“I guess I got turned around.” My smile feels sticky, as if it’s congealing at the edges.
“Get out.” His voice is a growl. Now his T-shirt looks like a direct threat. Guns don’t kill people. I do. “Now.”
I have to push by him, and for a second he gets in my way, and I have a quick flash of physical fear, a terror he won’t let me leave. But at the last second he turns, angling his body and giving me room to pass.
I practically sprint to the door; only after I’m standing on the porch, gulping air, do I realize I was holding my breath. As if a monster were about to get me. As if the house were a graveyard.
As if I were afraid to raise the dead.
Chapter Seventeen
I still haven’t heard back from the county prosecutor, Dev Agerwal, so I leave a message with his office, and, in desperation, send a follow-up e-mail through a contact form I find on his website. But I don’t hold out much hope. Agerwal has reason to be protective of his office, even if he did clean house when he took the position.
I leave the office early, while Joe is on the phone, to avoid having to give a blow-by-blow of our trip to Frank Mitchell’s house—I know he thinks we should be focusing on rooting out people who’ve had problems with their water and are willing to say so.
The cloud cover has burned off, and the evening sky has transformed into stripes of gold and auburn. Instead of turning right on County Route 12, which will lead me down past Sunny Jay’s where Condor works, the Elks Club, and, finally, the hair salon that conceals my rental house behind it, I turn left. I need to know what Frank Mitchell, whose home is halfway to hoarder, dumped in a storage space only a week after Kaycee disappeared.
U-Pack is a depressing sling of buildings ineffectively roped off by a sagging chain-link fence. I’ve always said that if you haven’t touched something for two years, then you don’t need it. But I’ve always hated junk and clutter. I don’t like stuff weighing me down. I would never need a storage locker; in fact, when people come to my condo in Chicago they ask if I’ve just moved in.
A cheerful bell tings when I open the door. The clerk, a man in his sixties, looks up from a magazine.
I can see the nicotine stain on his fingernails from where I’m standing. Smell it on his breath, too. “How can I help you?” He manages to say it as if he very much hopes he can’t.
I put on a smile. “Hi, I’m here for a friend—Frank Mitchell?” He doesn’t blink, doesn’t give any reaction to the name. “He’s drowning in stuff, honestly drowning. Total packrat and just can’t bring himself to toss any damn thing.”
“That’s why we’re here,” he says. I can’t tell if he’s making a joke or not.
“He can hardly find his couch nowadays, and of course he’s gone and lost the key to his unit.” I’m rambling and I know it. Less is more. “So I offered to come down and get a replacement, maybe take some stuff off his hands.”
He shakes his head. “Can’t let no one in besides the owner. He’ll have to come down here himself, give ID and his account number and put in for a new key.”
“That’s just exactly what I told him,” I say, making a big show of amazement, as if we’ve arrived together at the solution to a major physics problem. “He gave me his account number and told me to give it a shot anyway. I have his number, too—you can call him if you want.”
He looks at the phone on his desk as if it’s a dead mouse he hasn’t yet cleared away. I hold my breath. Finally, he just shakes his head. “You said you got the account number?”
I recite it to him. He turns to the ancient computer on his desk and spends a few labored minutes trying to get it to do whatever he needs it to do. Then, with a heavy sigh, he stands and disappears into the back office, returning a few seconds later with a key. But before I can grab it from the counter, he nudges a heavy leather-bound security log in my direction.
“Sign, date, and print your name clear,” he says. “Name of the unit owner, too.”
Not until then do I fully register the cameras winking at us from the ceiling. And for a split second, I have a feeling like waking up abruptly from a dream and seeing the real world rush at you.
But what rushes at me now is the gravity of what I’m doing. I don’t remember enough of criminal law code to know exactly what law I’m breaking—false pretenses, maybe, or larceny-by-trick, but only if I remove something—but either way, a violation of this size could get me disbarred.
I nearly leave the key where it is. I nearly mumble an excuse, turn, and hurry back to the car.
But I don’t. I scrawl a fake name into the ledger. The key—a new one—is very small and extremely light. Cheap keys for cheap locks for a cheap storage facility filled with cheap belongings. A no-man’s land of possessions: sufficiently disposable to be locked away, but too dearly loved, or at least too familiar, to be abandoned. I wonder how many storage rooms are built out of broken hearts and broken relationships, dead fathers and brothers and wives. I also wonder how many of them are just meth labs.
Standing in front of unit 34, I could swear there’s a low hum radiating down the long metal alleys. And I wonder whether in fact the keys and locks were meant to keep these old memories and broken objects safe—or if they are really meant to keep them from getting out.
—
The unit is full of art.
The storage space is roughly 10 x 20, but so packed with canvases and old art supplies I still have trouble squeezing inside. Many of the paintings are wrapped in tarp and duct tape and garbage bags while a few are left exposed. Not all of them are finished, although it’s difficult to tell: there’s an image of a woman’s face that seems to simply explode or disappear into white space, even though her clothing is painstakingly detailed. They’re Kaycee’s.
Some paintings are better than others. But all of them are good. I can tell that much without knowing a thing about art. I move as carefully as I can, afraid to touch or disturb anything. I peer through the clear garbage bags to puzzle out the shapes she pinned down with her brush: cornfields, the football stadium, even the Donut Hole. All familiar and deeply ordinary—and yet somehow, in her frenzy of brushstrokes and colors, they all light up with a strange and terrifying beauty. The football field opens like the jaws of a shark to consume the sky. The Donut Hole glows against dusk, and its sign casts a fluorescent halo into the clouds, but in the parking lot a figure lies curled in the fetal position.