Abandoned: A Thriller

by Cody McFadyen

  Alan takes it all in stride. “Mr. Hollister, why did you kill Avery?” Hollister stares off, considering this. It occurs to me that perhaps now, in the light of day, he’s starting to doubt his reasoning. “Sir?” Alan prods.

  “I needed to run. I was going to have to empty my bank accounts and run. Live on a cash-only basis. That was no life for two young boys.”

  I’ve seen this kind of reasoning far, far too many times. It’s the epitome of malignant narcissism. A father or husband is planning to either run away or take his own life. He decides it would be cruel to let his family go on without him, so he kills them. The truth is that he can’t stand the thought of them despising him once he’s gone.

  “Why were you going to have to run?” Alan asks.

  “I screwed up. I was supposed to pay him. I didn’t. So he took Dana and … he did what he did to her.” He grimaces at the memory. “He told me he was going to let Heather loose. Then he told me he was going to do to me what he did to Dana.”

  “Who is ‘he,’ sir?”

  Hollister gets very quiet now. “You can learn to live with almost anything,” he says. “As long as you don’t have to deal with it on a daily basis, it’s not that hard. The first few weeks and months might be difficult, but time sort of … covers everything with dust. Just like in the real world. The years roll by and dust covers everything, and then the dust turns to dirt, and then trees grow in the dirt. Soon enough, houses are put up, and no one has any idea that shiny new house was built on a graveyard.”

  He takes in a huge drag of smoke, which makes him wince and cough a little. “Heather and I started out in love. I really loved her. She was smart, she was kind, she was good in bed, a great mother. She was focused on her career more than I liked, but that wasn’t a big deal in the beginning. At least that’s what I thought. My mistake.

  “Time passed. She changed, I changed, and I realized that she wasn’t what I’d been looking for. I needed someone who’d be more attentive to me, to my needs. She needed someone who’d let her be married to her job.

  “It wasn’t one-sided either. She started seeing that faggoty real estate guy, Abbott.”

  More narcissism. He’d decided he didn’t love his wife and had gone looking for her replacement but was shocked and enraged at similar behavior on her part.

  “I got lucky. I found Dana. She wasn’t a hot-body like Heather. But she put more care and effort into everything when it came to me. To her man.” He smiles at Alan, a sickly smile. “That’s what she used to call me. Her man. She was always a little heavier than she wanted, her body leaned that way, but she went to the gym for an hour every day except Sunday, because she wanted to look good for her man. She cooked meals. She never refused sex or used it as a weapon. That’s what I wanted in my wife.”

  I wonder about the things missing in his account. Heather had been a strong woman. She wouldn’t have knowingly married a caveman like Douglas, would she? Did he hide it? Or was it just one of those anomalies, the ones you see in couples sometimes? People aren’t stereotypes; they are complex fractals, driven in the main part by things not visible on the surface.

  Hollister has gone quiet, lost in his own remembering. Alan nudges him along. “What happened?”

  “I had a problem. Heather was a bitch with a gun. She would have taken my sons and my house in a divorce. Dana said she’d stand by me, but, come on—what woman really wants a loser in an apartment? It was bothering me. I was losing sleep over it.” He shoots me a hostile, volcanic stare. I assume it’s because I, too, am a “bitch with a gun.” “I even started to have trouble performing in bed! Can you imagine? All I wanted was to be allowed to love who I wanted to love, and she wanted to take away my sons, my home, and my cock!”

  “Did you ever talk to her about divorce?” I ask. I should keep my mouth shut and let Alan do his thing, but I can’t resist, because I am almost certain of his answer.

  “Talk?” He laughs and waves me off. “I didn’t have to. I knew how it would go.”

  I bite back the words I want to say. He never even bothered to talk to Heather. He’d already decided who she was and how she’d react. His decisions weren’t based on his years with her. They were based on his own narcissism.

  Maybe she would have let him have the house.

  “What happened next?” Alan asks, reasserting control.

