What Remains of Me

by Alison Gaylin

  Shane had been to the Defiance set many times as a little boy. He’d loved it there—the gleaming prop guns, the horses, the pretty, busty extras in off-the-shoulder peasant blouses, Dad dressed like a real sheriff with a white hat and badge, Dad sneaking Shane glazed doughnuts from crafts services, winking at Shane through fake blood.

  But that one day . . . Man, it was amazing in how much detail Shane still remembered it. The grip of his mother’s cold fingers as she squeezed his hand outside Dad’s trailer, and her voice . . . the anger in it. “You wait here, Shane. Mommy’s going to see Daddy for a few minutes.” She’d said it like a door slamming, and even though Shane hadn’t understood why he couldn’t at least sit in the trailer, why he couldn’t play with that shiny badge while his parents talked—even then, at four or five years old, he’d known enough not to ask.

  It was the only time he could ever recall seeing his mother that angry. And to this day, he’d never found out why. “You don’t know everything about Dad,” he said to Bellamy. “None of us really know each other.”

  Her lips went tight. She turned away.

  “Mr. Marshall,” Braddock said. “Did your wife leave home for any extended period last night?”

  Shane closed his eyes. “No,” he said, picturing her in his mind, Kelly drenched in morning light, stretching on the bed, her lovely back arching. Kelly’s eyes had been closed for hours, Shane knew. There she was, brushing the sleep out of her eyes, opening them for his lens, the sad gray eyes, that strange coldness . . .

  No. He had been wrong about that. Paranoid, but for other reasons. She’d been deep asleep. For hours. And anyway, what were they suggesting? That Kelly had sneaked out of the house to watch Dad kill himself? Were they serious?

  Bellamy said, “You’re lying for her.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Are you telling us everything, Mr. Marshall?”

  Shane’s eyes opened. “She got up at six,” he said. “I woke her.”

  “Mr. Marshall. Do you and your wife sleep in separate bedrooms?”

  A direct question. He couldn’t lie to a direct question, asked by a cop. “Yes.”

  “Why?” Bellamy said.

  He put his back to her. “Do you have any other questions, Detective?”

  “Detective Braddock,” Bellamy said, “Kelly Lund loves to take long drives at night.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “She doesn’t,” Shane said. “She hasn’t spoken to Kelly since she got out of prison. She’s never been to our house. She has no idea—”

  “Mom told me. She said you once complained about it.” Bellamy looked at the detective. “She’d leave their house late at night and he’d ask where she was going and she’d say, ‘Driving.’ He didn’t want to press her because he didn’t want her to feel trapped. He wanted her to feel free. You know who Kelly Lund is, right? She’s a convicted murderer.”

  Braddock was watching Shane’s face in a way he didn’t like. “I never said that to Mom,” he said. It was true. He’d told his father.

  Shane didn’t want to talk about Kelly any more, didn’t want to think about her. John McFadden had been the director on Defiance. And it was on that set, while his mother was in Dad’s trailer venting her anger for whatever reason, that John had pulled Shane aside, telling him that Dad was the best actor he’d ever worked with. Don’t tell the gossip rags . . . Bellamy had been on set that day too, ignoring Shane like she always did, running around with John McFadden’s son, whom she called her “pretend brother.” (Her “better brother,” she used to call that kid, when she and Shane were alone and the grown-ups were out of earshot.)

  Shane gritted his teeth. He’d taken a sleeping pill last night, just like he did on most nights. But it hadn’t worked right away—he had a lot on his mind lately, thoughts he didn’t want to look too hard at. Thoughts involving Kelly, her late-night drives, her secrets . . .

  So he’d added a couple more pills. He’d taken five sleeping pills and passed out dead cold until the alarm had woken him. The Shane Marshall Ambien Coma, Kelly liked to call it. Kelly, who insisted on separate rooms because it was the only way she could sleep. In solitary. Kelly, who owned half a dozen hoodies. “I’m going to check on Mom.”

  “If you want justice for Dad,” Bellamy said, “you’ll tell the truth.”

