Chapter Eight
Eight
I followed behind Dominic and Porter toward a brick apartment building, wondering what I was doing.
I was a little high from the walk down memory lane.
My life now was structured, and I was coming to realize how much I was missing the rush.
I’d gotten a taste of the rush when the arms arrived, and it intensified when I saw my father in prison.
It was the rush I felt when we parked in front of my childhood home and it was the very same rush that I judged my mother for choosing over me.
The street echoed with muffled music from a handful of parties on that block alone—nothing says college neighborhood like parties on a Sunday night—and I wondered if Dominic might be a lot younger than I had assumed.
Once we entered the building, the others faded away and only the sounds of our party remained. We climbed the stairs to the fourth floor, the bass from the stereo beckoning us closer. My feet were heavy, but Porter was gliding up the stairs. Making new friends still seemed so attainable at his age.
Dominic turned back to me. “I have to warn you. This party might be a little weird.”
“What does that mean?” I asked, staring up at him.
“We shall see.” He smiled as he turned back and hustled up the stairs after Porter.
That was nice and ominous, but it was too late to back out now, even if I wanted to pretend that I wasn’t suddenly very curious.
Dominic pounded on the door to apartment 7.
It opened and the music poured out. A guy somewhere closer to my age than Porter’s answered the door.
He had one of those haircuts where the hair on top was long and I could see it was shaved underneath—thick, black, and slicked back in place.
It was the exact opposite of Dominic’s active hair, which was sticking out and positioned wherever he had last tugged it.
Dominic and our host exchanged a handshake-hug hybrid. “What’s up, man?” the new guy asked. “I’m so glad you made it.”
“I brought some friends. Hope that’s okay.”
“Of course, yeah…” He paused to look at us, like maybe the of course wasn’t so unqualified.
A smile slipped out for Porter, easily approved.
For me he stared a bit longer, assessing how much of a square I appeared to be—not a great day for me to be wearing a peach cardigan and fake pearl earrings.
“Please, come in,” he finally said after a beat that probably felt longer to me than it actually was.
“This is Gwen…and Porter,” said Dominic.
“I’m Jake. Dominic’s stepbrother.”
The guy seemed too cool for formal handshakes, and Porter and I both did awkward little waves as we stepped inside.
Thick curtains covered all the windows and the limited light came from a few shadeless lamps. The whole apartment had cheap laminate floors, scuffed to shit from a million different tenants. Jake led us toward an opening into the kitchen, where I could see a few people milling around the bar area.
“Help yourself.” Jake nodded toward the alcohol. “I stole it all from work anyway.”
Porter followed him into the kitchen, but I hovered at Dominic’s side in the living room, where he surveyed the space for anyone worth talking to.
I would describe the interior design as…
posters? There were a lot of posters, some taped, some tacked to the wall.
Posters of movies like Scarface and Fight Club, posters of mug shots like Charles Manson’s and Ted Bundy’s.
There was no poster of Abel Haggerty, thankfully.
My father had never really ascended to the commercial masses; he had more of a cult following—true freaks only, please.
I blamed it on his branding, or lack thereof.
There were several doors off the living room and it was really anyone’s guess how many people lived there.
Three big couches with sheets thrown over them filled the space and it looked like a college flop house except there was a real thirties look to a lot of the faces in the room.
No one noticed us walk in. One guy was flipping a switchblade open and shut, another yanked on a girl’s ponytail until he could reach her lips, licking them—not kissing; licking like a dog.
Not to be judgmental, but this was beginning to feel like a mistake.
I counted the people to calm down. There were twelve people in the living room, plus the three in the kitchen, plus the stepbrother, plus Porter, plus Dominic.
Eighteen people. The bathroom door opened—number nineteen stepped out.
It was another woman. We were the super-minority.
There were only four of us out of nineteen.
She had long, straight strawberry blonde hair and thick black eyeliner that said, Don’t talk to me.
I watched her, wondering which clique she would rejoin.
She walked past the three couches to the window, pulling back the curtain and slipping out onto the fire escape.
A minimalist tattoo of shrinking diamonds started at her neck and trailed down behind the swooping collar of her shirt.
The curtain fell behind her and she was gone.
“Do you want a drink?” Dominic asked, and I stopped staring at the window.
“Sure, yeah, I’ll come with you.” I didn’t see myself leaving his side anytime soon.
Porter was talking to Jake and the kitchen people like they were best friends for life and didn’t seem too concerned with being my wingman anymore.
I removed my cardigan, leaving only a white tank top I would consider an undershirt in any other circumstance.
Dominic slid a bottle of Bombay Sapphire off the counter between two of the guys without disrupting their conversation. His eyes matched the blue of the bottle. He held it out to me as a question and I nodded. Why not?
He led me away from the bar, looking as eager for personal space as I was. “Did you enjoy the tour?” he asked as we sat down at the kitchen table. He poured the liquor into two shot glasses. Shots of gin—an unusual choice, hipster gone wrong, but it would get the job done.
“Honestly?” I asked.
