a better description. In addition to a desk and a relatively new desktop computer, the room is cluttered with random furniture, a tangle of holiday lights, old electronics, a toaster still in its box, stacks of old hunting magazines. But there’s no trace of Kaycee here.
I rifle through a massive stack of old mail Frank Mitchell has cordoned off in a massive wicker basket, thinking that she might be the letter-writing type. I slip my fingers into the accordion of gutted envelopes: promotional offers from fishing magazines, inserts, slick torn-away pages with glossy photos of lures and other tackle, bills, faded bank statements, and what looks like a greeting card from a relative—the last name “Mitchell” is scrawled above the eviscerated return address. Inside, a cold greeting: BEST WISHES ON YOUR SPECIAL DAY. No signature. Why did he keep all this stuff? Years-old ads, outstanding bills, promotional coupons long expired.
Maybe after losing his daughter, he can’t bear to let anything go.
Maybe that’s why he hates Kaycee. She wouldn’t let him hold on to her.
I land on a smooth envelope, unopened. The return address is for a local storage company, U-Pack. With one finger, I slice the envelope open and pull out a single piece of paper, folded in thirds. There’s a comfort in crossing this line. Outside, something metal hits concrete—maybe on purpose, I think, a warning from Portland.
Footsteps creak across the porch. The screen door opens. My hands begin to sweat. I quickly find the date, and my chest tightens: the account’s been active for exactly ten years.
Meaning Frank Mitchell rented a storage space only a few weeks after Kaycee disappeared.
I commit the membership number to memory and slip the folded bill back into the mess just before Mr. Mitchell shoves open the door.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing in here?” He seems to swell. Or maybe I shrink, funneling back to the little kid I was when just the sight of him would make me cross the street.
“I guess I got turned around.” My smile feels sticky, as if it’s congealing at the edges.
“Get out.” His voice is a growl. Now his T-shirt looks like a direct threat. Guns don’t kill people. I do. “Now.”
I have to push by him, and for a second he gets in my way, and I have a quick flash of physical fear, a terror he won’t let me leave. But at the last second he turns, angling his body and giving me room to pass.
I practically sprint to the door; only after I’m standing on the porch, gulping air, do I realize I was holding my breath. As if a monster were about to get me. As if the house were a graveyard.
As if I were afraid to raise the dead.
Chapter Seventeen
I still haven’t heard back from the county prosecutor, Dev Agerwal, so I leave a message with his office, and, in desperation, send a follow-up e-mail through a contact form I find on his website. But I don’t hold out much hope. Agerwal has reason to be protective of his office, even if he did clean house when he took the position.
I leave the office early, while Joe is on the phone, to avoid having to give a blow-by-blow of our trip to Frank Mitchell’s house—I know he thinks we should be focusing on rooting out people who’ve had problems with their water and are willing to say so.
The cloud cover has burned off, and the evening sky has transformed into stripes of gold and auburn. Instead of turning right on County Route 12, which will lead me down past Sunny Jay’s where Condor works, the Elks Club, and, finally, the hair salon that conceals my rental house behind it, I turn left. I need to know what Frank Mitchell, whose home is halfway to hoarder, dumped in a storage space only a week after Kaycee disappeared.
U-Pack is a depressing sling of buildings ineffectively roped off by a sagging chain-link fence. I’ve always said that if you haven’t touched something for two years, then you don’t need it. But I’ve always hated junk and clutter. I don’t like stuff weighing me down. I would never need a storage locker; in fact, when people come to my condo in Chicago they ask if I’ve just moved in.
A cheerful bell tings when I open the door. The clerk, a man in his sixties, looks up from a magazine.
I can see the nicotine stain on his fingernails from where I’m standing. Smell it on his breath, too. “How can I help you?” He manages to say it as if he very much hopes he can’t.
I put on a smile. “Hi, I’m here for a friend—Frank Mitchell?” He doesn’t blink, doesn’t give any reaction to the name. “He’s drowning in stuff, honestly drowning. Total packrat and just can’t bring himself to toss any damn thing.”
“That’s why we’re here,” he says. I can’t tell if he’s making a joke or not.
“He can hardly find his couch nowadays, and of course he’s gone and lost the key to his unit.” I’m rambling and I know it. Less is more. “So I offered to come down and get a replacement, maybe take some stuff off his hands.”
He shakes his head. “Can’t let no one in besides the owner. He’ll have to come down here himself, give ID and his account number and put in for a new key.”