  Shane stopped. Enough. “He committed suicide, Bellamy.” He glared at the detective. “I want to see the note.”

  She blinked at him.

  “I want to see the note, Detective. I want to read it and I want to grieve my father’s death with my family in peace.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Marshall.”

  He exhaled. “No need. I understand. He was a famous man. People want answers, and believe me, so do I. Please show me the note.”

  The detective shook her head, her hair catching the light in a way that made him think again of Kelly this morning, silver hairs glistening among the gold, her face soft on the pillow, yet still that breach between them, that wall she put up . . . I’m sorry, Shane. I can’t. How well can you know a woman who refuses to make love to you? Who hasn’t let you in for close to fifteen years?

  Did Dad ask Kelly to witness his suicide? Did he ask her to assist in it?

  “Mr. Marshall,” said Braddock, her eyes dull from forced sympathy. “I said I’m sorry because the reporters got it wrong.”

  “What?”

  “This is an open murder investigation,” she said. “There was no note.”

  CHAPTER 8

  About half a mile up the mountain from Kelly and Shane’s house, in a double-wide surrounded by an army of prickly pears he’d planted himself, lived their nearest neighbor, a chainsaw artist who went by the name of Rocky Three.

  “Rocky Three?” Kelly had said five years ago, when Shane had pointed him out during their very first drive to the home he had bought for them. Kelly thinking she was hitting the ground running on her new life of freedom—starting fresh—when she’d spotted him out there among his prickly pears, a shirtless, sinewy, battered-looking bald man, deep green tattoos crawling all over his red-brown back, chainsawing the guts out of an enormous tree trunk, sawdust flying all around him.

  “Yep, that’s his name,” Shane had replied. “Even says it on his mailbox.”

  “Rocky III was when the Rocky movies started getting bad,” said Kelly. And then Rocky Three’d turned around and faced their car and she had locked eyes with him—bits of sharp blue in a sad, leathery, tattooed face, those bright eyes like something from another, better time of life. Kelly had waved at Rocky Three and he’d waved back. I understand the name, she had thought. I understand him.

  “Keep away from him,” Shane had said. “He’s nuts, and probably dangerous.”

  “Our neighbor? But what if I need to borrow a cup of sugar?”

  It had been a joke, but Shane hadn’t laughed. “He hasn’t lived here long. There are all kinds of rumors about him. Fortunately, he keeps to himself.”

  One week later when Shane was meeting with a client in their home, she’d excused herself, walked the three miles, knocked on his door.

  Back then, she hadn’t learned to drive yet. It was easier now.

  Kelly pulled past the prickly pears and around the side of the double-wide and parked. His creations lined the back end of the trailer—an angry bear, a looming, sharp-fanged dragon, an angel with enormous beckoning wings and a skull for a face—Kelly’s favorite. He’d named it for her.

  All the chainsawed statues were at least ten feet tall, carved out of tree trunks salvaged from Northern California clear-cuts. Rocky had them delivered to his home. Far as Kelly could tell, he never sold these things—he carved them for company. Kelly gazed into the skull face of the angel. Keep him safe. A corny thought, but not a new one.

  She felt someone watching her, and when she turned, she saw Rocky standing in the doorway. He wore white drawstring pants, his skin like burned, painted parchment, and he regarded her the way he alwa
ys did, warm but exasperated, as though their meetings occurred on a regular schedule that he had to keep reminding her about.

  A tattoo of a large green eye stared out of the hollow of his neck. It made Kelly’s heart beat faster whenever she saw it. She had a theory as to the tattoo’s meaning but she never mentioned it to Rocky, didn’t want to, for fear he’d shoot it down. “Should I be sorry for your loss?” Rocky said.

  Kelly nodded. “You saw the news.”

  “Yes.”

  “The police came to my house,” Kelly said. “Well, one detective.”

  “Did he scare you?”

  “Detectives don’t scare me.”

  “I know. That was kind of a joke.”

