“Sorry. I know you don’t like to talk about personal stuff. It’s just...”
“I changed, Chuy. My wife didn’t.”
“Oh.”
“Not to knock Vaughn or anything. That’s just the way it went.” On his way to the door, he checked his wallet, made sure the license-plate number was inside.
“Aren’t you forgetting something?”
Kevin turned to see the manager pointing at the Hostess display. He put on a smile. “Right.” He took a package of Twinkies from the display, jammed them into his jacket pocket. “My daily treat.”
“Couldn’t imagine you leaving here without taking a Twinkie or a Yodel or whatever.”
Kevin shrugged. “Makes me happy.”
“Bet that’s your only vice, right?” Chuy said. “Bet you don’t drink or smoke weed or screw around or nothing.”
Kevin nodded. “Yep. That’s pretty much it.”
“See? Three years, you tell me jack about yourself. But still, I know you.” Chuy’s face relaxed into a grin. “I’m perceptive like that.”
“You are very perceptive,” he said. “See you tomorrow, Chuy”
“See ya, George.”
Kevin pushed open the glass door. As he got into his car, he glanced back and saw the manager, smiling after him as he left. “Perceptive,” he said.
Sarah Jane Ledbetter had never apologized. Dr. Sheldon, the therapist Candace had forced him into seeing during Rachel’s final months of life, would mention this fact to Kevin frequently during their sessions, often in the form of a probing question: “She never apologized to you, did she, Kevin?” As if this were Sarah Jane Ledbetter’s worst infraction. Not saying “Sorry.”
Sixteen years old, Rachel had a voice like powdery snow under the soles of your boots. So soft and frail that you could barely hear it “I love you, Daddy,” she had said once, with Kevin sitting at her bedside, having hoped and prayed himself into a light sleep. At first he’d thought it was part of his dream. But then he had opened his eyes to find his daughter awake, watching him.
“I’m sorry,” Rachel had said.
Dr. Sheldon was fond of imaginary scenarios. “Put yourself in a room with Miss Ledbetter,” he said during a later session. “What would you do?”
Kevin hadn’t even bothered thinking about it. “Kill her.”
He remembered that now, as he climbed down the cellar stairs, taking in all of his home improvements, making sure everything was where it needed to be. Earlier tonight, when he’d first come home, he’d typed the license-plate number into the search bar of the online service he’d been subscribing to for the past three years, and watched all the information from Sarah Jane Ledbetter’s driver’s license materialize on the computer screen. As it turned out, she lived less than twenty minutes away.
“You don’t mean that, Kevin. That’s just your anger talking. You wouldn’t really kill her, would you?”
“I suppose not, Dr. Sheldon.”
Killing would be too quick. Kevin had just unlocked the cell he’d built. He was gripping the metal bars with both hands, testing their strength. There was a mattress on the floor, a porcelain sink and a bedpan. Outside the bars, across the room, he’d affixed two huge, full-length mirrors to the wall so that, inside the cell, there was no avoiding one’s own reflection. This won’t he quick. It will take time. Kevin pushed against the bars, threw all his weight into them, and without warning he heard his daughter’s voice in his head — a memory of Rachel’s voice at fourteen, loud enough to rattle the windows. “Daddy, want to see my cheer?”
“Not now, honey. I’m busy.”
“But tryouts are in an hour! Come on, Dad. Just watch, okay? It’ll take two seconds...”
Kevin squeezed his eyes shut. He felt hot tears seeping out of the corners. He gripped the metal bars, pressed his face into them, trying to see only blackness, but the image stayed in his head. Rachel at fourteen. The freckles. The ponytail. The wide-open smile...
“We’re the best I forget the rest I we must confess I we pass the test so... go! Bananas! B-a-n-a-n-a-s, just go!”
Kevin was sobbing now, breathing words into the cold bars. “Please don’t go to that tryout. Please, Rachel. Please, honey. Please stay home with Mom and me. Please stay home, you’re too good, Rachel. You’re too good to leave us, honey, please, please...”
“Go, go, go!”
The police didn’t care. The lawyers didn’t care. Nobody cared that Sarah Jane Ledbetter had taken Kevin’s daughter. She’d taken Kevin’s only child and made her into a ghost.
“How was that, Dad?”
“Well...”
“Be honest.”
“Honestly, Rachel?”
“Yes?”
“You’re gonna be the most beautiful, talented cheerleader on the squad.”
“Really?”
“You bet.”
She threw her arms around him and hugged him so tight that for a second, he couldn’t breathe.
Kevin slammed the cell door closed. The metal clanged and echoed. He dragged his hand across his wet face and took a deep, shaking breath, and then he left the basement fast, taking the stairs two at a time. After printing out the map he’d made online, Kevin went into his garage, where he pulled two spools of black duct tape from his toolbox, as well as a length of thick rope and a small burlap sack that used to hold Florida tangerines and still smelled of them. He then packed all the things into a large black duffel that he’d purchased at the same time as this house.
When he threw it all into his car and started driving, the citrus scent was thick in the air — strange and fresh and hopeful. It reminded Kevin of a family vacation, taken years ago and long since forgotten.
“I sympathize with you, Mr. and Mrs. Murphy. I really do,” the last lawyer had said. “But I’m sorry... you don’t have a case.”
She worked for a firm that Kevin had seen advertised during one of the daytime soap operas. “Ambulance chasers,” Candace had called the firm, yet she’d gone with Kevin anyway because he’d assured her that this attorney visit would be their last.
“What do you mean?” Kevin had asked the lawyer. “The woman killed our daughter. Of course we have a case.”
“Not technically. Not in the eyes of the law.”
Kevin felt Candace’s hand gripping his... a gesture not so much supportive as restraining. “What do you mean?” he said again.
The attorney leaned forward. She wore a lot of pancake makeup, a shade darker than it should have been. Under the bright office lights, it looked like paint on a pocked wall. She was wearing eye shadow the color of a fly’s body, and her lips were a deep, angry red. It struck Kevin that this lawyer went through the day wearing a mask, a disguise. How could he trust anyone like that?
“Miss Ledbetter,” she said carefully, “is a very insensitive woman...”
“She’s a lot more than that.”
“...but she isn’t a criminal.”
“She’s a murderer. This is a wrongful-death case if there ever was one!”
“I’m very sorry for your loss.”
Kevin turned to Candace. She stared straight ahead. “Maybe Rachel’s death was our fault,” she said, very quietly. “Ever think of that, Kevin?”
Sarah Jane Ledbetter’s house was much smaller than the one she’d owned in Larchmont. A raised ranch, they called it — a top-heavy cottage with big windows staring awkwardly out of a bloated second story, the smaller story on the bottom shouldering all the weight. Tacky, Kevin thought. But appropriate for a woman who delighted in crushing small things.