What Strange Creatures (17 page)

Missy stopped walking for a moment. “I love that house. Isn’t it pretty?”

She was pointing at a small yellow house with an especially pointy roof and spindly blue trim curling along the sides.

“Yeah,” I said, though it made me think of the witch’s house in “Hansel and Gretel.”

“You should see it in January, with all the icicles hanging off it.”

“Cool.” I shuddered.

Missy started pushing the stroller again. “Now, what I was starting to say about having something like that in your history. If there’s one other person in the universe who knows what it’s like to have the same nasty skeleton as you . . . it can be kind of hard to decide how you feel about that person. You never want to see them or think about them again, on one hand. But on the other, they’re all you’ll ever have if you want someone who can relate.”

“And this is how you felt about Kim?”

Missy nodded. “And presumably how she felt about me. Now, this is going to sound weird. But I’ll try to explain. A year ago or so, I saw that my husband had done a couple of Google searches on our computer. ‘Star athlete injury.’ ‘High-school sports injury changed my life.’ Because the thing about my husband is that he was going to be a big college football star, supposedly. Scouts from different universities came to check him out playing, whatever. But then he got this awful knee injury and it was over. Real sad
Friday Night Lights
kind of stuff, he says. He jokes about it now. But when I saw those searches, I thought, he’s looking for people who had the same sort of thing happen. How funny. Those people actually exist for him. I mean, if he wants to find them. He can find a kind of tribe, if he wants. But I’ll never have a tribe for what happened when I was a kid. Now, me, I could do a hundred Google searches and all I’d ever come up with is Kim.”

I’d never considered finding “my people” online, so I didn’t know how to reply. Maybe it was a generational thing. What would I type in anyway? “Wasted-youth medieval mystic”? “Divorced cat lady no Ph.D.”?

I peered in at Zoe, since she’d been so quiet. Her eyelids were drooping. I thought of remarking on her cuteness, but Missy began to speak again.

“It’s like she and I were the only two kids trapped in the same creepy attic. You don’t want to think about the attic at all. But when you do, you’re kind of glad someone else was there.”

It was rather an unsettling metaphor. I had to look away from Zoe’s urchin face for a moment.

“Where does Kyle fit into all this, though?” I asked. “What about him? Wasn’t he there, too?”

“Kyle didn’t ever testify. Kyle didn’t ever say incriminating things about Andrew Abbott. Kyle has suffered a lot. But that’s because he lost his sister. It’s different for him.”

Wayne groaned in surprise, then nearly yanked my arm out of its socket trying to dash into the yard in front of us. I looked up to see the rear end of a gray cat slip under a hedge.

“Can I ask you a question?” I said to Missy when Wayne quit barking.

“Yeah?”

“Who do you think first gave you the idea that it was Andrew Abbott? Where did that come from? Was it how the adults talked about him? Or the first police officer who questioned you about Jenny?”

“I feel bad saying this now. But I remember pretty clearly. It actually came from Kim. Kim started talking about Andrew kissing Jenny and all that. I kind of followed along, I think. Kim was always more sure of herself . . . talking to adults, telling them what she thought they wanted to hear. Making things sound good to them.”

“Where do you think
Kim
got the idea?”

We hit a corner. Missy made a sharp turn with the stroller, and I followed her. I was curious if we were making our way to the park, but I didn’t want her to skip this question.

“I have no idea. But Kim was kind of . . . fast, you know? You talk about kids picking up adult things. . . . She would’ve been one to pick up on it if the grown-ups were creeped out by Andrew. Me, I was kind of clueless. I never, ever would’ve thought anything was wrong with him showing us how to draw horses. You . . . uh . . . know about that part, right?”

Wayne sighed and glanced up at me, as if to say,
Do we need to talk about this?

“Yes. Well, basically. So . . . when she wanted to interview you for her video, what kind of stuff did she want you to say?”

“Oh, just talk about Andrew Abbott, and how he was wrongfully convicted, and how I wish more people were talking about that in the media, with Wallace running.”

“Wouldn’t Andrew Abbott or his family or friends be better people to interview?”

“Of course. But I don’t think Kim could ever get them to sit for her stupid video.”

“Did she ask?”

