False Witness

by Karin Slaughter

  Leigh pointed her light up at the popcorn ceiling. Callie recognized some of the old water stains, but the gouges where the wire had been ripped out of the Sheetrock were new. The light scanned the tops of the cabinets. A soffit ran around the perimeter of the room. The air-conditioner grills had been pulled off. The holes were black, empty mouths that flashed when the light hit the metal duct in the back of the throats.

  Callie felt the origami swan raising her head. The pointy beak opened as if to share a secret, but then just as suddenly as the creature had appeared, she folded back down her head and disappeared into the well of Callie’s untapped memories.

  “Let’s look in here.” Leigh left the kitchen. She walked into the living room.

  Callie slowly traced her sister’s footsteps, stopping in the middle of the room. No tired orange couch, no leather club chairs with cigarette-burned arms, no giant TV forming the apex of a triangle, cables hanging down like a coiled snake.

  The bar was still hulking in the corner.

  The mosaic was busted off, chips of ceramic littering the floor. The smoked mirrors had been splintered. Callie heard heavy footsteps behind her. She saw Buddy striding across the room, bragging about the money for a new job, slapping cookie crumbs off his shirt.

  Pour me one, baby doll.

  Callie blinked, and the scene was replaced with shattered crack pipes, pieces of burned foil, used syringes, and four stained mattresses laid out on shag carpet that was so old it crunched under her shoes. The realization that they were in a shooting gallery made every pore in Callie’s skin pucker, desperate for a needle to drown the origami swan in wave after wave of bright white heroin.

  “Callie,” Leigh called. “Help me.”

  Reluctantly, Callie left the sanctuary. Leigh was standing at the end of the hall. The bathroom door was gone. Callie saw the sink was broken, more pipes stolen. Leigh had her light trained up at the ceiling.

  Callie heard the floorboards creak as she passed Andrew’s bedroom. She couldn’t look up. “What is it?”

  “The access panel to the attic,” Leigh said. “I never noticed it before. We didn’t search it.”

  Callie stepped back, tilting to look up at the world’s tiniest tray ceiling. The panel was less than two feet square. Because her entire knowledge of attics came from horror movies and Jane Eyre, she asked, “Shouldn’t there be stairs?”

  “No, you idiot. Give me a boost so I can get up there.”

  Callie moved without thinking, crouching down, lacing together her hands.

  Leigh put her foot in the basket. The sole of her boot was scratchy against Callie’s palms. Leigh’s hand went to Callie’s shoulder. She tested her weight.

  Fire roiled through Callie’s neck and shoulders. Her teeth clamped down. She had started to shake even before Leigh had shifted her full weight into Callie’s hands.

  Leigh said, “You can’t lift me, can you?”

  “I can do it.”

  “No, you can’t.” Leigh returned her foot to the floor. “I know your arm is numb because you keep rubbing it. You can barely turn your head. Help me slide over those mattresses. We can make a pile and—”

  “Get hepatitis?” Callie finished. “Leigh, you can’t touch those mattresses. They’re covered in cum and—”

  “What else am I going to do?”

  Callie knew what had to come next. “I’ll go up.”

  “I won’t let you—”

  “Just fucking lift me, okay?”

  Leigh didn’t hesitate nearly long enough for Callie’s liking. She had forgotten how cut-throat the old Leigh could get. Her sister bent her knees, offered her hands as a step. This was how Leigh got when she was determined to do something. Not even guilt could stop her from making one more horrible mistake.

  And Callie knew instinctively that whatever she found in that attic would be a horrible mistake.

  She knelt to place the phone flat on the floor. The flashlight was a spot on the ceiling. She didn’t let herself think about how many times she had stepped her foot into a fifteen-year-old boy’s hands, then been raised up into the air like a ballerina on a music box. The trust it took to perform the maneuver was part training, part lunacy.

  It was also twenty years ago. Now, just lifting her foot meant Callie had to maintain her balance by holding on to the wall and grabbing Leigh’s shoulder. The lift was far from graceful. Callie kicked out her free leg, bracing her sneaker against the wall so she didn’t topple over. The effect was to make her look like a fly caught in a web.

