Page 92 of Haven't Killed in Years
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” said Kevin. “If he’s at Barbara’s, he probably doesn’t have service.”
“Can I give you my number?” I asked. “And if he calls you back, will you text me?” I pulled my phone from my pocket.
“I thought you didn’t have your phone.”
Shit.I was literally a disaster; I didn’t even need my phone to give himmynumber. To think I was anything like my father was becoming comical. I didn’t know what to say; instead I made a face that was equal partsI’m embarrassedandThis is awkward.
“I don’t want to get in the middle of anything,” he said.
“No, no,” I insisted. “I’m just crazy.” Self-deprecation for the win. “When someone doesn’t respond to me, I always think the worst—death, destruction, you know? I’m working on it, but it would help if I had confirmation he was alive.”
He shook his head but handed me his phone and I entered my contact information. I gave it back and he did his best to comfort me. “Seriously, don’t worry about him. He’s probably with Barbara and he’s a space cadet anyway. Really bad about checking his phone.”
“Thanks,” I said as he stepped past me toward the porch.
“See you later, Gwen,” he said, looking back with a smile before unlocking the front door and leaving me on the curb.
Kevin could be right. Dominic could be with his mother. She lived in the sticks in New Hampshire and it was nice to think he was there taking care of her with no cell service. He wasn’t ignoring me because he was dead; he was busy being a doting, selfless son. While Dominic being with Barbara was an optimal explanation, it was a complete guess from Kevin, who was probably just trying to get Dominic’s crazy girlfriend off his property.
Could I accept that Dominic was visiting his mother? Swallow that excuse to make myself feel better? No. I kept thinking about him being dead. He wasn’t returning any calls because whoever was behind this had chopped him into bits. Or, worse, had buried him alive, and instead of searching for him, I was like,Oh cool, he’s with his mom.
Whoever was behind this was definitely winning. I was losing it. I had to get out of the city. Time for a little road trip. New Hampshire’s lovely in the spring.
Fifty-Three
Barbara Cook lived inFranconia, New Hampshire. A quick search on a website called VerifiedData.com gave me her address with minimal effort. It was so easy I ended up googling Gwen Tanner and Marin Haggerty. Gwen Tanner showed my current address and the one I’d had before that one, and I regretted every credit card I’d ever opened. The Marin Haggerty search came up empty at least.
It took around two hours to drive there. It was a pleasant little town, with a ski resort closed for the season and some other nature-y stuff—thankfully nowhere near the pond my mother’s body was hopefully still submerged in.
The house was small and it didn’t look like more than a couple of people could live there comfortably. There was no sign of Dominic’s car or the tour van. The only vehicle in the driveway was a silver Honda Civic that I didn’t recognize.
I followed a stone path from the driveway to the front door, taking smaller-than-usual steps to stay on the stones. I reached the door,but it opened before I could knock. A middle-aged woman in nurse scrubs greeted me.
“Thank you for coming,” she said, dipping back into the house and allowing me to follow.
She scrambled around for her purse and coat and it was obvious she thought I was someone else. “She’s easy—already asleep and probably won’t wake up. If she does, you can usually take her to the bathroom and then she’ll go back to sleep. She can be a little disoriented, so if she’s upset, you can turn on the Game Show Network.”
“Okay,” I said, knowing I should explain that I was not there to relieve this caretaker—that I was actually a complete stranger with zero medical training—but how would that help anyone? This lady clearly had somewhere to be. Whoever she thought I was would show up soon. No harm, no foul.
The home nurse, or whatever she was, left me there having asked only one question: “Do you have any questions?” When I shook my head, she was satisfied and that was that.
I stood alone in the living room. The furniture was dated and sparse. There was a worn couch with a quilted blanket placed over it and a recliner that seemed wider than the doorway. The small table next to the chair was crowded with cups, pills, tissues—things that informed me it was mostly where the sick lady sat.
I meandered toward the kitchen, peeking my head in, feeling that if I stayed in the living room, I wasn’t quite trespassing yet. The kitchen was tiny like everything else, one counter with a row of wooden cabinets that had a shoddy coat of white paint over them and one rectangular table against the wall, with room for four chairs if anyone ever pulled it back, but it seemed content now with only two seats.
I moved away from the kitchen toward the hallway. The carpet was the same, running uninterrupted from the living room. Therewere three doors all in a row,1-2-3, all closed. I put my ear to the first one and could hear her breathing. They were weak, raspy breaths, the kind I thought might stop at any moment and she would be dead, but she kept breathing and I moved to the second door. There was no part of me that wasn’t going to open that door, but I inhaled, pretending I had seriously debated it, then turned the knob on the exhale.
It was a bathroom, super anticlimactic. Toilet, shower, sink, lots of grab bars to help someone in her condition function. I closed the door and moved on.
I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, but I had driven all this way and had a history of breaking in and snooping around Dominic’s life. It was our thing. I remembered how that freak had known I was there in his closet and had played the whole thing out just to mess with me. What an interesting guy. Definitely a weirdo, but in an appealing way. I tried to stay breezy about it, but I knew I would be devastated if he was dead.
The third room was finally something I could enjoy. It was a second bedroom, with a twin bed in the corner, but more accurately, it was a storage closet. Hard to tell if it was last month or ten years ago, but his mom had definitely been moved there hastily. There were boxes stacked to the ceiling with minimal labeling. A few hadkitchenorbathroomscribbled on them with a Sharpie, but most were nondescript.
I pulled one of the boxes without any labeling down onto the twin bed. It was full of toys, old toys that maybe could be worth something. It made me all sorts of nostalgic, not from memories of playing with those toys but from memories of seeing the commercials for them on the box TV in the recreation room at the facility. I used to tell Natalie how much each thing cost as if I had any idea. I would confidently report to her, “That game costs $12.99. It’s not worth it.Those pieces are going to break the first time you play.” She’d believed every word I’d said and it made her a little less sad about the fact that we were never going to have any of those toys.
Stop. Don’t think about her, I scolded myself. This was new. It was unusual for the memories of Natalie that bubbled up to be pleasant—to elicit a warm feeling. The norm was for every memory of our time together to be framed by how it had ended. As it turns out, that night in our room as teenagers wasn’t how it had ended after all. Instead, I’d held her in a pool of her own blood after my stalker had slit her throat. I guess now that she was gone, dead because of knowing me, I could remember her differently. I was becoming such a sap. It was hard to recognize myself.
I took an old Nintendo DS out of the box. The edges were scuffed and some of the color had worn off the buttons. I tried to turn it on, but who knows how long the thing had been in storage, and it might as well have been a rock.