  Hollister spares me a last, distrusting glance and turns his attention back to Alan. “I was staying up late a lot. I spent my time surfing the Internet. Just trying to keep myself amused. I found a website. It was all about guys like me, stuck with wives they didn’t love. Wives getting ready to cut their balls off. There was a forum and a chat room, and I spent a lot of time there. It was a safe place to vent, to give each other advice. Every now and then some feminist would find her way in there. We called them fem-cows,” he says, smiling at the memory. “The moderator would give them the boot pretty quick. It wasn’t getting me anywhere, but I felt a lot more at home.

  “Some of the guys who were there had already divorced their wives and were still hanging around to help those who hadn’t. A few had gotten married again but to better, more traditional women. Russians, or South Americans. Thai. Anything but American women,” he mutters. “God save us from the land of delusional fem-cows. Like one of the guys used to say, If I see one more fat ass wearing sweatpants that say ‘juicy’ at the supermarket, I’m going to puke.” He leans forward to make his point, jabbing a finger at Alan, completely caught up in his own sermon.

  “You ever see a Russian woman out shopping? She wouldn’t be caught dead in sweatpants. She puts on makeup the moment she rolls out of bed.” He sends me another blistering gaze. “Anyway. Where was I?” He puffs on the cigarette. “That’s what most of the men bitched about. So you can imagine how envious they were when I told them, no, I had the perfect woman, and she was American! Some of them couldn’t believe it. I said, yes, I know, it’s about as likely as winning the lottery, but Dana was the genuine article.” He grins. “They got me, though. One of the long-term members told me that I should find out about her mother. So I asked, and you know what? Dana was a first-generation American. Her parents came over from Poland. The guys had a good laugh over that, but I didn’t mind.” He chortles at the memory. “See? they said. She had a mother who knows how to treat a man. It’s true. I’ve met her mother and her father quite a few times since, and she’s just like her mom.”

  If Alan finds any of this diatribe boring or distasteful, he doesn’t let on. “So you were going to the forum and chat room regularly, and …?”

  “And one day I got a request for a private chat.”

  “Which is?”

  “The regular chat room is public, a free-for-all. Everyone in the room can see what everyone else is typing. A private chat is opened in a separate window and is only visible to the two people talking.”

  “I understand. Go on.”

  “The guy’s handle was Dali. I thought that was kind of strange.”

  “What was your handle?” I ask.

  “TruLove,” he replies, defiant.

  I want to puke, but I say nothing.

  “I hadn’t seen this guy before, but there were always new members showing up. New victims of the fem-cows. We called them the walking ball-less.” He grins at Alan. “Do you get it? Like the walking wounded, but—no balls.”

  Alan smiles politely. “Very clever. What did Dali say to you?”

  “He said he could solve my problem. He said he could do it by making my wife disappear and that her body wouldn’t be found until or unless I wanted it to be. I was suspicious, of course, and told him so. You could be a cop, I said. I can prove I’m not, he said. Is there anyone you work with—man or woman—that rubs you the wrong way? Someone you don’t like very much?

  “That was easy. Everyone has someone at work they don’t like. For me, it was a woman. Not my boss but the boss of a department that interfaced fairly often with mine. Her name was Piper Styles—sil
ly-ass name—and she was a bitch on wheels. One time she accused me of staring at her ass and threatened to bring me up on sexual-harassment charges.” He makes a grimace of disgust. “She wore these tight slacks; of course I was looking at her ass! So I thought of her when he asked, and I told him about her. He asked me for the exact spelling of her name and a description. Asked if I knew what kind of car she drove, which I did—an emerald-green Mazda Miata.

  “He told me something would happen to Piper in the next few days. Nothing fatal but something that would hurt her enough that I’d hear about it. That will be my proof to you that I’m not a cop and that I mean what I say, he said. I replied with a Sure thing, friend, or something to that effect. I figured he was full of it. One more thing, he told me. Breathe a word about this conversation to anyone, and I’ll kill Avery and Dylan. Then he was gone. I was left wondering who it was I’d just been talking to.” He rolls the cigarette between his finger and thumb, regarding it. “I decided I’d wait to see if anything happened to Piper. Until then I’d keep my mouth shut, for my boys’ sake. Just in case. He was probably a nutcase. Maybe he was one of the other members, playing a practical joke on me.” He shrugs. “Better to play it safe. Avery and Dylan were my sons. I wasn’t going to do anything to put them at risk.”

