“Mom. Please.” I get the full eye roll this time. “If I’d thought he was a creeper, wouldn’t I have said so to his face? And to yours? Loudly?”
She would have. Lily was shy. Lanny is not. Something in me eases, though I know I can’t afford to rely on a fourteen-year-old’s judgment, however good I think it is.
In this, I can only rely on myself. I have to take a risk, and I flinch at the very idea. I take risks for myself. But with them? With them?
“Mom.” Lanny is leaning forward now, and I see the earnest stillness in her. I see a ghost of the woman she will become. “Mom, Sam’s fine. He’s good. We’re good. Just do it.”
Just do it. I take in a deep, slow breath and sit back and nod. Lanny smiles slowly and crosses her arms. She does love to win.
“I’ll watch him like a hawk,” she tells me. “And I’ve got Javier and Officer Graham on speed dial. NBD, Mom.”
NBD, I know, stands for no big deal. It is. But I need a leap of faith, and this time I take it. I pick up my cell phone and lock eyes with Lanny again as I dial the phone number.
He picks up on the second ring. “Hey, Gwen.”
The normality and welcome of it steadies me, and my voice sounds almost normal when I say, “I need a favor.”
I hear water running. I hear him shut it off and put something down to give me his full attention. “Tell me,” he says. “I’ll do it.”
It’s that simple.
“I’m only going to be gone for about twelve hours,” I tell Sam on Sunday night, the night before I have to get on the plane, “but I appreciate you staying over. Lanny’s responsible, but—”
“Yeah, but she’s fourteen,” he says. He takes a drink from the beer I’ve given him—a pecan porter, which he seems to prefer. Craft beers are a gift from God. I’m sipping a Samuel Adams Organic Chocolate Stout, creamy and smooth. It soothes the jitters in my stomach. “You don’t want to come home to a trashed house and a mountain of beer cans, right?”
“Right,” I say, though I doubt Lanny would even consider throwing a party. With me gone, she won’t feel free, like most girls her age would. She’ll feel vulnerable—and she is vulnerable. If her father knows where we are, if someone’s really watching us on his behalf . . . I try not to think about it. I’m well aware that someone out there could be watching now. There are a couple of watercraft out on the lake in the sunset, making for shore. Maybe one of them has a camera trained on my porch. It makes me itchy. Mel will destroy this. He destroys everything.
But that is why I am going to visit him. To be absolutely sure he understands the stakes we are playing for now.
I haven’t told Sam where I’m going. I wouldn’t know how to even start that conversation. I also don’t tell him I’ve set up wireless cameras. There’s one focused on the front door, one on the back, one set back from the property on a tree to give a wide view, and one up high in an air-conditioning grille in the living and kitchen area. I can easily flip from one view to another on the tablet that came with them. In an emergency, I can e-mail the link to the Norton PD.
Not that I don’t trust him. Just that I need some kind of reassurance.
I do say this: “Sam? Do you have a gun?”
I catch him in midgulp, and he turns to look at me with a curious expression as he coughs. I cock an eyebrow at him, and he turns it into a rueful laugh. “Sorry,” he says. “Caught me off guard there. Yeah, I’ve got a gun, sure. Why?”
“Would you mind making sure you have it with you while you’re here? I’m just—”
“Worried about leaving your kids? Yeah. Okay. No problem.” Still, he continues to watch me, and his voice drops a little. “Any specific threats I need to know about, Gwen?”
“Specific? No. But—” I hesitate, thinking how to put it. “I feel like we’re being watched. Does that sound crazy?”
“Around Killhouse Lake? Nope.”
“Killhouse?”
“Don’t blame me for that one. Blame your daughter. I think one of her goth buddies came up with it. Catchy, isn’t it?”
I hated it. Stillhouse was plenty creepy enough for me. “Well, just—take care of them, that’s all I ask. I’ll be gone less than twenty-four hours.”
He nods. “I might work on that deck some, if that’s all right.”
“Sure. Thanks.”
On impulse, I reach out to him, and he takes my hand and holds it for a moment. That’s all. It isn’t a kiss. Isn’t even a hug. But it’s something strong, and it makes both of us sit for a moment savoring it.
He gets up eventually, draining the last of his pecan porter, and says, “I’ll be back early morning before you leave, yeah?”
“Yeah,” I agree. “I leave for Knoxville at four a.m. The kids will be off to school by eight, and they can get themselves up and on the bus. You’ll have the place to yourself until they’re back at three. I’ll be in sometime after dark.”
“Sounds good. I’ll be sure to eat all your food and watch only the highest-dollar pay-per-view. Mind if I buy a bunch of stuff on your account on the shopping channels?”
“You know how to party, Sam.”
“Damn right I do.”
He gives me a full, sweet smile and leaves to walk up the hill toward his small cabin. I watch him go, hardly aware that I’m smiling, too. It feels normal.
Normal, I think, as the smile finally fades, is so dangerous now. I’d been fooling myself into thinking I could live in that world, but my world is the one beneath, the one in the shadows, the one where nothing is safe or sane or permanent. I’d almost forgotten that with Sam. If I stay here, I am helping my kids, but I’m risking everything, too.
There are no good answers, but this time I’m not just going to be strong. I’m hitting back.
The next day I take an eye-wateringly early morning flight from Knoxville to Wichita, where we once lived, and from there I drive a rental car to El Dorado. It’s got a strangely industrial feeling, like a large manufacturing campus surrounded by miles of nothing, but there’s no mistaking what it really is once you see the shimmering fences around it in a lace ruff of razor wire. I’ve never been here before. I don’t know how to do this. The air smells different, and it reminds me of my old life, my old house that’s long gone. It was foreclosed on by the bank while I was in jail. A month after that, someone had set it on fire and burned it to ruins. There’s a memorial park there now.
When I want to punish myself, I look at the spot where I once lived on Google Maps. I try to overlay the house on top of the park from memory. It seems to me that the large stone memorial block sits in the center of what had once been Mel’s garage and killing floor. That seems appropriate.
I don’t take the detour to look on the way to El Dorado. I can’t. I am focused on one thing and one thing only as I follow instructions from the guard on where to park, what I can take inside with me. I’ve left my Glock locked in my Jeep’s gun safe back in Knoxville, and all I have with me now are the clothes on my body, a preloaded cash card for $500, phone and tablet computer, and my old Gina Royal ID.
I endure the sign-in process, where my ID is scrutinized, my fingerprints are taken, and I am subjected to stares and whispers from not just the prison staff but other women coming to see family. I don’t meet anyone’s gaze. I am an expert at being remote. The guards are certainly interested. I’ve never been to see Melvin before. They’ll be hotly discussing it up and down the corridors.
Next, everything but my clothes is taken and stored in a guard station, and then I’m strip-searched; it’s a humiliating, invasive process, but I grit my teeth and get through it without complaint. This is important, I think. Mel likes to play chess. This move, this visit, is my checkmate. I can’t afford to flinch at the cost of making it.