“That’s just exactly what I told him,” I say, making a big show of amazement, as if we’ve arrived together at the solution to a major physics problem. “He gave me his account number and told me to give it a shot anyway. I have his number, too—you can call him if you want.”
; He looks at the phone on his desk as if it’s a dead mouse he hasn’t yet cleared away. I hold my breath. Finally, he just shakes his head. “You said you got the account number?”
I recite it to him. He turns to the ancient computer on his desk and spends a few labored minutes trying to get it to do whatever he needs it to do. Then, with a heavy sigh, he stands and disappears into the back office, returning a few seconds later with a key. But before I can grab it from the counter, he nudges a heavy leather-bound security log in my direction.
“Sign, date, and print your name clear,” he says. “Name of the unit owner, too.”
Not until then do I fully register the cameras winking at us from the ceiling. And for a split second, I have a feeling like waking up abruptly from a dream and seeing the real world rush at you.
But what rushes at me now is the gravity of what I’m doing. I don’t remember enough of criminal law code to know exactly what law I’m breaking—false pretenses, maybe, or larceny-by-trick, but only if I remove something—but either way, a violation of this size could get me disbarred.
I nearly leave the key where it is. I nearly mumble an excuse, turn, and hurry back to the car.
But I don’t. I scrawl a fake name into the ledger. The key—a new one—is very small and extremely light. Cheap keys for cheap locks for a cheap storage facility filled with cheap belongings. A no-man’s land of possessions: sufficiently disposable to be locked away, but too dearly loved, or at least too familiar, to be abandoned. I wonder how many storage rooms are built out of broken hearts and broken relationships, dead fathers and brothers and wives. I also wonder how many of them are just meth labs.
Standing in front of unit 34, I could swear there’s a low hum radiating down the long metal alleys. And I wonder whether in fact the keys and locks were meant to keep these old memories and broken objects safe—or if they are really meant to keep them from getting out.
—
The unit is full of art.
The storage space is roughly 10 x 20, but so packed with canvases and old art supplies I still have trouble squeezing inside. Many of the paintings are wrapped in tarp and duct tape and garbage bags while a few are left exposed. Not all of them are finished, although it’s difficult to tell: there’s an image of a woman’s face that seems to simply explode or disappear into white space, even though her clothing is painstakingly detailed. They’re Kaycee’s.
Some paintings are better than others. But all of them are good. I can tell that much without knowing a thing about art. I move as carefully as I can, afraid to touch or disturb anything. I peer through the clear garbage bags to puzzle out the shapes she pinned down with her brush: cornfields, the football stadium, even the Donut Hole. All familiar and deeply ordinary—and yet somehow, in her frenzy of brushstrokes and colors, they all light up with a strange and terrifying beauty. The football field opens like the jaws of a shark to consume the sky. The Donut Hole glows against dusk, and its sign casts a fluorescent halo into the clouds, but in the parking lot a figure lies curled in the fetal position.
There are portraits, too: I recognize a young Misha in one, a shadow splitting her face. The next painting, distorted through plastic, looks at first like a collage of random shapes. Then I find a pair of eyes buried deep in the thickness of the paint, and another, and another. It’s like one of those visual deceptions where a vase is buried in a woman’s hair—in a millisecond the jigsaw of random shapes becomes instead a series of faces staring out at me from the paint.
Some glower, others appear to weep. All of them are Kaycee. It’s a self-portrait, an explosion of her—or versions of her—again and again on canvas. One has hair the color of blood. In all of them, her features are obscured, cut up, or erased, some imagined in negative space.
Even when we were little, she had that gift: she could study something I’d seen every day, take it apart and make it new. I labored over line drawings while she made flowers ripple on the page. She spent hours one day in the sun drawing the same enormous mushroom, over and over, until she was satisfied she’d got it right. When she asked if I liked it, I asked her to show me the actual mushroom she’d been staring at all day, but there wasn’t one. Just a scattering of shattered beer bottles in the middle of the field.
It amazed and scared me, the way her unseen world could seem more vibrant and alive than the real one. There was a time when I loved her imagination, would follow her anywhere. And yet even then, I hated the way she could make me question things that were obvious facts, things that were right there before my eyes.