“You know, she never said. I assume not. I assume she’d have told me. I think she was maybe too afraid to ask. Too ashamed of herself. I hate to say that now, but it’s how I felt about it.” Missy sighed. “I mean, ultimately I just wanted to say to her, ‘You want to feel better about what happened to Andrew Abbott, go to him directly and fucking apologize, for Christ’s sake.’ Excuse my language.”

“Did you ever do that yourself?” I hesitated. “Apologize to Andrew?”

“I did after the hearing. In 2006. Or—I tried.”

“What did he say?”

“He said that he didn’t blame me, so I shouldn’t apologize. That for him it was all about the adults who had done this to him. But at least he was willing to talk to me.” Missy shrugged. “So it might not have been very satisfying for her. But at least then she could’ve said she tried. That’s the thing about Kim. It was maybe more about drama than principle. I think she thought that this was gonna be Wallace’s ‘forty-seven percent’ video or something. And she’d, like, have all the glory of being the one to take him down.”

“Do you think she had any footage on her video that would be even remotely damaging to him?”

Missy stopped walking for a moment, thinking about my question. Zoe gave a little cry of protest, and then Missy began to move again. She stared down at the baby. I wasn’t sure if she was trying to will Zoe to stop fussing or just avoiding my gaze.

“It was hard to take Kim seriously sometimes,” she said. “So I’m not sure how to answer that question. But I think, in the end, she stumbled into something that might’ve been difficult for Donald Wallace after all.”

“And what was that? Do you want to say?”

She walked in silence for a moment, then asked, “Did Kim mention Colleen Shipley to you?”

“No.”

“Colleen Shipley was Donald Wallace’s assistant, back when he tried Jenny’s case.”

“Okay.”

“And Colleen Shipley, I was surprised to hear, was willing to talk to Kim. But not on camera.”

Missy pushed the stroller over a deep crack in the sidewalk. Zoe began to fuss again. Missy produced a purple pacifier from a plastic bag in her pocket and popped it into Zoe’s mouth.

“This is where it gets messy. Colleen Shipley gave Kim a few old VHS tapes. Of her and Wallace talking to me and Kim when we were kids.”

“Colleen
had
that?”

Missy shrugged. “I’m just telling you what Kim told me. I had my issues with Kim, but I don’t think she’d have made that up. And she offered to let me watch them. I said no thanks. I just don’t want to watch that shit at this stage of my life, you know?”

“I can understand that,” I said. “But . . . what happened to the videos themselves? Did Kim show them to anyone else?”

“I don’t know,” Missy said. “I know that she’d put what she found—or some of it—on DVD, because that’s what she offered me—DVDs. Probably she saved it on her computer or somewhere, too, since she’d somehow transferred it to digital format. Or gotten someone to do it for her.”

Nathan the bartender came to mind—Nathan and his wedding-video services. Putting that aside for a moment, I asked, “Do you remember talking to this Colleen lady, back when you were a kid? Talking to Donald Wallace?”

“Only vaguely. I felt, back then, like I had to say the same thing so many times. I didn’t know when I was talking to important people and when I wasn’t. But . . . Kim kept asking me if she could put some clips of the old tapes in her video.”

I thought of the journalist that Kim had apparently contacted—Janice something—who’d thought she was a little crazy for calling her claiming to have “special footage.”

“What clips?” I asked. “Something specific?”

“I don’t know. She said in general they made Wallace look like an asshole.”

“But was there something illegal that he did?”

“I don’t know. I think Kim hoped so. But I don’t think she was sure. She wasn’t exactly a legal expert.”

“Was it legal for Colleen Shipley even to
have
the tapes?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask Kim that. I wasn’t really so focused on that. More on what Kim was gonna do with them now that she had them.”

“So did you say yes? To letting her put clips with you in them on her video?”

Missy shrugged. “Not exactly. I mostly avoided the question. At first I tried to convince myself that her interest in the whole thing might burn out before the election was even over. In the last week or two before she died, I started to realize that might not happen. Although it seemed as if her interest was shifting.”

“Shifting?”

“The last time I saw her, she was talking more about those guys Dustin and Trenton. The Halliday boys.”

I didn’t expect to hear those names out of Missy’s mouth. “She told you about them?”

“A little bit. Do you know much about their case?”

“I’ve read all the articles I could find.”