  Rocky ushered her into the trailer. It was clean and spare and smelled of sawdust. A man like this, you’d expect him to live in a space as cluttered as his yard, his skin. But Rocky Three was the opposite of a hoarder. His walls were bare. He didn’t even own a couch—just hard chairs, a bed that was barely softer, nothing that could collect dust.

  There was a table in the kitchen area with a laptop on it, news headlines on the screen. Kelly saw a picture of Sterling Marshall. “I will miss him, you know,” she said.

  “You barely knew him.”

  “Doesn’t matter.” Kelly gave him a long look. “After all, I barely know you.”

  “That’s not true.”

  Kelly sat down on one of the hard chairs, wanting to collapse. “Thank you for having me in.”

  He shook his head, eyes finding the bleached white floorboards. So clean, his home. So empty and perfect. “Your husband is with his family?”

  “He’s at his parents’ house. He wasn’t around when the detective questioned me.”

  “That’s good, I guess.” Rocky sighed. He went into the kitchen and drew a glass of water, placed it in Kelly’s hand. His skin brushed against hers as he did, and she was grateful for that, the calluses on his fingers, the rough warmth of his skin, familiar as she wanted it to be. “He talked about things, that detective,” she said quietly. “He asked me a lot of questions.”

  “It’s what they pay him to do.”

  Kelly stared at him, but he wouldn’t meet her gaze. “I don’t know what to do, Rocky.”

  “Do the police think you killed Sterling Marshall?”

  She gave him flat eyes. “What do you think?”

  “I think maybe you did.”

  “Stop.”

  He shrugged his shoulders. The bottle green eye tattoo twitched with the gesture. “I saw a snake in the road the other morning. Made me think of you.”

  Kelly smiled a little. “Rattler?”

  “No. Just a sweet little garter. I was walking up Old Woman Springs at sunrise and there was that little snake, slithering across the road, leisurely as you please.”

  “Old Woman Springs is a busy road,” said Kelly. “The snake will get run over.”

  “That’s what I thought. ‘That snake is dead meat.’ But still something is making it head that way, across a busy street, so slow and deliberate . . . You know? It’s compelled to go where it shouldn’t be going.”

  Kelly swallowed some of the water, cool and smooth in her throat. “And that reminded you of me. The snake.”

  “It reminded me of the situation. Our situation.”

  “Oh.”

  “All these years,” he said. “All these years, you’ve been knocking on my door.”

  “Yes.”

  “And I open the door, every time you knock.”

  “So . . .”

  “So, I can’t figure it out, Kelly. Which of us is the pickup truck, speeding up Old Woman Springs at sixty miles an hour? And which of us is that dumb, slow-moving snake?”

  Kelly stood up. Strange, Rocky was such a powerfully built man, it made sense he’d be very tall. Yet when Kelly was on her feet and facing him, she looked him directly in the eye. That never stopped surprising her, how evenly matched they were.

  “I would have picked up that snake if I were you,” she said, taking his calloused hand in hers, leading him to the bedroom. “I would have moved it out of the road.”

  “DOES YOUR WIFE’S JOB TAKE HER AWAY FROM THE HOUSE A LOT?” Detective Braddock asked. She sat across from Shane in the den, working her notepad. It no longer bothered him, the note-taking, nor did his sister’s presence in the room with her perfume and her accusations. The room itself didn’t even bother him. Nothing did—other than the obvious. He felt as though someone had kicked him in the gut an hour earlier and he still hadn’t recovered from it.

  What Shane wanted to know—what he needed to know—was what exactly Braddock had meant by “open murder investigation.”

  Shane’s father had been shot in the center of the forehead, at very close range. Yet Shane had been the only one to mention suicide. There had been no note. He’d never known his father to be depressed. And what he had always known—well, since John McFadden’s death anyway—was that Dad had hated guns.

  Also, there was this, the one fact that stuck in his mind, the one he couldn’t voice for fear that if he said it out loud, it might make more sense than he wanted it to: of the three shots that Shane’s wife had fired into a defenseless John McFadden on June 28, 1980, the one that had killed him had been the one that had struck him in the center of the forehead, at close range.

