“Why do you call him that?”
“I don’t know. The guy seemed all fancy. Dressed up nice. Faggoty accent.”
I lean closer to him.
“What kind of accent?”
“You know, pompous. Like a king.”
British?
This brings a flood of questions into my mind, and now I want to know everything about this man who approached Starks on the street. Every detail of his appearance, his features, how tall he was, how he walked, his hair style. Everything.
I’m about to launch into my series of questions, but before I do, Thomas snaps from his reverie, raises the gun to the back of Starks’s head, and pulls the trigger.
Starks’s skull bursts like shrapnel all over my living room.
Part II
The Glassin Twins
Twenty-Six
Wednesday, October 21
The clouds outside the dirt-streaked window of the 777 are sunset-kissed, a dull pink-on-white, the sky vast and commanding. Yet even here, in this moment of stillness, I find no beauty. The clouds aren’t painted by a setting sun. No, all I see is Starks’s blood dissolved into dirty Manchester snow. I don’t see the slow rotation of the wondrous earth thirty-eight thousand feet beneath me. I see a ticking clock. A time bomb, the seconds counting down before it explodes.
I lower the shade.
I’m flying to England. Back to my home. I’m not so much heading there as I am fleeing New Hampshire. London was a good choice, because I might find answers there. It’s the birthplace of everything bad in my life.
What a mess.
I glance to my right and catch my seatmate out of the corner of my eye. He’s maybe midthirties, a bit shaggy and good-looking in a distressed-leather sort of way, smells vaguely of saddle soap, and, from the flashes I’ve seen on his laptop screen, works in real estate. He chatted me up a bit upon boarding in Boston, told me he’s going to a conference in London, and asked what I did. I told him I owned a coffee shop, and he seemed more interested than anyone should be in that subject matter. He told me his name was Ben, and I shook his hand and told him my name was Mary. Ben doesn’t wear a wedding ring. At an appropriate and early lull in the conversation, I put in my earbuds, and Ben faded easily into the background.
Yet Ben is persistent. He says something to me, and I pop my earbuds out.
“What?”
“You never told me what you’re going to London for,” he says.
“No,” I say. “I didn’t.”
“Work or pleasure?”
I return his gaze. He’s probably seven years my senior, but I feel so old in the moment, infinitely older than him. I’m certain I’ve produced more heartbeats in my life, and that counts for something. His eyes project youth and vibrancy. I feel beaten and worn.
“I had to get away from home, because my brother just murdered a man in my living room. Don’t get me wrong; this guy had it coming. He was there to kill me, after all, and we couldn’t chance going to the police. Which is another long story.”
Ben’s mouth is slightly open, that indecisive state in between smile and frown.
Screw it, I think. This feels good.
“Do you know how hard it is to dispose of a body?” I continue. “Especially that of a two-hundred-pound man? Massively difficult. And getting bloodstains out of a hardwood floor? Backbreaking. But we did it. But that only covered up the murder. I also have a stalker. He’s been obsessed with me since I was nearly stabbed to death in London when I was fourteen. I figured maybe in England I can find a clue as to who this creep is and be done with him once and for all. So, I guess it all depends on how you define it, Ben. Does that sound like work or pleasure to you?”
Ben blinks once. Then twice. A flight attendant passes at that moment, and Ben catches her and asks for a Dewar’s and Coke. She disappears up into the galley and then returns with the little plastic liquor bottle and the soda can. Bens pours and swizzles the drink, and at this point, I think he’s not going to respond to me at all, which is, I suppose, what I was hoping for. He takes a sip, then clears his throat.
“You know,” he says. “If you didn’t want to talk to me, you could’ve just said so. I’ll leave you alone.”
Ben reaches into a leather messenger bag and pulls out his Bose headphones, plugs them into his laptop, and launches a movie. I recognize it even before the title credits appear. It’s The Martian, the movie I saw just a few weeks ago. Someone drew an image of me leaving the theater that night, which ended up as a panel in my stalker’s book. Everything seems endlessly connected, yet I can’t figure a single thing out.
I reach up and turn off the light, pull my jacket over my shoulders, and curl up against the window. I don’t bother to listen to music. I just listen to the white noise offered by the plane, and sometime later, I drift into a jagged sleep, where I dream of uncomfortable things.
• • •
My bones ache as I disembark from the plane hours later, my body craving exercise. My last true physical exertion occurred three days ago, when Thomas and I dug a grave in the White Mountains. For all the fear I’ve experienced in my life, none was quite so sharp and visceral as disposing of a body in the middle of the night, horrified that at any moment, brilliant red-and-blue pulses from a police cruiser’s lights would wash over us. More likely, it would have been the sweep of a cop’s powerful flashlight, illuminating us deep in the woods. Just dragging Starks’s body that far was nearly impossible, but that wasn’t the truly challenging part. That was reserved for digging into frozen ground, one tiny shovelful at a time. We each had a flashlight, but the light did little more than make me feel exposed. It took nearly two hours to create a hole we thought would keep the scavengers out and roll Starks into it. I was keenly aware that, despite our gloves and amateurish attempts at caution, our DNA could well be somewhere on his body. A hair, most likely. But ridding ourselves of the corpse still didn’t compare to the challenge of cleaning up my house, which looked like a Pollock painting.