  Callie could not tilt back far enough to see what was right above her. She raised her hands over her head and located the panel by feel. She pressed her palms into the center, but the damn thing was either painted shut or so old that it had melded into the trim. Callie banged her fist into the wood hard enough that it gonged down into each and every millimeter of her spine. She squeezed her eyes shut against the sharp cramps of misfiring nerves and pounded until the wood cracked down the center.

  Dirt and grime and chunks of insulation rained down on her face. She used her fingers to wipe grit out of her eyes and nose. The beam of light from the phone had opened like an umbrella into the attic.

  Leigh lifted her higher. Callie saw that the panel hadn’t been painted shut. Nails jutted into the air. They were shiny in the rays of the flashlight. She told her sister, “These look new.”

  “Come down,” Leigh said. She wasn’t even winded from the effort of holding Callie’s full weight. “I can pull myself up and—”

  Callie stepped onto her shoulder. She poked her head into the attic like a meerkat. The smell was rancid, but not from meth. Squirrels or rats or both had set up nests in the narrow attic space. Callie couldn’t tell if any of them were still in residence.

  What she did know was that the ceiling was too low for her to stand. Callie guessed there was about three feet of space between the rafters that held up the roof and the joists that the ceiling was nailed to. The slope of the roof narrowed down to less than a foot at the outside walls of the house.

  “Stay on the joists,” Leigh said. “Otherwise you’ll fall through the ceiling.”

  As if Callie hadn’t watched Tom Hanks in The Money Pit dozens of times.

  She folded back the broken access panel, forcing the nails to flatten down with it. Leigh helped from below, but Callie’s arms shook as she raised herself up high enough to bend at the waist. She managed to cram the rest of her body into the attic by caterpillaring on her belly as Leigh pistoned her hands around Callie’s legs.

  “Hold on,” Leigh said, as if Callie had a choice.

  Light flashed into the attic. Then again. Then again. Leigh was jumping, by the sound of it, either trying to see into the space or providing a strobing ambience to the ghosts-in-the-attic atmosphere.

  Callie asked, “What are you doing?”

  “You left the phone on the floor,” Leigh said. “I’m trying to see where to throw it.”

  Again, Callie had no choice but to lay on her belly and wait. She’d lucked up, because there was something underneath her hips that bridged the joists. Plastic, by the flex of it. Rough against her bare belly, because her Care Bears T-shirt had ripped on a nail. Another outfit ruined.

  “Here it comes,” Leigh said. There were some loud thumps before she tossed the phone in Callie’s direction. “Can you reach it?”

  Callie blindly felt behind her. The toss had been good. She told Leigh, “Got it.”

  “Can you see anything?”

  “Not yet.” Light didn’t exactly solve the problem. There was no way for Callie to look ahead from this angle. Her nose was almost touching the back of the Sheetrock that covered the ceiling. Insulation was sucking into her lungs. She had to shove the phone into her back pocket to test whether or not she could raise herself up on her hands and knees. Right hand and knee on one joist. Left hand and knee on the other. Ceiling down below waiting for her to fall through and crack another vertebra into pieces.

 
The last part didn’t happen, but her muscles howled from straddling the sixteen-inch gap in the joists. There had been a time when Callie could skip along a balance beam, throw herself around the uneven bars, flip head over heels across the gym floor. There was no muscle in her body that held on to that memory. She despised herself for her perpetual fragility.

  “Cal?” Leigh called up, her anxiety like the squiggly lines on a cartoon sun. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes.” Callie reached out her left hand, dragged along her left knee, then did the same on the right side, testing her ability to inch forward along the joists before responding, “I don’t see anything yet. I’m going to poke around.”

  Leigh didn’t answer. She was probably holding her breath or pacing or finding some way to absorb all the guilt that had been trapped inside this house for over two decades.

  Callie used the phone to shine a path. What she saw gave her a moment of hesitation. “Someone’s been up here recently. The insulation has been pulled back.”