I suddenly feel bad. I shouldn’t be here. Whatever Mr. Mitchell says about Kaycee now, he loved her and he still does. Why else would he be so careful to preserve her art? Kaycee’s paintings feel like live things, bits of skin and bone strapped down beneath their protective covering: but still bleeding, invisibly, all over. Even after I’m back in the car, I imagine the smell of paint, and keep checking my fingers and clothes for residue. Kaycee transmuted into oil paint looks different from the Kaycee I remember: lonelier, deeper, even desperate. I remember what Kaycee said to me that day, the day she turned beer bottles into a mushroom that seemed to be growing right out of the page. You know the problem, Abby, isn’t that you can’t draw, she said, out of nowhere. It’s that you can’t see.
I’m beginning to think she was right.
Chapter Eighteen
On Tuesday morning, my ass has barely touched the chair before my phone rings: an upbeat clerk announces that Dev Agerwal, the county prosecutor, is on the line for me.
I unroll the same song and dance I gave when I spoke to his junior prosecutor Dani Briggs just a few days before, and he listens patiently and without interruption before politely telling me that Ms. Briggs had already filled him in. I like him for that; he’s the type who likes to get the same story from different angles, more journalist than lawyer.
“But I don’t know how much help I can be,” he says carefully, and though it’s exactly what I expected him to say, my chest deflates. “My predecessor never announced a formal investigation into Optimal’s business practices.”
“But he spoke about it in interviews,” I counter.
“Off the cuff, sure.” He sighs. “Look, Ms. Williams, I’ve built my career on trying to take big business and big money out of local politics. But unfortunately, it’s mostly a gray area. Optimal has done a neat job of blurring the line. And corruption has to be provable.”
“Only if you plan to prosecute,” I say. “We just need a reason to open up the books. A subpoena would be a slam dunk, but right now, you’re the one with the best shot at a case.”
Agerwal is quiet for a while. Then, abruptly: “Have you thought of speaking to Lilian McMann?”
I scribble the name on the back of a coffee receipt. “Never heard of her.”
“She might have some things to tell you about Optimal, and about their relationship to the…political climate. She used to work at the Indiana Department of Environmental Management. She was at the Office of Water Quality.”
That, I have definitely heard of: IDEM works directly with both local monitors and the feds. Just my kind of girl.
Dev Agerwal hangs up after taking down my e-mail address, with a promise to send me Lilian McMann’s contact information. And a few minutes later he makes good.
Actually, he makes great. The e-mail, sent from a personal e-mail address—not the state government server—also includes several attachments and a short note.
Hope this is helpful.
When I open the attachments, I nearly fall out of my chair. He’s included a copy of the check stub written from Associated Polymer, Optimal’s parent company, to the Campaign for Pulaski, as well as several e-mail exchanges between an Optimal employee and a campaign aide. The e-mails are carefully crafted, but the subtext is clear.
The most damning of them, sent from someone in Gifts, expresses hope “that our support will spark a new era of cooperation and mutual support between the nominee and one
of Indiana’s most successful homegrown businesses.”
On Wednesday, Joe, the snake charmer, works his magic on the local superior court. Unbelievably, our petition passes, and after we nudge Optimal’s legal counsel by dangling the threat of a much bigger problem down the line, we float an unofficial list of document requests. Now that we’ve gone ahead and filed, a deposition will be coming soon enough. After some hemming and hawing, Optimal agrees via their ancient-sounding lawyer to provide five years of financial records related to any third-party payments before the week is out.
Not totally ideal. I was hoping to go back further, ten years, to the complaint the Mitchells, Allens, Baums, and Dales dropped, and for bigger scope—investments, subsidiaries, the whole deal. But I know better than to say so to Joe. Still, he reads it on my face.
“You should be kissing my feet right now,” he says.
“I’ll let Raj do that for you,” I say, and he smirks in a way that doesn’t quite hide a genuine look of happiness. I feel a sharp stab of jealousy, and then another of disgust. When did other people’s happiness start feeling like assault?
But the answer comes quickly, and brings a bad taste to my mouth. Always. I didn’t ever stop feeling excluded. I just started to wear it and pretend it was my choice. Maybe that’s why I was drawn to the law of poisoned things, and hurt people, and scabby chemical earth. Maybe toxic is the only thing I really understand.
—
More good luck: that very afternoon, less than twenty-four hours after Agerwal directed me to her, Lilian McMann returns my call. I get out a hello and half of an introduction before she interrupts to suggest we meet in person.
Her office is about forty-five minutes out of town. Locals call this “uptown,” even though there’s nothing “up” about it. This is Anytown, strip malls and chain stores, and as a kid this is where we would come to hit the big grocery store when we wanted to buy in bulk. The storefronts have turned over but the structure is the same.
Bonfire: A Novel Page 10
