Page 103 of Haven't Killed in Years
Fourteen days after Jake Calloway was processed into Edgar Valley, he was found dead in his cell—strangled. It would have been easy to wrap a sheet around his neck, hang him from a bed, and disguise it as a suicide, but his assailant hadn’t gone to the trouble. Jake had been strangled by someone’s bare hands.
I knew who did it and so did the rest of the world, but two corrections officers insisted they were with Abel during the entire time window. I had seen my father control one of those officers with a look and I knew his alibi meant nothing.
I couldn’t stop fixating on Cody, wondering if maybe that was what he’d wanted all along, to end up in that prison, to get to Abel, to die at his hands like the rest of his family. His lawyer could have asked for a different prison. It would have been a reasonable request. I thought there must have been a reason he hadn’t. Then I would hate myself for how much the idea of him maybe getting what he wanted bothered me. Then the more I spiraled, the more it felt like hehadgotten what he wanted.
I had come a long way on paper. I wasn’t a murderer after all. I was nothing like my father, and even more than knowing it, I had accepted it. I grieved for Natalie and my mother—even for James Calhoun. I had people in my life I cared about. I should have felt better, but those were just bullet points. Realizing that I could be my own person, that I didn’t need to hide, and that I didn’t need to hurt people—that was nice, I guess. But that’s not how I had spent my thirty-year existence up to that point, and a few storybook epiphanies weren’t going to reset the way I processed the world and the people in it. The frosting was pretty, but I worried the cake was still rotten.
The guys were faring better than I was. Dominic was getting hisbook deal—a book that didn’t yet exist, but Elyse and I had both agreed to exclusive interviews and the publisher couldn’t resist.
Porter got a lot of attention, mostly because he was the only one receptive to it, and he very quickly leveraged that into something more. He gained an awful lot of Instagram followers and started posting ads. I didn’t know what qualified a person whose only claim to fame was almost being murdered to suggest teeth-whitening products and protein powders, but I was happy for him and his platform. He would shoot me a few texts once in a while, but I wasn’t sure he needed me anymore. I wasn’t sure what he thought about me, about Gwen. Or what he thought about Marin.
I sat on my couch. I’d thought everything would be so different for me now, but I was still alone and I was still battling thoughts I had hoped would dissipate.
I debated calling Elyse, but there was no way to be casual with her now. Over the past months we’d had brief conversations, never alone, always surrounded by cops or lawyers. I didn’t know if she had forgiveness in her. She had hated the real me for almost twenty years. She’d gotten her brother back and now he was gone again because of me.
I could have called Dominic. He always picked up, but I didn’t want to talk to him. These days, the conversations felt more like interviews.
Three dead ends.
I grabbed my phone, opened the internet browser, and stared at the search bar. Then I started typing.
Natalie Shea
She’d had no social media. Only that one video that was taken down but had lived on like all things do on the internet. There wereother links though. She was one of Cody’s victims after all. I read the first fifteen search results. They all listed her in the context of the bigger picture. A few described her as a mentally unstable accomplice, which I was sure they’d gotten from Cody. There was never a mention of any journals, and I had to assume Cody had taken them after he killed her.
If only people knew the truth, but I had the last journal, and I’d kept it a secret too. I told myself it was because it raised too many questions about Porter’s involvement, but it was really just something I didn’t want to share with the world. It was the only thing I had left of her.
I wondered what had happened to Natalie in all those years since they’d pulled her away kicking and screaming. I used to promise her that everything would be okay. Talk about broken promises.
I suddenly felt the urge to search another name.
Sixty
There were six DeclanHarrises on Facebook, but only one who lived in Pennsylvania. He had forty-two friends and his profile picture was the Monster Energy logo, which made me irrationally angry. I scrolled through his feed. His birthday was January 12. I knew this because his entire feed was four or five generic birthday messages from this year, then the year before, then the year before that, uninterrupted. Finally, there was another post from five years ago. Someone had tagged him in the background of a photo of a bonfire. It was hard to make out his face, but he was spooky skinny, looking like Slender Man in a backward hat. The photo was geotagged to a bar in Rawling, Pennsylvania. There were no recent pictures. Maybe he was dead. I would love to know the statistics on the number of people every year who wish a dead person happy birthday via Facebook.
I went to the medicine cabinet and pulled out a bottle of NyQuil. I took a generous swig, hoping for rest. Tomorrow I was going to drive to Rawling, Pennsylvania, and find out if Declan Harris was dead.
- - - - -
Declan wasn’t dead. Ittook me a couple of days before someone directed me to the Bridgewood Apartments. The place was a total dump—dirty towels as curtains, trash in the bushes, living room furniture on the lawn, molding from periodic rain. It was the type of place that belonged on the outskirts of town, only it sat right in the middle, on a street behind the post office, across from a park.
I sat in my car for hours before I saw Declan. He came out of nowhere, on foot, and lay down on one of the lawn couches. I proceeded to watch him shoot up and pass out. I’d never seen someone do drugs like that in real life—the real kind, the needle kind.
Once he stopped moving, I climbed out of my car. It was full-on nighttime now, but there were enough streetlights that I could get all the way to him without having to step into the dark.
I could smell him, or the couch, once I reached the lawn. It was a urine-mildew mix that made me gag. A breeze would blow the scent away and then it would come back once the gust passed, reintroducing me to it and never quite letting me get used to it.
I walked right up to the couch and stared down at him. His face was gaunt and pitted, trying to hide behind a struggling beard. I didn’t know what I was feeling. It’s hard to tell what’s fair for a person like that. He was an asshole when he was younger, but as far as I knew, he hadn’t killed anyone. He hadn’t even really hurt anyone. He was just a jerk. We were the ones who’d poisoned him.
He’d stayed in that facility with me for a year and half after Natalie left. There were lasting effects. He had some kind of issue with his kidneys and eventually he had to be taken somewhere better equipped to care for him. I had no clue what kind of man he had become. Or how much of it had to do with what we had done to him.
I didn’t know why, but I started to fixate on the distance betweenhis mouth and his nose. They seemed close together. Were they closer than normal? I put my hand to my own nose, measuring the distance to my mouth, pulling back my fingers to inspect the spacing like it was scientific research. It was normal, I guess. Maybe I was overthinking it.
I reached down, putting my thumb on the side of his nose, then my pointer finger on the other side, ready to squeeze if I was so inclined. He didn’t react to my touch so I lowered my palm, confirming the distance was short enough for me to cover his mouth. I could easily pinch his nose closed and cover his mouth with the same hand.
I didn’t need to be this new person, miraculously cured from all of her dark shit. He didn’t look well. It would be mercy.
“Hey!” a woman’s voice screeched at me.