  Leigh already knew this. It’s why she had wanted to go into the attic. They needed to answer the rock-bottom questions, which was the terminology that people who actually crawled through the attic got to use instead of something stupid like the B that linked the A and the C.

  What did Andrew know? How did he know it?

  Callie ignored the rock-bottom, visualizing the origami swan gracefully pushing back against the current that wanted to drag it down. She had purposefully built her life around the luxury of never having to think ahead. Now, she went against that lifetime of training and crawled forward on her hands and knees, keeping to the path of insulation that had been parted like the Red Sea. A skinny gray cable lay on the seabed. Rats had munched it into pieces, which was the plight of being a rat. Their teeth were constantly growing and they teethed on wires like babies with pacifiers, if a bite from a baby could give you hantavirus.

  “Cal?” Leigh called.

  “I’m good,” she lied. “Stop asking.”

  Callie paused her forward progress, trying to settle her mind, catch her breath, focus her thoughts on the task at hand. None of that worked, but she resumed crawling, carefully picking her way over a thick beam. The roughly hewn rafters scraped at her back as the pitch of the roof narrowed the space. She knew that she had just crossed over into the kitchen. Every muscle in her body knew it, too. She tried to lift her hand, but it wouldn’t leave the joist. She tried to move her leg. Same problem.

  Sweat rolled off her nose and splattered onto the back of the Sheetrock. The heat in the attic had sneaked up on her, slowly tightening its fingers around her neck. Another drop of sweat puddled into the other. Her eyes closed. She visualized the kitchen below. Lights on. Faucet running. Chairs tucked under the table. Buddy’s briefcase on the counter. His body on the floor.

  Callie felt a snort of hot breath on the back of her neck.

  The gorilla was behind her. Gripping her by the shoulders. Breathing into her ear. His mouth moved closer. She smelled cheap whiskey and cigars and Stay still, little dolly, I can’t stop I’m sorry baby girl I’m so sorry just relax into it come on just breathe.

  She opened her eyes. Gasped in a mouthful of warm air. Callie’s arms were shaking so hard she was afraid they wouldn’t support her much longer. She rolled to her side, lining up her body along the narrow joist like a cat balancing on the back of a couch. She looked at the underside of the roof. Nails spiked through the wood where the shingles had been pounded in. Water stains spread like dark thought bubbles above her head.

  The beautiful origami swan was gone, devoured by the malicious gorilla, but Callie could not suppress the truth any longer.

  She turned the light not straight ahead, but to the side. She pushed up on her elbow, making herself look over the beam, back toward the access panel. A plastic cutting board spanned two joists. Callie’s hand went to her stomach. She could still feel where the gouged plastic had scratched across her belly when she’d first crawled into the attic.

  She remembered the large cutting board from Linda Waleski’s kitchen. It had been on the counter one day then gone the next, and Callie had assumed that Linda had decided it was easier to throw it away than to clean it.

  But now she understood that Buddy had stolen the board for his attic project.

  Callie used the light to follow the rat-chewed cable that trailed back to the board. Without any other information, she knew that a VCR had been placed on the plastic. She knew that the gray, three-pronged RCA cable had hung down from the jacks on the front of the machine. Red for the right audio channel. White for the left audio. Yellow for video. The cable threaded into one long wire that now stretched in pieces back in Callie’s direction, then took a turn to the left.

  She followed the cable, inching on her elbows until her body lay across the joists instead of alongside them. The space narrowed even more. She used the light to examine the back of the Sheetrock. There wasn’t enough room to get anything but a harsh reflection off the shiny brown paper. She tucked the phone into her pocket, sending the attic into darkness.

  Even with that, Callie still closed her eyes. She ran her fingers along the flat surface. Almost immediately, she found a shallow indentation. Over time, something had left an impression in the soft pulp of the Sheetrock. Something two inches round, the same size as the focus ring on a camera. The same kind of camera that plugged into the end of the chewed cable that wound back to the missing VCR.