But even that wasn’t the real problem.
The real problem was—and still is—Richard.
After Thomas killed Starks, the next thing my brother did was aim the gun directly at Richard.
“Thomas, what are you doing?” I had asked.
The room was silent, though the concussion of the shot that killed Starks still echoed in my ears.
“He’s a problem,” Thomas said. “He could turn us in.”
“Put the gun down! He’s helping us. God, Thomas, you just killed Starks. What is wrong with you?”
But Thomas didn’t put down the gun. He held it fast with a hand that, incredibly, didn’t shake. He was so calm and focused. He was in a video game.
Richard hadn’t flinched. He maintained his gaze with Thomas, the two of them locked in to each other. Richard didn’t seem scared. He didn’t plead for his life, didn’t try to convince my brother that he wouldn’t go to the police. Instead he stood there for maybe a minute, a forever length of time. I waited for the shot to come, the blood to spray. I think I said something to Thomas again, but I don’t really remember.
Then Richard turned and walked to the door. Thomas kept the gun trained on him the entire time but didn’t fire. Richard opened the door and left, but he didn’t drive away. I heard his weight on the steps leading to the Perch, the door opening and closing, and then nothing. Like he always did, Richard had once again turned into the ghost upstairs.
The police never came. I didn’t go to see Richard. I figured if he was going to report what had happened, he would’ve already. So all Thomas and I could do was get rid of the evidence the best we could.
After we buried Starks, Thomas and I cleaned my car, scrubbing and vacuuming until it was spotless. Back at my house—at this point just after two in the morning—our attention turned to the mess in the living room. We were running on noth
ing but adrenaline at that point. We created a macabre collection of evidence to be disposed of: the bloodstained area rug, the rope, the pieces of medical tape, the chair Starks occupied, the bloody snow shovel, the shovels we used to bury Starks, our dirt-smeared clothes, the two guns. Worst of all, the three pieces of Starks’s skull that had landed on the living room floor near my fireplace. I picked them up with a plastic bag, much like I would a dead bird found in my yard, and added them to the pile.
We scrubbed the floor and walls. Fortunately, most of the blood had been soaked up by the area rug. Though the remaining blood appeared to come out completely with Clorox bleach spray, I’m not so ignorant as to believe our efforts would stand up to a true forensic analysis. If the police came to my house looking for evidence of a crime, they would find it, I’m certain. Probably easily. A few sprays of luminol.
I can only hope no one will be surprised that a Boston drug dealer went missing, and that little effort will be made to find him. At some point, all you can do is pray. This is true whether or not you even believe in God.
Thomas and I built a large fire in my fireplace that night, and on top of the wood, we added all the things that could easily burn. Everything else we bleached and wiped and tossed in three separate Dumpsters later. As for the pieces of Starks’s skull, I placed them in a gallon-size ziplock bag, took a hammer, and pounded them into tiny pieces. The powder of an ex-man.
I fought to repress my disgust at this, especially in handling the chunk with a small piece of scalp dangling like a loose tooth from it on one side and a slick coating of blood on the other. I tried to manage the process with the detachment of a field surgeon, just dealing with the bits and pieces and not concerned with the actual human to whom those bits and pieces belonged. Looking back, my overall coolness surprises me. For years, I’ve suffered panic attacks over memories, but actual blood on my fingers left me relatively calm and focused.
Thomas barfed until there was nothing left but scorching dry heaves.
Once I’d pounded the pieces of skull into manageable pebbles, I flushed them down the toilet. Farewell, Freddy Starks.
Thomas slept for about three hours; sleep did not come for me. When he woke, he put on the one change of clothes he’d brought with him and drove back to our mother’s house. He was calm, almost pleasant. I wonder if he would have done what he did had he taken his medication.
“You should get out of here,” he’d told me. “Just for a little while.”
Once Thomas was gone, I’d checked my laptop for any messages from Mr. Interested. Nothing.
I haven’t heard from him since he told me to kill Freddy Starks.
I walk groggily through Heathrow, which is a buzz of activity around me. Swarms of people, all with intense purpose and direction. Ben is gone from my view, and now my life. I queue up at immigration. I maintain dual citizenship, so I choose the shortest line: UK nationals. Signs all around tell me to turn off my cell phone, and as I reach for my mine, I notice a missed text. It’s from Verizon, welcoming me to the UK and telling me how much money I will spend if I care to use my phone here. I silence the ringer and slide it back into my purse.
I was doing fine asleep on the plane, but as I stand in this line, my nerves begin to fray. Seven immigration officers are waiting up ahead, and suddenly I wonder if there’s an alert out for me. Maybe Richard talked. Maybe Mr. Interested knows everything and sent a tip to the police, just as he tipped off Freddy Starks.
This flood of paranoia slowly builds to the point that I start thinking of proper nouns such as MI5 and Interpol.
I inch forward in the queue, a sea of drained travelers surrounding me. Families, business travelers, students. Scanning their faces, I see no fear. Just fatigue, boredom, impatience. But not guilt. What do they see on mine?