  The fact that one of his sons is lying dead upstairs, killed by his own hands, makes this statement ridiculous, but it’s obvious he is as oblivious to this as he is to any of the other thousand holes in his logic. His rationalizations only need to satisfy him, not us.

  “Did something happen to Piper Styles?” Alan asks.

  “Oh yeah.” For the first time since all this began, Hollister smiles his real smile, an ugly smile. “Someone broke into her home and used a knife on her face. Not just one side, like yours,” he says, looking at me, “but both. It was in a few newspapers. He disfigured her for life.” He smirks. “She never came back to work.”

  It’s amazing how quickly he’s let his true face show, the result of Alan’s rapport making him feel safe and his own decompensation now that the need for a mask is off. What we’re seeing now isn’t what Douglas Hollister became but what he’s always been. He never loved Heather. He is incapable of love. He probably married her because he hoped he could subjugate her strength in some way. When that didn’t work, he found a submissive woman.

  “So that’s when you started to take him seriously?” Alan asks.

  “Well, yeah. Wouldn’t you?”

  “I guess I would.”

  “He contacted me a few days later, again while I was chatting online. Did you get my proof? he asked. I said I did. Then he put the hook in me.” He pauses. “I guess I should say, he handed me the hook and had me put it in myself.” He puffs on the cigarette, no longer smirky or nasty. “You ever read Faust? The bargain with Mephistopheles?”

  “Sure.”

  “There’s the guy, Faust,” Hollister says, telling us the story anyway. “He’s an alchemist/scientist kind of guy. A seeker of truth. He’s frustrated because he’s reached the limit. Can’t find out more about life, the universe and everything. The devil notices and makes a bargain: He’ll serve Faust until the moment Faust reaches some highest point of happiness possible—then he gets his soul. Faust says, ‘Sure, why not,’ because he’s certain that moment will never come. He’ll get the devil’s help learning the secrets of the universe, but he’ll never have to pay the piper. Problem is, he does.” He sighs. “Dali gave me a choice, but he didn’t make me choose. I did that on my own.”

  Of course, I think, God saves Faust in the end, because He sees the value in Faust’s striving. Faust’s bargain, however misguided, was made in the direction of a worthwhile endeavor: acquisition of knowledge. Hollister sold his soul for a lot less.

  “He told me,” Hollister continues, “that he was going to give me a day to think about things. If you decide to go on from here, he said, there’s no turning back. We’ll be entering into an agreement. You’ll be making promises to me. Break a promise and there will be consequences. Then he signed off.”

  “Did you think about it?” I ask, truly curious.

  He contemplates me, not with contempt this time. There’s some recognition from him of the question’s value. “Not much,” he admits. “I just wanted her gone. I think he probably knew that. He knew I was caught the moment he offered to help me. Everything else was just reeling me in.”

  He’s probably right. Sociopaths tend to understand each other. Birds of a feather.

  “What did he offer you?” Alan asks.

  Hollister is getting tired. The adrenaline high of the last few days is wearing off. He’s looking into the future now, I imagine. Years of a prison cell, with memories of his dead son’s eyes, begging him for life. He takes a last drag of his fourth cigarette and stubs it out on the coffee table. He doesn’t light another.

  “He told me he could make both Heather and her boyfriend disappear. He’d take them away. He didn’t tell me if he was going to kill them or not, just that no one would ever find them.”

  “I assume you were supposed to pay him something?”

  “That was the brilliant part. I’d wait seven years and then get her declared legally dead, sans body. I’d collect on the life insurance and then he would contact me for delivery—in cash—of half the amount. It seemed risk-free. There would be no body, so no one could prove murder. Seven years would pass. That’s a long time. People would have moved on to other things.