“Yeah. So did Kim. Her idea was that Donald Wallace got their mother convicted wrongfully, too. It seemed like a long shot to me. What happened to Andrew was a total travesty, I know. But I don’t think Wallace’s career was
full
of convictions like that. I’ll bet most prosecutors have put one or two innocent people in jail. As I was saying, Kim maybe wanted to find more people like herself. I think she was attracted by the idea that Dustin was like her—that he was somehow another victim of Donald Wallace’s ambition.”

“She considered herself the victim in all this?”

“Oh, I don’t know if that’s accurate. It was more like . . . she needed Donald Wallace to be the villain. She needed a boogeyman. Andrew Abbott wasn’t it anymore. So Donald Wallace was his replacement.”

We were headed back toward Missy’s house now.

“You don’t need a boogeyman?” I asked.

“You know, that’s an interesting question. I stopped needing one when I had Zoe. Because now I’ve got about a thousand little boogeymen. And none of them is Donald Wallace. Let me just put it that way.”

A thousand little boogeymen.
As we took our final steps to Missy’s house, I chose not to ask Missy what some of those were. I knew what she meant.

As soon as I got out of Missy’s neighborhood, I pulled in to a Wendy’s. At the drive-through I ordered a double cheeseburger and a couple of waters, plus an extra paper cup. In the parking lot, I fed Wayne one of the meat patties while I ate the remainder of the sandwich.

“This is called emotional eating,” I explained to Wayne. “At least for me. For you it’s a reward for being a detective dog. That Missy probably would’ve slammed the door in my face if it weren’t for you. But she saw you and she spilled. So thank you.”

Wayne swallowed the last of his meat patty and yawned. I poured half a bottle of water into the paper cup and held it out for him while he slurped.

When he was finished, I put the cup in my cup holder and started the car.

“I’m feeling lucky, Wayne,” I said once we got on the road.

Using my Bluetooth, I tried Jeff’s mystery number again as I drove.

I so thoroughly expected that hag to pick up and tell me the mailbox was full that I nearly hung up before I gave her a chance. This time, though, she said,
“You have reached the voice mail of . . .”
Then there was a pause, and I was so startled I nearly lost my grip on the steering wheel.

“Dustin Halliday,”
said a male voice.

I hung up quickly.

“Did you hear that?” I said to Wayne, who was
uff-uff-uffing
in the backseat again. Talking to Wayne helped me keep calm.

I steadied my hands on the wheel.

“I suppose I could’ve left a message,” I said. “But I’d better come up with a plan first. Right?”

In the rearview mirror, I could see Wayne licking an old hoisin-sauce stain on the backseat.

“But by now he’s probably wondering who the stranger is who’s been calling and hanging up. I wonder if he’s ever going to pick up?”

I pulled in to my driveway and let Wayne out of the car, holding his leash. He led me around the yard, snuffling through the brown leaves that I would need to rake soon. Usually Jeff helped me with that.

A cold gust blew through the yard. Wayne raised his head and sniffed at it. The leaves—the few that weren’t mushed into the lawn—rattled softly. The brisk air seemed to clear my head of some of the sticky lethargy brought on by the fast food.

Of course I should pursue Dustin Halliday—but carefully.

And of course I should talk to Zach Wagner a little bit more about Dustin before I planned my approach. My brother was an accused murderer. Zach’s success and my failure were irrelevant now. I didn’t care what Zach—or the English department—thought anymore. I cared about Jeff.

I tugged at Wayne’s leash, and he obliged. Inside, before I had my coat off, I opened my laptop, went to the English department’s Web site, and found Zach’s e-mail address.

The Spellman Hall student lounge was crawling with undergrads. Maybe it was the weather—suddenly colder than the relatively mild autumn we’d had up till now—compelling them inside for the lukewarm flavored coffees on offer at the student café. Back when I was working on my master’s, I went in for the Pumpkin Spice. These days it felt to me like drinking a Whitlock’s candle.

Zach had agreed to meet me after his late-afternoon class, but I was early. I settled into one of the cube-shaped coral chairs and passed the time going through my coat pockets. I’d taken this coat out from storage just a couple of days before. It still had year-old cat hair on it and year-old tissues in the pockets. Plus a cough drop that likely predated my divorce. The last thing I found was a glove—half hidden in the torn lining of the coat. It was a knitted hippie glove, chunky with white and purple yarn from Pakistan, and it was turned inside out, its innards curling out like a tangled old telephone cord.