Closer. Now I’m certain this is all a mistake. What the hell was I thinking, coming here? They know, I think. Once my passport is swiped, a word is going to appear on the screen in front of the immigration officer. A word like detain.
Another agent directs me to a shorter line in front of one of the kiosks. I look at the officer with heightened fear. He’s not the one I was hoping for. There was another officer one kiosk over, and he was smiling at the travelers in his queue. Joking, even. Not this guy. My guy is younger, Indian or Pakistani. Maybe thirty. He’s been scowling the entire time, as if disappointed every time someone passes through without incident. He spends an inordinately long time with the man in front of me, asking him several questions I can’t make out.
I shift my weight back and forth between legs, trying to use my breathing exercises to steady my pulse. It does no good. I look up at all the cameras recording me, and I picture a team of analysts in a room somewhere, leaning into their monitors and studying the live stream, reading the signs of anxiety that are surely evidenced in every bit of my body language. They are alerting my guy something is up with me, that I should be given extra attention. The harder I try to calm myself, the more I feel like screaming. God, I have to get out of here.
But there’s nowhere to go. Just forward.
Finally, the man in front of me passes through.
My guy beckons me over with an imperial flick of the wrist.
I hand him my British passport, and he scans it in the reader. I wait for alarms to begin screaming.
He leans in and squints at his monitor. “You’re a U.S. resident, then?”
“Yes.”
“What’s the nature of your visit?”
The question rattles me. Why does it matter? I’m a citizen of the UK, so it shouldn’t be necessary for me to tell him why I’m here.
“Visiting family,” I manage to say.
He looks me over, a scowl on his dark, acne-scarred, swarthy face. He holds the passport up and flicks his gaze between my photo and my face.
“When is your return flight?”
It’s getting harder to keep the panic from reaching up and squeezing my throat closed.
“Three…three days from now.”
“What areas will you be visiting?”
Take control, Alice. You’re scared, and he smells it. I don’t think they know anything, but I don’t want to give them reason to question me further.
“I’m sorry, but can you explain to me why that matters?” I ask. “I’m a citizen of this country. Why do I need to tell you where I will be going?”
His scowl deepens for just a second, then quickly melts into a smile. Boyish.
“I live in Clerkenwell,” he says. “If you’re in that area, maybe we can meet up for a coffee.”
Are you fucking kidding me? I’m on the cusp of a heart attack, and this immigration agent is trying to pick me up? Yet my anger is still tempered by relief.
I reach out and pluck my passport from his hand.
“How often does that work?” I ask.
“Virtually nil,” he admits. “But given how many people come through my lane, the numbers bear out.”
“Can’t you get in trouble for that kind of thing?”
He shrugs. “It wouldn’t be the worst thing to be sacked from this job.”
“Can I go?” I ask.
“So I assume your answer is no.”
“The answer is no. Can I go?”
The scowl is back. He flicks me away as brusquely as he’d summoned me, and I become another one of his statistics, a tick in the no column. I leave to claim my bag.
At the luggage carousel, I reach back into my purse to check my phone for Wi-Fi. I want to at least let Thomas know I’ve arrived. We’ve both agreed not to write anything even remotely incriminating in our emails or texts, but I can let him know I’m here.
As I unlock the screen, I see another text has arrived. Likely another bit of traveler advice from Verizon, but it only takes a second for me to see it’s not. It’s not that at all.
It’s
from a blocked number.
Welcome home, Alice.
Twenty-Seven
How, how, how? How can he possibly know I’m here?
I don’t reply. Flustered, I turn off my phone and make my way out of the airport to the taxi stand, where I ask my driver to take me to Dollis Hill, a northwestern suburb of London. He asks for an address, and instinctually I begin to give him the address of my childhood home but stop myself.
“Are there hotels there?” I ask.
“There are hotels everywhere, miss. You have one in mind?”
“Something near Gladstone Park.”
He reaches two fingers beneath his wool cap and scratches his head.
“Don’t know that area all too well,” he says. “Give me a minute.” He consults his iPhone, then says, “There’s a Travelodge nearby. And a Holiday Inn. Both of them too far to walk to the park, I’d say, if the park is where you want to be.”
God, is the park really where I want to be? The way he says it makes it sound like Disney World.
“Anything closer?”
He looks again. “There’s an inn. Quincey House Hotel. Three and a half stars on TripAdvisor. Right on the south side of the park. That’s the closest.”
I have a vague memory of that hotel from my youth but can’t picture it.
“Can I bother you to phone them and see if they have rooms?”
“My pleasure.” He dials, has a brief conversation, then turns back to me. “He’s wanting to know how many nights.”
I have no idea. “Three,” I say, figuring that would be on the long side.
He relays the information, chirps “Very good, then,” and hangs up.
“Quincey House Hotel it is, then.”
“Thank you.”
At least I have some place to stay, though I still have no plan or even much of an idea of what I’m doing here. I have some vague notion of a direction and a strong hope that an invisible current will carry me along until a path becomes clear. Or perhaps it will just dump me out into the ocean, setting me adrift forever. I suppose that’s a reasonable end as well.
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