Page 18 of Haven't Killed in Years
The first bedroom I entered was dark and I hit the light switch. A picture of Dominic and a lady I assumed to be his mother told me it was his room and not Kevin’s. The espresso-brown dresser andnightstands matched the headboard in what I imagined was a hasty four-pieces-for-eight-hundred-dollars furniture deal. There was a mismatched desk in the corner, with a stack of notebooks and his laptop. I took a seat, and while I waited for the laptop to boot up, I grabbed a notebook.
It was full of handwritten scribbles. I opened to a page at random. It was dated from right before Christmas.Abel is in a good mood today. Doesn’t want to talk about any killings. Wants to talk about the holiday. Not allowed to decorate.How domestic. I flipped back to an earlier entry.Elderly lady he saw in the park previous week. She had a bad leg. Too weak to fight. He snapped her neck. He had to do it. Came to him in a dream.
A dream. I shook my head. My father had never desired to hone his narrative à la the Boston Strangler or the Wet Bandits. Every act, every story, every motive was different. The only through line was that it was necessary he do it, a mission that was communicated to him—only him, the chosen one. And someday, it would be my destiny to fulfill. That was a familiar part of the narrative, but only to me; it was never shared with anyone. As I skimmed through the entries, that detail appeared to be missing from these journals as well. My father had maintained at least this boundary with Dominic. Dominic wasn’t that special. Not special like I was.
I scanned the pages for reference to Elyse or her family. The Abbington name popped up every twenty pages or so with brief notes.Heasked about Elyse again. It’s almost every time now. Getting harder to distract him.
I reached the end of my sporadic review of that notebook and went for another. It was older.Reanne won’t write back. Hasn’t written since the divorce. Regrets it. Lonely. Doesn’t get as many letters anymore. People are losing interest. Hopes the book will help.
The laptop came alive and I put the notebooks back. His computerbackground was my father’s mug shot. He used to be handsome, one of his assets, but one eye was slightly askew—the defect looked obvious now, but only in hindsight.
Assorted icons floated around the desktop, but in the top-right corner was a folder labeledAbel Haggerty.I opened it, revealing even more categories—Background,Victim Profiles,Photos, et cetera. I opened theBackgroundfolder, then a folder labeledFamily, then finally one I knew would be there:Marin Haggerty.
I expected to find a treasure trove of information he shouldn’t have. I expected pictures of me, current day, taken from the shadows: pictures at the movies photographed with night vision, pictures of me at Painting Pots taken from the parking lot through the big square windows, pictures of me in my home angled from his car below. That was the evidence I was looking for, but there was nothing.
There were a few pictures from my old elementary school, but I’d still been chubby then, with blonde hair and round glasses. There was a scanned report card from third grade that he’d gotten his hands on somehow, and a copy of my birth certificate. The only thing of note was a heavily redacted document with the few remaining words being the date my parents were arrested, a lot of pronouns and prepositions, three uses of the wordminor, and the name of the detective filling it out—James Calhoun.
There was a noise at the apartment door before I could think anything through. The knob was rattling. I slammed the laptop shut and flew out of the chair toward the light switch. Cut to black.
The door creaked as it opened and a light crawled across the living room. I had no chance of getting back out the bathroom window. Footsteps. I slid into the closet and closed the door, leaving it slightly ajar because I couldn’t risk the sound of it shutting.
Was someone else breaking in? This wasmycaper. Maybe it was the real stalker—stalking me, stalking Dominic. Or was it Kevin,not actually out of town? Boring and somehow the worse option. The footsteps were almost at the bedroom. I backed in between some hanging shirts and peered through the crack in the door.
Dominic walked into the room, pulling his sweater over his head. It wasn’t a burglar; it was this asshole standing me up for the drinks that I was standing him up for and now I was stuck in his closet.
I stood in that closet for two hours while he made something in the skillet that smelled amazing and watched the second half of the Celtics game. Finally he got down to only his boxers, turned off the bedroom light, and climbed into bed. I waited another half an hour until all tossing and turning subsided. I cracked the closet door open a little farther and stuck my head out.
The whites of his eyes were all I could see in the darkness. He stared at me.
Eleven
I tumbled out of thecloset as Dominic sat up in his bed. “I was wondering when you were going to come out.”
“What the fuck?” I said, tripping over a towel balled up on the floor.
“What the fuck yourself?” He reached over to turn on a bedside lamp.
I was totally busted and had no excuse. “How did you— Why didn’t you meet me?” I rubbed at my forehead, hoping my brain would think of something smart to say.
“I saw you,” he said. “I came back for a coat and saw you snooping around.”
“So you just decided to mess with me?” I asked, somehow feeling justified to be pissed off.
He climbed out of the bed and walked toward me.
“You’re clearly crazy,” he said, stopping in front of me and crossing his arms. “So what kind of crazy are you?”
“Screw you. I did this to see if you were a psycho.”
“And?”
“And I’m going to go,” I said, turning away from him.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” He grabbed my arm and I basically hissed at his fingers gripping my bicep. He pulled his hand back and tucked it under his other arm. I read it as an offer to keep his hands to himself going forward. He would be smart to realize that was what was best for him. “I think we should talk,” he said. “Or I could call the cops. You did break into my apartment.”
We sat together on his leather couch, leaning against opposite arms so that we could face each other. He had found a shirt and he tugged at his hair,1-2-3.
“I’m not really sure what to say,” he said.