“Yeah, honestly.”
“I did,” I admitted, but he could never know why or how much.
“Good.” He beamed. “Tell all your friends.”
He handed me my shot. We clinked the glasses together and threw them back.
It burned as it went down my throat, craving to be mixed with tonic, a fire that said a buzz would be coming soon if I kept this up.
I wanted to get him drunk. Then I would pick his brain, see what he’d talked to my father about, see if he would slip and reveal that he knew more than he was letting on.
I had been so patient. My father would be proud.
“Another?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said, letting him do all the work for me. “I can’t tell you the last time I went to a house party like this.”
“Do you spend most of your free time hanging out at prisons?” he asked.
“You’re one to talk.” I smiled. “You’re the one hanging out with a serial killer. How do you even know him?”
“Kind of random actually. I was always interested in behavioral psychology. I tried minoring in it when I was in school. But anyway, a couple of years ago I started reading a lot, probably too much, about him. I went through a rough breakup and started writing him letters. Eventually he let me visit and now I’ve been going for almost a year. I guess we just hit it off.”
I opened my mouth, but he cut me off.
“I know, it sounds insane. It’s not like I thought writing to a serial killer would help me get over my ex-girlfriend. It was more like I was trying as many things as possible to distract me and that one stuck. I also tried golf, for the record.”
He smiled and I laughed because he was attempting a joke, but I was more focused on how a malleable young man with a broken heart had fallen right into my father’s lap. It was oddly convenient and maybe the whole story was a lie.
I brought my glass to my lips. I batted my eyelashes. So flirty, no ulterior motives here…“What’s he like?”
He thought about it for a second, then slid his hands off the table and leaned back in his chair. “I feel like I should tell you something…”
I paused my eyelashes, leaving my eyes wide open.
“I’m not being presumptuous or anything…” He hesitated. “But given the context, it feels like a purposeful omission to not let you know that I recently got out of a serious relationship. I was engaged, actually.”
“Okay…” I stalled.
“Just because…I said I first reached out to Abel Haggerty when I was going through a breakup, and now I’m going through one again, but that’s not why I visit him,” he insisted.
“What happened?” I asked. He had gone and changed the subject, and now I would have to dance back around to my real questions. Gwen Tanner would care about his failed engagement. At least I had some context clues to confirm he was old enough for me to be associating with him.
“Eh, you know. Got together right out of college. I can admit now that it probably started as a rebound for me. We followed what we thought were the right steps. Realized in time that it wasn’t working. Not too interesting.”
“Okay, robot,” I teased.
He laughed.
That was easy. When people share something emotional with you, the sooner you get them to laugh, the faster you can move on. I didn’t mean to be insensitive; it just felt more pressing to find out if he was chopping off men’s arms than whether he was sad.
“What about you?” he asked.
“Not engaged,” I teased again, but in a curt way that discouraged follow-up.
“Fair enough.” He smiled. “So what do you do?”
Ugh, no, not the work small talk. I was losing control of the ship. “Human Capital Management. Helping recruit the best and brightest, then trying to keep them happy. I’m just an associate though. Basically I print things and then hand them out.”
“Not very green.” He grinned.
“Well, I also send a lot of emails.”
Dominic laughed and I took the opportunity to pivot. “Needless to say, I wasn’t at Edgar Valley for work.”
“Yeah, I would assume they frown on criminal records.”
“Definitely.” I nodded. “I was visiting an old neighbor. In there for robbery. Nothing violent. I try to go a couple of times a year. He used to fix things in my apartment for free and I guess it feels like the right thing to do.” A hundred percent bullshit, but a dead-end story without much intrigue, and I spewed it all out before he could form any questions.
“That’s really nice of you. I don’t think I’d be that nice.”
“Your kindness is reserved for serial killers only, then?”
He laughed again, and just like that, we were back on course.
“What do you two talk about anyway?” I asked.
“Well, that’s confidential,” he said, and I glared at him. “What?” He grinned.
“You can tell me something. Be vague. You don’t have to tell me where the bodies are buried.” I took another sip. “I mean that figuratively, of course.”
“Of course.” He smirked. “We just talk.”
“Too vague.”
“He’s helping me write a book.”
“Like a biography?”
“Kind of. More about what makes Abel Haggerty tick.”
“Are you trying to get into his head?” I was skeptical of the business plan here.
“I try. He tells me stories and I put myself there in that place. I think about what I would do and what would have to be different for me to do what he did. I want readers to be able to relate.”
“And what would have to be different?”
“I haven’t figured it out yet.” He reached up and tugged at his hair.
“Tell me one of the stories,” I said, absorbing his energy.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah…”
“Gwen!” Porter’s hands landed on my shoulders and I jumped ten feet in the air.
“Oh my God, what?” I turned to look at him.
“Guess who’s here.”
“Who?” I asked. This better be good.
“Elyse Abbington—that girl from the family Abel Haggerty killed. Do you remember her?”
Of course I remembered her. What would really get this party started, though, was if she remembered me.