  “Kelly works from home,” Shane said. His head felt numb and swimmy, the leather couch sticky against his back. He wanted an aspirin. A scotch. A handful of Ambien . . .

  “Doing what?”

  “Pardon?”

  “You said your wife works out of the home. What does she do?”

  “She’s a writer.”

  Bellamy let out a noise of pure exasperation—half sigh, half scream. In the old days, the days before this past hour, Shane would have told her to shut up, get out of the room, at the very least, mind her own business. But again, things had changed.

  “She writes profiles for a dating site,” he said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “It doesn’t sound like a thing. But it is.”

  The detective nodded, scribbling away. “Does she leave the home a lot? Go into Hollywood for her job?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t?”

  “She doesn’t go anywhere for her job. She just makes up stories about pictures of soft porn models.”

  “But you don’t know if she goes into Hollywood otherwise?”

  “I . . . I like to give Kelly her space.”

  “So when she leaves the house, you don’t ever find out where she’s going?”

  “If she’s gone out for groceries,” he said, “she comes back with groceries. But I don’t ask ahead of time ‘Are you going for groceries?’”

  “My God,” Bellamy whispered. “My God.”

  The detective said, “Let me ask you something, Mr. Marshall.”

  “Yes?”

  “Have you ever spoken to your wife about the murder she committed?”

  “Huh?”

  “John McFadden. Have you ever—”

  “Why does that matter?”

  “Why do you think it matters?” Bellamy said, but the detective ignored her.

  “I’m just wondering,” she said, “what she thinks about it all now. If it haunts her at all, what she did to John McFadden. If she feels guilty, or if she thinks she was justified in some way and that your father’s enduring respect for the man she killed . . . Well, I’m sure you saw what your father said just two days ago about Mr. McFadden, in the Times?”

  “I don’t know what Kelly thinks about.” Shane’s words hung in the air—the most honest words he’d spoken all day.

  “Did you hear any noises last night?” Braddock was saying. “Possibly your wife leaving on one of her night drives?”

  “I took sleeping pills last night. I was dead to the world.”

  There was a time in his life when Shane would have sworn up and down that he knew Kelly, knew her better than anyone
—and weirdly, it had been when Kelly was in prison but before they got married, when she and Shane weren’t allowed to touch each other but through that thick glass.

  Back then, he would spend hours, days, writing letters to Kelly, most of those letters dozens of pages long, most of those pages answering the hundreds of questions Kelly would send him in her careful, looped handwriting, those questions so much more revealing than any statement could be. What was the happiest day you ever had? Tell me everything you remember about it, in as much detail as you can. Do you ever feel like something is missing from your life—and if so, what? Can you please go outside and tell me what the sun feels like on the back of your neck, Shane? I really want to know what that feels like because today I’m not allowed out.

  What is it like to have a sister?

  He wasn’t sure whether it was Kelly’s questions that had made him fall in love with her or her obvious joy at receiving his answers. But either way, she made Shane feel needed, which, as the youngest, weakest link in one of Hollywood’s most shimmering families, was not something he felt very often.

  I feel a connection with you, Shane. Do you feel it too? Sometimes, when I ask you questions, I already know what you’re going to say. I can picture your response in my mind—the same words, even—and then you write those exact words and it’s like we share one brain. Like we’re two parts of something huge.

  “Answer the detective, Shane,” Bellamy said as Shane remembered his reply: I feel it too. But what if this huge thing that the two of us are together is a bad thing—like Godzilla?

  Godzilla is good, Shane. He’s just misunderstood because of the way he looks. (And by the way, I knew you would say that!)

  Shane’s gaze shifted to Braddock. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Can you please repeat the question?”

  She nodded. A lock of gunmetal hair fell across her eye. She pushed it behind an ear with a gesture that seemed half angry, as though her own hair were interfering with her investigation. “I had asked,” Braddock said, “if there’s anyone you know of who your wife does confide in.”