  She heard movement below. Leigh was in the kitchen. Callie listened to her sister’s footsteps crunching against the grit on the floor. Leigh was standing where the table and chairs had been. A few steps forward and she’d be at the sink. A few steps back and she’d be by the wall where the kitchen phone used to be.

  “Callie?” Leigh turned her phone upward. A beam of light shone through the hole in the ceiling. “What did you find?”

  Callie did not respond.

  What she had found was the answer to both of their rock-bottom questions.

  Andrew knew everything because he had seen everything.

  Wednesday

  10

  Leigh looked at the clock. It was exactly eight in the morning and rush-hour traffic was already tangling up the roads. She was back behind the wheel of her Audi but, for the first time in days, she no longer felt like she was drowning on dry land. Leigh’s sense of relief ran counter to what Callie had found in the Waleskis’ attic last night, but Andrew had already made it clear that he knew the intimate details of his father’s murder. What Leigh had not known, what had pushed her to the brink of insanity, was how he knew. Now that Leigh had the how, Andrew was robbed of some of the power he held over her.

  That Callie had been the one to give Leigh the leverage made it even sweeter. Her sister’s observation that Andrew didn’t have a secret army of drones in the sky had clicked something in Leigh’s head. At eighteen, she had been woefully unfamiliar with the basics of house construction. There were walls and floors and ceilings and somehow the water got to the faucet and the electricity got to the lights. She had not yet been forced to navigate a crawlspace looking for the water shut-off valve because her husband had chosen that weekend to visit his mother. She had never hidden Christmas presents in the attic to keep them secreted away from a very curious and clever little girl.

  From the moment Andrew had reappeared in her life, Leigh had been going through that horrible night of the attack over and over again trying to see what they had missed. Until that moment on the swings, it had never occurred to her that they had looked everywhere but up.

  After that, there were no surprises. Every Christmas during high school, Leigh had worked at the audio/visual department at Circuit City. They got paid on commission, so Leigh had worn a tight shirt and blown out her hair to attract the hapless men who’d wander in at the last minute looking for something expensive to buy their wives that they could actually use for themselves. She had sold dozens of Canon Optura camcorders. Then she had sold storage cases, tri
pods, cables, extra batteries, and VHS tapes because the mini-cassettes only held around ninety minutes of video, so you either had to erase the content or back it up.

  Callie had taken several photos of Buddy’s attic set-up, but Leigh knew exactly what it looked like before her sister had even come down. The RCA cable connected to the camera on one end and the VCR on the other. You pressed a button on the camera, then you pressed record on the VCR and everything backed up. What Callie’s photos had done was trigger a long-lost memory of Leigh finding the remote control in Buddy’s pants pocket. She had flung it across the floor so hard that the battery compartment had cracked open.

  Buddy had not walked around all day with the remote in his pocket. He had deliberately put it in there, the same way he had deliberately hidden the mini-cassette from the bar camera in the box of Black & Milds. The fact that he had pressed record on the camera hidden over the kitchen table before the fight broke out with Callie was what the legal world called premeditation. The only reason Buddy Waleski had started the camera was because he had known when he followed Callie into the kitchen that he was going to hurt her.

  And now his son had it all on tape.

  Leigh mentally reviewed the many things that Andrew Tenant had not done with the recording: He had not gone to the police. He had not shown it to Cole Bradley. He had not confronted Leigh with the evidence. He had not told anyone who could do anything about it.

  What he had done was use the information to force Leigh into doing something she did not want to do. She had taken Tammy Karlsen’s medical chart off the conference room table. She had read the therapy notes. She had formed, at least in her head, a way to use the information to bring Tammy to her knees.

  For now, Leigh’s only crime was receiving stolen property. The charge was mitigated by the fact that she was Andrew’s lawyer and hadn’t advised him to steal it, or done anything criminal with it herself, and for that matter, how did she know it was stolen? Anyone with a printer could make a file folder look official. Anyone with a chunk of free time could generate the roughly 138 pages front-and-back that constituted summaries from over sixty alleged therapy sessions.