  “You have to do only three things, he told me. Say yes, live your life normally for seven years, and then give me my half of the insurance money when it comes.” His grin is sickly. His pallor has changed even in the short time of this interview. He is pale, drained. “So I said yes. A week later Heather and her boy toy were gone. He only contacted me one other time, with a warning. Remember—consequences, he said. Turn on me in any way, and terrible, terrible things will happen to you and the people you care for.”

  Now I’m finally seeing what happened. “You didn’t pay him,” I say. “I’m right, aren’t I? The money came in, and you didn’t pay him.”

  “Seven years had passed!” He speaks in a whine, like a small boy trying to justify himself. “We’d gotten on with our lives, we were happy. Hell, I’d kind of forgotten about him. Well, not forgotten … more like …” He pauses, searching for the words. “Like it never really happened. Like it was something I dreamed. You know? I mean, he never contacted me during that time. Never. And I had no way to contact him. He just didn’t seem real anymore.

  “Then one day he emails me and says it’s time for me to pay up. Out of the blue.” He shrugs, and it’s a gesture of cautious amazement. “I deleted the email. One little button push. It scared me, but it also kind of made me feel strong.” A muscle in his cheek jumps. “I remember thinking, how do I know he’s still got Heather? Maybe he killed her right off.” His eyes dart back and forth between Alan and me. They are filled with petulance and self-righteousness. “There was a good chance he had nothing on me. I had a new life. That money belonged to us!”

  I can withhold myself no longer. I should, but I can’t. I walk over so that I am standing behind the video camera. I pause the recording and look down on him, mustering all the contempt I can find, which in this case is plenty.

  “You’re a shitty excuse for a human being, Douglas. You’d gotten on with your life? You were happy? Do you know what was happening to Heather that whole time? She was cuffed or chained and left by herself in the dark. For eight years! While you watched TV and fucked your new wife and went to Little League with your sons. You robbed her of everything. And why? Because you didn’t want to be married to her anymore?” I put my palms against my eyes for a second, because I’m losing it. I steady myself. “I know I’m wasting my breath, but I want you to think about something, Douglas. Think about all the times you were sitting in this nice house, having a nice dinner, while Heather was naked and screaming in the darkness, probably not knowing why or if her sons were
alive or dead or maybe in some dark room next to her.”

  He snarls then, a last defiance. Maybe he finds a surge of strength because I’m everything he seems to despise so much. “She deserved every minute for what she did to me. If it wasn’t for her, Dana would be fine, and Avery would still be alive.”

  I gape at him, aghast. I’ve seen it before, of course, this kind of unbelievable displacement of responsibility. A pedophile once told me, in all seriousness: But they wanted me to touch them. If they want it, it’s natural, and you can’t fight nature, right?

  It’s my turn to slump, to feel drained. I push the record button again. “Finish up with him,” I tell Alan. “You can fill me in on anything pertinent later.”

  “Too much for you to handle?” Hollister sneers. “Just like all the fem-cows. You want the same job as a man, but you can’t handle it when things get messy, when the pressure is really on.”

  I can’t muster any anger. That’s okay. Exhaustion fits my reply best anyway.

  “Douglas, the problem I have isn’t that it’s too messy to confront. The problem I have is that you’re so”—I look for the word—“unoriginal. You caused so much pain, but in the end you’re a caricature. Do you understand what I’m saying? You don’t scare me: You make me tired.”

  He has no reply but hate. He shows it to me as he has throughout: with his eyes.

  I turn and walk away, opening the sliding glass door and letting myself out into the blessed freedom of the backyard.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “Burns called some uniforms to come and take Hollister away,” Alan says.

  I’m standing in the large backyard—which is much like the front yard, just a single tree and waves of too-green grass—looking at nothing. Trying to make sense of everything I just heard. “He really had no way of contacting this Dali?” I ask.

  “Nope. Hollister never initiated contact. The perp always contacted him, either by email or cell phone. The emails were always from a free service provider, like Yahoo or Gmail. He tried calling back on some of the cell phone numbers when things blew up, but they were all out of service.”