Page 32 of Haven't Killed in Years
“Did you get this plan fromAce Ventura: Pet Detective?”
He hesitated for a second and then burst out laughing. “No, not on purpose, but you’re right. It worked though.”
“They’re going to notice if one of us wanders off,” I pointed out.
“I’ll say I’m having stomach issues.”
“This is givingmestomach issues,” I muttered.
- - - - -
I’d spent four monthsin upstate New York after my parents were arrested. James Calhoun had located a relative. More likely, Abel had told him where to look. He was an uncle, but distant. Generations of infidelity and children out of wedlock had left Abel’s kin with loose connections.
The man was seventy-eight years old. Nimble enough to get himself to and from the local bar but not much else. He barely spoke to me or even acknowledged my presence much beyond bringing home highly processed snacks and tossing them in my direction.
James told me it would be short-term. Just enough time for thepaperwork to go through. Once my uncle was given full custody, the rest was easy. The paperwork was sealed and I was in the custody of a relative in another state; the State of Massachusetts never gave me much thought after that. Oswald would eventually request the name change, sealing those records as well, and then Marin Haggerty would be nothing but a ghost. He just needed a little time.
I didn’t know my place in the old man’s home. I’d been treated my whole life as someone special, the center of the universe, and now I ranked somewhere between the armchair and the trash can.
Love, therapy, safety—all the things I probably needed—were none of the things I wanted and none of the things I got. Instead, I kept to myself, inside my head, surrounded by the teachings of my father, clinging to every memory, trying my best not to forget who I was.
There was comfort in being alone. I didn’t miss the attention, the pressure to please my father, the punishments when I failed. No one expected anything from me. No one could hurt me. But it was lonely, and over time I started to accept I wasn’t on some little break from my normal life; I was transitioning to something new.
James Calhoun returned unannounced on a Saturday afternoon. Everything was settled. I was Gwen Tanner now, and Gwen Tanner was newly enrolled in a boarding school somewhere in Pennsylvania. We left that day; nothing was exchanged with the uncle other than the five hundred dollars James had promised.
Over the next two days, the long drive, a night in a motel when we got there, it became clear to me that the boarding school was not going to be the plaid-skirts-and-legacy-admissions type. It was aboardingschool in that students lived there full-time, but that was because these children were not welcome in their homes. It was a residential treatment facility more than it was a school, an educational institution with the emphasis oninstitution.
As far as the facility was concerned, my parents had died in a fireand I was having a hard time adjusting. I had no other close family and they shouldn’t expect any visitors. James told me it was just a cover, a place to hide out until the dust settled, but there was a part of me that knew he thought I belonged there.
- - - - -
I followed behind Dominic,more timid than I would have expected. It had a different name now and the landscaping was better maintained. The bars on the windows were gone and there were new tan awnings—but the silhouette was the same. New windows couldn’t stop old memories.
I remembered the day James brought me there—whispering in my ear tostick to the planas he led me inside. I said goodbye to him in the reception area; he wasn’t allowed to see me to my room, which was a real red flag. There were a lot of unsettling sounds on the other side of that door. I remembered hearing kids crying, yelling, TVs turned on way too loud to cover up other sounds. I didn’t make a peep while an attendant led me inside.
I spent a whole month segregated in a sterile fish tank because of my fictional propensity for self-harm—an easy sell given the five carvings down my side. James said I had to pretend it was true so no one would wonder who had actually done it to me. I was technically under observation at first, but there wasn’t much observing going on. Not much to see other than a little girl on a mattress on the floor.
I was eventually moved to a standard room where there was no lock on the door, and I could finally attend classes, which were a total joke. It was another month before I got a roommate. That little girl required a lot of attention and sometimes I think the staff forgot I was even there.
I didn’t want to go inside. How had I ended up there again? My pace had slowed down and Dominic noticed.
“Are you okay?” he asked, stopping so that he could give me his undivided attention.
“Aren’t you nervous? What happened to the guy who flipped out when Porter broke into the Haggerty house?”
“That was different,” he said.
“Yeah, this is way worse.”
“Not really,” he argued.
I wasn’t going to scare him out of this mission, and if I kept acting like this, it was going to start raising questions. “Just don’t be stupid,” I said.
“I’ll try my best,” he promised, content that my apprehension was directed toward his incompetence and not due to my paralyzing unwillingness to revisit this place.
The reception area was barely recognizable and it was immediately apparent that Dominic’s plan wasn’t going to work. There were several locked doors and a check-in desk behind a thin layer of glass. Behind the glass, behind the desk, behind a controlled-entrance door were the files—files that, for all we knew, didn’t even go back the almost twenty years he needed.
I shot him a look full of judgment and disappointment, masking my true feeling ofThank God.
