Page 33 of Haven't Killed in Years
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We drove home inmostly silence. I could tell he was embarrassed, and he should be. We’d suffered through a whole tour of that place with no hope of getting anywhere near the files. All it did was bring back more memories for me. It was eight years of my life that I had effectively blocked out. I had to use so much of my brain power to remember details from my life as Marin Haggerty that I think my mind was tired and needed a break when it came to those years.
After the first half hour in the car, the silence started to feel tense,more than it needed to be. I shifted around in my seat to try and reset the mood. “My neck,” I said, massaging it. “I think I slept funny. Why is it always the neck? Why don’t you ever wake up with anything else stiff?”
“Tell that to twelve-year-old me.” He laughed; I had succeeded in resetting the mood. It was the perfect alley-oop for a dick joke, but I giggled like it hadn’t crossed my mind. He needed to feel clever in order to stop pouting.
“Hey.” He paused, ready to address his misstep. “I’m sorry for dragging you all the way out here for nothing.”
“It’s fine. Now I can say I’ve been to East Buford, Pennsylvania.” I laughed.Ha ha. What a strange little place that I totally have never been to before, ever, like, definitely never lived there.
Eighteen
Going back to thatschool had me totally on edge, reminding me of how sick and twisted the world was. My father was an outlier, not something to be extrapolated onto the population. The kids I’d met there, though, they’d felt like something much more pervasive—symptoms of our society, a microcosm.
I had shielded myself after I left that place, isolating socially, trying to forget I was ever there. I reentered the world as eighteen-year-old Gwen Tanner—a loner who worked three jobs to survive and tried to better herself—but I was also still a little bit Marin Haggerty, who, when given the opportunity, moved back to Boston, where she could casually walk by old crime scenes and remember her father. I was never the girl who lived at that facility; that was just the in-between.
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As soon as wegot back, Dominic ditched me for work and I headed to Jake’s apartment. I hoped it was his little cult that wasdoing something with Porter; I’d rather someone be slicing up his stomach than cutting off his limbs.
“Hey, Gwen,” Jake said, opening the door.
“Sorry to show up like this,” I blurted out. I could tell he was surprised to see me.
“No problem. Come on in.” He backed away to make room for me to enter. He was always so polite for a guy who worshipped murderers and cut up his friends for sport.
The place was different sans party. The curtains were pulled back, and even though it was dark outside, it still felt brighter than when they were closed. A couple of guys sat on the couches with their laptops; one was eating a burrito, the other sucked on a purple smoothie. They glanced up to wave at me, then went back to whatever they were doing on their computers.
“Is Porter here?” I asked, cutting to the chase, extending my neck, trying to peek into the bedrooms.
“No. Is he supposed to be?”
“I haven’t heard from him in a few days.”
“Are you worried?” he asked.
“I’m not sure.”
“Come, sit.” Jake led me onto one of the unoccupied couches. His face was thin. It was kind of like talking to an attractive Crypt-Keeper. Did I need to seriously consider this guy too? Was he sending me body parts? At least if it was Jake, I could get him out of the picture; Elyse was way too good for him.
“When’s the last time you saw him?” I asked.
He thought for a second. “Sunday? At the party. He called a couple days ago, told me his parents kicked him out, and I said he could crash here, but when he didn’t show up, I assumed he had figured something out.”
“How did he seem?”
“Excited. Manic. He said he met someone, but he wouldn’t tell me who. He kept saying it would blow my mind, but I didn’t think too much of it. Hyperbole seems like Porter’s thing.” He smiled, but I didn’t have time for levity.
“Do you think it was Abel Haggerty?” I asked.
“Abel Haggerty?” He recoiled. “Why would you think that?”
“He told me he wrote him a letter.”
“Really? You should ask Dominic about that. He’s obsessed with the guy.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. It was the obvious move, but I had decided not to mention it to Dominic. It wasn’t like it hadn’t crossed my mind fifty times during the long car rides, but there was something that always stopped me. Like a crossing of streams that felt dangerous. It would be naive not to consider Dominic as still very much in play, and I didn’t want to risk that the information wouldn’t sit well with him. The fragility of believing you are unique to my father was something only I could truly understand and I wasn’t looking to shake that tree yet.
